Time Will Darken It (13 page)

Why, Nora wondered wildly,
why
should it always be a married man who manœuvres his way around the room until he ends up sitting beside me? Is it something I do that I shouldn’t, and that makes a serious conversation, a conversation about life, suddenly turn into something else?

People often ask themselves the right questions. Where they fail is in answering the questions they ask themselves, and even there they do not fail by much. A single avenue of reasoning followed to its logical conclusion would bring them straight home to the truth. But they stop just short of it, over and over again. When they have only to reach out and grasp the idea that would explain everything, they decide that the search is hopeless. The search is never hopeless. There is no haystack so large that the needle in it cannot be found. But it takes time, it takes humility and a serious reason for searching.

7

The surrey and then the English cart turned from the road into a narrow lane with deep ruts in it. The lane led through empty wheat-fields to a gate, and beyond it the farmyard, where a buggy stood with the shafts resting on the ground.
Bud Ellis drove around to the side of the house, and Austin followed him. While they were helping the ladies to alight, the old man and his tenant farmer came out of the barn and walked towards the carriages.

“So you came after all,” Mr. Ellis called to them. “I wasn’t sure whether you would or not.”

“You ought to know we wouldn’t let an opportunity like this slip by,” Mr. Potter said, mopping his face with his handkerchief.

“I wouldn’t have blamed you any if you’d changed your mind. It’s a long drive in this heat.… Meet Mr. Gelbach.”

The tenant acknowledged the introduction with a nod and then said, “Be quiet, Shep!” to the dog that was barking at them from ten feet away.

The barking dog and the odour from the pig-pen mingled with the other summer smells were like medicine to the restlessness that had afflicted Mr. Potter’s legs all morning. “A fine place you have,” he said, glancing around.

“The house needs paint and one thing and another,” Mr. Ellis said. “Just now it’s not much to look at, but I’ll get it all fixed up one of these days. With corn selling at thirty-three cents at the grain elevator, I may end up living here.” No one took him seriously and he did not mean that they should. He was knocking on wood in case the ancient gods of agriculture should have noticed his prosperity and consider that it had passed all reasonable bounds.

The tenant farmer unhitched the two horses and led them off to the barn.

“I’ve got something you ladies would enjoy seeing,” old Mr. Ellis said. “My new colt, born two days ago.”

The colt and the mare were in a pasture behind the big barn. “Pretty as a picture,” Mr. Potter said, leaning on the pasture fence. “Yes, that’s worth coming all the way from Mississippi to see.” He called a long string of coaxing invitations to the colt but it wouldn’t come to him.

They went on to take a look inside the big white barn, smelling of manure, hay, dust, and harness; at the corn cribs empty until fall; at the new windmill; at the sheds filled with rusty farm machinery; at the pigs; at the vegetable garden; and finally at an Indian mound down by the creek. A head, ears, nose, legs, and tail were all easily discernible to the people from Mississippi, and Mr. Potter knew about an Indian mound in Tennessee which was said to resemble the extinct Megatherium.

After the Indian mound, Mr. Ellis turned towards the cornfield, and at this point the women were left behind. They were not expected to take an interest in farming, and besides, their shoes were not suitable for walking over ploughed fields. Austin King and the tenant farmer walked along side by side with nothing to say. Each imagined that the other was mildly contemptuous—the farmer of the city man, the man who worked with his head of the man who worked much longer hours and harder because he had nothing to work with but his calloused hands.

Austin King was in many ways the spiritual son of Mr. Potter’s tall, gaunt, bearded father, and would certainly have been a preacher if he had been born fifty years earlier. Mr. Potter had had all the justice and impartiality he could stand in his boyhood. He had more than once been tied to the stake and burned alive in his father’s righteous wrath. And so he went on ahead with old Mr. Ellis and his grandson.

No one was ever made to feel morally inferior in Bud Ellis’ presence. Money was what Bud Ellis was after, and this cold pursuit has a tendency to elbow its way into the category of the amiable weaknesses, where it does not belong. For the sake of their warmth and protective coloration, the man whose real pursuit is money will also pursue women or drink too much, or make a point of sitting around with his coat off, his tie untied, his feet on a desk, killing or seeming to kill time. And in that way he can safely say that anyone who
appears not to be governed by materialistic or animal appetites is a blue-nosed hypocrite.

As they stripped off ears and compared the size of the kernels, Mr. Potter made the opening move in a game that must be played according to certain fixed rules, like chess—a game in which (as no one had more reason to know than Mr. Potter) hurry is often fatal. He admired whatever old Mr. Ellis admired, and listened to his long, rambling, sometimes pointless stories. Mr. Potter also told stories himself, stories in which he himself was invariably the shrewd hero, sly, tactful, humorous, always coming out on top at the end. These stories, taken together, tended to establish Reuben S. Potter as a sound man of business.

Mr. Ellis was himself a sound man of business. His four hundred acres had been acquired at a tax sale. The old man was quick to scent out a game and usually ready to play—on his own terms, of course, which would not in the final showdown be wholly to the advantage of Mr. Potter.

Without his family to restrain him, Mr. Potter’s voice grew louder and his bragging more open. “I knew what I was up against. I’d had dealings with Henry Fuqua before. So when he come to me and said he’d heard I had a pair of mules I was fixing to dispose of and how much did I want for them, I said, ‘Henry, you got a good mule now. What do you want with two more?’ ‘Well I do,’ he said, ‘and furthermore I got my eye on them two white mules.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘tell you the honest truth, I don’t know as I want to sell that pair of mules. They’re nicely broken in now and used to each other and I might have trouble finding another pair that would satisfy me. Why don’t you go talk to Fred Obermeier? I was out by his place the other day and he’s got some nice mules, two or three of them.’ ‘If I wanted to talk to Fred Obermeier,’ he said, ‘I’d be talking to him now. I wouldn’t be here dickering with you. I’ll give you eighty dollars for the two of them.’ Well, eighty dollars is a good price down home for a pair of
mules, but I figured if they were worth that to Henry, they were worth more to somebody else, because he can’t bear to part with a nickel he don’t have to, so I said, ‘Tell you what I’ll do. You can have Jake, if you want him, but Olly belongs to the children. They raised him and he’s kind of a pet. You know how it is, Henry,’ I said, ‘if I was to sell Jake and Olly both, they’d probably feel bad.’ ‘Make it eighty-five,’ he said. ‘No, Henry,’ I said. ‘That’s a decent enough offer, but these mules—I don’t know as I can see my way clear to selling them. Not at this time, anyway.’ So we argued back and forth, and the sum and substance of it was …”

Mr. Ellis dropped back beside Austin King and the tenant, a short stocky man of about forty, with light hair, blue eyes, and a dark sunburned neck. “My oats aren’t as good this year as last,” Mr. Ellis said. “We had a lot of rain in the late spring and planted late. But the corn will even things up—isn’t that right, John?”

“It ought to, if this weather holds,” the tenant said, his voice low and unemphatic.

“John had his own farm until a few years ago,” Mr. Ellis said, turning to Austin. “He’s a very good man, a hard worker. They both are. When we’re short of help she comes right out in the field and works alongside of him. They’ve got three nice children and she puts up enough vegetables to last through the winter and keeps the house neat as a pin. I want to get her some linoleum for the kitchen floor when I sell my corn. It always pays to keep the womenfolks happy, you know. Some people are eternally changing tenants but I’ve had this couple on the place for the last seven years and we get along fine.”

When the corn was delivered to the grain elevator, the tenant would claim his share of the profits. Meanwhile, he allowed old Mr. Ellis to take unto himself full credit for ploughing this forty-acre field, for sowing the seed, for disking and harrowing in dry weather. As they walked along under the enormous sky and in the midst of heat so luxuriant and
growth so swift that they could almost be seen and heard, the tenant farmer’s arms remained always at his side as if he had no power of gesture, and his eyes, not even angry, reflected no pride, no pleasure, no possession of anything that they saw.

8

When the men disappeared into the cornfield, Mrs. Potter didn’t have Dr. Danforth to fall back upon. There was Nora, of course, but to fall back upon Nora in time of need was to take up all manner of unsolved problems that Mrs. Potter, who loved peace and harmony, had agreed to let alone. She couldn’t make friends with the dog because Randolph had bewitched it, and Randolph himself was never to be counted on. He was only there when she didn’t need him. He was kneeling in the dust now, his face hidden by his crossed arms, and the dog was walking round and round, nosing Randolph, trying to get in past his hand, past his elbow. Mrs. Potter retired to the porch, opened her silk bag, and found her spectacles.

When the men came back from the fields, she could stuff her crocheting into the bag again and with the extreme adaptability which marks the lady, be ready to please, to console and comfort, to mother old Mr. Ellis, who was twenty-five years her senior but who would nevertheless need mothering after he had been so long in the hot sun.

“It’s cooler out here,” Nora called from the shade of a cottonwood tree.

“My knees,” Mrs. Potter called back.

Nora offered to drag the rocker out onto the grass, but Mrs. Potter would not allow it. She was happier where she was. Occasionally she raised her eyes from her crocheting and let them wander over as much of the farm as she could see from the porch. She did not insist on the tangles of cane-brakes and
somewhere among the enormous cypresses of the primeval forest, the scream of sawmills. She did not expect to see the great rolling sheet of cotton as it came from the gin or to be offered sow-belly and hot biscuits and sorghum molasses. What distressed her was that there should be no old trees around the farmhouse, no lawn, no flower garden. Neatness and order were wasted upon her and so was the fertility of black soil. She wanted something that gratified her sense of family tradition, of home as the centre of the universe. What Mrs. Potter saw was a flayed landscape that a hundred years earlier had been one of the natural wonders of the world—the great western prairie with timber here and there in the distance, following a stream, and the tall prairie grass whipped into waves by the wind, by the cloud shadows passing over it, mile after mile, as if the landscape (once an inland sea) remembered and was trying to reproduce its ancient aspect.