They worked into near dark, rendering all the fat into lard, washing out the intestines for chittlings, grinding and canning the trimmings and scraps into sausage, salting down the hams and middling meat, soaking the blood out of the head to ready it for making souse.
They washed up and went inside, and Sara began on supper while Inman snacked on a plate of cracklings that she had intended to add to the corn bread. Since they wouldn’t keep, she cooked up a kind of stew of the liver and lights, spiced with much onion and hot pepper. They ate and then stopped and rested. Then they ate again.
After dinner Sara said, I believe you’d look some better if you shaved down.
—If you’ve a razor I’ll give it a try, Inman said.
She went to the trunk and dug around and came back with a razor and a heavy strop of oiled leather. She set them in Inman’s lap.
—That was John’s too, she said.
She dippered enough water for a shave out of the water piggin into a black pot and set it to heat over the fire. When the water started steaming she poured it into the small gourd basin. She lit a candle in a tin holder, and Inman carried all of it out and spread it on the washboard at the end of the porch.
Inman stropped the razor and wet his beard. He held the razor up and took note of a brown smear of blood on the cuff of John’s shirt. Man or hog, one. He looked in the metal mirror, put the razor’s edge to his face, and went to work in the flickery light of the candle flame.
He had not gone beardless since the second year of the war, and he was mixed in his feelings about seeing what he looked like after all that time. He scraped at the hair until the razor dulled and then he restropped. He did not like looking on himself long enough for shaving, was one reason why he quit. That and the hardness of keeping track of a razor and making hot water during the past two years. Going bearded seemed one less thing to have to fail at.
The job at hand took some time, but eventually his face was bared. The mirror had gone to rust in scattered brown patches, and as Inman regarded himself in it, his pale face appeared scabbed over with crusty wounds. The eyes that looked back had a slit and sideling quality that he did not remember. A pinched and hollow cast to the features that was more than just food hunger.
What’s looking out from there now is all different from her boy-husband, Inman thought. Some killer visage lodged in the place where once young John looked out. What would be the reaction if you sat by a fire in winter and looked up to a black window and saw that face staring back? he wondered. What seizure or spasm would it set off?
It was to Inman’s credit, though, that he tried to believe such a face was not him in any true way and that it could in time be altered for the better.
When he went back in, Sara smiled at him and said, You look part human now.
They sat and looked at the fire and Sara rocked the baby in her arms. It had a croupy cough. Inman figured there was little reason to expect it to come out the other side of winter alive. It fretted in Sara’s arms and would not sleep and so she sang it a song.
She sang as if shamed by her own sounds, by the way her life voiced itself aloud. As she began, it seemed that a blockage had set up in her throat. And so the chant that escaped her did so with much effort. The force of air from her chest needed somewhere to go, but finding the jaw set firm and jutted and the mouth clenched against music, it took the far way out and reached expression in high nasal tones that hurt to hear in their loneliness.
The singing carried shrill into the twilight and its tones spoke of despair, resentment, an undertone of panic. Her singing against such resistance seemed to Inman about the bravest thing he had ever witnessed. It was like watching a bitter fight carried to a costly draw. The sound of her was that of a woman of the previous century living on in the present, that old and weary. Sara was such a child to sound that way. Had she been an old woman who long ago in her youth sang beautifully, one might have said that she had learned to use the diminished nature of her voice to maximum effect, that it was a lesson in how to live with damage, how to make peace with it and use it for what it can do. But she was not an old woman. The effect was eerie, troubling. You’d have thought the baby would cry out in distress to hear its mother in such a state, but it did not. It fell asleep in her arms as to a lullaby.
The words to the song, though, were no lullaby. They linked up to make a horrible story, a murder ballad called Fair Margaret and Sweet William. It was an old song, but Inman had not heard it before. The lines were these:
I dreamed that my bower was full of red swine,
And my bride bed full of blood.
When that one was done she started in on Wayfaring Stranger, at first just humming it and tapping her foot. When she eventually pitched in singing, it bore little kin to music but was more like some pinched declamation of spirit sickness, a squeal of barren lonesomeness as pure and undiluted as the pain following a sharp blow to the nose. When she finished, there was a long silence broken only by the sound of an owl calling in the dark woods, fit conclusion to songs so burdened with themes of death and solitude and carrying more than a hint of the specter world.
Sara’s offering of such music might have seemed to give no hope of consolation, either to the baby or, especially, to Inman. How unlikely that such a severe gift might yield a reduction of sadness when it was itself so bleak. Yet such proved to be the case, for though they talked but little the rest of the evening, they sat side by side in front of the fire, tired from the business of living, content and resting and happy, and later they again lay in bed together.
The next morning before he set out onto the road, Inman ate the brains of the hog, parboiled and scrambled up with an egg from the hen that had been eating on the raider from New York.
a satisfied mind
Ada and Ruby spent much of the autumn working with apples. Apples had come in heavy and had to be picked, peeled, sliced, and juiced: pleasant clean work, out among the trees handling the fruit. The sky for much of the time was cloudless blue, the air dry. The light, even at midday, brittle and raking, so that by angle alone it told of the year’s waning. In the mornings they went carrying ladders when the dew still stood in the orchard grass. They’d climb among the tree limbs to fill sacks with apples, the ladders swaying as the limbs they were propped against gave under their weight. When all the sacks were full, they would bring the horse and sled to the orchard, haul them in, empty them and begin again.
It was work that was just moderately tiring and, unlike the haying, produced only a peaceful still picture in Ada’s mind as she lay in bed at night: a red or yellow apple hanging from a drooping limb, behind it deep blue sky, her hand palm up, reaching out to the apple but not touching it.
For a long time Ada and Ruby ate apples at every meal, fried and stewed and pied and sauced. They dried rings of them into little scraps of apple leather, which they stored in cloth bags and hung from the ceiling in the kitchen. One day they built a fire in the yard and made a black kettle of apple butter so big that when they stood over it and stirred the apple mash with spurtles, the scene put Ada in mind of the witches in Macbeth working at their brew. The apple butter had come out thick, the color of old harness from spice and brown sugar, and they sealed enough of it in crocks to eat on for a year. They pressed cider from rusty culls and fallen apples, and they fed the pomace to the hogs, for Ruby said it would make the meat sweet.
The cider had hardened up enough by now to be worth something, and for that reason Ruby went out one afternoon on a trading mission. She had heard that an Adams man down the river had killed a beef, and she had gone off with two jugs of cider to see how much meat they might bring. She left Ada with two tasks. Burn the brush that had resulted from their earlier clearing a portion of the neglected lower field. And, using the method Ruby had taught her, split the six rounds of an old black-oak log they had discovered already cut into lengths out in the tall grass at the field edge. It would be a good initiation into timber work, for they would soon need to
go up on the mountain and cut a hickory or an oak, limb it, and let the horse drag it home with a J-grab to be sectioned and split. Ada had wondered if they had the strength for such work, but Ruby argued in detail that it did not necessarily require pure power. Just pacing, patience, rhythm. Pull the saw and release. Wait for the one at the other end of the saw to draw it away and then pull again. Avoid binding up. The main thing, Ruby said, was not to get ahead of yourself. Go at a rhythm that could be sustained on and on. Do just as much as you could do and still be able to get up and do again tomorrow. No more, and no less.
Ada watched Ruby go down the road and decided to split the logs first and enjoy the fire in the cool of afternoon. She walked from the garden to the toolshed and got a maul and a wedge and carried them to the lower field and stamped out a circle in the waist-high grass around the oak logs to make working room. The logs lay on their sides and were better than two feet across the cut ends. The wood was grey, for they had been lying forgotten since the tree was felled two or three years earlier by the hired man. Ruby had warned that the dry logs would not want to split easily as when fresh and wet.
Ada upended the big cylinders of wood, feeling the way they clung to the ground, and when she got them upright she found shiny black stag beetles the size of her thumb burrowing in the rotting bark. She went at the job as Ruby had shown her, first examining the cut end for a likely crack, then working it with the wedge. Moving slow, not straining, just lifting the seven-pound maul and letting it fall so that weight and gravity and the magic of angle combined to disassemble the log. She liked driving the wedge in halfway and then stopping to listen for the ripped-cloth sound of the crack as it kept opening for several seconds after the last blow. The work was calm despite all the pounding. The stubborn coherence of the wood and the weight of the maul imposed a slow rhythm to the task. In not much over an hour Ada had split everything but one difficult section where big limbs had once attached to the trunk and confused the grain. From each section she had split eight good-sized pieces of firewood and she reckoned there were forty pieces lying in a jumble on the ground ready to be hauled to the house and burned. She felt a great sense of accomplishment until she realized that the wood would only serve for four, maybe five, days of fire. She started to calculate the approximate number of pieces they would need for the whole winter, but she soon stopped for the figure would be dauntingly high.
Ada’s dress was soaked through across the shoulders and back with sweat, and her hair was wet against her neck. So she went to the house and drank two dippers of water from the spring and took off her hat and poured two more over her hair and then twisted the water out of it. She wet her face and rubbed it with her hands and then dried it on her dress sleeve. She went in and got her lap desk and notebook and came out to sit in the sun on the porch edge until she dried.
Ada dipped her pen in ink and started a letter to her cousin Lucy in Charleston. For a time there was hardly a sound but the scritch of nib on paper as she wrote.
I suspect, were we to meet on Market Street, you would not know me; nor, upon seeing the current want of delicacy in my aspect and costume, would you much care to.
I’m at the moment sitting on my back stoop writing this across my knees, my dress an old print shirtwaist soaked through with perspiration from splitting oak logs, and I have been wearing a straw chapeau coming apart at brim and crown so that it bristles every bit as much as the haystacks we long ago lodged in to await the conclusion of rainstorms (do you remember?). The fingers gripping the pen are dark as stirrup leathers, stained from shucking walnuts out of their stinking, pulpy husks, and the nail of the forefinger is ragged as a hackerd and wants filing. The silver bracelet with the dogwood blossoms cut in it stands out in bright contrast to the dark skin of my wrist. It is a day so autumnal that to write anything about it would be to engage in elegy. I am resting and waiting for the dress to dry before I turn my attention to burning a brush pile.
I cannot begin to recount all such rough work that I have done in the time since Father died. It has changed me. It is amazing the physical alterations that can transpire in but a few months of labor. I am brown as a penny from being outdoors all day, and I am growing somewhat ropy through the wrists and forearms. In the glass I see a somewhat firmer face than previously, hollower under the cheekbones. And a new expression, I think, has sometimes come to occupy it. Working in the fields, there are brief times when I go totally without thought. Not one idea crosses my mind, though my senses are alert to all around me. Should a crow fly over, I mark it in all its details, but I do not seek analogy for its blackness. I know it is a type of nothing, not metaphoric. A thing unto itself without comparison. I believe those moments to be the root of my new mien. You would not know it on me for I suspect it is somehow akin to contentment.
She scanned back over the letter and thought it odd and somewhat deceitful that she had not mentioned Ruby, leaving the impression that she was alone. Thinking to rectify the matter later, she put the letter unfinished inside the desk lid. She collected a pitchfork, some matches, a shawl, the third volume of Adam Bede, and a little straight chair with the legs sawn off short and carried them down to the brush pile.
She and Ruby had worked with scythes and brush hooks and bow saws most of a day the previous month and had let the cut brush fall where it would. The mix of blackberry canes, tall grass, good-sized jack pines, and sumac had sunned for several weeks spread on the ground and was now fairly dry. Ada worked awhile with the fork to draw the brush together, and when she was done the pile was big as the corncrib and the air was full of the sere odor of cut and withered foliage. She kicked up some duff and some doty sticks at the edge of the pile and set it afire. While it caught and burned she pulled the short chair into range of its warmth and sat to read Adam Bede, but the book did not go well. She could not keep her mind on it for she had to rise often to head off outrunners of flame that strayed across the stubble of the field. She beat them out with the back of the fork. And then, when the fire burned down flat, she had to draw the pile together and heap it high again, each time with a narrower diameter, and as the afternoon grew old the pile stood tall and conical in the field, flames rising from it like a miniature of a spewing volcano she had seen pictured in a book on South America.
So she had work as an excuse for not focusing her thoughts on the page. But, too, she had long since grown impatient with Adam and Hetty and the rest and would have quit the book but for the fact that she had paid so much for it. She wished all the people of the story to be more expansive, not so cramped by circumstance. What they needed was more scope, greater range. Go to the Indes, she directed them. Or to the Andes.
She marked her place with a yarrow stem and closed the book and set it in her lap. She wondered if literature might lose some of its interest when she reached an age or state of mind where her life was set on such a sure course that the things she read might stop seeming so powerfully like alternate directions for her being.
A bull thistle stood beside her. She remembered working around it with the scythe out of admiration for the fist-sized purple bloom, but it was now dry and silver white. She reached out and began picking apart the head. Her thinking was that since every tiny place in the world seemed to make a home for some creature, she would discover who the thistle dwellers might be. Soon down blew about in the breeze and caught in her smoky clothes and hair. She found but one fierce little crablike thing no bigger than a pinhead living solitary inside the dried blossom. It clutched to a thread of down with some of its hind legs and waved a minute pair of pincers before it in a way intended to be menacing. With a puff she blew away the luminous thistledown and nameless creature and watched as they caught an updraft and soared until they disappeared skyward as the souls of the dead are claimed to do.
When she had first lit the fire and begun reading, the light had been bright and even and the sky graded rather too evenly from horizon to zenith, white to blue, in the way Ada associated with landscape paintings o
f less than the highest quality. But now the seal of evening was on the wooded hillsides and on the pastures. The sky broke into bands and whorls of muted color until the entire west was like the marbled endpapers of her journal. Canada geese—v’d and honking—flew over southward, looking for a place to stay the night. A breeze blew up and flapped the skirts of the scarecrow out in the garden.
Waldo had gone to the gate by the barn. She was waiting and would soon bawl to have her bag stripped, so Ada left her chair and put the cow in her stall and milked. The air was still and damp, cooling with the fall of day, and when the cow turned her head to look back at the milking, her breath fogged and smelled like wet grass. Ada pulled at the teats and watched the milk come out listening for the change in pitch as the pail filled, first a high sizzle against the side and bottom, then a lower drizzle. The skin of her fingers was dark against the pink teat skin.
After Ada put the milk in the springhouse she returned to the field, where the fire still burned slowly, falling into ash. It would have been safe to leave it for the night, though Ada did not wish to. She wanted Ruby to come walking up the road and find her sooty, standing sentry over the afternoon’s work.
The air had a cold edge to it, and Ada drew her shawl around her. She reckoned it only a matter of days before the evenings would become too chill to sit out at sunset, even wrapped in a blanket. There was dew in the grass, and she stooped and took Adam Bede from where she had dropped it and wiped its faces against her skirts. She went and stirred the fire with the fork and it threw sparks into the sky. At the edge of the field, she collected downed hickory limbs and dry jack pine and pitched them on the fire and it soon blazed up and heated a wider circle of air. Ada pulled her chair close and put her hands out to warm. She looked at the lines of mountain ridges, the variety in their darkness as they faded into the distance. She studied the sky to see when it would fall deep enough toward indigo that the beacons of two planets, Venus and another—which she reckoned must be Jupiter or Saturn—might first shine forth low in the west in preparation for the dizzy wheel and spin of the night sky.