Between the Flowers: A Novel

  She felt a pleasant warmth of victory, of having through Marsh taken a step toward the wider world. It would be fun to be alone together, even in the renter's house in the bottoms. It wasn't as if they would be there always. Marsh would most likely buy a car, now that he knew he would be a time in the country. They would drive to Lexington, maybe buy the little furniture they would want there. She could see the university and the fine bluegrass country, or maybe they would even go to Louisville to the races; Marsh would like to see the horses. Her blood tingled pleasantly at thought of that. She had always wanted to see a race, a real one, not the kind at the County Fair. She would take some of her own money and make a bet, just a little one, so that when she lost she would not feel so wicked. She troubled a moment for her morals; she realized that she wouldn't feel wicked at all if she won.

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  11

  One afternoon in mid January Katy slipped away from school at afternoon recess, and ran to the bottom of Depot Street in Burdine. There, she saw and flagged a strange truck, but one with a Fincastle County license that would most likely go by Fairchild Place. ''It's Friday," she shrieked above the screeching brakes to the startled driver, "an' I want to hurry home an' read th' Westover Bugle."

  When she was settled and the truck was groaning down and around the steep hairpin curve above the post office, she smiled at the driver, a lanky, black-haired Scotch-Irish hill man, and explained, "I'm hopin' ole Reuben Dick, he's th' editor, you know, will print my piece today, th' one I wrote about Marsh Gregory takin' over a farm just across from us on th' Cumberland."

  "Whoever he is, I don't guess he was raised on a farm like I was," the driver said, and except for occasional interjections and speculative remarks with his eyes on the nature of Katy, said nothing more, and only nodded when his passenger thanked him at her own front gate. "You should cultivate a happier disposition," Katy told him, and ran between the wildly barking dogs to the kitchen door. The paper, still in its wrapper, lay on the kitchen table. She tore it open, glanced at the front page, and screamed at the top of her lungs, "Old Reuben put it on th' front page. Not just with th' common news.''

  Dorie and Delph, upstairs in the clutter room tacking a quilt for Delph, heard and came racing down the backstairs, while Angus and Marsh left off their corn husking in the barn to come and learn the

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  cause of the commotion. Katy bade them all be quiet while she stood with a hand on the kitchen table and read:

  "'January the twenty-sixth will be a great day in this neighborhood, and a lucky one for Cedar Stump over the Cumberland. On that day Mr. and Mrs. Marshall Gregory will settle on the old Weaver Place. Mr. Elliot will continue to live in the brick house on the hill. Mr. Gregory feels that with just his wife the renter's house in the bottoms is large enough for him. He has been very busy for the past few days, going about the country selecting stock and tools and seed. One of the finest things he has bought is a five-gaited saddle mare, named Maude, once the property of William Copenhaver, Senior, in Fincastle County. Just before Mr. Copenhaver died of pneumonia, not long after Christmas time, he had his son write a letter to Mr. Gregory offering to sell Maude. He wanted his mare to be in good hands, the old man said.

  "'Mr. Gregory plans to practice a form of diversified farming. He will grow mostly corn on his bottom lands with the upper fields for hay and pasture. This year he means to try a fair sized crop of melons as a quick cash crop.

  "'Beginning with next week your Salem correspondent will write no more of the Cedar Stump news. She only did it because there was no one there who cared to write for the paper. Delphine Costello Gregory, talented young wife of Mr. Gregory, has kindly consented to take time from the many duties she will have as a farmer's wife, and write the Cedar Stump news. We feel certain that the Gregorys will make a true promised land of the old Weaver Place. We all wish them good seasons and abundant crops.'"

  Katy finished the reading. There was a moment's silence in the kitchen, while all, including the dogs, looked at her in admiration. "I want to send a clippin' of that to Sam," Dorie said. "It 'ud do him good to read it."

  Marsh fumbled with the broken arrow head he had carried in his pocket for years as a lucky piece, and looked at Katy with beaming, grateful eyes. "I'd sort a like to keep a clippin', too," he said.

  Katy, however, was mournful and ready to cry as she flung the paper to the kitchen table. "It doesn't tell th' half of it. My pieces never do," she wailed.

  Marsh smiled at her and shook his head. "Pshaw, Katy, you've done a good job. Nobody could put it in words in a paperall of itever."

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  Delph praised Katy with the others. Still, while she had listened a moment's misgiving at Katy's words of the future had racked her, only to be blown away like a last year's leaf in an April wind. It was easier to enjoy the goodness of the moment, and leave the future to shift for itself. Marsh had a future; he would turn eagerly back to it when he learned what farming really was. Life now was one long adventure with each day bringing some new understanding of him, learning more of what he loved and what he hated, drawing him a bit closer. The days when she had thought that he would go away without her were remembered less as days than nightmarish dreams that made the awakening to reality, even though it was not what she had planned, sweeter than it might have been.

  It was fun to use the bit of money she had and buy things for the house. Marsh was busy with his own buying, and she with help from Dorie was left to take full charge of the picking of this and choosing of that. Dorie was a rare one at getting the most from anything, be it an acre of red clay sheep skull land or a dollar. She and Delph, sometimes on foot, sometimes with Angus and the truck, hunted bargains over the country side.

  Luck blew their way like a wind. There were two auctions within a week. The old Shearer couple down the Jefferson Pike sold out in preparation for a move to a city in the north in order to be near their children. Their furniture was old, solid stuff that sold for almost nothing. Delph, at Dorie's insistence, bought a good bit of it, for though she disliked it, she knew she wouldn't live with such furniture always. That night Marsh looked at it, smoothed the heavy doors of a massive walnut wardrobe and said with pleasure in his eyes, "No flim-flam about this." The wardrobe made Delph think of a double coffin stood on end, but still she smiled to see that Marsh was pleased.

  It was fun to go to Mr. Cheely's store in the upper Burdine Bottoms and buy no end of things, especially dishes; nothing so stolid and expensive as a set all alike, but odds and ends of broken sets with no piece matching another. Mr. Cheely had inherited the store from his father who had in turn inherited from his father. The store was divided into three parts; a large front or main room where Mr. Cheely kept an assortment of newer things, ranging from fat bologna sausages hung over a counter where shoes and dress goods were displayed

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  to the piles of shot gun and rifle ammunition stacked in the rear by the hoes and under the horse collars next to a counter of ladies' hats and men's underwear. The back room was reserved for feed and seed and fertilizer, while the side room, receptacle for more than sixty years of all that would not sell, might contain anything, and was unlocked only for such privileged persons as Dorie.

  Dorie and Delph spent the most of several rainy afternoons rummaging in the side room where dishes, pots and pans, odds and ends of unmatched wall paper might be found among the dresses with leg-o-mutton sleeves, spittoons, bowl and pitcher sets, shaving mugs, Indian masks, painted shells, and lightning rods.

  Upon finding an article that might be of use to Delph, Dorie would carry it to Mr. Cheely who in winter weather sat reading and rocking in the main room by the stove. On seeing whatever she happened to bring, he would feign great surprise, leave off his rocking, push up his hat, and say, "Why, I can't see how that got in th' back room. It would ha sold in no time out here." Dorie would point out numberless reasons why nobody but a foolish young bride like Delph would want such a thi
ng, driving the price lower and lower until Mr. Cheely would suddenly commence rocking again with especial violence as he exclaimed, "Dorie, not one cent lower, an' that's disgraceful cheap," but when Dorie's eyes sparkled over the bargain she had made he would grunt and add with high satisfaction, "It's all clear profit to me, anyhow. If you hadn't a found it I'd never a knowed it was there, an' couldn't a sold it."

  Dorie liked the bargaining, but Delph found the Sears Roebuck orders much more exciting. She, with Dorie's advice, ordered bundles of remnants, curtain goods, toweling, sheeting, gingham, and percale. There was no end of excitement in waiting for the bundle and wondering just exactly what assortment Sears Roebuck would send. The buying of cloth in remnant bundles was a trick Dorie had learned when her children were small and every penny counted, and a place could be found in her household for any scrap of cloth.

  Though she bought remnants now mostly to satisfy her gambling instincts, so she said, Dorie remembered the days when she had had to think of cloth in terms of covering young bodies at the cheapest possible cost. As she and Delph sat sewing in the clutter room, now and again she would forget the curtains she hemmed or

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  the dish towels she cut, and fall into long, minute descriptions of this or that thing she had made from remnant bundles. "Many's th' time Sam used to say to me when I'd made him a remnant shirt, th' tails pieced out like a crazy quilt, th' collar lined with one color and th' cuffs with another, 'Mama,' he used to say, 'it's a pity you couldn't a studied higher mathematics. With th' way you can rigger things out you could ha learned it, I know.'"

  And she would go on; tell of bonnets for the girls with a crown of one color, hooded by still another, and tails pieced from something else, "Ever'body in th' country said my girls had th' prettiest bonnets," she would add, and tell on of aprons and skirts and dresses put together from hand-me-downs and remnants. She sighed a bit sometimes for Ethel; she had rebelled continually against such clothing and vowed many times that when she grew up she would have money enough to buy all her dresses ready made. She praised Emma, the oldest girl, only eighteen months younger than Sam; the one who had with him suffered most from the burden of a mortgaged farm, but Emma, no more than Sam had ever complained at anything. They'd both been born with sand in their craws and strength to back it up. Rachel had laughed at everything and cared no more for clothes than Katy, but it was a good thing that by the time Joe was ready for college there was more money for clothes, for Joe took everything seriously including the color of his ties.

  Dorie, like Juber at home, was a great teller of tales, some of her stories were old like his and began with a "back before th' War," or "This is one old Aunt Rachel Kidd used to tell." But the ones that Delph liked best were those of Dorie's children, accounts of their adventures in the wider world: Emma's fright on her first day as copy writer for a big Chicago department store, Rachel's adventures in hunting cheap food, clothing, and shelter in Cincinnati's west end, for Rachel had graduated from high school one day, and on the next ran away and was married in sun socks and a gingham dress to a college friend of Joe's, a member of the unemployed. There was Joe's winning of his first case; and Ethel's husband and home in Detroit which Dorie had never visited and doubted if she ever would. Ethel had married well, and lived in the suburbs with a cook and a maid, one over scrubbed little boy, and a house with landscaped grounds instead of just a yard planted with things, so Katy

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  who had been there said. Katy much preferred to visit Rachel; she had two children, two dogs, a pleasant tempered husband, who though he made little money, was never "always lookin' hard run an' all in a fluster like Ethel's."

  Delph for some unknown reason she had never stopped to puzzle out, had never asked of Sam, though in her eyes he was more important than the others. One afternoon when Marsh was with them in the clutter room, and Dorie as usual when with him was talking of crops and land, Delph heard her mention him, and stopped to listen. Dorie was by a window pointing out a rolling pasture field to Marsh. "We always called that knob 'Ole horny heel.' It was never any good 'til Sam took it in hand. Let me see." She paused and counted years or children's ages on the knuckles of one hand. "He couldn't ha been more than eleven years old when he took it into his head to try sweet clover there. Aye, I'll never forget how he looked. He was little for his agethen, an' th' clover was nigh as high as his head. I'd look up there; it was th' summer Poke Easy was a year old, an' see him a cuttin' away. Aimin' to cut some for hay, he said. There'd be just his black head a shinin', he had hair black as his father's, an' th' bees swarmin' 'round. They take awful after sweet clover. Lord, he was made for a farmer."

  "But as long as he's gettin' along so well where he is I guess you don't mind it so that he's away," Delph suddenly said, somehow impelled to speak in defense of Sam.

  Dorie turned from the window, and snatched up a sheet she had been hemming. Anger snapped through her eyes, and then it was gone, leaving her face old and empty and tired. "No, I don't mind," she said and looked at the stitches she had basted. "Sam he is a great success. He had too many brains to waste 'em workin' with th' land. He went to college interested in land and fertilizer an' nitrates. He had learned about 'em workin' with th' clovers." Her voice had grown level and toneless as if her mind had taken for itself all the shades of meaning her tongue could give. "In college he aimed to learn how to match land with fertilizer. He studied chemistry. He learned a lotabout nitrates. He learned their most important uses. He's high up in research in one of th' biggest munitions plants in th' countryspendin' all his days searchin' out th' cheapest ways to kill th' most men in th' least time. An' he could be workin' out ways to build up th' land."

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  Delph looked at her; and wished that she, Delph, had kept silent. Dorie seemed for the moment not to be Dorie, owner of a fine farm and mother of successful children, but only a disappointed, defeated woman growing old, with her back above the sheet she sewed bent more than a back should be.

  Marsh looked at her with pity in his eyes, opened his mouth as if to speak, then closed it, and went downstairs. Delph followed him, and soon both forgot Dorie upstairs as they talked excitedly of this and that. For better than anything else, Delph liked the endings of the afternoons like this when Marsh came from work on the old Weaver place, or scouring the country for tools and stock. She must show him something of the work she had done during the day, and he would tell her of the bargains he had found; a hive of bees dirt cheaphe didn't need a hive of beesbut it was so cheap he couldn't resist it. There was the great brood sow that in her last litter had borne fourteen pigs with never a runt to the bunch, and the six shoats, practically pure Poland China, not too high, and all vaccinated for cholera; and a fine Jersey cow to go with Prissy.

  Marsh was rapidly gaining the reputation of being "uncommon cautious when it comes to buyin'." Known as a man who knew enough to feel a hen's breast bone and look at her feet and her feathers as well as her comb; one who wouldn't buy a cow just because she was pretty and young and healthy looking; a lover of horses but with sense enough to know that with pure love and kindness only he would never get very far with a mule; and a man who wouldn't risk cheap fertilizer or cheap mixed grass seed.

  The southern end of Westover County watched him and wondered how he would turn out. Some thought he'd make a go of it, some held him as nothing more than a flash in the panany fool, give him plenty of bulletins to read and some observation could, with advice from Dorie Dodson Fairchild, farm in his head. It was a well known fact that the finest crops of all were grown and harvested in winter by a good warm fire with seed catalogs for farms. Some said that unless he got a renter to take at least half the bottoms he could never manage the whole farm without a good bit of machinery. Others held that his wife would count for more than farm machinery. Most had heard of the old Fincastle County breed of Costellos, and all of Delph's father, so that they accepted Delph and

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  knew
what she would do. Some of her people might be a bit on the wild side maybe, but all in all she came of a good strong back country stock of women who knew how to work, and could live for a time without frippery or foolishness; not like a city woman.

  Mr. Elliot on the rare times when he discussed anything with those he termed the natives, talked in a jovial way of his new landlord. He seemed like a sensible chap, but anybody must admit that it was pure foolishness for him to stay and try to finish paying for his land by farming it. He knew oil and could have rented the place and made a great deal more money in the oil fields. Still, if he worked a season or so on the place, it would probably bring a much better price when he sold it.