Between the Flowers: A Novel

  Marsh continued with the plowing until the lengthening hill shadow told him the afternoon was almost gone. He stabled Charlie, threw an old army saddle on Ruthie Ann, stopped for Delph's grocery list, and rode on to Lewis's store. He had hoped the place would be empty, but as he dismounted at the porch it seemed that half the neighbormen were there. They had, through Uncle Jackson Lewis, ordered some tons of fertilizer together in order to get it cheaper; it had come during the morning and all had knocked off early to haul it home. Perce Higginbottom called to him in hearty greeting as he entered. He answered readily enough, but he wished the man had kept silent. The others noticed him now. One of Quarrelsome Sexton's tall black-eyed boys measured him in speculative silence, while old Jackson Lewis, keeper of the store, lay down his paper, pushed up his spectacles and smiled at him from his seat by the

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  amber-stained stove. Tobe Huffacre was there, a big man, strong, a successful farmer, but with something cowed and timid in his eyes. He looked at Marsh and said, ''Still stickin', I see. I kind a thought you'd turn that place over to some renter come spring, but your wife was tellin' mine you thought you'd stay till fall."

  "I thought I'd have a try with it myself first," Marsh answered, and studied Uncle Jackson from the corners of his eyes. He had traded with him on several other occasions, but never until now had he bothered to think what manner of man he was. He looked to be a good hearted old soul with wisps of white hair smooth and neat on his pink shining skull that gave his head somewhat the look of one bland smile. He didn't seem to be the sort of man who would force a farmer into selling his cows to pay a debt, as long as he thought he would have a crop in the fall.

  Marsh dropped to a nail keg in a corner by the counter and leaned his shoulders against the fly specked candy case, and thought he would wait a bit and maybe the others would go home. But Perce, after his usual talkative fashion, came and asked how much ground he had ready for planting, and remarked that Ruthie Ann didn't look so skittish as in the late winter. "You'd ought to be careful," he said. "I've seen more good teams than one worked to death on that piece a ground you've got."

  "An' men' too," Big Jim Burnett said, and searched him a moment with his slow quiet eyes.

  "I've felt no sign a dyin' as yet," he answered shortly.

  Quarrelsome Sexton's boy studied him speculatively. "Th' hard time's not come," he said. "Pap an' me an' my brothers we rented that piece a bottom ground one year. God, it was awful layin' corn by in July, with th' sun strikin' back frum that limestone hill above ye." He spat contemptuously into the stove heat. "I'd sooner lay a sweet potato ridge in hell than plow high corn in bottom lands.''

  "There's nothin' like tryin'," Marsh answered, and was angrily conscious of being the center of attention. He had known it before, this being measured and appraised by men with whom he was to work and live. A long time ago before he was out of his teens, drillers had looked at him in silence, studied his legs and the set of his shoulders and said, "Well, boy, you look like you might be able to swing a sledge long enough to sharpen a twelve inch bit, but can you?" And

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  he could answer, "Yes," and speak the truth. Later, when lease bosses asked him if he could drill, work twelve hours a day through weeks in which there were no Sundays, he could answer yes to that, and he could answer yes to hauling and mixing nitroglycerin, or holding his own in an oil fire or a free for all fight. Now, when men looked at him with questions in their eyes and the questions mattered more than the others, he couldn't answer. He didn't know.

  He had a sudden uneasy feeling that every man of them knew how he felt; could look through his shirt and see the tiredness in his back and shoulders that came from the unaccustomed work he did. They maybe knew that sometimes at night after his first few days of plowing it would have been pleasant to drop by a furrow and just lie there and restand rest; and they maybe knew. He got up abruptly and walked to the stretch of counter where men stood when they wanted to trade. Uncle Jackson laid down his paper and asked, "Want somethin', Mr. Gregory?"

  "Fifteen pounds a mixed ten an' twelve penny nails," he began, and while Uncle weighed up the nails, his eye traveled down the list; coffee, he'd drink more buttermilk and less coffee; sugar, Delph was always baking cakes; flour, meal was forty cents cheaper on the sack than flour; vanilla, what in the hell did he need with vanilla? He'd batched months on end and never smelled the stuff.

  He bought meal and nails and sugar and coffee. Uncle Jackson looked at him over his spectacles and asked, "Will that be all?" and when Marsh nodded, he figured the total on the edge of a newspaper. Marsh and the other men were silent while Uncle figured so that his solemn statement of the total sounded loud in the quiet room. "Three dollars an' seventy-six cents," he said, and extended his hand a little way, palm upward.

  Marsh stood staring at the empty hand, conscious of the waiting and the watching of his neighbors. He'd be damned if he would admit to the whole neighborhood that before he even had his crop in the ground he was so hard up he must ask for credit. The words of asking he had planned to use wouldn't come past his tongue. It was easier to pull his worn black leather wallet from a hip pocket and take out the five dollar billhis last one.

  He watched the dirty, sweat stained piece of paper fall limp and loose on Uncle's, and the hand close and the paper go into the till.

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  Then Uncle was counting change into his handfour quarters, two dimes, and four pennies. He dropped it into his jumper pocket, heard the faint jingle, and wondered when he would have another five dollar billfor groceries. The monthly rent from the brick house was needed for feed and work bills, and what with the poor pasture the spring had so far brought, his feed bills were high. His harness wouldn't last the season, and any money made from early produce would have to go for harness.

  The sense of uncertainty and fear of defeat which beset him as he left the store disappeared when he came to the wide new whitewashed gate that opened on his road. As always he must pause a moment and study the gate; a fine gate, a proper gate, made like those of the bluegrass country, cunningly contrived so that a man might ride through with no dismounting. Some day he would have a grilled iron gate with the name Gregory worked in an iron scroll across the top like some of those in Fayette County; the gate would lead to a finely graveled road, and on each side the apple and pear trees would grow.

  He followed the wagon track through a corner of the pasture, down past the brick house orchard where the dead flowered fruit trees were showing green. He rode up to a spot by the orchard fence and rose in the stirrups, and after much craning of his head he saw what he wanted to see, high on a forked limb of an apple tree. The limb swayed and jumped in the wind, and the robin's nest built on it rose and fell like a small ship riding out a storm, while the bird sat, helpless to do more than stay on the nest.

  Marsh looked at the bird in a worried way, and the bird twisted its head about and studied him a moment, then only settled more firmly on the eggs. He lingered, and scolded his foolishness in wasting time, but there must be some way to feed the bird when it could not and would not leave its eggs for a moment to the cold. The bird looked at him, as it rose and stood above the eggs, then began a gentle conversational calling, half summons, half explanation.

  He waited and the bird waited. Soon there was an answer from a pear tree a few rows away. He saw soon another robin, an enormous fat gentleman of a bird with a great expanse of bright red breast. He explained and apologized but took his time, coming along with short flights and masterful hops. He reached the limb, hopped

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  up on the edge of the nest, while the other bird, after a bit more conversation which sounded much like advice or discussion of the weather, hopped out of the nest and flew away. The other settled himself on the eggs, careful to keep his head toward Marsh, for he seemed more wary than his mate.

  Marsh smiled with his eyes on the bird, and said, "Well, I'll be damned. Is that th' way you m
anage?" and rode on, light hearted for no reason at all. He hurried, ashamed of having wasted time in such fashion, but when he came to the top of the hill, though it was near sundown, he must linger again to look at the lower fields. He saw Delph driving the cows down the barn lane for milking, and thought of the meal he had bought when she ordered flour; and he wished that she hadn't told that gossiping Sadie Huffacre he would go away in the fall.

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  14

  The Robin's eggs hatched and grew into birds that lived and learned to fly. Marsh saw them at their lessons a time or so, and then forgot them as he forgot many things in the hard press of work that came with summer.

  Delph did the milking and barnwork now, went about in the foggy, dewy mornings with her dress tucked above her knees, slopping the hogs, feeding and counting her chickens, milking and driving the cows up to the hill pasture for the day. Finished with the morning outside chores, she did her housework, washed dishes, churned, carried buckets of milk and crocks of butter to the spring house under the hill, scoured milk vessels and set them to sweeten in the sun, boiled her clothes clean in the iron boiler set in a corner of the yard, and ironed them with irons heated on the kitchen range.

  There were days when her mind raced ahead of her hands, and her body never seemed big enough or strong enough to do the chores and housework, peddle with Maude in the cart and keep the garden free of weeds. Her garden was a large one, and more and more Marsh left the tending of it as well as hoeing in the melon fields to her. Now that the weather was settled and dry, his mind and his heart and his body were only for the young corn, planted late but thrivingand he never seemed to know that most nights found her cruelly tired and that on some mornings when she awakened her hands and arms and back felt stiff and slow as if they belonged to some old woman and not to Delph.

  Still, she knew that for all her tiredness Marsh worked harder than she. Mornings she would look across the dewy fields and see

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  him and the mules moving through an ugly world of black earth and white fog. Evenings when the dew was falling in the valley he would still be there, moving more slowly than at noon. She would hear sometimes his long drawn "gees" and "haws," and other times his curses, black oil man's oaths, that gave her a feeling of guilt and of sorrow. She, with her stubborn ways, had been the cause of his trying to farm.

  He never cursed the sandy soil that was continually getting into his shoes, nor the corn, nor the blistering sun, and seldom the mules, but often the harness which was old and given to breaking; and his furrows with the double shovel. They were not always straight as he would have them be, and now that the corn stood knee high, he broke it sometimes, plowed it up or covered it over; and he cursed his unskillful ways. Mostly, though, he was silent, especially through the hot close afternoons.

  Delph would hear his silence, and know that he was tired. No matter what she might be doing, she would stop her work and take him a cornbread sandwich and buttermilk, cold from the spring house. Sometimes she could persuade him to walk down to the river and sit a time in the shade of the willows, and souse his head and his hands in the cool water, but most often he drank his milk with one hand on a plow handle and the reins about his shoulders. She would look at him as he tilted his head and drank the milk; his eyes lifted, a farmer's eyes hunting in the sky, his face beginning to be a farmer's face with the mark of his hat a pale band across his sun burned forehead, and fine sun wrinkles forming at the corners of his eyes. He was thinner than in the spring; the muscles of his arms and shoulders played under the skin like twisting ropes, and even his face was drained of fat, flat cheeked with cord laced temples, and a chin that seemed always set like a fighter's chin. Sometimes in the field or at night when he seemed more like some dumb overworked beast of burden than a man, Delph would open her mouth to speak; to say all the things she knew that sooner or later he would learn without her telling. Still, the days passed with her eyes alone speaking her troubled thoughts. Something about his face when he looked at the young growing corn or called to Caesar that it was time to go to the field, held her silent.

  She appealed to Doric one hot day in early July when the older woman came down to bring them a mess of fresh killed mutton and

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  learn how things were faring. They were in the chicken run, admiring Delph's lot of Plymouth Rock fryers, fat and ready to sell, when Delph abruptly changed the conversation, and said in a choked embarrassed voice, "I know it's a funny thing for a wife to ask another woman, butDoric, I wish you'd talk to Marsh. Ihe wouldn't listen to me. Think maybe I was complainin', butI can't just go on an' on an' see him kill himself with work when there's no need."

  But Dorie only sighed, and pushed back her bonnet. She looked a moment past the chicken run where Marsh plowed in the knee high corn. "Aye, Delph don't start out like I did, worryin' over your man. You can live with him for sixty years an' he'll still be one person an' you another." She studied Delph a moment, her brown face and sun burned arms, and her hands that were beginning to show the work they did. "You'd better worry after yourself. If anybody says anything to him, it ought to be about youworkin' from daylight to dark."

  Delph caught her sleeve. "Don't say anything to himabout me I mean. I'm strong. I don't mind. An' in a way this fool notion he took for farmin', it's all my faultth' way I carried on when he planned to go away. Work makes th' time passan' I know it won't be for always."

  Dorie looked abruptly away from her up into the sky. "I'd never be any hand at readin' weather signs down in a valley like this," she said. "But valley or no valley long as them mare's tails keep a shinin' we'll have no rain. Garden stuff's needin' it now."

  Delph studied the sky, too. Last night Marsh had mentioned the need of rain; and so she wished it would rain. One of the young fat fryers came pecking by her feet, and she smiled a little secret smile as she said to Doric, "Don't you think these chickens are big enough to sell? I want th' moneyfor a special reason."

  She hoped that Doric would ask her why she wanted the money, but Doric only studied the chicken and said, "I'd keep th' pullets though, but feedin' th' roosters any longer is pure waste."

  Delph nodded and said nothing. Doric like Marsh seemed to have mind only for crops and land and weather signs, with no gaps in her conversation that could be led to babies. There never seemed to be a proper time to say, "Marsh, one a these days next winter we'll

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  maybe have a baby." It would be easier to buy cloth and baby's things and let him see. That was the way women in stories managed, and it seemed a very nice way.

  Still, a few days later when she had sold the chickens and bought fine white cloth and other things she thought a baby might need, she wondered as she waited on Burdine Hill for the ferry boat, if she should have spent the money. They needed so many things, and Marsh was always speaking of the cost of this or that.

  She looked out over the Cumberland, blue and sparkling in the sun, heard the lumber mills behind her droning with a sleepy, lazy sound, and gradually as she thought of Marsh, shame that she should make of him such a stranger in her heart took the place of fear. She saw the child, a little, helpless, ever-demanding thing with eyes gray like Marsh's eyes; and they would brighten when it smiled like quiet gray water turned suddenly to the sun, the way Marsh's eyes brightened.

  The ferry boat came at last, and as always she and Maude waited until all the cars were on. She liked the short ride over the river. The little waves rippled and whispered against the flat-bottomed boat, and if she shut her eyes and the people in the cars were quiet she could imagine for a moment that she was on the ocean or some great wide river like the Mississippi. But today when she closed her eyes, she saw Marsh, red-eyed and haggard faced, studying the sky for rain.

  She drove slowly up the hill, remembering Marsh's advice to be careful of Maude. She paused once and watched men working high up on the white limestone cliff where they blasted a tunnel for the road that would lead to the bri
dge. The strange working men with their sharp northern brogue were, except for the Elliots and the unfamiliar cars she met on the road, the only things new or different in the neighborhood of Burdine.

  Mostly the town, more a memory of boom days than a town, seemed a place from which people went away. She saw them many times; the ones waiting to go away, up by the yellow depot watching for northbound number twelve, or at the bus station in the lower town waiting for a northbound Greyhound. Usually they were long-limbed hill men with suitcases gripped awkwardly in great-knuckled, sunburned hands, come up from the back hill counties to take