He stood a moment and looked at her. He could not see her face. Her back was bent and quivering. He thought of a mortally wounded dog he had once watched; it had crawled away and looked at nothing and made no sound. He called her again, and when she did not answer, he backed slowly through the door. He stared a time at her quivering shoulders, then turned and walked rapidly away. Outside the dew was falling. He smelled it on the fresh plowed ground and on the growing corn; and the smell sharpened his sense of failure and of foes and of sin. He thought of Delph, the way she had been, nothing in her heart for him but love and laughter when she thought him no more than a roving oil man. His head ached with a dull wonder of how he could have done what he had done; and the only answer he had was an ugly sickening one; he might come away from the oil fields but maybe the life he had learned there would follow him always; they were the place where he had learned to use the only weapon that he hadhis hands.
He stumbled against a ledge of stone, and found that he was going up the pasture hill. He stopped, and wondered why he went up the hill, but remembered when he glanced overhead and studied the stars. Many nights when they were not too tired, he and Delph would walk to the high knoll in the pasture and look for signs of rain and watch lightning play low in the west.
Page 192
He did not go on but sat a time on the stone with Caesar by his feet and looked down into the valley, where in the darkness he could see nothing but the squares of yellow light from the windows of his own house. It would be so good to go walking back and find Delph there, just as she had been yesterdayor as he had thought she was; one thing in life of which he could be certain, more than a woman to live with all his days, but something to feed his life and hold it as the soil fed the corn.
Down in the house Delph roused herself and washed the dishes, moving slowly with aimless, fumbling gestures like a woman old or blind. Finished with the dishes, she churned, drawing the heavy dasher up and down in the stone churn. Sweat trickled down her breasts and across her thighs, and sometimes pain in her face pricked through her numbed consciousness. But she was not tired. Sometimes she glanced through the open door into the early heavy darkness, thickening now with rising river fog. A train blew over the Cumberland bridge, its whistle coming with a lonesome cry down over the dark flat lands, calling her like a live thing to some splendid world she had wished for and now would most likely never see.
A moth came and fluttered about the lamp globe, and she watched it a moment, then bowed her head and stared at the blue and yellow bands on the churn. She watched the bands a long while, saw them grow dim and faint and thought it strange that they should change so. She lifted her head and saw the lamp flame flickering pale blue. The oil was burned away and she had filled the lamp that morning. She put more oil into the lamp, and lifted the butter from the churn, but felt still the same numb wonder that this could be Delph who worked alone in the night in a strange house while a strange man walked somewhere near.
She thought of him, and the loss of her dreams seemed nothing. She had loved a man who didn't exist. She sat for a time in the kitchen door, and felt the cool damp night air on her bare arms. Sometimes she looked for long moments over head and tried to search out the fog-hidden stars, but always her glance was lost in a nothingness of mist and darkness.
She never knew how long she sat, not trying to think or feel or wonder, just sitting. It might have been midnight when she heard feet walking with heavy hesitant steps across the dry hard ground in
Page 193
the yard. That would be Marsh, she knew, and got up and went into the kitchen. She glanced wildly about the room. He might maybe say that it was time they went to sleep. She saw the two steps leading to the stair door. Somewhere in the mostly unfinished upstairs there was a bed with one broken slat and a half filled tick, but it would do. Anything would be better than being near him.
She left the lamp on the kitchen table and went upstairs. She heard soon his feet go clumping about the house, and then he was by the stairs and calling in a low hesitant voice, "DelphDelph."
She dropped her shoe to let him know that she was there. He called again, and when she did not answer she heard, after a time of waiting, his feet go slowly away.
Page 194
15
Marsh awoke to the misty in-between-time of neither night nor day. He lay a moment and heard fog drip from the eaves, and felt the morning air, cool through the window, and heavy with the smell of plowed earth. He remembered, and lifted suddenly on one elbow and looked at Delph's pillow. It was smooth and neat with a curiously empty look in the gray light.
He got up and dressed quickly, and carrying his shoes in his hand went to the kitchen. The clock ticked loudly there, and the house seemed dead and empty, like the shanties he had batched in during his oil field days. He tip-toed to the stair door, and listened on the bottom step until he thought he heard a bed spring creak.
He turned away, put on his shoes, and went hunting in the wood box for cedar wood and hickory bark. When the bark snapped and crackled in the flames, he washed, filled the tea kettle and set it to boil, put on the coffee, sliced bacon for frying, and stood then looking about the room, hoping to find a bit of work or some excuse for staying until Delph came.
He went to stand by the screen door, and now and then glanced up through the fog, trying but absentmindedly to learn if the day were cloudy or clear. The sky mattered less than yesterday. Mostly he listened for Delph.
His heart quickened when he at last heard her feet on the sttirs. He started across the room, but stopped abruptly when the door opened and he saw her face. Last night she had not cried out or spoken of pain, yet half her face was swollen and discolored, with the skin on her nose and forehead broken.
Page 195
He watched in silence while she came slowly down the last two steps, as if since yesterday she had grown slow and old. She paused to fasten the stair door with particular care, turned again and said with her eyes careful to look at nothing except the stove, "I must have overslept, but I'll have breakfast ready by th' time you feed."
She spoke so carefully, like a child saying a poorly memorized and greatly detested bit of scripture before a strange and hated audience. He knew she lied. Most likely she had awakened when he came into the kitchen, and had lain, hoping that he would go away. She walked on to the stove with her shoulders straight and high above her proud breasts, and her head tilted a little as if her braids had been a crown. He tried to find the old Delph in her eyes, and for a moment something hurt and broken fluttered in their even stony blueness, and then they were like her shoulders, hard and proud and still.
Wordless he went from the kitchen. A growing realization of what he had done took away all the pleasure of that first trip to the barn. He liked the walking about on his own land with Caesar at his heels in the gray shifting fog of a summer's morning when the smells of growing corn and dew dampened earth and of cattle and hay and harness leather lay close and clear like things he could touch. Other mornings, before the full heat and the hard work of the day, he had felt strong and unhampered, able to live the life he wanted, forever here on his own land.
But today nothing was right or good. Breakfast was a long struggle to swallow food that kept sticking in his throat. The early morning's plowing was less the work in which he took much pride than a continual reminder of what he had done to Delph. He had taken time to mend the harness, patch it and brace it in a multitude of places, putting into the work the realization that it would be a good while before he could buy new. And so the harness had not broken like yesterday, and Delph's spending of the money, the thing that had started the quarrel, seemed a mere nothing, a little childlike thing at which a sensible man would have smiled.
When he saw her come out to hoe in the melon rows, he stopped his work and went to her. He tried to tell her that now she must not work so hard, but she hoed on and answered stonily from the recesses of her sunbonnet, "It would be a pretty time to quit work nowknowi
n' that ever'thingmaybe our winter's bread depends on what we make this summer."
Page 196
''But, Delphth' baby," he began hesitantly.
She whirled about at that. "You're a fine one to be thinkin' of th' baby. Hatin' me becausebecause I'm havin' it. I never fussed an' quarreled for myself onlybutbut for it an'you."
She choked and turned abruptly back to the hoeing. He stood and watched her, angered by the never-to-be-untangled mingling of truth and lie in her talk. He hadn't struck her because she was going to have a child. He didn't know exactly what of her hard words had flung him beyond the borders of sanity and reason; but he did know past any doubt that all the hateful things she had said had been mostly for the child, and for that foolishly brilliant future she saw for him.
He stood a time shifting hesitantly from one foot to the other; the hot sun on his back reminding him that it maybe felt hotter still to Delph. He at last touched her on the shoulder, but when she lifted her head and looked at him, he saw a barrier in her eyes which his words, never free and easy like those of other men, could not pierce. He went back to his work, and his hope for rain was dwarfed and small by the greater hope that somehow, sometime Delph would at least let him reason with her.
Days passed and mostly things remained the same. A few thunder showers fell on the withering crops, and Delph's healing face sometimes had the look of a woman's face, but mostly it seemed a thing cut from stone. Marsh plowed his corn six times, watered his stock in the river, worked harder than he had ever worked, and found little time to think and wonderand fear. When thoughts of Delph goaded him into the misery of bafflement, he turned more fiercely to the land. There he was sometimes able to find the old goodness again; and because of that his wide fields seemed more than a road to security, but filled with a strength and kindness greater than that to be found in men. There were times especially at twilight after a hard day's work when some of the patience and the strength of the land seemed entered into him, and he could think of Delph, not as she was now, but she had been and would be again.
August came and Delph drove the mules and peddled melons in Burdine and the surrounding country. Marsh had suggested that he peddle and hire Sober Creekmore, the negro down the river, to do the hot back breaking work of gathering, but Delph had stubbornly
Page 197
insisted that she peddle. Now, for her the peddling days were like bright holidays when the fierce struggle not to cry or think or let her mind wander past the birth of her child was easier than when she stayed at home. The mules were not gentle as Maude, but young and hard to manage.
Everywhere people shook their heads over the drought and the heat, and sighed for the burning crops. Dorie and Marsh seemed the only ones that never complained. Dorie came often to comfort and advise the Gregorys. She would look at the sky and then at the land and say, half in pity, half in scorn, ''Aye, it's maybe not half as bad as it'll be. A wet spring, dry summer, an' then maybe a hard winter ended by a flood. It's weather like this weeds out th' farmers."
"Only th' no good ones," Marsh would say, and Delph said nothing. Only now and then when she drove by the Burdine depot, she would go slowly by and study the crowd of waiting men. The group was larger now, not only the young ones, but older, family men with sober timid eyes and great gnarled hands who, while they waited for the north bound train, showed in their faces that their thoughts were less for the factories that maybe lay ahead, than for the things they left behind. Delph pitied them, old as they were, the best of their lives and their bodies already gone to years of farming thin hill lands; the cities of the north could hold little future for them. She would think of Marsh, see him in them, old, with his strength gone for nothing. She would drive on, blind to the road.
One afternoon when a second load of melons kept her late in the town and the depot seemed deserted, she drove to the back where the mail trucks waited, and without climbing down from the wagon, called in a low voice to a man weighing sacks of dried mayapple root by the express office, "How much is a ticket to Cincinnati?"
The man stared at her a moment before asking, "One way or round trip?"
"One way," she said.
"Three-sixty-five," he answered, and after studying her a moment longer, smiled and asked, "I believe you're Marsh Gregory's wife, th' man that took over th' old Weaver Place?"
She nodded, and fumbled with the reins as she explained in a hesitant voice with her eyes on the ticket window showing through the door, "One a my cousins in th' back hillsshe wrote to find out. She was thinkin' a goin' up there for work."
Page 198
The man came and put his foot on the wheel, and smiled up at her as he talked. "Work's mighty slack," he said. "Two people fer ever' job in them big towns. You'd better write an' tell her she's better where she's at. Them that have got a roof to their heads an' somethin' to eat's lucky these days."
She gathered up the reins, and looked at them while she said, "I guess this womanmy cousinwould be kind a foolish to take a babyan awful little babyto a place like thatnot even knowin' she could get a job."
The man spat then gave his head a short hard nod. "She wouldn't just be foolishcriminal I'd call it to take a baby to a place like that.Well, from what I've been hearin' your man'll have them that was sayin' back in th' spring he couldn't farm, a talkin' out a th' other side a their mouths by fall. Some are sayin' he must ha knowed a dry spell was on th' way, an' a planted his corn late an' a good sized melon field on purpose. From all th' loads I've seen you haul, he'll more than pay for his summer work if it don't rain another drop," he said, and there was admiration in his eyes.
"Mostly I guess it's beginner's luck," she said and tried to smile. When he had taken his foot from the wheel, she turned her team about and drove rapidly away.
Though she had not intended to, that night at supper Delph told Marsh of the stranger's comment on his luck; and in spite of the little lie she made by saying he was a truck driver instead of a man who knew the price of tickets, she felt rewarded in the look of gratitude that came to Marsh's eyes. There were days when his eyes were like pages written full of troubled words, and some hope would come to her that the weather might do what she and his reason had failed to make him do. Yet even while she hated him for his stubbornness, pity tightened her throat when she watched him as he watched the sky. If it happened that they were in the melon field, she would pause and say, "Maybe there'll come a good soakin' rain."
"Maybe so," he would say, and continue to search the southwest where day after day he saw the same stretch of cloudless sky, no longer blue, but a glittering white like a quilt of milk weed down.
Then Delph would work again, waiting to hear the things he never said. She saw his face when at noon he looked at the withered corn, and in his gray eyes she could see no despair, pity rather for
Page 199
the corn that seemed certain to die, maybe a hard stony anger when he looked at the sky, but never despair.
She marveled sometimes at the happiness he found in trivial things such as the melons. Them he seemed to prize not only because they were bearing a crop in spite of the drought, but because they fought so to live when other plants died. When he looked at them it was as if he saw people and not plants, and his eyes never yearned over them as over the corn. Though there was still plenty of hope for the corn, so Dorie said. It was from her seed, large and slow growing and white, a type that with good soil and the careful tending Marsh gave it could take most anything the weather had to give and return a fair yield.
Delph wished sometimes that Dorie would stay away. She accepted the drought as Marsh accepted it; not as a monster that came and blasted hopes and made as nothing months of work and money spent for seed, but only as one of the many misfortunes liable to overtake any farmer. "This is th' worst part of a drought," she said one day while she visited with them in the melon field. "Th' heat won't kill us, an' things are not all dead, but now it's th' waitin' an' watchin' 'em die that hurts a body so."
/> "Th' corn's puttin' up a hard fight," Marsh said, and looked down the pale rows where the plants held their withered, tightly curled leaves like spear points raised against the sky.