Dorie nodded. "It's a curlin' its leaves tight to keep in ever' bit a water." She shook her head slowly, and some strange delight kindled in her eyes. "Aye, you know a plant is a wonderful thing. It's hard to understand how they live in all this suna hundred an' four yesterday in th' shade."
"An' look at that pile a melons there," Marsh said, and something of the old woman's pleasure glowed in his own eyes. "I can't see for th' life a me where they get their water." He took a handful of soil, looked at it a moment, then blew it slowly from his palm, and in the air it made a little cloud.
"It's wonderful what hot weather a melon can take an' still thrive," Doric answered. "They'll be your salvation this season."
Delph looked down the rows of withered, limp-leafed vines. They looked dead. Their frail stems were black in spots, but everywhere the great cool looking melons lay. They were mostly water;
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yet the leaves died for lack of it and still the melons grew and made their seed. It was a marvelmaybe, just as there was a wonder in the way the corn leaves curled to keep the plant alive, and the cunning of the lower leaves that died so that the upper ones might live and bring the plant to seed. She stared at the two before her; Marsh, gaunt with red unshaven beard and his blue shirt, a darker blue with sweat, and the old woman standing motionless above the hot soil; they were like the melons and the corn and the garden beans that bloomed and bloomed. They accepted the land and the sky as the melons accepted, fought as they fought with all the cunning in their power, and whether they won or lost they accepted still. She studied them a moment longer, then hastily dumped the muskmelons in her apron into the wagon, and hurried to the house. Though her own room upstairs was like an oven when the sun struck full on the tin roof, she went there. After drawing the blinds to shut out the sight of the fields, she flung herself face downward on the bed. She thought of Marsh as he had been, and as he was nowno better than a plant of wilting corn. She could have cried for him, but he didn't want her tears. He didn't want her; he wanted the land, and always his farm would be the master and he the slave.
She thought of her child, and her hands clutching and twisting over the feather bolster grew still, and the ache that seemed so many times too big for her throat went away. Soon, she got up and went back to the melon field. Marsh looked at her and smiled to see that she seemed happier than she had been for days. She never saw his smile, and hardly noticed that her bonnet was limp with sweat or that her dress was wet on her back as if she had stood in a rain. She saw her child; a part of her it would be, like a piece of herself to go on and on, higher than any dream she had ever had for Delph.
August dragged through dog days, and the drought ceased to be a simple thing like lack of rain, but was a presence that entered their house and lived with them, sat at their table, and haunted their sleep on the dewless nights. They no longer listened to the rain crow's mournful cry on the river hill. The rain crows lied that year so Dorie said, and all other rain signs as well. The earth worms burrowed deep to find a coolness in the earth, and now when Delph carried buckets of cool water from the spring house, the bucket showed but little sign of sweat in the hot dry air.
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Great cracks appeared in the hard ground of the yard where the few flowers had long since been uprooted by hogs bursting through the makeshift fence. Hot winds from the north raised streamers and eddies of the dust-like soil of the corn rows until the limp ragweeds by the road stood more brown than green. The spring ran thin and quiet, and the mint by the spring house door gradually paled, lost its green crispness for one of brown, and died.
There was dust and silence and murky yellow light, and worse than those, there was the waiting, and the watching of plants, and searching of the sky. Marsh worked and gathered melons and tended stock and never seemed to know he had a body. Hope gradually drained from his face, just as the bit of fat in his body melted away in sweat. Still, he said nothing of going away.
More than the sight of the dusty corn fields, or the dying melon vines, it was Marsh's face Delph wanted to forget when she peddled. Often she drove as far as Patty George's store, a barn like building set a good distance back from the main road and well hidden in a clump of scrub oak trees where unlicensed liquor was sold. There, it was no uncommon thing to see drunken, sunburned men, gaunt under sweat clinging overalls, lying in a stupor by some tree, or loping a mule helter-skelter through the trees to the tune of a hill-billy song.
Sometimes, a deputy sheriff who was usually by or some one of the men, more sober than the others, would tell her it was no place for a woman. But her melons sold well there, and she would laugh at advice, and stay until they were sold. Marsh didn't know that she came there, and he would maybe not like it. Still, the occasional fights, drunken brawls with now and then a bit of gun play helped take her mind from its tortured ways. She didn't care what others thought about her going. It didn't matter. Nothing seemed to matter.
She was sick of being Delph, a farmer's wife, forced to talk and smile and never let anyone know that the healing wound on her faceone night she'd been running after Prissy's sassy calf, and hadn't watched where she was going, and banged her face hard against a set of harness Marsh, fool like, had left hanging in the barn hallwas a little thing compared to the great wound that made her whole life ugly ... and Marsh's with it.
He stayed about the house no more than necessary, and dreaded the Sundays when there was no work to keep him in the fields, and
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he could not go to church. He would not go without Delph, and Delph would not go. She could not wear a deep brimmed bonnet to church, and since he had made the mark on her face she had never been among people without her bonnet. Usually he spent the day puttering at first this and that, but feeling always guilty and lazy because on Sundays Delph did the house work she had neglected through the week. He would go sometimes to sit by the river, but was miserable there, thinking always of Delph hard at work in the hot kitchen.
One Sunday morning, sick of staying always away from her, he begged for the privilege of doing her churning, but Delph no more than in the first days of her marriage could stomach the idea of a man doing woman's work. In the end he did what he usually did, went for a scrub in the river, finished with that he washed Caesar, then sat a time in the shade and watched the water.
He thought of his dying corn, and the debts, and the dead pasture, his stock beginning to show the sparseness of their fare, and the long months of buying all the feed he needed; and he knew that he was beginning to be afraid. He thought of Delph, working too hard, eating her heart away, maybe doing some mysterious damage to the childif she were going to have a child. There was little change in her that he could see; her body thinner if anything, with her eyes big and a wild bright blue against her sun burned skin.
He got up and walked quickly toward the house, but stopped when he came to the edge of the field. It had happened before, and it would happen again, and always he would master it in timethat wild wanting of Delph; not just her body, or her willing, patient hands, but all of her, the part he wondered if he had ever had. If he could go to her and talk, tell her that he was afraid, that maybe the cows must be sold, that maybe in the fall he would have to go hunt a job and work until spring. If he could say all that the things he feared would matter less. She would smile and toss back her hair and say, "Pshaw, a little hard work won't kill us." He would feel better then, and know that things would right themselves in time. She could do all that, and it was hard to remember that she was the one he must fear most. It would be so easyand so goodto make her his again, complain of the hard times, and let her persuade him to go awayand always after he would hate himself, and her, too, maybe.
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He went back to the house not long after, and after some searching found Delph in a freshly ironed dress and apron sitting in the spring house door with a book on her knees. He brushed past her with the excuse that he wanted one of the melons they kept cooling there. "What you readin',
Delph?" he asked.
She looked up quickly in a dazed sort of way as if he had roused her from a sleep. It was plain she preferred the book to him. "A book about India Dorie loaned me, It's all about jewels, an snakes, an' tigers, an' droughts, an' child marriages," she answered. Her face lost its look of happy absorption while something like hunger and anger shadowed her eyes. He wished he had not spoken. Still, he had to speak.
He had to content himself with what little bits of herself she gave him, and when after supper she walked away, though with never a word, he was glad, and followed her. He knew she was going to watch the sun go down; that was almost the only thing they did together now. He walked in silence a few steps behind, with Caesar trotting before him. They went up the hill and then into the pasture where the sound of their feet over the brown grass and stubble sounded loud like thorns crackling in a fire.
They came to the high knoll with its crown of little walnut saplings that let yellow leaves fall on their hair as if the time had been October. Down in the bottom dark had come, but here on the high ground the red-washed twilight stained the world like the hot glow from a melting sky. The color touched their faces and their hands, and the hair along Caesar's back seemed more red than brown.
The sunset was a high mysterious land of castles and islands and mountains formed of red and gold and purple cloud. Bands of red rose higher, and they watched their rising until their heads were tipped far back and their eyes ached with the red light. "We might as well go," Marsh said. "We could look all night an' see no sign a rain."
"That's right," Delph answered, and turned and looked toward the north where Hawthorne Town lay. There, when it was dark enough and clear, she could see rows of lights from streets and railroad shops. She looked a time, but tonight the lights were no more than a pale glow, smudged by dust and dimmed in the sunset.
They went away then, silently as they had come. Once Marsh plucked a weed by the path, felt it in the darkness and said, "There's no dew fallin'."
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"No fog either th' last few nights," Delph answered, and added, "That helped a little."
"Don't forget," Marsh said when they had reached the house, "this is th' night you write up your news."
"I know," Delph answered wearily. She hated this writing of little petty news from Cedar Stump in order to get the paper free.
Tonight the writing went slowly. The moths swarming about the lamp were a torment to her heat strained nerves, and her sweating fingers were awkward and stiff over the pen. She watched the black letters curl over the page, and saw again the heartless beauty in the sky, the blade-curled rows of corn, and the melons that ripened fruit and died. In the face of the drought the births and deaths and sicknesses of which she wrote grew small and unimportant, more like the doings of ants who lived in the shadow of some stone that any day might fall and hide all sign that they had lived.
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16
Marsh wiped his face and neck with a soggy blue bandanna, and once more turned from his work of gathering melons to look at the southwest where the sky no longer lay white and shimmering, but was gray and cool to the eyes. He thought it had darkened a little in the last hour, but still it was nothing against all that dry white blue.
He heaved a watermelon to his shoulder, cradled another in his other arm and started to the wagon, sinking ankle deep in the dry sandy soil. He watched his sinking feet, felt the hot dry soil in his shoes, and was glad that his plowed lands were flat. Hill fields loosened with a plow and stripped by the drought of every plant that might have held a bit of soil would wash to the bone this winter. The winter would most likely be wet, or cold with a good bit of snow. He'd sow the melon fields and maybe some of the pasture to alfalfaif he could buy the seed. Alfalfa would be good for early pasture next springif he could hold on till spring.
He put the melons in the wagon, and wished there were a patch of shade for Maude. She was heavy with foal and it was not good for her to stand in the hot sun. He wondered if the foal would be colt or filly, and hoped it would be a good piece of horse flesh, something like what he had always wanted, though he knew he ought to have been sensible and let her raise a mule colt. He looked at a dead melon vine by his feet, and knew that Maude and her foal didn't matter. He'd most likely have to sell them both to pull him through the winter.
He glanced at the sky again, and thought that somewhere Delph was maybe looking at it, too. She had been peddling since
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full sunrisesold one wagon load and was back for another before he had enough gathered to fill the wagon. He had asked her how she sold the melons in such a hurry. Her eyes had flashed up at him from her sunbonnet, and she had laughed and answered, ''Some fool man thought th' mules were runnin' away, an' yelled, an' all th' mill men came on th' run. They bought th' melons."
"You be careful. They could hurt you bad," he had warned, and wished he had paid Sober Creekmore to do the hot back-breaking work of gathering, so that he could have peddled. He thought of her selling to the mill hands, and the thought sickened him. He was her husband, and the mill men were strangers, yet they had as much of her as he had; her presence and her smilesometimes.
He was almost ready to drive to the barn with his load when Perce Higginbottom and Roan Sandusky hailed him from the lane. "I brought Roan here down to look at your melons," Perce explained, and came and leaned his elbows on the wagon side and cleared the melons with a neat stream of tobacco juice, then added, "I picked him up celebratin' in Hawthorne Town."
"What over in this God awful weather?" Marsh wanted to know.
It was Roan's turn to spit. "High Pockets Armstrong over on th' Little Yellow Branch had joined hands with progress an' built a cow barn, an' nailed cross pieces in his apple trees for chicken roosts," Roan answered a little sadly, for High Pockets had been promising to build a chicken house for the last ten years.
Perce slapped him on the shoulder. "Cheer up, my son, we can't all be Samuel Dodson Fairchilds, like that new school teacher said to one a my boys when he couldn't get his interest problems straightlike he had more brains than my youngen."
"He was brainy all right," Roan said, and something in his eyes or voice caused Perce to change the conversation.
"How's your farm?" he asked. "You ought to live on it one a these days an' raise a little somethin' just to show people you can farm."
Roan's face brightened at mention of his land, and the talk then turned to the hundreds of acres of cheap cutover land he owned in the Rockcastle Country; a rough wild place forty miles from a railroad where there were more wildcats than people so Perce said.
Marsh liked to hear of the hill country, a place where pine and
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poplar grew tall, and full of little fertile coves and narrow river banks where a man so minded could have a crop and garden, with orchards and vineyards on the limestone slopes of the hills. There was scrub oak and hickory in the valleys, so that hogs could fatten on the mast. There, so Roan said, he meant to spend his old days and prove to all men that where trees had once grown they would grow again, and that Kentucky's hill lands, if properly farmed, could be made to support a family.
''It's a good country," he said, turning to Marsh. "This winter when it's so cold you can't work you ought to let me take you huntin' there. Last winter I made a good bitfoxes and skunk."
"I couldn't get away," Marsh answered somewhat regretfully. If he didn't have to leave for the oil fields, he would have liked to make a little extra money by hunting in the back hills where there were no people, only trees, and rocks and a river.
Perce was talking again, telling of how he had licked the drought with tobacco. It was funny, the drought, of course he'd be lucky if he made fodder and nubbins from his corn, but his tobacco was a different story. It was so funny that he must now and again pause for laughter. This summer because the boys were a good bit bigger than last year, all able to spray and sucker and worm and such, he had put in an uncommonly
large tobacco crop, so large that he had laid off to build a tobacco barn, though he had wondered at times where the money was coming from.
Well, Sir, the drought came along and changed his plans. The flyin's, trash, and lug leaves had cured on the stalk, and the boys and Lizzie had leaf strung them. With so little left to the tobacco and it stunted anyhow, it hadn't taken up very much room, and he didn't have to build a new barn. He figured from reading the papers and listening to the radio, that he would make more money this season on half a crop than on a full crop in a good growing summer, since the dry weather in the blue grass had cut the crop by more than half.