Between the Flowers: A Novel

  "Come on," Roan urged. "Your farm won't run away in two weeks time. Delph will be all right."

  He gave her a last beseeching glance, then turned abruptly back to Roan. "All right. I'll go."

  Delph continued with her sewing as if she had not heard, though now and then, while the three men talked enthusiastically of hunting and fishing and the tall timber in the Rockcastle Country, she paused to listen. She stopped suddenly with her needle half through a fold of cloth when she heard the word, "January." She listened and understood soon that they planned to go the first or second week in January if the weather were right. She tried to count weeks and months on her fingers, but gave it up soon, and sat a moment and watched the rain with dark troubled eyes. She had never been one to watch calendars and clocksbut the baby might come in late January, not late February as she had told Marsh. She didn't know.

  She sprang up, scattering thread and scissors from her lap, and walked across the room to the busily talking men, all hunkered now by the empty hearth over a map Roan was making with cedar splinters and his fingers. "Right here," he was saying, "is a pure stand a yellow poplar, virgin growthabout th' last left in Kentucky. I want you to see it, Marsh."

  Marsh nodded, and then he wasn't interested in the poplar. He felt Delph's fingers pulling gently at his hair, the way she had used to tease him before their quarrel. He twisted his head about and looked up at her. "What a you wantin' now, Delph?" he asked gently, unmindful of the company.

  She studied him a moment with soft, kind eyes, then Perce was booming, "Now, Delph, don't be beggin' him off. You can live without him for a couple of weeks. You've not had time to get so set in your ways as my Lizzie."

  She turned short about and walked away. "I don't want anything, an' I was never much on beggin' anyhow," she answered over her shoulder.

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  Marsh got up and started after her, but stopped when she went to the kitchen and up the stairs. Since the quarrel he had never followed her there. He remembered his guests and went back to the map on the hearth, but the talk was less interesting than it had been.

  It was late afternoon before the men went away, and at their insistence Marsh rode with them to the top of the hill. Though there had come no slackening in the rain, he and Caesar began at the gate on the hawthorne and made a leisurely solemn circuit of the farm, stopping sometimes for whole minutes together to stand stock still in the steadily falling rain, just standing and looking and sniffing. Caesar was a fool for water, splashing with his big feet through the deepest puddles, then when his thick black coat was properly soaked, running to Marsh and shaking himself by his knees. Marsh only laughed at the muddy water, and smiled to see the mud on his shoes. He wished Delph were with him, splashing about in the mud, laughing at the rain the way she had used to do, loving it as he loved it. But he and Caesar continued to walk about alone, stopping often in the pasture to marvel on the grass and clover, which in the morning had stood brown and seeming dead, now showed past any doubt that its roots were alive.

  They even grew bold enough to go near the school and lean a time on the fence and frown over the poorly kept building, and decide that one of the first things a good trustee should do would be to plant a few black locusts and maples in the yard, or maybe it ought to be fenced first. Stray cows or hogs were always wandering into the schoolyard.

  The school house was forgotten in the wonder of the bottom corn fields; it seemed that he and the dog could never get their fill of looking. The corn leaves stood unrolled, and though the lower blades hung limp and gray and dead, the silks showed green and tender, and over the whole of the bottom lands the warm earthy smell of the rain was sweet with the odor of green reviving corn. What with a stop in the garden, followed by a round-up of the youngest chickens, to learn if the now strange weather had caused them to run yipping witless in the rain until they drowned themselves, it was near barnwork time when he and Caesar returned to the house.

  Delph, wrapped in one of his old jumpers, was just coming from the kitchen with milk buckets in her hands. ''God, Delph, it's a wonder to

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  see th' change th' rain's already brought,'' he cried and hurried up to her.

  "I guess things will grownow," she answered and walked on.

  He said no more of the goodness of the rain, but reached for the milk buckets, and said with something like contrition in his eyes, "From now on, Delph, I'll do th' barn work. There's no need for you to help with th' milkin' anymoreor peddle. Th' melons are mostly done, anyhow."

  "I'm plenty able to do th' milkin' while you feed," she answered stonily, and did not give over the milk buckets.

  He tugged gently at the pails. "There's no need," he answered, and added with the embarrassed haltings that always overtook his tongue when he spoke of the child he had not wanted, "Delph, I don't thinkyou ought to do such work any more. A cow might kick you oror."

  "I'm plenty well an' strong an' I won't be lettin' this baby make a puny sickly thing out a me for that Sadie Huffacre to sob an' sigh over."

  "Aw, Delph, pleasecan't you kind a feel better because it's rainin'?" he begged, and when he had waited a time in her cold silence, he turned wordless away and went to his cows.

  Delph watched him a moment, triumphed over a wild hot wish to run after him, cry on his shoulder and tell him they were both fools, then turned into the house with a great slamming of the screen door. The room smelled of damp earth and was filled with the gray light of the rain. She went to stand by a window and stare at the wet fields of corn. She felt the mark on her forehead, almost healed now, and wished she could lay it away in her mind as a part of the price she had paid for the corn, and forget it. Marsh with his melons through the dry spell and his corn planted late was the victor nowmore so than on that night they had quarreled.

  She thought of the fall and the winter, and shivered and turned from the window, and started a fire in the stove; and when the flames whispered and fluttered like wings and the red light showed through the stove grate bars, she stood with her hands outspread by the oven door and smiled and forgot the dreary fields; this time next year her baby would be big enough to notice the firelight and the rain and, oh a lot of things. No matter what Marsh did or the weather

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  did, there was one thing they could not dotake her child. She was young and strong and not afraid; and her child would be like herself, strong and unafraidbut it would never know the taste of being bound to the land and governed by the sky.

  Through the fall and into a hard cold winter with snow piling on snow, she knew many times the taste of loneliness, and strange wonderings of how it might have been had she never known Marsh. She learned to hate the long blue winter twilights, and the silence, and the cold, and the house that was heated by nothing but a kitchen stove. More and more she felt the burden of the child; there were days when her back ached as she churned or ironed or did her housework, and she felt clumsy and ugly and dull. Sometimes she hated Marsh, his continual concern for her body as if she would harm her child, and his eternal old womanly patience when, weary of her close silent world, she turned on him with sharp words and sudden flurries of temper over little things. Then she would hate herself and pity the child to be born from such an ill dispositioned mother, and something inside her would start crying for her to make it up with Marsh. While he was gone from the house she would spend long minutes in thinking of all the good kind words she would say to him. And when he came she was silent, mending some of his clothing or cooking a thing he liked especially wellshe could forget the past as long as she thought only of herself, but not when she thought of her child.

  Through the winter many of the neighbor women visited her, now and then bringing something they had made for the baby, or some food they thought she might like, for it was hard for a woman in Delph's shape to eat always of her own cooking, they said. Dorie came now and then to advise her, Sadie Huffacre to sigh over her and cast mournful glances at her distended stomach. Mrs
. Elliot came with envy in her eyes, and Katy with pity that she should change so, and Delph was sometimes thankful for their presence. Marsh left her scarcely any work to do, and she sickened at times of always reading about the world, and so was glad when a neighbor came to help her pass the time.

  There was one she learned to like better than the others; Lizzie Higginbottom who had cried so at her wedding. Lizzie alone of all the others saw the baby after it was born; and she and Delph would

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  spend whole afternoons in happy conversation, wonder if it would behave like Lizzie's oldest did on his first day of school, decided that it would be a child wild, and hard to manage, never afraid of anything for it would of course take after the old Costello breed, though it would most likely have a chin like Marsh's. There was the question of where it should be sent to high schoolHawthorne Town or Burdine. Lizzie was in favor of Hawthorne because her two oldest boys went there, and when her Little Lizzie was a senior Delph's child would just be starting and Little Lizzie could keep an eye on it and show it around for the first few days; the Hawthorne High School was a big place, and a young country child like Delph's was liable to get lost going all alone.

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  17

  It was four o'clock on a black January morning, intensely cold and still. Marsh crunched over the frozen path to the barnyard, and wished as he had wished many times through the winter that he had not told Roan he would trap with him on the Big Rockcastle. The barn door latch stuck to his fingers, tighter than on other mornings. He looked overhead and the stars were bright as midnight, for dawn was yet a long while away. He heard ice creak in the river, and was still a moment with listening. There was something foreboding in such hard cold and hard silence, as if somewhere behind it all something waited.

  He shrugged his shoulders and called himself a fool and went into the barn where the animals slept their heavy last sleep, and only Ebony, the young colt, stamped and trembled in his stall. The fierce cold was going hard with Ebony, though he had the warmest stable of all with a good bed of clean fresh hay. Marsh flung another blanket over him, and then after looking stealthily about to see that no one watched in all the darkness, he set the lantern by the crib door, felt about in the crib until he found a barrel of oats, plunged his arm deep into the barrel, and searched for something hidden there. He drew up a cardboard box, and with quick thief-like motions removed the lid part way, took something out, closed the box and quickly hid it again.

  He took the lantern and returned to Ebony's stall, and, leaning on the low stable door, fed the colt a lump of brown sugar, while he stroked its neck and told him the cold would pass, that spring would come and Ebony could frisk in knee high clover under a hot June

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  sun. He talked softly, stopping at times to listen. If a man were going to be a fool, it were best that no one know.

  Caesar came and watched the feeding of the colt. Marsh gave the dog a bite, too, and they both looked at him, and the lantern light glowed in their eyes and showed love and unquestioned adoration. About him there was the breathing of cows, and mules' feet shifting on a stable floor, and one of the brood sows grunted softly in her sleep. He stroked the colt's neck a long while. He wished Delph would look at him that way. He fed and curried the mules and returned to the house, half hoping that she was still in bed, and not up working in the cold, getting him off for the early start he said he had wanted. The smell of coffee and frying bacon reached him at the gate, and he knew she was up, dashing about, getting him ready to go away. He opened the door, blew out the lantern, set it under the water shelf, and hoped she would raise her head from the biscuit board and look at him, but she worked on until he said, "It was so cold I thought I wouldn't call you."

  And she answered with no lifting of her head, "I didn't mind. I was awake anyhow."

  He watched her, and a fresh trouble smote him when he thought that Vinie might maybe not rise as early as Delph, who would from pure impatience get up and build the fire and catch cold. She noticed he was watching her and said, "I know it's not Sunday, but sincesince you won't be here for a while I thought I'd bake biscuit this mornin' 'stead of cornbread."

  " 'Why don't you have 'em ever mornin'," he suggested, and was nettled by the startled look she gave him. She ought to know that now things were not so bad with him but that he could have biscuits three meals a day if he wanted them. Last spring when he said that cornbread was cheaper than biscuits, and he would just as soon eat it, he had not known from one week to the next how the mules were to be fed.

  The biscuits were good, but the third one stuck in his throat. He watched Delph. She sat so still, seemed hardly to know he was there, and as always in the lamplight, her eyes were deeper, more filled with what had grown to be for him the shadows of some secret wall she put between them.

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  "You ought to cat more," he said. "Lots a times you eat hardly nothin'."

  "I'm all right," she answered, and as always the toneless, commonplace words silenced him.

  He finished his coffee, the second cup which he had sipped slowly to hold him there, but stayed yet a time longer and said again all the things he had said last night at supper. Delph listened and looked most often at her empty plate, and promised to do all that he said; not go about the barn or any of the stock; she might get hurt, and Sober Creekmore would take good care of things. She was not to spend a single night alone. If something happened and Vinie hadn't come by the time Sober came to do the night work he was to go after a couple of Perce's boys or take Delph up to the brick house.

  At last he had said all he could think to say, and there was nothing to do but go. He got up and dressed for the outdoors, and Delph was silent watching him. She got up and handed him the package of lunch and basket of uncooked food she had packed, hesitated a moment with her hands smoothing her apron, then said, "Wait a minute, Marsh. There's somethin'I made for you a while back. They might be handy on a huntin' trip."

  He waited while she took the lamp and went to her room upstairs, and returned soon with a small bundle which she shoved hastily into his hands. "It's socks," she explained with an embarrassed smile. "Some a my knittin'. I meant it for a Christmas presentbutbut my knittin' was so bad I was ashamed of itth' first I've ever done."

  "I know they'll be fine," he said, and held her hand along with the blue knitted socks. It was small and cold against his own, as if maybe it was ashamed of the lie she told. They had had a quarrel on Christmas Eve. Delph had wanted to skate with Katy on the frozen Cumberland, and he, fearing harm both for herself and the child, had refused, first with the patient reasoning, but when she turned on him with sharp angry words, accusing him of tending her as if she were a brood mare, he had lost patience and thundered at her until she cried. Christmas night had seemed a young eternity with his sitting on the stairs and listening to her smothered sobs. Now, he had the sudden wrenching fear that when he had gone she might cry and cryand there would be no one by to hear.

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  He held her hand as he walked to the door. She opened it, and he felt the bitter cold, and knew he was a fool to go away. Caesar came wagging his tail by his knees, and Delph said, "I'll keep him by me 'til you're gone," and turned to the table for a bit of bread. Then he was outside, still seeing her back, straight now as always in spite of the child. He turned about to see her again, but there was the door closing in his face. He heard, first the outraged barking, and then the puzzled whining of the dog. Caesar would rather follow him than eat. He stopped and listened and wished for a sound from Delph. He watched the door and hoped that it would open. She wouldn't just shut it like that and let him walk away.

  Last spring when he was riding away in the dawn to attend to some business in Hawthorne, Delph had flung open the door and called to him as he rode down the barn lane. He had dismounted, thinking something was forgotten, but she had only come, laughing and tossing back her hair, crying, "I just wanted to see you again, Marsh." And he
had kissed her once and lightly, half grudgingly, for Hawthorne was a good piece away, and already the dawn was changing from gray to red. He had seen the red fire of it flaming up in her eyes.

  Now, the door did not open. There was nothing to do but harness the team and drive away, but he knew as he went down the lane that no matter how long he stayed or what he saw, the most of him was left with Delph. He continued to know that, during the drive to Hawthorne, and the two days ride into the Rockcastle Country.