She waited down below in the press of people and kept squeezing and rolling her handkerchief in her brown sweaty hands. It seemed the judges would never decide. Burr-Head's eyes were getting bigger and bigger; pretty soon his lower lip would quiver and the tears come splashing down, and he would stand there crying soundlessly the way he did at home sometimes. Then suddenly Burr-Head smiled and waved to some one in back of her. She looked and there was Marsh with eyes for no one but his son; he had not been certain he could come to the baby show, he had so many of his animals to attend to, but there he was laughing and winking at Burr-Head. Burr-Head tried to return the wink, but couldn't quite make it. He only squinched both eyes tight together then opened quickly with a
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blinking, and the crowd laughed so that Dr. Hobson, head of the baby judges, had to rap twice for order.
Delph listened, looking at the judge and tying hard knots in her damp handkerchief. Katherine Rebecca Weaver, six months old daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Archie Weaver of Clay Hill, had won in the class for one year olds and under. Sober Marshall Costello Gregory, nineteen months old son of Mr. and Mrs. Marshall Gregory of Cedar Stump, had won it for those between one and two.
Delph pushed her way through the crowd, rushed to the platform, caught up Burr-Head, blue ribbon and all. She wished that on the instant she could take him and just play with him for the rest of the day; take him down by the river and build castles in the sand the way they did sometimes on Sunday afternoons. But Marsh was there behind her and saying, "Here, let me have him, Delph. You'll never get him outside." And there was Katy with her sister-in-law, Joe's wife home with Joe on his vacation. Mrs. Elliot was there, pleased as if she were his mother, telling some nicely dressed woman, strange to Delph, of how she had fed and cared for him until he was a month old.
Outside, they all clustered around Marsh and his son, Marsh looking more as if he had won the blue ribbon than Burr-Head who only smiled at them all and seemed in no wise excited by the business. Delph wiped beads of sweat from his nose and upper lip, then moved away a step or so from the fluttering talking women in their dainty dresses and with their white gloved hands. She grew more and more conscious of the too-tight coffee-colored voile, her brown bare hands with their nails short and straight, kept that way from all the work she did. She wished she could hide the damp knotted and twisted handkerchief, and she wished the strange woman's voice were not so beautifully clear and quick with all the proper i-n-g's and d's and t's; it made her own seem slow and slovenly, like the Kentucky hill woman's voice that it was.
Mrs. Elliot suggested that Burr-Head ought to have his picture taken in his new blue suit and the blue ribbon on his chest. She'd always wanted a picture of him, a large one, not just the little snap shot she took from time to time. She could take him if Marsh and Delph didn't have the time. Burr-Head would go with her; he and she were great friends.
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Marsh hesitated. He couldn't go. He had to see to several things. He glanced at Delph, and wondered at the tightness in her voice as she said, smiling a bit at Burr-Head, "Let Mrs. Elliot take him, Marsh. He wouldn't be a bit afraid. II have to go see to my pickles an' suchbut that's no reason to keep him from havin' his picture taken.You be good, Burr-Head," she said, and turned abruptly away.
She hurried back to the food show and found Lizzie Higginbottom and others of the Cedar Stump women. Lizzie smiled when she told of Burr-Head's triumph, and went on to describe how she had mixed and baked her red devil's food cake that had won a prize. Delph listened but absentmindedly. She kept thinking of Burr-Head, wishing she had gone with the others in spite of feeling out of place and ill at ease. She knew she wasn't timid or ashamed; she'd never be ashamed of being Marsh's wife. It was just the knowing that she didn't belong. She was a farmer's wife with a pretty child. They were something else; more like the people Burr-Head would know when he grew older and went out into the world.
She looked at Lizzie, smiling, talking, showing with her hands just how carefully she had folded the beaten eggs in; Lizzie never thinking of anything but her house and her cookery and her garden and family. Delph listened until Lizzie paused for breath, then said, "I'm sorry, but I'll have to be goin'.I want tobuy some things in th' ten cents store," and she turned and hurried from Lizzie as she had from the other.
It was hot in the ten cents store; crowded with farmers' wives like herself come out to see the Fair, and women from the back hills who maybe got into Town no more than once a year. Some had babies in their arms and children at their heels, most were brown with work shaped hands, and shoulders not so straight as they might have been. But most smiled as they looked at this or that, bought their children ice cream cones and cheap candy, and were kept busy wiping sticky chins and noses.
Delph pushed through the crowd to the back of the store where records and sheet music were sold. Though she never bought music of any kind, the red headed girl who played the piano knew her and smiled. Sometimes when the girl was not too busy they talked a bit, or mostly it was the girl. Once, she had had a job in Detroit where
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she played and sang songs in a ten cents store twenty times larger than this; and one winter she had sung in a night club therebut that was a long time ago.
Delph wished that today she could tell her of Burr-Head and the baby show. She with her red nailed hands and her permanent wave didn't look as if she would be interested in spiced peaches or pickles. But there was no chance to talk to her of anything. The crowd kept asking for this and that, mostly hill billy and cow boy songs, and the girl was busy over the keys. The girl had a wilted look, she thought. There was a smudge of sweat across the shoulders of her dress and when a song was finished her head would droop a little wearily. Still, she smiled a fixed painted smile that made the music sad for Delph, no matter what she played. She knew the smile; and felt it passing over her mouth when an acquaintance from Salem spoke to her.
She turned away into the crowd, but the music kept drifting through the noise and following her. A lonesome, long drawn hill billy love song the girl sang now. Delph put her hands over her ears, but took them away when a passing hill man smiled, and she remembered where she was. She had had a memory like a looking back of how it had used to be when she listened to Juber's fiddle tunesand the music of the dance that night. The songs had cried to her of many things, and now they cried stillbut of different things.
She wished she were home. Maybe all this wouldn't hurt her so. The white-gloved women away with Burr-Head, talking of many things, clothes and books and places visited, music and furniture, magazines and shows, or flowers, or maybe nothing at all. They were there; here were the others, the farmers' wives, and she, Delph, felt lost and alone with either. It was all so little, this business of the Fair. To plan on making pickles for months ahead, and feed chickens in a coop after first carefully selecting the eggs and setting them under hens, and talk about it with the neighbors, and plan it thus and soand all for a blue ribbon to lay away in the scrap book along with that picture of Sam and the clippings from the paper. It would hurt to write the news of Poke Easy's having gone with Joe, and there was Perce's oldest boy going away to college in the fall, and next fall there would be Katyand none of them would ever be back except as visitors.
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She wandered a time through the crowded streets, stopped a time and watched the fountain, then strolled through the court house hall, but always it was the same; women and children and men much like those in the ten cents store.
Usually when they came to Hawthorne she waited for Marsh in the office of the Westover Bugle. She liked it there; Reuben Kidd the editor had books and magazines and sometimes papers from large cities to read. She saw him as she went through the door, sitting as he usually sat, his back to her, his eyes on the street, and his feet on the massive table like affair he called his editor's desk. "Sleepin'?" she asked in a low voice, hoping not to wake him if he were.
"Now, Delph, you know
I never sleep in th' day time," the old man said as he tilted farther back in the chair and shifted his feet a bit on the desk and continued to watch the street. "I was watchin' that boy thereth' one walkin' past that old hitchin' block. I can't make up my mind whose youngen he can be. He walks like a Fitzgerald, but no Fitzgerald ever had hair as red as that."
Delph said nothing, and picked up a copy of the Westover Bugle with a little rustling. She hoped the old man would hush and she could read. Reuben Kidd was like the old people as she remembered them at home. He could tell a man's voting precinct by the kind of mud on his shoes, and see a man dead forty years in a child's eyes or the tilt of a boy's head, and like the other old ones he would go wandering back into the days when the man he saw in the child had lived.
She threw down the paper after reading the news she had writtentalk of little things, a new barn, and words on cider making time. She found a book that looked newer than the others, and settled herself by a window but did not read. Reuben's voice kept forcing itself between the words, asking questions about this and that in Cedar Stump, until in despair she closed the book and sat and studied him. He was an old man, older than Dorie, longer than Roan Sandusky, with a rough untrimmed beard and wavy untrimmed hair, whiter behind than in front so that when he raised his head from a session of resting the back of it on his clasped hands, he made her think of some pictured saint or prophet crowned with a halo of silver.
He roused himself, spat neatly between his outspread feet and the plunking clink on the other side of the desk not only proclaimed
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that Reuben had thus spat from the same spot for more than forty years but destroyed Delph's vision of a saint as well. She studied him and wondered as she had wondered many times since meeting him more than two years ago, how it would be to know a real editor, an exciting man who dealt with important things in important places. She wondered, too, how it was that a man with the sense Reuben seemed to have could spend all his days in one county seat town and find the procession of petty political scandals, gun battles between the law and the moonshiners in the eastern section, the trials and fights and elections, the births and deaths and weddings, the floods and droughts and failures still full of interest after forty years.
She looked at him again. He appeared to have fallen asleep, the back of his head resting on his laced fingers so that his beard stood pointing at the ceiling. She turned away. The old sleeping man seemed somehow an image of failure and wasted lifea picture of what she heard in the music crying out of the ten cents store. She wondered that if in his sleep he did not dream sometimes of the many who had gone from Hawthorne Town and Westover County and of whose success he had written in the paper.
She sat in the quiet room and heard the sounds that came from the street; the whispering of the fountain in the square, mule shoes clop-clopping over paving stones, the rattle of iron shod wagon wheels, slither of cars, and somewhere sheep, doubtless being driven homeward from the Fair, made a thin plaintive bleating. Nothing was of the city, or of anything except her own sky governed world, and that was built on fields and men in overalls. They came and choked the life from the townif it had a life apart from them and their land.
She went to stand by the window and look for Marsh. It was long past his usual time for coming; with ten miles to drive in the wagon they would be dark getting home. She saw him at last, driving down the street in his heavy wagon, with a loose easy rein on the mules. Though there was no look of middle age or weariness about him, it seemed to her that the stamp of the hours he had spent with plow handles in his hands was strong upon him. Still, it was his face, she thought, that marked him as a farmer with no mistaking; brown as the side of one of his Jersey cows, with sun and wind wrinkles etching about the corners of his eyes. And the eyes
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themselves, wandering continually over earth and sky, searching out sign of rain or wind or sun or cold, glancing after stock and plants and soil, seeing only hardware and harness displays in store windows.
She watched him as he glanced a moment at the sky, and felt with a weary irritation mixed with wisdom loving foolishness, that if he were dropped into the middle of New York City he would go searching immediately for a bit of earth and a bit of sky. He looked tired, dejected she thought, and that old wish to make him laugh or smile came, and as always was stronger than any other thing. "Oh, Marsh, wasn't it fine about Burr-Head," she called before he noticed her by the window.
He glanced at her, and a smile flickered across the lost look in his eyes. "You'll have to give him castor oil tonight, though," he said. "Recollect it's your turn. He's had a lot of foolish stuff to eat like an ice cream cone, an' Mrs. Elliot has maybe give him more."
"She took him home, I guess," Delph said, and knew the question was a foolish one; there was nothing in the wagon but the hay she had brought packed about her canning exhibits.
Marsh stopped the wagon when he was just by the window. "Hell, no. Burr-Head would have none of that. He's sleepin' here behind me in some hay.Aw you can't see him. I heaped it over him to keep th' sun out of his eyes."
Delph studied the mound of hay, then let her eyes wander to the back of the wagon where there was a great heap of hay, more it looked than they had brought. She wasn't certain but it looked as if there might be a big box or crate or something under the hay. "Marsh what is?" There came the plunking clink, and in a moment Reuben came to stand by the window. "Marsh, if what I heard about an hour ago is th' truth I'm goin' to put a piece about you on th' front page next week. Why, that's th' biggest price any piece a horse fleshan' it a colt not two years old at thathas ever brought in this county.Go around to Coomer's Studio an' have your picture taken. Charge it to th' Chamber of Commerce or Slip Yorrow's campaign fund an' I'll put it in th' paper."
"Marsh, youyou didn't sell Ebony, th' prettiest thing we had?" Delph begged and didn't know which was worse, the lonesome look in Marsh's eyes or the loss of Ebony.
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Marsh twisted the reins in his hands and looked at the knees of his overalls. ''If you'd put his picture now. Aye, he looked so fine when they went leadin' him away. I went an' watched 'em load him into th' truck, an' it was a sight th' spirit he showed, rearin'." He paused and spat at the foot of a maple tree by the street.
Delph glanced at him with troubled eyes. "Marshsince whensince when did you start chewin' tobacco?"
"I've not started," he answered, too full of Ebony's loss to feel guilt in doing what he had always held to be a dirty, wasteful thing. "Roan gave me a chew when we went to see Ebony loaded."
"You ought to a kept him," Reuben said.
Marsh shook his head. "I did think about it, but I reckin it's like that man from th' bluegrass that bought him said. He'd make a good hunter' an' it would be foolish to keep a colt like Ebony. I had no need to ride him, an' all that time to be wasted breakin' him in an' trainin' him an' him eatin' his head off, an'." He stopped, and would have spat again had not Delph's beseeching eyes restrained himfor a moment. Soon, he could not help himself.
He wished he would quit thinking foolish thoughts; the empty stable in the barn, and the wonder if they who bought him would change his name. He glanced at Delph standing quiet and unsuspecting by the window, and felt a sharp pleasure is spite of the loss of Ebony. He wondered yet if he'd done right or wrong to spend a good bit of the Ebony money on foolishness for Delph. He hadn't planned the business. He had gone hunting Delph to tell her of the good price he got for Ebony, but at the food show had only found Lizzie, gathering up the spiced peaches and pickles that Delph had forgotten. "She's gone to th' ten cents store," Lizzie had said, and added with a hint of question in her voice, "She seemed mighty down in th' mouth for a woman that's carried off so many blue ribbons."
He had gone to the ten cents store and had seen her there, staring at the red headed girl who pounded the piano keys. She looked lonesome, he thought, the way she had used to look when she stood on the hill and watched the sun go
down. So he had gone and spent a lot of money foolishly, exactly why he didn't know.
Now, the problem was to get her home without her knowing. She came out and climbed into the wagon; in vain did he tell her that he couldn't waste the time for her to uncover Burr-Head and look at
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him. She pulled the hay away from his face and sat a moment on her heels and smiled at him. Marsh kept watching her over his shoulder, ready to call that she must come sit down, if she so much as went near the mound of hay in the back of the wagon. But just at the wrong moment High Pockets Armstrong called to him from across the street, and wanted to know if that Jersey bull had won first place again this year, and if he'd really sold that colt of his.