Between the Flowers: A Novel

  Poke Easy nodded. High Pockets cut another notch in the twisted plait then said in his drawling gentle voice, "An' I reckin you know what th' Bible says. 'An' eye fer an' eye an' a tooth fer a tooth.'"

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  Poke Easy cleared his throat. "'Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy! Christ said that. Recollect, High Pockets?"

  The hill man's eyes made Marsh think of the blue stained glass in the windows of Salem Church. It was hard to think they were part of a living man, when he sat and stared straight ahead seeing nothing as he said, "I'd ruther burn in Hell till God goes blind than ask fer mercy in a case like this.You can go so far with Jesus but not all th' wayan' when it comes to a toss up 'tween th' two I'll take God all th' time." He turned to Marsh. "Ain't that what you say? You look like a man that wouldn't let be done to yours what's been done to mine."

  Marsh pondered and shifted uneasily from one foot to the other. "I think I'd try to keep mine by me so nothin' would happen t'em," he said.

  "But if'n it did happen," High Pockets insisted, and bent forward and peered at him from under his hat brim.

  "Aye, Lord, I don't like to think on it," Marsh said, and saw the hurt and the trouble in the old man's eyes, and pitied him.

  High Pockets got up and stood whittling a time in silence before he nodded toward Poke Easy and said with his eyes on his jackknife, "I want ye fer my lawyer."

  Poke Easy flushed and stared at the floor. "I appreciate your opinion of me, High Pockets, butwellrecollect this, thatwellI don't know what you've got on your mind, but in some placesfor doin' some thingsneither God nor I could keep you from goin' up for lifeor worse."

  High Pockets cut another notch and studied it as he said, "Don't be worryin' over thatI had Lutie write him a letterinvitin' him downshe didn't know, pore child. Saturday it'll behe's a comin' with a truckone he'll borrie to take her back in an' th' load a taters an' such I offered himto come."

  Poke Easy swallowed, and Marsh felt as if cold water were poured on his head. Neither spoke when High Pockets folded his knife, dropped it into his pocket and turned to the door. "I thought you'd mebbe like to be thinkin' on it," he said with a nod toward Poke Easy, and started down the lane.

  He was half way to the road gate before Marsh remembered his duties as host and hurried after him. He begged him to stay for dinner,

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  but High Pockets only smiled and shook his head. "Aye, I think I'd ruther walk about a bit in th' rain," he said, "an' then I'll flag a ride into Town an' walk on in home." He hesitated a moment, and then with the air of a child asking permission for some precious thing, asked, "I wonder would you mind if I walked about through your corn field?''

  "Nothin' could please me better," Marsh said, and High Pockets smiled and said with his eyes on Poke Easy who had followed them, "It's might nigh th' prettiest piece a corn I ever seedan' wellmy days a walkin' through fields a high growin' corn in th' rain are mebbe about overfer all I know."

  The two men stood in silence and watched him walk down between the rows of corn. Marsh turned suddenly away with a something like a sickness clawing through his body. "God, it would be awful to be shut uplike he'll most likely be. Never so much as get a smell a th' rainnot even see th' sky."

  Poke Easy nodded and looked after him. "It would be hellan' for me, too," he said.

  The days passed and many times Marsh while he worked or ate or played with Burr-Head would feel that coldness in his hair or sickness in his body and think of High Pockets, the blind baby, the sick girl, and the man who was to visit them. Later, he wondered if the young man ever knew why it was that when he drove into the garage back of the bus depot late on Saturday afternoon and waited there for High Pockets, so many came to look at him. Marsh did not go to Town that day; but others said that the man was young, hardly more than a boy, slim built with curly hair and shiny brown eyes like the blind eyes of his child, a pleasant-dispositioned man who smiled at a hill woman staring at him and asked her how old was the baby in her arms.

  High Pockets came to meet him about the time of sundown and the streets were crowded with those who watched them drive away. No one ever knew exactly; some said one place and some another, but most seemed to think that it was at that little swag in the Rockcastle Road just before it turns up Honeysuckle Ridge that High Pockets choked him to death and broke his neck. It couldn't have been so very far out; for it was only a few hours until High Pockets came driving back with his son-in-law's body stretched neat and

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  straight in the truck. Some said, though it was maybe mostly gossip, that though it was near midnight by then Estil Dick the high sheriff waited in his office and Cliff New the undertaker in his.

  That year the date of the fiddlers' contest was moved from late October to mid September. High Pockets' trial was scheduled for the next meeting of circuit court, late in September, and he was one of the best fiddlers in the county. He won the prize that year; men said that they had never seen him fiddle so, from his head and from his shoulder with his fiddle talking like a live thing.

  It was pretty well agreed that it was the last contest he'd ever see; the betting odds throughout the county were five to two that he'd be sent up, at least for twenty years. In the whole county twelve men could not be found for a jury who didn't know that High Pockets only did what he set out to dostill everybody felt that it was safer to have the trial in Westover. He'd have a better chance there than any place else. And all pitied Poke Easy, especially the older lawyers. They'd hate to be in his shoes, they said.

  On the day of the trial Hawthorne Town was packed with people. Men sat in the courthouse windows, lined the walls and overflowed to the stairs and the upper outside platform. Poke Easy came looking more like a farmer than a lawyer, strolling in a little bit late, as if maybe he had just decided to come. It took the prosecuting attorney less than half an hour to prove High Pockets guilty of murder in the first degree, and the prisoner himself helped matters little by nodding over his whittling as he listened to the witnesses and thereby declared that they spoke the truth.

  Poke Easy had no witnesses for the defense, so he called on God. Before he had finished the eternally just but never compassionate God the hill men knew was sitting in the room, and High Pockets had grown from a murderer and law breaker to a man who fearlessly carried out the word of Godbecause the laws of the land failed to do so.

  The jury was out about fifteen minutes, and there was little tension in the room when they returned to read a verdict of killing in self defense. Marsh heard the verdict, and felt a burden lifted from his mind. It had hurt somehow to think of High Pockets never again walking down through his corn rows in the rain. And he was one of the many men who overflowed the saloons that day and drank to

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  Poke Easy's future as a great lawyer and to High Pockets who had upheld the laws by which Kentuckians in the old days had lived.

  Many in Westover County wondered what would become of the sickly girl Lutie and her blind child. The girl died around Christmas timeof grief some saidbut hardly a year had gone before High Pockets was bragging around about the way that grandchild of his loved fiddle tunes. Marsh saw him in Town one day, the summer Burr-Head was between three and four, and High Pockets was telling of how he had to fiddle him to sleep each night.

  Then High Pockets put away talk of family matters to ask Marsh how were his crops and his calvesa question many asked Marsh Gregory that summer. More than two years back Marsh had taken John's advice and kept his cows and bought more calves. He'd make little money on the business, but he might as well grow corn on his corn land and clover and alfalfa on his pasture as sit still and wonder when he'd see another bit of cash.

  So it was that he had continued to grow corn, and when there was a big-boned calf for sale, he had managed by hook and by crook to get it. There was one, a blaze faced Holstein steer he'd got from Wiley Davis for two gallons of honey; there was the clay colored steer he'd bought w
hen it was three weeks old for a bushel of cow peas; there were Herefords he had swapped for chickens, and Green River Jerseys he got with tobacco plants; some he had taken in exchange for work with his mules or such, and several he had swapped for cider that fall the apple crop was good. The calves grew and fattened on the fine pasture he had, the clover and alfalfa hay, and the corn.

  Now and then Perce or Roan or Poke Easy chaffed him about his calves. Fine as they were they'd hardly pay their way to market. And Marsh smiled, called them his manure-spreaders, said they were improving his pasture fields, and let it go at that. What happened came on so gradually that he sorrowed a bit because he had had no great moment of triumph such as he had felt when it rained on his first corn crop.

  He heard men talk in Hawthorne, say that cattle and corn were going higher, read in the paper of short crop predictions and dry seasons, listened to such talk over the radio, and went on buying a calf when he could get it cheap enough.

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  By early June, though there was little sign of a drought in Westover, the talk was that in Iowa and Kansas and other corn growing states corn as well as hogs and cattle would be scarce that year. And so it was that in early Augustbetween Burr-Head's third and fourth birthdaysMarsh sold fourteen hundred bushels of his last year's corn at a dollar-fifty on the bushel, and in October when some of the young Holstein steers he had bought almost three years ago tipped the scales at better than a thousand pounds, he sold fifty-three head of cattle at slightly less than five thousand dollars. Though he had by mid July begun to feel the teeth of the drought, he pulled his cattle through on the hay crop he had harvested earlier in the season, and in the lower fields there was the promise of at least a two-thirds yield of cornand by October corn was a dollar-sixty on the bushel.

  There were many nights that fall that he and Delph sat late into the night figuring and studying price reports and predictions. In the Little South Fork country straying over Delph's timber lands were close to two hundred head of hogs. The problem was whether he should leave the hogs to winter on the mast and sell his corn, and sell the hogs next fall, or drive them in, fatten them on corn and sell them through the winterfor hogs were so high that few farmers killed any that fall.

  In the end John decided the matter for him. He wrote to say that with hogs the price they were, it was maybe not best to leave them all winter in the woods, and already he had heard of a gang up from Tennessee changing the ear marks on some and driving them across the border. Marsh went for his hogs without delay, and men who saw him pass on his return trip said it was like the old days when the hog drovers went to Georgia.

  In the end the hogs brought more than the cattle, and the whole of Westover County talked of Marsh Gregory's luck, and some of the hill people wondered in what sign the moon had stood when he was born. He'd been lucky through bad seasons and high prices, through a flood, held on through good seasons and no prices, and now he had stumbled into some cash. Yet, for all their wonder of his luck there were but few who failed to say that he deserved it. Any man who had shown the toughness he had shown deserved whatever he could get.

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  All through the fall Marsh felt the bedrock of his dreams firm and sure under his feet like the limestone below his land, for his dreams were never airy things like mare's tails in the sky. He could have paid off the mortgage that year, and might have done so, hard up as he was for many things, had not old Silas Copenhaver, chief owner of the bank, objected. With the way things were the bank was having a time finding investments for what money it had; in fact they'd be glad to double the mortgage on his farm in case he wanted a lot of cash for somethingsay buy up several thousand acres of hill land at less than a dollar on the acre. That would be a good investment. But Marsh shook his head, and agreed to pay within three thousand dollars of the end.

  It seemed then that the winter evenings he and Delph spent together were the best he had ever known. They spent hours over nursery catalogues and farm machinery catalogues, and Sears Roebuck, and book catalogues that Delph had ordered. He needed fence and more machinery and another barn for his overflowing produce. He needed tile to drain that swaggy bit of bottom land, and he would like to buy about five hundred grape vines and set them on the far side of the pasture above the creek. He would like to have a real bathroom instead of the makeshift he had made at the back of the house. He would like a registered Poland China brood cow, and he would like a pony for Burr-Head. He wanted to buy Delph an Encyclopedia; she was always wishing for one, and there was a book he wanted for himself, but it cost more than twenty dollarsa history of thorough bred horses printed in England.

  Burr-Head, sitting on the floor between them, would hear their eager talk and plans and feeling jealous and shut away, would get up and run to the map of New York City and beg for a story from Delph. He was almost four years old now, a slender child with cinnamon colored curls, that curled still when Marsh kept them cut short as any boy's. His wide gray eyes and his straight back were his father's and no mistaking, but there was a tilt to his head that came only from Delph.

  Marsh would listen in silence while Delph told him a story of some place that seemed a mixture of heaven and fairyland; it irked him sometimes that Burr-Head loved the map of New York City better than that of fairyland, but mostly he laughed and didn't care.

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  Burr-Head cared for neither when he had the Sears Roebuck farm machinery catalog with its pictures of farming tools and horses or better yet a seed catalog with its unbelievably red tomatoes and great ears of yellow cornthat is when Delph was not around to tell him stories.

  Though Marsh was held by all to be a modest man who, when others praised his crops or cattle, was apt to look uncomfortable and say that his success was mostly from a good wife and good land, it was hinted by some that anybody could get on his good side by a few words of praise for Burr-Head. Sadie Huffacre was constantly lamenting the fact that the Gregorys were so slow about having another child, Burr-Head would be rotten spoiled if they didn't look out.

  It was disgraceful the way they showed him off and let him learn so many little verses and such; he would most likely die with water on his brain before he was ten years old. Still, on the Christmas before he was four years old, even Sadie had to admit that, though he was too little to be in any kind of program, he did uncommon well for a four-year-old child, to stand up before so many people and sing the Christmas song of the little black lamb that would be white.

  But it was disgraceful the way Delph and Marsh and Doric and Katy, home from college in Lexington, had carried on over himand Mrs. Elliot, too. It was all foolishness. She, Sadie had only given him a red candy rooster from the ten cents store, but he came and thanked her so sweet like; she thought she'd give him a chocolate rabbit for Easter.

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  The memory of Christmas Eve at school and the song he sang was for a time sharp in Burr-Head's mind, painted in clear bright colors like the pictures of God and Moses on the cards he received at Salem Sunday School. Then the picture was gone, crowded out and smothered away by the myriad events of his life on the farm. It seemed sometimes that he stood on a high hill, high as the knoll in the pasture by Solomon's pen, and from that hill he could look back and see his babyhood days. Many times when Delph spoke to him of taking naps or such he laughed and showed his squirrel like teeth and cried, "Pshaw, Delph, I'm not a baby anymore."

  And Delph would look at him and smile and say maybe, "But even big boys like you take naps sometimes, Burr-Head," or some such thing.

  But he would go laughing away, swaggering in stiff many-pocketed overalls exactly like his father's even to the Indian heads on the copper buttons and the strong smell of new cloth and dye. He would go stamping his feet so that the iron cleats on his heavy cow hide shoes might ring the way his father's rang. He had been proud as a king's son dressed in his father's robes, the night Marsh brought his first real cow hide farmer's shoes from Hawthorne Town, put toget
her with many a copper rivet, strong leather loops in back, steel hooks for string instead of foolish holes. He had gone clumping over the house, and that night he sat upright fighting sleep and nodding by the fire, determined to put off the time of parting with his shoes.