Between the Flowers: A Novel

  She wiped her eyes on her apron and sat very still, trying to hold all his words in her mind, see past the ugliness and pain of death to the life she had dreamed of back in the Little South Fork Country. Sam remained with her, and not long after Poke Easy came, and scolded her for the traces of tears he saw on her cheeks; said she was foolish worrying after Marsh, a man tough as ground hog hide. He'd pull through, never forget that, he said, and glanced at Sam, still sitting on the ground. It seemed to Delph sometimes, or maybe she only imagined it, that there was a coldness between Sam and Poke Easy, or rather on Poke Easy's side alone; she could not imagine Sam's being cold to anyone, he was too smilingly indifferent to most things for coldness.

  Today he smiled lazily at his wide shouldered brother, and wanted to know if there were any work he wanted done. He and Sober had Marsh's corn, tobacco, and hay under fairly good control. Poke

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  Easy grunted and didn't know, and seemed to hesitate before he said, "Maw said that if I saw you to tell you to hunt up Delph an' keep her from goin' out of her mindbut I notice you've already done that.Sober said tell you he'd be out of spray by noon, an' he'd have to have arsenic before he could mix another batch."

  "That's simple," Sam said, and got up, brushing twigs and the sticky walnut leaves from his clothing. "Delph and I will go to Hawthorne for some. Won't we, Delph?" And he caught her hand and pulled her to her feet.

  Delph hesitated. She would like to ride to Town with Sam in that long blue roadster that looked as if it would go like the wind. And because she wanted so much to go, it seemed unfair to Marsh. But when Sam insisted, teasingly reminded her of Dorie's command, she went, and in spite of Poke Easy's disapproving eyes, and questioning looks from neighbors met on the road, she was, in only a little while, glad that she had gone. Sam drove slowly and talked of tobacco, and the diseases that sometimes attacked its leaves. Men would never learn to cure them through bacteriology and botany alone; chemistry was the answer. He told her then of his plans for such work as a boy, and sighed a little with his eyes when he went on to say that he had, instead, decided to have a try at research in munitions.

  "But you're not too old to do th' other yet," she reminded him, work on an experiment farm, or have one of your own, or maybe go huntin' all over th' world for certain plants that won't take some diseases, an' learnin' why, an' tryin' to make others th' same way, like men I've read about in books," she said.

  He nodded toward the road and smiled his swift bright smile that made him seem a young boy instead of a man older than Marsh. "It's never too late for anything is iteh, Delph? There's nothin' like doing what you want to dowhen you're certain you want to do it."

  She watched a black lock of wavy hair tumble on his forehead, then one quick hand flipping it away. "Th' trouble is, I guess," she said, "is bein' certain what you want to do."

  "So, you know that, too," he said, and drove a good piece in silence before he added, "but then when you do know, it's worth all the wasted time and troubleand disappointmentit took to find out. Let's drive right on through Hawthorne and go till we find

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  another town where they sell arsenic. There's no hurry. If we get hungry we can buy hamburgers and hot dogs. Did you ever eat a hot dog, Delph?"

  She smiled a little ruefully, "Every year before I went to th' Fair back at home, Aunt Fronie always made me promise never to eat any such 'trash,' she called it. An' now Marsh always says it's foolish to spend money for suchonce I bought some bologna sausage just to see what it was like an' Marsh he almost had a fit, trash, he called it, tooan' I guess it was silly to buy it when I had chicken an' ham an' beef an' such at homebut, you know in some books, th' new ones that Mrs. Elliot gives me to readth' poor people are always eatin' things like hot dogs an' bologna sausage or pork an' beans.You know, I've never in my life had a taste of canned pork an' beans."

  Sam laughed, his gentle kind of laughter, that always seemed as much at himself as at her. "We'll have to have a picnic," he said, "on bologna sausage and pork and beans."

  Delph nodded and agreed, and that afternoon when they brought Sober his arsenic somewhere around four o'clock, she wondered a little guiltily where the time had gone.

  The day she picnicked with Sam was the beginning of a strange way of life, like a long sleeping, often black with nightmares of fear and the shadow of death, but shot through sometimes with dreamlike moments of seeing and of understanding a man who should have been remote and different to herself, but never was. And through him she saw herself, the Delph she had used to be in the Little South Fork country; and now that Delph seemed neither strange nor sinful because she had thought at times of running away from home, had never promised God she wouldn't dance or do other things upon which the God of the Little South Fork country frowned. Others in the world had been the same at least once. There were moments when the sweetness of finding the echoes of herself and of having another find the same, seemed too precious for any moments not spent with Marsh. And she would go abruptly away, maybe to stand by the window with the morning glory vines.

  Twice each day she went and sat a time in Marsh's room, and that was all she saw of him. Dr. Andy had found a middle-aged nurse in Lexington; a woman experienced in typhoid and strong enough to manage Marsh. When in her presence Delph always sat

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  stiffly on the edge of her chair, feeling a stranger in her own house, anxious to do as the woman wished, but hoping always that Marsh would speak to her or she could talk with him a bitat least enough to make her know that he was Marsh, her Marsh. But Mrs. Redmond discouraged such things, with a "Really, Mrs. Gregory, you irritate the patient," and Delph would feel her ineptitude and go awayto Sam.

  The long skeleton under the sheet that through some miracle continued to breathe and scream and ask for water seemed no more than some piteous, slowly breaking link between life and death. True, the fever raged less fiercely. There were hours when he lay like one conscious and watched the flickering shadows of the morning glory leaves with wide gray eyes touched by nothing except the changing patterns of light. Sometimes he would speak and the words were those of a man in his sense, but the voice was low and hoarse like a voice from the sky or underground.

  Then a fiercer flame of fever would come and he would be mad again and raving. Now, at such times if Delph were by, she would refuse to go away when Dorie and the nurse insisted, and take no heed of the women's complaint that she could do nothing, except kill herself with the agony of the watching. There were moments when she watched and seemed to see the fever like a monster tearing Marsh from his body. It drove him to inhuman cries and turnings and writhings so that the women sent for Sober, who slept now in the barn, to come help in his holding. Delph would run, thinking as she ran that no matter how swift her feet, she might return and find the sunken face still; its deep gray eyes fixed on some point past the quivering shadows of the leaves.

  There could be no strength in that wasted shriveled body with scarcely breath enough to speak above a whisper. The strength for the insane screams had a ghostly quality, as if the fever, having taken all there was of life, now borrowed from death to prolong the agony. Delph's mind would run in countless, endless circles through sorrow and pity and angry rebellion against the ways of life and death; Marsh who had fought so for the life he wanted must now fight the bitterest battle of all for the thing that every man could havedeath.

  She wondered at the nurse and Dorie and Dr. Andy and the neighbors who came day after day, stood a moment by the yard gate

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  or at the door, and went away saying always, "He's puttin' up a good fight."

  "Maybe he'll pull through," she would sometimes hear one say, and then another answering, "Aye, he's weak. When th' fever goes, he'll go."

  She watched Dorie as she watched Marsh through the hours. Dorie's face was the same as when she had watched the lower corn blades curl through the drought of that first hard summer. Apart from any sorrow o
r fear as to what the outcome might be, Dorie's eyes were filled with the admiration she had always held for fighting, struggling things, be they plant or human. Often when the fever was fierce upon him, Delph would look into the older woman's face for comfortand never find it. Dorie's face was that of one who watched a battle or a storm. It was as if all life lay in Marsh and all death in the fever, and the drama of the fight between the two was a something that held Dorie and the people of the countryside.

  Delph saw no battle. She saw only the tortured passing of a life. Evenings, while she sat the little time allowed with him she could feel death, touching not only the thing on the bed, but herself and her child and all the life about. Dorie would see her sitting so, with bloodless face and clenched hands, and say, "Delph, you'd better take Samhe's waitin' out there to row me over th' riveran' see that ever'thing's all right in th' barn. An' then I'd go up to th' brick house, pore child, you're worse than nothin' here."

  And Delph would go, no longer troubled with guilt at leaving Marsh. He never knew her, never would; the lingering ways of his death seemed crueland she would wish that he could be out of his fever and pain and fear. She and Sam would walk together to the barn, light the lantern and look at this and that as she and Marsh had used to do; and in his ways in the barn he made her think of Marsh, stopping to separate a flock of hens crowded foolishly close together on the roost, making certain that everything was locked and tight, stopping in the dark to listen for sign of mice or rats, stroking Maude's nose a time or so, and speaking a word to Jule, Maude's second colt.

  Nights while he waited for Dorie they would sit on the back porch steps or on the grass under the box elder tree, and talk of many things. Delph would listen in the darkness to his soft, easy hill man's

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  voice, and find again the world she could not see when near the skeleton on the bed. Sam could drive away the ugliness and the pain, and she would find herself young again and strong, able to dream and plan, and see Burr-Head grow into the man she wished him to besomeone hungry for the taste of the world, like Sam.

  Sam no longer mentioned Marsh, no more than any of the neighbors asked her how he was. They knewmaybe better than she. Nor did Sam talk always of things he had done and seen; more and more he talked of what he would like to do, and Delph would listen and wonder sadly why it was that Marsh had never talked to her of his plans as Sam talked; they would maybe have seemed as bright and as worthy as Sam's now seemed. Sometimes he stood away and laughed at them as he sometimes stood away and looked at and laughed over the self he was. Other times he was serious and moody, a little regretful, she thought.

  One night while they sat under the box elder tree saying little, he suddenly asked with a sober note under the banter of his talk, ''Delph, you have the reputation of being a wise young woman. What would you say to a man if he quit a good job in these hard times for no reason at all, except to do something he wanted to doand would maybe if he did it never have any money again as long as he lived?"

  Delph wrapped a grass blade around and around her finger and studied the stars. "I'd say it all depended on th' man," she said after a time. "With some I'd say they ought to stickbut well, with a man that didn't take th' job for th' money, or th' name, or anything, I'd say for him to strike out after what he wants."

  "But, Delph, why in God's name would any fool take a job for anything but the money or the name or because he liked the work so well he couldn't quit it?" Sam asked in a curiously eager voice, and moved closer over the grass.

  She smiled. "Mostly, I guess because he wanted to see how it would be to work in a munitions plant, see if he could hold his own with all th' other chemists, or maybe th' work was dangerousan' he wanted to be certain he wasn't afraid, or maybe he wanted th' moneythenor maybe he was just foolish, wantin' to see what he could do."

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  "You know an awful lot, Delph," he said, and put his hand over her hand lying on the grass. "My whole familythey never knew. And Roan my best friend never knewat least enough but what he hated me for the going. But you know, and don't hate me because I seemed to go like all the rest, after money and a good job."

  "An' now that you know you can do it, you don't care about it any more," she said, and felt his hand over hers, and knew she ought to draw away, but did not. After all he was like an old acquaintance or a cousinand then she knew she lied in her heart, for when he said, "How do you know so much, Delph, about me?" she stayed to answer, though she knew she ought to go away.

  "Just from thinkin' how I'd be," she said. "Always since I've been big enough to sing in church I've wondered if I could sing for people that knew what singin' was.An' when I bake a cake that wins th' prize at th' Fair I wonder if I could have learned to do other things, more with my head I mean, an' won prizes in college. An' when people in Hawthorne Town nod an' wave to me or invite me to their houses I wonderif in a city or in any place where th' people are different from th' ones hereif they would like me thereor if maybe I wouldn't feel more at home with them, somehow, an'but pshaw, I'm always wonderin'. It's silly."

  "It's not silly.I guess I'll wonder about a lot of things till I die."

  She turned about and studied him, but his face was no more than a white blur in the darkness. She was glad of that; he could not see her talking eyes. "But you never stopped with th' wonderin'," she said.

  "No," he said, and lifted her fingers from the grass, "not always, but over some things I've done nothing but wonder. I'll always want to knowdon't try to run away when I askbut what became of that girl, you told Emma about her once and Emma told meand never knew she told methat girl in the Little South Fork Country? She could have gone away; her man would have followed then. I know; it was the fall that prices dropped to the bottom, and even Poke Easy wrote to say that he was thinking of going with Joe."

  He waited and when Delph continued to sit motionless and silent, he whispered, "Please don't take it wrong, Delph. Don't answer if you don't want tobut I always wondered."

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  She felt his hand strong and warm on her own and forgot his question in thinking of one of her own. "Tell me, Samwere you thinkin' of me thenwonderin'why?"

  "I told you once I always read the Westover Bugle. I used to read the things you'd say, about farming or the weather or the health of the neighbors, and sometimes you'd mention me, the way you mentioned the rest of our family or anybody else, and I could see that you never thought I'd let the county down or my mother by going awaywhen they all thought I ought to stay and help her raise the younger ones and manage the farm. You never hated me, or enviedand so I wondered.There was no sin in that," he said.

  "I'll tell you then," she said, and pulled her hand away and locked it with the other about her drawn up knees. "I couldn't have any man comin' to me like a whipped dogtakin' my way because he'd failed at farmin'through no fault of his own. But he'd never ha' failedbut there was onceone nighthe seemed to think he had. I guess maybe I saw how much it meant to himan' saw maybe that he would never leave itor maybe I couldn't stand to see himfeelin' that he wasn't any good.But, pshaw, what does it matter? It's been a long time ago," she ended hastily, and sprang up and ran to the house; and avoided Sam for three or four days. But Dorie kept flinging them together.

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  Sometimes when Marsh lay in a seeming stupor, Delph would be conscious of his searching eyes as she went away. Often, when the nurse was resting and Dorie or Emma tended him, she would bring him a young ear of corn or a bough of half ripened apples or a cluster of tobacco flowers. She never attempted to talk with him, but tried to show him in that wordless way how things were doing. He would look at the thing she brought, smile faintly with his eyes, but say no word and never try to lift his hand for reaching. "He's savin' his strength, th' best patient I ever had," Dorie would say, and add when it seemed she spoke to the empty room, "Pore man, it always seemed anyhow that most a th' time you could plow ten acres a land easier than you could say six
words."

  Sometimes Marsh heard, and often he did not. In either case he never answered, Once, he smiled a little under his closed eyes when heard Sadie Huffacre say from the other side of the window that his seeming disconcern for all that went on about him was a bad sign. He knew most of the life about him with no asking of questions. Times, when he returned from some long voyage into the nightmarish land of the oil fields or the dreary waste of life that had been his childhood, he had only to look at the morning glory vine to know the hours or the days that the delirium had claimed him.