Between the Flowers: A Novel

  He had planned the day for late October, and on the evening before as they all walked up the hill to look at the sunset, he kept hoping that Delph would say some thing of what she planned to do tomorrow in Town. He would wear his good suit instead of overalls, and maybe have their dinner at the Hotel Hatcher instead of at the little restaurant on Maple Street. Delph would like that.

  But she never seemed to remember what day tomorrow would be, and was silent as they walked to the top of the high knoll where the slender trunks of the walnut trees stood straight and black in the red light. Better than almost anything Marsh liked these nights in fall when he could stand and watch the sun go down and dusk fall blue in the valley, and feel the rising night wind, sharp against his face.

  Delph stood a moment with him there, and then as if eager for something higher, she climbed to the top bar of the Solomon Pasture fence and sat and looked into the west.

  Marsh forgot the sunset and went to Delph and leaned his shoulder against the fence, and tried to shape in words all the things he wished to say. When he looked at her, staring away from him, her

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  eyes on the sunset, but the heart in her eyes beating for something beyond the sunset and past the clouds, he felt a weariness and a loss and a sense of failure. She was Delph and he was Marsh. They had been together in the long fight for the land, in drought and flood and heat and cold, through sickness and poverty, through quarrels and the ecstasy of love; and she was Delph and he was Marsh, the same as the shy strangers meeting over Azariah's grave.

  He looked at her and thought of so many things, and all the while she looked away from him. He wanted to bring her nearer, make her see that he knew how much she had given, make her know that some day she would be glad of their way of life and proud of him. But as always the thoughts remained thoughts; the gratitude was both hurt and burden and there were no words. He straightened his shoulders and said, ''Delph, you oughtn' to get in th' habit of climbin' on Solomon's fence."

  He waited, and then again: "Delph, you've picked a bad place to sit."

  She suddenly turned her head and looked down at him, her face puzzled as she tried to think what he had said. "Oh, yes, I'll be settin' a bad example for Burr-Head climbin' on Solomon's fence like this," she said, and sprang to the ground. "I'll bet you've been talkin' about th' house, an' I never even heardwool gatherin' as always, I guess."

  "Nothin'I was just aimin' to show you how big I thought th' cellar ought to berecollect I'll need a big one when my grapes come in an' we start makin' all that wine," he said, proud that she had at last noticed. He walked away, and with Burr-Head and Caesar following at his heels, counted the cellar off in paces, marking a corner with a stone or tree, drawing a line with his shoe heel for the stairs or a window.

  Delph stood with her arm about a sapling and watched him with a fierce desperation in her eyes, that caused her to nod slowly over each least thing he did. She would put her mind on Marsh and Burr-Head and the stone house and never, never let it go wandering away again. Maybe a thing too big to be forgottenevercould be crowded out and choked to death, just as Bermuda grass if left to grow could in time choke a young shade tree. She wished she could feel sin and sorrow or pray for the blackness she knew was in her soul,

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  even though she couldn't feel it. She wished it were that hard dry summer come again, and she had to work from daylight till dark with never a pause for restshe could maybe sleep then at night. Not lie with wide hot eyes wandering hour after hour through the darkness, hear Marsh's strong regular breathing, and thinkand thinkof how she had felt when she had learned he would get well. And then heap sin on sin by thinking past him to how it might have been, and hold still the memory of a bit of brightness and laughter and gaietyand dreamlike a warm live thing in her heart.

  She saw herself sometimes and marveled at that self of her that could work and smile, and talk to the neighbors, and make no sign of that something like a grindstone grinding slowly through her head. She clutched the little tree, and was proud of the lightness she could put into her voice when she called to Marsh, "From that upstairs window there, right above your head, you can look down an' see how your hired men are tendin' th' corn."

  "I'll be with 'em until I'm so old I'll need two walkin' canes," Marsh answered, and he and Burr-Head continued to tramp and measure and plan until the falling darkness hid the corner stones. They started home then, and passed the brick house where the tips of the chimneys were faintly silvered with the white rising of a harvest moon. As always Delph paused by the back garden gate and looked into the garden where the chrysanthemums and late-blooming cosmos and marigolds glimmered through the dusk.

  Marsh watched her as she leaned on the gate, and felt a guilt and a hurt as he said, "You can have a whole acre of flowers up by th' stone house."

  "Pshaw, I wasn't thinkin' a that," she said, and turned away.

  They walked on, but the spicy scent of the flowers followed, sharp in the frosty air. Delph stopped and looked up at the sky, and back toward the flowers and said, "I wonder will it frost tonight. I maybe ought to tell her."

  Marsh, too, looked at the sky, and so did Burr-Head, and Caesar sniffing at old rabbit tracks, paused and studied the rising moon. "I'd not tell her to cut 'em for another night or so. Maybe it'll turn warm an' they can live a week or so," Marsh said. He, too, hated this cutting of the flowers, the foolish ones that only bloomed to die, and never lived to make their seed.

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  They turned down the hill and Caesar pricked his ears and Burr-Head said, "There's a car turnin' in up at our pasture gate."

  Marsh listened, and said, "It's SamI reckin," and wondered why he did not drive over the bridge and home and not come bothering himand Delph.

  Delph said nothing and went on down the hill. "He's comin' down to see us, most like," Marsh said. "It's no more'n common manners to wait for him."

  "You waitI'll go on an' start th' fire in th' livin' rooman' take Burr-Head. His sleep is catchin' him," she said, and he thought her voice sounded low and strained somehow as if she were sick or afraid.

  He heard her feet go on down over the rough road, and then Sam's car stopping at the top of the hill. He waited and Sam came down to him through the darkness. He saw his long body like a smudge of deeper darkness coming toward him, and when Caesar barked Sam was the first to speak. "That you, Marsh, up walking around?"

  "You didn't expect to come and find me still in bed, I hope," he said, and after that it was easier. Under the darkness and with the easy farmer's talk they had as they walked down the hill, Sam seemed no more than another one of the Fairchilds home for a visit.

  They talked of many things, the fine harvest of fruit and of corn, the good tobacco curing weather the fall had brought, the coming winter, and of Roan's land in the hills. "He said for you to be certain and stop by his office tomorrow," Sam said. "That was mostly why I came by, to tell you that. He said you'd been talking to him of buying a few sheep. He knows where there's a couple of yoes for salecheap, he said, and good as there is in the county."

  "Thanks," Marsh said, and the talk then turned to corn and clover and alfalfa.

  "I always meant to ask you," Sam said as they neared the front yard gate, "but you were too sick. How did you fertilize that clover in that little field? I could tell it was fertilized in strips, and I wondered what you had used."

  Marsh frowned and was glad of the darkness. Sam knew too much, understood so many things. He was not a farmer and he had lived most of his life away; still, he could come and see a thing such

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  as that small fenced off square of clover, and know the thought behind it and understand the world it might contain. He tried to speak lightly, brush the business away as if it were a nothing with which he sometimes fooled his time instead of a great love for which he would have given a great deal to have a more complete understanding. "There were ten strips, measured in square feet, an' before I took sick I
meant to cut it an' weigh th' yield an' figure th' fertilizer costs," he explained, and went on after his usual halting fashion to tell of the ten strips of red clover, one fertilized with lime and phosphate, one with phosphates only, one with triple superphosphates, one neither treated nor inoculatedit was a long story and meant nothing except that he was trying to find the best and cheapest way of growing the best clover.

  Sam listened with more interest than politeness, interrupting to ask questions, but when Marsh had finished he was silent a time before he said, "Marsh, you ought to have been a scientist."

  And Marsh answered, "Maybe you ought to have been a farmerI mean th' kind you used to think you'd mebbe be."

  "I've wondered," Sam said. He glanced toward the squares of yellow light that came from the living room where Delph had led the sleepy Burr-Head. "I guess I'll always stick to commercial researchnow," he said.

  "You make good money in that kind of work, so I've heard. That's somethin'," Marsh said.

  "People seem to think it is," Sam answered, and his stride lengthened and quickened so that Marsh could hardly keep up with him as they went down the walk toward the squares of yellow light. But he stopped a moment on the stone terrace by the door and asked abruptly, "Delph hasn't gone to bed has she? I just wanted to stop long enough to tell her and Burr-Head good-bye."

  "Pshaw, no. Sometimes she's up half th' night readin'.You leavin'? I thought you had a longer stay," Marsh said, and was more pleased by the prospect than he wished to be.

  "I've changed my mind," Sam said, and they walked into the living room together where Delph stood by the mantle with her back to the fire.

  She was silent a moment, standing stiff and still like a woman made of glass who could remain a woman and unbroken only as long

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  as she was still. Then Sam was going up to her, holding out his hand and saying some commonplace words of greeting that any other man might have said, and Delph was smiling with her head bowed a little over his hand, and Marsh wished he could see her eyes. He heard her say, "I guess you'll be leavin' soon," and Sam answering, "Yes. I decided I'd better go back to my work."

  They sat a time by the fireplace and talked of little things, but the talk was slow and disconnected and there were long whiles of silence when the ticking of the clock and whispering of the fire seemed loud. Delph talked less than either of the men. She sat frozen faced and silent, looking sometimes at the fire, sometimes at Sam. Marsh saw the stricken look in her eyes, and knew why it was there and through his anger and his sorrow comforted himself with some words he had heard from John a long time ago. "She's got a mind like an April wind."

  She roused only when Sam arose and said in a strained awkward way, strange for Sam, "Well, I must get home and try to get ready to leave about noon tomorrow."

  "Your mother'ull hate to see you go," Marsh said.

  Sam smiled at that. "Not so much as you'd think. Emma and I have been begging her to visit us in the east this winter. She can leave the farm with Poke Easy and you two. She'd maybe stay two days."

  "That would be fine for her," Delph said, and stood and pinched little pleats into her apron. She thought of Burr-Head, sleeping on the cedar chest. Once, she had planned that he should some day live in a strange place near a city. Now, she knew he never would. He wasn't her child. He was Marsh's child. He would be a farmer, too. But then it didn't matter. She would have been old by then, a graying farmer's wife gone to visit her son, not Delph to try her strength against the city.

  She raised her head and Sam was smiling at her, holding out his hand to say goodbye. She moved her head so that her face was in shadow. She wondered if she cried. She knew there was a crying in her heart. Then she was reaching blindly for his hand and saying, "Goodbye, Sam," and he was gone, and Marsh was walking with him through the yard and up the hill.

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  She waited with only her hands folding and unfolding her apron, the rest of her was still while she listened for the sound of his car going away over the hill. A cold night wind blew through the door and she thought of the winter. She would be alone day after day while Marsh worked in the barn or in the fields. Burr-Head would be with him and Caesar, too, and she would hear the ticking of the clock and lonesome sound of passing trains; see the flat stretch of bottom lands, black mud under gray rain or untouched reaches of snow where leafless corn stalks whistled in the wind. And always she would thinkand thinkand remember. This couldn't be the last time; all of him that she would ever have or see. It couldn't be.

  She ran to the door, but stopped when she saw Marsh standing in the square of light that fell through a window. He stood straight and still with his feet spread a little, his hands clenched in his overall pockets and a hard anger written over his mouth and his eyes. ''You needn't cry for him," he said, and came across the porch.

  "I'm not," she said. She knew the hurt behind the anger in his face and felt heavy with a sense of guilt but with it all could feel no sorrowor shame. She went back to sit by the fire, sitting crouched on the edge of her chair and staring into the flames.

  Marsh came and stood and warmed his back, and looked at her. "You've already got all th' neighbors talkin'," he said in a low flat voice.

  She clenched her hands and saw her tears splashing on them like slow drops of summer rain. "Youyou oughtn' to hold that against me, Marsh. Inever believed it when Sadie told tales on you."

  A coal dropped from the fire onto the hearth, and he ground it out with a long heavy crushing of his shoe heel against the stone, a grinding sound it made for such a little coal. His lips were thin and flat and white against his teeth, and his eyes like narrow bits of black stone in his face. "Maybe Sadie tells th' truth sometimes," he said, and stalked away to make his last round of the barn.

  Delph sprang up and stood calling after him, "Please, Marsh, please," but he walked on, and after a time she sat crouching by the fire again and staring at her hands. She was sitting so when he came from the barn a good while later.

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  He came and leaned his elbow on the mantle, and in a moment said with his voice kinder than it had been, "We'd better be goin' to bed, Delph."

  "I'm not sleepy," she said, still looking at her hands.

  "You'll get sleepy when you go to bed. We'll want to get an' early start in th' mornin'.

  "For what?"

  "Delphdon't you recollect? Tomorrow's th' day I finish payin' th' mortgage."

  "Oh," she said, and got up and picked up the lamp, then set it back on the mantle. "Marshyou go on to bed. I thinkI think I'll read upstairs in bedth' way I do sometimes when I don't want to keep you awake."

  He walked away in silence, but stopped at the door of their bedroom when she said, "Marsh, if you don't mindI thinkI think I'll just stay at home tomorrow. I'vegot a sight a work to do."

  He turned about and looked at her, but he could see little of her face. The lamp was on the mantel just by her head, and as she stood, looking not at him, but at the floor there were shadows on her mouth and on her eyes. "You know I mind," he said, "havin'a wife that thinks she's too good to ride with her man in a wagon. When I was sick you were plenty willin' to." Delph had turned away from him and stood leaning her forehead on the mantle. Her shoulders looked strange, not like Delph's shoulders, but tired and bent, as if they belonged to some worn out old woman. He had an instant's picture of ten thousand different things those shoulders had donemostly for him. He wanted to go to her and say the things he thought of saying while she sat on Solomon's fence, but he knew he never could. There would be a tomorrow and Sam would be gone. "There'll be another day, Delph," he said. ''Things will seem different then. Let's go to bed now."

  "There'll be a lot of other days," she said, and he left her there with her head leaning on the mantle.

  It seemed a long while before he heard her go upstairs. More than once he lifted on one elbow; he thought he heard a smothered sobbing but it was so low he couldn't tell. He lay and watched the square o
f light from her window above his own glimmer on the dead leaves in the yard until he fell asleep.