"I want to see Delph," he said.
"Waityou can't see her. I meanSolomon, he."
"Solomon?"
"YesSadie did what she couldbut not soon enough. She's here in th' hospital, too."
Marsh brushed his hands across his eyes, and it was strange to feel the coldness of his fingers. His hands were never cold. "I want to see her."
Poke Easy walked again, and there were girls in stiff starched white, and there were men, he had known them yesterday, but they were strangers now. And they, too, looked at him, and one man older than the others said, "I don't think you ought to go, Mr. Gregory."
He answered nothing but followed Poke Easy to a room at the end of a long hall. He paused by the door, angry with the hospital. Delph would want a room in front where she could watch the people in the street. He remembered then, and watched a nurse open the door. It seemed to take her such a time, awkward and fumbling with her hands, but then few women had the light skillful hands of Delph. It was her hands that had pulled him through that first hard summer. "I want to go by myself," he said when Poke Easy and the nurse followed.
It was a small room with a chair and a window and a bed. The bed looked long and high and wide, or maybe it was only that Delph looked strangely small. He knew it was Delph in spite of the sheet with its spreading stain of blood. There was her hand, not meek and
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folded on her breast, but tossed away with the fingers showing past the edge of the sheet.
He walked up to her and took her hand and drew it from under the sheet. In it there was a faint warmth and there was grape stain on the fingers. She wouldn't like that now, for tomorrow she was to sing in church and when she sang she hated work-stained hands. He remembered and laid the hand gently back upon the sheet. And it was strange to see it stay as he had laid it, cupped and empty like a wind blown leaf. The emptiness of it worried him, the slightly bent fingers had an expectant look as if they waited for something. He wished he had a flower. He wished he could see her face, but the sheet above her face was dark with stain, and he knew she would not like for him to see her so. She had flushed each time he had looked at the small scar he had made on her face.
Still, there was her hair. He pulled the sheet away, and saw the little loosened tendrils, stirring softly when he moved the sheet, and the hair was alive and soft and warm still to his hand. The nurse and Poke Easy came again, and Poke Easy said, "Please, Marsh," and the nurse said, "Now, Mr. Gregory."
He felt guilty and embarrassed. He shouldn't have done that. Maybe it was against the rules. Delph wouldn't like it. She was always saying, "Marsh, I want Burr-Head to grow up an' learn how to act with all kinds of people in all kinds of places." He had never hardly been in a hospital, and here he was acting all wrong. "I'll just sit," he said. "II won't move, but I want to staya while, yet."
The nurse brought a chair and he sat by Delph. He sat straight and still with his hat on his knees. Sometimes he looked at her hair and sometimes at her hand and sometimes out the window. He saw buildings and a block of sky and a square of grass. The grass worried him. He thought a time and remembered. He had thought of the grass when his neighbors died; men, he had said, were like grass. He wondered why he had ever bothered with thinking of such things. Death was nothing, an emptiness like the sky. He could measure death no more than he could measure the sky, and like the sky he would always live with it.
He saw the shadows of buildings fall long and thin across the grass, and he remembered that once he had loved the twilight, for that meant milking and barn work time. For him there would never
Harriette Simpson Arnow, Between the Flowers: A Novel
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