“Dad’s birthday comes soon now,” Merle said. “He’ll be fifty-seven. We should have a party, I think.—With presents.” She got up slow and shaking herself like a shaggy thing, heavy with warm sun and the food. She stood up in front of us with a round grave face.
“Where’ll you get the money?” Kerrin asked. “I’ve got some, but you haven’t any. I bought a knife that I’m going to give him.”
I looked at Kerrin quick and jealous. “—Where’d you get money from?” I asked. I hadn’t remembered there was a birthday coming, or thought of a thing to give, and it made me angry at her.
“It’s mine, Marget. I earned it!” Kerrin shouted. “I suppose that you think I stole or borrowed!” She got up and glared down on me. She was dark all over her long thin face, and I think she hoped that I did suspect her—she wanted to feel accused of dark and secret things. I probed the earth into little holes and buried a dandelion head, embarrassed and half-afraid of what she might do to me. “I just wondered,” I said, “since nobody else has any.”
Kerrin drew herself stiff like a crane. Her eyes seemed almost to twitch when she got excited or thought that she had a right to be. “You ought to have shut your mouth before you talked. You don’t know anything anyway!” Her liddy eyes opened fierce. She was always making scenes.
Merle clasped her fat hands together. She was anxious and uneasy and dreaded these times more than any snake or ghost. “We ought to be going back,” she said. “Maybe it’s later than the dishes—”
Kerrin looked angry and defiant. “What if it is? Who cares? Maybe I’m not going back a while!” She kept breaking twigs in her skinny hands.
“Kerrin,” I said like a pompous fool, “it isn’t always the things we want that are given us to do.”
“Why don’t you do them then?” Kerrin sneered.
I didn’t have anything to say. I was afraid to start probing again about the knife. Nothing was changed, but the afternoon seemed cold and chilly. . . . Merle started off down the hill. She was always thinking of Mother having to do the work alone, and was always the first to start at whatever there was to be done. Something was in her, even then, that kept walking foot after foot down a straight path to some clear place, and I wished then, and still do, that there was something in me also that would march steadily in one road, instead of down here or there or somewhere else, the mind running a net of rabbit-paths that twisted and turned and doubled on themselves, pursued always by the hawk-shadow of doubt. But even though I despised myself, it seemed that earth was no less beautiful or less given to me in my littleness than to Merle who had twice as much of good in her. And it seemed unjust and strange, but would probably balance up some day.
I ran after her and Kerrin followed, not wanting to come or to stay alone. “What’ll you give him, Merle?” I asked. She looked red and proud, pleased to be questioned when she knew the answer. “I’m going to give him a box,” she said. “A big one for his nails and screws.”
“That’s wonderful,” I told her. “You can make partitions in it for the sizes, and stain it some.” But I didn’t see how she was going to do it at all.
“What’re you going to give him?” Kerrin asked me. “Everyone ought to have something anyway. It doesn’t have to be awfully much.”
“You’ll see,” I said. In my heart I didn’t think that it would be much. I wondered if maybe it wouldn’t be anything at all. I wasn’t much good at making things.
We went slow in the hot sun. Merle was quiet, thinking, I guess, of all the chickens whose nests still had to be filled, and of the lame one who broke all her eggs but wanted so steadfastly to hatch that it was pitiful, though Merle hated her stupidness and the egg-stuck, smelly hay. It was almost two, and it seemed as if doing nothing at all took up time faster and more unknowing of what it swallowed than work had ever done. We walked up the cow-path where the ground was dry and warm, and alongside the thistles coming up. We could see Dad ploughing again already and robins come down in the furrows but keeping a long way off from the plough. There was a blue-smoke smell from burning brush and a warm haze in the air. Merle walked first, round and with a clean skin, and her mouth full of the one left piece of bread, and her hair messed up and woolly in the back; and then I came, not looking comparable to much of anything, with a brown dress on and beggar-lice seeds in my stockings; and then Kerrin straggled along behind, acting as though she might leave us any minute. She had reddish hair cut off in a bang, and her arms like two flat laths hung down loose from her shoulders, but her face was much sharper and more interesting than ours. She was stronger, too, and thought she could plough if Father’d let her. But he thought that a girl could never learn how and would only mess the field. “You help your mother, girls,” he’d say. “You help your mother.” He hired a man to work for a while and Kerrin was angry, felt things pounding in her, impotent and suppressed, and was sullen and lowering as the young bulls are. “He thinks I can’t do anything!” she’d shout at Mother. “He treats me as if I were still two. Why don’t you do something about it? Why don’t you make him see?”
“He’ll see after a while,” Mother said. “I think he’ll see pretty soon.”
“Why don’t you tell him though?” Kerrin’d say. “Why do you always wait so long about everything? You treat him like he was God Himself!” She’d end that way each time and slam a door somewhere while we pretended not to hear and would go on with what we did, only sick and drawn inside with hate. And for Mother who took things hard and quiet and lived in the lives of other people as though they were her own, it was like being bruised inside each time. I’d hear her suggesting things to Father in a quiet and hesitating way, and if he were tired he would be angry, or if in the rare times when he was pleased about something—about Merle’s fat cheeks that seemed to glow in wind, or about some clever thing she had said—he would laugh but never agree at once or let her know she had changed his mind. It was hard for her to bring things up at the times when he was pleased or sitting down quietly, because he had so few of these intervals, and it seemed like torturing him. We would walk carefully, praying the moment to last longer, to stretch out into an hour, and sometimes Mother would let the chance go past for the sake of peace, although there was much that she felt unjust, and had pestilent worries of her own she would like to have burdened on him.
When we came back that day we saw Mother had all of the old potatoes spread on the cistern-top and was cutting them up for seed. She looked thin and lumpy and her hair was wound in a braided ball behind. She was round-cheeked and young-looking, though, and glad to see us—which used to puzzle me sometimes, even then, thinking that fourteen years of us should have made her more chary and doubtful of our company.
“We had a good time,” Merle said, “and the lunch was good.” She stuck out some oozy dandelion stems curled together with spit, and plastered them on behind at the bottom of Mother’s knot.
“They look beautiful,” Kerrin said. “They look like worms.” She started to cut up potatoes, very fast and neatly, but Merle paid no attention and nobody else did either. I thought that it served her right, and Mother only laughed. Mother never talked much herself, but listened to everything that was said, and it made us feel there was reason in talking because she was there to hear. Nobody else we had ever met cared as much for all of the things that there were to know and be talked about—the wheeling of planets and the meaning of bonds, or the kind of salts that the chickens needed and the names of the great Victorian poets.
We hacked the potatoes for a long time, and quiet. The sun was still warm, and slow in moving. I thought about Kerrin and the money, and wondered when she had earned it for the knife, and thought most likely she simply had taken it (which was so), but forgot this in watching a grey hawk skimming along the oaks, and forgot it in wondering what supper was going to be. It was as if sun had slowed up everything and pressed us out calmer and more smooth. For a little while, at least.
THAT year