“Nothing’s wrong with Max,” Father said. “He’s gone where he’ll get more pay. Gone to do road-work, and left me flat. I paid him for ploughing and was going to do corn on shares. I ain’t the money to pay a man for that. Someone’ll have to do it on shares.”
“Maybe you could sell it,” Mother said. “Pay someone to help and sell the corn this fall.”
Father laughed. A sound more like a snort or sneer, as though he were glad to have her mistaken. “If it’s good,” he said, “so’ll everyone else’s be. Land’ll be drowned in corn.—How’s a man to know?” he burst out, exasperated. “You ought to be able to sell all the stuff you raise! Somebody needs it. A farm ought to pay as good as a road. No road’s going to feed a man!” He looked old—old and childish at the same time. As if he might burst out crying soon. It was awful—the rage he felt; but it wasn’t the anger so much as the despair that made us afraid.
“Maybe Christian Ramsey could come,” Mother suggested. She put out the words with doubt, feeling her way along his mind.
“Christian’s swamped under now. Got all his creek-bottom full. What’d he do with ten acres more?” He slapped the words at her raw.
“Grant Koven might do it then,” Mother said. She knew that nothing was ever as overwhelming or final as he seemed to think,—that if he would wait, instead of shouting, there’d be less to shout over in the end.
“No,” Father said. He shoved her suggestions away as though they were stupid thoughts that had come to him hours ago and been found of no use. He stared at his hands. Sullen and tired, the anger going out. Then he jerked his head toward Merle, saw the potatoes half-peeled with their skins still patched around, and asked when supper was going to be. “If you’d have it any time soon,” he muttered, “I’d make it over to Kovens’ tonight.”
I was glad that Kerrin didn’t come in that time. She made it a point to stay away, out in the barns or field, till supper was ready; and sometimes didn’t come even then, but ate by herself, secret and ravenously. She would scoop the syrup of sweet potatoes out of the dish with her hands, and wipe out the roasting-pan with pieces of bread hacked off and ragged. Father stopped asking about her after a while and looked at her doubtfully when she did come in, suspecting her of some hidden reason. I never got used to his sick impatience, and felt racked all the time with hate and pity. Even before, when we were younger, I’d sit and watch him sometimes at the table, when he sat there eating and leaving things on his plate and not saying much, with the tired look on his face that made me want to cry at times, although I was quick to hate him when he would turn on us suddenly and shout out: “Eat your dinner, you girls! Stop messing with your food!” But all the time I would feel us there on his shoulders, heavy as stone on his mind—all four of our lives to carry everywhere. And no money.
Kerrin said once he made her think of the mad King Lear, and wondered if after all the daughters were wholly wrong. “He was a wild old man and half-mad already. How could they reason with one like that?” she’d ask. She read the play with a sort of gloomy pleasure, and memorized pages off by heart—mostly the cold and rational words of Goneril, and then, more for the sound than anything else, the howling of Edgar on the heath. I was glad that she wasn’t here, watching and thinking about him, this time while Father sat at the table and drummed with his fingers on the cloth, not hungry but tired and impatient. When supper was done, he left for the Kovens’ early.
I had never seen Grant, but Merle had, a long time ago when she was still little and he came through hunting a horse he’d lost. She didn’t remember much except that the one he rode was tired, and he left it out by the barn, going away on foot. She gave it some water, and when he came back he took what was left and washed off its head and sides. His hands were as big as shovels, she said, but hadn’t noticed much else. Kerrin would have remembered everything; she’d have remembered even the things he wore and whatever he’d said and a lot that he didn’t say. Grant was about thirty-one, Mother said, and had been away from home for five years, working on ranches and in the mines after he’d finished school, but had come back now to his father’s place. Bernard Koven had been a minister once, then he bought this land of his and went back to farming while he still had a tithe saved up and breath to make use of it. They owned only pasture land, not fit for much but mullein plants and grazing, and kept both steers and hogs. They did no dairying, or any of all those things that Father had started and was breaking his back to keep on doing—each by itself too much for one man alone.
I went down to the wood-pond by myself that night. It was cold and windy. Too cold almost for rain. The frogs sang loud enough to deafen, but stopped dead when I came. They sounded like old women cackling in the water. I stopped to listen, but could think of nothing except whether or not Grant would come, and wondered if he would be a man like Father. It was hard to think of another kind, and yet harder to think of him as young. It seemed strange, too, that we would have someone different to live with us, a person with knowledge that was taught, and one who had gone beyond this county and state, learning things by sight instead of just reading about them. Father had done this, too, but now it was as though these ten years of farming had blotted out all that was behind, and he was only a little different from those around us—the Ramseys and Huttons and Mayers who knew a great deal but saw it only from this one land-bound side.
It was miserably cold. Ground even at the pond-edge hard. No spring about anything, and even the wild plums dim like a dirty web. I felt excited, though, and full of a kind of nameless hope. This year, I thought, will be different . . . better.
I stood there long enough for the frogs to think I had gone, and they started up again, grunting and rumbling a long way apart;—and then came the shrill, insane chorus, thrust up like spears of sound, but guttering away again into a silence.
I WONDERED a lot about Grant in those days before he came. Merle seemed only mildly interested, though, and hoped that he wouldn’t eat very much. Kerrin said nothing at all about him and may not even have known that he was to come. She was never around when things were told, and then acted as if we had a conspiracy of silence against her. Once in those days I had a strange thought when I looked at Kerrin.—I thought that if I could look like her and know that nothing could ever change it—not sickness nor fear nor accident nor age, nor anything—that I should not care very much what happened, that nothing would worry me any more. Kerrin was beautiful in a dark, odd way, and made with a brown cold skin tight-stretched, and wild colty eyes. She would stand sometimes turning her face before the mirror, or spread her hands out through her hair that was more like a thick red light than anything real. She’d crane and stretch her neck to see how the light looked smooth and syrupy over her cheeks, and it seemed sort of sad to me at times that all her loveliness was going to waste on just us, with none but a few shy stumbling fellows to see her, or farmers already married.
I felt little and mean in envying her and in wanting a beauty that nothing could ever change. I could not acknowledge it even to myself, but it was so. I used to wonder how men who had murdered or done crude and slimy things could go on living with the self which had made them do it still inside like a worm or ulcer; but now I could see how simple it was to make excuses.—How amazingly kind and tolerant we are to ourselves! What infinite patience we have!
I went and looked at my face in the glass. There was something wrong and dull in the lines of it. A pale smear with no life in the skin, and a mouth like a cut across. I was plain—O God, so plain! But still I had seen homelier people than I, and not minded them so much—loved some, in fact. I tried to console myself with this, but remembered that they had strong faces, though. We—I—seemed like a disease on earth compared with the other things. Our lives, buildings, our thoughts even, a sort of sickness that earth endured. These were grotesque and morbid broodings, but they came back often in the unbearable cleanness of this spring.
There were other