In those early years, to read and to eat and to be alive on the hills had been enough for Merle and me. From the beginning we had felt rooted and born here, like the twin scrub-oak trees that grew together in the north pasture and turned lacquer-red in fall, and whose roots were under the white ledgestones. We called them the Gemini, and their inner branches grew short and were locked together so that the shape of both made only one tree with two boles.
At no hour did life suddenly change, nor was there any moment which could be said to have altogether made or altered us. We were the slow accretion of the days, built up, like the coral islands, of innumerable things.—The moment of evening air between the stove and the well outside . . . the sound of wind wrenching and whining in the sashes . . . the flesh of corn-kernels . . . fear—fear of the lantern’s shadow . . . fear of the mortgage . . . cold milk and the sour red beets . . . the green beans and the corn bread crumbling in our mouths . . . fear again . . . and the voice of Kerrin singing to herself in the calf lot . . . the sense of safety in Mother’s nearness . . . the calm faith that was in her and came out of her like a warmth around . . . the presence of each other and a lusty love of being, of living and knowing there was tomorrow and God knows how many more tomorrows and each a life and sufficient in itself. . . . We were added to by the shadow of leaves, and by the leaf itself . . . by the blue undulations across the snow, and the kingfisher’s rattling scream even when creeks were frozen over. We were the green peas, hard and swollen, which Merle gathered late so that what was earth in the morning would be gone into and swelling out the peas by night, making them bigger all through no trouble or expense of ours, which seemed an odd, almost too kind thing—like a miracle when none was asked. They were as much part of us as the sight of white-boned sycamores flung up against the sky, or clouds driven like steam along the tops. In the thought and the strangeness of self we could spend hours as traveling through a labyrinth, and it was a riddle sufficient in those days to keep the mind quick and seeking, hungry and never fed; and in the mystery of the turnip, you forgot the turnip-leaf.
But for Kerrin these things had never been satisfying enough, even in other years. She used to get restless and savage, and rode out long ways into the night while we sat reading. “Where’s Kerrin?” Father would keep on asking, would read a chapter and go peer out into the moonlight. “Why don’t you keep her home, Willa?” he’d say to Mother. “How do you know what she’s doing out this way? No girl ought to be out at night this way!” He’d be tired by dark, wanting to sleep early, wanted to go to bed by eight sometimes but insisted on staying up till Kerrin came back along the road, sometimes as late as nine or ten. We’d hear the plough-horses whinny and go thundering down the fence, and then the sorrel’s feet rattle the road stones a fourth of a mile away, and hear his shrill, exhausted neighing. “She’s here now,” Mother would say. “She’s safe enough. You go to sleep now, Arnold.” And with the nearer rattling of stones and feet, Father would close his book, for a half-hour now unread, and go upstairs, having learned that he could not meet or say anything to her, and remembering the one night when she first had stayed this late and he had gone storming out to meet her, shouting for explanations he never got, and made inarticulate with rage when she would not answer or come into the house. She had spent the night out in the barn that time, sleeping up in the weedy hay and more comfortable perhaps than we were, sick and unsleeping in our beds.
I remember the morning after that night.—It was April, and cold, walled in with mists high as the sheep-barn roof. We saw Kerrin come out of the barn with dry scraps of weed still stuck in her hair, and stretch and yawn in the sun that came down through the mists, then come up the stones to the kitchen when Dad had gone. We looked at each other and shivered, but thought it was because of the fog that clung to our clothes and made them damp and chilly. We came down into the kitchen and flapped their dampness in front of the fire, and Kerrin sat at the table without saying anything, and the hay still messed in her hair. Her legs were wet and goose-fleshed from walking up in the grass. She watched us to see what we would say, but we only went on drying our clothes, more interested in the thick bacon smell and the glunk of oatmeal on the stove. Mother brought her some bacon and a hunk of toast and milk that had cream still marbled on the top, and told her she’d better move up against the stove to dry; and we could see she was hoping that Father would stay out a good long time. Kerrin ate savage and hugely like a wolf, and smeared on jelly till all her toast was gone, then ate the jelly plain in high, quivering spoonsful from the jar. Merle and I sat there and ate patiently at our blobs of oatmeal with milk around the edges. It came to me as a sort of dim, unfinished thought that there were hours of sun and hours of picking and hot hours on a stove all gone into those few minutes of Kerrin’s swallowing and would become part of her, giving her energy to hate and use loud words and tears; and I wondered how Mother’s faith would answer that, for it seemed to make the pattern of things more distorted than before. I hadn’t time to follow this thought to the end—which was well, perhaps, for there was no answer, at least none that I could have found—for Father came in just then and stood in the doorway looking at us.
He was a big man and heavy, and his face hung dragged in long thin folds. His red hair used to be thick, but was now sparse and grown in somber hummocks. Once he had let it grow down over his collar, which made him look like a preacher and more kindly, but most of the time he was shaved and alien-looking to the earth. He had frosty eyes—a kind of white-blue with fierce pupils. I loved him sometimes when he smiled; because he so seldom did, I guess. He cared most for Merle and me, partly because we loved the land more, which seemed to justify and comfort him in a way. Merle he loved most, and used to say that she would have made a good boy. But he did not try to treat her as one, thinking that nothing could change a girl much. He looked at us from across the misty gulf that he thought was between him and all women, and thought of the place in which they moved around and did things as a long way off—a place from which they might step across this gulf to marry a man, but any time might go back again. Only Mother he saw clearly. The outside part of her anyway. If she went back in secret to this woman-place he did not know it, because marriage was to her a thing of which mighty few men are worthy—a religion and long giving.
He seemed not to see or to have forgotten Kerrin, might not have noticed her at all if she’d kept still and combed her hair instead of leaving it strawed and weedy. “Max isn’t coming up today,” he said. “He’s sick.” He put the milk down slopping over the floor, and looked at Kerrin. He started to say something, but only got red and tight and turned around in a helpless, exasperated way. Mother asked him how much they had finished yesterday, and he said it wasn’t a third of what still was waiting. Max was slow, he muttered, and worked at home, besides—worked too much. . . . The Rathmans were planting corn, too. . . . Could silage it, anyhow, if it didn’t sell. . . .
“Why don’t you grow something that nobody else has got?” Kerrin blurted out. “Something that’ll bring us more money than just corn!”
“You want too much too fast,” Father said. He was cold and quiet and sounded years away from her nagging voice. He spoke as though to a little dog that insisted on yapping, a little dog that he might kick soon.
I could see Mother watching him, screwed hard and tense, saying—be careful . . . be careful . . . don’t look at her that way! . . . Not aloud, but with her eyes. She was praying inside, I knew. Aloud she said, in a sort of indifferent way, that he might try celery later on, that it was hard to raise, she knew, but none around here had it and it took more water than