IN MARCH of this year—ten years since the day we came—there were tin-grey clouds and cold winds, and the white ash of orchard fires was blown east and scattered. But no rain had come since the first of February. “This year will have to be different,” I thought. “We’ve scrabbled and prayed too long for it to end as the others have.” The debt was still like a bottomless swamp unfilled, where we had gone year after year, throwing in hours of heat and the wrenching on stony land, only to see them swallowed up and then to creep back and begin again. I felt sure somehow that this year would end differently and better, and not be merely a shift of seasons that left us still bound and waiting. We had gone too long in a fog of hope.
My father’s life had been a sort of fierce crawling to rid us of debt before that time when even the effort would be too heavy for him. He wanted some safety for us, freedom from that fear and doubt he had always known himself. And he wanted time to look around and be still. He loved the land in a proud, owned way,—only because it was his, and for what it would mean to us; not in the way that Merle and I did, and still do. To us it was a thing loved for its own sake, giving a sort of ecstasy and healing (high words, but even they are too pale), and we felt a nameless, not wholly understood love. But the land was all Father’s life then. The whole weight of his ambition, the hope and sanity of his mind rested on the same ground he walked. This heavy, complaining labor with doubtful profit was almost the only visible sign of love he had ever showed us. But it was one that I’d never doubted.
Father was like Kerrin in that he couldn’t see the masterpiece of a maggot or be satisfied with the shadow of a leaf, in which ways we were older than he was, but young in being so blind we could not see the heaviness of his responsibility or know the probe of that fear which made him want security at the expense of our happiness.—I think sometimes that he would have been a milder, more patient man had there been some sons instead of nothing but girls’ talk all the time and women-voices. Life’s lonely enough and isolated enough without the thick wall of kind to make it go even darker. Later we did not talk so much, but in the first years we were like a bunch of guineas, cackling and squawking at all hours. It irritated him to have us picking and pecking at lives of other people, and telling the things we’d heard. “Shut up!” he’d shout.—“Shut up and keep out of others’ business!” And at times we had hated him for it. He felt too that we blamed him because there was nothing left but this land out of everything he had piled together for years; but the truth was that we never thought about this, and were glad that the place was old and stony and full of uncleared woods. Nor did Mother blame him either in word or mind. The only place she wanted to be was where Father was, whether this place was Eden or Sheol itself, and what form it took didn’t matter much. But he was so raw in mind himself that he suspected us all.
We never seemed able to make much over. All that we saved above what it cost to live—and live by mouth and mind only, with nothing new but the seasons or thoughts we had—all went into the mortgage-debt. It would have taken so little to make us happy. A little more rest, a little more money—it was the nearness that tormented. The nearness to life the way we wanted it. And things that have cost more than they’re worth leave a bitter taste. A taste of salt and sweat.
The spring crept up slowly this year; tide-like receded. Green crosiers of the ferns again and the mandrakes humping up like toadstools in the grass. I got tired as a rag sometimes and would not have minded being run through with a locust thorn and left for the shrikes to pick at. What use all this in the end? The hope worn on indefinitely . . . the desire never fulfilled . . . four o’clock and the ice-grey mornings . . . the cows and dark . . . the cans enormous in the foggy lamplight . . . day come up cold and windy . . . Max sullen as a red clod . . . the endless cooking . . . the sour rim of pails . . . Father’s grey shirts soaking all day in water. . . . There seemed no answer, and the answer lay only in forgetting.
But the days were warm sometimes. Spring came first to the air, and then to the life of things. The elm trees were green like sulphur smoke, or dust from a dry old fungus-ball; the wild ginger hard-packed still on its roots, but green with a silver mold, and in the ravine I found a moccasin snake coiled and hating, while the cold spring water flowed over his skin, over and over until I grew almost chilled with seeing it. The ground was hard. Things struggled up with their heads bent over. Father began to plough, and cut farther into the woods this year. Acres of wild phlox turned to corn. There was no use to say anything. Not even Merle did any more. Four trees came down, two pin-oaks and some sycamores, and the oaks had a queer and oily smell. No peaches this year. Blossoms stuck scrappily, one or two on a branch; but the apple buds were thick, and the pear trees covered. “A good year,” we said, “—if nothing happens.” (I wondered if anywhere on earth men could say such and such will be, with certainty. No farmer ever could.) One good year and the land would be ours again. I could imagine life free of this weight, so wonderful that only to be alive would be in itself enough. But hope was all we had then; not even belief—unless hope so strong and obstinate that nothing can root it out is called a faith.
It was queer how little rain came that month, and we thought that the next would bring a flood.
WHEN Kerrin’s school closed in April this year, I dreaded the thought of her being home all day. It seemed to me even then, eight months ago, that there was something more inerasably wrong with her than just a fierce selfishness and discontent. This teaching only held back awhile the black tide of something that had its beginning with her birth. Four years after we came, she had started to teach at the Union County school, although she was only nineteen then and there were some on the board who said it was wrong to have her even as only a substitute for Ally Hines. It wasn’t her age they minded so much, but we never had joined the church; and there was some talk of her “not being the one for the place,” but it dwindled into a mild nothing. Kerrin was good as a teacher and worked much harder than Ally Hines, with her cancerous bones and cough, had ever been able to. Ally had come down sick in the middle of the year, and Kerrin had asked for the place herself. The board would never have thought or considered her of their own accord, but when they heard she was through with high school, which was all that Ally herself had done, they took her for lack of knowing what else to do and being confused with Ally’s sickness as a thing not reckoned on in their almanacs. We were glad, not only because of the money—which Kerrin kept to herself, knowing it gave her a kind of power even though she might have to lend it sometime,—but glad because it took her away from home.
Even when she was quiet or reading, I could never find rest where Kerrin was. None of us could. Only out in the fields was there any peace when she was at home. I would come in the house sometimes and, without seeing or hearing, know she was there, and know too when she was gone without hearing her go. No matter in what sort of mood she was—and there were times when Kerrin was almost fiercely happy and kind—the tautness was never gone, the fear of what she might say or do.
She made a good teacher, good because she understood all those lumpy children in so far as any but God could understand them, I guess, and held them all to her with a kind of hard leniency and discipline. She succeeded because she really cared about them and thought it important that they should know the states and the laws and the years in which things happened or died, although not caring if she forgot it all forever, herself. She believed that for some reason it was important and valuable for them to know 1066 and the mystery of square root, and never asked herself exactly why