It was true and it wasn’t true—what she said about the children. People weren’t born and fastened to earth any more. They came and went, returning and leaving, not like a tide but in scattered ways and times. People came back to the land as we had come, after years of another life, bringing with them a newness to old things, a different seeing from the sight of men born with the sound of calves’ bawling in their ears and the taste of mud in their mouths from the beginning. There was no solitude utterly unpierced, no isolation complete any longer—except for the final one of self. If Kerrin had chosen to point out the myriad facets of life, the strangeness of breath itself, she might not have left them so blind and narrow, even if they had been as indifferent as she thought. But maybe she herself didn’t see these things, and was blind and gaping, too, which made her restless and full of uncertain angry moods, and above all lonely.
I hoped that this year she would find enough work to keep her quiet, and wished that August with schools beginning was not so far, although God knows we needed her help enough. She had been of more use to Father than even she herself realized, and things had taken him twice as long while she was away at school. He was slow and fumbled the harness, jerked and thumped at the horses until they pounded the walls. Kerrin used to do it all for him, shoving the bits in swift and angry, but with no hesitation or fumbling tries. A sort of contemptuous certainty. She used to feed them at noon and toss in corn, kind and yet viciously, damning their eagerness. The stalls got muck-deep and moldy when she was gone, and Father left them because there was little time. But this year when school closed, she seemed to forget all the things she used to do, and it was only by nagging that we made her work.
I wished that all the strength which she spent in hate and in searching for something she did not even name to herself had been ours to use. But I knew that strength alone would never have helped us much, and even if we had raised nine farms we would have had less than an acre’s return in money. Kerrin herself never cared whether or not this slough of debt was filled, and to her the land was only a place to stay in, and as lonely as peaks or islands are.
She spent most of her time now, as she used to do when we were children, reading—it seemed, almost everything that was piled up there on the shelves. She would lie with her hard brown face casting a shadow on the page, and go through the books that the grandfathers used to own—old books that had page after page without a new paragraph or picture, and filled with philosophies obscure and gloomy as were the bindings, but even more durable perhaps. She spent hours in reading them over and did not stop, as Merle and I did, at a certain page or time, or stop to do dishes and scrabble in earth to make a garden. She was never law or time bound, or thinking of how her eyes might hurt; and she had a faith that was almost religious in believing a thing must be so if a man would bother to write it out seriously and bind it in a book.
Even if we had had more money, I doubt that Kerrin would have been satisfied. She carried the root of her unrest with her, a root not the kind that pushed the self on and up to accomplishment and fed it with a desire, but a poisoned thing that wasted its strength in pushing down here and there, and found only a shallow soil or one full of rocks wherever planted. I knew that she wanted love,—not anything we could give her, frugal and spinsterly, nor Father’s (having long ago stopped even hoping for it), but some man’s love in which she could see this image she had of herself reflected and thus becoming half-true. I knew it was this fierce restlessness, this desire and hunger that had led her—even after teaching school all day, and carrying up milk at night, and finishing all those things accumulated and undone as though tipped there from the day like a rubbish heap of the hours’ leavings—to go out fox-hunting at night with the farmers, or walk alone, tramping the marsh grass and weeds or along the dim rutted roads until morning. I would crouch cold on these nights in bed or at the window, driven by some obsession to see her come and go, and could not sleep until the empty moon-patch on her bed was broken and I could see the light on her bony and polished arms.
I felt empty and thirsty, too, sometimes, dreaming wild and impossible dreams, but was driven easily from them by the pattern of a shadow or a pot on the stove, and driven from them too by a wry sense of humor that made my mind leap always to see the vision’s end. Not even on April nights heavy with grape smell, or in the moving of shadow-leaves could my mind forget the inevitable noon.
ON FATHER’S birthday this year, I walked up near to the old stone fence where we’d buried Cale. Merle and I had piled some of its rocks in a sort of cairn on top of his grave, and planted wild ginger there. We used to see Kerrin going up this hill-path sometimes, and once, years ago, we found her crying on top of the cairn and sneaked away, pretending not to see. It seemed queer to us who had never cried afterward but had loved him so much when alive—much more than she had, we thought. But now I’m not sure of it.—Kerrin had a strange way of not seeming to notice things or care about them, but years later we’d find the feeling was there, living and fierce, under a thin slab of indifference.
The stones were toppled over and wrenched apart by roots, but the wild ginger still covered it like the leaves of enormous ivy. I saw Kerrin down on the road below me, and wondered if she would come here to the cairn. She was curiously sentimental in some ways and played small parts for her own sake even when no one could see her, and it would have been like her to come here on this day. She went on past to the barn, though, and did not look up or turn.
We did not celebrate Father’s birthday any more, but I would have liked to bring him back something from the woods, some foolish thing like a bud or stone, to make him know that I had remembered the day. But it was hard to give trivial things, and I wondered if after all I was glad that he was born and had any reason to make the day seem a special thing. If I had spent money for a present he would have been anxious over the cost and suspicious as always, demanding to know where it came from, and seeing the farm sold under our feet for the sake of a ten-cent tie.
We let this day go by without saying much, and I think he himself had forgotten the meaning of it; but there was one thing at least this year that set it apart again from other days.
Father came up tired that night while Merle was peeling potatoes, cutting the skins off thick and stoutly, her mind full as always of some strange thing she had thought or memorized, and not noticing what she did. He smiled at her absently, more out of habit left from the days when she was small and her hair stood up rough and matted like weedy grass behind, than from any feeling of kindliness left now. He turned toward Mother and threw his hat on the table, mopped at his damp and rutted face. “Max isn’t coming back,” he said. “It seems not to pay to work for me!” He looked at Mother as if it were she who had driven Max off or else had failed through some fault to hold him here.
It