Chapter V: Part 5

She turned into the familiar lane, which seemed shrunken now. She heard farm noises. A cow mooing softly in a far place, pigs grunting just off the path, a duck squawking somewhere in sudden protest. The house seemed smaller and the yellow paint was peeled; it was ugly. Hesitant, she went up the sagged steps. The towels on the porch line were muddied, the tin tub was turned carelessly over, the egg basket was torn. She was opening the screen door. There was no one, no sound there in the kitchen. Beyond in the bedroom she saw her mother in a chair under one of the little windows, bent over some work. Ellen looked at her a moment as though she were a stranger. From the parlor came Frankie’s stripling voice in singsong, “I do, I did, I have done. I draw, I drew, I have drawn. I eat, I ate.” The small voice sighed audibly as Ellen entered.

“Sounds right brave, Frankie.”

“Ellie! You just came. I missed you. Was it fun in Chicago?” As they were embracing Ellen saw Frankie’s eyes were dark-shadowed, but her skin was smooth and her hair glistened. She was asking about Garland. “Is he kind, Ellie, in his own house?”

“Of course.”

“I heard Pa say you ran off and left Uncle. Did you, Ellie? I wanted to brave Pa to ask. But he gets riled when we name you. Reckon he doubted you were coming home.”

“I was visiting someone.”

“Where? Where’d you stay?”

“Is he on the outs with me?”

“Pa? I reckon. You went to St. Louis, didn’t you, Ellie? I heard him say it to Ma.”

“You learning grammar again, Frankie?”

“Tell you true, I hate it. Whate’er I speak, teacher stops me and changes it.” She shrugged, resentful. “He’s daft.”

“You let Pa know it?”

“No, I’m in thick enough with Pa now. He’s e’er raising sand. I got to practice all morning now and I’m only to help with housework. Not to milk or hoe the garden.” She looked away. “Wish I was little again.”

Ellen frowned. “You’ve got to study ahead. And watch the ways of turning. That’s a thing I learned.”

The two were silent. Looking back to the freedom of childhood, they chafed at the fretful boundaries, the responsibility that seemed to mark maturity. They went forward because there was no other way. Frankie was looking up, doleful, “Missed your songs, Ellie.”

“Say, how’re the goats?”

“The old one dropped two kids. Reckon it was in April. Sam found them in the morning; one died, the other was a buck, a black one. Pa had Sam cut it. Said they’d butcher it in fall.”

“What about the little doe, Rhodie? She drop one too?”

“I don’t know. I can’t keep it in my head. I think Sam said he took her to a billy. You ask him. Tell you true, Sam’s been doing for them.”

“Oh, Frankie. And me pining for them all this tormented time.”

“I’m sorry, Ellie. I’m a poor thing,” Frankie laughed, pleading.

“It’s hot. I’ll go unpack.”

* * * * *

In the attic room, Ellen made her bed up for the night, put away her clothes. All the while a thing was waxing heavy in her, leaden, as she thought on her father. “One thing, I’ll ne’er cry. Wish I could make out not to fear him.” She took the statuette of the Virgin to its old place on the round table in the parlor. She could hear Maria and Frankie in the kitchen preparing supper. Loneliness swept Ellen like an empty cloud as she stood, uneasy. Anton came upon her there. Looking at his face she recalled when Blueberry had balked starting a wagon and Anton lashed him coldly about the head with leather lines. Ellen had watched secretly from a barn window, heart pumping, waiting until the rearing horse lunged and moved the load. She was going up the stairs without a word. He climbed gently after, his breathing becoming strident on the way.

He held the belt. His voice shuddered hoarse. His lips were trembling with their weight. “You e’er were froward, girl.” He was hitting her again, holding the strap with a relentless hand, feeling the easing of his own sharp flesh. “I’ll teach you yet. Get on your knees. You were walking and mincing in that seat of whoredom, weren’t you? Did you know my brother Marc died rutting there in St. Louis? And that’s what killed my ma?”

She was enduring the hot bite of the striking leather. She fought within herself as since a child, to hold silence, pinning her will on it.

“How do you reckon Sam favored doing your trading? How do you reckon your chores were done up these months, you plagued dummy?” His voice was a heavy cold whisper and his gray eyes were half closed. “And you stole the Virgin image.”

Ellen was breathless in the sting of tears. It’s his way. It’s for love he does it. He’s trying to teach me what’s right. He must.

“Now, you’ll not go off this farm again,” he was warning in the doorway, “lest I marry you to someone proper.” He paused. “I allow I’ll kill you before you’ll stand against my will.” He was rolling the belt up around the home-forged brass buckle as he went out.

Ellen followed down to the evening meal. She went to Maria eagerly, kissing her, forgetting, in her need, her mother’s preoccupied ways. “How’ve you been, Ma?”

“Tormented, Ellie. He knows.” Maria looked upward with vague eyes.

“I’ll be here to do for you now, Ma. You glad I’m back?” she pleaded swiftly.

“I took count,” Maria said. “Hit’s been six months July fifteen. Mester Gaddy’s been fretted.”

“Quit jawing, ooman,” Anton said. “Set and eat.”

* * * * *

After the meal, though the air was close, Anton directed the family to go to the parlor, bade Ellen, “Fetch my Bible.” He took the book from her, leafed the pages. He looked at Frankie, sitting by Maria on the sofa. “Even as these oomen fared, so will hit be with you, Poppet, if you don’t pay me heed.” They watched him take the silver-banded reading glass, peering through it at the page.

“Down on your knees,” he told Ellen, and she obeyed. “Because the daughters of Zion are haughty and walk with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet, therefore the Lord will smite them. And the Lord will discover their secret parts.”

Ellen was tired. She was kneeling by the doweled rocker, her head on the arm of the chair. She closed her eyes and thought about the man who could start balky mules by blowing in their long ears, twisting them so they forgot their orneriness.

“In that day the Lord will take away the bravery of their tinkling ornaments about their feet, and their cauls and their round tires like the moon, the chains, and the bracelets,” Anton cherished the syllables, “and the hoods and the veils. And it shall come to pass that instead of a sweet smell there shall be a stink and instead of a girdle a rent, and instead of well-set hair, baldness, and instead of a stomacher, a girding of sackcloth.”

* * * * *

Under the attic window she was lying sleepless, the uncertain moonlight washing over her bed. The cockerels in the chicken shed were crowing intermittently, confused by the unseemly moon’s glare. Her body ached from the beat of the strap. Her breasts were swollen because she had tolerated the child to nurse her over the past days and the milk had not as yet subsided. She would wait and in a week the discomfort would be gone, then she would be done with him. Her mind circled on Penny and Clate, on the Dougherty beasts, the donkey and Brownie and the doe Tiny. She was overcome by devotion to them all. She went further back to the autumn of despair, and to the summer preceding that was fading now as the separate incidents blurred and blended. The night stretched brilliant as she rose and leaned at the window sill. The quavering of the young cocks’ chorus was heard again.

She slipped into her dress and went down. Jack met her at the door, hurling himself upon her. She sat on the steps to pluck burrs that were tangled in his hair. She was listening to the sounds the wind made that sometimes has a business in the high branches, spurning the ground. In the warty-barked hackberry there was a rustle as the leaves resisted the wind, and in the spruce by the road fence an indistinct whisper came and went as many tiny needles rasped gently one on another. The wind sounds were all different in the varied trees. In the black willows by the Sweetincreek there would be a swishing and a swaying, and in the stiff leaves of the catalpa nearly no noise at all. The mockernut was so tall and straight that the soughing was disguised and far away. I might know the particular tree just from the voice of the wind through it. The cockerels were piping again in the moonlight, foretelling the dawn just coming.

* * * * *

In the early morning she hurried out to find none of her goats at the woodshed, nor any trace they had been stabled recently there. A setting goose was peering from under the cobwebbed manger; it hissed a warning, hovering over warmed eggs in musty straw. For a moment Ellen stood in the doorway, then she went to the barnyard. Sam was pouring foaming milk into tall cans. “Your nannies are at the field.” Sam looked her over quietly. “Your pa says leave them there.”

“I’m taking them up to the woodshed right now. There’s a silly old goose setting in there.”

“Better ask your pa if you can, Ellie.”

“Well, I’ll help you-all milk first.”

In the barn she drew the first streams onto the ground to clean the udder. Then she was milking steadily, her hands efficient. She pressed her head into the joint of the young cow’s back leg.

“That Sal’s a real kicker,” offered Sam.

“Watch you don’t lose her milk,” Anton said, coming in.

“Ho, suckey.” Ellen would know if the nervous heifer were about to strike out. She stripped the front teats and began to milk the tight back ones. “Ho, Sal.”

Anton gave her leave to take her goats in from the field when she brought the cows. “And you help with the milking hereafter, girl.”

Ellen discovered Penny was thin and her udder flabby, for she ran loose with a black yeanling. Rhodie was slick-haired, rounded with a kid Sam said she would drop next month. They were skittish and Ellen coaxed them to her. She sat in the grass with corn in her apron until they could not hold their greed and curiosity. Penny licked her ear, bleated softly on her neck, remembering her all at once. The black wether was timid and handsome but he came under her hand too. She resented his castration though she knew it was necessary. They were munching the corn grains, pushing against her.

Go through my window
My sugar lump
And buy molasses candy
Blue bird, blue bird, go through my window
And buy molasses candy

10

The fiery sun of August labored in the sky across the languid procession of days. In the evenings, by the light of kerosene lamps, the women still were finishing canning of peaches, tomatoes, berries. They clamped glass lids on by wire bails and stood filled jars on a rack of laths in the wash boiler. Pits and peelings were heaped in pails in the yard where flies gathered, and gnats and yellowjackets. They put up salt-and-sugar beans, selecting green-tinted jars to protect the color. They dried peppers and sweet corn. They made brine for gherkins and green tomatoes, packed a ten-gallon crock in the pantry with cucumbers and branches of dill. Ellen added horseradish roots to the salty brew, and mustard seeds. On top she placed grape and cherry leaves. “To get a good brine you got to add salt just right,” she said, “till it gets the power in it to hoist a fresh egg from the bottom of the crock and float hit.”

Ellen was making jelly. She strained the cooked fruit through flannel bags and then added sugar or sorghum and boiled the juice. She tested the hot purple syrup. “It doesn’t want to sheet off and tear proper,” she told Amanda York who came to keep her company. “I’ll just wait on it.” She wiped her forehead with a perspiring hand.

Sometimes Lily Garrett, in a shapeless flowered dress, walked up the road to sit in the kitchen heat and visit awhile. “You make such pretty jam,” Lily said. “Why don’t you take some to the county fair at Seven Mile Run? Mama does. She got a prize last year and hers was clouded.”

Ellen held the jar to the sunlight; the jelly glowed. “I do favor redcap jelly.”

“Well, you should go, Ellie.”

“What color’s the first prize?”

“Blue.”

“You going to, Ellie?” asked Frankie.

“There’s no harm talking.”

“Get it out of your head, girl,” Maria was speaking. “I begged Mester Gaddy ten years ago. He said it was foolishness.”

“I know.”

Lily was showing Frankie how to make a special kind of cherry preserve. “The receipt named this Barrier Cherries, Frankie. Takes apple vinegar and strained honey.”

Maria’s face was sweated and reddened in the heat of the stove fire. She reached back into the dimness of her memory, to when she had run in crying to a grayed old woman, “Mam, there’s a booger scratching my eye.” The woman had licked the eye with her soft tongue to remove the foreign substance, then set Maria on a three-legged stool outside the door to work the dasher of the churn up and down. “Stone churn ain’t good enough for you, girl,” she said to Ellen, suddenly.

“What did you say, Ma?” Ellen was startled.

“Old-timey days we had a stone churn. And when Pap was home sometimes he’d bring us a runty possum, or maybe a coon. Summers now, we ate good.”

“Did you store up like we do against winter?” asked Frankie.

“I like to lay up when there’s plenty,” Maria admitted. “But the most Mam did was to dry corn and herbs. Folks didn’t figure to eat then like now. Once or twice a day was all we sat to table.” She reflected a moment. “I allow I didn’t miss hit. And my folks thought a heap of me till Mester Gaddy came along.”

“Tell, Ma. Did you pine for love of him when you saw Pa?” Frankie cried.

“Mester Gaddy gave me a fine snuffbox. It was mother-pearl. And a deal fair to hold in the sun.”

“I ne’er saw that box, Ma,” said Ellen.

“Show us.” Frankie was eager.

“No. Mester Gaddy was forced to sell hit once when he was short cash. I always regretted that.”

“When did you start honing after Pa?” persisted Frankie, slim and frail beside Lily, stirring the kettle at the stove. “For love.”

“He rode a big gray mare and there was nothing so tall as he. See, I was a tedious plain girl and my folks were old already when I was born. They hadn’t looked for me. So they fretted on what was to come. Mester Gaddy rode o’er to Seven Mile Run and talked to Pap.”

“And then Mester Gaddy courted you?” Lily inquired.

“Go on,” Frankie pressed.

“Pap had scrimped for a dowry that was to come with me. Pap was bound to care for me proper. You’d ne’er have thought it the way we lived so poor-like while he was putting by.”

“I ne’er thought about Pa being young once,” said Ellen. “Was he different from now?”

“No. Except his hair was red and thick. I came with him to this farm. Here I been since. He hitched that gray mare to a two-wheel cart and I set up beside him and figured I was a lady.” Her dull eyes sparked. “E’er do as Mester Gaddy says, girls.”

“There was Pa on a horse,” Frankie said. “I’d just as lief have seen that.”

“Oh, all the folks rode horses those days,” said Ellen.

“That’s right,” Lily assented.

“Don’t go talking to Mester Gaddy about those days,” Maria was warning. “He’s disremembered them. Watch your cherries don’t burn there, girls.”

“They’re doing right, Mrs. Gaddy,” Lily said. “You were gone a powerful time in spring, weren’t you, Ellie?” Curious, Lily was sniffing after gossip to brighten her wishful youth.

Ellen took up the basket, leaving the table where she had been stoning cherries. “I’m getting in some corn for supper,” she called as she was going down the porch steps.

“Ellie’s so contrary.” Lily watched Ellen stride down the field. “She won’t talk with me proper-like.”

“That’s her for you,” Frankie said.

“I reckon she doesn’t like me.”

“Oh she does, Lily.”

“No.”

“Ellie’s just bossy that way.” The two girls embraced abruptly. The pot boiled. The sugary odor was filling the kitchen, seeking darkened rafters where smoke from years long past dwelled.

“Would you be best friends with me, Frankie?” The big girl was effusive.

“I will. Ellie doesn’t tell things to me ever.” They clung, whispering, comforted, sharing their trepidations. They returned to their stirring of the Barrier Cherries.

* * * * *

Ellen had made the land to her since she returned, and the creatures and birds spawned upon it. In hot night she would hear hoot owls ululating in the oaks, and sometimes a mocker-bird would hang on the stones of the garden fence, quavering through marbled moonlight. I came through. The fear is past and I’m home. She stood by while Rhodie was yeaning a kid. The doe stamped her little hoofs nervously, pawed the straw and crouched, straining. With a worried blat, she expelled a spotted kid. Ellen was tearing the caul lining to free it in a flood of water. She cleaned the mucus from its gasping mouth, gazed on the odd-looking animal with ears like a hound. “Where’d you find the buck?” she asked Sam.

“Well, I says to myself in March when she commenced to wag her tail, Ellie’d want her caught. So I took her over to a pied billy the other side of Millville.”

“I ne’er saw a skewbald goat, Sam. And those drooping ears.” Penny’s maternal instincts were aroused at the sight and smell of a newborn one; she vied with Rhodie in cleaning it. Rhodie was stretching her head and yawning as animals will do in discomfort. The kid staggered up to nurse the tiny nipples. “I’ll call it Pie,” Ellie decided. “There, Pie.”

In the mornings when she left her goats at the pasture, she took the path around the farm pond. Tiny green frogs were camouflaged in the reeds and grasses, and blacksnakes lived among haw and alder roots along the marshy bank. One would slip into the shadowed water, head crooked like a twig held upright as it moved across the unbroken glass. When the speckled thrush was buzzing and flapping by the path, she ran to find a snake twined around a sapling cottonwood. Its head was in the nest and the mother bird was darting at it, crying shrill. A single fledgling remained, beak gaped for food. Ellen seized a stick, striking the reptile until it twisted dying from the tree. She crushed its head, slit the body with her pocketknife to see if there was life in the swallowed birds. They were limp and she dropped them in an open field while the bird continued the alarm clatter. “You’d as well feed the one you got left if you can find your way to go back to that serpent-smelling nest.”

Afterwards buzzards wheeled. Ellen knew they were scenting the dried rotted nestlings. One huge bird descended and sat hunchbacked on a rail, glassy eyes fixed on her. “Stinking brat.” Jack stalked it until it made grunting low sounds and flapped away.

Only once since that day in late July when she had come home did a sharp edge touch the smooth progression of Ellen’s hours. She awoke in the night to hear Anton speaking to Maria in the hall below. “What’s amiss with your daughter? There’s no young men coming to the door.” Maria whispered to him and they were gone. Ellen lay awake a long time. But in the morning when it came to her mind, she thrust it from her. “It’s not my fault if they don’t come.”

Anton stepped aside on Sunday to speak with Craig Hedrick and his widowed mother about a boar he wanted to buy. On the way home he looked over his shoulder at Ellen. “That Hedrick boy’s got a motorcar.” He was shouting above the cart’s rumble, “And he’s done proud with that farm since his old man was killed. He says, Ellie’s a comely thing.”

She felt all her being grow still, watching the dusty road glide from under the wagon. Craig had been one of the bigger boys in the grammar school, a few years older than she. His father, Moses Hedrick, had had a cleft palate and though the boy had no actual reason for a speech impediment, he would talk in nearly the same tongue-tied manner that had characterized his father. Craig had been good-natured, his dog followed him to school, he was big enough to force the smaller boys from their torturing of turtles and frogs and insects that fell into their hands. But while Ellen’s pity made her kind, her nature had been revolted by the boy’s way of speech, his dirt-ingrained fingernails and pocked face, the sour odor that arose from his unwashed winter clothing. She did not reply to Anton now. The blood rose hot in her face and her pulse beat heavily when he said, “You’re seventeen, Ellie. Where’s all those young men?”

“You’d best take hold.” Maria wagged her head while the wagon jolted. “Lest you be caught an old maid. Get your man while you’re still blooming, for you’ll be a rag soon enough.”

“Young Hedrick’s a Catholic, as well,” said Anton.

Their words rang with finality. She closed her ears to them. Her hands were folded in her lap on last summer’s dress of blue-dotted Swiss. She clenched them tightly. The steel-rimmed wheels turned in rhythm, hate and hate. Wish I was dead like old man Moses Hedrick with a pitchfork tucked between my shoulder blades.

* * * * *

There came, early on a sultry afternoon, the yellow-billed cuckoo’s moan, “Kow, kow, kow.” Ellen lifted her head from her churning, spoke to Frankie going by with a pail of hog slop. “Raincrows. Hear them cry? Reckon it’ll come on a storm?”

“I ain’t scared.” Frankie laughed high. “Teacher Peyton’s coming and I got my lesson ready.”

An hour later the sky began to darkle. Ellen walked down the lane to look toward the pasture. She could see her goats, hoofs upon the gate bars. The cows lay in their usual spot, chewed their cuds, complacent. Almost imperceptibly the air was taking on a greenish cast. A fresh-smelling wind yawed and swept the field of rye grass. Green beyond green under the sky mass, the grass was weaving, bending to it. Over all heaved the blooming sunglow, golden and omnipresent. A rumble was sounding faint, a flash of light flicked in the west. The wind was subsiding, the heat smoldered oppressive and in the gloom of the sky the sun withdrew. Darkness ruled. Sam appeared at the lane head, waving like a tiny distracted spider, his face grimaced. “Afore Gawd, get the cows, Ellie. Could rile up a twister.”

She was running to the field. The dog rounded up the cattle, drove them in at a lope, milk-sacks swinging about their skinny legs so the white fluid spurted. Ellen took Pie in her arms. The others bounded after as she ran to the woodshed. Rhodie snorted and jumped sidewise stiff-legged, her bearded chin tucked in. The girl laughed, “You daft one.” She shut them in the pen. Lightning streaked, a thunderclap crashed upon the ground. “If you were out in a storm, you’d be safe beneath a cedar or a white birch. So Sam says. Beware the ash and the oak for it’s their nature to tempt lightning.” She was wending up the path to the house, searching cloud drifts for a down-sucked tail that could betoken the birth of a tornado. Thunder drummed, light cracked the horizon. The sweeping wind had ridden off the burdening heat.

The topmost branches of the hackberry lurched and swayed and she felt her heart catch. “It’s so fair. So enduring fair a storm be.” Tears drew into her eyes from the gladness. The wind reeled upon her so the flimsy gingham clung flattened along her young hips and the hard nipples of her breasts. She sensed her strength quicken, fathoming for an instant how she, eternal, would through the ages walk the long green soul of man.

Standing there, she heard Frankie’s scream. She turned to the porch steps. “It can’t storm. I got my grammar lesson.” The voice was protesting, “I’m afraid, Pa.”

Anton mocked her, soothing. “Haw, Frankie. Now you ne’er seen a twister.”

“I’m afraid. Afraid.”

The wind shrieked, the loft door slammed. In the kitchen a pot of scented geraniums on the window sill was spun across the floor. The noise crackled. Anton, from the parlor door, was roaring at Ellen and Maria. “Get the windows shut, you oomen. And draw those shades. Open windows are what sucks the bolts.” He was lighting a lamp in the parlor, pulling the shades. He looked at Frankie in the subdued light, drawn up rigid and white in her chair. “Hit’s just an old-timey commotion out there now.”

There came the splintering noise of a falling tree. In the instant Frankie sprang up, shook her fists helplessly, shut her eyes and clenched her teeth. “Everyone’s against me. Hit’s coming to get me.” Under the storm’s tension, her inhibitions mounted to the surface. She was sobbing in her reedy voice, “I’m going to die. Really I hate you, Pa. I hate you. I don’t want to go off to Chicago.” Maria and Ellen had come in. Frankie turned her tear-drenched face to them. “Everything’s Pa’s fault. What’ll I do, Ellie?”

“All I can say,” Ellen told her, “is I’d as lief it would rain and get it o’er. This thunder’s souring all the milk.”

Lightning sizzled, then cracked, a flare skirting the window shades. Behind came the bolt, reverberating through the hollows of the house. The young girl lamented in desperation, her breath spasmodic, “I don’t want to get those lessons. You’re hateful, Pa. You’re fore’er pushing me.” The voice was a pale shriek. “I’m afraid!”

“Here, girl. Hold your sass. Those are baneful words.” Anton’s eyes were slits. “Want I should set you on your knees and whip you? I’ll do it.”

“No.”

He turned to a chair, taking up a journal. “I mind,” he drawled and settled into the low seat, “when there was a storm like this two-three years ago. Twister came flailing through Bethel killing four.”

Ellen stayed by the door. Not for long had she seen him so wrought up. Maria had taken up her sewing, pursed her mouth over it in the lamplit room. Anton was directing his words to his younger child who cried now in abject penitence. The convulsive sound came sadly into the still of the room as the noisy gale tottered and staggered upon the vegetation of the earth.

“Three old Chester brothers were batching with their ninety-year-old ma. Folks say it was because they were terrified of the storm but all three went off their heads and murdered one another. The old lady too.” Anton smoothed his palm over his balding hair. Dry tobacco juice marked the edges of his mouth, his long jaw thrust upward. “The plumber man came to fix the pump next day. Found them lying about in a mess of blood. Old ooman’s throat ripped with a razor. One batch was gored, the other two were filled with shotgun holes.”

Heavy drops slammed on the windowpane and Ellen spoke in timid relief, “There’s the rain, Pa.”

“Still fixing to die, Frankie?” prodded the man.

“Hit was the dread, Pa,” she pleaded and in time was drawn to sit shrived on his knee.

“Now tell, would her pa let harm come to her that’s my pretty poppet?”

The rain was beating strongly, steadily, washing down banks along the road, mingling with dust and traveling through stones and suckling earth until it gained the water pan far below. Over the pond a silver sheet was draping until the water rose over the sides to flood the meadows. The swaggering wind was in full strength. Moisture softened the earth about the roots of a giant basswood that had matured before the father of Jules Gaddy built his lean-to and set up a rail fence for his mules and hogs. A sudden blast slammed into the aged trunk; it fell sluggish, reluctant, upon its side with a wounded noise, gashed roots exposed. Tree branches grappled and fought the gale and were broken, some borne by the wind and slung against the house roof, making staccato sounds.

“When you were just a mite, Frankie, I told you thunder was a potato wagon going across a bridge. Wasn’t any fear in you then.”

“Will Mester Peyton come at all, Pa?”

“Roads are so bad he’ll likely be hindered. Do what I tell you, Frankie, for that’s what’s right.”

The orgasm of the tempest was done. In the clearing sky, white fluffs were drifting in remote wind tides. The man went to survey the destruction left in the wake. His daughters were sent with hatchets and string to gather fallen branches for kindling and to fagot the twigs.

“My sir used to recount,” Anton said, before he walked out, “how in the forests of the old country they were given leave to break off all the boughs to the height a standing man could reach. For firewood. There wasn’t any rotted trash like in this new country. And it was soft as carpeting underfoot.” He took his ax and wedges and went to join Sam, who was bringing the team up the lane, hitched to a whiffletree. Sam was balancing on his shoulder a bucksaw and a two-man crosscut. They headed toward a yellow locust spraddled across the road past the farm entrance.

“Locust does right smart for fence posts, Mester Gaddy.”

“I’m glad that tree came down. I was minded to cut it anyway, Sam.”

By the pond frogs were shrilling, in the field near the orchard a buzzard sat hunched on a stump, the black dampened wings held motionless, outspread to dry, the naked head tucked into the wrinkles of its bare neck. “I ne’er meant what I said,” Frankie was telling Ellen. “For I love my pa and he’s good.”

“You carried on like you were taken with a fit,” admitted Ellen. “Makes me puke to see you that way.”

“Thinking of me always, he is.” Frankie tied a bundle of twigs and threw it to a pile they were making at the field’s edge. “Poor Pa.”

Ellen heaved a rock at the buzzard and watched it soar effortless. “The wind’s flattened that cornfield. There’s a mort of damage been done.”

* * * * *

The leaves had been touched by the first frost and nearly overnight strident colors were emerging on the countryside. Ellen and Frankie were cleaning the musty litter from nest boxes, stuffing in fresh oat straw. “Wonder how come we ne’er tried a doorknob in the nests, Frankie? A porcelain one might coax them to lay. I’ve heard of it.” She harked back to little Clate hanging to her dress hem.

The cows were restless, feeling the new season, the sluggish summer shaken off. On dark mornings Ellen would wear her rough brown sweater, torn in the sleeve, against the chill. The cows heaved themselves to their knees, then to all fours. She put her bare feet in the warmed straw where they had lain. A heifer plopped her hoof in the fresh foam and held it there, stubborn head low, flanks whitened with the splash. The lantern light blinked and Sam was shuffling in. He gazed at the white-spattered wall, belched gently. Ellen caught the whisky scent. “Don’t ill at her, Ellie,” he advised, “or she’ll fore’er mistrust you.”

“Who’s illing?” She carried the pail to the pump to clean it.

He was following, garrulous. “My old-old-old man always said, don’t ill at a creature which does your work,” he nodded, sanctimonious, “and fills your belly.”

“There’s the milking to do, Sam. You’re late. Pa’s waiting on you.”

“Old-old-old’s sort of a byword with us Offuts. When Pa was getting on in years, I sassed him once. He’d started in to say I shouldn’t talk back at my old man. He commenced to say old and he couldn’t stop.” Sam cleared his throat, spit phlegm into the cold bushes. “I told it on him after that. Old-old-old, we Offuts always say.”

Ellen sighed. Sam’s milking would wait on his tongue.

11

The car was puttering up the lane, a trailer hitched behind. It was a day in early October. Ellen drew back from sight, hearing Craig Hedrick’s high-pitched halloa. Anton was coming from the barnyard where, with Sam, he had been forking manure onto the wagon for broadcasting over the fields. Ellen fled along the fence line, down to the pond and the tranquil woods beyond. “I aim to get a mess of shaggy-manes to stew for supper,” she was promising herself. Most of the afternoon she stayed in the woods, finding few of the big mushrooms she hunted although there were some overripe ones. These she kicked to see the sootlike powder billow as they split. Jack ran a rabbit and barked at squirrels and woodchucks. Ellen was leaning idly on a fence rail, looking over the tawny sedge grass of a neighboring field. A red-shouldered hawk circled in flight, uttered its squeal like escaping steam. She mocked him, “Kee-yoo! Get you a passle of crawdads, you old hen-thief.”

She put her chin in her hands. A mass of midges vibrated in the sunshine, minute wings whirring swifter than eye could follow. You take a flower now. When it goes to raise out of its leaves, it stirs everlasting slow, unfolding. It’s a case of time, it would seem, and man’s caught between. How quick we must appear to the trees, and how draggy to the midges.

Back she walked in the late day up the fallow hill field, new-plowed for autumn wheat. “Wish I was an earthclod, nary a care.” She stubbed her shoes against turned furrows.

In the wagon bed that was rumbling in from the field her father swayed, standing spraddle-legged. His face was shadowed with a beard, his sateen shirt was open, baring his chest. The dun horse shook its mane and the mare nickered to its yearling colt trotting in the pasture beside the lane. “Whaw,” Anton was shouting. The chomping of bits and movement of harness on the sweating animals made tinny bright noises. “You’re a great one for roaming, girl. Where you been?”

“I took a notion to gather shaggy-manes for supper, Pa. I hunted but there weren’t any.”

“Hit’s a sight too dry for mushrooms. I could have told you.” He looked down from his vantage on the wagon. The muscles swelled on his freckled forearms and he was holding the reins careless. “You just missed young Hedrick. He came to visit and trade off our old boar for a thoroughbred one I wanted. It’s more than twice the size of the old one.”

“I’ll take a look at it, Pa,” she told him.

“He asked after you. That young man.” He shrugged with satisfaction. “Whup.” The wagon was rolling by her.

She replaced the pole barriers. “There. That hammer-tongue Craig.”

The next afternoon she was gathering herbs and seed pods for drying. It was warm while she worked, for the garish sun heated the withering earth. Craig Hedrick’s Model T was turning into the yard. He came up, throwing himself forward as though there were many miles to go before the end of the day. His sandy hair curled woolly and his small nose turned up, his upper lip protruded slightly, which gave him a hounded expression. “Hey, Ellen.” He stood ungainly as she nodded. He was hitching the belt to his blue serge slacks, adjusting the knot of his purple rayon tie.

“Good-looking hog you traded to Pa, Craig. What do you call those spotty ones?”

“He’s a Poland China,” he said in his tongue-twisted way. “They’re bred for lard. Not what you call a bacon pig.”

She laid aside her seed harvest and came to sit on the porch steps with him. Anton walked out. “Hey, Hedrick.”

His presence eased the younger man. “Bought me a manure spreader, Mester Gaddy. You own one? Chops straw and dung up and sifts it like my old lady straining wheat flour on her bread board.”

“Hum.”

There was a long pause. All three watched the progress of a flicker hammering up one side of the hackberry trunk. Craig was lifting his arms slowly as though he held a gun. He sighted the woodpecker on the red band across the back of its head. “Pow.”

Anton grunted, appreciative. He lit his pipe with a match he struck on his overall pants, drew the smoke into his lungs and exhaled. “There. I allow you got that high-hole.”

Craig was adjusting his position on the step, uncomfortable. “Well.”

Anton asked, “Heard the comical one about the hen that laid the oversized egg?”

“How’s it go?”

“It wasn’t comical to the hen.”

The young people were still, uncommunicative. “Come on, see my Ford, Ellen.” Craig was going in his springy stride to the black two-passenger automobile. He held his gait down to match Ellen’s. She was conscious of the smell of the man, could scarce speak for her contempt. Yet there were the pleading eyes and the wounded way of a beast about him. “You know where I live, Ellen? Just a piece from Tomkin’s Ditch.” He fought with his flaw of speech. There was a rich section, he was confiding, adjoining his, that he hoped to buy and add to his own. He had many plans.

Ellen knew it was because of the way he looked upon her that he was pushing out his chest and leaning awkward against his polished automobile. He was tall in his shining shoes and Sunday wear. Her dress was torn. All the while though, she felt he was the pitiful one. She stood apart from her own body and watched this Ellen Gaddy, her forbearance, her dignity. She was gentle. “I got chores to do now.”

“Well then.” He started the motor, drove hastily off.

In days to follow Craig would stop to talk with her. Ellen, aloof, would listen as he rambled. Her mind would stray on whether Pa would remember to get the sorghum syrup or whether Sam had mended the split butter paddle as he promised.

The fields were being prepared for winter wheat, the horses and plow working over the land. The disking and harrowing were now in progress and the blended figures of man and team moved over the horizon to disappear and return again. Ellen could see them from the potato patch. She was digging in the rows with a fork, and she stuffed the tubers into towsacks. The dust rose; her nostrils were clogged with it. A bluebird, lingering before it flew south, was beading its sad autumn cry, “Far-away, far-away!”

It was then that the days of a summer came upon her and she thought of the man on whom she had laid a curse. She wondered if she could remember his looks and ways, if meeting him she would know him. It’s past and done. He can’t ever hurt me more. Down the row slowly she worked. It’s past. She was testing it. But then it was as if Christian Ay emerged from the shadows and stood by her in the row. She ceased digging, there in the ragged dress, her hair bound by a bit of twine, her feet dirty, black outlining the toenails. The north wind of late October was blowing and the shadow fell across her. It seemed he was broad and strong, he laughed greatly and she loved him in a way that her being ached. She was trembling, water flowing down her face. She stood a while in her surprise, frightened by the issuance from what she had thought a safe memory. Its pain stirred her.

In that night the wind was changing. She heard it, felt its veering. And the whippoorwills came up, calling in the cool caves of morning.

* * * * *

The next day Craig hunted until he found her in the orchard where her goats were grazing on crisp fallen leaves. She was leaning against an apple tree, listless. “Hey, Ellen. Hit’s Indian summer.”

She made no reply. He stood restive before her. A yellow insect hovered whining about his tight-curled hair. “There’s a news-bee, Ellen.” He reached out to catch it and it flew off. “Wonder what it came to tell, Ellen?” The fragrance of the girl’s blown hair as she leaned on the armor of the old tree, brought him yet again to speech, his face on fire. “I’d get two-three nanny goats if you’d a mind for them. You could have honeybees too, and by the doorside I’d set out petunia flowers.”

She turned to him, absent, her face wan, her gray eyes sorrowful. “Think I’d have a poor rake such as you?” After a time she looked up from where she bent her head to see he still was standing there. He wore a bruised look and his underlip sucked in. “I ne’er meant to say that. It’s because I’ve no notion for marrying, Craig. It’s nothing against you.”

“E’er seen my farm, Ellen? Out by Tomkin’s Ditch? You’d only to see hit to change your mind. I was fixing to paint the house, too.”

His dreams left her unmoved. She was watching two winging birds come to settle in a tree. “There’s a pair of doves.”

“I might even build on a porch and put up screening.”

“If one dies, it’s mate’ll mourn till it dies too. E’er find a dove lying dead, no mark on it?”

“I’d set out young shade trees, Ellen, to put a chair under.”

“I came on a dove in the path one time. It ne’er had a sign nor wound on its body and was still warm.”

They returned to the house. Anton was under the hackberry, pulling on his pipe. “Set to dinner along with us, Hedrick.” He was poking the young man with his elbow. “Ellie made a wild-plum pie this morning. She’s one for kitchen chores.”

After their first hunger was spent, Anton was talkative. “A sight of my corn ruined in that summer storm. Might have to buy a load come spring. You lose any crops?”

“I reckon I’ll make out. I’ve got a herd of steers. I’m going to take them to the auctions in Louisville.”

“You fattening steers? Well.” Anton pushed his food with a knife onto the fork he held in his left hand. “I call to mind my sir gave me two matched bull calves when I was a youngen. I set store by them, made them a little yoke and learned them to drag a stone-boat and mind hawp and gee. My sir waited till they were two-year-olds to cut their balls. That was to allow them to get a good crest.”

“What did you name them, Pa?” asked Frankie.

“I mind the off one was Brown. I disremember the near one’s name. I was proud of them for a shirt-tail brat.”

“What happened, Pa?”

“My ma sold them under me. She needed cash for my brother Marc, who was getting his learning. I hunted the barns and meadows, came in squalling someone stole them. What do you mean, your ox-team, Ma says, cash is cash.” Anton pursed his thick lips. “Now, they were so slick you could hunt for a loose hair. I used to file the horns and grease them.”

“Your maw give you a cut on what they sold for, Mester Gaddy?”

“I ne’er seen hit.” He asked Craig, “Have you worked oxen?”

“You couldn’t law them on me. I’m one for mules. Steady, and easy keepers. But to tell you true what I mostly hanker for is a tractor. I aim to get one some day.”

“And where’ll your manure come from then?” Anton gloated.

They were pushing back their chairs. The two men went out on the steps while the women cleared. Frankie was drying plates and laying them upside down, ready for the evening meal. Ellen took the butter and milk jars out to the dry well near the porch. “Go to mass in my auto tomorrow, Ellen?” Craig asked when she passed on the step.

Anton answered, “She’ll go. Be pleasured to.”

Ellen would give them no glance though Craig murmured, “Ellen?” as she was going by up the stairs and into the kitchen. She heard them. “I aim to take a drive later, Mester Gaddy, if it makes no nevermind to you. Ellen’s not seen my farm and my maw’d be proud to meet her.”

“That suits.”

“How’s that seed-boar I traded you?”

“He’s a crapping mean sonofabitch, Hedrick. Set on rutting up his fence all the time.”

“I noticed he liked to do that. Always breaking through. But I wouldn’t say he was mean. That’s hog nature.”

“Maybe so. I call him Luther.”

“That’s a foreign name. Spot would fit him more.”

“After Martin Luther. A crapping bastard Dutchman Brinker worships. Heathen.”

“Say. Bet that’s the first hog e’er to go by that name in this county.”

* * * * *

“Ellie, how come Craig’s pa got killed?” Frankie was asking as they lay in their beds in the muddled dark of their room.

“Oh, it was in hay time. Craig and him were working with a watch-eye hand. Craig and that man were in the loft stacking hay back. His pa was down on the wagon. Well, that watch-eye man was fixing to jump down and pitched his fork ahead of him. It stabbed Moses Hedrick in the back between his shoulders. There he was, holding to the hay frame and the handle sticking out of his back. They said the prongs came out in front. Said he died standing there before he fell down.”

“Oh my, I’d think a one-eye man would guard against such a happenstance.”

“I reckon he couldn’t gauge distances so good.” They lay awhile in silence. Then Ellen was speaking in the dark, “Craig took on the farm then. You can say that for him. And he was still going to the grammar school.”

Ellen wore the blue crushed-satin hat that Garland had brought her last Christmas. In Craig’s Model T, she was heading for the Catholic church. She kept her eyes straight ahead on the little ivory crucifix fastened on the dashboard. Under her feet the carpeting was torn; the car smelled of dust. The young man was voiceless, his tension exhibited in his handling of the machine. His collar was starched; the ill-fitted suit constricted him. “Here it is.”

They were walking in stiffly. When his arm touched her, she moved away. At mass when the bell rang, Ellen knelt by him. But while heads around her bowed in the incensed air, she was staring about. Anton was with Maria and Frankie in a back pew. Pa’s trying to trap me with Craig. She held her head rebellious among the bent ones. What’s all the begging and praying about? I don’t care for this way of loving Him. I’ll get my peace out on the fatness of the earth that is His footstool. And the dew and the smell of the fields.

“Stand up, Ellen,” whispered Craig.

Father Tompert was reading out to the people in the clapboard church the beginning of the gospel of John. Ellen listened, brooding. They can’t make me marry him. “Thanks be to God,” said the priest and the people moved to go.

Craig was driving a mile or two along a cart-rutted road on the other side of Millville, unfamiliar to Ellen. “There’s Tomkin’s Ditch,” he nodded to a joint post office and general store by the deserted roadside. “And here’s that section of land I’m fixing to buy. I aim to rent it the first two years to make the payments.” He halted the car, gazed upon an overgrown field. “Hit’s all virgin. A virgin piece. Ne’er a plowshare been put to it. Corn’ll grow ten feet tall with not a handful of fertilizer.” He moved the hand throttle and the car was lurching forward. He steered down a winding approach to a weather-beaten red house set barren of trees before a barn of the same color. “Let me point out the sights. Then you can meet Maw.”

Ellen left her blue hat on the car seat. She came to where Craig leaned on the lot fence. Steers, deep in muddy manure, idled around troughs of corn. A yellow hound wagged up to her, sniffed her dress. She patted its smooth head; it wriggled, threw itself with a grunt on its side in the rutted road, waving its feet, ingratiating.

“That’s Sooner.”

“Hey, Sooner.” She was stroking it.

“Sooner stay as come.” An elm grew by the fence. Craig cut a twig from it and offered it to Ellen. She shook her head. “Hit’s a slippery elm.” He was picking his teeth with the little stick. “Keeps off throat trouble.”

He hung his coat on the fence, rolling his sleeves, uncovering blond hair that grew long on his arms. He walked with caution around the mire of the lot and climbed into the shed loft. The steers licked at the dry stalks he was forking down; they gazed at Ellen with deep-lidded eyes. Craig shouted, “Nothing to do but eat, hey, Ellen?” He was strutting over to her. “Rather watch them eat than feed my own face. You know?”

“Well.”

He spat out the twig. “I took on a man’s ways when I was yet a stripling. I dragged this farm up from a poor bit, starting the day Paw was killed. It’ll make some folks set up.”

“Your ma take to it out here?”

“Don’t you study on her, Ellen. Maw says the day I bring home a wife to do my cooking she’ll go to live with my sister up Indiana way.”

“Craig,” Ellen warned, “I’m not marrying. I told you. If you will talk so, you can take me home.”

“But I figured on it, Ellen.”

“I’m not beholden to your figuring.” A thrill of fright ran through her, seeing he had raised up tall and pulled in his lip. He was looking upon her as though she were changed. He leaned over, gripping her upper arm, swathed in the winter coat. “I told you no, Craig.”

“I heard a girl was taught to say no to lead her sweetie on hotter. You playing games?” His hand was tightening.

“Craig, Pa’d kill you if he saw how you’re acting.”

“Mester Gaddy’s thirsting to foist you off on me.”

“But I got ne’er a liking for you, Craig. You have to give me time.” If she could but stave him off until she was safe at home. Home was distant and dear.

“Don’t you e’er get hot, Ellen?” He was thrusting his hand within her coat, roughly hunting her breast.

She pulled from him. “Maybe I would if you were good and waited.” She tried to soothe him. “Let’s go meet your ma now.”

He was dragging her to his pock-marred face with an arm that was a band of steel. “You virgin, Ellen?” The scent was there, an odd mingling of moth balls and urine and hair oil. His lips were striving upon hers while she struggled. His hand was pressing her back, holding her against his body that was a rock. She felt the hard prod of him and a streak of flame ran through her, overlaid with disgust. I mustn’t go wild, it’s like with a mean boar, like Luther. You have to deal easy with him. She forced her body to slacken and felt him relax. She drew her mouth stiffly aside. “Give me a chance to breathe.” She smiled, forcing it.

“There, Ellen. You do like me. See?”

She twisted like a snake, darting free. Upon her heels she heard him, his breath an angry roar. The five-tined pitchfork was leaning against the fence bars where he had placed it after throwing hay to the cattle. She grasped it, flailing with the prongs turned backward. It smote him across the face, leaving white streaks. He stumbled, gasping amazed. She swung again.

“Bitch,” he hissed, “I’ll prick you yet.” He grappled for the tool.