The Time of Man Read online

  ‘Hep Bodine’s got a poor trash sort of house,’ she said. She stuck out her tongue at the yellow wall and made three ugly faces at the bare prim lawn. She laughed a long laugh at Hep Bodine, and when she had finished she laughed another long ugly laugh at Hep Bodine’s wife. Then she turned away from their premises, singing a jargon of many phrases that were remembered for the pictures they preserved or the tones they carried.

  Hounds on my track,

  Chicken on my back.

  Oh, Brother Andrew have you got a G fiddle string?

  Oh, Brother Andrew, have you got a G string?’

  She was walking down the upper pasture, bending back and stepping high, her feet cringing at the hot stones but her body setting them down without heed or mercy. She played a short while with one of the colts in the enclosure, making friends with him easily, for she knew the ways of horses. She knew why he kicked up his heels and ran a little way, and she knew what his soft muzzle meant in her hand and what his soft biting lips and his tossing forelock. She kissed his forehead with her forehead, pushing hard. She ran with him down the pasture, screaming and jeering a wild man-animal talk, forgetting her fear of fences which enclosed land. When she remembered and went back to the brush, the colt followed her there. She knew little of the cows that grazed about in the pasture, knew only horses and dogs, the animals of roads.

  A pain lay in her chest, under her breath, tokening something impending. There was something to do, something to happen. She thought that if she only had some bread or an egg she would not go to the cabin at all during the day, for she knew what there was to eat, beans and fat bacon – old bread. If only she had an egg, cool and juicy. You could slip in your hand and take an egg. The creek came out of a steep valley that was grown with bushes and trees, making a ravine which wound back into the hills. She saw into the curves of the ravine and went slowly over the creek sand, thinking: your hand would slip into the straw and there would be the egg. Blackbirds were chiming in the trees at the edge of the tobacco field and the bobolinks of yesterday were still busy over the meadow. Up in the narrow ravine she sat with her feet in the water, as still as stone, waiting for the life which her coming had disturbed to return. Presently a snake came out from under a white rock, making a sigh in a tuft of water grass. It went off down-stream, flowing more quickly than the water. Your hand would glide in over the straw and you would hardly know when it happened, she thought, and then the egg would be running down your throat. She watched the grey water bugs walking in the sandy mud under the still pool. They floated more than they walked and they made faint trails in the slime. Where the water ran over a stone it had a low purring sound like children talking far off, little children saying,

  I found one.

  I found one too.

  Look at mine!

  Her mind lay back among the people she had left two days before; the people made a certainty which spread back of her strange new sensations that were derived from the fields. Scraps of talk, lodged in mind, loomed out now in unprecedented moments.

  ‘Eleven. They’ve got eleven youngones, eleven brats now.’

  ‘What they think they are? White rats? Belgium hares?’

  This was Screw and Connie and their talk. Screw and Connie in a fight Tuesday, talking loud and throwing things. Screw whipped Connie and knocked her down often, and then she would hide her razor in her dress and swear she would kill him when he came back, but, next day, she would be washing his dirty shirt in the creek and singing a song:

  And I fancied I could trace

  Just a tear on her dear face…

  She was thinking about Connie and Screw when she climbed over a water gap and went higher up the creek. A hunger pulled at her inner part in spite of the strawberries and the two green apples, and this hunger she could separate from the pain that lay under her breath, but she did not wish to go back to the cabin and see her father and mother, the one lying leg-weary in the shade, the other sitting listlessly in the door, smoking the pipe. When her father waked they would talk a little:

  ‘Wonder where Jock and Joe is by today?’

  ‘On the road down below Rushfield a piece. I could catch up in three hours or a little more if I was of a mind to.’

  ‘And Eva Stikes as like as not has got on her red head rag and is a-tellen fortunes to the Briartown niggers.’

  ‘And her hoop earbobs on, maybe.’

  ‘And Tessie is a-palaveren, wherever she is. I never see such a vigorous woman to palaver.’

  Her mother and father whipped her for running off to Tessie’s wagon. Now she sat by the water of a pool, stirring the mud with a stick and thinking of Tessie. Tessie was always ready to take notice. ‘Hear that-there redbird!’ she’d say, and she would walk like a street parade when she told about a circus. Her eyes would round big when she would say, ‘Oh, Grannie, what makes your ears so big? To hear you the better, my child.’ She was all for tree-shaded avenues and stone gateposts and people walking down to sundials to tell the time of day, and even for horses they bought and sold every week. ‘I don’t know what you see in that-there old carcass,’ Jock would say, and Tessie would be rubbing the critter’s nose and looking into his eyes. She was married to Jock, Jock West; some said she was only taken-up with him, like Screw and Connie. The cathedral at Nashville, a great church, came into her mind. Once Tessie slipped her away and took her there to see – it was twittering candles and great music running down suddenly into little music and people swaying all together until there was a river running through the church, up and down, and her heart surged in her breast. She and Tessie sat on a back seat watching. Another time they had stood beyond a paling when a white-robed man called in a voice rich with music, ‘Oh, Brother Andrew, have you got a G string?’ Some nights sitting around the fire Tessie was so shiny you could hardly take your eyes off her… Hanging her clothes up on a wire fence to dry, stepping quick, no shoes and stockings on. ‘Tessie is our kind of folks,’ she said.

  She stirred the mud with a forked stick, thinking of Tessie’s voice, hard and tight in a curse, pushing the curse down at all four corners and holding it steady, coming not often – Tessie was full of ways and plans and she did not have to curse much. But sometimes when a wagon stuck in the mud and they could never budge it for a whole day, then she did, and once when Connie said she was sweet on Screw. ‘God Almighty for God’s sake! A damn little I think of Screw. Thick neck! Always a-knocken down. Connie can have Screw. Damn Screw!’

  Ellen went further up the creek, jumping from white stone to white stone, feeling safe in the narrow ravine hidden among the willow bushes. She heard quails calling over in the fields, and farm sounds came into the hollow, a calf or a mule crying out. After a little she knew that the farmer had come back from church; sounds heard less than felt told her this, echoes in the hillside, screen doors slamming in the right-hand bushes and rocks. She found a dead snake still bloody from his wounds and this made her think of the man Screw had killed – blood and the breath gone out. She turned the snake over and over to see it writhe, pity and wonder and cruelty in her mind. Screw had killed a man. Haldeen Stikes said he had killed two, but you never dared speak of it even if you called it one. Her father had whipped her once for asking, ‘Did Screw kill a man?’

  The day clouded over and rain gathered in the sky. Ellen lay on a large rocky shelf, tired from wandering. Her thin flanks sank against the white stone and her stringy legs quivered with their exhaustion. Her closed eyes saw the book out of which Eva Stikes had learned to tell the fortunes, a little green book, rolled at the corners and dirty, smelling of snuff-dip. Eva had sent ten cents for it; it had come from Batavia, Illinois. ‘Gives lucky and unlucky days, interprets dreams, tells fortunes by all methods, cards, palmistry, tea-cup zodialogy,’ was printed on the paper cover. The picture on the back of the fortune book looked very much like Eva herself, for Eva’s mouth sank together where her teeth were gone. Tessie knew all about Eva’s youngones; she had six dead, but four were living.
A high thin voice and a low deep voice took turns in memory:

  ‘Mammy, I want to eat.’

  ‘Well, go to the grub box.’

  ‘There ain’t e’er bite there, I been.’

  ‘Well, ask Joe Stikes to feed you, he’s your daddy.’

  Henry Chesser drove the mower up and down the clover field, cutting the hay for Mr Bodine. Ellen lay on a bed of the cut grass under a cloudy sky and rested her tired muscles, her mind at ease, her body glad for the day of rest before the long jolting of the wagon should begin again. She looked at the clover narrowly, minutely, trying to see it as ants see, as bees. She piled cool clover on her face and felt the smell come and go until sense was drugged and there was no odour left in the blossoms. Henry was singing as he drove the clinking instrument up and down the field, his song coming when the machine ran easily along the clear sweeps of hay and checking itself when the horses turned and the blades must be matched to the uncut corners. She was amused to hear her father singing loud and rolling out long high ‘ohs’ to keep the song a little longer in his mouth.

  As I went up the new-cut road,

  Tired team and a heavy load – oh…

  Cracked my whip and the leader sprung,

  Bid farewell to the wagon tongue – oh…

  She would be telling Tessie about the hay field, perhaps tomorrow, at any rate by the day after. ‘Warm smells a-steamen up and a lark a-singen when he hopped up on a snag tree, and Pappy a-whistlen when the team goes down the field. A hay field is a good singen place now. But a baccer patch, who wants to be a-singen in baccer! I just wish you could ’a’ seen Pappy a-sitten up big on that-there rake and a-whistlen to fair split his sides. I didn’t say e’er a word or let on like I hear. If I’d taken notice he would ’a’ shut right up. I never in life hear Pap sing so hard before.’

  The day went slowly, warmth, idleness, weariness that passed with the turning of the shadows until, when the chimney birds came darting about the cabin ridge, the world lay clearly seen through clear eyes, lay heavy with colour, lying back outstretched upon its own colour and way. The leaves hung still on the locust tree, or they moved a little. The lane ran down to the highroad, clear to see, easy to go. Ellen stood about the stone step, without a care, without a wish, or she walked into the cabin past the cooking fire, ready for something more and passive for the next happening. In the early dusk Mr Bodine and Henry came talking beside the cabin door.

  ‘I’ll give you twenty dollars a month in cash money and the house rent-free to live in and I’ll furnish you-all with your lard and side meat and wheat for flour, all at a cost figure. I’ll keep your horses till you can sell to suit you. They can run on pasture for a spell, till the end of July, nohow. You can have all the wood you-all need to burn. Twenty dollars in cash money.’ Henry was being offered the tenant’s place on the farm.

  ‘You can have a garden patch here by the creek. Time enough to plant some truck, and I’ll give a day off from farm work to let you put it in. That-there gal can keep it hoed and keep the weeds out.’

  Inside the cabin Ellen stood listening while her immediate future was being arranged, little darts of pain shooting out from the inner recesses of abdomen and chest, anger making a fever in her blood.

  ‘I’m not a-goen to stay here. I want to go with Tessie. I’m a-goen where Tessie is.’ She murmured it out of her catching breath, growing bolder as her fear grew. ‘I’m a-goen where Tessie goes. We can’t stay here.’ She caught her mother’s arm to insist. ‘We can’t stay. I have to go.’

  ‘You think you’re the boss of this-here place? The boss of your pappy? I’ll skin you alive if I hear e’er word more outen you.’ There was a dark quarrel and Ellen was shaken and slapped.

  ‘I want to go…’

  ‘I’ll skin the hide offen you…’

  ‘We can’t stay. We have to go. I have to be where Tessie…’

  Nellie leaned over the fire, turning the frying meat, her broken hair hanging in oily strings around her forehead. Ellen wanted to plunge the knife she held in her hand into the bent head, and the recognition of her want tore her mind in two. She began to scream. The cries brought her father, who slapped her with his hands and sent her up the ladder to the loft room above. She had slept there the night before and her old quilt lay on the floor where she had left it.

  In the morning she came down the ladder hungry and whipped, degraded, grateful for any companionship. She cried softly when her mother gave her food, a pone of bread and a piece of bacon, and these she ate sitting in the doorway near her mother, who was smoking tranquilly, words edging their way out from her mouth between the lips and the pipestem from time to time.

  ‘Your pappy went to work soon after sunup… It’ll be right good to settle down for a spell… You’ll like liven here right well after you get used to the ways of the place.’ Ellen knew that she could not stay. She had no thought of staying, no picture of herself as keeping there, in the doorstep, going the paths. But she dared make no answer. She ate her bread, her hunger eager for it, her head turned aside. ‘Your pappy and mammy don’t belong to that-there parcel of road trash, nohow,’ Nellie would say… ‘Your pappy is a farmen man… Don’t you recollect how we was a-moven to Nelson County when he caught up with Jock?… Travellen the road is one o’nary life. You’ll like right well after you get broke to the ways of the place, right well.’

  A day for planting the garden was allowed Henry before the week was over, and he prepared the soil for beans and corn. Ellen stood by, subdued, obeying readily, even watching his hands to anticipate his want. She dropped the corn into the hills, three grains to the place, her mind full of pity for the corn, pity for her father.

  ‘Now get the hoe,’ Henry said.

  She brought the hoe, handing it gently across the corn hill. She waited abjectly for her father’s next wish, her eyes on the clods or on her father’s feet where they sank into the cloddy soil.

  ‘If you water your garden and keep the weeds down you’ll have a right sharp parcel of truck here in no time,’ Henry said. ‘You’ll be right proud of your garden after a spell. Look at that-there toad-frog…’ He had brought some tomato plants down from the farmhouse garden and these he planted beyond the corn, watering their roots with the water Ellen carried from the creek in a large tin pail. ‘When these-here grow a spell you set a stake alongside. Now fetch more water.’ Ellen watched all his processes and obeyed his directions, thinking nothing, feeling nothing but the great out-reaching pity into which she was spread, pity for the water sinking into the dust, pity for the soil that turned unwillingly and sprawled abjectly apart, for Henry’s hands leaping with the hoe, for his voice, ‘Look at that-there old toad-frog…’

  At the end of June Henry had gone to town to buy things for his family, driving his team hitched to the wagon. He came back with some iron cooking utensils, a kitchen table, and a cot bed for Ellen. The farmer had sold him an old wooden bed for himself and Nellie and this now stood in the cabin room opposite the fireplace. Ellen’s bed was placed in the loft room above, a sloping chamber of one window which was closed by a rough wooden shutter during storms but left open at all other times. Ellen went up the ladder to her bedroom on light arms and legs, first a hand up and then a foot, wheeling over and over. The new bed filled her with a pleasurable excitement whenever she thought of it, even in mid-morning when she chopped the wood for the dinner fire, even when she hoed lightly about the cornhills to cut the grass and weeds, but this pleasure but strengthened her pity for the farm and her renewed need to see Tessie and to tell her of the bed. The beans, the tomatoes, and the corn, these were all the vegetables planted. From the woodpile and the garden she could see the rolling lines of the surrounding farms, curve cutting curve, and sometimes she traced the lines in the air with her finger. Pictures of the old life grew sharper in her mind although they appeared less often, and the misty details faded out. For a little while she dreamed of the people of the road when she slept, but after a few weeks she was dream
ing of the tobacco field, herself turning over the green leaves looking for tobacco worms, of the cabin room where the food was cooked over the open fire. She would remember the weary rumbling of the wagon bed, her sore body, tired from driving, from walking to relieve the load on the up-grade. There were the infected sores on her feet, great sores that would never quite heal and were always cut by the road dust, but were now fading. She would see the pageant of them going down the road, one of the Stikes youngones in front driving a lean filly hitched to a buckboard, either Haldeen or Irene it would be. Then the Stikes wagon with Eva driving and Joe Stikes asleep inside and Lige and Esther on the seat beside the mother. Then Screw and Connie, perhaps, or Tessie and Jock in their new wagon. Jock would be on the seat driving with Tessie beside him, her deep eyes burning in sunburnt skin, her quick mouth with little sharp corners. Then Henry’s wagon, a rough old thing mended everywhere, her mother inside on the bedding, herself driving the team, her father out bringing up the horses. Or maybe they would be cooking something beside a little bridge, then she would be by Tessie’s fire hearing Tessie talk about a house. Tessie was always wanting a house, a house with vines up on the chimney, a brick house with a gallery, a stone house with a fountain, a little brown house with white on the windows and doors, a house by a seaside, a house on a street. Tessie was always talking.

  ‘And I would have, if I could, a slated roof, red up there in the sun… steps a-goen down to a grass place where would be a sundial in the other end. Me a-comen down in the morning dew with a flower basket on my arm. Me a-cooken breakfast and a-setten out the pretties… I’d have a room in my house for Ellen…’

  ‘Or I would have’ – this would be another day – ‘a little house on a high bank above a river – let it be the Ohio or maybe the Tennessee – and me a-washen windows in a great hurry because company is a-comen.’ Or another day she would say, ‘I’d have a parlour to sit back in, cool and fine.’ ‘Me a-comen down marble stairs…’ ‘Me a-washen up things after dinner at a white sink like the one in the house where I worked for a spell in Bowling Green.’