Between the Flowers: A Novel Read online

  Dorie gave a short impatient sigh. "Lord, Lord don't be so cautious like."

  "If I hadn't a been cautious I'd a been dead long ago.Your children all well?" he asked, sick of the wearisome conversation.

  "Well as they'll ever be, I reckin," she answered shortly.

  "Poke Easy, I guess, he'll about make up his mind this summer to farm when he gets through college?" he asked with an eagerness like a hunger in his eyes.

  Dorie looked suddenly old with all the fight gone out of her face. "Aye, they'll all go like Sam. Maybe never so far in th' wrong direction. Poke Easy he'll end up with Joe in Chicago. Joe's makin' money an' gettin' himself a namecriminal law's big money they say."

  "But Katyshe's one that'll never live in any city."

  "She'll never die without seein' th' world." She gestured impatiently with her cigarette and turned on Marsh her hard angry eyes, "Who that's young an' strong an' smart like mine wants to spend their days on a river bottom farm by a dyin' lumber town? Burdine's dead. They've got th' coal an' th' oil an' timber out a these hills, th' money's gone, them that got it went away, th' land's washed out, an' what's to hold th' children?"

  "There's good farms like yours by th' rivers," Marsh said, and added without looking at her, "It would be th' best kind a farm in th' worlda river bottom farm like yoursor that old Weaver place. How're its renters makin' out?"

  "Takin' all they can take," she said, but the anger was gone from her face and her eyes were gentle with memories. "Sam he used to

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  love that farm, an' talk th' way you do. 'All kinds of land we've got right here,' he'd say, an' then he'd go on.Aye, Lord, it's a one-sided world. When I think a them, first Sam an' then Emma. Ethel an' Joe an' Rachel didn't matter so, or else I didn't mind by then, but Sam he could ha' done so much. Th' land could have a few, Marsh. It needs good heads more'n strong backsbut they all go away to live they."

  The gate clicked, and clicked again in closing. Steps sounded over the stones by it, then died as they came to the carpet of cedar needles. Dorie hastily handed her cigarette to Marsh, and began chewing a sprig of mint she had brought. In a moment Delph's blue linen dress showed between the cedar trees. She stopped uncertainly on seeing Marsh, but came on when Dorie called heartily, "Come on over, Delph. I've been wantin' to have a word with you anyhow. This is Marshall Gregorydon't mind him. He's like one a my family."

  Delph smiled at Marsh, a polite good-child's smile, and said, "How-do-you-do, Mr. Gregory. I saw you in church," she went on hesitantly, "an' I wanted to thank you for bringin' my magazinebut I couldn't. II wondered if you had anything to eat."

  "Mrs. Crouch took care of him," Dorie answered in his place. "Come on an' make yourself at home."

  When Delph had taken a seat on one side of Dorie and Marsh had resumed his place on the other, Delph asked the question with which most greeted Dorie Dodson Fairchild, "Your children all gettin' along fine, I guess?"

  And when Dorie only nodded and showed no inclination to speak of her children, she tried another timid, eager question. "How is Sam? II've read of him in th' papers a long time ago, an' I've wellwondered lots a time how it would be to do what he's done, be so smart an' win scholarships an' such." She seemed not to notice Dorie's moody silence, but hugged her knees and smiled at the cedar needles with bright dreaming eyes. "Oh, it must be fine to go away like that an' learn so many thingsan' then to have a job by New York City."

  Dorie grunted, "Well, from all I hear there's nothin' to keep you from finishin' high school an' then goin' on to college an' workin' away like mine."

  Delph lifted her head and studied Dorie. "I wonder if I'm smart

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  enoughor if I could learn all th' things that others learn in college. I'dI'd give my heart to try. But ifif."

  "Now what's th' matter?" Dorie wanted to know when Delph had sat a time looking at the ground with troubled eyes.

  Delph sat suddenly erect with lifted chin. "Nothin's th' matter. Not a thing," she answered and clasped her hands tightly in her lap, but while her mouth smiled her eyes begged something of Dorie. "II've been wantin' all summer to talk to youa little about, well, about speakin' to Uncle John." She drew a sharp hard breath. "I'm still not certain he'll let me go, just to Town to take my last year of high school. Th' little one on th' other side of th' post office gives only three. Uncle John respects you so. 'Dorie Dodson holds by th' old ways,' he always says.An' your children they went awayto college evenan' II can't live all my days in this back hill country wonderin'."

  She stopped, and sat flushed and angry eyed staring at the toe of her shoe. "There's no harm in your goin' away to school that I can see," Dorie said after a moment's silence, but her voice was doubtful and uncertain as she added, "But I never mix in family matters."

  Delph's tightly clasped hands slowly loosened as her fingers relaxed their hard hold, and Marsh looking at the hands, brown and strong and slender like the rest of her, found them lax with a look of emptiness and of despair strange in things so young. He glanced up and met her eyes, and in their smoldering hunger he saw himself, straining always for the things he never had. Delph flushed and looked away, and he felt a curious sense of shame as if he had seen more of her than she would have any one see. "You two talk, I'll be gettin' on," he said, and got up, but stood hesitant with no wish to go away.

  Dorie looked longingly at the half smoked cigarette, and then glanced appraisingly at Delph. "Mr. Gregory here," she said after a time, "has been askin' me about th' early generations of your family, but I couldn't tell him anything. You ought to tell him about Ole Azariah. Your father thought more a him than all his other bloodkin.I'm sorry I can't stay. I want to see th' dates on ole Peter Chrismann's grave, an' look in on th' Dodson dead," and Dorie got up and walked away into a deeper tangle of cedar trees.

  Delph looked somewhat startled at being left alone with a strange oil man, such a wild one at that, for though she had scarcely seen him

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  until now and had never heard his name, she, no different from the rest of the Little South Fork Country, knew him as the man who batched alone because no one in the country would have a nitroglycerin outfit near, had heard of him who could swear as men in the old days swore, only wilder with black heathen oaths. She was surprised and half disappointed when he touched a red dahlia on old Azariah's mound of stones and said, "Somebody in your family has a hand for growin' things."

  She smiled but would take little credit for the flowers. She and Juber raised them together; sometimes he hoed them and sometimes she, but they both liked flowers, especially the big bright ones. "I thought," she said as she came and stood with him by the grave, "that most of th' old Costello dead, especially Azariah therethat's just a marker for him, we don't know where he iswould like bright things like old maids an' dahlias better than pale puny ones like baby's breath or snow-on-th'-mountain.

  "Azariah was th' first of us all," she went on to explain when Marsh showed the interest that Dorie said he had. "He never lived here long. He was never one for stayin' in one spot like a knot on a log. He never even stayed to finish th' Revolutionhe left that to his boyshe came sometime in th' late seventies, about a hundred an' fifty years ago, an'"she lifted her skirt slightly, and the next instant stood on top of the mound of stones. "You come up, too," she invited, "an' I can show you as I tell.''

  Marsh stood with her on the mound of stones among the wilting flowers, and looked where she pointed and saw a spot he had often noticed while driving over the country; a high, flat-topped knob of stone, higher than the surrounding hills, that stood like a sentinel at the head of the valley. He knew its name, "The Pilot's Rock," but he had never climbed it. Delph told him of its height, of how one could stand on its top, and see into both Virginia and Tennessee. Old Azariah had stood on the rock and looked down into the Little South Fork Country, and liking it, he had gone back to North Carolina for his wife and sonsgrown men they had been for Azariah was then past middle age.


  They had settled in different valleys, with Azariah taking up the whole of the Little South Fork Countrya land grant given him for service against the Indians. But he had stayed only a dozen years at

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  most, and then gone west into new wild country, leaving his wife and children with directions to care for his land and hogs and mules. They never heard from him again, and when Janethat was his wifedied she asked her sons to make this grave for him; a proper grave for a man dead in Indian country.

  Marsh listened to Delph's eager talk of the man dead all these years, and gradually the dead came alive and he could see him as Delph said, "taller than Uncle John, quieter, too, I guess, an' his eyes blue as corn flowers, strange far seein' eyes he had like all great hunters in th' old days, an' his hair was black as a coal, an' long down to his shoulders," and she talked on of what a man he was, never afraid, and always hunting in new strange country, not a bit like John.

  "He was like you, I guess," Marsh said, and Delph flushed, and for the first time seemed to see him instead of Azariah.

  "My eyes are not so blue," she said, and added with a smile, "but I'm plenty brown enough to be a long hunter." She sighed, but with little trouble in her sigh.

  "Aunt Fronie fusses sometimes, but it's more fun workin' out with flowers an' such, or even helpin' in th' hay when Uncle John's not around than working' in th' house."

  Marsh broke a spray of blue berried cedar and looked at it. He wished he could make her see him, understand that even strange oil men were men, more alive than her dead of a hundred and fifty years ago. Or maybe men like himself who had worked by days wages and known what it was to be bound and bossed and shaped and afraidseemed mere shadows of men to her who was so alive. Strong she was, and almost as tall as he, and all as nature made her with never a smudge of paint, a store-bought curl, or bob, blood and bone of the old free dead, tinged with earth and sweat and rocks and sun and wind, a faint sprinkling of freckles to add interest to her nose, her hands brown, not pinky-white play things, but a woman's hands.

  Then she was whirling away and springing from the grave like a startled deer when a woman's voice came calling through the cedar trees, "Delph-i-i-ne."

  "It's time for th' afternoon services," she explained, and hastily smoothed her dress, and patted her hair.

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  He, too, jumped to the ground and stood a moment and begged her with his eyes not to go away so soon, and maybe she read his eyes for she stopped and studied him and said, "I don't guess a man like youone that's been around a lotwould think much of comin' to church here, but early in September th' revival will begin, an' you must come sometime."

  "I will," he said and when he had followed her a step or so through the cedar trees, touched her braids and said, "You can't go singin' in th' choir like that with cedar needles on your hair."

  "Where?" she asked, and he said, "There," and flicked a bit of cedar from her hair.

  "Thanks," she said, and was gone, running away across the graves.

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  3

  The first week of September came. Marsh as he hauled nitroglycerin to the wells in the high back hills found signs of fall in the blood red leaves of black gum bush, and a few slender fingers of flowering goldenrod. The hazelnuts were ripening, and he would sometimes hear the falling thud of a worm-bitten hickory nut.

  He would listen intently, and then drive on; his thoughts not on the nut that fell but of the winter that seemed gathered in the sound. And as always there was the wonder of where he would be. His work by the Little South Fork Country was mostly done. There were days when he did not have to touch the nitroglycerin, and though he hated the loss from his wages, he now looked forward to such times. Once, free days had meant only that for a little while he could be free of the long fear and the long wonder that had like slowly revolving screws twisted deeper year by year into all his conscious thought. But now they were given an added brightness; if he managed just right he could maybe see Delph.

  On the mornings of such days he fed his horses first as always, but different from other times he remained a while and watched them eat. Sometimes he quarreled a bit with Jude. He was certain that Jude had not forgotten the big barn and the river valley farm on the Cumberland that had been his home until last spring. Jude was always, especially in the mornings, a bit remorseful, a bit disdainful of his pole and pine bough stable with living pine trunks for its corners.

  ''I'll sell you in th' late fall," Marsh said one morning when there was no work to do. "You're not th' oil fields kind anyhow. Luke

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  there he'd soon spend his days haulin' nitroglycerin as plowin' corn, but you, you fool, you're different," and he talked on so for a moment, softly, leaning against the poles, looking sometimes at the horses, now and then glancing away at the rising sun that hung like a red enameled pie pan against a gold and purple wall of early morning cloud. The big horses ate quietly of the oats he had given them, lifting their heads at times to glance at him. And in the red sunrise light their eyes, he thought, were kinder, more filled with understanding than at other times.

  When he had cooked and eaten his breakfast which, no matter what time and care he gave to its preparation, never seemed either better or worse, he returned and curried his horses, slowly and with particular pains as if he might that day take them to a fair. It was some little time before the horses were finished to his liking, and even then he must stand a time and study his work and try once more to subdue an especially unruly patch of hair on Jude's left hock.

  It was Jude, the unruly, scornful one, that he always rode, for he, unlike Luke, could not be led to graze in the woods. In the last two or three weeks the horses had grown more or less accustomed to his far flung search for a grazing ground when there were grass filled open pine woods within a stone's throw of the cabin. Today they followed much the same route they had followed on other days, keeping clear of roads, fording the creek, and wandering with apparent aimlessness until they came to a stretch of burned over ridge side where the purple blossoming beggar lice and a variety of wild yellow-flowered sweet clover grew lush and thick. He hobbled Jude and left Luke free, and Jude as always showed signs of surliness at the ways of a world that hobbled its leaders.

  He left the horses to graze and went to sit by the roots of a thick black oak tree, a distance down the hill side. He drew a government bulletin from his pocket, smiled in a sheepish sort of way at the title and began to read. His reading, however, went slowly. Sometimes he paused to look at his horses, but most often he would turn about and look toward the faint trace of an old ridge road that twisted between the pines on the ridge top.

  The morning lengthened, the dew dried, and in the heat the pine smell came strong and sharp, but still the road lay empty. He heard

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  the slow ringing of Big Cane Brake church bell, calling all people to the morning service of the revival meeting. He continued to listen until the last faint hum of echo died. He sat a time longer, then put the bulletin on clover in his pocket and started slowly toward his team.

  He stopped abruptly as he heard the faint sound of a horse's hooves beating over the sand on some stretch of the road he could not see. He hurried up the hill, and waited with his back against a tree. He soon saw Delph on Tilly, the big-footed gray mare John gave her to ride. She rode lightly, no bridle in her hand, for her hands were occupied with other things; a bunch of red and yellow dahlias in one, her hat in the other, and tucked under one arm was a good sized leather bound Bible, its gold edges flashing in the sun, while something that looked to be a bundle of clothing bounced at the back of the saddle. She saw him, waved her hat, smoothed her wildly blowing dress down over her knees, and came on at a more dignified pace.

  "I was beginnin' to think you'd gone with th' others down th' main road today," he said when she came up to him.

  She stopped Tilly, and smiled her quick bright smile, and gave no sign she knew the oil man lied
. "I see your horses have run away again," she said. "An'you had to follow all th' way over here. Pshaw, I wouldn't have such horses."