Prose (9 page)

“But Old Man Blackader only pays big boys four dollars a week,” said Cato, sensibly, “and he wouldn't pay you that much.”

“Well…”

Emerson swore and spat toward the side of the road, and they went on while the moon rose steadily higher and higher.

A humming noise ran along the telephone wires over their heads. They thought it might possibly be caused by all the people talking over them at the same time but it didn't actually sound like voices. The glass conductors that bore the wires shone pale green, and the poles were bleached silver by the moonlight, and from each one came a strange roaring, deeper than the hum of the wires. It sounded like a swarm of bees. They put their ears to the deep black cracks. Cato tried to peer into one and almost thought he could see the mass of black and iridescent bees inside.

“But they'd all be frozen—solid,” Emerson said.

“No they wouldn't. They sleep all winter.”

Emerson wanted to climb a pole. Cato said, “You might get a shock.”

He helped him, however, and boosted up his thin haunches in both hands. But Emerson could just barely touch the lowest spike and wasn't strong enough to pull himself up.

At last they came to where their path turned off the road, and went through a cornfield where the stalks still stood, motionless in the cold. Cato dropped quite a few crumbs to mark the turning. On the cornstalks the long, colorless leaves hung in tatters like streamers of old crepe paper, like the remains of booths that had stood along the midway of a county fair. The stalks were higher than their heads, like trees. Double lines of wire, with glinting barbs, were strung along both sides of the wheel tracks.

Emerson and Cato fought all day almost every day, but rarely at night. Now they were arguing amicably about how cold it was.

“It might snow even,” Cato said.

“No,” said Emerson, “it's too cold to snow.”

“But when it gets awful cold it snows,” said Cato.

“But when it gets real cold, awful cold like this, it can't snow.”

“Why can't it?”

“Because it's too cold. Anyway, there isn't any up there.”

They looked. Yes, except for the large white moon, the sky was as empty as could be.

Cato tried not to drop his crumbs in the dry turf between the wagon tracks, where they would not show. In the ruts he could see them a little, small and grayish. Of course there were no birds. But he couldn't seem to think it through—whether his plan was good for anything or not.

*   *   *

Back home in the yellow farmhouse the stepmother was getting ready for bed. She went to find an extra quilt to put over Lea Leola, Rosina, and Gracie Bell, sleeping in one bed in the next room. She spread it out and tucked it in without disturbing them. Then, in spite of the cold, she stood for a moment looking down uneasily at its pattern of large, branching hexagons, blanched, almost colorless, in the moonlight. That had always been such a pretty quilt! Her mother had made it. What was the name of that pattern? What was it it reminded her of? Out from the forms of a lost childish game, from between the pages of a lost schoolbook, the image fell upon her brain: a snowflake.

*   *   *

“Where is that damned old barn?” Emerson asked, and spat again.

It was a relief to get to it and to see the familiar willow tree and to tug at one side of the dragging barn door with hands that had no feeling left in them. At first it seemed dark inside but soon the moon lit it all quite well. At the left were the disused stalls for the cows and horses, the various machines stood down the middle and at the right, and the hay now hung vaguely overhead on each side. But it was too cold to smell the hay.

Where were Judd's blankets? They couldn't find them anywhere. After looking in all the stalls and on the wooden pegs that held the harness, Emerson dropped down on a pile of hay in front of the harrow, by the door.

Cato said, “Maybe it would be better up in the mow.” He put his bare hands on a rung of the ladder.

Emerson said, “I'm too cold to climb the ladder,” and giggled.

So Cato sat down in the pile of hay on the floor, too, and they started heaping it over their legs and bodies. It felt queer; it had no weight or substance in their hands. It was lighter than feathers and wouldn't seem to settle down over them; it just prickled a little.

Emerson said he was tired and, turning on his side, he swore a few more times, almost cautiously. Cato swore, too, and lay on his back, close to his brother.

The harrow was near his head and its flat, sharp-edged disks gleamed at him coldly. Just beyond it he could make out the hay-rake. Its row of long, curved prongs caught the moonlight too, and from where he lay, almost on a level with them, the prongs made a steely, formal wave that came straight toward him over the floor boards. And around him in darkness and light were all the other machines: the manure-spreader made a huge shadow; the reaper lifted a strong forearm lined with saw teeth, like that of a gigantic grasshopper; and the tedder's sharp little forks were suspended in one of the bright patches, some up, some down, as if it had just that minute stopped a cataleptic kicking.

Up over their heads, between the mows, every crack and hole in the old roof showed, and little flecks, like icy chips of moon, fell on them, on the clutter of implements and on the gray hay. Once in a while one of the shingles would crack, or one of the brittle twigs of the willow tree would snap sharply.

Cato thought with pleasure of the trail of crumbs he had left all the way from the house to here. “And there aren't any birds,” he thought almost gleefully. He and Emerson would start home again as they had the previous times, just before sunrise, and he would see the crumbs leading straight back the way they had come, white and steadfast in the early light.

Then he began to think of his father and Judd, off in town. He pictured his father in a bright, electrically-lit little restaurant, with blue walls, where it was very hot, eating a plate of dark red kidney beans. He had been there once and that was what he had been given to eat. For a while he thought, with disfavor, of his stepmother and stepsisters, and then his thoughts returned to his father; he loved him dearly.

Emerson muttered something about “that old Judd,” and burrowed deeper into the hay. Their teeth were chattering. Cato tried to get his hands between his thighs, to warm them, but the hay got in the way. It felt like hoarfrost. It scratched and then melted against the skin of his numb hands. It gave him the same sensation as when he ate the acid grape jelly his stepmother made each fall and little sticks, little stiff crystal sticks, like ice, would prick and dissolve, also in the dark, against the roof of his mouth.

Through the half-open door the cornstalks in the cornfield stood suspiciously straight and still. What went on among those leaf-hung stalks? Shouldn't they have been cut down, anyway? There stood the corn and there stood, or squatted, the machines. He turned his head to look at them. All that corn should be reaped. The reaper held out its arm stiffly. The hayrack looked like the set coil of a big trap.

It hurt to move his feet. His feet felt just like a horse's hooves, as if he had horseshoes on them. He touched one and yes, it was true, it felt just like a big horseshoe.

The harnesses were hanging on their pegs above him. Their little bits of metal glittered pale blue and yellow like the little tiny stars. If the harnesses should fall down on him he would have to be a horse and it would be so cold out in the field pulling the heavy harrow. The harnesses were heavy, too; he had tried the collars a few times and they were very heavy. It would take two horses; he would have to wake up Emerson, although Emerson was hard to wake when he got to sleep.

The disks of the harrow looked like the side—those shields hung over the side—of a Viking ship. The harrow was a ship that was going to go up to the moon with the shields all clanging on her sides; he must get up into the seat and steer. That queer seat of perforated iron that looked uncomfortable and yet when one got into it, gave one such a feeling of power and ease.…

But how could it be going to the moon when the moon was coming right down on the hill? No, moons; there was a whole row of them. No, those must be the disks of the harrow. No, the moon had split into a sheaf of moons, slipping off each other sideways, off and off and off and off.

He turned to Emerson and called his name, but Emerson only moaned in his sleep. So he fitted his knees into the hollows at the back of his brother's and hugged him tightly around the waist.

At noon the next day their father found them in this position.

The story was in all the newspapers, on the front page of local ones, dwindling as it traveled over the countryside to short paragraphs on middle pages when it got as far as each coast. The farmer grieved wildly for a year; for some reason, one expression he gave to his feelings was to fire Judd.

1948

The Housekeeper

My neighbor, old Mrs. Sennett, adjusted the slide of the stereoscope to her eyes, looked at the card with admiration, and then read out loud to me, slowly, “‘Church in Marselaze, France.'” Then, “Paris.” “Paris,” I decided, must be an addition of her own. She handed the stereoscope over to me. I moved the card a little farther away and examined the church and the small figures of a man and woman in front of it. The woman was dressed in a long skirt, a tiny white shirtwaist, and a dotlike sailor hat, and, though standing at the foot of the church steps, through the stereoscope she and the man appeared to be at least fifty feet from the church.

“That's beautiful,” I said, and handed the machine back to Mrs. Sennett. We had exhausted all the funny cards, like the one that showed a lady kissing the postman while her husband, leaning out of a window, was about to hit the postman on the head. Now we were reduced to things like the church and “King of the Belgians' Conservatory,” in which all the flowers had been painted red by hand.

Outside, the rain continued to run down the screened windows of Mrs. Sennett's little Cape Cod cottage, filling the squares with cross-stitch effects that came and went. The long weeds and grass that composed the front yard dripped against the blurred background of the bay, where the water was almost the color of the grass. Mrs. Sennett's five charges were vigorously playing house in the dining room. (In the wintertime, Mrs. Sennett was housekeeper for a Mr. Curley, in Boston, and during the summers the Curley children boarded with her on the Cape.)

My expression must have changed. “Are those children making too much noise?” Mrs. Sennett demanded, a sort of wave going over her that might mark the beginning of her getting up out of her chair. I shook my head no, and gave her a little push on the shoulder to keep her seated. Mrs. Sennett was almost stone-deaf and had been for a long time, but she could read lips. You could talk to her without making any sound yourself, if you wanted to, and she more than kept up her side of the conversation in a loud, rusty voice that dropped weirdly every now and then into a whisper. She adored talking.

Finally, we had looked at all the pictures and she put the little green trunk containing the stereoscope and the cards back on the under shelf of the table.

“You wouldn't think to look at me that I was of Spanish origin, would you?” she asked.

I assured her with my hands and eyebrows that I wouldn't, expressing, I hoped, a polite amount of doubt, and eagerness to learn if she really were or not.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “My mother was of pure Spanish blood. Do you know what my first name is?”

I shook my head.

“Carmen. That's Spanish. I was named after my mother.”

I said “
Pret
-ty” as hard as I could. Mrs. Sennett was pleased and, looking down modestly, flicked a speck of dust off her large bosom. “Were you born in Spain, Mrs. Sennett?” I asked.

“No, not exactly. My father was on a ship and he brought my mother back to England with him. I was born there. Where were you born?”

I told her in Worcester.

“Isn't that funny? The children's uncle is the boxing commissioner there. Mr. Curley, their father's brother.”

I nodded my knowledge of Mr. Curley.

“But you'd never think to look at me that I'm half Spanish, would you?”

Indeed, to look at Mrs. Sennett made me think more of eighteenth-century England and its literary figures. Her hair must have been sadly thin, because she always wore, indoors and out, either a hat or a sort of turban, and sometimes she wore both. Today the turban was of black silk with a white design here and there. Because of the rainy weather she also wore a white silk handkerchief around her throat; it gave the appearance of a poetically slovenly stock. Mrs. Sennett's face was large and seemed, like the stereoscope cards, to be at two distances at the same time, as if fragments of a mask had been laid over a background face. The fragments were white, while the face around them was darker and the wrinkles looser. The rims of her eyes were dark; she looked very ill.

“They're Catholic, you know,” she told me in her most grating whisper, lest she should offend the ears of the children in the dining room. “I'm not, but their father doesn't mind. He had eleven housekeepers inside two and a half years, after their mother died when Xavier was born, and now I've been with them almost five years. I was the only one who could stand the noise and of course it doesn't bother me any since I can't even hear it. Some Catholics would never trust their children to a Protestant, but their father's a broadminded man. The children worry, though. I get them dressed up and off to Mass every Sunday and they're always tormenting me to come with them. Two Sundays ago, when they came back, Xavier was crying and crying. I kept asking him, ‘What's the matter with you, Savey?,' but I couldn't get anything out of him and finally Theresa said, ‘He's crying because Francis told him you'd have to go to Hell when you died.'”