Chapter 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.

She tore it loose, driving at him strongly. He was staggering backward, tripping in a road rut, falling. He threw up a protecting arm, blood oozing from a tine-mark on his forehead. Mud covered his Sunday vest and pants and striped shirt. She turned, speeding across the stubble field toward woods beyond. The hound, Sooner, was pattering alongside. She clawed her way through underbrush, aware after a time of a hurt in her throat where the breath was sobbing. She looked about. The hound had disappeared. She took the direction that seemed true, cutting across country, skirting the few houses. She climbed a rail fence and her dress caught, ripping. She shook her head, “I’ll have to mend that.”

The afternoon was wearing on. A chill breeze was born. A faintness enveloped her. She startled when a twig cracked. She stopped to consider, speaking into the stillness. “It’s the fright makes me light-headed. I must have got my bearings turned. I should have come on the pike by now.” She was going at a slower gait; she remembered, “Now my hat’s in his car.”

She was following a stony path bordered by thimbleberry bushes. It led onto the Millville Road which she recognized at once. A mud hen ran stammering before her, “Butbutbutbutbut!” It vanished in a field. The rail-birds were seldom seen; Sam Offut claimed that in winter they changed into frogs and hid in the marshes until spring. Ellen walked swiftly, head down, as automobiles and later a buggy came from behind and passed. Then she was at the house steps and slowing her pace.

Anton was in the kitchen with Frankie who sprang from a chair. “Hey, Ellie. Is your beau with you?”

“I’ve got no beau,” Ellen said stonily. She stood a moment plucking beggar’s-lice from her coat while her fingers shook. She turned to her father. “That was a whoreman you set on me, Pa.” She began to weep freely as anger overcame her.

“You greening me? Speak up.”

“You were bound and determined to sic that Hedrick on me, weren’t you?” Ellen whimpered.

“Speak up,” shouted Anton.

“He wanted to show me his farm. Then he came after me. I said let’s go meet your ma, but he wouldn’t.”

“Tell what he did,” Anton threatened, fear glowing in the gray pupils of his eyes.

“I grabbed a dung-fork and hit him. Then I ran.”

“You seem to be safe enough, girl. The Lord God takes care of you.”

Anger caught her up again. “It’s not that. With you it’s always root hog or die for me, and you know it.” The words fell biting as her tears washed. “It’s not because of God’s help I be home again.” She was running to her room.

Later she appeared, pale and sullen, to do her chores and help with supper. When Anton came to the kitchen, she whispered, cold, “I ne’er meant those words, Pa. I was unsettled, I reckon, by all that walking.”

“Were you out walking then, Ellie?” asked Maria. “I thought you were with that young man.”

“I don’t take trifling from a youngen,” said Anton, contemptuous. “Got worries enough hanging from my neck without you laying more on.”

“I ask you to overlook it.” She strove against the alienation.

“Root hog or die, such talk after all that’s done for you. And taking God’s name. Whoso curses his father, it’s said, his lamp shall be put out.”

“I ne’er cursed,” she breathed.

“I saw you holding your head haughty in church this morning at the canon of the mass when all good souls were waiting on God. Now bend your head proper, girl. And don’t disgrace me. Mind.”

Before they blew the candles in the bedroom that evening, the sisters were sitting in their shifts on the beds. Ellen looked out the window where the curved horn of the waning moon bobbed in scuds, and the wind coursed high upon it. “It’s wild out there tonight. The Indian summer’s on the decline.”

“Ellie, what did Craig do to you?”

“Nothing.”

“I’d ne’er let a man touch me. I’d hide like Ma in the wardrobe closet first.”

“I’ll see that come the time.”

“Well tell, did he kiss you?”

“No.”

“Tell about girls, Ellie. Why are there girls and then men?”

“Go to sleep. Why can’t you let it be? You’re always going on.”

“I want to know if a man’s secrets are more like a ram or a stallion. Wish I knew.”

“You say more and I’m going to tell Pa you’re asking such stuff. He’ll whip those notions from you all at once.”

Frankie lay restless, drawing the quilts up to her chin. She sighed. The candles by the bedside flickered, and upon the slanted roof beams shadows were wavering like wings of pinned moths.

Ellen slept. She was dreaming of Christian Ay. And in the dream he had knowledge of her. It seemed this time she was willing. She came awake wondering at the vividness, sheltering its guilt. Maybe it all befell in another world as Miss Gentry the school teacher had claimed. Once Ellen had related a childish nightmare to her and she had replied, “Some say the soul is freed while you’re asleep, Ellen. And that’s when evil’s got its chance. And there’s some can prophesy from a dream. Now others go against those old ways, holding modern notions such as dreams showing up your real wishes, and you having a hidden mind with its own thoughts. I don’t hold by any of that. I maintain those fancy notions are much the same as prophesying.”

It was another strangeness to dwell on. Then she recalled the child she had borne in the Dougherty orchard. She put the memory away with distaste, separating its being from the love she had held for Christian Ay as if there were no connection. She closed her eyes again, weary from the long day.

The spotted boar that Anton had obtained from Craig Hedrick rooted up his fence in the night, wandering into the lot where the cows were penned for the winter months. He weighed over half a ton, had an untrusty temper, an insatiable appetite. Anton and Sam would view him in his pen when he fed. “Haw. Luther. Old bastard stinks, doesn’t he, Sam? Luther.”

“He’s ugly, Mester Gaddy. I want to see the pigs he sires to fatten for market. Say.”

The brute’s jowls below his dish face were touching the ground. His ears flapped over tiny vacant eyes. His back was arched high and powerful, his larded sides shook when he trod on his small cleft hoofs. His screw tail was twitching with excitement. He roamed, investigating the new territory, growling. He nibbled at the corn he rooted from cow droppings, at hay fallen under the racks. But he was seeking a tastier morsel. The heavy milker, Maisie, had been due to drop a calf, the men examining her judiciously every evening for signs because Anton wanted to raise it. Now she was down in straw at the corner of the shed, groaning, pushing forth a heifer calf. As Luther rounded the shed side he smelled it, half born. He fed his hunger, ripping at the moist caul-swathed fetus, his eyes glittering.

In the morning Anton had to shoot his mutilated cow. The men strung it up to skin it and dress out what meat could be salvaged. Anton was scooping the foul-smelling entrails into a washtub. “When we finish trimming this carcass, before God, Sam, we’re going to drive locust posts four feet deep. Build that murdering bastard a barricade that’ll hold him.”