Old Crow Part 65

Tenney did not come home until two o'clock. When he drove into the yard he found Tira there, standing on the step. This was a day of clear sunlight, like that of yesterday, and the breeze moved her light rings of hair. Tenney glanced at her once, but, saying nothing, got out and began to unharness. Tira stood waiting. He led the horse into the barn, and when he came out and walked toward the house she was still waiting, a woman without breath even, one might have thought. When he was perhaps three feet from her she spoke, but in a quiet voice:

"Stop! You stan' right there an' I'll tell you. The doctor's been. I 'phoned him. I told him I overlaid the baby."

"Overlaid?" muttered Tenney, in a puzzled way.

Now a little feeling did manifest itself in her voice, as if he must be a fool not to have known these tragedies that come to mothers.

"Overlaid," she repeated, with the slightest tinge of scorn. "That's what women do sometimes, big heavy women! Roll over on the little creatur's an' lay on 'em so 't they can't breathe. I s'pose they can't help it, though. They're tired. I told him I done that. He was sorry for me. I asked him if the crowner'd come, an' I'd have to swear to't, an'

he said no. I was glad o' that, though mebbe it's no worse to swear to anything than 'tis to say it. He was terrible good to me. I told him baby'd got to lay over to Mountain Brook, side o' mother, an' he said he was goin' there an' he'd git one of 'em to dig the little grave. I told him you're all run down, your foot behavin' so, an' you wouldn't be able to do nothin', an' I was 'most afraid o' your givin' out, when I told you. So he's goin' to send the man with the little coffin."

There was no faintest tremor of bitterness or gibing in this. It was the simplest statement of facts. Tenney had stood perfectly still, but now he lifted one hand and looked at it casually, as he had that other time.

He made an uncertain step, as if to pa.s.s her and enter the house, but Tira stretched out her arms. They barred the way.

"No," she said, "you ain't comin' in."

"Ain't comin' in?" repeated Tenney.

He looked up at her, but his glance fell at once to the trembling hand.

"No," said Tira, "you ain't comin' into this house ag'in till he's carried out of it. I've made you up a bed in the lower barn an' I've set you out suthin' to eat there. Day after to-morrer mornin' the doctor's comin' over after me an' baby--or send somebody, if he can't come--an'

he's goin' to see to the minister an' all. He was terrible sorry for me.

An' that night, day after to-morrer night, you can come back into the house; but you can't come before."

She went in and shut the door behind her, and Tenney heard the key turn sharply in the lock. He stood there several minutes, moistening his dry lips and looking down at his hands, and then he, too, turned about and went down to the lower barn, where he found a bed made up and a cold lunch on a little table. But while he ate he wondered, in an absent muse, about the bed. It was the old four-poster he had packed away in the shed chamber. How had she carried the heavy hardwood pieces down, fitted them together and corded them? He was curious enough to lift the tick to find out what she had used for cord. Her new clothes-line; and there was the bed wrench in the corner by the chopping block. It looked as if, having done with it, she had thrown it there in a wild haste to get on with these things that must be done before he came. Even then, with his mind on his hands--not hands, it seemed to him, he could quite bear to touch food with--he wondered if some man had helped her. Had Martin been here again, or was it Raven? But, after all, nothing seemed to matter: only the queer state of his hands. That was the trouble now.

All through the next day he hung about the place, doing the barn work, milking, taking the milk to the house, but stopping there, for Tira met him at the door, took the pails from him, and carried them in without a word. He wondered vaguely whether, having denied him entrance to his own house, she meant to refuse him food also, but presently she appeared with a tray: meat and vegetables carefully arranged and the coffee he depended on. Then she pointed out a wooden box, a little chest that had lived up in the shed chamber, lifted the lid and bade him note the folded garments within: he must change to-morrow, and these were his clean clothes. Occasionally he glanced at her, but he could not see that she looked very different. She was always pale. Early in the morning of the third day she appeared with hot water and a basket filled with what seemed to him at first a queer a.s.sortment of odds and ends.

"Here," she said, "here's your shavin' things. I'll set the little lookin' gla.s.s up ag'inst the beam. Here's your razor. I'll fill the mug.

Now, you shave you. If anybody should happen to see you, they'd say 'twa'n't fittin' for a man to have his baird all over his face, day of his baby's funeral."

The gla.s.s, with its picture of a red and blue house and a cedar tree, she set against a beam, but it escaped her fingers and fell forward and cracked straight across the little house. She picked it up, balanced it against the beam and held it, with a frowning care, until it was secure.

"Sign of a death!" she said, as if to herself, but indifferently.

"There! you shave you now, an' then I'll bring you out your breakfast an' carry in the things."

Tenney shaved before the little mirror with its crack across the house, and, as if she had been watching him, she appeared at the minute of his finis.h.i.+ng. Now she was carrying a breakfast tray, poising it absorbedly, with the intentness of a mind on one thing only. It was a good breakfast, eggs and coffee and bacon, and the thick corn-cake he liked; also, there was his tin lunch box. She pulled out the little table, set the tray on it and brought his chair.

"There!" said she. "Now soon as ever you've finished eatin' you take your luncheon an' your axe an' go over to the long pastur' an' don't you show your head back here till it's time to fetch the cows. You can bring 'em along with you, an' I'll have the pails out on the step so 't you can start right off milkin'. An' when you've got through, you fetch the milk into the house, same as usual."

As she was leaving the barn she turned and the breeze lifted those little rings of her hair and Tenney, looking full at her now, groaned.

It was not, he felt, any of the other things that had happened to them: only there was always breeze enough, even on the stillest day, to stir her hair. Now it seemed to be the only thing in the world with life in it.

"I shall tell 'em," she said clearly, as if she wanted him to understand and remember--and she did not look at him, but across the road and up the slope where the hut stood waiting for her--"the doctor an' all the rest I've got to see, you was so sick over it, you couldn't come."

Then she stepped out of the picture she had made against the smiling day, the dark interior of the barn framing her, and walked, with her free-swinging step, to the house. And Tenney ate his breakfast, took his luncheon box and axe, and started for the woods. But he had not got out of the yard when she called to him. He stopped and she came running; she was no longer pale, and her eyes were rimmed with red. She came up with him.

"Isr'el," she said, "you think o' this. You think of it all day long.

'I'm goin' through it alone,' you says to yourself mebbe, after you've got off there into the woods. 'But I ain't alone. He'll be with me, the Lord Jesus Christ.' An' you remember there's that to think on. An'

there's forgiveness. Isr'el, you lay down your axe. You let me take holt o' your hand."

He could only stare at her, and she took the axe from his hand and laid it at their feet. She took his hand and put it to her cheek. Then she took his other hand and laid that also on her cheek, and murmured a little formlessly, but in a way he sharply remembered as a means of stilling the baby. She lifted her head then, smiling a little, and still holding the hands. But before releasing them she stroked them softly and said, "There! there! Poor souls," she added, "poor souls!" Did she mean the unhappy hands, or all souls of men caught in the network of mysterious life? She picked up his axe and gave it to him as a mother might dismiss a child who was going to a distasteful task. "There!" she said again. "Now, you remember." She turned from him, and Tenney went, head down, to his work.

That afternoon, about three o'clock, Nan was in her garden, busy with the peony bed. She was dressed in cotton crepe the color of the soil, and her cheeks were red, like wild roses, and her ungloved hands also the color of mould. She was delightfully happy getting into the earth and the earth into her, and she looked it. Charlotte, coming on her across the gra.s.s, thought her face was like a bloom the rest of her had somehow made, as the earth was going to make red peonies. That is, I think Charlotte thought something of this sort, though she would not have put it in that way. Only she did have a great sense of Nan's entire harmony with the garden bed and the garden bed with her. Charlotte had other things on her mind, and she spoke without preamble:

"D'you know what's happened over to Tenney's?"

Nan got up from her knees, and her face was no longer the April-May face she had bent above the peonies.

"No," she said. "What is it?"

"I see doctor go by this mornin' in his car," said Charlotte, "carryin'

Tira. In a couple of hours they come back. An' then he went by ag'in, goin' down home. I was on the lookout an' stopped him. I was kind of uneasy. An' he says: 'Yes, Mis' Tenney's baby's dead. She overlaid it,'

he says. 'They feel terribly about it,' he says. 'Tenney run away from the services.'"

Nan stood staring. She was thinking not only about the baby and the Tenneys' feeling terribly--this Charlotte saw--but something farther behind, thinking back, and thinking keenly.

"I didn't say nothin' to n.o.body," Charlotte continued, "but the more I thought on't the more stirred up I got. The baby gone, an' she there all alone! So I run over. I knocked an' knocked, an' not a sound. Then, as I was turnin' away, I got a glimpse inside the kitchen winder, an' if you'll believe me there she set, hat an' all on, an' her hands full o'

daffies. You know them big double daffies always come up in their gra.s.s.

Well!"

Nan threw down her trowel.

"I'll go over," she said. "We'll both go."

"What I come for," Charlotte hesitated, as they crossed the gra.s.s, "was whether I better say anything to anybody."

Nan knew she meant Raven.

"No," she said, "Oh, I don't know! We can't tell till we see."

Nan remembered she had not washed the earth off her hands, and yet, though they were pa.s.sing her door, she could not stop. When they came in sight of the house, there was Tira in the doorway. She had taken off her hat now, and there was no daffies in her hands. She looked so commonplace, if her height and n.o.bility could ever be less august, that Nan felt a sudden drop in her own anxiety. Tira called to them.

"Couldn't you come in a minute? I'd be pleased to have you."

They went up the path, and when they stood at the foot of the steps, confronting her, Nan saw how she had changed. And yet not tragically: she was merely, one would have said, entirely calm, the stillest thing in that pageant of the moving day.

"I'd be pleased," she said, "if you'd walk in."

She looked at Nan, and Charlotte at once turned away, saying, as she went:

"If there's anything--well, I'll be over."

Nan and Tira went in, Nan holding Tira's hand in her earthy one.

"Let's sit here," said Nan, crossing the room to the sofa between the side windows. She was not sure of anything about this talk except that she must keep her hand on Tira. She noticed that the double daffies, a great bunch of them, were lying on the table. Tira was smiling faintly.

She drew a deep breath. It sounded as if she had been holding herself up to something and had suddenly let go.