Donald Henderson Clarke - Lady Ann

Ann stopped at the foot of the hill and picked a handful of choke cherries. Eating them, she went a few rods further to the gate of the Smith pasture. Instead of dropping the bars, she stepped up on the lower bar and swung her left leg over the top one, followed it with her right leg, and slid down into the pasture. The cows all were down at the lower end, near Big Brook. Ann had plenty of time. She moved quickly toward the brook, making quick side steps to avoid cow dung, and keeping an eye open for snakes.

Gold Tooth Billy Bangs, discharged the day before from Eastham County Jail after serving three months for vagrancy and assault, stopped still when he rounded a turn in the road and saw Ann enter the cow pasture. He caught his breath when Ann’s dress, rucked up as she slid off the bar, bared tender white skin. He slipped between the bars, and cautiously followed.

“Dis’ll make me sixt’,” he mumbled, trembling.

Ann arrived at Big Brook and walked down it a few yards until she was sheltered by pine trees which grew thick on both banks. No sun penetrated this cathedral-like solitude, where the only sound was the murmur of flowing water.

She unbuttoned her dress in the back and pulled it over her head. Her balbriggan undervest and cotton drawers followed. Cupping her breasts in her hands, she dipped a toe in the brook.

Gold Tooth Billy stood a dozen feet away, concealed partly by a rock and partly by heavy undergrowth. He watched her as she tested the water again with her toe and then stepped gingerly into it at a point where Nature had formed a pool and carpeted it with sand.

Soon she was in to her waist. Holding her breasts, she sank to her neck. The outline of her body was dimly visible through the clear water. She scooped up water in her hands and washed her face. She swam six breast strokes, when she swallowed some water, and scrambled to her feet coughing.

Billy crept closer to Ann’s clothes, wriggling slowly along on his stomach. He dropped, silent, behind a thick pine not three feet from the cheap garments. There he waited, his right hand clutching a rock.

Ann waded ashore, stepping gingerly to avoid slipping on the smooth rocks near the bank. She stood on a broad stone, which rapidly became wet from the moisture which ran down her legs in tiny streams and dripped from her arms and torso.

Billy rose cautiously to his feet and began the single step that was to take him within arm’s length of the girl. A dry twig snapped under his foot. He said:

“Christ!”

Ann whirled and dodged, with arms raised to protect her head. Billy barely missed hitting her head with the rock, which grazed her right shoulder. His shoe slipped on the wet stone, and he lost his balance. He clutched at Ann, his nails leaving deep scratches on her arm.

She pushed him away with all her young strength. The push added momentum to his falling motion, which had begun with the misstep. He pitched down the bank, his head cracking against a flat rock and snapping beneath him. He lay still.

Ann drew a long, quivering breath. A crow back in the pines cawed. A frog splashed into the pool. A cow bawled. The scratches on her arm were bleeding. An angry bruise was visible on her shoulder. She stared, fascinated, at Billy’s sprawled figure.

Then she sprang into life. She scrambled into her shirt, drawers and dress, unmindful of her damp body or her bruises. She started to run, glancing back over her shoulder. She stopped, hesitated a minute, returned to the inanimate shape and dropped on one knee beside it.

Billy’s body looked pitifully thin. His face was thin. He looked quiet and strangely inadequate lying beside the brook. His eyes, visible through slightly opened lids, were glassy.

Ann remembered her mother in her coffin, and her father in his coffin. Pictures of dead fowl, dead fish, a dead fox, and dead woodchucks went through her mind. This tramp wasn’t breathing. He was dead.

Death in itself had no horrors for Ann. It was a state into which animals you ate, or that human beings, frequently were translated. She herself, with the aid of an ax, had helped a couple of dozen chickens into this condition of permanent inanition. Death also was something that happened to other people, not to her.

She leaned over, absorbed in an unconscious study of this shell from which the motivating force had departed. He was a terrible-looking man. It was lucky for her he was dead.

Unconscious that she was performing an ancient rite, she closed Billy’s eyes, pulled his feet together, and crossed his hands on his chest.

After she had driven the cows home, and Clarence had milked them, she and Clarence ate supper in the kitchen. Rebecca was spending the day and night with her unmarried sister, Helen, and her father. Clarence drank cider which he had brought up from the cellar in a blue crockery pitcher. Ann drank milk with the cold beans and German fried potatoes, apple pie and cheese.

Clarence poured another glass of cider and took a deep drink, wiping his mustache with his fingers and sipping stray drops from the hairs. He still was in his suspenders. Conspicuous on the right strap was the star which revealed him as the town constable. The star was gold and blue enamel, and it shone in the soft light of the kerosene lamps, in brackets in the wall over the table.

Clarence watched Ann as she arose and began to carry the dishes to the iron sink connected by hand pump with a rain-water cistern in the cellar. Drinking water came from a covered well twenty feet out from the door of the kitchen. A ten-inch speckled brook trout was lord of that well. His job was to eat up insects and any other small life which might appear in the water.

Ann poured boiling water from a kettle into the dishpan. Clarence stuffed a pipe with tobacco and lighted it. There was a choking whiff of sulphur from the slow-lighting match and then a pungent odor of tobacco. Clarence sighed, arose, stretched, yawned, and said:

“Gimme a dish towel and I’ll wipe.”

“You go out and set,” Ann said. “These won’t take me a second.”

“I like to help,” Clarence said, a trifle weakly.

Ann smiled.

“Washing and wiping isn’t men’s work, Uncle Clarence,” she said.

She had heard her mother and Rebecca both say that. He put two big brown hands on her shoulders. With her hands still in the dish water, she twisted her neck and looked up at him.

“Anything botherin’ you, little girl?” he asked. “You seemed kind of quiet tonight.”

“I’m all right, Uncle Clarence,” she said.

She raised her face as if she might be expecting a kiss. Clarence petted her cheek, and said:

“If you ever should have any troubles, you tell your Uncle Clarence. Won’t you, Little One?”

She nodded, busy with the dishes. He took a muslin bag of tobacco from the shelf over the sink, filled and lighted a pipe, and stepped into the yard, Tack at his heels.

Next morning before sunrise Ann was brewing coffee and making griddle cakes and frying sausage. She made coffee by putting in one heaping tablespoonful of coffee to each cup of water, with an extra tablespoonful for the pot. Then she broke an egg, shell and all, into the grounds and mixed them up. After the mixture boiled five minutes, it was ready to drink.

She made the griddle cakes of sweet milk, adding baking soda to the flour and beating the mixture with an egg beater instead of a spoon.

“It smells good,” Clarence said, coming in from the sitting room and going to the sink.

He took an agate washbasin from the shelf, set it under the cistern pump, and moved the iron handle up and down.

“But you could have had your beauty sleep,” Clarence said. “I’d just as soon milk before I eat.”

“I like to cook,” Ann said.

Clarence picked up the basin filled with water in one hand, and a towel, a cake of yellow soap, and a comb in the other. Balancing the basin, he stepped into the woodshed, off the kitchen, where he began to splash, puff and blow.