Эллен Глазгоу - Barren Ground

For the first few weeks after her meeting with Jason on the edge of the pines, she had been enveloped in profound peace. Then, gradually, it seemed to her that the farther she moved away from him in reality, the closer he approached to her hidden life. As the days went by, the freedom she had won in his presence wore off like the effects of an anodyne, and the bondage of the nerves and the senses began to tighten again. Never, since she had looked into his face and had told herself that she was indifferent, had she known complete disillusionment. The trouble was, she discovered, that instead of remembering him as she had last seen him, her imagination created images which her reason denied. Not only her pain, but the very memory of pain that had once been, could leave, she found, a physical soreness.

Beyond the fields and the road the sun was sinking lower, and the western sky was stained with the colour of autumn fruits. While she watched the clouds, Dorinda remembered the heart of a pomegranate that she had seen in a window in New York; and immediately she was swept by a longing for the sights and sounds of the city. "There's no use thinking of that now," she said to herself, as she left the brow of the hill and walked down the path through the orchard. "Like so many other things, it is only when you look back on it that you seem to want it. While I was in New York I was longing to be away. There comes Nimrod with the cows, and Fluvanna bringing the milk-pails."

On the back porch her mother was drying apples, for the apple crop had been good, and the cellar was already stored with russets and winesaps.

"We ought to have dried apples enough to last us till next year," Mrs. Oakley remarked, while she wiped the discoloured blade of the knife on her apron. "The whole time I was slicing these apples, I couldn't help thinking how partial your father was to dried fruit, and last fall there were hardly any apples fit to keep." Raising her hand to her eyes, she squinted in the direction from which her daughter had come. "I can't make out who that is running across the corn-field, but whoever it is, he's in a mighty big hurry."

Dorinda followed her gaze. "It's Rufus. He looks as if something were after him."

Mrs. Oakley's face was twisted into what was called her "neuralgic look." "He promised me to mend that churn before night," she said in a dissatisfied tone. "But I haven't laid eyes on him since dinner time. He goes too much in bad company. I haven't got a particle of use for Ike Pryde and those two Kittery boys over by Plumtree."

Dorinda nodded. "I'm glad he is going away. The sooner, the better."

"I reckon he has just recollected the churn." Mrs. Oakley's tone was without conviction, and she added presently, "He certainly does look scared, doesn't he?"

"I wonder what could have frightened him?" As the boy drew nearer, Dorinda saw that he was panting for breath and that his usually florid face was blanched to a leaden pallor. "What on earth has happened, Rufus?" she called sharply.

He waved angrily to her to be silent. His palmetto hat was in his hand, and when he reached the porch, he hurled it through the open door into the hall. Though his breath came in gasps as if he were stifling for air, he picked up a hammer from one of the benches, and without stopping to rest, bent over the broken churn at the side of the step.

"What on earth has happened, Rufus?" Dorinda asked again. She saw that her mother was trembling with apprehension, and the sight exasperated her against Rufus.

"You ought to have let me go away last spring," the boy replied in a truculent tone. He lifted the hammer above his head and, still wheezing from his race, drove a nail crookedly into the bottom of the churn. His hand trembled, and Dorinda noticed that the swinging blow fell unevenly.

"You haven't done anything you oughtn't to, have you, son?" his mother inquired shrilly.

Rufus turned his head and stared at her in moody silence. Though his handsome face wore his usual sulky frown, Dorinda suspected that his resentful manner was a veil that covered an inner disturbance. His dark eyes held a smouldering fire, as if fear were waiting to leap out at a sound, and the hand in which he clutched the hammer had never stopped shaking.

"Don't you let on I wasn't here, no matter who asks you," he said doggedly. "It wasn't my fault anyway. There isn't anybody coming, is there?"

"No, that's Nimrod bringing up the cows," Dorinda rejoined impatiently. "I must put on my overalls."

Whatever happened, the cows must be milked, she reflected as she entered the house. This morning and evening ritual of the farm had become as inexorable as law. Hearts might be broken, men might live or die, but the cows must be milked.

When-she came back from the dairy, Rufus had disappeared, but her mother, who was preparing supper, beckoned her into the kitchen. "I haven't found out yet what's the matter," whispered the old woman. "He won't open his mouth, though I can see that he's terribly upset about something. I'm worried right sick."

"He's probably got into a quarrel with somebody. You know how overbearing he is."

"I reckon I spoiled him." Mrs. Oakley's lip trembled while she poured a little coffee into a cup and then poured it back again into the coffee-pot. "Your father used to tell me I made a difference because he was the youngest. I s'pose I oughtn't to have done it, but it's hard to see how I could have helped it. He was a mighty taking child, was Rufus."

"Where is he now?"

"Up in his room. I've called him to supper. He's loaded his gun again, but he didn't seem to want me to notice, and he's put it back in the corner behind the door."

"Oh, well, try not to worry about it, Ma. Some fool's play most likely. Can I help you get supper? I'll be straight back as soon as I've slipped out of these overalls. There's a lot of work for me afterwards in the dairy."

She ran upstairs to her room, and on the way down, as she passed Rufus's door, she called cheerfully, "Rufus, aren't you coming to supper?"

To her surprise, his door opened immediately, as if he had been hiding behind it, and he came out and followed her meekly downstairs into the kitchen. His excitement had apparently left him, but his healthy colour had not returned and his eyes looked strained and bloodshot. Bad whiskey, she thought, though she said as amiably as she could, "If I were you, I'd go to New York next week even if the job isn't ready."

He looked at her gratefully. "I was just thinking I'd better do that."

His manner was so conciliatory that it made her vaguely uneasy. Jason had been like that, she remembered, in the weeks before he had jilted her, and, unjustly or not, she had come to regard suavity in men with suspicion. It was on the tip of her tongue to ask Rufus if he had got into a scrape; but she decided, as she brought his supper to the table, that it was a situation which she had better ignore. No good had ever come, she reflected with the ripe wisdom of experience, of putting questions to a man. What men wished you to know, and occasionally what they did not wish you to know, they would divulge in their own good time. Her mother, she knew, had spent her life trying to make men over, and what had come of her efforts except more trouble and stiffer material to work on?

When she sat down at the table, she expected her mother to begin her usual interrogation; but the old woman allowed Rufus to finish his supper undisturbed. Even when the last cake was lifted from the gridiron, and Mrs. Oakley dropped into her chair behind the tin coffee-pot, she was still silent. The cords in her throat twitched and strained when she raised a cup to her lips, and after a vain effort to swallow, she pushed her plate away with the food untasted.

"Poor Ma," thought the girl, watching the drawn grey face, where the veins in the temples bulged in knots of pain, "can she never have peace?" A longing seized her to fold the spare frame in her young arms and speak comforting words; but the habit of reserve was like an iron mould from which she could not break away. Nothing but death was strong enough to shatter that inherited restraint and resolve it into tenderness. While words of affection struggled to her lips, all she said was, "You look worn out. Is your neuralgia worse?"