Эллен Глазгоу - Barren Ground

"Nobody knows. It doesn't surprise me to hear that he was."

"And now Jason is dying in one. Is that the result of character or merely accident, I wonder?"

"Of both probably," John Abner rejoined. "I've read of too many decent human beings going on the rocks to believe the fable that virtue alone will get you anywhere, unless it is to the poorhouse instead of the gaol."

"There it must be now," Dorinda exclaimed, pointing to the right of the road. "Do we turn in over that ditch?"

"It seems to be the only way. Hey! Get out of the road there!" shouted John Abner to a skulking black and tan foxhound.

Withdrawn from the road, behind the fallen planks which had once made a fence, the poorhouse sprawled there, in the midst of the life-everlasting, like the sun-bleached skeleton of an animal which buzzards had picked clean of flesh. The walls and roof were covered with whitewash; there was whitewash on the smooth, round stones that bordered the path to the door; and the few starved cedar trees in the yard were whitewashed to the thin foliage at their tops. At one side, a few coarse garments were fluttering from clothes-lines, and several decrepit paupers were spreading wet things on the bushes that grew by the back porch.

Like other relics of an abruptly changing era, the county poor-house possessed both the advantages and the disadvantages of desuetude. The seven aged paupers and the one indigent young mother who now accepted its charity were neglected, it is true, but they were neglected in freedom. Where there was no system there was less room for interference. If the coarse clothes were thin, they were as varied as the tempers or the inclinations of the paupers. Though the fare was mean, the complaints over it were bountiful. It is hard to be a pauper; it is particularly hard to be an aged pauper; but if these nine inmates (including the week-old infant) could have chosen between liberty and fraternity, they would probably have preferred the scant food and the rough clothes to the neat livery of dependence. Dorinda, however, perceived none of the varied blessings attendant upon orderless destitution. All she saw was the ramshackle building and the whitewashed cedars, which reminded her vaguely of missionary stories of the fences of dry bones surrounding the huts of Ethiopian kings. "It looks as bare as the palm of my hand," she said aloud.

The doctor's Ford car was standing in front of the door, with one wheel in a mud-hole and one in a pile of trash; and when they stopped, an old woman, who was hanging the wash to dry on the bushes, put down the wet clothes and came over to meet them. She was so old that her skin was like bark; her mouth was closed as tight as a nut-cracker over her toothless gums; and her small red eyes flickered between eyelids which looked as if they had worn away. As she mumbled at them, she wiped her steaming wet hands on her skirt.

"You ain't got any sweet stuff, is you, honey?" she whined, until the doctor appeared at the door and beckoned them round the corner of the house where the sunshine was falling. As usual he looked brisk, kind, incurably sanguine.

"There is no longer any question. These county poorhouses must go," he said, as they followed the beaten track which wound by the side of the building. "It costs the county not a cent under two thousand dollars a year to keep this place open for these eight inmates. It would be cheaper in the end to board them at the City Home where there is some system about the way things are managed." Then he lowered his voice, which had been high and peremptory, as if he wished to be overheard. "We brought Doctor Greylock here because he couldn't be left alone, and none of the negroes would go near him. There's a scare about him, though he's perfectly harmless. A little out of his dead now and then, but too weak to hurt anybody even if he tried."

"Is he delirious now?"

"No, he's in his senses this morning, and quiet-you'll find him as quiet as you could wish. Is there anybody to look after him at Five Oaks?"

"We're not taking him to Five Oaks. There's no place for him there. But I've got a nurse for him, Aunt Mirandy Moody. She knows how to take care of the sick, and I believe the can manage him."

"Oh, anybody can manage him now," Doctor Stout said reassuringly.

A tremor of weakness passed over Dorinda. She felt that her knees and elbows were shaking, and there was a meaningless noise in her ears. Was it Jason of whom they were speaking? No, it was not Jason, for it seemed to her that Jason had died long ago, so long ago that she couldn't remember him. She was standing by the wall of the poorhouse, and an obscure pauper, somebody who could be "easily managed," was dying within. She dropped her eyelids to shut out the brown cloud, as thick as the smoke of burning leaves, which rolled up from the meadows. When she opened her eyes again the sunshine on the whitewashed wall dazzled her. If only she had known! If only she could have looked ahead to this moment! Those summer evenings thirty years ago, and this autumn day beside the wall of the poorhouse! The whitewashed cedars, the sunken road, the flat fields, the ridged earth where labourers moved slowly, and over all the glittering dust of life-everlasting.

"He ought to drink as much milk as he can," Doctor Stout was saying in his professional voice. "And eggs when he will take them. Every two hours he should have nourishment in some form, and an eggnog with whiskey three or four times a day. You can't expect him to do without whiskey. I've got a bottle for you to take back with you. He may need some on the way if he seems to be losing strength."

She nodded. "I learned a little when I was a girl in a doctor's office in New York; but everything has changed since the war. You'll come over to-morrow?"

"I'll drop in whenever I am called that way. If he gets much worse, you can telephone me. I feel that he has a professional claim on me."

The weakness had gone now. She felt courageous and full of vitality, as if the rich blood had surged up through her veins. With the return of strength, her self-reliance, her calm efficiency, revived. She was facing the present now, not the past, and she faced it imperiously.

"You think he is able to be moved?" she asked.

"Even if it is a risk,"-he met her gaze candidly, — "wouldn't anything be better than to die in this place?"

She acquiesced by a gesture. Then, threading her way between the stunted rose-bushes, she spoke in a smothered voice, "Is he ready to go with us?"

"He is waiting on the back porch. It's sunny there."

"The car is open, you know, but John Abner is putting up the top."

"Fresh air won't hurt him. You've plenty of rugs, I suppose, and he'll need pillows."

"I've thought of that. You can fix the back seat like a bed. Of course we shall drive very slowly." Glancing up at the sun, she concluded in her capable manner: "It's time we were starting. John Abner and I both have work to do on the farm."

Doctor Stout bent an admiring gaze on her, and she knew from his look that he was thinking, "Sensible woman. No damned mushiness about her." Aloud, he said, "He is ready to go. You'll find that he doesn't say much. When a man has touched the bottom of things, there isn't much talk left in him. But I think he'll be glad to get away."

"Well, I'll see what I can do." Stepping in front of him, she turned the sharp angle of the wall and saw Jason lying on a shuck mattress in the sunshine. Beneath his head there was a pile of cotton bags stuffed with feathers and tied at the ends. Several patchwork quilts were spread over him, and one of the old women was covering his feet as Dorinda approached. His eyes were closed, and if he heard her footsteps on the ground, he made no sign. A chain of shadows cast by the drying clothes on the line fell over him, and these intangible fetters seemed to her the only bond linking him to existence. While she looked down on him, all connection between him and the man she had once loved was severed as completely as the chain of shadows when the wind moved the clothes-line.