Pearl Buck - Time Is Noon

Behind her Mr. Blum stood, short and fat and dark, trying not to be facetious. “Sure, we’ll do it all, folks,” he said loudly. “That’s our business, you know. I always say it may be a dead business, but—” He stopped and coughed, remembering he was in the presence of the bereaved. “Sure—” he ended weakly.

So they were together again in the sitting room. They had nowhere else to go except in this one room that had been kept for them. The house was not theirs. Even in the study there were women’s coats and hats piled on the table. Hannah was crying and hurrying in the kitchen to make coffee for everybody. Past the open door went wreaths and flower pieces. There was the sudden shadow of a great black box. “Easy there, boys,” Mr. Blum’s voice roared, “careful of the corners!” Francis, standing by the window, turned away from them, biting his nails, and leaped and banged the door behind him and ran though the kitchen into the backyard and down the south street.

Rose sat by the desk. The little diary was open before her. She began to write in it again, weeping silently, writing down the story of her mother’s death. She blotted it carefully and turned to Joan. “I wish you could have seen the smile at the end—” In the leather chair the father sat in his plum-colored sateen quilted robe. The sunshine of midafternoon shone searing across his face, withering it, making him white and old …

Joan sat on a stool before the wood fire Hannah had lit and stared into it. She spread out her hands to the blaze, for she was cold. Upstairs they were tending the body she had tended all these days. But all the tending had not been enough. She was tired to the heart and it was not enough. Death had not stayed for all her fighting. They were washing the flesh. Strangers were there at the end.

Her father’s melancholy voice broke across her agony, reflective, mournfully, surprised, “I think I am the first one of all my family to have been left a widower, Joan.”

“Yes, Father?” she answered. A little clear blue flame darted out of a log and flashed slender and upright as a dagger toward the chimney.

“Yes,” he continued in a sort of sad surprise. “John was younger than his wife Annie and he died before her, and Isaac never had his health after the war and he died of old wounds and David died of typhoid, and Frederick is still living—”

“Dearies,” said Mrs. Winters at the door, “come and see her! She’s so sweet — I never saw her look sweeter—” Somehow she herded them all together. “Where’s Francis? Oh, he’ll be too late. We do want to get all this sadness over before Christmas — I do think he might have stayed with the family this last hour — I wish he had listened to—”

She was pushing them upstairs. Rose and Joan and their father. The father tripped and Mrs. Winters caught his elbow and held it firmly, guiding him. “Now, Doctor, I don’t wonder you feel it, but the Lord giveth and taketh. Joan, we put on the orchid bed-jacket and a fresh — It was difficult to dress — you know — Well, she looks so sweet, her lovely hair all white and still so curly, and Mr. Blum just touched her up a little.”

“I can’t,” gasped Joan.

“Oh, honey, she’s so sweet to look at — your own mother — You’ll always regret it—” She was pushed into the room. Now it was a strange room, full of strangers. Mr. Blum was there, wiping his hands on a stiff linen towel. “One thing,” he whispered hoarsely. “I always ask the family, should we take off the wedding ring?”

Against her will Joan’s eyes searched in terror. She saw a tall stiff doll lying in the great box, dressed and tinted into the semblance of life. The strong shapely hands were folded upon the breast, the wedding ring was shining there. For days they could not have taken away the ring if they would. But now the hideous swelling was mysteriously gone. Her mother was her own self once more, but strangely her own self dead, dead, with her hands folded upon her breast as only the hands of the dead are folded.

“Let her alone!” Joan cried, her voice bursting from her, and to her own horror she burst into loud childish weeping before all these strangers.

So she lost the body of her mother. They took her from the hour of her death and she was no more for her children. Others had her. Even at the funeral she belonged to others. Only for a moment did Joan regain her. There was the moment when she spoke for her mother to them all and so for that moment regained her. The church, they said, perturbed, was decorated for Christmas. Holly and pine wreaths and a silver star were for Christmas. They all had loved her, of course they wanted everything right for their beloved pastor’s wife, but the wreaths were so hard to put up and take down.

“Leave them as they are!” she cried at them. There they were, the women of the Ladies’ Aid, crowded into the sitting room, heavy-bodied, anxious, kind. “We don’t want to seem lacking in respect,” they said, their faces solemn. But Joan flung out her arms and cried at them, “Don’t you remember how she loved Christmas? Why, on Christmas morning she used to run over to the church before breakfast to see it! She thought the church never so beautiful as on Christmas morning. Even when she’d spent days on the wreaths and even after she had hung the star herself and had seen it all the night before, she’d run over alone on Christmas morning. She wouldn’t want the wreaths taken down because of her, and not the star, especially.”

So, dubiously, they had left the wreaths and the great silver star shone above the chancel and they set her there under it.

But it was all strange and awry. It was strange for the father to be in the pew with them instead of the mother. He was out of place there, while the short stout Methodist minister stood in his pulpit to praise the dead.

He felt shorn and embarrassed. To hear these praises made even her memory unreal. “A good and faithful wife,” a strange voice said, “a shining light in the community, a friend to us all — we shall miss her.” It seemed indecent to hear his wife thus publicly commended. He shrank within himself. Mary — his mind was full of Mary, Mary going about the house at her little swift half-run, Mary at the table managing for them all, Mary — but he could not quite remember her face now. He had never been good at remembering faces. Her eyes had been brown, he knew. He remembered that because when they were alone in the night and she had got into bed first as she always did because she was so quick, she lay looking at him, her eyes strange and dark and quiet, and this look always made him uncomfortable although he did not know why. She was so strange when they were alone together — he wanted the light out because she was always less strange when he could not see her. Her warm and present body was familiar to him, but when the candle was lit her dark silent eyes made her strange again. They had argued about the candle lit in the night. She said, “Let me light the candle, Paul, I want the light. The darkness weighs me down.”

But he did not answer. He held her and hurried on. It was not only that her eyes were dark and strange, but the light made him ashamed of what he wanted to do. He argued it with himself in the daytime, in the study, working on his sermon, the Bible open before him. Why should he be ashamed when it was lawful wedlock? Why should he want the darkness to hide him? But if she prevailed, and sometimes she had, then desire went out of him and he felt himself injured and helpless, and he could not see why, because to put such things into words seemed shameful to him …

“So He giveth His beloved sleep,” the voice from the pulpit declared with unction.

But her mother did not want sleep, Joan cried passionately in her heart. She wanted to be awake, to live, to run and to work and to laugh. She begrudged even the sleep of night. She arose early every day, eager to be awake. She asked nothing except not to sleep. But God had given her only sleep, eternal sleep. A rush of anger rose up in Joan, anger against God, God was suddenly real and alive to her, a shape of force, definite and inexorable and powerful. They were all lost in that power, helpless in the reasonless tossing ocean of God’s power. Tears filled her eyes, furious tears. She looked at the family. She gathered them together in her heart, her father, Rose, Francis, and each was touching. They were forlorn and deserted. God had robbed them. Her father was very pale, even his lips were suddenly dry and pale. He was not listening. He had opened a hymnbook and he was reading a psalm in the back. Rose, pretty Rose, her little sister, was sitting quietly, her hands folded, sitting so still, her tongue moistening her lips now and then. And Francis was her mother’s love. She must be responsible now for Francis and for all he did. His face was twisted and set into sternness against weeping. He alone of the three was staring rigidly at what lay beneath the Christmas star.