Pearl Buck - Time Is Noon

He did not even know. He had not heard. She tore the letter into small pieces and left the heap upon the table.

… So what could she do? The house stretched about her, empty, inexorable, waiting for her to go, waiting to begin another life. It was through with her. She was terrified of this house. She ran out into the garden. It was nearly Thanksgiving. She had not thought how nearly Thanksgiving it was. But now a load of cornstalks was being drawn to the church door, the cornstalks they always used as a background for pumpkins and fruits. There was a loud shout from the wagon as it drew near, and the horses stopped in front of her, breathing out steam. A strong bulky figure leaped down from the wagon and came near her. It was Bart. She smelled the odor of the dry stalks upon him, clean and earthy. Suddenly she began sobbing again, the sobs that jerked at her very entrails. “Oh, Bart,” she sobbed. “Oh, Bart, Bart!”

He came toward her, smiling, steady, sure, safe. He had his arm about her and she clung to him and he led her into the empty house. There in the empty sitting room she felt his lips upon hers at last. She was still for a moment, feeling. His lips were stiff and hard upon her mouth. Deep within her body her heart drew back in strange dismay. But she clung to him, sobbing. He was strong as a rock, his arms about her were like the walls of a house.

THIS RING UPON HER finger was new and stiff. She had never worn a ring before, because it soon irked her. Someone had given her a ring once when she was a little girl and she wanted to wear it because it was so pretty, a red bit of glass set in a loop of silver-washed metal, but she could not. In a little while it made her restless and she took it off. But this ring she must not take off. She must learn to wear it. She had set it herself upon her hand, a wide band of gold, old-fashioned and heavy. Bart had searched among the rings upon the counter in the little jeweler’s shop in Clarktown while she stood waiting until he had found a ring like his mother’s. “It’s got to last a long time,” he said. When the clerk had fitted it to her finger and given it to them, Bart had tried it on his own hand. But it would go over no finger except the little one, and there it stuck upon the crooked joint.

There was no need to wait. There was no one to consider. Why should she consider those who had not considered her? She would slip out of that old life. It could be nothing to any of them what she did. She did not want to tell anybody she was going to marry Bart Pounder. She did not want to see that surprised look—“Bart Pounder?” She silenced her own heart savagely. “Yes — Bart Pounder — who else is there?”

She went to Mr. Winters, who was an elder, in the evening after store hours. He was there alone, searching over his shelves for something someone had wanted in the day and he could not find. It was his usual evening occupation. “If you can just wait till tomorrow, I can find it,” he said a dozen times a day. Upon bits of paper he scrawled, “Mrs. Parsons — ink eraser”—“a spool of sixty white for Mrs. Bradley”—“Billings a chipping knife.” When she came in tonight she could hear him muttering mildly, “Now where in tuck did I put that?”

“Mr. Winters, will you please tell them I shall be leaving the manse right away?”

He left off muttering and turned to her, kind, protesting. “Now don’t you let them hurry you.”

“No, but I have made my plans.”

“Going away?”

“Yes, I’m going away.”

Next morning Mrs. Winters came bustling up the steps. “Joan, I came right over. Mr. Winters told me. What are you going to do?”

“I’m going away, Mrs. Winters.”

“Yes, but—”

“I’m not a child, you know. I’m grown up. I have my plans. I’ll write you.”

Mrs. Winters could not help. No one could really help. It was better to be silent, to make her own life. She would not forget that only by death was her father saved from these people.

But when she said good-bye to Hannah, she clung to her a moment. Hannah said, patting her back briskly, “Did you write me that little letter, Joan, so’s if I don’t make it with this new minister’s wife, I could go and try some of the summer folks over at Piney Cove?” Joan released her instantly. “Yes, Hannah.” She opened her bag and took out the letter. This is to introduce Hannah Jackson, our general servant for more than twenty years. We have always found her clean, honest —

“It’s hard on a body,” said Hannah fretfully, “at this age to be having to find a new place and I haven’t chick nor child.”

“Yes, it’s hard,” said Joan quietly. “It’s hard at any age.”

There could not be, of course, any white satin nor any of that dreaming. White satin would have sat strangely upon her with Bart standing by her in his bursting blue suit. So she put on her old orange wool dress and her brown coat and the small brown felt hat and she and Bart stood before the county clerk, repeating his words. He was a small, wry-faced man with big loose lips in a wizened face. The day was cold with November and his thin-curved nose was damp and red, and he wiped his hand across it often. “You can sign there,” he said, pointing with his nail-bitten forefinger.

She signed her name steadily, “Joan Pounder.” Steadily she forced her hand to the name she had taken for her own, shaping its unfamiliar letters for the first time. She stood and watched Bart hold the pen clumsily like a farm tool in his great hand. He wrote his name in a childish angular scrawl beside her neat small script. She stood for an instant looking at the two names. Then she said, “Take me home, Bart.”

“Giddap there!” he shouted at his two horses. He clacked the reins across their backs and they began to trot briskly, their rustbrown coats shining in the wintry sun.

“I’ll get a car one of these days,” he said. “But I’ve got to get ahead a little. And a car’s no good for plowing. Got to have horses on a farm, car or no car.” He turned to grin at her. A look she was beginning to know came over his face. His nostrils thickened a little, his lips parted and loosened. “I don’t know if we could sit so close in a car though, my girl,” he whispered heavily. He had small yellowish soft-looking teeth set in gums too wide and pale. She looked away quickly.

They were moving out of the country she knew into a rugged hilly land, whose valleys were dark with woods. Between the rough fields were stone walls piled of the stones from the land. Everywhere the last colors of autumn were subsiding into dun and gray. Only the oak trees still burned dully red, but a few more nights of frost would strip them, too. Then it would be winter. She was glad for Bart, she told herself, gazing straightly into the dying landscape. If it had not been for Bart she would have been quite alone and winter was coming. In so short a time had she been left quite alone.

Then at a bend of the narrow earth road rose a big frame house with green blinds, an oblong of white against the land. A few great maple trees stood about it, their skeleton limbs not hiding it.

“There’s the house,” said Bart, pointing with his whip. “The folks will be expecting us. Don’t you mind my mother.”

He had never mentioned his home before except to say shortly, “I live with my folks. I’m to have the place if I stay with them — so I’m staying.”

They drew up and the door opened and now she was near enough to see them, his father, his mother, his brother. They came out, one by one, his mother last, and stood waiting for her. Her heart rushed eagerly toward them; she peered through the dusk to see them — father, mother, brother. But she liked the house, so cleanly white and green, she liked the maples. Under their bare limbs the unraked leaves lay in a carpet of ashy gold.