Pearl Buck - Time Is Noon

After the meal was over they sat in the small crowded room. She had tried to help clear away, taking out the dishes, searching for the dishpan. “I’ll wash the dishes,” she said. But Bart’s mother poured the water into the pan and tied on an apron. “You can wipe,” she replied. So Joan wiped, and Bart sat in the other room with the men. Now that the men were alone a little talk went on. She could hear the flat toneless voices.

“You finish that cornfield today, Sam?”

“Pretty near — tomorrow anyway.”

“You aiming to take tomorrow off, Bart?”

“No, I guess not.”

“Apples ought to be sorted. Shaler’s comin’ for them the day after.”

“All right.”

In the kitchen she searched herself desperately for something to say. What would Bart’s mother like her to say? “This is a nice kitchen — I like a big kitchen.”

There was no answer for a moment. Bart’s mother swept the cloth about the greasy edge of the pan. “It makes work when you have everything to do yourself,” she answered. Her face did not change its dull worried look.

“I’ll help you now,” said Joan eagerly. “I want to help all I can.”

She opened the dish closet and began to put away the dishes she had just finished wiping. “Let me see — the plates here — and these spoons—”

“They don’t go there — the good spoons I put in the drawer. Those are kitchen things — you’d better let me put them right.”

She pushed Joan aside and began to sort the dishes and silver.

“There—”

“I’ll know tomorrow,” said Joan humbly. She went into the other room. The three men fell silent at once. They sat about the table, set for the next meal and shrouded with a gray-white cloth. She sat down on one of the straight chairs, wondering what was beyond the closed doors. There must be many rooms in this big house. But it was as though there was only this room where they ate, the kitchen, the rooms for sleep upstairs. She sat, afraid to go upstairs, although she was very tired, too tired to try again to talk. Tomorrow in the morning, when the night was over — There was yet the night.

The father yawned suddenly and enormously. “Got to get to sleep,” he muttered.

He rose, and opening the cupboard beside the sealed fireplace, he brought out a squarely bound Bible and his spectacles. “Mother!” he called, and Bart’s mother came in, untying her apron as she came. She sat with it across her knees, her hands limply clasped upon it. He opened the Bible and searched slowly for a mark, moving his callused finger from page to page.

“The thirtieth chapter of Isaiah,” he announced, and began to read slowly, hesitating over the long words, “Woe to the rebellious children, saith the Lord.” It was a long chapter, but he read it to the end. They sat, motionless as stone. Were they listening? She looked from face to face, but she did not know. The mother sat with utter emptiness upon her face, lax with the habit of weariness. It was not possible she heard. Bart sat staring at his great hands. She saw his eyelids droop — he was almost asleep. Sam’s eyes were upon her ankles. She drew them quickly under her chair.

“Let us pray,” Bart’s father said, closing the book, and they knelt. Now forced to speak sentence upon sentence, the old man’s voice dropped into a mumble. He repeated bits of Scripture, made half-formed petitions, accepted ill fortune with a strange heavy patience. “We know that whatever comes it is from God. We plant but we may not reap. Man soweth but the harvest is with God. Help us to take what comes to us and work at whatever our hand finds to do. Amen.”

They rose into silence again. Bart’s mother tied her apron about her waist and went back to the kitchen. The father put the book and his spectacles back into the closet and sighed deeply. He turned with heavy abruptness and went to the kitchen. She heard a basin clatter in the zinc-lined sink and heard him dip and pour water. There was the hiss of lather, the dry stroke of a razor against the stubble of his beard. There was the clash of water flowing and of water emptied. Then he walked heavily through the room and up a small back staircase she had not seen.

“Well,” said Sam, rising, “I guess I’ll go to bed.” He rubbed his great hand through his red hair. She saw him staring at her, at Bart, avid. Secrecy, hot and fierce, was in his eyes. She looked away quickly and he went into the kitchen. His mother was still in the kitchen, moving about, wiping off the top of the stove, putting away pots, filling the kettle.

“Sam, you get me some wood first thing in the morning,” she said.

“All right. Where are the apples?”

“Don’t leave the cores under your bed for me to pick up the way you did this morning.”

He did not answer. He came into the room where she and Bart sat, and grinned at them. “Well, sweet dreams, you two!” he said, and went up the small back stairs.

She did not answer. One by one they were forcing the night upon her. The mother was waiting for them to go. In the kitchen she was sitting now on the reed-bottomed chair by the stove, waiting.

Bart got up suddenly. “Ma always comes up last. We’d better go.”

“All right, Bart,” she said faintly. She turned to go into the hall to the stairs down which she had come. But he called her abruptly. “Come this way — we use the back stairs every day.”

“All right, Bart,” she said, and followed him up the steep dark stairway.

It was dawn. When she opened her eyes the low ceiling seemed close, like a dim sky. The small room was full of pale quiet light. She raised her head and leaned upon her arm and looked out of the window.

Bart had said, brusque with embarrassment, “What side you want to sleep on?” and she answered quickly, “Outside — next the window, please.” He was ready before she was and he had rolled heavily to the wall. She had looked at the window all the time she was getting ready. It was a window away from this room, a window toward the hills.

There the hills were now, dark and still under the faintly coloring sky. She looked at them with a quiet wintry sadness. This was the way old people must feel, as she felt this morning, very old people, from whom everything had been taken away, or who knew that now nothing more was to be theirs. Nothing more now was to be hers except the things old people may have, a roof for shelter from rain, a fire for warmth, food, sleep, and within their hearts the emptiness of no more to come. All the emptiness in life was inside her, nothing but emptiness. She was a hollow figure, standing alone in a great silent empty plain. No one was near — no ear to hear her, no voice which she could hear. Behind her she heard the rasping steady breathing of Bart. Now that he was at last asleep he slept thickly, lumpishly. She must not look at him, must not imagine how he looked. Here was the window through which she could see the hills.

She crept carefully out of the bed and into her clothes. When she was dressed she knelt beside the window and watched the changing light. Let her not think, let her not remember anything. But she remembered suddenly one thing. Once when she was a little girl and she heard that quarreling in the room next to hers — were they quarreling? — she had got up out of bed, troubled, quivering, to listen at the door, to know what was wrong. She heard her mother say in a small, death-like voice, almost a whisper, “Is this all? Paul, is there nothing more than this?” And her father had answered more sharply than she had ever heard him speak, “I don’t know what you mean, Mary.”

But she knew what her mother had meant. This morning she knew.

“You up already?” Bart’s sleepy voice came suddenly from the wall.