Pearl Buck - Time Is Noon

“Yes, I’m up, Bart.”

He yawned loudly. “I’m awful sleepy this morning. Guess I’ll take another nap.”

“All right, Bart.”

… What could she pour into such emptiness to fill it? There was nothing deep enough to fill it to the bottom. Everything she did was so small it only floated on the surface of the fathomless emptiness. She watched the dawn brighten, and slowly the hills turned blue and over their rim the edge of the red sun rose and swelled into roundness and light poured over the land. Day was here again. Her frantic body was nothing in the hugeness of the day and night. This shell of walls and roof were all she had for shelter from the moons and suns and roaring winds or racing million stars, and from all the carelessness of people passing by. She turned from the window and began to unpack her bag and put her clothes away into the drawers.

In the days, she learned to work as she never had. She wasted no time on talk. Words echoed too hollowly in that void. She learned to be as silent as the others were, as chary of unnecessary speech.

“Bart, what time are you getting up to plow the wheatfield?”

“Half past four.”

No use to say more than that. Half past four meant breakfast at five. And before breakfast there must be the praying and Bible reading. She sat in stillness, dawn after dawn, staring out of the dusky windowpane while Bart’s father read the Bible, one verse after the other, following the lines with his thick cracked fingertip. She dreaded the deepest winter when the window would be black and she could not see the hills lightening with morning. But deepest winter came and then all she could see in the window was only a mirror. In it she saw five people sitting about a shrouded table, their heads patiently inclined. She saw herself one of them and she turned her head away.

Setting the cold skim milk on the table, the cold bread, the pat of pale milky butter, she watched the window, watched for the dawn. It seemed sometimes it would never come. Sometimes they had eaten what there was to eat — eggs were not to be eaten because they could be sold, and coffee was an indulgence, a strong drink with which to indulge the flesh — and she was washing the dishes, before that light began to break, streaming over the hills like music.

… Music! She had forgotten there was music. Behind one of the closed doors there was an old upright piano. She touched it once, softly. But its faint notes jangled and twanged out of tune and she closed it. Sometimes Bart’s father came into the kitchen on a Saturday night where she and Bart’s mother sat in silence mending the clothes the men wanted to put on after their weekly baths.

“Here,” he said gruffly, “see if you can pick out that tune.” He had a shining red hymnbook open to his hand. He had to choose hymns because he was superintendent of the Sunday school, as he had been for thirty years. The mother rose, sighing, and took the book and went to the piano. Behind her he stomped, stocking-footed, grumbling. “Since they went and got these new hymnbooks I can’t go by the old words anymore.”

She heard the warped tune wavering in the cold other room, a treble picked out with one finger. She waited for silence or for a shout: “Never heard such a heathenish dancy tune!” But if it was what he wanted, there was only silence. Silence was his thanks for anything, and his only praise.

… Once she had tried to be gay, for she was so made that she could not keep from growing a little fond of what she must care for, and once she said to the mother on a Sunday morning, “You look nice in that brown coat.”

The mother looked half-frightened and shy to sickness, and Joan smiled, still trying to be gay. “Didn’t anyone ever say you looked nice before — not even him ?” She nodded toward the father.

But he stared at her, his mouth a grim, wide line across his jaw, bewildered by her gaiety.

“I hate polite talk,” he said. “It’s not honest. I expect my wife to look right. If she doesn’t, I tell her so.”

On that day they had gone to the church as they did every Sunday. Through snow and rain and wind they went as steadily as through sunshine, and Bart’s father whipped up the horses, worried that he must, because it was the Sabbath and these were his beasts. Once, reading in a chill dawn, he came to the Commandments. “Thou and thy beast,” he read, and suddenly he paused and whipped off his spectacles and looked about at them. “I wish it had gone on and said how to rest the beast on Sunday when you have to go to church.” He stared at them, one after the other, and the light from the oil lamp fell on his lined anxious face. Joan saw in that moment’s light the troubled puzzling of many years spring into his deep-set grayish eyes. Every Sunday morning he had waked to it.

Sam mumbled, his small red eyes lighting under the clownish thatch of his hair, “Pity it doesn’t mention a car!”

But his father glared at him. “You and your making jokes of everything,” he shouted suddenly.

Sam bristled feebly. “Well, a joke’s no harm that I can see. Anybody’d think a joke in this house was a sin!”

“Shut up,” his father bellowed.

“Abram, Abram,” the mother broke in, “and you with God’s word open on your knee!”

In the silence he began to read again, his burden still upon him. He fretted constantly because he could not find ways of literally obeying what he read.

And none of these things filled the emptiness within her. Now she knew where every dish and spoon belonged and where the rooms must be brushed and wiped and she knew the secret of every room, the parlor where they never sat, unless some relative came to see them. …

“This is my son’s wife Joan, this is Bart’s Aunt Emma.”

“Uh-huh, well, I heard Bart was married, but I didn’t get invited to the wedding.”

Aunt Emma’s black eyes stared at her out of an enormous fat face, as expressionless as the underside of a pie. “You’re a right hefty somebody, aren’t you? Almost as tall as Bart! Is she a good cook, Minna?”

“I do the cooking.” Bart’s mother said stiffly, and added unwillingly, “She’s handy, though, about the house.”

“Who were her folks?”

Her folks! Had she once had people of her own, who had been hers and whose she was?

Bart, called in from the stable to see his Aunt Emma, said shortly. “Her father was the old preacher over at Middlehope.”

“I heard tell of him,” said Aunt Emma. “Folks said he was a little off.”

“My father?” Joan gasped.

“Nothing but his age and all, I reckon,” said Aunt Emma placatingly, and Joan saw this woman did not mean to be unkind. But still she was stabbed. So people had spoken of her father!

There was the dark parlor, where they never went, not even on Christmas Day. … But then, what was Christmas in this house of silence? There was a tree at the Sunday school in Chipping Corners on Christmas Eve. Christmas fell that year on a Sunday and the horses must take them, Bart’s father said, to what was no better than a merrymaking on the Sabbath. But it was not so very merry. The tree was a slightly crooked pine, sparsely scattered with tinsel from a ten-cent store. But there was a star, a white paper star, stitched around the edges with tinsel, and Bart’s father read the story of the star, and the children came forward, the pinched frightened-looking farm children who worked early and late at chores, and the smug little children of small village storekeepers, with here and there among them the angelic face of a child who would never belong anywhere. Looking at one of these, a little brown-haired girl, staring at the few candles upon the tree, dreaming them into hundreds, Joan saw herself. She watched the little girl, smiling, catching from the child’s eyes a solitary gleam of Christmas. She made her way to the little girl’s side and said, “Merry Christmas!” But the words were strange to the child. She did not know the greeting. She pointed a thin little finger at the tree and cried out, “That there one is a-fallin’!” She drew close while Joan straightened the candle, and stared on, lonely and entranced.