Pearl Buck - Time Is Noon

“No, it was better that you didn’t.”

He looked at her sharply and she added, “I mean you couldn’t have helped — it was all over.”

“That’s what I thought. So I went to Michigan with a fellow and got a job in the factory there. It was furnace work. I couldn’t stand it. I had to stoke the furnaces all day — my skin cracked on me — I was half-roasted. I used to look at my hands and expect the meat to drop off of them. Then I got into some trouble there. I got taken up by some fellows who were arrested for trying to start a strike. Joan, there wasn’t a job in that factory fit for a man to live by except the gatekeeper’s job. He could stand out in the sunshine and air. The rest of us just stood ten hours a day doing one thing, stoking, riveting, hitting the same place in each car as it came along. If you were on that assembly line you couldn’t stop a minute even to breathe or straighten your back — the next car was there and you had to do your share. Another man at the furnaces with me was named Jim Dobie — he was a West Virginia fellow, and his dad had been in the coal mines. He swore he’d never go back. But he did go back and I went with him. He said at least it was cool in the mines — cool and dark. I’d stared into that fire until I thought my eyeballs would burst. I thought if I could just get into some cool dark place … but I couldn’t stand the mine. Every day I had to go down and down — into blackness.” He was twisting his grimed hands and she saw him tremble a little. A light sweat broke out about his lips and he wiped it off and went on twisting his hands. “I’d look up at the sky before I went down. Then I’d have to go down. I had to stand being in a hole in the darkness, the earth and the rocks clamping me in. I never could stand being shut in anywhere, even when I was a kid. One morning — soon after I got your last letter — I looked up like that. It was the brightest morning I’d ever seen, sunshine everywhere and the leaves all glittering yellow — everything was sunshine. And I looked up and there was a plane flying high in all that light. I just laid down my stuff and quit. I guess you won’t understand. But I quit. I said, I’ll never go down again, not if I starve, not if I never fly. At least I won’t go down again.”

“I do understand,” she said. “I understand better than I can tell you.”

“I don’t see—’” he began, and the door opened and Bart came in.

Bart stretched his hand out toward Francis heartily. “I heard downstairs you were here,” he said. Upon his square unshaved face was his aimless good-natured grin. She saw him sharply, in Francis’ astonished eyes. She saw Bart’s rough looks and heard his crude laughter, she saw his simple mind. She saw his thick nostrils and little deep-set meaningless eyes, his huge useless strength, as useless as a beast’s unless it were harnessed to some primitive tool.

Her eyes met Francis’ eyes with brave pleading.

“You see I do understand,” she said.

She had been living here on this hillside, and beyond the rim of the stable hills the world had been roaring and whirling around her, as huge and unknown as the night sky against which she had drawn the shades, lest she be lost. Francis had been caught and held in that whirling, tossed and caught and thrown up again into this one still spot. She listened to him, hour upon hour. He did not pour out talk upon her. He was too wounded for that. In fragments, in torn bits of himself, in scattered words, he let her see. They wandered into the orchard, and into the woods. They sat by the stream in the valley under the falling leaves. In the house he was completely silent, with a guarded stopped silence. But alone with her outdoors he talked, pausing often to breathe deeply, to wipe his forehead when the sweat burst out, to break off suddenly, “Well, there’s no use in going into all that.” There was nothing left in him of that willful boy, tumbling down the stairs in the sunny old manse, crashing into the dining room shouting for food, whistling noisily everywhere, planning loudly for pleasure, arguing eternally for his own way. He moved, guarded and controlled, his head bent downward a little, as though he had been walking for a long time under a roof too low for him. But from the scraps she pieced out what was whirling about this still spot of earth. In the silence of the woods where the stream slipped so softly over smooth stones that it was scarcely to be heard, she listened.

“Things are shutting down on us everywhere now. You can’t get jobs. They don’t want you. Nobody cares if you starve.”

He said, “I came near starving right there in New York City — food everywhere, restaurants full of food, shops full of food, groceries, delicatessens, wagons full of food, people sitting eating everywhere. And I was so hungry I went crazy and went up to a taxi stopped at a traffic light. There was a woman inside — an old woman. I wouldn’t have spoken to a girl. I said, ‘Would you let me go with you to any restaurant to get a meal? I’m faint with hunger.’”

“Frank!” she cried. “Why didn’t you come home?”

“What for?” he answered. “That wouldn’t help. I can’t keep coming home all my life. She wanted to give me money. She said, ‘Here’s a dollar.’”

“Oh, Frank,” Joan said.

“I wouldn’t take it. That wasn’t what I wanted. She said, ‘I’ll lend it.’ And I said, ‘I can’t pay it back.’”

“Then what?” she whispered.

“Then the light changed and the taxi went on,” he replied.

A leaf floated slowly down, upheld by the breeze, and settled upon the small placid pool. Its shadow lay, magnified through the clear water, upon a rock at the bottom.

“And?”

“I fell in with another fellow who hadn’t any job, and he took me to a joint he knew and the fellow that ran it gave us some stuff left over from what he didn’t sell — lemon pie and stuff that spoiled if he kept it.”

She was silent, staring at the shadow of the leaf, so clear, so dancing. A squirrel capered up a tree. She could see its inverted reflection in the pool.

“If you had come home—”

But he straightened himself impatiently and threw a stone into the smooth pool. It broke into a shimmer of ripples and the leaf tossed like a little ship upon the little waves.

“Don’t you see it wouldn’t matter? There’s hundreds of fellows like me, trying to catch on somewhere, hungry as hell — running home doesn’t help them. There’s got to be a place for them. Gosh, when I think of that stuff Dad used to talk — all that holy salvation stuff! Listen here — not one thing he said was ever any use to me.”

“He honestly believed—” she began, troubled.

“Yeah, and what of it?” He was snarling. She saw a hungry boy wandering along the city streets, his hat over his eyes, his body aching with hunger. “You’ve got to do something more than talk these days. Something’s got to be done, and be done damned quick! There’s a lot of us feeling like that. And I stick by them! I stick by the hungry and the fellows that can’t get jobs!”

He was shouting, his voice ringing through the quiet woods. He had sprung to his feet and she looked up at him.

“Why, Frank, you look just like Father!” she said.

He stared back at her.

“Oh, my God!” he whispered.

He dropped to the log beside her and began scuffling at the small stones.

“I mean—”

“I know what you mean,” he said bitterly. “It’s the damnedest thing, the way you can’t get rid of your ancestors!”

He fell into moody silence and she was bewildered. “Come on home to supper, anyway,” she said at last. At least today she had that to give him, food upon a table and a roof under which to sleep. She would take him home. He rose to follow her, and they stood a moment looking at the pool. It was smooth again and the little leaf was quietly sailing on a wave, sailing nowhere and the stone he had flung lay lost among the other stones at the bottom.