Pearl Buck - Time Is Noon

But here was no home for Francis, though with all her strength she sought to make it a home. She took the walls of this house and encompassed him about for his shelter. She made his bed in the attic soft with quilts and put sheets upon it for comfort, although Sam slept without sheets, and not until she came had Bart used them. But Francis should use their mother’s sheets which she had brought with her. She dragged the boxes and trunks to make a sort of room for him near the bookshelves. And at the table she plied him with food, passing him the butter, the bread, the meat, relentlessly under their eyes.

“I’ll make a pie,” she said to Bart’s mother. She had not cared before, but now she wanted to make it.

“It takes lard,” the older woman said, grudgingly.

Then Joan shamelessly made use of Bart. “Bart says he likes pie,” and when she saw Bart’s mother give way she used this means again and again. “I made a raisin pudding, Bart.” “Bart, I made cookies today — Francis, they’re the old ginger cookies, like Mother’s.” Bart ate, enchanted. “Gosh, Jo, you’re a famous cook. What’s the matter you been keeping it all to yourself?”

She smiled, her eyes on Francis. His thinness was daily growing into a slender resilient strength. When they were alone she urged him, “Eat, Frank. I want you to get your strength back.”

“Yes, I’ll take food,” he said sturdily. “I’ve got to begin again, I’ll stay until I am able to begin over.”

He was so beautiful she could not stop looking at him. His hands were free of the black of the mines now, but they were hard, clean and hard. He helped silently about the place, chopping wood and filling the box in the kitchen and in the dining room, helping her wring the clothes and hang them, carrying water to the barn. She would give him something when he went back to work, buy a new suit for him. She would coax him to take it. But now she gave him a pair of the blue jeans that Bart wore. “I’ll take your suit and clean it and press it.” She brushed and pressed the stuff with careful pleasure. It was not work to touch and clean and mend that which clothed one’s beloved. Strange how garments partook of the bodies which they clothed!

But none of this made his home. In the attic they met sometimes alone, and they knew that their only home was all that which they had shared and which was gone now. They talked long hours here together, he talking again and she still listening. She led him on to talk and now he talked more easily. His speech did not come in such wrenched, broken sentences. He was growing a little healed. But as he was healed he was restless. He was like an animal held by a wound, and one day he would be well of it and ready again to go away. But they talked always and only of him — and she wanted it so. She fended off day by day the question which she saw hanging upon his lips, daily nearer to utterance: “Joan, how did you come to do this?” She talked feverishly of himself. “What do you want to do now, Frank darling? When you get rested and ready to start again—” In the attic she poured out the names their mother used so lavishly upon them all: “darling Frank,” “dear heart,” “dearest Frank”—all the names for which she had as yet no other use — no use until her baby was born. So that she might fend off that question she talked constantly with him about himself, because in such talk he forgot her. “I want to fly,” he said, over and over. “I’ve got to fly — I can do it. If I had a chance I could do it. I feel it in myself — the power to do it. I’d know how to do it if I could just get at the controls. They wouldn’t need to tell me but just the once—”

He liked the attic. He came to it now whenever there was nothing he could do, when she was busy about the house, when they were not at meals. She found him here when she was free by the gable window, staring out into the sky, over the hills and fields. “I can almost imagine sometimes here that I’m flying,” he said. “That elm tree top just outside hides the ground. You see Joan? You look straight over it to the hills and it seems far up.”

Yes, she knew Francis must go. They were pushing him out by their silence, by their steady disapproving silence. She said, placating Bart’s father, “Let Francis shell the corn for you today.”

“I’ve shelled it myself for thirty-five years,” he said grimly.

“Francis can bring up the milk for you,” she said to Bart’s mother. “Francis and I will gather the eggs.”

“The hens don’t take to strangers,” she said, and Francis stumbled upon the dark cellar stairs and spilled the milk. “You better go and set somewhere,” she said bitterly, and cried at Joan, hastening with a cloth and a pail, “Don’t bend over — you’ll hurt yourself and I’ll have the care of you.”

No, here was no home. And he never really gave himself up to her here. For with all their talk, they never spoke of why he had gone away that day, of why she had urged him to go away and why he had eagerly gone. Part of him still hid from her.

One morning after breakfast, when he had been there less than three weeks, Sam beckoned to her with his great thumb. She followed him into the hall and he shut the door.

“You kinda follow me after a half hour or so,” he whispered to her. “I’ll be in the barn cleaning out the manure. Got something to tell you.”

“Why don’t you tell me now, Sam?” she asked, surprised. His full red face was strangely unyouthful, close to hers like this. He had already lost his front side teeth. He was not yet twenty-five.

“You’ll thank me for not telling you here,” he replied. “It’s about your brother.”

She stopped, frightened. “All right, Sam,” she said quietly.

In the kitchen, over the dishes, she searched for excuses. “I believe I’ll stir up some applesauce,” she said to Bart’s mother. “I’ll go out and pick up some corncobs to start the fire up a little.”

“I told Sam to get them last night,” the mother answered.

“He forgot,” said Joan. “I’ll tell him.”

In the barn, above the smoking manure, she heard Sam’s coarse whispering. He leaned upon the spade, his little hot eyes boldly upon her, glancing now and then at her fullness.

“I heard something last night, Jo. Never mind where I heard it, but I heard it, straight from a colored girl. She’s looking for your brother. Says he owes her something and she’s going to get it. She’s not all colored — she’s pretty near three-fourths white. Name’s Fanny. She heard he’d come back.”

“How did she hear?” Joan asked. She knew he was staring at her, but she would not seem to know. She could penetrate that shallow skull. He turned away and spaded with elaborate ease about the edge of a stall. “Oh, women like her — they got ways of knowing — they find out anything they want to find out.”

She did not speak. She stood watching his spade searching out the filth and lifting it. The stench overwhelmed her — rank, penetrating, hot. He stood in it, breathing it in and out. She turned quickly and went outside the barn, panting for the clean air.

But she was grateful for the warning, else how would she had known so swiftly what to do that next afternoon? It was a still, fair afternoon, and she had just come down from the attic. She had gone to find Francis, but when she lifted the latch he lay on the bed, his hands folded under his head, asleep. He lay very still, breathing so gently she could not hear him. Upon his face was a look of deep repose. She closed the door again, softly. Let him rest. He seemed so seldom to rest. In the close tense stillness in which he now held himself there was no rest. He had in so short a time changed all the loose gamboling ways of his youth to this controlled stillness of the body. It was as though under his clothes his body were bound in secret chains. So let him rest.