Pearl Buck - Time Is Noon

A young man in overalls came up panting. “All right, sir — she’s ready.”

“All right — I’m ready. Look here”—his eyes came back to Joan’s face—“what’s this about your brother?”

“I’ve always wanted to fly, sir!” Francis said quickly.

“I seem to remember your face,” the man said, looking at him.

“I worked here a little while.”

“Ground crew?”

“No, sir. I never got that far. I was just a sort of extra. Then they cut down their men. It was after an accident, I guess, and they took off some planes.”

Roger Bair looked from one to the other of them. They were both beseeching him. “Look here,” he said hurriedly to Francis, “I’m not a potentate. I don’t know what I can do about jobs. But — you feel about this plane like she does?” He looked at Francis and nodded toward Joan.

“Yes, sir,” said Francis. He wet his dry lips and looked steadfastly back at this god who could deliver him.

“All right. Show up here two days from now at this same time and I’ll see what I can do. Now I must go—” He turned to Joan and his face wrinkled deeply into the warmest smile she had ever seen. “Some day you’ll fly with me.”

“Shall I?” She smiled back at him. It was impossible, seeing him, not to let her smile respond to his, and not to believe him.

“Yes!” he shouted confidently. He was already running. Now he was in the plane, and she could not see him.

The steps were drawn away, the door closed, and the great roaring creature moved to mount into the air with the heavy lightness of an eagle. She stood, not knowing that any soul was near, watching him fly higher and higher to disappear into the far mists of the morning. He was gone. Without a word she followed Francis and he put her on the train.

“You’ll be all right now,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “I’ll be all right.”

She was going back, alone again. But she had those words, like a token, like a flower left in her hands. “Some day you’ll fly with me.” Anything was possible, as long as life lasted. Her heart flew dancing out of her breast and gamboled among the shining clouds, following him merrily. I believe I shall, she thought. She held the corners of her mouth into a smile, because she could have laughed in sheer exaltation and delight. Beauty! The world was full of it. Her face lit and sparkled, but she said nothing at all. She let her pure pleasure flow through fields and villages. She thought of him in purest pleasure, remembering him, shaping the memory, holding fast in her mind the movement of his body, the lines of his face, the color of his eyes. And there was, for life in the image, the memory of his smile.

The house was dark and close. To come back to this house, its closed windows, its empty rooms, the small huddled dining room, the kitchen where the men washed, where the food was prepared, where they sat more and more about the iron range now that winter was closing in, was to burrow into the earth. She could never forget, so long as she lived, that wide smooth field, the light of the rising sun, the shining silvery lifted plane. And Roger Bair was a part of it, the embodiment of that morning, just as Bart was the embodiment of these backbreaking fields, this earthy life filled with nothing but the work for food to eat, food forced from the earth, washed, cooked, eaten.

For here they spent their days in getting and eating the food. They went to bed early, exhausted, and slept like beasts, soddenly, heavily. They rose at dawn to get their food again. And they thanked God for this. It was the life of moles, burrowing through the sullen earth. They never lifted their eyes from earth to sky. The seasons were for the fruitation of their crops for food. Snow might fall but there was no beauty in it. It was a cause for anger if it fell too long; if it fell too lightly, the wheat suffered. Spring was measured not by bloodroot in the woods and arbutus under the brown leaves around the roots of an old oak, but by the frost upon the fruit trees, and summer was cursed by insects on the potatoes and the beans, by storms too harsh for corn and ripening grain, and autumn was gloomy with a harvest too scanty. They were bound into the earth, mind and body, and their souls were never lifted. When the old man prayed, he pulled God down to earth.

But sometimes she heard a far rushing sound and then she ran out, though the wind were bitter from the north, and looked up into the clouds to search in that distance for the diving shining shape. Sometimes she found it, glittering like a daytime shooting star. Sometimes it was lost in cloud and she would only hear it passing. But she could always imagine it was the plane beside which she had stood, into which he had climbed. She could imagine it, and so make it a light in her darkness, and he was there, a companion in her loneliness. And, she argued to excuse her dreaming, if she thought about him the baby might grow a little like him perhaps. Surely dreams were not wrong, not if there was nothing else, especially not if her hands went on doing their duty day after day.

She came, as winter drew near, to spend more and more time in the attic, high among the treetops. She sat there often while the swift evening fell, gazing out of the gabled window, hearing the city branches crack as they swayed about her. Was the plane flying, she wondered, through these frosty clouds? … Francis had his job, he wrote her.

Roger Bair had been very kind. He was going to be taught to fly some day. He was learning everything about the plane. If he got there early in the morning, Roger Bair taught him things. He always was there early and he always was there when Roger Bair came in … She sat in the stillness of the attic. Francis was safe now. She could take her mind from Francis. Down in the earth, in this house, buried among these hills, she could remember the sky and that clean springing soaring shaft of flight into the sky.

When the attic grew dark, as it did early these days, she curled for warmth into the quilts where Francis had slept. She had left his bed as it was, and now it was a place for her. For she could not sleep with Bart now. She was restless with him, and it was no slight restlessness of the body. This was a restlessness which fell upon her like a sickness that first night of her return. She was afraid of this increasing restlessness. In the night she drew far from him, lest she touch him, even inadvertently. At first she lay far from him, grateful for the width of the old bed, so that in his sleep he might not fling his heavy arm unknowingly upon her. Then one night she crept in the darkness to the attic bed, and there alone fell instantly into deep sleep. He found her there, astonished, angry. She woke the second time to see him in the doorway in the woolen underwear he wore at night as well as in the day.

“What’d you come up here for?” he cried resentfully, staring at her over the lighted candle he held. “What’s the matter with you anyway these days?”

“I’m restless,” she answered. “The baby’s so near.” Her conscience stirred. She would have been restless without the baby. This was another restlessness. Then her courage welled up strongly. She would make a life. She was not afraid of Bart. She went on calmly, her heart thudding, “I shall sleep here as often as I like, Bart. I’m going to do whatever is best for the baby now. I’ve got to think of him.”

He stared at her over the candle. The upward light threw into relief his thick stubborn jaw, his wide coarse dry lips, the broad base of his nose. The forehead and the small grayish eyes receded into shadow.

“I have my rights,” he muttered. “You got to give me my rights.”

“I’m staying here,” she said. She must speak very plainly to him. He understood nothing else but the straightest, plainest speech. “I’m staying here as long as it’s best for the baby.” She turned over and closed her eyes. Her heart was beating very hard and she must still it. This sickness, this fearful repulsion, must not go into the making of her baby. She must think of other things, lovely things. She would think of the sky and of the driving silver stars. She lay waiting until she heard him stumble down the stairs and until she heard the door slam. Then she leaped from her bed and searched the sky. But there were no stars. Outside was the deep darkness.