Pearl Buck - Time Is Noon

“Get some more milk,” Bart’s father interrupted. “I have to get done early tonight. There’s a meeting over at the church — a missionary from Africa’s talking. The parson wants a crowd and spoke to me as superintendent. Sam, get your good clothes on and go, too. You’d better go, Minna. He’s got lantern slides.”

“I haven’t planned,” she exclaimed in distress. “You ought to have told me sooner, so I could plan the work after supper.”

“I’ll do everything,” said Joan.

“Wouldn’t you like to go though, maybe, Joan?” Bart’s mother, about to agree, paused. “It would be interesting — your sister a missionary and all. I’ll stay with Paul.”

“I’m very tired,” said Joan.

“Then maybe—” Bart’s mother said, unwillingly pleased. Then she said quickly, “It isn’t that I just want to see the pictures. I feel I ought to take an interest in the work the church is doing in heathen lands.”

“Yes,” said Joan. She turned to Bart. “Why don’t you go, too, Bart? You’d like the pictures.”

“Don’t know but I will,” said Bart.

So the house was emptied. There was only Paul and herself. The silence was complete. There was no sound of breathing or of footsteps. She washed the dishes and swept the crumbs away and set the table for breakfast and covered the table with the cloth. Then she bathed herself and brushed her hair and put on her nightgown. It was, she thought, as though she were laying herself down to die by her own hand. But she could not die, for Paul was alive. In the darkness she went to his crib and listened. He was breathing steadily, soundly. She felt his hand. It was warm and lax. She had done everything she could think of to do. She went and laid herself down in her bed and let agony fall upon her, unchecked at last.

But how could one live in agony day and night while a year passed, and then another and another? She would sleep a little and wake in the morning stifled, as one might wake in a dense smoke, or under a heavy weight. Before she was well awake, dragging her mind upward out of sleep, she knew something was wrong — terror waited. Then she was awake and there the terror was, fresh and sharp and new with the morning.

When she forgot, as sometimes she could forget, for a moment, for a moment of sunlight through shining leaves, for a moment of the phlox bed glowing under the noon sun, for a moment of dewy madonna lilies freshly blooming at twilight, the beauty of mists stealing up the hills from the valleys under the moon, the terror was there, new again, to be realized again and again. Better never to forget it than to have that continual new realization. “Oh, how lovely the hills are today under the moving shadows of the clouds! — Yes, but Paul will never be like other children.”

And there was no edge so desperately keen as when he himself made her forget, the close dearness of the nape of his neck when his fair hair began to curl against the white skin, the lovely roundness of his body in the tub. She could laugh with her passionate tenderness, adoring his loveliness, forgetting for a moment’s adoration, and feel her heart dissolve again in the eternal agony.

She longed to see other children. She plied Rose with questions of David. But Rose wrote unhappily that she was going to have another child. “I have so little time for the work now,” she wrote.

“I don’t know what she’s talking about,” Joan cried aloud to herself, fierce with envy. She thought of going to Netta, and shrank from it. Meeting Fanny under the oak tree beyond the bend of the road, she begged her, “Bring little Frank with you next time. I want to see him again. It’s been so long.”

“Surely,” said Fanny. She had put on flesh in the past two years, and looked like a great dark poppy in a ruffled dress of scarlet lawn.

And the next week Joan could hardly listen to her for looking at the boy. There was some trouble. Fanny was in trouble, quarreling with her husband. She took pleasure in trouble and quarreling.

“Darling,” said Joan to the little boy, kneeling in the dust to him, “you’ve grown so big. Are you going to go to school?”

The child stared at her, charmed, his great black eyes soft and fathomless.

“If Fanny’ll let me—” he whispered.

“Don’t you say mamma?”

“She doesn’t like me to.”

Fanny laughed richly. “No, I don’t have any of them call me ma. It looks better. If I take him anywhere. I say he’s my brother.”

The child looked at her gravely as she laughed. Then he turned back to Joan and regarded her curiously and quietly with profound intelligence. That was the look Paul’s eyes should have had, that comprehending aware look. Francis, for all his waywardness, used to have it, and their mother seeing it would seize him and hold him and murmur over him. Strange to see Francis looking at her now out of the jungle!

“What are you going to do with this child, Fanny?” she asked anxiously.

The girl shrugged her shoulders gaily. “He’s all right, long as I don’t decide to go away. Long as that man behaves, that is!” She frowned darkly. “Not many men been to my taste like Frank was, though, I declare. Sometimes when I get thinking about Frank, I just lose my taste for them all. Isn’t he ever coming home? I wouldn’t bother him — just show him the boy and say hello.”

“No,” said Joan quickly. “He’s never coming back — he said so.”

The girl sighed, a deep full sigh.

“Well, I’ve got to be going. Thank you for the dollar again — it sure does help. I keep Frankie the nicest of any of my children.”

But she could not let him go. She felt the small body all over with her hands. It was firm and hard and shapely. She took his hand and it held to hers closely. The very feel of the body was different from Paul’s heaviness, the cling of the hand so different from Paul’s loose, varying clutch. She held the hand a moment and looked at it. She could imagine the smooth fresh skin white. But underneath, the blood ran dark.

“Is your little fellow all right?” asked Fanny. She was staring into a small mirror, rouging her already scarlet mouth.

Joan hesitated. Then she said firmly, “No, he’s not all right — there’s something wrong.”

Fanny lowered her mirror. Her face warmed with pity. “That’s too bad! My children’s all healthy. But I know a girl with a puny baby. She took her to a gospel meeting, and the preacher put his hand on her and she’s better — at least her ma says she’s better. Come on, Frankie — Lem’ll be mad, waiting for us!”

She had to let him go now. She rose and stood watching him walk sturdily through the dust. When she could see them no longer, she sat down beside the road, again desolate. Summer was passing, the corn was ripening, nothing was growing now. Summer after summer, before, she had left everything growing, pushing to bud and blossom and fruit, life full tilt with growing. Now it was stopped, over the whole land, over forest and field. There was no more growing. There was only ripening and slow downward dying. Another autumn was near. She got up and went home to Paul.

She kept remembering what Fanny had told her. There was a woman with a puny baby who took her to a gospel meeting and she got better. In South End the people were very ignorant and full of superstitions. Rose still wrote her long letters which Joan still sent to Mrs. Winters when she finished them, so that they could be read at missionary meeting. Rose said there were heathen women who went to temples if their children fell ill.

“In their blindness and ignorance,” Rose wrote, “they go to their gods and promise new robes or new shoes if the child recovers. It is difficult to persuade them to give up this foolish and wicked practice.”