Pearl Buck - Time Is Noon

The sun would swing its way around the world to bring another day. No cry or prayer of hers could stay or hasten the measure of the day and night. She knew it now and accepted all that had been her life. What had happened to her, she accepted. What was to come, she had strength to accept. She went steadily on, in freedom and alone, carrying her own burden.

SHE LIFTED THE LATCH very softly, the cottage was dark, a dark small solid shape in the faintly lighter surrounding darkness. Mrs. Mark must be asleep. But she was not. Her voice came cutting small and thin out of the darkness.

“Who’s that?”

“It’s only I — Joan — back again.”

“What are you back for at this time of night?”

She heard Mrs. Mark fumbling for matches, and there was a scratch and a flaring light. In it Mrs. Mark’s wizened face peered out, a jumble of lines.

“My soul, Joan, what have you got there?”

She stood holding Paul, her bundle on her arm. “I’ve left my — the house — the Pounders’ house. I can’t go back. If I can just stay the night with you—”

Mrs. Mark was lighting the candle beside her bed. “My soul and body,” she was muttering, “my soul and body! There’s no peace.”

“He’s a quiet child,” said Joan quickly.

“I don’t mean him,” said Mrs. Mark. “Come on in. There are sheets in the bureau drawer and quilts in that old box. I don’t know where you can sleep.”

“I’ll sleep in the other room, on that settee — I’ll manage.”

She was desperately tired. Paul was so heavy, always inert in her arms. She laid him down on the foot of the bed. Mrs. Mark peered at him.

“He’s a big child to carry. What did he do — go to sleep?”

She had better speak at once, tell it definitely and clearly. “He’ll never be right — he’s born wrong.”

“Oh, my soul,” Mrs. Mark whispered. “Give him to me.”

Joan lifted Paul and laid him across the dead legs. Mrs. Mark held him in her sticks of arms and stared at him with her small inscrutable eyes, muttering over and over, “Oh, my soul — my soul—” Her face was gathered into a knot of pity.

Joan sat down on the bed and suddenly the old sobbing began to rise in her, the old dry aching sobbing. But she held it in her throat, choking, dry. No use crying. There was really no use crying. She set her teeth. “Don’t feel sorry for me,” she said. “I can just manage if you don’t feel sorry for me.”

“I’m not being sorry for you,” Mrs. Mark answered. “What’s the good? Well, get along and fix your bed. It’s late. There ought to be milk and bread in the kitchen. I heard the delivery man leaving them tonight.”

She lay back and Joan took Paul from her and undressed him for the night. She made the bed upon the couch in the small sitting room and laid him there. Then she went back to Mrs. Mark and took her scrawny yellow hand. “Shall I tell why I left that house? I feel as if I ought to tell you, coming here like this.”

Mrs. Mark’s hand was like a clutch of wires, thin, stiff, dry.

“It doesn’t matter to me,” she said. “I gave up wanting to know why long ago. What happens happens. You came away because you had to, I reckon.”

“Yes, I had to,” she said.

“It’s why we all mostly do the way we do. Get along now. I’m ready for my sleep.”

She blew out the candle and Joan felt her way out of the dark room.

When she woke in the morning it was light. She woke in light and the small stone house was full of a warm peace. She got up and bathed and dressed Paul freshly and fed him and then when she was dressed she opened the door quietly. But Mrs. Mark was not asleep. She had brushed her hair and tidied her sheets about her and put on her bedsack and was lying with her eyes fixed upon the door.

“I wasn’t sure I hadn’t dreamed it,” she said in her high small voice. “These days I take to dreaming. There are times when I feel my old man in the house and my girl that died when she was six.”

“I’m no dream,” said Joan, smiling. No, this morning was real. The sun was streaming in the windows. She felt strong and actual, able for whatever was ahead. “Now your breakfast. I shall bring you hot water and when you’ve washed you shall have a tray. I’ll not ask you what you want — I’ll just bring it.”

She straightened the bed and put the table to rights. Under the bed Mrs. Mark had had drawers put so that she could reach them, where she kept her things, the clothes she needed, her comb and brush.

“Not going to give me my choice, eh?” she grunted, her small sad eyes amiable.

“No,” said Joan cheerfully. “You’re always bossing other folks, you know.”

She busied herself, fetching the water, turning her back while Mrs. Mark struggled. She heard her panting and dragging at her legs, and she could not bear it. “Why don’t you let me help?” she said. “I took care of my mother so long.”

“I guess I can still take care of my own two legs,” said Mrs. Mark sharply.

“I’ll get your tray ready then.”

In the small kitchen she fed wood into the stove. She tried to realize that she was a woman who had left her husband the day before. Was this how such a woman felt? But she felt as one feels who has stepped out of stumbling through a darkly shadowed wood into a meadow in the morning light. The very sunshine was different. She had so often risen in the cold shadows of that house and gone downstairs into the cold silence. Bart was always there to overpower her spirit. She knew him for what he was, and daily she had determined to be as she would. Yet because he was never changed he could overpower her every mood. She could never be freely happy when he was near. If she was for a moment happy, he was there like the knowledge of Paul — a dark weight.

But Paul was still her baby. He did not ask anything of her, only to be fed and cared for. Her heart flew out of her in tenderness to Paul, who never asked anything of her, and she dropped the stove lid and ran to fetch him. She propped him with quilts in a corner of the kitchen and made laughter over him, talking to him. This morning she could not be sad. He was her little boy anyhow. The fire was crackling in the wood stove and the bottom of the kettle began to sizzle. The room was full of sunshine.

If I lived here I’d hang yellow curtains, she thought in the midst of everything. She loved this small, sparsely furnished house. Perhaps Mrs. Mark would let her stay. She could make a garden and buy a cow and then if she could make just a little money … Her mind, freed, was dancing about the house like a beam of light. She could do anything. She could find a way. She would write to Francis. No — she paused and stood still, the bread knife in her hand, pressing into the loaf — she thought of Roger Bair. Even after all these years why shouldn’t she write to Roger Bair and ask him how a woman with little children could make some money? She stopped again above the eggs she was frying, her spoon poised. She hadn’t said a word to Mrs. Mark about Rose — about Rose’s children. She was leaping ahead as she always did without thinking how she was going to do the thing she wanted, seeing it done. She was always seeing things done. She lifted the eggs and put them on a plate with the bacon and ran into the wasted garden and found a spray of small scarlet leaves from the top of a woodbine vine and laid it upon the white cloth of the tray and poured the coffee. It was all ready. “There!” she said, setting it before Mrs. Mark with delight.

Mrs. Mark looked up at her. She had made herself very neat in a clean high-necked nightgown. Her wrinkled face was like a triangle of cracked old ivory, her small black eyes peering deeply out. She looked at the tray and wet her withered bluish lips.