Pearl Buck - Time Is Noon

When she woke it was cold with sundown. A wind had risen out of the nearby wood. Paul was fretting among the leaves, struggling to get up. He certainly tried to get up alone now sometimes. She jumped to her feet and brushed the leaves from her skirt and out of her hair and picked him up and ran into the house with him.

“How I slept!” she called to Mrs. Mark in the other room while she tended him. But Mrs. Mark did not answer. She went to the door and cried merrily, “Still sleeping?” But Mrs. Mark did not answer. She found the matches and lit the candle quickly. The room felt strangely empty. When the candle was lit she saw Mrs. Mark lying in the dusk, her hands neatly folded upon her breast. She was dead.

She laid Paul safely in quilts upon the floor and locking the door upon the two of them, ran through the deepening twilight to find Dr. Crabbe. He was eating his supper of bread and milk and he leaped up when he saw her. But when she cried out her message he sat down again.

“I’ll finish my supper,” he said. “I learned a long time ago not to run if the patient was already dead. Run for the dying — but if it’s too late, finish your supper — that’s sense for the doctor.” He dipped up the last mouthful. “Poor soul,” he said heartily, “I’ve been expecting her to go off suddenly like this any time for months. I’ve been trying to get her to have somebody in, but she always said she hadn’t had much of her own way in life, and she was going to die as she liked. How come you were there, Joan?”

Joan hesitated. Dr. Crabbe had taken her when she was born. She had begun her life naked in his hands. “I’ve left my husband,” she said.

“You have!” said Dr. Crabbe. “You and your upbringing!” He put down his spoon and bellowed, “Nellie!” The housekeeper put her head in the door. “I’m going! Mrs. Mark has died at last.”

“You’ve got rice pudding yet to eat,” cried Nellie belligerently.

“I won’t eat it,” he shouted, struggling into a threadbare brown coat. She disappeared, muttering. “Come on,” he said to Joan. He tramped ahead of her to his small rackety old car and started the engine with a roar. “Left Bart Pounder, eh?” he shouted. She nodded. The engine calmed and the car jumped down the road like a jackrabbit. “I never told you,” he said, “I was married once.”

“No!” she whispered, unbelieving.

“She ran away from me,” he said abruptly, “ran away with a fellow — friend of mine — a fellow I knew in college. He came to visit us — decent chap, too. We’d talked some of being partners. I couldn’t blame her. Smooth-skinned fellow — I’ve always been kind of hairy.”

“She didn’t run away for that,” said Joan.

“How do I know what for? She ran away when we’d been married less than a year. Some women run and some stick it out, I reckon. Your mother stuck it.”

“I couldn’t,” said Joan quickly.

“No. Well,” said Dr. Crabbe, “some women do. It doesn’t matter in the end. Lucille — that was her name — she’s been happy. Every now and then she writes me, wants me to get married again. I say who to, for God’s sake? There isn’t anybody else. Get out that side, Joan. Not that I can do anything, if she’s dead.”

But he went in and washed Mrs. Mark’s dead body carefully while Joan waited outside. He called Joan at last. There was a slip of paper in his hand. “She had this under the pillow — wrote it today, I reckon.”

There were four lines scrawled upon the paper.

Joan Richards, married Pounder, is to have my house and everything in it. In the money box is one hundred and thirty-seven dollars. I write this in full and right mind.

ABBY MARK

“Has she anybody?” asked Joan in a whisper. Mrs. Mark lay stiff and still on the bed.

“Never heard of it,” said Dr. Crabbe, washing his hands.

“It’s not legal,” she argued.

“No, but if anybody shows up and says it isn’t, tell him to come and see me, and I’ll sic Martin Bradley on him. Martin’s beholden to me. I’ve kept him out of trouble for years, and there’s never been anything to have him do back for me.” He dried his hands, and glanced at Mrs. Mark. “Are you scared to stay here till tomorrow with her?” he asked.

Joan looked at Mrs. Mark, neat and composed. “I can’t imagine being afraid of her,” she said.

“No,” said Dr. Crabbe. “She’s been as good as dead for years. Well, I’ll go back and eat my rice pudding.” He seized his dilapidated leather bag and trudged away.

So she had had no time to write the letter to Roger Bair. But in the night she woke, and the thought of it was sweet. It lay ahead of her, like a treat to a child, a pleasure to be fulfilled. Even if he never answered her, she would have written the letter and signed her name, Joan Richards. He need not know her life. She would simply be herself to him, Joan Richards. Behind the closed door Mrs. Mark lay dead, but she was not afraid. She would like to have gone in and thanked Mrs. Mark if she could. “Thank you for giving me a house, a home. You’ve made me safe.” It seemed impossible to bear it if there was no way to thank Mrs. Mark in the power of her gratitude. But Mrs. Mark would have been the last person to endure thanks. She could imagine Mrs. Mark opening her small dead eyes to say, “Get along — don’t bother me. Don’t you see I’m dead?” and instantly closing them again. It was like Mrs. Mark to give her all she had and then die before she could be thanked. She drifted into sleep.

In the morning when Mr. Blum came with his two men she had everything ready. She had picked a bouquet of pale purple wild asters and goldenrod, and placed them by the bed, and she had opened the windows to sun and wind. There was no odor in the room. When she had opened the door she had half expected the remembered smell of death. But Mrs. Mark had not died suddenly in health and fullness. Her body was spare and dry, bone clean, withered without decay. She lay exactly as she was. Mr. Blum put on his gloves and his men set a long box beside the bed.

“Dr. Crabbe’s given full directions,” he said unctuously. “You are the sole mourner, ma’am, I understand?”

“She had no one,” said Joan.

“Very nice, I’m sure,” said Mr. Blum. “I remember your mother so well — beautiful in death, I said of her. I don’t remember the name of the gentleman you married, Miss Richards.”

She did not answer, and he forgot her. “Easy there, now, men, feet first — There she is, comfortable as a baby!”

He fitted the lid down exactly and took Mrs. Mark away.

It was impossible to feel sad. She was ashamed that she could not feel sad. She was not sad even when she stood in the corner of the churchyard beside the grave. About the narrow hole stood a few old people — Mr. Pegler, Mr. and Mrs. Billings, Miss Kinney, Dr. Crabbe and Mrs. Parsons. They stood listening to the new minister’s quick abstracted voice. He had not known Mrs. Mark except as a rude old woman who pretended to be asleep when he went to see her, and now he made haste to bury her.

They stood about him in the bright afternoon, old and wrinkled and shabby. Only Dr. Crabbe looked sturdy, stocky and rough like a thick-trunked tree whose top had been early chopped away and the wound long healed. His curly white hair blew in the breeze as he held his hat in his hands. Miss Kinney stood a little away from them all, a wraith. She talked to herself, her lips moving, smiling. Catching Joan’s eyes she waved her hand gaily across the grave and then remembered where she was and blushed an ashen pink. Her face was more than ever like a small withered flower at the end of a long stalk.

It was over very quickly. Mrs. Parsons sang, her voice rising feeble and shallow in the autumn air. “For all the saints who from their labors rest,” she sang. Joan listened, gazing across the grass to where her mother and father lay. Mrs. Mark would have hated such singing. “Don’t call me a saint, for pity’s sake,” she would have snorted if she could.