Ellen Glasgow - The Ancient Law

THOUGH it was six days since Daniel Ordway had come out of prison, he was aware, when he reached the brow of the hill, and stopped to look back over the sunny Virginia road, that he drank in the wind as if it were his first breath of freedom. At his feet the road dropped between two low hills beyond which swept a high, rolling sea of broomsedge; and farther still – where the distance melted gradually into the blue sky – he could see not less plainly the New York streets through which he had gone from his trial and the walls of the prison where he had served five years. Between this memory and the deserted look of the red clay road there was the abrupt division which separates actual experience from the objects in a dream. He felt that he was awake, yet it seemed that the country through which he walked must vanish presently at a touch. Even the rough March wind blowing among the broomsedge heightened rather than diminished the effect of the visionary meeting of earth and sky.

As he stood there in his ill-fitting clothes, with his head bared in the sun and the red clay ground to fine dust on his coarse boots, it would have been difficult at a casual glance to have grouped him appropriately in any division of class. He might have been either a gentleman who had turned tramp or a tramp who had been born to look a gentleman. Though he was barely above medium height, his figure produced even in repose an impression of great muscular strength, and this impression was repeated in his large, regular, and singularly expressive features. His face was square with a powerful and rather prominent mouth and chin; the brows were heavily marked and the eyes were of so bright a blue that they lent an effect which was almost one of gaiety to his smile. In his dark and slightly coarsened face the colour of his eyes was intensified until they appeared to flash at times like blue lights under his thick black brows. His age was, perhaps, forty years, though at fifty there would probably be but little change recorded in his appearance. At thirty one might have found, doubtless, the same lines of suffering upon his forehead and about his mouth.

As he went on over some rotting planks which spanned a stream that had gone dry, the road he followed was visible as a faded scar in a stretch of impoverished, neutral-toned country – the least distinctive and most isolated part of what is known in Virginia as "the Southside." A bleached monotony was the one noticeable characteristic of the landscape – the pale clay road, the dried broomsedge, and even the brownish, circular-shaped cloud of smoke, which hung over the little town in the distance, each contributing a depressing feature to a face which presented at best an unrelieved flatness of colour. The single high note in the dull perspective was struck by a clump of sassafras, which, mistaking the mild weather for a genial April, had flowered tremulously in gorgeous yellow.

The sound of a wagon jolting over the rough road, reached him presently from the top of the hill, and as he glanced back, he heard a drawling curse thrown to the panting horses. A moment later he was overtaken by an open spring wagon filled with dried tobacco plants of the last season's crop. In the centre of the load, which gave out a stale, pungent odour, sat a small middle-aged countryman, who swore mild oaths in a pleasant, jesting tone. From time to time, as the stalks beneath him were jostled out of place, he would shift his seat and spread out his short legs clad in overalls of blue jean. Behind him in the road the wind tossed scattered and damaged leaves of tobacco.

When the wagon reached Ordway, he glanced over his shoulder at the driver, while he turned into the small grass-grown path amid the clumps of sassafras.

"Is that Bernardsville over there?" he asked, pointing in the direction of the cloud of smoke.

The wagon drew up quickly and the driver – who showed at nearer view to be a dirty, red-bearded farmer of the poorer class – stared at him with an expression which settled into suspicion before it had time to denote surprise.

"Bernardsville! Why, you've come a good forty miles out of your road. That thar's Tappahannock."

"Tappahannock? I hadn't heard of it."

"Mebbe you ain't, but it never knowed it."

"Anything going on there? Work, I mean?"

"The biggest shippin' of tobaccy this side o' Danville is goin' on thar. Ever heard o' Danville?"

"I know the name, but the tobacco market is about closed now, isn't it? The season's over."

The man's laugh startled the waiting horses, and lifting their heads from a budding bush by the roadside, they moved patiently toward Tappahannock.

"Closed? Bless you, it never closes – Whoa! thar, won't you, darn you? To be sure sales ain't so brisk to-day as they war a month back, but I'm jest carryin' in my leetle crop to Baxter's warehouse."

"It isn't manufactured, then – only bought and sold?"

"Oh, it's sold quick enough and bought, too. Baxter auctions the leaf off in lots and it's shipped to the factories in Richmond an' in Danville. You ain't a native of these parts, I reckon?"

"A native – no? I'm looking for work."

"What sort of work? Thar's work an' work. I saw a man once settin' out in an old field doin' a picture of a pine tree, an' he called it work. Wall, wall, if you're goin' all the way to Tappahannock, I reckon I kin give you a lift along. Mebbe you kin pick up an odd job in Baxter's warehouse – thar's a sayin' that he feeds all the crows in Tappahannock."

He drove on with a chuckle, for Ordway had declined the proffered "lift," and the little cloud of dust raised by the wagon drifted slowly in the direction of the town.

A mile farther on Ordway found that as the road approached Tappahannock, the country lost gradually its aspect of loneliness, and the colourless fields were dotted here and there with small Negro cabins, built for the most part of unbarked pine logs laid roughly cross-wise to form square enclosures. Before one of these primitive dwellings a large black woman, with a strip of checked blue and white gingham bound about her head, was emptying a pail of buttermilk into a wooden trough. When she saw Ordway she nodded to him from the end of the little path, bordered by rocks, which led from the roadside to the single stone step before her cabin door.

As he watched the buttermilk splash into the trough, Ordway remembered, with a spasm of faintness, that he had eaten nothing since the day before, and turning out of the road, he asked the woman for a share of the supper that she gave the pigs.

"Go 'way, honey, dis yer ain' fit'n fur you," she replied, resting the pail under her arm against her rolling hip, "I'se des' thowin' hit ter de hawgs."

But when he had repeated his request, she motioned to a wooden bench beside a scrubby lilac bush on which a coloured shirt hung drying, and going into the single room inside, brought him a glass of buttermilk and a piece of corn bread on a tin plate. While he ate hungrily of the coarse food a half-naked Negro baby, covered with wood ashes, rolled across the threshold and lay sprawling in the path at his feet.

After a little rambling talk the woman went back into the cabin, where she whipped up cornmeal dough in an earthenware bowl, turning at intervals to toss a scrap or two to a red and white cock that hovered, expectant, about the doorway. In the road a covered wagon crawled by, and the shadow it threw stretched along the path to the lilac bush where the coloured shirt hung drying. The pigs drank the buttermilk from the trough with loud grunts; the red and white cock ventured, alert and wary, across the threshold; and the Negro baby, after sprawling on its stomach in the warm earth, rolled over and lay staring in silence at the blue sky overhead.