Now in November. Josephine W. Johnson
near and too familiar are clear and strange now. It has been a long year, longer and more full of meaning than all those ten years that went before it. There were nights when I felt that we were moving toward some awful and hopeless hour, but when that hour came it was broken up and confused because we were too near, and I did not even quite realize that it had come.
I can look back now and see the days as one looking down on things past, and they have more shape and meaning than before. But nothing is really finished or left behind forever.
The years were all alike and blurred into one another, and the mind is a sort of sieve or quicksand, but I remember the day we came and the months afterward well enough. Too well. The roots of our life, struck in back there that March, have a queer resemblance to their branches.
The hills were bare then and swept of winter leaves, but the orchards had a living look. They were stained with the red ink of their sap and the bark tight around them as though too small to hold the new life of coming leaves. It was an old place and the land had been owned by Haldmarnes since the Civil War, but when we came no one had been living there for years. Only tenant farmers had stayed awhile and left. The land was stony, but with promise, and sheep grew fat in the pastures where rock ledges were worn back, white like stone teeth bared to frost. There were these great orchards planted up and down the hills, and when Mother saw them that first day she thought of having to gather the crop and haul the apples up this steepness, but she only said a good harvest ought to come, and the trees looked strong though old. “No market even if they bear,” I remember Father said; and then,—“it’s mortgaged land.”
Nobody answered, and the wagon went on groaning and squeaking in the ruts. Merle and I watched the jays, blue-flickering through the branches, and heard their screams. The elms were thick with buds and brown-webbed across the sky. It was beautiful and barren in the pastures, and the walnuts made a kind of lavender-colored shadow, very clean. Things were strange and unrelated and made no pattern that a person could trace easily. Here was the land and the spring air full of snow melting, and yet the beginning of fear already,—this mortgage, and Father consumed in himself with sour irritation and the future dread. But Mother sat there very quiet. He had not told her the place was mortgaged, and the land at least, she had thought, was unencumbered, and sanctuary though everything else was gone. But even in the moment when she saw that this, too, was uncertain and shifting ground, something she always had—something I didn’t know then and may never know—let her take it quietly. A sort of inner well of peace. Faith I guess it was. She stood a great deal and put up with much, but all without doubt or bitterness; and that she was there, believing and not shaken, or not seeming so at least, was all that we needed then to know. We could forget for the time this sense of impermanence and doubt which had come up from his words. Merle was ten then and I was fourteen, and it seemed to us that some great adventure had begun. But Father looked only at the old, year-rotted barns.
He wasn’t a man made for a farmer, Arnold Haldmarne, although brought up on the land when a boy, and now returning to acres not different much from the ones he used to plough. He hadn’t the resignation that a farmer has to have,—that resignation which knows how little use to hope or hate, or pray for even a bean before its appointed time. He’d left the land when he was still sixteen and gone to Boone, making himself a place in the lumber factories there. He’d saved and come up hard and slow like an oak or ash that grows with effort but is worth much more than any poplar shooting two feet high in a season. But now he was chopped back down to root again. It’s a queer experience for a man to go through, to work years for security and peace, and then in a few months’ time have it all dissolve into nothing; to feel the strange blankness and dark of being neither wanted nor necessary any more. Things had come slow to him and gone fast, and it made him suspicious even of the land.
We hauled our beds here in the wagon with us. The car was sold and most of the furniture gone too. We left our other life behind us as if it had not been. Only the part that was of and in us, the things we’d read and the things remembered, came with us, and the books we’d gathered through three generations but could not sell because earth was knee-deep and wading in books already. We left a world all wrong, confused, and shouting at itself, and came here to one that was no less hard and no less ready to thwart a man or cast him out, but gave him something, at least, in return. Which was more than the other one would do.
The house was old even then, not log, but boards up and down as barns are made. It was overgrown with the trumpet and wild red ivy-vines, twisted and heavy on the porch. Wild grapes were black across the well in autumn and there was an arbor of tame ones over the pump. Father found an old thrush’s nest hunched up in the leafless vines and took it down so that Merle wouldn’t mistake it for a new nest in spring and keep waiting for birds that never came. She filled it full of round stones and kept it up on the mantelpiece, maybe because she thought that the fire would hatch stone birds,—I didn’t know. She was full of queer notions and things that never existed on earth. She seemed older sometimes than even Kerrin who was born five years ahead.
That first spring when everything was new to us I remember in two ways; one blurred with the worry and fear like a grey fog where Father was—a fog not always visible but there, and yet mixed with it this love we had for the land itself, changing and beautiful in a thousand ways each hour. I remember the second day we came was stormy with fist-big flakes of snow and a northwest wind that came down across the hills, rattling the windows until the panes were almost broken, and the snow smacked wet against the glass. We thought it an omen of what the winters here would be, but strangely it was not cold afterward, even with almost two feet of snow along the ground, and a wind that shook the hickories from branch to root and sent a trembling down through the oaks. Merle and I went down by a stony place in the woods where the rocks shelved out to make a fall, and saw the air-bubbles creeping under the ice, wriggling away with a quick and slippery dart like furtive tadpoles. Down near the crawfish shallows the slime ferns were green and fresh and the sun so hot that we walked with our coats swung open and stuffed our caps away. Much of everything, it seemed afterward, was like that beginning,—changing and so balanced between wind and sun that there was neither good nor evil that could be said to outweigh the other wholly. And even then we felt we had come to something both treacherous and kind, which could be trusted only to be inconstant, and would go its own way as though we were never born.
IT WAS cold that first March and the ploughing late, I remember. There are times out of those early years that I have never forgotten; words and days and things seen that lie in the mind like stone. Our lives went on without much event, and the things that happened rise up in the mind out of all proportion because of the sameness that lay around them. That first spring was like in a way to most that followed, but marked with a meaning of its own.
Kerrin complained of the raw coldness and the house was hard to keep warm enough, but I remember one day of God that came toward the last, when we lay down carefully on the grass so as not to smash the bluets, and smelled their spring-thin scent. The hills were a pale and smoky green that day, and all colors ran into and melted with each other, the red of crab branches dissolving down into lavender of shadows, but the apples had bark of bloody red and gold. We went up where the old barn was then, the one grey-shingled with sagging beams—that was in its age like a risen part of the earth itself. We ate our lunch there on the south side of its wall and sucked in the hot spring sun and the pale waterwashed blue along beyond the trees, and even Kerrin seemed less alien and odd. Dad had too much to do and could not waste his time in coming, for the getting enough to live on and eat was work sufficient itself, and if a man thought to put anything aside or to pile it up for another time, it kept his nose in the furrow and his hand on the plough even while he slept. Mother stayed back with him to eat, and we thought they were probably glad to be alone one meal at least, without all our eyes staring them up and down and noting the things they said, to remember and repeat should they ever at any time contradict themselves.
We sat on the hill and watched a bluebird searching the trees and along the fence posts, and could see a long way off into the bottom land where the creek was and the maples that followed the water, long-branched and bending down to its pools. There was a shrike in the crab branches and Kerrin said they were