Stubble. George Looms
Susie went on inexorably, "That worthless Zibbie Tuttle has been tearing all my good linen and lace to pieces for the past three weeks. And now I suppose I'll have to put up with her for a few weeks longer."
"Yas'm," Zenie replied weakly.
"However"—Miss Susie pronounced it as though it were one syllable—"I suppose I can't help it. What is it? Boy or girl?"
"Boy," said Zenie, and with growing decision, "but hit ain' him I come to see you-all about. No'm. Thank you jes' as much. I jes' aim to tell you I ain' take in no mo' wash. No'm. Zeke he don' want me to take in no mo' wash. No'm."
"Zeke!" Miss Susie's snort was very ladylike. "Zeke!—and what has Zeke to do with what you want to do?"
"We'se ma'ied, ain' we, Mis' Susie?"
This was irrefutable, but more so the changing viewpoint. Zenie had tasted emancipation. Miss Susie shrugged her shoulders and left the room with short hurried steps.
Zenie turned to Mary Louise. "I'm tiahed of the ol' tub. 'Tain' no use my weahin' myself out fu nuthin'. 'Sides, this heah boy a heap o' trubbel." She shook her head doubtfully.
Mary Louise disregarded the confidence. "D'you say Mister Joe—Mister Joe Hooper—named your baby? How could he? He's not even home."
"Yas'm. Yas'm, he is. He come in t' see Zeke this mo'nin'. Mist' Joe lookin' mighty fine."
Mary Louise felt a curious sinking feeling of being shoved into a discard. And then Miss Susie came hurrying back into the room. In her hand she carried a small bundle of red flannel cloth freshly cut from the bolt. Zenie eyed her uncertainly.
"Here. Here's something to keep out the cold—next winter. And you oughtn't to bring it out in such rainy weather." She went to the door and held it open in all finality. And Zenie, with much secret and inner scorning for a ritual so antiquated and a gift so obsolete, could do naught but depart. Miss Susie had somehow managed to keep the advantage, and the two white women watched the departing figure shuffle down the walk, out through the sagging, screaky gate. The clouds had broken in the west and a soft golden radiance suffused the row of maples that lined the fence along the street, and the swelling branches gleamed with promise. Over toward the east a patch of blue sky appeared, and then the tip of a sickle moon thrust itself through and floated entire for a moment on a tiny azure lake. A little breeze came round the corner of the porch from the sunset. It was as soft and warm as an unspoken promise, and it flipped back skirt hems and twisted hair tendrils most inoffensively.
"Come, honey!" Miss Susie said at length, wrenching herself loose from the charm. "It's getting late."
Mary Louise stepped slowly off the porch on to the spongy lawn that stretched out to a summerhouse partly covered with the skeleton of last summer's vines. "Just a minute, Aunt Susie," she answered, without looking back. "I want to see how the hydrangea is coming on."
Miss Susie turned and closed the door behind her.
Bloomfield had a quality of unchangeableness. Even in the dead of winter you could tell with half an eye how it would look bedecked in its summer finery. Down the stretch of years, past many an intervening milepost, it always stood clearly envisioned to its sons and daughters both natural and adopted. There was about four hundred yards of macadam street lined with oaks and maples as old as or older than the meeting house of early Post-Revolutionary days which stood at the cross-roads corner diagonally across from the glary white gasolene station. Half-way down the street, in a cluster of elms, stood the remnants of an ancient tavern, whose front wall, flush with the sidewalk, showed occasional bullet scars on the rough red brownstone surface. Green outside shutters lay inertly back from dull leaded panes which reflected metallically the orange glow of the setting sun, and over the door, which was squat and low and level with the pavement, an ancient four-sided lantern, hung from a bracket of rusty black iron, was gathering cobwebs in disuse. All this lay within Mary Louise's field of vision from the summerhouse and yet she saw it not. She was staring abstractedly at a wary robin that had stopped to rest on a fence post, his beak all frowzy with the débris from a recent drilling. The McCallum house—her father's—stood at the other end of the row of maples on the same side of the street as the meeting house and a hundred yards or so distant. There was quite an expanse of greening lawn in front and to the south, whereon stood the summerhouse, and a tangle of rose bushes hid the decaying board fence which marked the southern boundary. Along the brick sidewalk stretched a line of ageing wooden pickets and about midway in their extent hung the wooden gate with the screak. The house was frame, low and wide-stretching, with an inviting verandah about a cavernous front door that was dark and rarely open. People used the side door into the ell sitting room, and the brick walk leading in a curved sweep to this doorway was free from grass. A high wooden lattice separated the front lawn from the backyard and sheds and stables, and about this lattice sprawled in luxuriant freedom rose vines and honeysuckle, just now faintly budding into life.
Mary Louise stooped and punched a hole in the soft earth with a little stick, unconsciously uprooting a tender shoot thereby. A black beetle came scurrying out of the decaying baseboard at this disturbance and was summarily filliped off into the greening wastes of lawn. Collecting herself, she next inspected the branches of the plant near by and finding sufficient promise of green, straightened up and flung back an escaping wisp of hair, with a sigh.
There was nothing particularly noticeable about Mary Louise unless it might possibly be a certain fine-drawnness. Her eyes, which were brown, had a sort of set focus on the immediate, and there were some fine lines from the corners of her lips to her nose. She was slim and straight, with small hands and feet, and her arms, which were bare to the elbow, might have been soft and round, were it not for a sinuous tension that showed itself in little corded creases right where a girl's arms should be softest and roundest. And her hair had a way of coming down at all times and in all weathers. It had never been decided whether she were pretty or not. That was something that had never mattered—to her, at least.
As she threw back her head she was conscious of a general escaping of hairpins and a loosening of hair. With a frown she dropped her stick and turned her attention from horticulture to coiffure. A low whistle sounded from somewhere beyond the rose vines, and as she turned, with her fingers in her hair and elbows protruding, she saw a man come swinging along the walk past the boundary fence, his eyes sweeping the house from upstairs windows to side porch.
Mary Louise calmly proceeded with her toilette, making no sign. He caught sight of her, paused a moment, and then vaulted stiffly over the picket fence into the yard.
"'Lo," he said.
She had a hairpin in her mouth and returned the greeting with a slight lifting of eyebrows. As her head was lowered and her chin tucked in, this was a sufficiently effective reply.
"Musta rained pretty hard here," he ventured, as, noticing the damage that the damp grass was doing to his trouser hems, he covered the remaining distance between them in a series of violent haphazard leaps.
The hairpin rendered her response unintelligible.
"How d'you find things?" gaining her side, and a bit more calmly.
Mary Louise deliberately tucked in one last recalcitrant wisp and pinned it down, and then turned to him. "Pretty well." Her gaze was level and critical.
"Aunt Sue better?"
She nodded. Then she turned and slowly walked within the inclosure of the summerhouse and sat down. He followed her and stood framed in the doorway.
"What's the gloom?" he asked directly, after a moment of silence.
"Nothing," she said, a little too brightly.
"Not interrupting anything, am I?"
Disregarding this: "What are you doing in Bloomfield?"
He laughed. "Aren't sorry I came, are you? This is Saturday. Times have changed. Maybe you don't know. Proletariat's riding high."
"They're giving you the whole day now?" in a mildly dubious tone.
He