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When they parted, and she went home along the edge of the tobacco field, the sun was beginning to go down, and from the meadows, veiled in quivering heat, there rose the humming of innumerable insects. The long drought had scorched the leaves of the trees, and even the needles on the pines looked rusty against the metallic blue of the sky. In the fields the summer flowers were dry and brittle, and over the moist places near the spring, clusters of pale blue butterflies, as fragile as flower petals, hung motionless. Only the broomsedge thrived in the furnace of the earth, and sprang up in a running fire over the waste places.
As she went by the tobacco field, her father stopped work, for a moment, and stooped to take a drink of water from the wooden bucket which stood at the end of the furrow. Before she reached him the steaming odour of his body, like that of an overheated ox, floated to her. His face, the colour of red clay, was dripping with sweat, and his shirt of blue jeans, which was open on his broad, hairy chest, was as wet as if he had been swimming. There was nothing human about him, except his fine prophet’s head and the humble dignity of one who has kept in close communion with earth and sky. He had known nothing but toil; he had no language but the language of toil.
“Has the drought done much harm, Pa?” she asked.
With the gourd raised to his lips, Joshua looked round at her. “Middlin’,” he replied hoarsely because of his parched throat. He had removed his hat while he worked, for fear that the wide brim might bruise the tender leaves of the tobacco; but resting now for a minute, he covered his head again from the bladelike rays of the sun.
“You’ll get sunstroke if you go bareheaded,” she said anxiously. “The minister was in the store this morning, and he told me that, if the drought doesn’t break by the end of the week, he’s going to put up prayers for rain in church next Sunday. I wonder if prayer ever brought rain?”
Joshua rolled his eyes toward the implacable sky. “Don’t it say so in the Bible, daughter?”
Dorinda nodded, without pursuing the inquiry. “And what the dry weather doesn’t spoil, the tobacco-worms will. They were as thick as hops yesterday. It’s this way every year unless we have a cool summer; then the tobacco ripens so late that the frost kills it. Why don’t you give up tobacco next year and sow this field in peas or corn? Jason says the best method of farming is to change the crop whenever you can.”
Having drained the last drop of tepid water, Joshua tilted the gourd bottom upward on the rim of the bucket. “I ain’t one fur newfangled ways, honey,” he rejoined stubbornly.
He turned back to his work, and Dorinda went on slowly along the dusty path that skirted the field. “If I had my way,” she was thinking, “I would do everything differently. I’d try all the crops, one after another, until I found out which was best.”
As she approached the house, the mingled scents of drying apples and boiling tomatoes enveloped her; for her mother was working desperately in an effort to save the ripening fruit and vegetables before the sun spoiled them. Boards covered with sliced apples were spread on crude props and decrepit tables, which had been brought out of doors. Above them a crowd of wasps, hornets, flies, and gnats were whirling madly, and every now and then Mrs. Oakley darted out from beneath the scuppernong grapevine and dispersed the delirious swarms with the branch of a locust tree. Though she insisted that the dry weather had “helped her neuralgia,” she was suffering now from a sun headache, and could hope for no relief until evening. Her face, with its look of blended physical pain and spiritual ecstasy, was as parched and ravaged as the drought-stricken landscape.
“You got home early to-day, daughter.”
“Yes, it was too hot to walk, and Jason came by sooner than usual.”
“How does Rose Emily stand the heat?”
“I’m afraid she isn’t getting any better,” Dorinda’s voice trembled. “Jason says she can’t last through another bad hæmorrhage.”
“And all those children,” sighed Mrs. Oakley, pressing one hand over her throbbing eyes and waving the locust branch energetically with the other. “Well, the Lord’s ways are past understanding. I wonder if they will ever be able to do anything for that baby’s clubfoot.”
“I don’t know. Jason would like to operate, but Nathan and Rose Emily won’t let him. They are afraid it may make it worse. Poor Rose Emily. I don’t see how she can be so cheerful.”
“It’s her faith,” said Mrs. Oakley. “She feels she’s saved, and she’s nothing more to worry about. I’m sorry for Nathan too,” she concluded, with the compassion of the redeemed for the heathen. “He’s a good man, but he hasn’t seen the light like Rose Emily.”
“Yes, he’s a good man,” Dorinda assented, “but I never understood how she could marry him.”
Mrs. Oakley dropped the branch, and then picking it up began a more vigorous attack on the cloud of insects. “I declare, it seems to me sometimes that the bugs are going to eat up this place. Did you see your father as you came by?”
“Yes. He was working bareheaded. I told him he would have sunstroke. I wish he would try a different crop next year, but he’s so set in his ways.”
“Well, it’s being set in a rut, I reckon, that keeps him going. If he weren’t set, he’d have stopped long ago. You’ve a mighty high colour, Dorinda. Have you been much in the sun?”
“I walked across from the woods. When we turned in at the red gate I saw Miss Tabitha Snead going up the road in her buggy. Did she stop by to see you?”
“Yes, she brought me a bucket of fresh buttermilk. I’ve got it in the ice-house with the watermelons, so it will be cold for supper. She told me Geneva Ellgood had gone away for the summer.”
“Oh, she went the first of July. I saw her at the station.”
Mrs. Oakley’s gaze was riveted upon an enterprising hornet that had started out from the crowd and was pursuing a separate investigation of the tomato juice on her hands. While she watched it, she swallowed hard as if her throat were too dry. “Miss Tabitha told me that her brother William went up as far as Washington on the train with Geneva. He’s just back last week, and what do you reckon he said Geneva told him on the way up?” She broke off and aimed a fatal blow at the hornet. “What with wasps and bees and hornets and all the thousand and one things that bite and sting,” she observed philosophically, “it’s hard to understand how the Lord ever had time to think of a pest so small as a seed tick. Yet I believe I’d rather have all the other biting things together. I got some seed ticks on me when I went down to the old spring in the pasture yesterday, and they’ve been eating me up ever since.”
“They are always worse in a drought,” Dorinda said, and she asked curiously: “What was it Geneva told Mr. William?”
Mrs. Oakley swallowed again. “Of course I know there ain’t a bit of truth in it,” she said slowly, as if the words hurt her as she uttered them. “But William says Geneva told him she was engaged to marry Jason Greylock. She said he courted her in New York a year ago.”
Dorinda laughed. “Why, how absurd!” she exclaimed. “Miss Tabitha knows we are to be married in October. Hasn’t she watched Miss Seena helping me with my sewing? I was spending the evening over there last week and we talked about my marriage. She knows there isn’t a word of truth in it.”
“Oh, she knows. She said she reckoned Geneva must be crazy. There ain’t any harm in it, but I thought maybe I’d better tell you.”
“I don’t mind,” replied Dorinda, and she laughed again, the exultant laugh of youth undefeated. “Ma,” she asked suddenly, “did you ever want anything very much in your life?”
Startled out of her stony resignation, Mrs. Oakley let fall the branch, and the spinning swarms descended like a veil over the apples. “I’ll have to hang a piece of mosquito netting over these apples,” she said. “There’s some we used for curtains in the spare room. Well, I told you I’d kind of set my heart on your father,” she added in a lifeless tone. “But there’s one thing I can tell you, daughter, mighty few folks in this world ever get what they want.”
“Oh, I mean before you knew Pa, when you were a girl. Didn’t you ever feel that there was only one thing in the world that could make you happy?”
Mrs. Oakley pondered the question. “I reckon like most other people I was afraid of the word happiness,” she replied. “But when I was just a girl, not more than sixteen or seventeen, I felt the call to be a missionary, and I wanted it, I s’pose, more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life. I reckon it started with my favourite hymn, the missionary one. Even as a little child I used to think and dream about India’s coral strand and Afric’s sunny fountains. That was why I got engaged to Gordon Kane. I wasn’t what you’d call in love with him; but I believed the Lord had intended me for work in foreign fields, and it seemed, when Gordon asked me to marry him, that an opportunity had been put in my way. I had my trunk all packed to go to the Congo to join him. I was just folding up my wedding-dress of white organdie when they broke the news to me of his death.” She gasped and choked for a moment. “After that I put the thought of the heathen out of my mind,” she continued when she had recovered her breath. “Your great-grandfather said I was too young to decide whether I had a special vocation or not, and then before I came out of mourning, I met your father, and we were married. For a while I seemed to forget all about the missionary call; but it came back just before Josiah was born, and I’ve had it ever since whenever I’m worried and feel that I’ll have to get away from things, or go clean out of my mind. Then I begin to have that dream about coral strands and palm trees and ancient rivers and naked black babies thrown to crocodiles. When it first came I tried to drive it away by hard work, and that was the way I got in the habit of working to rest my mind. I was so afraid folks would begin to say I was unhinged.”
“Does it still come back?” asked the girl.
“Sometimes in my sleep. When I’m awake I never think of it now, except on missionary Sunday when we sing that hymn.”
“That’s why you enjoy sermons about the Holy Land and far-off places.”
“I used to know all those pictures by heart in your great-grandfather’s books about Asia and Africa. It was a wild streak in me, I reckon,” she conceded humbly, “but with the Lord’s help, I’ve managed to stamp it out.”
A missionary, her mother! For more than forty years this dark and secret river of her dream had flowed silently beneath the commonplace crust of experience. “I wonder if there is any of that wildness in me?” thought the girl, with a sensation of fear, as if the invisible flood were rushing over her.
“Did you ever tell Pa?” she asked.
Mrs. Oakley shook her head. “I never told anybody when I was in my right mind. I don’t believe in telling men more than you’re obliged to. After all, it was nobody’s fault the way things turned out,” she added, with scrupulous justice. “I’m going in now to get that mosquito netting. There’s your father coming. I reckon he’d like a drink of fresh water from the well.”
Following her mother’s glance, Dorinda saw her father’s bowed figure toiling along the path on the edge of the vegetable garden. Far beyond him, where a field had been abandoned because it contained a gall, where nothing would grow, she could just discern the scalloped reaches of the broomsedge, rippling, in the lilac-coloured distance, like still water at sunset. Yes, old Matthew was right. What the broomsedge caught, it never relinquished.
Lifting the wooden bucket from the shelf on the back porch, she poured the stale water over a thin border of portulaca by the steps, and started at a run for the well. By the time Joshua had reached the house, she had brought the bucket of sparkling water, and had a gourd ready for him.
“You must be worn out, Pa. Don’t you want a drink?”
“That I do, honey.” He took the gourd from her, and raised it to his bearded lips where the sweat hung in drops. “Powerful hot, ain’t it?”
“It’s scorching. And you’ve been up since before day. I’ll hunt worms for you to-morrow.” She was thinking, while she spoke, that her father was no longer young, and that he should try to spare himself. But she knew that it was futile to remind him of this. He had never spared himself in her memory, and he would not begin now just because he was old. The pity of it was that, even if he wore himself out in the effort to save his crop from the drought or the worms, there was still the possibility that the first killing frost would come too soon and inflict as heavy a damage.
He shook his head with a chuckle of pride. “Thar’s no use yo’ spilin’ yo’ hands. I’ve hired a parcel of Uncle Toby Moody’s little niggers to hunt ’em in the mornin’. If they kill worms every day till Sunday, I’ve promised ’em the biggest watermelon I’ve got in the ice-house.”
Before going on to feed the horses, he stopped to wash his face in the tin basin on the back porch. “I declar’ I must be gittin’ on,” he remarked cheerfully. “I’ve got shootin’ pains through all my j’ints.”
This was nearer a complaint than any speech she had ever heard from him, and she looked at him anxiously while he dried his face on the roller towel. “You ought to take things more easily, Pa. The way you work is enough to kill anybody.”
“Wall, I’ll take my ease when the first snow falls,” he responded jocosely.
“But you won’t. You work just as hard in winter.”
“Is that so?” He appeared genuinely surprised. “I never calculated! The truth is I’ve got the land on my back, an’ it’s drivin’ me. Land is a hard driver.”
“And a good steed, they say,” she answered. “If you could only get the better of it.”
He smiled wistfully, and she watched the clay-coloured skin above his thick beard break into diverging fissures. “We’ve got to wait for that, I reckon, till my ship comes in. It takes money to get money, daughter.”
While he trudged away to the stable, Dorinda went up to her room and changed into a pink gingham dress which Rose Emily had given her a year ago. The flower-like colour tinged her face when she came downstairs and found her mother, who had dropped from exhaustion, in a rocking-chair on the front porch.
“I felt as if I couldn’t stand the kitchen a minute longer.” Mrs. Oakley glanced wearily at her daughter over the palm leaf fan she was waving. “You ain’t going out before supper, Dorinda?” Her damp hair looked as if it had been plastered over her skull, and in the diminishing light her pallid features resembled a waxen mask.
“I can’t wait for supper,” the girl replied. “I’ve promised to meet Jason over by Gooseneck Creek.”
“Well, don’t stay out too long after dark. The night air ain’t healthy.”
Dorinda laughed. “Jason says that’s as much a superstition as the belief that Aunt Mehitable can make cows go dry. But I shan’t be late. Jason can’t stay out long at night, unless somebody is dying, and then he gets one of the field hands to sleep in the house. It must be terrible over at Five Oaks.”
“I ain’t easy in my mind about your living there with that old man, daughter. He’s been a notorious sinner as far back as I can recollect, though he was a good enough doctor till he went half crazy from drink. But even before his wife died, he kept that bright yellow girl, Idabella, living over there in the old wing of the house. And he’s not only as hard as nails,” she concluded, with final condemnation, “he’s close-fisted as well.”
“Poor Jason can’t help his father’s sins,” Dorinda rejoined loyally. “After all, it’s worse on him than it is on anybody else.” As she turned away from the flagged walk, she resolved that the dissolute old man should not spoil her happiness.
Her path led by the pear orchard, past the vegetable garden, which was fenced off from the tobacco field, and continued in an almost obliterated track through the feathery plumes of the broomsedge. At the end of the barren acres the thin edge of Hoot Owl Woods began, and after she had passed this, there would be only a stretch of sandy road between her and the creek. By the willows she knew the air would be fresh and moist, and she knew also that Jason was waiting for her in the tall blue-eyed grasses.
She went slowly along the path, in a mood so pensive that it might have been merely a reflection of the summer trance. The vagrant breeze, which had roamed for a few minutes at sunset, had died down again with the afterglow. Heat melted like colour into the distance. Not a blade of grass trembled; the curled leaves on the pear trees were limp and heavy; even the white turkeys, roosting in a solitary oak near the orchard, were as motionless as if they were under a spell. As far as she could see there was not a stir or quiver in the landscape, and the only sounds that jarred the leaden silence were the monotonous chirping of the locusts, the discordant croak of a tree-frog, and the staccato shrieks of the little negroes hunting tobacco-flies.
The sun had gone down long ago, and the western sky was suffused with the transparent yellow-green of August evenings. All the light on the earth had vanished, except the faint glow that was still cast upwards by the broomsedge. Wave by wave, that symbol of desolation encroached in a glimmering tide on the darkened boundaries of Old Farm. It was the one growth in the landscape that thrived on barrenness; the solitary life that possessed an inexhaustible vitality. To fight it was like fighting the wild, free principle of nature. Yet they had always fought it. They had spent their force for generations in the futile endeavour to uproot it from the soil, as they had striven to uproot all that was wild and free in the spirit of man.
At the edge of the woods she paused and looked back. There would be light enough later, for the golden rim of a moon, paling as it ascended, was visible through the topmost branches of the big pine in the graveyard. While she stood there she was visited by a swift perception, which was less a thought than a feeling, and less a feeling than an intuitive recognition, that she and her parents were products of the soil as surely as were the scant crops and the exuberant broomsedge. Had not the land entered into their souls and shaped their moods into permanent or impermanent forms? Less a thought than a feeling; but she went on more rapidly toward the complete joy of the moment in which she lived.