VIII
“Ebenezer Green?”
“Dat’s me.”
“Peter Plumtree?”
“Dat’s me.”
“Toby Jackson?”
“Dat’s me, Miss D’rindy.”
“Rapidan Finley?”
“Dat’s me.”
She was calling the names of the field hands, and while she went over the list, her mind was busily assorting and grouping the faces before her. Yes, she knew them all. Ever since she could remember they had been a part of the country; she had passed them in the road every week, or seen them in the vegetable patches in front of their cabins. Like her mother, she was endowed with an intuitive understanding of the negroes; she would always know how to keep on friendly terms with that immature but not ungenerous race. Slavery in Queen Elizabeth County had rested more lightly than elsewhere. The religion that made people hard to themselves, her mother had often pointed out, made them impartially just to their dependents; and like most generalizations, this one was elastic enough to cover the particular instance. It was true that the coloured people about Pedlar’s Mill were as industrious and as prosperous as any in the South, and that, within what their white neighbours called reasonable bounds, there was, at the end of the nineteenth century, little prejudice against them. Here and there a thriftless farmer, such as Ike Pryde or Adam Snead, would display a fitful jealousy of Micajah Green, who had turned a few barren acres into a flourishing farm; but the better class of farmers preferred the intelligent coloured neighbour to the ignorant white one. Both were social inferiors; but where the matter was one solely of farming, the advantages would usually fall to the more diligent. As for the negroes themselves, they lived contentedly enough as inferiors though not dependents. In spite of the influence of Aunt Mehitable Green, they had not yet learned to think as a race, and the individual negro still attached himself instinctively to the superior powers.
“I remember you well, Ebenezer,” she said; “you have a sister, Mary Joe. I want her to help look after my henhouse.” She laughed as she spoke because she knew that the negroes would work twice as well for an employer who laughed easily; but she wondered if they detected the hollowness of the sound. It occurred to her, as she looked at the doomed broomsedge across the road, that farming, like love, might prove presently to be no laughing matter.
Turning back toward the house, she met her mother, who was coming out with a basin of cornmeal dough for the chickens. The sun had just risen, and there was a sparkling freshness over the earth and in the luminous globe of the sky. She had slept well, and with the morning weakness had vanished. The wild part of her had perished like burned grass; out of nothing, into nothing, that was the way of it. Now, armoured in reason, she was ready to meet life on its own terms.
“Do you know where Rufus is?” she asked. “I want him to see the hands start work in the eighteen-acre field.”
Mrs. Oakley shook her head. “I don’t know. I thought he was going to finish ploughing the tobacco field, but I saw him start off right after breakfast with Ike Pryde. It seems they found honey in a big oak over by Hoot Owl Woods, and they’ve set off with an axe to cut down the tree.”
“Oh, the fool, the fool!” Dorinda exclaimed, and determined that she would expect nothing more from Rufus.
“Well, you know how men are,” returned her mother, with unpolemical wisdom. “They’ll seize any excuse to stop work and cut down a tree.”
“I do know. But to cut down a big oak, and for honey!”
The old woman scattered dough on the ground with an impartial hand. “Rufus has got a mighty sweet tooth,” she remarked.
“So has Pa, but you never found him making an excuse to stop work.”
“I know. Your Pa always put his wishes aside. There ain’t many men you can say that of.” Though she sighed over the fact, she accepted it as one of the natural or acquired privileges of the male; and she felt that these were too numerous to justify a special grievance against a particular one. Even acquiescence with a sigh is easier than argument when one is worn out with neuralgia and worse things. A frost had blighted her impulse of opposition, and this seemed to Dorinda one of the surest signs that her mother was failing. There were moments when it would have been a relief to be contradicted.
“Well, I’ll have to do it myself. Because I am a woman the hands will expect me to shirk, and I must show them that I know what I am about.”
“I’ll help you all I can, daughter.”
“I know you will.” Dorinda’s conscience reproached her for her impatience. “You will be wonderful with the hens, and I’ll get Ebenezer’s sister Mary Joe to help you. She must be fourteen or fifteen.”
“Yes, she’s a real bright girl,” Mrs. Oakley remarked, without enthusiasm. She had scarcely closed her eyes all night, and bright coloured girls, even when they helped in the henhouse, left her indifferent. “I’m going down in the garden to see if I can find a mess of turnip salad,” she added after a pause, in which she scooped the last remnant of dough out of the basin and flung it into the midst of the brood of chickens.
“Let me go while you sit with Pa. I was coming in to see about him before I went down to the field where they are working.”
Mrs. Oakley shook her head. “No, I can’t keep still in the daytime. It’s hard enough having to do it at night. Fluvanna couldn’t get over early to-day; but she sent her little sister Ruby, and she is keeping the flies off your father’s face. That’s all anybody can do for him now.”
“Well, I’ll speak to him anyway. Then I’ll see after the hands.”
Mrs. Oakley raised her eyes to her daughter’s face. “You’ve brought back a heap of vim, Dorinda,” she said dispassionately, “but I reckon you’ve been away from the farm too long to know what it’s like.”
She put the basin down on a bench, picked up a blue gingham sunbonnet she had laid there when she came out, and started, with her nervous walk, to the garden at the end of the yard.
In her father’s room, Dorinda found a small coloured girl, in a pink calico slip, perched on a high stool by the bedside. Her bare feet clutched the round of the stool; her eyes, like black beads, roved ceaselessly from the wall to the floor; and her thin monkey-like hand waved a palm-leaf fan to and fro over Joshua’s immovable features.
“Good morning, Ruby. Has Pa moved since you’ve been here?”
“Gwamawnin’. Naw’m, he ain’ don ez much ez bat ’is eyelids.”
Dorinda caught the fan away from her. “Don’t you go to school in the mornings?” she inquired, after a pause in which she tried to think of something to say.
“Dar ain’ none.”
“Aren’t you learning to read and write?”
“Yes’m. Fluvanna she knows, en she’s larnin’ me.”
“Well, run away now, and come back when I call you.”
The little girl ran out gladly, and Dorinda took her place on the stool and brushed the flies away with slow, firm waves of the fan. Immediately, as soon as she had settled herself, something of her mother’s restlessness rushed over her, and she felt a hysterical longing to get up and move about or to go out into the air. “If I feel this way,” she thought, “what must it mean to poor Pa to lie there like that?”
Since the hour of her return he had not appeared to recognize her. He was beyond reach of any help, of any voice, of any hand, lost in some mental wilderness which was more impenetrable than the jungles of earth. Though he was apparently not unconscious, he was beyond all awareness. His eyes never left the great pine, and once when his wife had started to close the shutters, a frown had gathered on his forehead and lingered there until she had desisted and turned away from the window. Then his face had cleared and the look of hard-earned rest had returned to his features.
While she sat there, Dorinda began counting imaginary chickens, a method of collecting her thoughts which she had learned as a child from Aunt Mehitable. She was still counting the fictitious flock when Joshua opened his eyes and looked straight up at her with an expression of startled wonder and surprise, as if he were on the point of speaking.
“What is it?” she asked, bending nearer.
His lips moved, and for an instant she was visited by an indescribable sensation. He was so near to her that she seemed, in the same moment, never to have known him before and yet to know him completely. She felt that he was trying to speak some words that would make everything clear and simple between them, that would explain away all the mistakes and misunderstandings of life.
“What is it?” she repeated, breathless with hope.
Again his lips moved slightly; but no sound came, and the look of wonder and surprise faded slowly out of his face. His eyes closed, and a minute later his heavy breathing told her that he had relapsed into stupor.
“I must ask him when he wakes,” she thought. “I must ask him what he wanted to tell me.”
After dinner she hunted for Rufus again, but he had not, it appeared, returned to the farm.
“I reckon he went home with Ike Pryde,” his mother said. “He’s been seeing too much of Ike, and I’m afraid it ain’t good for him. The last time Almira was over here she told me Ike was drinking again.” She was worried and anxious, and the twitching was worse in her face. “I declare I don’t see how Almira can put up with him,” she said.
“Then I’ll have to harness Dan myself,” Dorinda replied. “I’ve got on my best dress, so I hoped Rufus would drag out the buggy. I’m going over to Green Acres.”
“I was wondering what you’d put on your blue poplin for,” Mrs. Oakley returned. “I’d think that hanging veil would get in your way; but if you’re going over to the Ellgoods’, I’m glad you dressed up. Fluvanna, I reckon, will hitch up the buggy for you.”
Fluvanna, emerging from the kitchen, offered eagerly to look for Dan in the pasture. “He ain’t got away,” she said, “for I saw him at the bars jest a minute ago.” She had gone to school whenever there was one for coloured children in the neighbourhood, and though her speech was still picturesque, she had discarded the pure dialect of Aunt Mehitable and her generation. “Don’t you worry, Miss Dorinda,” she added, hurrying down the path to the pasture.
“I tell Fluvanna that her sunny disposition is worth a fortune,” Mrs. Oakley remarked. “She never gets put out about anything.”
“I believe she’ll be a great comfort to us,” Dorinda returned thoughtfully. She liked the girl’s pleasant brown face, as glossy as a chestnut, her shining black eyes, and her perfect teeth, which showed always, for she never stopped smiling. “Just to have anybody look intelligent is a relief.”
“Well, you’ll find that Fluvanna has plenty of sense. Of course she slights things when she can, but she is always willing and good-humoured. You don’t often find a hard worker, white or black, with a sunny temper.”
They were still discussing her when Fluvanna drove up in the buggy and descended to offer the dilapidated reins to Dorinda.
“Thank you, Fluvanna. I declare this buggy looks as if it hadn’t been washed off for a year.”
Fluvanna, who had not observed the mud, turned her beaming eyes on the buggy and perceived that it was dirty.
“I’ll come over the first thing in the mawnin’ an’ wash it for you,” she promised. “There ain’t a bit of use dependin’ on Mr. Rufus. He won’t do nothin’.”
Dorinda gathered up the reins, settled herself on the bagging which covered the seat, and turned Dan’s head kindly but firmly away from the pasture.
“I wonder if things used to look as dilapidated, only I didn’t notice them so much,” she thought.