XIII
For the second time in her life Mrs. Oakley allowed herself to be put to bed without protest. She hung limp and cold when they placed her in a chair, and watched her children with vacant eyes while Rufus piled fresh logs on the fire and Dorinda brought bottles of hot water wrapped in her orange shawl. When the grey flannelette nightgown was slipped over her shoulders, the old woman spoke for the first time since she had entered the house.
“Dorinda, the Lord gave me strength.”
“They have killed her,” the girl thought resentfully; but she said only, “Now you must get to bed as quick as you can.”
Mrs. Oakley stared up at her with eyes that were wind-swept in their bleakness. Her face looked flattened and drawn to one side, as if some tremendous pressure had just been removed. “I reckon I’d better,” she answered listlessly.
“You must try to eat something. Fluvanna is making you some tea and toast.”
“I ain’t sick enough for tea.”
“Then I’ll make you a cream toddy. There’s some nice cream I saved for you.”
While Dorinda was speaking she leaned over the bed and wrapped the clammy feet in the orange shawl. “Can you feel the hot water bottles?” she asked. The feet that she warmed so carefully were as stiff already, she told herself in terror, as if they belonged to a corpse. Neither the hot water nor the blazing fire could put any warmth into the shivering body.
“Yes, I feel them, but I’m sort of numbed.”
“Now I’ll make the toddy. I’ve got some whiskey put away where Rufus couldn’t find it. If Fluvanna brings your supper, try to eat the egg anyway.”
“I’ll try, but I feel as if I couldn’t keep it down,” Mrs. Oakley replied submissively.
Flames were leaping up the chimney, and the shadows had melted into the cheerful light. When Dorinda returned with the cream toddy, Mrs. Oakley drank it eagerly, and with the stimulant of the whiskey in her veins, she was able to sit up in bed and eat the supper Fluvanna had prepared. It was long after the coloured girl’s hour for going home, but the excitement had braced her to self-sacrifice, and she had offered to stay on for the night. “I can make up a pallet jest as easy as not in yo’ Ma’s room,” she said to Dorinda, “an’ I’ll fix Mr. Rufus’ breakfast for him, so he can catch the train befo’ day.”
There were few negroes who did’ not develop character, either good or bad, in a crisis, Dorinda reflected a little later as she went out to the dairy. Though there was no need for her to visit the dairy, since Fluvanna and Nimrod had finished the work, she felt that she could not sleep soundly until she had inspected the milk. Was this merely what Rufus called “woman’s fussiness,” she wondered, or was it the kind of nervous mania that afflicted even the most successful farmer?
The brilliant autumn day had declined into a wan evening. From the dark fields the wind brought the trail of woodsmoke mingled with the effluvium of rotting leaves; and this scent invaded her thoughts like the odour of melancholy. Not even the frosty air or the fragrant breath of the cows in the barn could dispel the lethargy which had crept over her. “I’m tired out,” she reasoned. “I’ve been going too hard the last six months, and I feel the strain as soon as I stop.” Though she was saddened by the haunting pathos of life, she did not feel the intimate pang of grief. All that, it seemed to her, was over for ever. The power to pity was still hers, for compassion is a detached impulse, but she had lot beyond recall the gift of poignant emotion. Nothing had penetrated that dead region around her heart. Not her father’s death, not her mother’s illness—nothing. Drought had withered her, she told herself cynically, and the locust had eaten away the green of her spirit.
In the morning, Rufus went off on the early train, and Dorinda drew a breath of relief as she turned back to her work. The shock of the tragedy appeared to have cleared the boy’s temper, and he showed genuine distress when he parted from his mother. “I feel as if I’d never see her again,” he said to Dorinda on the porch, while he was waiting for the farmer who had promised to stop for him on the way to the station.
Dorinda shook her head. Helplessness in the face of misery acted always as an irritant on her nerves. “You never can tell,” she replied. “But remember all you have cost her and try to keep straight in the future.”
“I swear I’ll never give her another minute’s worry,” he responded, stuffing his handkerchief into his pocket.
Perhaps he meant it; but it seemed to Dorinda that his repentance, like his gift with tools, was too facile. “Whatever comes of this, it has been the death of Ma,” she thought, as she went into the house.
When the day’s churning was over, and she was in her mother’s room, the new doctor from the Courthouse arrived with his instruments and his medicine case. He was a brisk, very ugly young man, with an awkward raw-boned figure, and an honest face which was covered with unsightly freckles. As different from Jason as any man could well be! He had risen by sheer ability from the poorer class, and already, notwithstanding his plain appearance and uncompromising honesty, he had built up a better practice than the hereditary one of the Greylocks. For one thing, he insisted upon having his fees paid, and it was natural, Dorinda had discovered, to value advice more highly when it was not given away.
As the doctor sat down beside Mrs. Oakley’s bed, she opened her eyes and looked at him without surprise and without welcome. Her bed was smooth and spotlessly clean; the best quilt of log-cabin design lay over her feet; and she was wearing a new nightgown which was buttoned closely about her neck. Without her clothes, she had the look, in spite of her ravaged face, of a very old child.
“I’ve never spent a day in bed in my life, doctor,” she said, “except when my children were born.”
“I know,” he rejoined, with dry sympathy. “That is the trouble.”
He did not waste words, but bent over immediately to begin his examination; and when it was over, he merely patted the old woman’s shoulder before packing away his instruments.
“You’ll have to stay in bed a while now,” he said, as he stood up with his case in his hands. “I’ll leave some medicine with your daughter; but it isn’t medicine you need; it is rest.”
Her groping gaze followed him with irrepressible weariness. “I don’t know what will become of the chickens,” she said. “I reckon everything will go to rack and ruin, but I can’t help it. I’ve done all I could.”
He turned on the threshold. “My dear Mrs. Oakley, you couldn’t get up if you tried. Your strength has given out.”
She smiled indifferently. All the nervous energy upon which she had lived for forty years was exhausted. There was nothing now but the machine which was rapidly running down. “Yes, I reckon I’m worn out,” she responded, and turned her face to the wall.
Not until they had left the porch and crossed the trodden ragweed to where the buggy was waiting, did Dorinda summon the courage to ask a question.
“Is she seriously ill, doctor?”
At her words he stopped and looked straight into her eyes, a look as bare and keen as a blade. “She isn’t ill at all in the strict sense of the word,” he answered. “She told the truth when she said that she was worn out.”
“Then she will never be up again?”
“One never knows. But I think this is the beginning of the end.” He hesitated, and added regretfully, “I ought not to put it so bluntly.”
She shook her head. “I’d rather know. Poor Ma! She is only sixty-two. It has come so suddenly.”
“Suddenly.” The word broke from him like an oath. “Why, the woman in there has been dying for twenty years!”
Her eyes were stony while she watched him mount into his buggy and turn the horse’s head toward the gate. The wheels spun over the rocks and out into the road, as if they were revolving over the ice in her heart. Would nothing thaw the frozen lake that enveloped her being? Would she never again become living and human? The old sense of the hollowness of reality had revived. Though she knew it was her mother of whom they had been speaking, the words awoke only echoes in her thoughts. She longed with all her soul to suffer acutely; yet she could feel nothing within this colourless void in which she was imprisoned.
When the buggy had disappeared, she retraced her steps to the house and entered her mother’s room with a smile on her lips.
“You’ll have to rest now, Ma, no matter how you hate it.”
At Dorinda’s cheerful voice, the old woman turned over and looked at her daughter as if she were a stranger.
“I don’t know how you’ll manage,” she answered; but her tone was perfunctory.
“Oh, we’ll manage all right. Don’t you worry. Just try to get well, Ma.”
A change of expression rippled like a shadow over the grey features, and passed without leaving a trace. “I was afraid maybe the doctor didn’t think I was sick enough to stay in bed. I know I ain’t exactly sick, but I seem to have given way. I reckon Mary Joe can look after the chickens till I’m able to be up.”
After this she fell into a doze from which she did not awaken until Dorinda brought her favourite dinner of jowl and turnip salad.
“The doctor says you must eat, Ma, or you’ll never get back your strength.”
“I know I ought to, daughter, but I feel as if something was choking me.”
Day after day, month after month. Nothing else all through the autumn and winter.
Though Mrs. Oakley lived more than a year longer, she was never able again to leave her bed. For the greater part of the time she lay, silent and inert, in a state between waking and sleeping, unconcerned after all her fruitless endeavours. Rufus, she never asked for, and when his letters were read to her, she would smile vaguely and turn away as if she had ceased to be interested. Old Rambler spent his days on a mat at the side of her bed, and Flossie lay curled up on the patchwork quilt over her feet. If they were absent long, she would begin to move restlessly, and beg presently that they should be brought back. At the end, they were the only companions that she desired, for, as she said once, they “did not bother her with questions.” The tragedy to Dorinda was not so much in her mother’s slow dying as in her unconditional surrender to decay. For more than forty years she had fought her dauntless fight against the sordid actuality, and at the last she appeared to become completely reconciled to her twin enemies, poverty and dirt. Nothing made any difference to her now, and because nothing made any difference to her, dying was the happiest part of her life.
“There ain’t any use struggling,” she said once, while Dorinda was cleaning her room, and after a long pause, “It doesn’t seem just right that we have to be born. It ain’t worth all the trouble we go through.”
But there were other days when her inextinguishable energy would flare up in sparks, and she would insist upon sitting up in bed while the white Leghorns flocked by the window. Then she would recognize her favourite hens and call them by name; and once she had Romeo, the prize rooster, brought into her room, and kept him under her eyes, until he began to strut and behave indelicately, when she “shooed” him out in her old peremptory manner. Frequently, in the last few months, she asked to have Dan and Beersheba led to her window. Tears would come into her eyes while the long sad faces of the horses looked at her through the panes, and she would murmur plaintively, “There’s a heap of understanding in animals. You’ll never let those horses want, will you, daughter?”
“Never, Ma. In a few years, if nothing happens, I’ll turn them out to pasture for the rest of their lives.”
Mrs. Oakley would smile as if she had forgotten, and after a long silence, she would begin talking in an animated voice of her girlhood and her parents. As the weeks went by, all the years of her marriage and motherhood vanished from her memory, and her mind returned to her early youth when she was engaged to the young missionary. Her old tropical dream came back to her; in her sleep she would ramble on about palm trees and crocodiles and ebony babies. “I declare, it seems just as if I’d been there,” she said one morning. “It’s queer how much more real dreams can be than the things you’re going through.”
At the end of the year, in the middle of the night before she died, she awoke Dorinda, and talked for a long time about the heathen and the sacrifices that Presbyterian missionaries had made to bring them to Christ. “Your great-grandfather was a wonderful scholar,” she said, “and I reckon that’s where you get most of your sense. I s’pose missionaries have to be scholars. They need something besides religion to fall back on in their old age.” Never once did she allude to anything that had occurred since her marriage, and she appeared to have forgotten that she had ever known Joshua.
The next afternoon she died in her sleep while Nathan was sitting beside her bed. For a few minutes Dorinda broke down and wept, less from grief than from the knowledge that grief was expected of her; and Nathan, who was always at his best in the house of mourning, won her everlasting gratitude by his behaviour. She found herself depending upon him as if he had been some ideal elder brother such as she had never known. So naturally that fate seemed to have arranged it on purpose, he assumed authority over the household and the funeral. He thought of everything, and everybody deferred to him. Funerals were the only occasions when he had ever risen to dignity, and though he had sincerely liked Mrs. Oakley, the few days before her burial were among the pleasantest that he had ever spent in his life.
“I shall never forget how good you have been,” Dorinda said, when it was over. “I don’t know what I should have done without you.” And though the words were spoken impulsively, as a matter of fact she never, in the future, forgot Nathan’s kindness. It was a mark of her proud and self-sufficient nature that she could not forget either gratitude or resentment.
When he had driven away, she turned to Fluvanna, who was picking up bits of rusty crape from the floor of the porch.
“I really don’t know what we should have done without him,” she remarked over again.
“If you ax me, Miss Dorinda, he is one handy man at a funeral,” answered Fluvanna, who relapsed into dialect on tragic or perilous occasions. “I was thinkin’ right along how pleased yo’ Ma would have been if she could have seen him, for she cert’n’y did like handy folks about her.”
“Poor Ma, I wish she could have had the chickens a few years earlier,” Dorinda sighed. “To think of the years she went without a cow.”
“Well, she enjoyed ’em while she had ’em,” Fluvanna responded fervently. “Have you thought yet what you’re goin’ to do, Miss Dorinda?”
“Yes, I’ve thought. The farm is mine. Ma left it to me, and I’m going to stay on as we are.”
“Just you and me? Won’t you get lonesome without some white folks?”
“After Jonas Walsh moves out of the overseer’s house, I’ll engage Martin Flower, who is a better farmer, and has a sensible wife. Mary Joe can take care of the chickens, and I’m going to hire her brother Ebenezer to help Nimrod with the cows. If everything goes well this winter, I’ll be ready to start a real dairy in the spring. Then I’ll need more hands, so we shan’t be lonely.”
“Naw’m, I don’t reckon we’ll, get lonesome, not the way we work,” Fluvanna agreed. “I ain’ never seen no man work as hard as you do, Miss Dorinda. Yo’ Ma told me befo’ she passed away that you had stayin’ power and she reckoned that you was the only one of the family that had. Sprightliness don’t git you far, she said, unless you’ve got stayin’ power enough to keep you after you git thar. Well, it’s all your’n now, ain’t it?” she inquired placidly, as Dorinda’s eyes swept the horizon.
“Yes, it’s all mine.” Walking over to the edge of the porch, Dorinda looked across the vague, glimmering fields. Another autumn had gone. Another sunset like the heart of a pomegranate was fading out in the west. Again the wandering scents of wood smoke and rotting leaves came and went on the wind.
For an instant, the permanence of material things, the inexorable triumph of fact over emotion, appeared to be the only reality. These things had been ageless when her mother was young; they would be still ageless when she herself had become an old woman. Over the immutable landscape human lives drifted and vanished like shadows.