“Before God, Sam. Can’t figure how a little fart like you can put in a day’s work alongside me. Haw.”
“E’er watch a banty cock, Mester Gaddy? It’ll outlast your Barred Rock rooster any day of the week. Not so much of me to get wore out.”
The Gaddy women were laboring too, bringing in grapes and berries, beans and tomatoes by the pail and bushel. They canned and dried and sugared down the procession of largess that moved through the kitchen. There was more milk than the dairy would buy and Maria would skim the surplus for cream, send Ellen to trade the butter she churned. It was dirt cheap in this season. The remaining thin milk was thrown to squealing young pigs in wood troughs, foul-smelling in the reek of heat. Milk would sour swiftly, spots of yellow-green milkstone forming on the sides of pails. Ellen was directed to scrape it clean with a knife. Cheeses were made, some to cure amber and hard, hanging in the smokehouse, others to be stirred daily in stone crocks until the white curd turned yellow, the strong odor left, and it became bland. There was an abundance of cottage cheese with clabber cream and chopped green onions stirred in, or a seasoning of herbs that grew by the houseside. Maria had a lavish hand when it came to seasoning.
“I reckon I got such a heavy hand because my mam always was put to it to get enough for us to eat. She’d dig chicory roots for coffee and gather wild thyme and herbs. Pap cut lumber to sell to the railroad and worked tobacco. He saved e’er a penny he was paid and gave her none.” Maria sighed, “Mam found out I ate stones once. Seemed there was a satisfaction when the food was gone, to a white pebble, smooth like a bit of lard. I just recollect.”
Christian would come on Saturdays at dusk. Ellen met him covertly at the usual place and they ate a few lingering strawberries from the burned-out plants, then went to lie in the shade. He was boasting about the gigantic machine that Brinker had rented to harvest his wheat. “That combine’s some invention. Finished the whole field in a day. The bags are stacked in the crib. By heck, Brinker grows good wheat. We counted twenty grains on some ears. That’s forty bushel to the acre.” He was browned, his white teeth were flashing and he swaggered. “In the afternoon old lady Brinker drove the pickup out to the field with a freezer can of ice cream and three new-made cakes. Tell you, that woman’s my ideal of a wife. Spread a white cloth and brought silver and plates and a tin can of lemonade. We sure polished it off.” He reflected. “In the lemonade she had a chunk of ice floating.”
“Wish I had a piece of ice big as my head. Purely I do.” Ellen looked away, sighing in the stifled air scarce cooled by the setting of the sun. “It seems like all that’s to be garnered is trying to ruin before we can get hold of it to store it against the winter.”
Christian would stay with her only a short while because he was roused now while it was yet dark to begin the long day. Ellen spoke softly with him but when he laid his hand in the hollow below her throat or upon the dress over her thighs as he had done in the truck, she was afraid and made him laugh with her foolishness and coaxed him from his wont.
Sam Offut had failed to appear for milking one morning. Sam lived with his wife a short way down the road in a shack he owned; he would take his first two meals with the Gaddys and supper at his own table. Anton was hard put this morning, even with the help of the girls, to finish the chores on time, and sat down late to breakfast. As he was arising, the hired man appeared in the doorway, bleary-eyed, with an air of not having washed or slept. Sam was saying evenly as he took the chair across from Anton, “Ran my old ooman off last night. Those two were laying there still when I came home. On my bed. That whorish Eadie. I ne’er saw that particular peddler before. I could have killed them but I only ran them off.” He speared a slice of ham with the sharp knife. “I’ve doubted many a year now, since my youngens are grown and gone, if I be the daddy to more of the six than the first-born.”
Anton said shortly, “If you’ve got a mind after this, Sam, you can take supper here. Come on to the barn when you’re done.”
“I’m beholden.” Sam was eating like one famished.
During that day Ellen marveled at little Sam Offut, middle-aged, leathery-skinned, smoldering as he went through the days at his wife Eadie, bedding with other men. She wondered at how it took the white heat of August to kindle him into action.
When Jack was driving the cows in from the pasture one night, the white kid was missing. Penny and her young would always be in the lead in their anxiety to reach Ellen, who would have an evening tidbit set out for them in the woodshed—apple peels or bread crusts or carrots. Penny and the brown kid were standing in wait at the woodshed door. As pangs smote her, Ellen bolted down the lane to the field. The dog barked, running ahead. She searched the fence lines, from afar spied the bit of white, the buckling strangled in the fence where he had tried to slip through. He had hung himself. Ellen, extricating the stiffened body, met death for the first time intimately. She fought over her loss in the solitary field. “Oh you were my dear droll poppet that followed me.”
Ever in coming weeks when she thought of the clownish yeanling, tears came and her throat caught in anguish so complex it was nearly joy. She never forgot the death of the white kid. Its impact made a mark on her like scars she could point to on her body. “Here the sickle cut into my leg when I cleaned the path one day. And here that spotty hound bit my wrist when he had that fight with Jack.”
In her new-found anxiety for her two remaining goats, she kept them from the field, penning them in the barnyard and bringing them kitchen scraps and meadow grass. In their cleverness, though, they slipped through the fence to nibble in the garden and wander at will. Anton discovered them girdling bark from a stripling peach tree with their sharp teeth. He threatened, “To pasture with those tormented creatures where they belong. And if they be the cause of further botherment, girl, I’ll knock their heads in gladly and butcher them. Mind now.”
So Ellen went down the lane, Penny solemn at her heels, the doeling trotting last. Laughing at their comical air, the girl began to run. They snorted and sprang after her abandoned, striking their little hoofs sharply on the dry ground, unconscious of dignity or the heat of August. She left them blatting disconsolate at the meadow gate. In days to follow she would go to the barnyard fence, straining her eyes for a glimpse of the two small does amid the drove of cows.
* * * * *
There came the hour when Christian and Anton met. Though Ellen would slip out to see Christian when he walked down the road on his afternoon off, she had not mustered the boldness to bring him to the house. Anton never spoke of the young man though he knew Ellen met with him. One time he had watched them for a while from behind the oak by the berry patch. He saw his daughter talking while she switched flies with a branch of leaves, and the young man, brooding, leaned upon the fence. Anton could see nothing amiss and pulling on his pipe, went to listen to his favorite practicing at the piano.
Ellen had joined Christian in the orchard near the brook. Her goats finished browsing and lay back to back in the grass chewing their cuds in their rapid dainty way. Ellen was sitting on a fallen log. She wore an old dress that fitted her budding form too tightly. She laid in her hair white meadow rue and yellow oxeye daisies. She bowed her head to one side over the field flowers in her hands and knew, dreaming, how fair she was.
Christian lay on his stomach in the grass by her, catching her mood, knowing he’d never seen the girl so fetching. The lines of her long face were soft in a frame of flaxen hair. He spoke suddenly, “I got another letter from Mama.”
“Oh?”
“She mad again. My sister had a chance to get married and she turned it down. Mama says Rose wants bigger fish.”
“Fish?”
“Mr. Johnson’s only got a house and money. That’s not enough for my sister. He’d have to be a millionaire.”
“Well.”
“And she says Daddy gets pains nowadays. Has to lie down. He won’t see a doctor.”
“He’ll be all right, don’t you reckon?”
“He hates to pay a doctor bill.” He reached over to cover her bare foot with his palm. “You’re so sweet, Ellie.”
“Sweet as Miss Sabatha Withers, boy?” Anton was standing before them in the long grass. His overalls were ragged, the sleeves to his black shirt had been cut below the shoulders so his heavy biceps showed. His chin was thrust out, his body pulled erect in the habit of short men. A straw hat was settled upon his sparse hair. He was chewing a quid of tobacco.
Christian jumped to his feet. The two of them were the same height. “Hello, Mr. Gaddy. How do you do? I’m Christian Ay.”
“So hit seems.” The man spat, looked about as though searching for someone. “Hum. You didn’t bring your lady friend with you?”