“Wonder how he did start it?”
“Um. Said he twisted its ear and blew in it. Said that dazzles a beast. Brother can do it just so.” He lapsed into silence, his head drooped in the heat of the afternoon. The mules switched their tails and shimmied their skin to fight flies. Unguided, they were following the road.
When they reached Love’s store, Ellen thanked the farmer, climbed down from the wagon seat to the pike where the clay baked in the molten sun. Stacey was in the screened doorway. “Ellen? I thought you’d left these parts. Grady,” she called. “Looky here. How be you, now? Sam Offut’s taken o’er the trading for your ma. They had a time when first you ne’er came home. Where you been?”
Ellen was smiling and nodding. Grady came around the corner of the frame house; she sought his kindly tight-skinned face. “Hey, Mester Love.”
“Hey there, Ellen. I swear. Come have a glass of my ginger beer. The yeast’s working good now. Two bottles exploded all o’er the place yesterday.”
She followed him, and Stacey came after. Ellen was eager. “I visited my uncle for a spell. Said howdy to you both.”
“That so?” Stacey asked. “He kept you long.”
“Then I went to stay with Mrs. Dougherty while she had a baby.”
“Thought she had hers last year.”
“You remember Penny Dougherty?” Ellen urged. “This is her second. It’s a boy too. A likely one.” Ellen felt Stacey’s eyes searching her for the truth. “I came home to help Pa with the summer work.”
“He’ll be glad to see you,” Grady said.
“Penny wanted to be remembered to you both, Mrs. Love.”
“That’s kindly of her,” Grady said.
“Well,” said Stacey. “You’re looking right pert again, Ellen.” She was fanning herself with Grady’s hat.
Ellen sipped the ginger beer while the woman talked. “Mester Gaddy and that Sam ne’er would say where you were.” Ellen was afraid of Stacey’s tongue, conscious of the milk dried on her dress, and she wondered if Stacey could tell it was there. “I reckoned,” said Stacey, “you met up with a rich Yankee man who made you his wife.”
“Oh, Mrs. Love.”
“Now Stacey,” Grady cried, “stop greening Ellen.”
“I’m beholden for the drink.” Ellen went to the door. “I was parched.”
“Your daddy know you’re home?” asked Stacey.
“Oh yes.” She was hurrying out and down Sweetincreek Road, unconscious of the weight of her bag. Then her gait slowed. A small verging of anxiety had begun and she pushed it back with her will. She changed hands with the valise, passed over the wood bridge where the Sweetincreek flowed, and on the other side, in the swampy earth, was plucking a green-white flower. “I know this one. It’s the lily of the valleys.” She breathed the perfume, studying the stony well-worn road. “Reckon he’ll beat me?”
She turned into the familiar lane, which seemed shrunken now. She heard farm noises. A cow mooing softly in a far place, pigs grunting just off the path, a duck squawking somewhere in sudden protest. The house seemed smaller and the yellow paint was peeled; it was ugly. Hesitant, she went up the sagged steps. The towels on the porch line were muddied, the tin tub was turned carelessly over, the egg basket was torn. She was opening the screen door. There was no one, no sound there in the kitchen. Beyond in the bedroom she saw her mother in a chair under one of the little windows, bent over some work. Ellen looked at her a moment as though she were a stranger. From the parlor came Frankie’s stripling voice in singsong, “I do, I did, I have done. I draw, I drew, I have drawn. I eat, I ate.” The small voice sighed audibly as Ellen entered.
“Sounds right brave, Frankie.”
“Ellie! You just came. I missed you. Was it fun in Chicago?” As they were embracing Ellen saw Frankie’s eyes were dark-shadowed, but her skin was smooth and her hair glistened. She was asking about Garland. “Is he kind, Ellie, in his own house?”
“Of course.”
“I heard Pa say you ran off and left Uncle. Did you, Ellie? I wanted to brave Pa to ask. But he gets riled when we name you. Reckon he doubted you were coming home.”
“I was visiting someone.”
“Where? Where’d you stay?”
“Is he on the outs with me?”
“Pa? I reckon. You went to St. Louis, didn’t you, Ellie? I heard him say it to Ma.”
“You learning grammar again, Frankie?”
“Tell you true, I hate it. Whate’er I speak, teacher stops me and changes it.” She shrugged, resentful. “He’s daft.”
“You let Pa know it?”
“No, I’m in thick enough with Pa now. He’s e’er raising sand. I got to practice all morning now and I’m only to help with housework. Not to milk or hoe the garden.” She looked away. “Wish I was little again.”
Ellen frowned. “You’ve got to study ahead. And watch the ways of turning. That’s a thing I learned.”
The two were silent. Looking back to the freedom of childhood, they chafed at the fretful boundaries, the responsibility that seemed to mark maturity. They went forward because there was no other way. Frankie was looking up, doleful, “Missed your songs, Ellie.”
“Say, how’re the goats?”
“The old one dropped two kids. Reckon it was in April. Sam found them in the morning; one died, the other was a buck, a black one. Pa had Sam cut it. Said they’d butcher it in fall.”
“What about the little doe, Rhodie? She drop one too?”
“I don’t know. I can’t keep it in my head. I think Sam said he took her to a billy. You ask him. Tell you true, Sam’s been doing for them.”
“Oh, Frankie. And me pining for them all this tormented time.”
“I’m sorry, Ellie. I’m a poor thing,” Frankie laughed, pleading.
“It’s hot. I’ll go unpack.”
* * * * *
In the attic room, Ellen made her bed up for the night, put away her clothes. All the while a thing was waxing heavy in her, leaden, as she thought on her father. “One thing, I’ll ne’er cry. Wish I could make out not to fear him.” She took the statuette of the Virgin to its old place on the round table in the parlor. She could hear Maria and Frankie in the kitchen preparing supper. Loneliness swept Ellen like an empty cloud as she stood, uneasy. Anton came upon her there. Looking at his face she recalled when Blueberry had balked starting a wagon and Anton lashed him coldly about the head with leather lines. Ellen had watched secretly from a barn window, heart pumping, waiting until the rearing horse lunged and moved the load. She was going up the stairs without a word. He climbed gently after, his breathing becoming strident on the way.
He held the belt. His voice shuddered hoarse. His lips were trembling with their weight. “You e’er were froward, girl.” He was hitting her again, holding the strap with a relentless hand, feeling the easing of his own sharp flesh. “I’ll teach you yet. Get on your knees. You were walking and mincing in that seat of whoredom, weren’t you? Did you know my brother Marc died rutting there in St. Louis? And that’s what killed my ma?”
She was enduring the hot bite of the striking leather. She fought within herself as since a child, to hold silence, pinning her will on it.
“How do you reckon Sam favored doing your trading? How do you reckon your chores were done up these months, you plagued dummy?” His voice was a heavy cold whisper and his gray eyes were half closed. “And you stole the Virgin image.”
Ellen was breathless in the sting of tears. It’s his way. It’s for love he does it. He’s trying to teach me what’s right. He must.
“Now, you’ll not go off this farm again,” he was warning in the doorway, “lest I marry you to someone proper.” He paused. “I allow I’ll kill you before you’ll stand against my will.” He was rolling the belt up around the home-forged brass buckle as he went out.
Ellen followed down to the evening meal. She went to Maria eagerly, kissing her, forgetting, in her need, her mother’s preoccupied ways. “How’ve you been, Ma?”
“Tormented, Ellie. He knows.” Maria looked upward with vague eyes.
“I’ll be here to do for you now, Ma. You glad I’m back?” she pleaded swiftly.
“I took count,” Maria said. “Hit’s been six months July fifteen. Mester Gaddy’s been fretted.”
“Quit jawing, ooman,” Anton said. “Set and eat.”
* * * * *
After the meal, though the air was close, Anton directed the family to go to the parlor, bade Ellen, “Fetch my Bible.” He took the book from her, leafed the pages. He looked at Frankie, sitting by Maria on the sofa. “Even as these oomen fared, so will hit be with you, Poppet, if you don’t pay me heed.” They watched him take the silver-banded reading glass, peering through it at the page.
“Down on your knees,” he told Ellen, and she obeyed. “Because the daughters of Zion are haughty and walk with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet, therefore the Lord will smite them. And the Lord will discover their secret parts.”
Ellen was tired. She was kneeling by the doweled rocker, her head on the arm of the chair. She closed her eyes and thought about the man who could start balky mules by blowing in their long ears, twisting them so they forgot their orneriness.
“In that day the Lord will take away the bravery of their tinkling ornaments about their feet, and their cauls and their round tires like the moon, the chains, and the bracelets,” Anton cherished the syllables, “and the hoods and the veils. And it shall come to pass that instead of a sweet smell there shall be a stink and instead of a girdle a rent, and instead of well-set hair, baldness, and instead of a stomacher, a girding of sackcloth.”