* * * * *
Under the attic window she was lying sleepless, the uncertain moonlight washing over her bed. The cockerels in the chicken shed were crowing intermittently, confused by the unseemly moon’s glare. Her body ached from the beat of the strap. Her breasts were swollen because she had tolerated the child to nurse her over the past days and the milk had not as yet subsided. She would wait and in a week the discomfort would be gone, then she would be done with him. Her mind circled on Penny and Clate, on the Dougherty beasts, the donkey and Brownie and the doe Tiny. She was overcome by devotion to them all. She went further back to the autumn of despair, and to the summer preceding that was fading now as the separate incidents blurred and blended. The night stretched brilliant as she rose and leaned at the window sill. The quavering of the young cocks’ chorus was heard again.
She slipped into her dress and went down. Jack met her at the door, hurling himself upon her. She sat on the steps to pluck burrs that were tangled in his hair. She was listening to the sounds the wind made that sometimes has a business in the high branches, spurning the ground. In the warty-barked hackberry there was a rustle as the leaves resisted the wind, and in the spruce by the road fence an indistinct whisper came and went as many tiny needles rasped gently one on another. The wind sounds were all different in the varied trees. In the black willows by the Sweetincreek there would be a swishing and a swaying, and in the stiff leaves of the catalpa nearly no noise at all. The mockernut was so tall and straight that the soughing was disguised and far away. I might know the particular tree just from the voice of the wind through it. The cockerels were piping again in the moonlight, foretelling the dawn just coming.
* * * * *
In the early morning she hurried out to find none of her goats at the woodshed, nor any trace they had been stabled recently there. A setting goose was peering from under the cobwebbed manger; it hissed a warning, hovering over warmed eggs in musty straw. For a moment Ellen stood in the doorway, then she went to the barnyard. Sam was pouring foaming milk into tall cans. “Your nannies are at the field.” Sam looked her over quietly. “Your pa says leave them there.”
“I’m taking them up to the woodshed right now. There’s a silly old goose setting in there.”
“Better ask your pa if you can, Ellie.”
“Well, I’ll help you-all milk first.”
In the barn she drew the first streams onto the ground to clean the udder. Then she was milking steadily, her hands efficient. She pressed her head into the joint of the young cow’s back leg.
“That Sal’s a real kicker,” offered Sam.
“Watch you don’t lose her milk,” Anton said, coming in.
“Ho, suckey.” Ellen would know if the nervous heifer were about to strike out. She stripped the front teats and began to milk the tight back ones. “Ho, Sal.”
Anton gave her leave to take her goats in from the field when she brought the cows. “And you help with the milking hereafter, girl.”
Ellen discovered Penny was thin and her udder flabby, for she ran loose with a black yeanling. Rhodie was slick-haired, rounded with a kid Sam said she would drop next month. They were skittish and Ellen coaxed them to her. She sat in the grass with corn in her apron until they could not hold their greed and curiosity. Penny licked her ear, bleated softly on her neck, remembering her all at once. The black wether was timid and handsome but he came under her hand too. She resented his castration though she knew it was necessary. They were munching the corn grains, pushing against her.
Go through my window My sugar lump And buy molasses candy Blue bird, blue bird, go through my window And buy molasses candy
10
The fiery sun of August labored in the sky across the languid procession of days. In the evenings, by the light of kerosene lamps, the women still were finishing canning of peaches, tomatoes, berries. They clamped glass lids on by wire bails and stood filled jars on a rack of laths in the wash boiler. Pits and peelings were heaped in pails in the yard where flies gathered, and gnats and yellowjackets. They put up salt-and-sugar beans, selecting green-tinted jars to protect the color. They dried peppers and sweet corn. They made brine for gherkins and green tomatoes, packed a ten-gallon crock in the pantry with cucumbers and branches of dill. Ellen added horseradish roots to the salty brew, and mustard seeds. On top she placed grape and cherry leaves. “To get a good brine you got to add salt just right,” she said, “till it gets the power in it to hoist a fresh egg from the bottom of the crock and float hit.”
Ellen was making jelly. She strained the cooked fruit through flannel bags and then added sugar or sorghum and boiled the juice. She tested the hot purple syrup. “It doesn’t want to sheet off and tear proper,” she told Amanda York who came to keep her company. “I’ll just wait on it.” She wiped her forehead with a perspiring hand.
Sometimes Lily Garrett, in a shapeless flowered dress, walked up the road to sit in the kitchen heat and visit awhile. “You make such pretty jam,” Lily said. “Why don’t you take some to the county fair at Seven Mile Run? Mama does. She got a prize last year and hers was clouded.”
Ellen held the jar to the sunlight; the jelly glowed. “I do favor redcap jelly.”
“Well, you should go, Ellie.”
“What color’s the first prize?”
“Blue.”
“You going to, Ellie?” asked Frankie.
“There’s no harm talking.”
“Get it out of your head, girl,” Maria was speaking. “I begged Mester Gaddy ten years ago. He said it was foolishness.”
“I know.”
Lily was showing Frankie how to make a special kind of cherry preserve. “The receipt named this Barrier Cherries, Frankie. Takes apple vinegar and strained honey.”
Maria’s face was sweated and reddened in the heat of the stove fire. She reached back into the dimness of her memory, to when she had run in crying to a grayed old woman, “Mam, there’s a booger scratching my eye.” The woman had licked the eye with her soft tongue to remove the foreign substance, then set Maria on a three-legged stool outside the door to work the dasher of the churn up and down. “Stone churn ain’t good enough for you, girl,” she said to Ellen, suddenly.
“What did you say, Ma?” Ellen was startled.
“Old-timey days we had a stone churn. And when Pap was home sometimes he’d bring us a runty possum, or maybe a coon. Summers now, we ate good.”
“Did you store up like we do against winter?” asked Frankie.
“I like to lay up when there’s plenty,” Maria admitted. “But the most Mam did was to dry corn and herbs. Folks didn’t figure to eat then like now. Once or twice a day was all we sat to table.” She reflected a moment. “I allow I didn’t miss hit. And my folks thought a heap of me till Mester Gaddy came along.”
“Tell, Ma. Did you pine for love of him when you saw Pa?” Frankie cried.
“Mester Gaddy gave me a fine snuffbox. It was mother-pearl. And a deal fair to hold in the sun.”
“I ne’er saw that box, Ma,” said Ellen.
“Show us.” Frankie was eager.
“No. Mester Gaddy was forced to sell hit once when he was short cash. I always regretted that.”
“When did you start honing after Pa?” persisted Frankie, slim and frail beside Lily, stirring the kettle at the stove. “For love.”
“He rode a big gray mare and there was nothing so tall as he. See, I was a tedious plain girl and my folks were old already when I was born. They hadn’t looked for me. So they fretted on what was to come. Mester Gaddy rode o’er to Seven Mile Run and talked to Pap.”
“And then Mester Gaddy courted you?” Lily inquired.
“Go on,” Frankie pressed.
“Pap had scrimped for a dowry that was to come with me. Pap was bound to care for me proper. You’d ne’er have thought it the way we lived so poor-like while he was putting by.”
“I ne’er thought about Pa being young once,” said Ellen. “Was he different from now?”
“No. Except his hair was red and thick. I came with him to this farm. Here I been since. He hitched that gray mare to a two-wheel cart and I set up beside him and figured I was a lady.” Her dull eyes sparked. “E’er do as Mester Gaddy says, girls.”
“There was Pa on a horse,” Frankie said. “I’d just as lief have seen that.”
“Oh, all the folks rode horses those days,” said Ellen.
“That’s right,” Lily assented.
“Don’t go talking to Mester Gaddy about those days,” Maria was warning. “He’s disremembered them. Watch your cherries don’t burn there, girls.”
“They’re doing right, Mrs. Gaddy,” Lily said. “You were gone a powerful time in spring, weren’t you, Ellie?” Curious, Lily was sniffing after gossip to brighten her wishful youth.
Ellen took up the basket, leaving the table where she had been stoning cherries. “I’m getting in some corn for supper,” she called as she was going down the porch steps.
“Ellie’s so contrary.” Lily watched Ellen stride down the field. “She won’t talk with me proper-like.”