Lightning sizzled, then cracked, a flare skirting the window shades. Behind came the bolt, reverberating through the hollows of the house. The young girl lamented in desperation, her breath spasmodic, “I don’t want to get those lessons. You’re hateful, Pa. You’re fore’er pushing me.” The voice was a pale shriek. “I’m afraid!”
“Here, girl. Hold your sass. Those are baneful words.” Anton’s eyes were slits. “Want I should set you on your knees and whip you? I’ll do it.”
“No.”
He turned to a chair, taking up a journal. “I mind,” he drawled and settled into the low seat, “when there was a storm like this two-three years ago. Twister came flailing through Bethel killing four.”
Ellen stayed by the door. Not for long had she seen him so wrought up. Maria had taken up her sewing, pursed her mouth over it in the lamplit room. Anton was directing his words to his younger child who cried now in abject penitence. The convulsive sound came sadly into the still of the room as the noisy gale tottered and staggered upon the vegetation of the earth.
“Three old Chester brothers were batching with their ninety-year-old ma. Folks say it was because they were terrified of the storm but all three went off their heads and murdered one another. The old lady too.” Anton smoothed his palm over his balding hair. Dry tobacco juice marked the edges of his mouth, his long jaw thrust upward. “The plumber man came to fix the pump next day. Found them lying about in a mess of blood. Old ooman’s throat ripped with a razor. One batch was gored, the other two were filled with shotgun holes.”
Heavy drops slammed on the windowpane and Ellen spoke in timid relief, “There’s the rain, Pa.”
“Still fixing to die, Frankie?” prodded the man.
“Hit was the dread, Pa,” she pleaded and in time was drawn to sit shrived on his knee.
“Now tell, would her pa let harm come to her that’s my pretty poppet?”
The rain was beating strongly, steadily, washing down banks along the road, mingling with dust and traveling through stones and suckling earth until it gained the water pan far below. Over the pond a silver sheet was draping until the water rose over the sides to flood the meadows. The swaggering wind was in full strength. Moisture softened the earth about the roots of a giant basswood that had matured before the father of Jules Gaddy built his lean-to and set up a rail fence for his mules and hogs. A sudden blast slammed into the aged trunk; it fell sluggish, reluctant, upon its side with a wounded noise, gashed roots exposed. Tree branches grappled and fought the gale and were broken, some borne by the wind and slung against the house roof, making staccato sounds.
“When you were just a mite, Frankie, I told you thunder was a potato wagon going across a bridge. Wasn’t any fear in you then.”
“Will Mester Peyton come at all, Pa?”
“Roads are so bad he’ll likely be hindered. Do what I tell you, Frankie, for that’s what’s right.”
The orgasm of the tempest was done. In the clearing sky, white fluffs were drifting in remote wind tides. The man went to survey the destruction left in the wake. His daughters were sent with hatchets and string to gather fallen branches for kindling and to fagot the twigs.
“My sir used to recount,” Anton said, before he walked out, “how in the forests of the old country they were given leave to break off all the boughs to the height a standing man could reach. For firewood. There wasn’t any rotted trash like in this new country. And it was soft as carpeting underfoot.” He took his ax and wedges and went to join Sam, who was bringing the team up the lane, hitched to a whiffletree. Sam was balancing on his shoulder a bucksaw and a two-man crosscut. They headed toward a yellow locust spraddled across the road past the farm entrance.
“Locust does right smart for fence posts, Mester Gaddy.”
“I’m glad that tree came down. I was minded to cut it anyway, Sam.”
By the pond frogs were shrilling, in the field near the orchard a buzzard sat hunched on a stump, the black dampened wings held motionless, outspread to dry, the naked head tucked into the wrinkles of its bare neck. “I ne’er meant what I said,” Frankie was telling Ellen. “For I love my pa and he’s good.”
“You carried on like you were taken with a fit,” admitted Ellen. “Makes me puke to see you that way.”
“Thinking of me always, he is.” Frankie tied a bundle of twigs and threw it to a pile they were making at the field’s edge. “Poor Pa.”
Ellen heaved a rock at the buzzard and watched it soar effortless. “The wind’s flattened that cornfield. There’s a mort of damage been done.”
* * * * *
The leaves had been touched by the first frost and nearly overnight strident colors were emerging on the countryside. Ellen and Frankie were cleaning the musty litter from nest boxes, stuffing in fresh oat straw. “Wonder how come we ne’er tried a doorknob in the nests, Frankie? A porcelain one might coax them to lay. I’ve heard of it.” She harked back to little Clate hanging to her dress hem.
The cows were restless, feeling the new season, the sluggish summer shaken off. On dark mornings Ellen would wear her rough brown sweater, torn in the sleeve, against the chill. The cows heaved themselves to their knees, then to all fours. She put her bare feet in the warmed straw where they had lain. A heifer plopped her hoof in the fresh foam and held it there, stubborn head low, flanks whitened with the splash. The lantern light blinked and Sam was shuffling in. He gazed at the white-spattered wall, belched gently. Ellen caught the whisky scent. “Don’t ill at her, Ellie,” he advised, “or she’ll fore’er mistrust you.”
“Who’s illing?” She carried the pail to the pump to clean it.
He was following, garrulous. “My old-old-old man always said, don’t ill at a creature which does your work,” he nodded, sanctimonious, “and fills your belly.”
“There’s the milking to do, Sam. You’re late. Pa’s waiting on you.”
“Old-old-old’s sort of a byword with us Offuts. When Pa was getting on in years, I sassed him once. He’d started in to say I shouldn’t talk back at my old man. He commenced to say old and he couldn’t stop.” Sam cleared his throat, spit phlegm into the cold bushes. “I told it on him after that. Old-old-old, we Offuts always say.”
Ellen sighed. Sam’s milking would wait on his tongue.
11
The car was puttering up the lane, a trailer hitched behind. It was a day in early October. Ellen drew back from sight, hearing Craig Hedrick’s high-pitched halloa. Anton was coming from the barnyard where, with Sam, he had been forking manure onto the wagon for broadcasting over the fields. Ellen fled along the fence line, down to the pond and the tranquil woods beyond. “I aim to get a mess of shaggy-manes to stew for supper,” she was promising herself. Most of the afternoon she stayed in the woods, finding few of the big mushrooms she hunted although there were some overripe ones. These she kicked to see the sootlike powder billow as they split. Jack ran a rabbit and barked at squirrels and woodchucks. Ellen was leaning idly on a fence rail, looking over the tawny sedge grass of a neighboring field. A red-shouldered hawk circled in flight, uttered its squeal like escaping steam. She mocked him, “Kee-yoo! Get you a passle of crawdads, you old hen-thief.”
She put her chin in her hands. A mass of midges vibrated in the sunshine, minute wings whirring swifter than eye could follow. You take a flower now. When it goes to raise out of its leaves, it stirs everlasting slow, unfolding. It’s a case of time, it would seem, and man’s caught between. How quick we must appear to the trees, and how draggy to the midges.
Back she walked in the late day up the fallow hill field, new-plowed for autumn wheat. “Wish I was an earthclod, nary a care.” She stubbed her shoes against turned furrows.
In the wagon bed that was rumbling in from the field her father swayed, standing spraddle-legged. His face was shadowed with a beard, his sateen shirt was open, baring his chest. The dun horse shook its mane and the mare nickered to its yearling colt trotting in the pasture beside the lane. “Whaw,” Anton was shouting. The chomping of bits and movement of harness on the sweating animals made tinny bright noises. “You’re a great one for roaming, girl. Where you been?”
“I took a notion to gather shaggy-manes for supper, Pa. I hunted but there weren’t any.”
“Hit’s a sight too dry for mushrooms. I could have told you.” He looked down from his vantage on the wagon. The muscles swelled on his freckled forearms and he was holding the reins careless. “You just missed young Hedrick. He came to visit and trade off our old boar for a thoroughbred one I wanted. It’s more than twice the size of the old one.”
“I’ll take a look at it, Pa,” she told him.
“He asked after you. That young man.” He shrugged with satisfaction. “Whup.” The wagon was rolling by her.
She replaced the pole barriers. “There. That hammer-tongue Craig.”
The next afternoon she was gathering herbs and seed pods for drying. It was warm while she worked, for the garish sun heated the withering earth. Craig Hedrick’s Model T was turning into the yard. He came up, throwing himself forward as though there were many miles to go before the end of the day. His sandy hair curled woolly and his small nose turned up, his upper lip protruded slightly, which gave him a hounded expression. “Hey, Ellen.” He stood ungainly as she nodded. He was hitching the belt to his blue serge slacks, adjusting the knot of his purple rayon tie.