At noontime, when they finished eating, Maria spoke. “There’s a thing I did.” She went to get the Bible, her eyes moist and bright.
The smoke from Anton’s pipe dwelled over the used dishes and his brow drew in puzzled lines. “How’s this?” He was taking the book from her. “Where’d you get the money?”
“Amid the straw then, under the bed.”
“How’d you think to look, ooman?”
“Peddler said it would be there. So he knows is the way of a farmer. I took but seven.”
Then Anton was hitting her on the shoulder from where he sat, because he had been shown for a fool. He rose, seizing his black shirt and ripping it so buttons fell tinkling. His chest was exposed, matted. He struck her again. “Prices are falling so I can’t sell. Rising so I can’t buy. There’s a drought on us, and you have to thieve behind my back.” He lifted up his fist.
She ran to the bedroom where the wardrobe closet stood, and crouched in the camphor-ridden woolens. She whimpered, “Mam.”
Ellen waited until Anton had gone to join Sam in the yard. She picked up the Bible and put it on the table before Simon. Most of the Book of John was missing, and Kings and Isaiah. Later Anton would hunt in vain for Jeremiah, his favorite prophet. But now Ellen was turning to the First Book of Samuel. She had accepted Anton’s violence as she did the drought, linking them in her mind as manifestations of indisputable power. And she would give Maria time to recover, in the same unquestioning way in which the farm folk would woo the land back with seed and share when the rain came. Ellen was reading to Simon, “The Lord seeth not as man seeth. Man looketh on the outward appearance. But the Lord looketh on the heart.”
Simon examined the pictures while she made order in the kitchen. “Here’s varmints I ne’er knew of, Mama.”
The windows were open. Anton had taken a screen down the day before to mend it and Ellen had hung strips of cloth to keep out flies that bred constantly in the barnyard. Simon snatched at those buzzing about him. When he caught one, he would slide from his chair and let it out the door. He returned to his perch and book. “You’re a soft one,” she scoffed. “That fly’s coming right back through the window.”
He smiled in his slow way. “I don’t care.” His eyes were as if he had drawn aside curtains where he was apt to hide himself.
Ellen was making a pot of coffee. She went to coax her mother from the closet. “Come on, Ma.”
Maria stared coldly. “Leave me be.”
“Have some coffee. You were clever, Ma. To get a book like that at such a price.”
At length the woman arose, rubbing her bruised shoulder. “Well.”
Simon gave her the book. “Take it, Granny.”
“We have to cut hoofs, Ma. You drink the coffee.” Ellen set the cup by Maria.
“Go along, then.” Maria was opening the book. “You can take a look if there’s any apples. This is a dreary year for storing up.”
In the pasture, Ellen trimmed the goats’ hoofs with a pocketknife while Simon held their leather collars. The little herd had prospered. There were six, besides Rhodie who still boarded at the Yorks. Ellen walked among her goats and she was the center of the wheel. She knew each and the way it differed from the next, how it placed its foot, how it moved or crowded to be close to her, butting another with a click of horns. Penny was aging and moved slow. Pie, the big skewbald one, had no beard and was slick and fat. There were two shaggy brown yeanlings, saucy and bold. And Leona, the white doe, had yellow eyes in a long homely face.
Simon and she took the does, when they had finished, over to the orchard. “Wonder why goats like to follow after, Mama? And you got to drive a cow?”
Ellen was drawing tree boughs down. The animals craved the young shoots more than field clover; they were rearing on their hind legs, dancing with tongues extended.
“There’s no apples here, Mama.”
“There’ll be a few later. I see some fruiting.”
The goats had their fill and were taken to the pasture again. Then Ellen went up the lane, Simon trailing behind. The does stood their slender forefeet on the gate bars, calling after them. The heat quivered, the land lay gasping, the corn died as clay cracked like a split plate around yellowed stalks. The sun dominated the clear dome as well as the prostrate land. Even Simon felt the menace and reached for Ellen’s hand.
After supper Anton, his anger exhausted, was reading to the boy from Maria’s Bible. He had brought it to the porch. The women in the hot kitchen could hear through the open door. “Now this Elisha was going about the countryside doing miracles. There came forth children out of a city and mocked him. Said, go up thou baldhead. Go up thou baldhead. Elisha he looked on them and cursed them in the name of the Lord. There came two she-bears then out of the woods. They tore forty and two children of them. And then Elisha he went from thence to Mount Carmel.”
Simon’s eyes were large and wary. “They shouldn’t have sassed that man.”
“Take a lesson from it. Heed your manners. Hear, youngen?”
“I will, Granddaddy.”
The women came out with cornhusk fans that Maria once had fashioned. Anton turned pages, seeking the words of Jeremiah. “You got a reaming to top all here, ooman. Go fetch my own Bible, boy. This one’s not put together proper.” Then he read, “Thus saith the Lord. Stand ye in the ways and see and ask for the old paths where is the good way. And walk therein and ye shall find rest for your souls.”
Ever since Ellen and Anton had visited Father Tompert and she had voiced herself to the priest, Ellen had discovered a new freedom. She had found herself supported by the church in her dispute with it, in her desire to find her own path. It gave her a wholeness and a bravery toward Anton. So she would keep Simon at her side on Sundays while her parents rode to church. Maria was disturbed. “Hope you don’t burn for this, Ellie. Wonder what Jesus would say if he came through Millville today?” Anton had grunted, angry, to the team, “Haw-whup.” Unknown to Ellen, he had spoken to another priest in Bethel regarding his daughter’s departure from the church. This man was old, his face creased in deep lines, and he advised Anton to obey his parish priest and to care for his own soul.
* * * * *
After her sister had gone away with Genevieve Wheeler, Ellen would watch Anton going about his work abstractedly. He would stop now and again to raise a hand or mumble to himself, then startle as though coming out of a dream, and resume his work. He declared no one was to speak Frankie’s name. One day Ellen, rummaging for a lost tool in the shed behind the hog pens, came on the remains of a glass bowl-garden, the one Frankie had made when she was fifteen to please her father. It was smashed and Ellen knew Anton had hurled it there in a smoldering rage.
He began to use certain phrases with Simon such as he had used with Frankie. “A storm is nothing, Poppet,” he said once when thunder moved over the sky, failing to see that Simon had no fear. He baited the boy too, told him to watch the butchering of an old milk cow. “This is man’s work and you just as well learn it early.” He smote the beast with a maul behind the ear. When it staggered to its knees, he used the maul again. Sam cut the jugular with a sticking knife and while the lifeblood flowed, they fastened chains to its hocks and hoisted the limp body up.
Simon brought a pail of water for washing, took the liver and kidneys in a pan to the kitchen. He helped carry meat that the women were frying down in fat for the lean winter coming. He stumbled up the steps to the kitchen with his load. “Granddaddy killed old Jess. While she was looking at him.”
“He needs the money, Simon. She wasn’t good for a milker any more. He’s going to take the hide and one side to Bethel.”
“He could have laid his kerchief o’er her eyes.” He took up the blood-stained pail. With lagging step he returned to his tasks.
Anton found Simon was apt to be slow and chided him. He was scattering handfuls of slaked lime on the hog house floor, sending Simon to refill the pails from the sack in the yard. In the ovenlike heat, the white dust clung to their sweated clothing and skin. “Think menfolk are always going to wait on your lazy ass? Now when I was a youngen I learned on a stick. Haw.”
And sometimes Anton turned on him unexpectedly. When the child heard his steps and ran to open the porch door, the man would say, “Now get out of here.”
“It’s but his way, Simon,” Ellen pleaded when she saw the boy’s eyes following the stocky erect figure.
“I know it, Mama.”
The drought broke toward the end of September. Maria was claiming the Man of Signs had foretold it. “It be the Autumnal Equinox. The sun’s entering Libra now.”
“That’s a fact,” said Sam. “The Scales been balanced toward drought. And now they be tilting the way to the rain.”
Thunder belted the heavens, rattling the timbers of the old house. The moist air was lightened and smelled of a sweetness unknown since early summer rains. Water was pouring from a full sky. In the oat field it hit the cracked clay and bounced off. Washes were beginning where stones formed little dams. Rivulets were taking the paths contrived and becoming foaming streams that roared like rivers and cut gashes that deepened into crevices. Much of the topsoil washed into the valleys. But the land was filled, the water stores replenished. All vegetation sucked and had its fill. And still there was more. “I vow we’ll get wet tonight, Sam. Appears to be just commencing.”