“Reckon I might make a little mess of garden truck yet,” Ellen said, “before the first frost.”
“Mester Gaddy,” said Sam, “I’d as soon set right out in this while I milk. I got a honing to get drenched.”
That night crickets that dwelled in the stone foundations and katydids with leaflike wings and long silken feelers and green eyes, were scraping their wings in the teeming dark. They had been listless through the dry weather, now were voicing themselves in lusty chorus. The red cardinal was singing so softly in the hackberry that it sounded as if it were away down Sweetincreek Road.
The drought had wreaked a stiff toll. A few loads of hay would be brought in but most of the crop was lost. There would be no corn to garner, no small grains. One crib remained from the previous year and from it Anton would eke out the winter feeding. He decided to ride with Dyke Burwell to the auctions in Louisville up on the northern border of Kentucky. He selected four sows to hold over the winter with the breeding boar; he would sell the others and all the yeanling pigs. They were flat-sided, poorly finished. The men hoped that in the city they would get a better price than was paid locally. Dyke had loaded his father’s excess hogs in the Burwell Chevrolet truck. The two were driving off for the seventy-mile trip and would return in a few days.
The Gaddy women and the child watched the load of squealing hogs, bedded in straw, lurch down the lane. Ellen laughed, “Let’s have an outing, Simon.” The air was brightened as the head of the house was carried further and further away. They took biscuits and cheese down to the orchard. Jack accompanied them. When they had eaten, they gathered fallen apples into a bushel; Simon climbed trees, shook down the few that clung to the branches. They went beyond the orchard to a patch of sorghum cane. Being near the farm brook, it had survived the dry spell. They were breaking stalks, sucking the juice.
“Crows don’t always squall, Mama. They can talk soft too. I heard one twittering like a wren, feeding its youngens.” The child wanted to know the ways of the beasts and fowl. “Granddaddy says buzzards will kill a baby pig and steal off with it. Reckon that’s so?”
“A buzzard’s not biggity enough. They’re good but to clean up what’s dead and rotting.”
Returning to the house, they had come on an opossum in the path. The heart of the swooned animal beat faintly, its dull-white jaws, withered ears and skinny tail bore a semblance to death. Simon was plucking it from the dust, cradling it in the bend of his arm. He stroked the coarse fur. “I’ll make it a pet.”
Ellen laughed then. But somehow she was lonely, walking up the hill in the breeze of the afternoon, bearing the basket of fall apples.
“I always wondered if a mole could swim, Mama. Yesterday I saw one cross the branch. Now I know that thing.” She made no reply and he went on, “You reckon those goat-sucker birds truly suckle the cows at night? Sam says it’s so. He says milk snakes’ll do it too. I’m going to spy one time on them.”
Anton and Dyke came back from Louisville. Prices had fallen more than anticipated; the buyers’ eyes had been hard. Anton bought a load of poor-quality hay that was stacked high on the truck. They had had a flat tire on the way home and arrived late at night. Anton was pounding on the door. “Open up, ooman.”
They brushed by Maria who stood in a knee-length sweater, her grayish hair in braids. “Hey, ma’am,” Dyke muttered. They went in the parlor, the stench of manure and sweat about them.
“Paid fifty cents for this lightning.” Anton cradled a Mason jar of clear liquid. “Didn’t tell you, boy, in case we got asked if we had any moon hid in that hay.” He unscrewed the lid and filled glasses.
Ellen went up to bed; she found Simon on the stairway and sent him before her. She heard her father’s shout and Dyke’s growl of agreement as she was drifting off to sleep. She awoke, feeling a hard hand on her shoulder. “What’s amiss?” she whispered, thinking it was Anton.
“Hey. It’s me, Ellie.” She heard the pleading whisper, smelled the sour breath.
“You’re sodden drunk, Dyke. Go downstairs and get to sleep. If you can find your way to the sofa in the parlor.” She spoke severely, heard his clumsy steps descending the stairs, his curse as he stumbled and bumped the wall. In the morning she was serving them breakfast. As soon as the hay was unloaded Dyke would drive home. Ellen could see he had no sure memory of his visit to her room. She caught his covert glance. He thinks it was a fancy he had.
17
In that fall Ellen had a dream of Christian Ay. It was her first thought of him in many months’ time. His figure was unclear, touched with gentleness and warmth; it was apart from her. She fancied he was hurt. He was calling, his voice as if through water. When she awoke she could hear the echo of her own cry. She was musing at the power of the nightmare’s image. “There could be a meaning. Like the Prophet Ezekiel seeing the dreadful wheels. A wheel whirling in the middle of a wheel. And there was a meaning there that certain men read.”
She went downstairs to sit wakeful while the dream was still fresh, in the balmy fall moonlight. Fog steamed in the air, blurring the rims of trees and the porch roof. There was a rustle in the drying grass and though no wind stirred a fallen leaf seemed to move on itself, and presently another, and then the shadow of an embryonic mouse was darting, vanishing before the eye could catch the shape. The shrews were harvesting for the winter ahead; their tiny gray piglike bodies sped soundless; through the movement in their wake one was aware of them. “Sam says folks will dream of a body when they’re in danger. Or when they’ve died. Wonder if a trouble’s come to Christian Ay?” Dwelling on the dream Ellen forgot the curse she had laid once on the man. She buried her injury, turning the old love over gently, painfully, alone on the step.
Winter was casting her days off, one by one. Spring had arrived. Anton’s worrying of Simon had become less pronounced. Ellen heard the child’s high voice repeating the tuneless song his grandfather was teaching him.
It was our William Jennings Bryan Who told them Adam was there first When he fought the battle With those sons of darkness At the trial of John T. Scopes
Anton was lifting the big boy onto his knee. “Shaw. Now, here’s this poppet. You know I had a son once. If he’d have lived, I’d been minded to give him my name.” Simon sat stiff at the favor granted. Ellen watched through the door from where she worked, pleased at this new way of Anton’s. “How come you called him Simon, girl?”
“The Doughertys named him, Pa.”
“Anton’s a good name. I don’t favor Simon. There was a Simon in the Bible tried to buy Peter.”
“Oh, Pa. There are lots of Simons in the Bible.”
“Well.” He was turning to the boy again. She had never heard her father sing, and was glad.
They said our ancestors Were monkeys Now can’t you see, folks That’s quite absurd?
And then the days were passing, made of long hours. The months were lengthening into years. The winter following the drought was the first Ellen knew when the table wasn’t amply laid. She had to learn how to stint in the cooking and to curb her generous hand. When weevils got in the meal she would strain them out and mix the meal with water to make a corn pone. In the old days she would have tossed it easily to the hens. The market for the milk and produce worsened. Every fall Anton and Dyke made two or three trips up to Louisville to the sales. They took pigs and steers, chickens, geese and ducks, small grains and root crops. Through the years the Gaddys would manage, for they depended on varied harvests. The one-crop farmer suffered the most. Many of them were driving away from their plots of land, their families and goods piled on wagons and trucks, hoping to find jobs in factories and foundries of the cities. When Anton saw a loaded vehicle go down Sweetincreek Road, he articulated his scorn, “I’d set and eat clay before I’d leave my farm. Those fellows are oomen-farmers, farting with a patch of tobacco. Putting on fertilizer and then burning it off. Laying cheesecloth strips like a ooman.”
“What for, Granddaddy?”
“I vow I don’t know. Then they go to the auction and hit don’t sell for nothing. They buy moon from the patent medicine man and come back with their pockets empty. So go on,” he shouted at the retreating wagon, “and don’t come back.”
“And don’t come back,” cried Simon shrilly.
Anton turned to the boy, his eyes hot. “You stay on this farm, Poppet, and some day maybe it’ll all belong to you.”
Anton slowly was transferring the fervor he used to spend on his younger daughter, Frankie, to this boy, Simon. He was taking him over. As time passed he judged Ellen’s guidance of the child. “You be a fool, girl. You’ll spoil him rotten.”
When the boy remembered and did as bid, Anton was pleased; when he disobeyed, he whipped him, stolid. “Thou shalt beat him with a rod, so it’s said. I’ll take no sass. You do as I say, Simon.”