Now in November by Josephine W. Johnson Read Free Book Online

there but its use not known. But to Merle and me, even when we had first come, it seemed that our hearts must be small and shriveled-up things since they felt so tight and full with only an eye’s breadth of loveliness to hold, and we wondered if they would grow or burst by the year’s end, what with having to hold all the nights and days andseasons, the change from hour to hour, and the change from minute to minute even, from cloud-shadows moving up and down the hills.
    In those early years, to read and to eat and to be alive on the hills had been enough for Merle and me.From the beginning we had felt rooted and born here, like the twin scrub-oak trees that grew together in the north pasture and turned lacquer-red in fall, and whose roots were under the white ledgestones. We called them the Gemini, and their inner branches grew short and were locked together so that the shape of both made only one tree with two boles.
    At no hour did life suddenly change, nor was there any moment which could be said to have altogether made or altered us. We were the slow accretion of the days, built up, like the coral islands, of innumerable things.—The moment of evening air between the stove and the well outside . . . the sound of wind wrenching and whining in the sashes . . . the flesh of corn-kernels . . . fear—fear of the lantern’s shadow . . . fear of the mortgage . . . cold milk and the sour red beets . . . the green beans and the corn bread crumbling in our mouths . . . fear again . . . and the voice of Kerrin singing to herself in the calflot . . . the sense of safety in Mother’s nearness . . . the calm faith that was in her and came out of her like a warmth around . . . the presence of each other and a lusty love of being, of living and knowing there was tomorrow and God knows how many more tomorrows and each a life and sufficient in itself. . . . We were added to by the shadow of leaves, and by the leaf itself . . . by the blue undulations across the snow, and the kingfisher’s rattling scream even when creeks were frozen over.We were the green peas, hard and swollen, which Merle gathered late so that what was earth in the morning would be gone into and swelling out the peas by night, making them bigger all through no trouble or expense of ours, which seemed an odd, almost too kind thing—like a miracle when none was asked. They were as much part of us as the sight of white-boned sycamores flung up against the sky, or clouds driven like steam along the tops. In the thought and the strangeness of self we could spend hours as traveling through a labyrinth, and it was a riddle sufficient in those days to keep the mind quick and seeking, hungry and never fed; and in the mystery of the turnip, you forgot the turnip-leaf.
    But for Kerrin these things had never been satisfyingenough, even in other years. She used to get restless and savage, and rode out long ways into the night while we sat reading. “Where’s Kerrin?” Father would keep on asking, would read a chapter and go peer out into the moonlight. “Why don’t you keep her home, Willa?” he’d say to Mother. “How do you know what she’s doing out this way? No girl ought to be out at night this way!” He’d be tired by dark, wanting to sleep early, wanted to go to bed by eight sometimes but insisted on staying up till Kerrin came back along the road, sometimes as late as nine or ten. We’d hear the plough-horses whinny and go thundering down the fence, and then the sorrel’s feet rattle the road stones a fourth of a mile away, and hear his shrill, exhausted neighing. “She’s here now,” Mother would say. “She’s safe enough. You go to sleep now, Arnold.” And with the nearer rattling of stones and feet, Father would close his book, for a half-hour now unread, and go upstairs, having learned that he could not meet or say anything to her, and remembering the one night when