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

she first had stayed this late and he had gone storming out to meet her, shouting for explanations he never got, and made inarticulate with rage when she would not answer or come into the house. Shehad spent the night out in the barn that time, sleeping up in the weedy hay and more comfortable perhaps than we were, sick and unsleeping in our beds.
    I remember the morning after that night.—It was April, and cold, walled in with mists high as the sheep-barn roof. We saw Kerrin come out of the barn with dry scraps of weed still stuck in her hair, and stretch and yawn in the sun that came down through the mists, then come up the stones to the kitchen when Dad had gone. We looked at each other and shivered, but thought it was because of the fog that clung to our clothes and made them damp and chilly. We came down into the kitchen and flapped their dampness in front of the fire, and Kerrin sat at the table without saying anything, and the hay still messed in her hair. Her legs were wet and goose-fleshed from walking up in the grass. She watched us to see what we would say, but we only went on drying our clothes, more interested in the thick bacon smell and the glunk of oatmeal on the stove. Mother brought her some bacon and a hunk of toast and milk that had cream still marbled on the top, and told her she’d better move up against the stove to dry; and we could see she was hoping that Father would stay out a good long time. Kerrinate savage and hugely like a wolf, and smeared on jelly till all her toast was gone, then ate the jelly plain in high, quivering spoonsful from the jar. Merle and I sat there and ate patiently at our blobs of oatmeal with milk around the edges. It came to me as a sort of dim, unfinished thought that there were hours of sun and hours of picking and hot hours on a stove all gone into those few minutes of Kerrin’s swallowing and would become part of her, giving her energy to hate and use loud words and tears; and I wondered how Mother’s faith would answer that, for it seemed to make the pattern of things more distorted than before. I hadn’t time to follow this thought to the end—which was well, perhaps, for there was no answer, at least none that I could have found—for Father came in just then and stood in the doorway looking at us.
    He was a big man and heavy, and his face hung dragged in long thin folds. His red hair used to be thick, but was now sparse and grown in somber hummocks. Once he had let it grow down over his collar, which made him look like a preacher and more kindly, but most of the time he was shaved and alien-looking to the earth. He had frosty eyes—a kind of white-blue with fierce pupils. I loved him sometimes when hesmiled; because he so seldom did, I guess. He cared most for Merle and me, partly because we loved the land more, which seemed to justify and comfort him in a way. Merle he loved most, and used to say that shewould have made a good boy. But he did not try to treat her as one, thinking that nothing could change a girl much. He looked at us from across the misty gulf that he thought was between him and all women, and thought of the place in which they moved around and did things as a long way off—a place from which they might step across this gulf to marry a man, but any time might go back again. Only Mother he saw clearly. The outside part of her anyway. If she went back in secret to this woman-place he did not know it, because marriage was to her a thing of which mighty few men are worthy—a religion and long giving.
    He seemed not to see or to have forgotten Kerrin, might not have noticed her at all if she’d kept still and combed her hair instead of leaving it strawed and weedy. “Max isn’t coming up today,” he said. “He’s sick.” He put the milk down slopping over the floor, and looked at Kerrin. He started to say something, but only got red and tight and turned around in a helpless, exasperated