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

way. Mother asked him howmuch they had finished yesterday, and he said it wasn’t a third of what still was waiting. Max was slow, he muttered, and worked at home, besides—worked too much. . . . The Rathmans were planting corn, too. . . . Could silage it, anyhow, if it didn’t sell. . . .
    â€œWhy don’t you grow something that nobody else has got?” Kerrin blurted out. “Something that’ll bring us more money than just corn!”
    â€œYou want too much too fast,” Father said. He was cold and quiet and sounded years away from her nagging voice. He spokeas though to a little dog that insisted on yapping, a little dog that he might kick soon.
    I could see Mother watching him, screwed hard and tense, saying—be careful . . . be careful . . . don’t look at her that way! . . . Not aloud, but with her eyes. She was praying inside, I knew. Aloud she said, in a sort of indifferent way, that he might try celery later on, that it was hard to raise, she knew, but none around here had it and it took more water than anyone else had the time or means to give.
    â€œWho’ll haul the water?” Dad asked. Less of a question than a sneer. He had the old look of tiredness on his face that came when we argued with him,that look of being harried and forced to fight back against things not worth the battle. A look of woman-tiredness.
    â€œI can do it,” Kerrin said. She looked excited and eager in a sudden flare. “Go ahead,” Father told her. “Go ahead and see what you can do!” He shoved back his chair and sat there laughing to himself. An unpleasant and meager sound, exasperated and turned in as if to some other man, invisible inside, who understood and pitied him. He seldom swore aloud, thought it was wrong to do before his girls;—but all the blasphemy was there, bursting and turning sour inside.
    Merle and I sneaked away and went out of the house. The mists were all risen and we could see down into the valley where the peaches were coming into bloom and flecked with skinny rose. They were sparse that year and thin-petaled, but the wild plums flowered in clouds. There was a lane of them back behind the barns, and we went there past the fresh dung-heaps steaming warm and the tall hogs that rooted in the mud. The old sow Clytemnestra stared at us dully with suspicion and muttered, and with her were nine hairy shoats, following where her great dugstrailed along the mud. The air came sweet and stale and full of a grassy smell. We felt that a hard, smothering weight was gone, and climbed the fence and started to run fast and blunderingly over the gopher field. We wanted to reach the woods and be hidden in it. Shut ourselves off in the sparse green shadows. The hollows were full of the wild thin pansies, blue as if frost or fog were laid there—acres, it seemed, and covering the ground thick as grass itself. We went up past the pond where already there were clusters of slimy eggs from the frogs and salamanders, transparent and round like a bunch of tapioca balls black-specked and stuck together. Merle picked up one in her hand but it slid away like a fat and slimy fish, and seemed almost to squirm. We waited and watched, but could find no frog swelled up to sing, and nothing that seemed alive but the whirling beetles that darted and left their streaks on water like the scratch of skates on ice. The white-oaks were in tassel then—but there is no way to tell of them. We only stood like a pair of stumps, and looked and thought that something would break inside, and we felt too stretched and heavy to hold much more. Then Merle went down on her knees in the grass and started to pull up thepansies, almost savagely and in great chunks. “There’re so many,” she said. “Nobody’ud miss them if I pulled a thousand!” And I pulled some, too, and it seemed to stop the hurt when you got your hands tight on them, even knowing that they would die.