Fidelity Page 7

  Slowly she learned to imagine where she was. The ridge named for Walter Cotman’s family is a long one, curving out toward the river between the two creek valleys of Willow Run and Katie’s Branch. As it comes near to the river valley it gets narrower, its sides steeper and more deeply incised by hollows. When Elton and Mary Penn were making their beginning there, the uplands were divided into many farms, few of which contained as much as a hundred acres. The hollows, the steeper hillsides, the bluffs along the sides of the two creek valleys were covered with thicket or woods. From where the hawks saw it, the ridge would have seemed a long, irregular promontory reaching out into a sea of trees. And it bore on its back crisscrossings of other trees along the stone or rail or wire fences, trees in thickets and groves, trees in the houseyards. And on rises of ground or tucked into folds were the gray, paintless buildings of the farmsteads, connected to one another by lanes and paths. Now she thought of herself as belonging there, not just because of her marriage to Elton but also because of the economy that the two of them had made around themselves and with their neighbors. She had learned to think of herself as living and working at the center of a wonderful provisioning: the kitchen and garden, hog pen and smokehouse, henhouse and cellar of her own household; the little commerce of giving and taking that spoked out along the paths connecting her household to the others; Port William on its ridgetop in one direction, Goforth in its valley in the other; and all this at the heart of the weather and the world.

  On a bright, still day in the late fall, after all the leaves were down, she had stood on the highest point and had seen the six smokes of the six houses rising straight up into the wide downfalling light. She knew which smoke came from which house. It was like watching the rising up of prayers or some less acknowledged communication between Earth and Heaven. She could not say to herself how it made her feel.

  She loved her jars of vegetables and preserves on the cellar shelves, and the potato bin beneath, the cured hams and shoulders and bacons hanging in the smokehouse, the two hens already brooding their clutches of marked eggs, the egg basket and the cream bucket slowly filling, week after week. But today these things seemed precious and far away, as if remembered from another world or another life. Her sickness made things seem arbitrary and awry. Nothing had to be the way it was. As easily as she could see the house as it was, she could imagine it empty, windowless, the tin roof blowing away, the chimneys crumbling, the cellar caved in, weeds in the yard. She could imagine Elton and herself gone, and the rest of them—Hardy, Hample, Cotman, and Quail—gone too.

  Elton could spend an hour telling her—and himself—how Walter Cotman went about his work. Elton was a man fascinated with farming, and she could see him picking his way into it with his understanding. He wanted to know the best ways of doing things. He wanted to see how a way of doing came out of a way of thinking and a way of living. He was interested in the ways people talked and wore their clothes.

  The Hamples were another of his studies. Jonah Hample and his young ones were almost useless as farmers because, as Elton maintained, they could not see all the way to the ground. They did not own a car because they could not see well enough to drive—“They need to drive something with eyes,” Elton said—and yet they were all born mechanics. They could fix anything. While Daisy Hample stood on the porch clucking about the weeds in their crops, Jonah and his boys and sometimes his girls, too, would be busy with some machine that somebody had brought for them to fix. The Hample children went about the neighborhood in a drove, pushing a fairly usable old bicycle that they loved but could not ride.

  Elton watched Braymer, too. Unlike his brother and Walter Cotman, Braymer liked to know what was going on in the world. Like the rest of them, Braymer had no cash to spare, but he liked to think about what he would do with money if he had it. He liked knowing where something could be bought for a good price. He liked to hear what somebody had done to make a little money and then to think about it and tell the others about it while they worked. “Braymer would be a trader if he had a chance,” Elton told Mary. “He’d like to try a little of this and a little of that, and see how he did with it. Walter and Tom like what they’ve got.”

  “And you don’t like what you’ve got, “ Mary said.

  He grinned big at her, as he always did when she read his mind. “I like some of it,” he said.

  At the end of the summer, when she and Elton were beginning their first tobacco harvest in the neighborhood, Tom Hardy said to Elton, “Now, Josie Braymer can out-cut us all, Elton. If she gets ahead of you, just don’t pay it any mind.”

  “Tom,” Elton said, “I’m going to leave here now and go to the other end of this row. If Josie Braymer’s there when I get there, I’m going home.”

  When he got there Josie Braymer was not there, and neither was any of the men. It was not that he did not want to be bested by a woman; he did not want to be bested by anybody. One thing Mary would never have to do was wonder which way he was. She knew he would rather die than be beaten. It was maybe not the best way to be, she thought, but it was the way he was, and she loved him. It was both a trouble and a comfort to her to know that he would always require the most of himself. And he was beautiful, the way he moved in his work. It stirred her.

  She could feel ambition constantly pressing in him. He could do more than he had done, and he was always looking for the way. He was like an axman at work in a tangled thicket, cutting and cutting at the brush and the vines and the low limbs, trying to make room for a full swing. For this year he had rented corn ground from Josie Tom’s mother down by Goforth, two miles away. When he went down with his team to work, he would have to take his dinner. It would mean more work for them both, but he was desperate for room to exert himself. They were poor as the times, they saw more obstacles than openings, and yet she believed without doubt that Elton was on his way.

  It was not his ambition—his constant, tireless, often exhilarated preoccupation with work—that troubled her. She could stay with him in that. She had learned that she could do, and do well and gladly enough, whatever she would have to do. She had no fear. What troubled her were the dark and mostly silent angers that often settled upon him and estranged him from everything. At those times, she knew, he doubted himself, and he suffered and raged in his doubt. He may have been born with this doubt in him, she sometimes imagined; it was as though his soul were like a little moon that would be dark at times and bright at others. But she knew also that her parents’ rejection of him had cost him dearly. Even as he defied them to matter to him, they held a power over him that he could not shake off. In his inability to forgive them, he consented to this power, and their rejection stood by him and measured him day by day. Her parents’ pride was social, belonging, even in its extremity, to their kind and time. But Elton’s pride was merely creaturely, albeit that of an extraordinary creature; it was a creature’s naked claim on the right to respect itself, a claim that no creature’s life, of itself, could invariably support. At times he seemed to her a man in the light in daily struggle with a man in the dark, and sometimes the man in the dark had the upper hand.

  Elton never felt that any mistake was affordable; he and Mary were living within margins that were too narrow. He required perfection of himself. When he failed, he was like the sun in a cloud, alone and burning, furious in his doubt, furious at her because she trusted in him though he doubted. How could she dare to love him, who did not love himself? And then, sometimes accountably, sometimes not, the cloud would move away, and he would light up everything around him. His own force and intelligence would be clear within him then; he would be skillful and joyful, passionate in his love of order, funny and tender.

  At his best, Elton was a man in love—with her but not just with her. He was in love too with the world, with their place in the world, with that scanty farm, with his own life, with farming. At those times she lived in his love as in a spacious house.

  Walter Cotman always spoke of Mary as Elton�
��s “better half.” In spite of his sulks and silences, she would not go so far as “better.” That she was his half, she had no doubt at all. He needed her. At times she knew with a joyous ache that she completed him, just as she knew with the same joy that she needed him and he completed her. How beautiful a thing it was, she thought, to be a half, to be completed by such another half! When had there ever been such a yearning of halves toward each other, such a longing, even in quarrels, to be whole? And sometimes they would be whole. Their wholeness came upon them as a rush of light, around them and within them, so that she felt they must be shining in the dark.

  But now that wholeness was not imaginable; she felt herself a part without counterpart, a mere fragment, dark and broken off. The fire had burned low in the stove. Though she still wore her coat, she was again chilled and shaking. For a long time, perhaps, she had been thinking of nothing, and now misery alerted her again to the room. The wind ranted and sucked at the house’s corners. She could hear its billows and shocks, as if somebody off in the distance were shaking a great rug. She felt, not a draft, but the whole atmosphere of the room moving coldly against her. She went into the other room, but the fire there also needed building up. She could not bring herself to do it. She was shaking, she ached, she could think only of lying down. Standing near the stove, she undressed, put on her nightgown again, and went to bed.

  She lay chattering and shivering while the bedclothes warmed around her. It seemed to her that a time might come when sickness would be a great blessing, for she truly did not care if she died. She thought of Elton, caught up in the day’s wind, who could not even look at her and see that she was sick. If she had not been too miserable, she would have cried. But then her thoughts began to slip away, like dishes sliding along a table pitched as steeply as a roof. She went to sleep.

  When she woke, the room was warm. A teakettle on the heating stove was muttering and steaming. Though the wind was still blowing hard, the room was full of sunlight. The lamp on the narrow mantel shelf behind the stove was filled and clean, its chimney gleaming, and so was the one on the stand by the bed.

  Josie Tom was sitting in the rocker by the window, sunlight flowing in on the unfinished long embroidery she had draped over her lap. She was bowed over her work, filling in with her needle and a length of yellow thread the bright corolla of a jonquil—an “Easter lily,” as she would have called it. She was humming the tune of an old hymn, something she often did while she was working, apparently without awareness that she was doing it. Her voice was resonant, low, and quiet, barely audible, as if it were coming out of the air and she, too, were merely listening to it. The yellow flower was nearly complete.

  And so Mary knew all the story of her day. Elton, going by Josie Tom’s in the half-light, had stopped and called.

  She could hear his voice, raised to carry through the wind: “Mrs. Hardy, Mary’s sick, and I have to go over to Walter’s to plow.”

  So he had known. He had thought of her. He had told Josie Tom.

  Feeling herself looked at, Josie Tom raised her head and smiled. “Well, are you awake? Are you all right?”

  “Oh, I’m wonderful,” Mary said. And she slept again.

  III

  Making It Home

  He had crossed the wide ocean and many a river. Now not another river lay between him and home but only a few creeks that he knew by name. Arthur Rowanberry had come a long way, trusting somebody else to know where he was, and now he knew where he was himself. The great river, still raised somewhat from the flood of that spring and flowing swiftly, lay off across the fields to his left; to his right and farther away were the wooded slopes of the Kentucky side of the valley, and over it all, from the tops of the hills on one side to the tops of the hills on the other, stretched the gray sky. He was walking along the blacktop that followed the river upstream to the county seat of Hargrave. On the higher ground to the right of the road stood fine brick farmhouses that had been built a hundred and more years ago from the earnings of the rich bottomland fields that lay around them. There had been a time when those houses had seemed as permanent to him as the land they stood on. But where he had been, they had the answer to such houses.

  “We wouldn’t let one of them stand long in our way,” he thought.

  Art Rowanberry walked like the first man to discover upright posture—as if, having been a creature no taller than a sheep or a pig, he had suddenly risen to the height of six feet and looked around. He walked too like a man who had been taught to march, and he wore a uniform. But whatever was military in his walk was an overlay, like the uniform, for he had been a man long before he had been a soldier, and a farmer long before he had been a man. An observer might have sensed in his walk and in the way he carried himself a reconciliation to the forms and distances of the land such as comes only to those who have from childhood been accustomed to the land’s work.

  The noises of the town were a long way behind him. It was too early for the evening chores, and the farmsteads that he passed were quiet. Birds sang. From time to time he heard a farmer call out to his team. Once he had heard a tractor off somewhere in the fields and once a towboat out on the river, but those sounds had faded away. No car had passed him, though he walked a paved main road. There was no sound near him but the sound of his own footsteps falling steadily on the pavement.

  Once it had seemed to him that he walked only on the place where he was. But now, having gone and returned from so far, he knew that he was walking on the whole round world. He felt the great, empty distance that the world was turning in, far away from the sun and the moon and the stars.

  “Here,” he thought, “is where we do what we are going to do—the only chance we got. And if somebody was to be looking down from up there, it would all look a lot littler to him than it does to us.”

  He was talking carefully to himself in his thoughts, forming the words more deliberately than if he were saying them aloud, because he did not want to count his steps. He had a long way still to go, and he did not want to know how many steps it was going to take. Nor did he want to hear in his head the counted cadence of marching.

  “I ain’t marching,” he thought. “I am going somewheres. I am going up the river towards Hargrave. And this side of Hargrave, before the bridge, at Ellville, I will turn up the Kentucky River, and go ten miles, and turn up Sand Ripple below Port William, and I will be at home.”

  He carried a duffel bag that contained his overcoat, a change of clothes, and a shaving kit. From time to time, he shifted the bag from one shoulder to the other.

  “I reckon I am done marching, have marched my last step, and now I am walking. There is nobody in front of me and nobody behind. I have come here without a by-your-leave to anybody. Them that have known where I was, or was supposed to, for three years don’t know where I am now. Nobody that I know knows where I am now.”

  He came from killing. He had felt the ground shaken by men and what they did. Where he was coming from, they thought about killing day after day, and feared it, and did it. And out of the unending, unrelenting great noise and tumult of the killing went little deaths that belonged to people one by one. Some had feared it and had died. Some had died without fearing it, lacking the time. They had fallen around him until he was amazed that he stood—men who in a little while had become his buddies, most of them younger than he, just boys.

  The fighting had been like work, only a lot of people got killed and a lot of things got destroyed. It was not work that made much of anything. You and your people intended to go your way, if you could. And you wanted to stop the other people from going their way, if you could. And whatever interfered you destroyed. You had a thing on your mind that you wanted, or wanted to get to, and anything at all that stood in your way, you had the right to destroy. If what was in the way were women and little children, you would not even know it, and it was all the same. When your power is in a big gun, you don’t have any small intentions. Whatever you want to hit, you want to
make dust out of it. Farms, houses, whole towns—things that people had made well and cared for a long time—you made nothing of.

  “We blew them apart and scattered the pieces so they couldn’t be put back together again. And people, too. We blew them apart and scattered the pieces.”

  He had seen tatters of human flesh hanging in the limbs of trees along with pieces of machines. He had seen bodies without heads, arms and legs without bodies, strewn around indifferently as chips. He had seen the bodies of men hanging upside down from a tank turret, lifeless as dolls.

  Once, when they were firing their gun, the man beside him—Eckstrom—began to dance. And Art thought, “This ain’t no time to be dancing.” But old Eckstrom was dancing because he was shot in the head, was killed, his body trying on its own to keep standing.

  And others had gone down, near enough to Art almost that he could have touched them as they fell: Jones, Bitmer, Hirsch, Walters, Corelli.

  He had seen attackers coming on, climbing over the bodies of those who had fallen ahead of them. A man who, in one moment, had been a helper, a friend, in the next moment was only a low mound of something in the way, and you stepped over him or stepped on him and came ahead.

  Once while they were manning their gun and under fire themselves, old Eckstrom got mad, and he said, “I wish I had those sons of bitches lined up where I could shoot every damned one of them.”

  And Art said, “Them fellers over there are doing about the same work we are, ’pears like to me.”