Читать книгу Now in November - Josephine W. Johnson - Страница 14

7

WHEN Kerrin’s school closed in April this year, I dreaded the thought of her being home all day. It seemed to me even then, eight months ago, that there was something more inerasably wrong with her than just a fierce selfishness and discontent. This teaching only held back awhile the black tide of something that had its beginning with her birth. Four years after we came, she had started to teach at the Union County school, although she was only nineteen then and there were some on the board who said it was wrong to have her even as only a substitute for Ally Hines. It wasn’t her age they minded so much, but we never had joined the church; and there was some talk of her “not being the one for the place,” but it dwindled into a mild nothing. Kerrin was good as a teacher and worked much harder than Ally Hines, with her cancerous bones and cough, had ever been able to. Ally had come down sick in the middle of the year, and Kerrin had asked for the place herself. The board would never have thought or considered her of their own accord, but when they heard she was through with high school, which was all that Ally herself had done, they took her for lack of knowing what else to do and being confused with Ally’s sickness as a thing not reckoned on in their almanacs. We were glad, not only because of the money—which Kerrin kept to herself, knowing it gave her a kind of power even though she might have to lend it sometime,—but glad because it took her away from home.

Even when she was quiet or reading, I could never find rest where Kerrin was. None of us could. Only out in the fields was there any peace when she was at home. I would come in the house sometimes and, without seeing or hearing, know she was there, and know too when she was gone without hearing her go. No matter in what sort of mood she was—and there were times when Kerrin was almost fiercely happy and kind—the tautness was never gone, the fear of what she might say or do.

She made a good teacher, good because she understood all those lumpy children in so far as any but God could understand them, I guess, and held them all to her with a kind of hard leniency and discipline. She succeeded because she really cared about them and thought it important that they should know the states and the laws and the years in which things happened or died, although not caring if she forgot it all forever, herself. She believed that for some reason it was important and valuable for them to know 1066 and the mystery of square root, and never asked herself exactly why and so was able to teach them well and thoroughly. There’s a driving force—an energy lying in blindness—which is never known by those wondering and open-minded ones who are led by thought into doubt, and from there through all the stages of futility and despair until they are paralyzed to point out one way or the other even to children who haven’t the sense to sneer. But Kerrin, who riddled all laws herself, took a fanatic delight in shoving down law and order into their placid throats, amiably open wide and gaping. The children loved her, and sometimes she brought them home after school, one or two at a time, for no reason except that they asked her to. If they were little boys that came, Father would stop his work and come up to talk with them in an eager, hearty way, pointing out the pig houses or the water-pump by the pond, and laugh at whatever they said, no matter whether their words were smart or foolish. Kerrin herself liked the boys better because their faces were not so stupid and their minds clicked faster. The girls were already vacant wives, she said,—not stolid, their tongues slapping around like wheels, but already bounded tight with convention, a thick wall between them and the unknown things; nor was it in Kerrin to see and point out a way, or break a hole that these children could nose through and escape. “—Hillbillies and tenant farmers,” she said. “No Lincoln’ll ever come out of these. Smart enough to be even school-teachers, maybe, repeating the things they’ve read. Why should I try for more? They only want to know enough so they can clerk in a store some place and ride in a Ford on Sundays. Want to be able to read the magazines and catalogues. If they’re looking for more, they can go some place else and get it!—And none of them ever will. . . .”

It was true and it wasn’t true—what she said about the children. People weren’t born and fastened to earth any more. They came and went, returning and leaving, not like a tide but in scattered ways and times. People came back to the land as we had come, after years of another life, bringing with them a newness to old things, a different seeing from the sight of men born with the sound of calves’ bawling in their ears and the taste of mud in their mouths from the beginning. There was no solitude utterly unpierced, no isolation complete any longer—except for the final one of self. If Kerrin had chosen to point out the myriad facets of life, the strangeness of breath itself, she might not have left them so blind and narrow, even if they had been as indifferent as she thought. But maybe she herself didn’t see these things, and was blind and gaping, too, which made her restless and full of uncertain angry moods, and above all lonely.

I hoped that this year she would find enough work to keep her quiet, and wished that August with schools beginning was not so far, although God knows we needed her help enough. She had been of more use to Father than even she herself realized, and things had taken him twice as long while she was away at school. He was slow and fumbled the harness, jerked and thumped at the horses until they pounded the walls. Kerrin used to do it all for him, shoving the bits in swift and angry, but with no hesitation or fumbling tries. A sort of contemptuous certainty. She used to feed them at noon and toss in corn, kind and yet viciously, damning their eagerness. The stalls got muck-deep and moldy when she was gone, and Father left them because there was little time. But this year when school closed, she seemed to forget all the things she used to do, and it was only by nagging that we made her work.

I wished that all the strength which she spent in hate and in searching for something she did not even name to herself had been ours to use. But I knew that strength alone would never have helped us much, and even if we had raised nine farms we would have had less than an acre’s return in money. Kerrin herself never cared whether or not this slough of debt was filled, and to her the land was only a place to stay in, and as lonely as peaks or islands are.

She spent most of her time now, as she used to do when we were children, reading—it seemed, almost everything that was piled up there on the shelves. She would lie with her hard brown face casting a shadow on the page, and go through the books that the grandfathers used to own—old books that had page after page without a new paragraph or picture, and filled with philosophies obscure and gloomy as were the bindings, but even more durable perhaps. She spent hours in reading them over and did not stop, as Merle and I did, at a certain page or time, or stop to do dishes and scrabble in earth to make a garden. She was never law or time bound, or thinking of how her eyes might hurt; and she had a faith that was almost religious in believing a thing must be so if a man would bother to write it out seriously and bind it in a book.

Even if we had had more money, I doubt that Kerrin would have been satisfied. She carried the root of her unrest with her, a root not the kind that pushed the self on and up to accomplishment and fed it with a desire, but a poisoned thing that wasted its strength in pushing down here and there, and found only a shallow soil or one full of rocks wherever planted. I knew that she wanted love,—not anything we could give her, frugal and spinsterly, nor Father’s (having long ago stopped even hoping for it), but some man’s love in which she could see this image she had of herself reflected and thus becoming half-true. I knew it was this fierce restlessness, this desire and hunger that had led her—even after teaching school all day, and carrying up milk at night, and finishing all those things accumulated and undone as though tipped there from the day like a rubbish heap of the hours’ leavings—to go out fox-hunting at night with the farmers, or walk alone, tramping the marsh grass and weeds or along the dim rutted roads until morning. I would crouch cold on these nights in bed or at the window, driven by some obsession to see her come and go, and could not sleep until the empty moon-patch on her bed was broken and I could see the light on her bony and polished arms.

I felt empty and thirsty, too, sometimes, dreaming wild and impossible dreams, but was driven easily from them by the pattern of a shadow or a pot on the stove, and driven from them too by a wry sense of humor that made my mind leap always to see the vision’s end. Not even on April nights heavy with grape smell, or in the moving of shadow-leaves could my mind forget the inevitable noon.