She sighed again, in the midst of the clean kitchen.
“But my sister is coming home …” Joan began again. She would not give up quite so easily as this.
Then she thought of a key to open the door of this house to Rose. Once a month in the middle of the week Bart’s mother put on her second-best black dress and one of the boys or Bart’s father hitched up and drove her to the church to a missionary meeting. Joan never wanted to go. She always said, “I’ll have supper ready for you when you come back.” But once or twice she had gone and sat quietly through the meeting. It was like all the others she had known, the good mothers sewing, listening to tales of famine and flood and falling down before idols, their eyes absorbed, turned inwardly upon their houses, upon the house where each must be back for supper. There was the tinkling dribble of small silver and copper coins and it was all over. Still they went, since it was a duty.
“You know — did I tell you? — that Rose and her husband are missionaries?”
“Yes, you did tell me,” Bart’s mother said. “I always thought it kind of queer that you never cared more about the meetings, they being missionaries themselves. Well, I guess I’ll stir the potatoes. Does seem as if mealtimes come round quicker than anything could.”
She rose from her seat by the stove, sighing.
No, there was no room here for Rose’s baby to be born. She wrote to Rose, “If I ever have a place of my own—” For she had no place of her own, after all. She must let Rose have her baby in a foreign country.
Into the emptiness she began to put an image of Bart. She needed an image in her emptiness and so she took a little here and there of what she had. “He’s my husband,” she said to herself. So she took fragments of Bart and shaped them with the welding of her imagination into an image. She took his size, the breadth of his shoulders and his strong neck and his length of limb. But she did not take his hands, clenched, hard, swollen, so that he could never really straighten them or never seem, when he took her hand in his, really to hold it. She took his square jaw, his close curly dark red hair. But she did not take his stiff pale lips, nor his deep-set reddish eyes. She even took his silence and made it strength. And the breath with which she breathed life into this image she made was the moment in the field when she saw him as a small awkward country boy, wanting the merriment of parties, of play, and doomed to work, to get up and milk the cows before he went to school, to milk cows and chop wood and carry feed and water to the beasts when other boys were playing ball and sledding and skating and giving and going to parties.
For of course there had never been any fun in this house. There was no room in which fun could be made. The parlor was full of the old-fashioned horsehair set, the polished table, the bright rose-flowered carpet, still clean after fifty years. The sitting room was full of the jangling piano, the cabinet of shells and hair flowers and little boxes and bits of glass. Poor Bart — poor little working boy!
She began to be kind to Bart, to talk more to him. In that silence of his, what might there not be sleeping but alive? She might find thought and imagination — if not love, perhaps thought and imagination. It would be good to find these buried under the vast silence, the silence he did not break in the day — for it was not broken by his saying, “Where’d you put my old pants?” or by her saying, “They are mended and hanging on the second hook behind the door”—which he did not break in the night, which he would not have broken if she had cried aloud what she so often cried with inward desperate tearless weeping, “Is this all, Bart? Is this all it is?” For he took her night after night, swiftly, and in the same silence in which he ate and drank or in which he fell into instant sleep.
But sometimes in the day when she was away from him she remembered the little longing boy she saw in the field. From that little boy Bart might be born again, a man such as his father and mother had not made him.
“Bart, would you like me to read to you sometimes?”
“What?”
“My books. They were in the round-topped truck I brought with me, remember? I’ve set them on a shelf in the attic. Your mother said they wouldn’t be in her way so much there.”
“Sure.”
He was so amiable that the image in the emptiness stirred with life. In their own room that night she opened the book she had chosen. In the afternoon, after the work was done, she had gone to the attic and had sat down and one by one she had taken down her books. Here were the books she had had in college. On a page she found Mary Robey’s name scrawled: When this you see, remember me. Yes, she remembered. It was another life — a life finished with its end. Strange how life could end abruptly and begin again, wholly different, so that one was another person! But these books, some of them her mother’s, were like a frail mesh, binding that past to this hour. Perhaps they would bind Bart and her into some sort of life together. Story of an African Farm. It had been when she first read it a troubling book, with the trouble of reality and of herself in the child on the farm. And then Miss Kinney had made Africa vivid in darkness, and she could see it all.
She began to read to him. He sprawled upon the sheepskin rug before the empty fireplace. She began to read in a quiet even voice, eagerly. Perhaps this was the beginning of a sort of companionship. Perhaps she had not tried enough. She read on a while, and then the old sense of troubled reality came over her again out of this book. It became at last too much for her. She looked up, trembling, pleading. She laughed shyly, her eyes wet.
“Bart, this child is so much like me that I—”
He was asleep, deeply asleep, his mouth open. He must have been asleep a long time.
Though she put her books away to read alone sometimes, going up the steep attic stairs to them alone, she was still kind to Bart, who was only a boy. She saw now that there was nothing more in him than what was to be seen by anyone. He could never be anything but a boy. Once reading of a man and a woman in one of her books, she found herself weeping. It was like waking from sleep to find herself weeping. It was not a surface weeping, not tears only, but some hurt in the roots of her. She was a woman now. There was no more of the girl Joan left. She knew why she wept and she said steadily to her weeping heart, “Be just. I married him for a home and for safety, and I have these two things.”
But the book made her think of the way she used to kiss Martin Bradley. She did not love Martin Bradley. She did not want him anymore. But there had been those kisses, the only ones she had ever given any man. She did not kiss Bart. She could not kiss Bart. When he pressed her she touched his lips quickly, she kept her lips still and patient beneath his. She said to herself day after day, “I must always be just to Bart.”
Sometimes passive in the night she thought, reproaching herself, “I have injured him. On one of the farms in these hills there would have been a woman to love him in his own way.” She remembered the farmer and the girl who had come to be married in the manse. The man was like Bart, she thought, filled with remorse. “I have deprived them both so that I might have a place for myself. I must make it up to him.”
So she was very kind to Bart. She denied him nothing, by day or by night. She went when he called from the barn or the yard. “Bring me a pail of fresh water this morning. Jo — I’ll be in the west field.”
“Yes, Bart.”
“Come and see the two old hogs fight, Jo. It’s a sight to make your sides split!” She stood by the pigpen with him, watching, revolted by the angry grunting beasts.