He asked no more questions of her until she went outside. Then he shot his white eyebrows over his eyes at her and said sharply, “You happy, Joan?”
She smiled at him. “Why not? I’m going to have my baby.”
And jogging home alone she began to sing. She hadn’t sung in months. Now she thought she could, if she had a little time, make a song of her own again. The tight dark isolation of her heart was over. Yes, actually, there was a song in her mouth. She held it lightly on her lips, waiting for it to shape. Here was a phrase, and here. When she reached home she went straight to the attic and found a bit of paper and put down the two lines and then a third.
But although she waited, the end would not come. The song hung there, unfinished, and she let it be. It was a song written to a child not yet born. The end would come in its own time.
Waiting for her baby in overflowing tenderness, she wrote to Rose more warmly than she ever had. “Tell me all about little David, I feel he is mine, too.” She tried to see the little fragile fair baby, nursed by a brown woman. She wondered about his home and the Chinese landscape. If only Rose would tell her more — she couldn’t see anything of Rose’s life. When she tried, she saw a static picture of a church, shining among dark vague temple shapes, and a stream of brown people leaving the temples, pouring into the church. But that could not be life. The work was going well, Rose said. Little David had had a fever — malaria, they thought, but he was better again. The Lord blessed them and they were receiving nearly fifty new members this year. Rob was opening new territory. The people were hostile and he went in danger of his life among them, but they were not afraid. They persisted steadily in God’s work, preaching the Gospel to unwilling ears, trusting to God for the harvest. She hoped Joan would bear her child more easily than she did. David interfered a good deal with her classes, but he would soon be older.
I wish I had him, Joan thought, folding the pages. I could take care of him easily. I believe he bothers Rose. I can’t think of her holding a baby and bathing him and dressing him.
But Francis never answered her letters. She thought about him while she was waiting, worrying about him because he never wrote. She seemed to see him now always as he had been when he was a small boy in a little red sweater, his eyes very black above round scarlet cheeks and his black hair curling a little at the ends. … “Joan, take Frankie with you if you are going to the Winters’ to play.” … “All right, Mother — come on, Frankie!”
If sometimes she was impatient with his short steps and his constant tagging, one look at his face and chubby body softened her. None of the girls had a little brother so pretty. What if she’d had a pale-eyed weazened little runt like Netta’s Jackie? She was always proud to walk along the street with Frank. They might meet a stranger who would surely, say, “What a beautiful little boy!” Then she could always reply proudly. “He’s my little brother!”
But he never wrote to her.
Then one clear frosty morning when she was doing the Monday’s wash under the elm tree in the yard she looked up and saw him walking down the road to the house, a small suitcase in his hand. She could not believe it was he, but she knew the way he walked. And it was like him to come suddenly, without a word. She straightened herself above suds and ran, clumsy with her child, to meet him and take him in her arms.
“Oh Frank!” she cried, laughing and wanting to cry. “I’ve been thinking about you so much. Why haven’t you answered my letters? I’ve written and written!”
Ah, it was good to have her arms warmly about someone!
He had grown. He was taller than she now, he was handsomer than ever. But so thin! Her eyes took him all in at once — that was the same blue suit he had when he went away. Now it was worn and gray at the wrists and elbows, and he had turned the cuffs of the trousers inward. But it was his face at which she looked. His rosy boyish color was gone. His face was sharp-boned, sunken at the jaws and the temples. He looked tired enough to die.
“I only got two letters,” he said. “It’s taken me a while to come — to get here.”
“It’s home,” she said quickly. “Where I am is always home for you.”
He did not answer. He walked beside her to the house, and followed her in. She took him to the dining room, the only room that was warm, and the day was chilly with autumn. Then she did not know where to take him. “Wait,” she said. “I’ll ask Bart’s mother.”
In the kitchen she said, “My brother has come.” She paused, “May he — What room shall I put him in?”
Bart’s mother looked up from the stove, astonished. “How long’ll he be here?” she asked after a while. No one had ever come here to stay.
“I don’t know,” she answered. “I haven’t had a chance to talk.”
Bart’s mother lifted the lid of the stove and pushed in a knotty stick of wood. The lid would not fit down and she clattered at it.
“He can sleep with Sam, or in that old bed in the attic. We used to have a hired man up there when times was good, but nobody’s slept there for a long time. It’s all right as long as it’s not summer. There’s some quilts in that old chest under the eaves.”
She went back to the dining room and took his hand. It was callused and hard, so hard that she looked at it quickly. It was grimed with so deep a grime that it looked as though it could never be clean. “What have you been doing?” she cried. His hands had been slender, the joints supple. It was still a slender hand, it would always be slender, but the skin was scarred and the nails black and broken.
“Been in machine shops,” he said, “and this last six months I’ve been in West Virginia in a coal mine.”
“In a mine!” she said, astonished. “I thought you wanted to fly.”
“I do,” he said. “I lost my job — nobody can hold a job these rotten days — and I went south with my pal. We heard there were jobs in the mines.” He made a grunt of laughter. “Do you see me in a mine, Joan, wanting to fly?” He sat down and put his grimy slender hands through his too long heavy black hair and leaned upon them.
“Come upstairs,” she said. “Come up to my room. I must know everything.”
He followed her up the front stairs, not knowing why she hesitated a moment and then said firmly, “Yes, come this way.” She led him into the bedroom.
“Gee,” he said, “I’d like a bath, Joan. I’ve hiked and hitchhiked for days.”
She hesitated again. There was the bathroom, but — the child made her strong today for Francis. Someday the child would be a man like Francis, and he would not wash himself in a wooden tub in the woodshed. “I’ll show you where the bathroom is,” she said.
While he bathed she went downstairs. She was foolish enough to be afraid for a moment of this fat silent woman moving about the kitchen. She listened to know if Francis was quiet. He used to be so noisy, rushing the water out of the faucets, dropping the soap dish, his strong bare footsteps thudding about. But he was very quiet now. For a moment she was so foolish as to think she would not tell Bart’s mother. She could put everything in order — Then she straightened herself. She would not be afraid, she was going to make a life for her own boy here in this house.
She went to the door of the kitchen. “Francis is using the bathroom,” she said quietly. “He has come a long way — he’s very tired.”
Looking down, she met Bart’s mother’s eyes fully — pale eyes whose brown had no depth. They were the color of shallow leaf-stained water flowing over stones. She gazed into them steadfastly, defying them. Sometimes it was good to be tall and towering. The pale eyes wavered and fell.