“What for?” he answered. “That wouldn’t help. I can’t keep coming home all my life. She wanted to give me money. She said, ‘Here’s a dollar.’”
“Oh, Frank,” Joan said.
“I wouldn’t take it. That wasn’t what I wanted. She said, ‘I’ll lend it.’ And I said, ‘I can’t pay it back.’”
“Then what?” she whispered.
“Then the light changed and the taxi went on,” he replied.
A leaf floated slowly down, upheld by the breeze, and settled upon the small placid pool. Its shadow lay, magnified through the clear water, upon a rock at the bottom.
“And?”
“I fell in with another fellow who hadn’t any job, and he took me to a joint he knew and the fellow that ran it gave us some stuff left over from what he didn’t sell — lemon pie and stuff that spoiled if he kept it.”
She was silent, staring at the shadow of the leaf, so clear, so dancing. A squirrel capered up a tree. She could see its inverted reflection in the pool.
“If you had come home—”
But he straightened himself impatiently and threw a stone into the smooth pool. It broke into a shimmer of ripples and the leaf tossed like a little ship upon the little waves.
“Don’t you see it wouldn’t matter? There’s hundreds of fellows like me, trying to catch on somewhere, hungry as hell — running home doesn’t help them. There’s got to be a place for them. Gosh, when I think of that stuff Dad used to talk — all that holy salvation stuff! Listen here — not one thing he said was ever any use to me.”
“He honestly believed—” she began, troubled.
“Yeah, and what of it?” He was snarling. She saw a hungry boy wandering along the city streets, his hat over his eyes, his body aching with hunger. “You’ve got to do something more than talk these days. Something’s got to be done, and be done damned quick! There’s a lot of us feeling like that. And I stick by them! I stick by the hungry and the fellows that can’t get jobs!”
He was shouting, his voice ringing through the quiet woods. He had sprung to his feet and she looked up at him.
“Why, Frank, you look just like Father!” she said.
He stared back at her.
“Oh, my God!” he whispered.
He dropped to the log beside her and began scuffling at the small stones.
“I mean—”
“I know what you mean,” he said bitterly. “It’s the damnedest thing, the way you can’t get rid of your ancestors!”
He fell into moody silence and she was bewildered. “Come on home to supper, anyway,” she said at last. At least today she had that to give him, food upon a table and a roof under which to sleep. She would take him home. He rose to follow her, and they stood a moment looking at the pool. It was smooth again and the little leaf was quietly sailing on a wave, sailing nowhere and the stone he had flung lay lost among the other stones at the bottom.
But here was no home for Francis, though with all her strength she sought to make it a home. She took the walls of this house and encompassed him about for his shelter. She made his bed in the attic soft with quilts and put sheets upon it for comfort, although Sam slept without sheets, and not until she came had Bart used them. But Francis should use their mother’s sheets which she had brought with her. She dragged the boxes and trunks to make a sort of room for him near the bookshelves. And at the table she plied him with food, passing him the butter, the bread, the meat, relentlessly under their eyes.
“I’ll make a pie,” she said to Bart’s mother. She had not cared before, but now she wanted to make it.
“It takes lard,” the older woman said, grudgingly.
Then Joan shamelessly made use of Bart. “Bart says he likes pie,” and when she saw Bart’s mother give way she used this means again and again. “I made a raisin pudding, Bart.” “Bart, I made cookies today — Francis, they’re the old ginger cookies, like Mother’s.” Bart ate, enchanted. “Gosh, Jo, you’re a famous cook. What’s the matter you been keeping it all to yourself?”
She smiled, her eyes on Francis. His thinness was daily growing into a slender resilient strength. When they were alone she urged him, “Eat, Frank. I want you to get your strength back.”
“Yes, I’ll take food,” he said sturdily. “I’ve got to begin again, I’ll stay until I am able to begin over.”
He was so beautiful she could not stop looking at him. His hands were free of the black of the mines now, but they were hard, clean and hard. He helped silently about the place, chopping wood and filling the box in the kitchen and in the dining room, helping her wring the clothes and hang them, carrying water to the barn. She would give him something when he went back to work, buy a new suit for him. She would coax him to take it. But now she gave him a pair of the blue jeans that Bart wore. “I’ll take your suit and clean it and press it.” She brushed and pressed the stuff with careful pleasure. It was not work to touch and clean and mend that which clothed one’s beloved. Strange how garments partook of the bodies which they clothed!
But none of this made his home. In the attic they met sometimes alone, and they knew that their only home was all that which they had shared and which was gone now. They talked long hours here together, he talking again and she still listening. She led him on to talk and now he talked more easily. His speech did not come in such wrenched, broken sentences. He was growing a little healed. But as he was healed he was restless. He was like an animal held by a wound, and one day he would be well of it and ready again to go away. But they talked always and only of him — and she wanted it so. She fended off day by day the question which she saw hanging upon his lips, daily nearer to utterance: “Joan, how did you come to do this?” She talked feverishly of himself. “What do you want to do now, Frank darling? When you get rested and ready to start again—” In the attic she poured out the names their mother used so lavishly upon them alclass="underline" “darling Frank,” “dear heart,” “dearest Frank”—all the names for which she had as yet no other use — no use until her baby was born. So that she might fend off that question she talked constantly with him about himself, because in such talk he forgot her. “I want to fly,” he said, over and over. “I’ve got to fly — I can do it. If I had a chance I could do it. I feel it in myself — the power to do it. I’d know how to do it if I could just get at the controls. They wouldn’t need to tell me but just the once—”
He liked the attic. He came to it now whenever there was nothing he could do, when she was busy about the house, when they were not at meals. She found him here when she was free by the gable window, staring out into the sky, over the hills and fields. “I can almost imagine sometimes here that I’m flying,” he said. “That elm tree top just outside hides the ground. You see Joan? You look straight over it to the hills and it seems far up.”
Yes, she knew Francis must go. They were pushing him out by their silence, by their steady disapproving silence. She said, placating Bart’s father, “Let Francis shell the corn for you today.”
“I’ve shelled it myself for thirty-five years,” he said grimly.
“Francis can bring up the milk for you,” she said to Bart’s mother. “Francis and I will gather the eggs.”
“The hens don’t take to strangers,” she said, and Francis stumbled upon the dark cellar stairs and spilled the milk. “You better go and set somewhere,” she said bitterly, and cried at Joan, hastening with a cloth and a pail, “Don’t bend over — you’ll hurt yourself and I’ll have the care of you.”
No, here was no home. And he never really gave himself up to her here. For with all their talk, they never spoke of why he had gone away that day, of why she had urged him to go away and why he had eagerly gone. Part of him still hid from her.