“If Fanny’ll let me—” he whispered.
“Don’t you say mamma?”
“She doesn’t like me to.”
Fanny laughed richly. “No, I don’t have any of them call me ma. It looks better. If I take him anywhere. I say he’s my brother.”
The child looked at her gravely as she laughed. Then he turned back to Joan and regarded her curiously and quietly with profound intelligence. That was the look Paul’s eyes should have had, that comprehending aware look. Francis, for all his waywardness, used to have it, and their mother seeing it would seize him and hold him and murmur over him. Strange to see Francis looking at her now out of the jungle!
“What are you going to do with this child, Fanny?” she asked anxiously.
The girl shrugged her shoulders gaily. “He’s all right, long as I don’t decide to go away. Long as that man behaves, that is!” She frowned darkly. “Not many men been to my taste like Frank was, though, I declare. Sometimes when I get thinking about Frank, I just lose my taste for them all. Isn’t he ever coming home? I wouldn’t bother him — just show him the boy and say hello.”
“No,” said Joan quickly. “He’s never coming back — he said so.”
The girl sighed, a deep full sigh.
“Well, I’ve got to be going. Thank you for the dollar again — it sure does help. I keep Frankie the nicest of any of my children.”
But she could not let him go. She felt the small body all over with her hands. It was firm and hard and shapely. She took his hand and it held to hers closely. The very feel of the body was different from Paul’s heaviness, the cling of the hand so different from Paul’s loose, varying clutch. She held the hand a moment and looked at it. She could imagine the smooth fresh skin white. But underneath, the blood ran dark.
“Is your little fellow all right?” asked Fanny. She was staring into a small mirror, rouging her already scarlet mouth.
Joan hesitated. Then she said firmly, “No, he’s not all right — there’s something wrong.”
Fanny lowered her mirror. Her face warmed with pity. “That’s too bad! My children’s all healthy. But I know a girl with a puny baby. She took her to a gospel meeting, and the preacher put his hand on her and she’s better — at least her ma says she’s better. Come on, Frankie — Lem’ll be mad, waiting for us!”
She had to let him go now. She rose and stood watching him walk sturdily through the dust. When she could see them no longer, she sat down beside the road, again desolate. Summer was passing, the corn was ripening, nothing was growing now. Summer after summer, before, she had left everything growing, pushing to bud and blossom and fruit, life full tilt with growing. Now it was stopped, over the whole land, over forest and field. There was no more growing. There was only ripening and slow downward dying. Another autumn was near. She got up and went home to Paul.
She kept remembering what Fanny had told her. There was a woman with a puny baby who took her to a gospel meeting and she got better. In South End the people were very ignorant and full of superstitions. Rose still wrote her long letters which Joan still sent to Mrs. Winters when she finished them, so that they could be read at missionary meeting. Rose said there were heathen women who went to temples if their children fell ill.
“In their blindness and ignorance,” Rose wrote, “they go to their gods and promise new robes or new shoes if the child recovers. It is difficult to persuade them to give up this foolish and wicked practice.”
On that first Sunday morning when she came home from college, it had not seemed necessary to think about God, because then she had taken everything for granted. God would take care of her. She had been told so often that God was good. Here in this home night and morning she sat while Bart’s father read “the Word of God.” She had not needed to listen, since God was good.
But now there was no use in pretending that Paul grew any better. He was no better. She played with him every day, singing over and over to him with desperate grim patience the gay childish songs her mother had sung to them all. “Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker’s-man.” Francis used to pat his baby hands together in solemn ecstasy. “Paul, Paul, see? Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake—” She held his hands and patted them together day after day. Each day she waited to see his hands move a little upward of their own volition. “Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake—” Day after day she let his hands fall and got up quietly to busy herself at some other task. It took a long time to teach little children — a long, long time. Her mother used to cry, “It does seem to me I have to keep telling you children the same thing over and over.” Every day she told Paul the same thing over and over.
Then one day when he was nearly five years old, she put his hands down. She went to the trunk and found a little box of toys she had made ready for his Christmas. Each year she had planned in happiness. “Next year, I’ll have a tiny tree. He will be big enough surely to notice the candles and to laugh at toys.”
She would not wait this time for Christmas. She lit the lamp and set it where he could see it. She opened the box and brought out a rattle she had bought, with bells on the handle, and she jangled it near him. She took his hand and curved the fingers about the handle and moved it gently. But when she took her hand away, the rattle dropped. She snatched up the lamp, sobbing, and held it above him. He did not recognize the light. His wandering eyes saw and slipped away.
“It is no use pretending anymore,” she said aloud, fiercely. She set down the lamp and put all the toys back into the box and set the box into the trunk and closed it. There never would be Christmas in this house. She knew it now. She began her old sobbing again. “Oh, God,” she said sobbing, “oh, help me, God!”
Her father used to teach them, saying, “Ask and you shall receive, for so we are taught.”
She searched in the trunk for her mother’s Bible. She and Rose had put it there. It had been years since she had read the Bible for herself. On Sunday afternoons when she was a little girl they each had to read a chapter. And once for a while when she was a young girl she had read it of her own will, to delight in the swinging powerful words. There was the Song of Solomon. And then abruptly she had put it aside and read instead the poems of the Brownings, and Tennyson’s “Princess,” and any love stories she could find.
Once she had really prayed for her mother’s life and her mother died. But then her mother was no longer young and there comes a time to die. Paul was only a child, and death was not for him — not for years upon years. She fell upon her knees by her bed, clenching her hands together, her eyes closed, her whole being pouring and concentrated. She felt a power sweeping up from her feet, through her limbs, her body, soaring upward to the cold starry sky, a shining shape of intense desire. “Oh, God, make Paul well!”
… She would give God time. She lived in a waiting intensity through days and nights. The work was to be done, in this house. There was so much work to be done, a routine of sweeping and polishing and cleaning. She worked at it doggedly. On Tuesdays she opened the dark unused parlor and wiped all the furniture and the pictures, all the curly carved surfaces. She knew every surface now without loving any. There was no meaning to any shape. She had never seen anyone sit on the chairs. The window shades were not lifted except on Tuesdays. On Wednesdays she cleaned the pantry. There were three heavy complete dinner sets on the shelves. “You shall have them when I’m gone,” Bart’s mother said often.
“Why don’t you use them?” she answered heartily. “I’d rather you used them now.”
“Use Mother’s good wedding set every day?” Bart’s mother cried in horror. “She never did, nor I. Besides, there’s the trouble of washing them every day. I’d never get over it if some were broken.” They ate from ten-cent-store dishes. She wiped the empty old-fashioned dishes savagely. If they were ever hers, she’d use them every day, every meal, and she’d slash them about in the dishpan.