Between the Flowers: A Novel

Chapter 15

· 15 · M ARSH AWOKE to the misty in-between-time of neither night nor day. He lay a moment and heard fog drip from the eaves, and felt the morning air, cool through the window, and heavy with the smell ofplowed earth. He remembered, and lifted suddenly on one elbow and looked at Delph's pillow. It was smooth and neat with a curiously empty look in the gray light. He got up and dressed quickly, and carrying his shoes in his hand went to the kitchen. The clock ticked loudly there, and the house seemed dead and empty, like the shanties he had batched in during his oil field days. He tip-toed to the stair door, and listened on the bottom step until he thought he heard a bed spring creak. He turned away, put on his shoes, and went hunting in the wood box for cedar wood and hickory bark. When the bark snapped and crackled in the flames, he washed, filled the tea kettle and set it to boil, put on the coffee, sliced bacon for frying, and stood then looking about the room, hoping to find a bit of work or some excuse for staying until Delph came. He went to stand by the screen door, and now and then glanced up through the fog, trying but absentmindedly to learn if the day were cloudy or clear. The sky mattered less than yesterday. Mostly he listened for Delph. His heart quickened when he at last heard her feet on the sttirs. He started across the room, but stopped abruptly when the door opened and he saw her face. Last night she had not cried out or spoken of pain, yet half her face was swollen and discolored, with the skin on her nose and forehead broken. 194 195 He watched in silence while she came slowly down the last two steps, as if since yesterday she had grown slow and old. She paused to fasten the stair door with particular care, turned again and said with her eyes careful to look at nothing except the stove, "I must have overslept, but I'll have breakfast ready by th' time you feed." She spoke so carefully, like a child saying a poorly memorized and greatly detested bit of scripture before a strange and hated audience . He knew she lied. Most likely she had awakened when he came into the kitchen, and had lain, hoping that he would go away. She walked on to the stove with her shoulders straight and high above her proud breasts, and her head tilted a little as if her braids had been a crown. He tried to find the old Delph in her eyes, and for a moment something hurt and broken fluttered in their even stony blueness, and then they were like her shoulders, hard and proud and still. Wordless he went from the kitchen. A growing realization of what he had done took away all the pleasure of that first trip to the barn. He liked the walking about on his own land with Caesar at his heels in the gray shifting fog ofa summer's morning when the smells of growing corn and dew dampened earth and of cattle and hay and harness leather lay close and clear like things he could touch. Other mornings, before the full heat and the hard work of the day, he had felt strong and unhampered, able to live the life he wanted, forever here on his own land. But today nothing was right or good. Breakfast was a long struggle to swallow food that kept sticking in his throat. The early morning 's plowing was less the work in which he took much pride than a continual reminder of what he had done to Delph. He had taken time to mend the harness, patch it and brace it in a multitude of places, putting into the work the realization that it would be a good while before he could buy new. And so the harness had not broken like yesterday, and Delph's spending of the money, the thing that had started the quarrel, seemed a mere nothing, a little childlike thing at which a sensible man would have smiled. When he saw her come out to hoe in the melon rows, he stopped his work and went to her. He tried to tell her that now she must not work so hard, but she hoed on and answered stonily from...