Between the Flowers: A Novel

Chapter 27

·27· T HE FALL that year was a farmer's fall. October brought high-skied, windless days when the valley lay filled with yellow dusty light that seemed less air and sunshine than some special manifestation of that particular fall. For Marsh each day was something more than hours of a life, but was like a stay in some well earned paradise where his life and all the life on his land was fine, beyond his dreams. He had never known a vacation, a time when he was neither working nor looking for work, but since Dr. Andy and all the neighbors as well as Delph reminded him continually that he must take things easy, he did no extra work that fall. Sober and other hired men had cut the corn and dug the sweet potatoes, and he had ridden to Hawthorne Town in Elliot's car and attended to this and that so that the most pressing of the work was done. There were whole days when he did little except the barnwork ; and that left long free hours for walking about in the fine fall weather with Burr-Head and Caesar. Sometimes they gathered hickory nuts and walnuts that grew on the rough land above the creek. Other times they crossed the creek, and went to a forgotten stretch of worn out meadow land where the wild rose pips were red in the sage grass, and in the corners of rotting rail fences the clustering vines of bursting bittersweet made clouds of deep orange flame. He and the child would go walking back to the house, their arms burdened with many things. They would leave their loads on the empty hearth and go to the kitchen and Delph. There, all the enchantment and the essence of the fruitful fall seemed gathered in the jars and crocks that Delph filled with jellies and ketchups and 398 399 preserves and pickles, and through the house there was the smell of fruit and spices and of cider bubbling into apple butter. Marsh would call as he had always called when he entered the house, "Home, Delph?" and she would answer as she usually did, "Here, in th' kitchen, Marsh." He and Burr-Head would go to stand in the kitchen door, and Delph would turn and smile at them, push a sweat dampened curl from her forehead With the back of one hand, and say, "Havin' a good time, you two?" and then turn back to her work. Burr-Head would go running away to rake leaves in the yard or hunt chinkapin on the hill, but Marsh would linger in the kitchen door, and hunt with his eyes for some kitchen work he could do, and if there were a pan of pears half peeled or short core apples to be cut and cored, he would sit by the kitchen table and do the work-just to keep him there by Delph. But most always she would smile or laugh a tight little laugh and send him away. "I'll manage," she would say. "Th' Lord knows you've got a little somethin' good comin' to you now." When she had spoken thus a time or so he would go to do some fiddling work in the barn, maybe, or simply to walk over his corn and pasture lands and plan crops and work for the coming year. The plans tangled sometimes in his head, while his mind went back to Delph in the kitchen. He wished she would leave the canning and the pickling and come walking with him. He wished that in the evenings when he lighted a fire in the fireplace against the early cold, she wouldn't just sit staring into the fire or reading books that Sam had loaned her or suggested that she read-so she had said. Still, when he spoke to her, she always smiled and listened to whatever he had to say, and then next day she never knew what it was he had said. He knew she was tired, worn with all the weeks of worrying after him. The circles under her eyes and the sudden thinness in her cheeks were proof of that. Now that he was well and walking about he was ashamed and sorry for the way he had acted during the last part of his sickness-when he was well enough to sit up in bed and fret and fume over what was happening on the...