Between the Flowers: A Novel

Chapter 19

· 19 · M ARCH CAME with mighty trumpeting winds, a great blowsy, strong-armed woman who scoured the earth with rain and wind and sun. The sycamore limbs grew gray again, and on the hill pasture the grass and unfolding clover leaves were green and lush and tender. Clouds raced all day long in a high blue windy sky, and at night the wind sang and whistled through the little cedar trees on the river hill. Marsh, batching now at home, would listen to the wind and smile, think of Delph, able to be up and about, and of Burr-Head, getting bigger and so mean his hide wouldn't hold him, so Emma said with pride. That child was always up to something; one day he hit her own Sammy right in the nose, and another day he grabbed Louvinie's crackled meat skin and sucked it a bit before Louvinie had the heart to take it away from him. Though it happened regularly twice a week, it was always a great occasion when Emma brought Burr-Head to see Delph, and after the first visit Delph was more like herself than she had been for weeks. That afternoon when Marsh walked down the hill, he stopped a time in the road above the yard, and looked at his place. He liked to look at his house, especially the great chimney that he and Sober had built from gray, unpolished limestone quarried from his land. He liked to build in stone, and now when he looked at the chimney and thought of Delph and Burr-Head, an old dream stirred and filled his head. He could not remember the beginnings of the dream, no more than he could recall the sights and things heard about that had shaped it through the years. Sometimes, if the dream came while he 260 261 was alone, not too busy and with a bit of pencil handy, he would draw lines and squares; study them, erasing here, adding a mark there, lost in the figure until he remembered that it was all a foolishness that tricked a man into wasting his time. But whenever down the river hill he saw the good, strong, granite-like limestone and then the chimney he had made, thoughts of a whole house built of gray stone would come into his mind. He would have it on a hill, up in the pasture, say, near the grove of little walnut trees where he and Delph had used to watch the sun go down. Sometimes he thought he would like to talk to Delph of such things, but somehow he never did. Through the spring she was too taken up with thought for Burr-Head to give more than half an ear to anything he told her of the farm. . Many times when he came away from her he felt a loneliness and a troubled wordless foreboding of something worse than loneliness ; he wished she would seem more eager to come home, would go against Mrs. Elliot's determination that she stay until the weather was warm and settled. Still, he had little time for tortured probings into Delph's mind. Nights found him tired and ready for sleep; the days were filled with work and plans and something else that he had scarcely ever had-the interest and good will of a neighborhood. He found less speculation in the eyes that watched him now. More men greeted him in Hawthorne Town and by the road, and the county seat merchants offered him credit, while High Pockets Armstrong and other hill men whom he scarcely knew would stop him in the street to ask after his family, for the whole country had heard of Sober Marshall Costello Gregory. The piece that Katy wrote for the Westover Bugle on Sober's rescue of Delph not only made the front page in the county paper, but was mentioned in a Lexington paper as well, and so great was Katy's delight that she played hookey from school for a week, and spent the time in helping the neighbor women straighten the Gregory house. While Marsh lived alone on the lower farm many a farmer from both sides of the river came down to see how he was making out, and give a hand or lend advice on this or that. He planned a tobacco crop-nothing large, no more than a couple of acres at most-and seasoned tobacco farmers from allover...