Between the Flowers: A Novel

Chapter 4

· 4 · THAT YEAR more than one in the Little South Fork Country marveled at the beauty of the fall. The early frosts were light and the days clear and still, roofed by high bottomless skies, cloudless and intensely blue. Sometimes with only Tilly for company Delph went on long hunts down the pine ridges after wild grapes and chestnuts. Mostly she would come home empty handed, a few chestnuts in her sweater pockets or grape stain on her fingers. She would stand silent under Fronie's tearfullamentations , and never answer her aunt's eternal, "What ails you anyhow , Delph?" and never defend herself when she said, "You know no woman's reputation can stand runnin' around in th' woods by herself.-An' th' Lord knows yours is bad enough as it is, after runnin ' away to that dance, an' causin' a fight by dancin' with a strange oil man." Delph never told her aunt or even Juber what it was she hunted in the woods. She didn't know. Sometimes she would sit motionless on Tilly for minutes together and watch a single yellow poplar leaf rise and rise and linger for one moment high and bright and gold against a great blue sweep of sky, then turn and fall in long cascading spirals, its brightness lost in shadow, and settle at last only another leaf to rot and die. Something would ache in her throat and smart in her eyes, but she never cried. The sky and the leaves and the earth cried of change, and the honking call of the wild geese flying in a high vee was a challenge to go away. And more than these were Marsh's eyes when he looked at her, and smiled, with little joy in his smile. Each day of fall brought the winter nearer, a time when he would be like the leaf and the wild 49 BETWEEN THE FLOWERS goose call, a memory of something that went away, They met often in the woods, sometimes in Mrs. Crouch's kitchen, but Delph seldom chattered gaily or teasingly as she had used to do with Logan. Marsh thought there were many who said he would be safer out of the country, tried not to think of the winter and of going away. The thought hurt when he walked through Old Willie's fields and smelled the ripened corn, but it was something worse than simple hurt when he looked at Delph. Sometimes he tried to tell her how sorry he was he had gone to the dance and had a fight with Logan of which the whole country, including her Uncle John, heard. But Delph would only interrupt to say, "Pshaw, if it hadn't a been that it would ha been somethin' else.-I guess I was never meant to go away," and she would look at him and smile with sorrow, but no blame in her eyes. Many, especially Mrs. Crouch and Juber, marveled that Delph tookJohn's refusal to let her go to school with such seeming unconcern . Delph herselfwondered sometimes why it was that school and the mysterious world that books could open for her no longer seemed important-or even interesting. Marsh alone kept life from being empty and flat and dull. New magazines with their tantalizing smell of ink and fresh shining paper were irksome, and the endings of the continued stories no longer mattered. The letters that Logan sent filled with apologies and asking her forgiveness were bits of paper and nothing more. Fronie talked of dresses for the winter, and John, kind as always in spite of his sternness, bought her a blue tweed coat with a red fox collar-the nicest coat she had ever had and qne as any in Town-but she didn't want the coat. She didn't know what she wanted. Nights when the west wind came softly up at dusk and brought a smell of smoke and ripened corn, and hinted too of some farther world, a land behind the wind, she would be restless, fidgeting with her sewing by the fire, and often seizing a water bucket from the kitchen and running to the well on the pretext that she wanted a cold drink. She liked to stand by the well on a windy moonlit night, hear the soft, sad moan of the white pines by the gate, the whine and swish ofbeech twigs in the grove, and the deeper, farther wail of the...