Katherine Anne Porter (34 page)

Miranda pulled herself together, feeling limp, and stood up. Cousin Eva put out her hand again, and drew Miranda down to her. “Good night, you dear child,” she said, “to think you’re grown up.” Miranda hesitated, then quite suddenly kissed her Cousin Eva on the cheek. The black eyes shone brightly through water for an instant, and Cousin Eva said with a warm note in her sharp clear orator’s voice, “Tomorrow we’ll be at home again. I’m looking forward to it, aren’t you? Good night.”

Miranda fell asleep while she was getting off her clothes. Instantly it was morning again. She was still trying to close her suitcase when the train pulled into the small station, and there on the platform she saw her father, looking tired and anxious, his hat pulled over his eyes. She rapped on the window to catch his attention, then ran out and threw herself upon him. He said, “Well, here’s my big girl,” as if she were still seven, but his hands on her arms held her off, the tone was forced. There was no welcome for her, and there had not been since she had run away. She could not persuade herself to remember how it would be; between one home-coming and the next her mind refused to accept its own knowledge. Her father looked over her head and said, without surprise, “Why, hello, Eva, I’m glad somebody sent you a telegram.” Miranda, rebuffed again, let her arms fall away again, with the same painful dull jerk of the heart.

“No one in my family,” said Eva, her face framed in the thin black veil she reserved, evidently, for family funerals, “ever sent me a telegram in my life. I had the news from young Keziah who had it from young Gabriel. I suppose Gabe is here?”

“Everybody seems to be here,” said Father. “The house is getting full.”

“I’ll go to the hotel if you like,” said Cousin Eva.

“Damnation, no,” said Father. “I didn’t mean that. You’ll come with us where you belong.”

Skid, the handy man, grabbed the suitcases and started down the rocky village street. “We’ve got the car,” said Father.
He took Miranda by the hand, then dropped it again, and reached for Cousin Eva’s elbow.

“I’m perfectly able, thank you,” said Cousin Eva, shying away.

“If you’re so independent now,” said Father, “God help us when you get that vote.”

Cousin Eva pushed back her veil. She was smiling merrily. She liked Harry, she always had liked him, he could tease as much as he liked. She slipped her arm through his. “So it’s all over with poor Gabriel, isn’t it?”

“Oh, yes,” said Father, “it’s all over, all right. They’re pegging out pretty regularly now. It will be our turn next, Eva?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t care,” said Eva, recklessly. “It’s good to be back now and then, Harry, even if it is only for funerals. I feel sinfully cheerful.”

“Oh, Gabriel wouldn’t mind, he’d like seeing you cheerful. Gabriel was the cheerfullest cuss I ever saw, when we were young. Life for Gabriel,” said Father, “was just one perpetual picnic.”

“Poor fellow,” said Cousin Eva.

“Poor old Gabriel,” said Father, heavily.

Miranda walked along beside her father, feeling homeless, but not sorry for it. He had not forgiven her, she knew that. When would he? She could not guess, but she felt it would come of itself, without words and without acknowledgment on either side, for by the time it arrived neither of them would need to remember what had caused their division, nor why it had seemed so important. Surely old people cannot hold their grudges forever because the young want to live, too, she thought, in her arrogance, her pride. I will make my own mistakes, not yours; I cannot depend upon you beyond a certain point, why depend at all? There was something more beyond, but this was a first step to take, and she took it, walking in silence beside her elders who were no longer Cousin Eva and Father, since they had forgotten her presence, but had become Eva and Harry, who knew each other well, who were comfortable with each other, being contemporaries on equal terms, who occupied by right their place in this world, at the time of life to which they had arrived by paths familiar to them both. They need not play their roles of daughter, of son, to aged persons
who did not understand them; nor of father and elderly female cousin to young persons whom they did not understand. They were precisely themselves; their eyes cleared, their voices relaxed into perfect naturalness, they need not weigh their words or calculate the effect of their manner. “It is I who have no place,” thought Miranda. “Where are my own people and my own time?” She resented, slowly and deeply and in profound silence, the presence of these aliens who lectured and admonished her, who loved her with bitterness and denied her the right to look at the world with her own eyes, who demanded that she accept their version of life and yet could not tell her the truth, not in the smallest thing. “I hate them both,” her most inner and secret mind said plainly, “
I will be free of them, I shall not even remember them.
”

She sat in the front seat with Skid, the Negro boy. “Come back with us, Miranda,” said Cousin Eva, with the sharp little note of elderly command, “there is plenty of room.”

“No, thank you,” said Miranda, in a firm cold voice. “I’m quite comfortable. Don’t disturb yourself.”

Neither of them noticed her voice or her manner. They sat back and went on talking steadily in their friendly family voices, talking about their dead, their living, their affairs, their prospects, their common memories, interrupting each other, catching each other up on small points of dispute, with a gaiety and freshness which Miranda had not known they were capable of, going over old memories and finding new points of interest in them.

Miranda could not hear the stories above the noisy motor, but she felt she knew them well, or stories like them. She knew too many stories like them, she wanted something new of her own. The language was familiar to them, but not to her, not any more. The house, her father had said, was full. It would be full of cousins, many of them strangers. Would there be any young cousins there, to whom she could talk about things they both knew? She felt a vague distaste for seeing cousins. There were too many of them and her blood rebelled against the ties of blood. She was sick to death of cousins. She did not want any more ties with this house, she was going to leave it, and she was not going back to her husband’s family either. She would have no more bonds that smothered her in love and
hatred. She knew now why she had run away to marriage, and she knew that she was going to run away from marriage, and she was not going to stay in any place, with anyone, that threatened to forbid her making her own discoveries, that said “No” to her. She hoped no one had taken her old room, she would like to sleep there once more, she would say good-by there where she had loved sleeping once, sleeping and waking and waiting to be grown, to begin to live. Oh, what is life, she asked herself in desperate seriousness, in those childish unanswerable words, and what shall I do with it? It is something of my own, she thought in a fury of jealous possessiveness, what shall I make of it? She did not know that she asked herself this because all her earliest training had argued that life was a substance, a material to be used, it took shape and direction and meaning only as the possessor guided and worked it; living was a progress of continuous and varied acts of the will directed towards a definite end. She had been assured that there were good and evil ends, one must make a choice. But what was good, and what was evil? I hate love, she thought, as if this were the answer, I hate loving and being loved, I hate it. And her disturbed and seething mind received a shock of comfort from this sudden collapse of an old painful structure of distorted images and misconceptions. “You don’t know anything about it,” said Miranda to herself, with extraordinary clearness as if she were an elder admonishing some younger misguided creature. “You have to find out about it.” But nothing in her prompted her to decide, “I will now do this, I will be that, I will go yonder, I will take a certain road to a certain end.” There are questions to be asked first, she thought, but who will answer them? No one, or there will be too many answers, none of them right. What is the truth, she asked herself as intently as if the question had never been asked, the truth, even about the smallest, the least important of all the things I must find out? and where shall I begin to look for it? Her mind closed stubbornly against remembering, not the past but the legend of the past, other people’s memory of the past, at which she had spent her life peering in wonder like a child at a magic-lantern show. Ah, but there is my own life to come yet, she thought, my own life now and beyond. I don’t want any promises, I won’t have false hopes, I won’t be romantic about
myself. I can’t live in their world any longer, she told herself, listening to the voices back of her. Let them tell their stories to each other. Let them go on explaining how things happened. I don’t care. At least I can know the truth about what happens to me, she assured herself silently, making a promise to herself, in her hopefulness, her ignorance.

T
HE
two grubby small boys with tow-colored hair who were digging among the ragweed in the front yard sat back on their heels and said, “Hello,” when the tall bony man with straw-colored hair turned in at their gate. He did not pause at the gate; it had swung back, conveniently half open, long ago, and was now sunk so firmly on its broken hinges no one thought of trying to close it. He did not even glance at the small boys, much less give them good-day. He just clumped down his big square dusty shoes one after the other steadily, like a man following a plow, as if he knew the place well and knew where he was going and what he would find there. Rounding the right-hand corner of the house under the row of chinaberry trees, he walked up to the side porch where Mr. Thompson was pushing a big swing churn back and forth.

Mr. Thompson was a tough weather-beaten man with stiff black hair and a week’s growth of black whiskers. He was a noisy proud man who held his neck so straight his whole face stood level with his Adam’s apple, and the whiskers continued down his neck and disappeared into a black thatch under his open collar. The churn rumbled and swished like the belly of a trotting horse, and Mr. Thompson seemed somehow to be driving a horse with one hand, reining it in and urging it forward; and every now and then he turned halfway around and squirted a tremendous spit of tobacco juice out over the steps. The door stones were brown and gleaming with fresh tobacco juice. Mr. Thompson had been churning quite a while and he was tired of it. He was just fetching a mouthful of juice to squirt again when the stranger came around the corner and stopped. Mr. Thompson saw a narrow-chested man with blue eyes so pale they were almost white, looking and not looking at him from a long gaunt face, under white eyebrows. Mr. Thompson judged him to be another of these Irishmen, by his long upper lip.

“Howdy do, sir,” said Mr. Thompson politely, swinging his churn.

“I need work,” said the man, clearly enough but with some kind of foreign accent Mr. Thompson couldn’t place. It wasn’t Cajun and it wasn’t Nigger and it wasn’t Dutch, so it had him stumped. “You need a man here?”

Mr. Thompson gave the churn a great shove and it swung back and forth several times on its own momentum. He sat on the steps, shot his quid into the grass, and said, “Set down. Maybe we can make a deal. I been kinda lookin’ round for somebody. I had two niggers but they got into a cutting scrape up the creek last week, one of ’em dead now and the other in the hoosegow at Cold Springs. Neither one of ’em worth killing, come right down to it. So it looks like I’d better get somebody. Where’d you work last?”

“North Dakota,” said the man, folding himself down on the other end of the steps, but not as if he were tired. He folded up and settled down as if it would be a long time before he got up again. He never had looked at Mr. Thompson, but there wasn’t anything sneaking in his eye, either. He didn’t seem to be looking anywhere else. His eyes sat in his head and let things pass by them. They didn’t seem to be expecting to see anything worth looking at. Mr. Thompson waited a long time for the man to say something more, but he had gone into a brown study.

“North Dakota,” said Mr. Thompson, trying to remember where that was. “That’s a right smart distance off, seems to me.”

“I can do everything on farm,” said the man; “cheap. I need work.”

Mr. Thompson settled himself to get down to business. “My name’s Thompson, Mr. Royal Earle Thompson,” he said.

“I’m Mr. Helton,” said the man, “Mr. Olaf Helton.” He did not move.

“Well, now,” said Mr. Thompson in his most carrying voice, “I guess we’d better talk turkey.”

When Mr. Thompson expected to drive a bargain he always grew very hearty and jovial. There was nothing wrong with him except that he hated like the devil to pay wages. He said so himself. “You furnish grub and a shack,” he said, “and then
you got to pay ’em besides. It ain’t right. Besides the wear and tear on your implements,” he said, “they just let everything go to rack and ruin.” So he began to laugh and shout his way through the deal.

“Now, what I want to know is, how much you fixing to gouge outa me?” he brayed, slapping his knee. After he had kept it up as long as he could, he quieted down, feeling a little sheepish, and cut himself a chew. Mr. Helton was staring out somewhere between the barn and the orchard, and seemed to be sleeping with his eyes open.

“I’m good worker,” said Mr. Helton as from the tomb. “I get dollar a day.”

Mr. Thompson was so shocked he forgot to start laughing again at the top of his voice until it was nearly too late to do any good. “Haw, haw,” he bawled. “Why, for a dollar a day I’d hire out myself. What kinda work is it where they pay you a dollar a day?”

“Wheatfields, North Dakota,” said Mr. Helton, not even smiling.

Mr. Thompson stopped laughing. “Well, this ain’t any wheatfield by a long shot. This is more of a dairy farm,” he said, feeling apologetic. “My wife, she was set on a dairy, she seemed to like working around with cows and calves, so I humored her. But it was a mistake,” he said. “I got nearly everything to do, anyhow. My wife ain’t very strong. She’s sick today, that’s a fact. She’s been porely for the last few days. We plant a little feed, and a corn patch, and there’s the orchard, and a few pigs and chickens, but our main hold is the cows. Now just speakin’ as one man to another, there ain’t any money in it. Now I can’t give you no dollar a day because ackshally I don’t make that much out of it. No, sir, we get along on a lot less than a dollar a day, I’d say, if we figger up everything in the long run. Now, I paid seven dollars a month to the two niggers, three-fifty each, and grub, but what I say is, one middlin’-good white man ekals a whole passel of niggers any day in the week, so I’ll give you seven dollars and you eat at the table with us, and you’ll be treated like a white man, as the feller says—”