Time Is Noon (43 page)

“I’ll finish my supper,” he said. “I learned a long time ago not to run if the patient was already dead. Run for the dying—but if it’s too late, finish your supper—that’s sense for the doctor.” He dipped up the last mouthful. “Poor soul,” he said heartily, “I’ve been expecting her to go off suddenly like this any time for months. I’ve been trying to get her to have somebody in, but she always said she hadn’t had much of her own way in life, and she was going to die as she liked. How come you were there, Joan?”

Joan hesitated. Dr. Crabbe had taken her when she was born. She had begun her life naked in his hands. “I’ve left my husband,” she said.

“You have!” said Dr. Crabbe. “You and your upbringing!” He put down his spoon and bellowed, “Nellie!” The housekeeper put her head in the door. “I’m going! Mrs. Mark has died at last.”

“You’ve got rice pudding yet to eat,” cried Nellie belligerently.

“I won’t eat it,” he shouted, struggling into a threadbare brown coat. She disappeared, muttering. “Come on,” he said to Joan. He tramped ahead of her to his small rackety old car and started the engine with a roar. “Left Bart Pounder, eh?” he shouted. She nodded. The engine calmed and the car jumped down the road like a jackrabbit. “I never told you,” he said, “I was married once.”

“No!” she whispered, unbelieving.

“She ran away from me,” he said abruptly, “ran away with a fellow—friend of mine—a fellow I knew in college. He came to visit us—decent chap, too. We’d talked some of being partners. I couldn’t blame her. Smooth-skinned fellow—I’ve always been kind of hairy.”

“She didn’t run away for that,” said Joan.

“How do I know what for? She ran away when we’d been married less than a year. Some women run and some stick it out, I reckon. Your mother stuck it.”

“I couldn’t,” said Joan quickly.

“No. Well,” said Dr. Crabbe, “some women do. It doesn’t matter in the end. Lucille—that was her name—she’s been happy. Every now and then she writes me, wants me to get married again. I say who to, for God’s sake? There isn’t anybody else. Get out that side, Joan. Not that I can do anything, if she’s dead.”

But he went in and washed Mrs. Mark’s dead body carefully while Joan waited outside. He called Joan at last. There was a slip of paper in his hand. “She had this under the pillow—wrote it today, I reckon.”

There were four lines scrawled upon the paper.

Joan Richards, married Pounder, is to have my house and everything in it. In the money box is one hundred and thirty-seven dollars. I write this in full and right mind.

ABBY MARK

“Has she anybody?” asked Joan in a whisper. Mrs. Mark lay stiff and still on the bed.

“Never heard of it,” said Dr. Crabbe, washing his hands.

“It’s not legal,” she argued.

“No, but if anybody shows up and says it isn’t, tell him to come and see me, and I’ll sic Martin Bradley on him. Martin’s beholden to me. I’ve kept him out of trouble for years, and there’s never been anything to have him do back for me.” He dried his hands, and glanced at Mrs. Mark. “Are you scared to stay here till tomorrow with her?” he asked.

Joan looked at Mrs. Mark, neat and composed. “I can’t imagine being afraid of her,” she said.

“No,” said Dr. Crabbe. “She’s been as good as dead for years. Well, I’ll go back and eat my rice pudding.” He seized his dilapidated leather bag and trudged away.

So she had had no time to write the letter to Roger Bair. But in the night she woke, and the thought of it was sweet. It lay ahead of her, like a treat to a child, a pleasure to be fulfilled. Even if he never answered her, she would have written the letter and signed her name, Joan Richards. He need not know her life. She would simply be herself to him, Joan Richards. Behind the closed door Mrs. Mark lay dead, but she was not afraid. She would like to have gone in and thanked Mrs. Mark if she could. “Thank you for giving me a house, a home. You’ve made me safe.” It seemed impossible to bear it if there was no way to thank Mrs. Mark in the power of her gratitude. But Mrs. Mark would have been the last person to endure thanks. She could imagine Mrs. Mark opening her small dead eyes to say, “Get along—don’t bother me. Don’t you see I’m dead?” and instantly closing them again. It was like Mrs. Mark to give her all she had and then die before she could be thanked. She drifted into sleep.

In the morning when Mr. Blum came with his two men she had everything ready. She had picked a bouquet of pale purple wild asters and goldenrod, and placed them by the bed, and she had opened the windows to sun and wind. There was no odor in the room. When she had opened the door she had half expected the remembered smell of death. But Mrs. Mark had not died suddenly in health and fullness. Her body was spare and dry, bone clean, withered without decay. She lay exactly as she was. Mr. Blum put on his gloves and his men set a long box beside the bed.

“Dr. Crabbe’s given full directions,” he said unctuously. “You are the sole mourner, ma’am, I understand?”

“She had no one,” said Joan.

“Very nice, I’m sure,” said Mr. Blum. “I remember your mother so well—beautiful in death, I said of her. I don’t remember the name of the gentleman you married, Miss Richards.”

She did not answer, and he forgot her. “Easy there, now, men, feet first—There she is, comfortable as a baby!”

He fitted the lid down exactly and took Mrs. Mark away.

It was impossible to feel sad. She was ashamed that she could not feel sad. She was not sad even when she stood in the corner of the churchyard beside the grave. About the narrow hole stood a few old people—Mr. Pegler, Mr. and Mrs. Billings, Miss Kinney, Dr. Crabbe and Mrs. Parsons. They stood listening to the new minister’s quick abstracted voice. He had not known Mrs. Mark except as a rude old woman who pretended to be asleep when he went to see her, and now he made haste to bury her.

They stood about him in the bright afternoon, old and wrinkled and shabby. Only Dr. Crabbe looked sturdy, stocky and rough like a thick-trunked tree whose top had been early chopped away and the wound long healed. His curly white hair blew in the breeze as he held his hat in his hands. Miss Kinney stood a little away from them all, a wraith. She talked to herself, her lips moving, smiling. Catching Joan’s eyes she waved her hand gaily across the grave and then remembered where she was and blushed an ashen pink. Her face was more than ever like a small withered flower at the end of a long stalk.

It was over very quickly. Mrs. Parsons sang, her voice rising feeble and shallow in the autumn air. “For all the saints who from their labors rest,” she sang. Joan listened, gazing across the grass to where her mother and father lay. Mrs. Mark would have hated such singing. “Don’t call me a saint, for pity’s sake,” she would have snorted if she could.

Yes, it was soon over. The minister shook hands with them briskly and went away. The old people lingered. They spoke to her. “Well, Joan, we don’t see much of you these days,” and lingering they spoke together a moment. None of them had known Mrs. Mark very well. “She wasn’t a woman you could know,” said Mrs. Parsons gently, “but I am sure she was very good.”

Mr. Pegler pondered. “I didn’t make her a pair of shoes—let me see—not for twelve years, and then they were house shoes—slippers. She came to me that day, I remember, saying she was stiff in the legs. Well, we all have to go, one way or another, and soon it’s all over with us. We’ve had all there is. There’s nothing beyond.”

They fell silent, these old people, looking at a new grave, troubled, frightened. No one contradicted Mr. Pegler, for once. Any day now, any one of them—Miss Kinney was staring down at the coffin, bewildered, as though she had not seen it before. The sexton was beginning to shovel in the earth.

“Why, we are all getting old, aren’t we?” Miss Kinney cried. She looked down upon them, one and another, her small face frightened.

“Come along now,” said Dr. Crabbe, taking her fragile arm in his hand. “I’ll take you home. Your mother will be wanting you.”

“Yes, of course,” said Miss Kinney. “I must go, of course. I can’t leave Mother too long.” She bobbed away beside Dr. Crabbe, a head taller than he, a wisp dropping over his thick rolling body.

Mr. and Mrs. Billings were waiting. They stood together, a little to one side, waiting for her. These two were not afraid. “Everything’s got to die,” Mr. Billings was saying respectfully. He said this often in his butcher shop. He had not sold Mrs. Mark any meat in years. But she was part of the village, so he had come to her funeral.

“Joan, honey,” said Mrs. Billings. “How are you getting on?”

Now everyone was gone except the three of them. And she wanted to tell this plain old pair everything. They stood so honest in the sunshine, their big comfortable bodies, their red honest faces. “I’ve left my husband,” she said. They stared at her. “I just couldn’t go on,” she said quickly.

Mr. Billings nodded. “I know the Pounders,” he said very slowly. “They’re honest folks—though queer. They keep to themselves. I buy a steer or two from them now and then.”

Mrs. Billings patted her hand, sighing hoarsely, “Well, dear—”

“I’m living in Mrs. Mark’s cottage,” Joan said, hurrying on. “She left it to me. I’m to have Rose’s children.”

“That little pretty Rose,” mourned Mrs. Billings. “It’s hard to understand all that’s took place—so much scattering and sorrow these last ten years. Yet it seems only yesterday that your mother went.”

“Yes,” said Joan. They stood in silence a moment. She felt them warmly near her, without condemnation, taking her as she was.

“Well,” said Mr. Billings, clearing his throat, “with all them children you’ll be like the old woman in the shoe. I better send you some meat to make ’em some broth.”

He grinned at her cheerfully and she smiled and tears rushed to her eyes. “You’re two of the best people in the world,” she said.

Mr. Billings laughed. “We’re most common,” he said.

The sexton was shaping the grave carefully, patting down the sod. It was all over and they went away.

But still it was not possible to be sad. Waking next morning, in the little house, it was as though now for the first time she was really beginning to live. Mrs. Mark had given her a place where she could live and had gone quietly away, leaving nothing of herself.

She set the three rooms straight and neat, and put Mrs. Mark’s clothes together. There was very little. Mrs. Mark had lived here without small possessions. She was not willing to be cluttered by many things. In the closet hung two black dresses. They were limp and the folds were faded from long hanging. She had not worn them in years. All the things scarcely filled a bushel basket. Joan packed them neatly and took them into the attic and found a corner under the eaves.

She had not been in the attic before. There was a room finished off in unpainted boards, a room never lived in, clean except for dust. That was David’s room, she decided quickly. This house was now her own! Every room was hers to do with as she liked. There was no feeling of strangeness anywhere in it. It had been given to her and she had taken it. The other house to which she so foolishly had fled for shelter could never have been hers. It was shaped from the beginning by alien life. Though they had all died and left it to her, it would not have been hers and she could not have loved it. But this house sheltered her at once, warmly, closely. She felt as though she had already lived here a long time. She loved the deep walls, the many small windows, the hues of brown and golden stone. There was an old fireplace. Someone had taken the stones of the field, from his own land, and built this house and made a fireplace to warm him and his love. Surely, surely sometime this house had been made in love and lovers had planned it and Mrs. Mark had only kept it for her. And she would live here with all her children, gathering them together beneath this roof.

And warm in all she did, like a southern current through the sea, ran the thought of the letter to Roger Bair. It would be like bringing him, too, under this roof. She put off writing hour by hour—her heart needed its dream. She set the house neat and made the bed fresh, the mattress fresh with sun and wind, and she gathered flowers from the meadows, goldenrod and small starry purple asters and a bunch of scarlet leaves, and when the house was made wholly her own she sat down in the evening of a day of sweet loneliness, when she had seen no other face than Paul’s, to write the letter at last. So how could she be sad?

“Dear Roger Bair—” she wrote. Then she stopped and over her at that instant flowed the meaning of his name. She loved him. All these years she had loved him. Whenever his name had been written in any letter of Francis’, she had seen it above all other words upon the page. But not until now had she been free to know she loved him. Under the shadow of that silent house, love had stifled, alive but not known. Now in this free solitude it came forth, a lovely noble shape, full grown. It had been growing all this time. She sat staring down at the name she had written. To write it had been to open the door and he was there. He had always been there, ever since that morning she had seen him on the flying field. She put aside the pen and sat quietly in her little house, the shades drawn, alone in the lamplight. She could love him fully and freely, quite alone. She could love him and live in her love for him, asking nothing. It was filling her even now, an energy for life. She took up the pen again and began to write swiftly and clearly.
I need your help. I am not afraid to ask for it.

When she had asked of him what she wanted she signed her name and sealed the letter and made ready for the night. She had early laid Paul in the bed and he was asleep. She stood in her nightgown, looking down at him as she always did before she put out the light. He lay quietly, his smooth child’s face untroubled, his lips parted and rosy. He was getting tall. He was growing stronger and trying to get to his feet when she put him on the floor. She had watched him, the feeble brain dimly struggling to follow the strong beautiful undirected body, and daily her heart had broken by him. He was all she had and she had often wept to know it. But now looking at him it came to her that he was no longer everything. She had something more at last. Even weeping could not be the same now.