The Morning and the Evening Read online

  When the man stopped stroking, Jake’s fingers hesitated, half curled. He sat waiting, but the screen flickered, the scene changed, and the man was gone. There were horses instead, pounding frightfully going over a hill, and the sound of gunshots. Not only the next face but all the faces hissed, and twenty-five pairs of feet thudded dully against the sawdust. Jake laughed, picked up one of his feet, then the other, set each down in the sawdust, stomping too.

  Suddenly through a cloud of dust on the screen, he saw a cow face come toward him with wild frightened eyes, mooing loudly and mournfully. He stood up. “Sarah Jane, Sarah Jane,” he cried out, a gaunt figure waving mute and frantic arms before the onrushing herd of cattle.

  “Sarah Jane, Sarah Jane,” he called again and again, beginning to run. The owner grabbed him by his crossed straps and one sleeve, dragged him down the light beam through the aisle of snickering faces, and out into the night. “God damn you, loon,” he muttered.

  Jake pulled back toward the tent, but the man shook him hard; then Jake forgot about the tent. He stood bewildered, with the man’s face breathing close to his. “You’re not getting back in there,” the owner gritted out between his teeth.

  With no thought left of what was inside the tent, Jake stood limply while the owner held him. Finally the owner released him and lit a cigarette, stood facing him, waiting to overcome his anger. “Just God damn you,” he said as he drew on the cigarette, which glowed faintly red against his face in the dark.

  And this faint red glow stirred up, as much as possible, a memory in Jake. When he had seen the owner with the spotlight playing across his face, he had associated it with the one thing of color indelibly etched on his mind—the sunset—because he watched it daily, and now he knew that he had seen this face before with color on it. He began to tell the man. “Take your hands off me. Get on away,” the owner said, giving him a good shove before he threw away his cigarette and went on back into the tent.

  Jake turned after him, knew from the tone of his voice not to follow, and stood holding on to the outside fold of the tent flap, beginning to tell the man about the sun going down red against a darkening sky. In a little while someone stuck his head out. “Shut up that noise and go home,” he said, and while the tent flap was open Jake glimpsed a man and a girl, heard music, saw a horse with its mane waving in the wind; then he was staring at nothing, with his nose up against the closed flap of the tent.

  He turned, ran his hand over his nose where the rough tent had scratched it, and went on slowly down the faint road. The moon came out smiling from behind a cloud, opened up a white path; he followed it, listening to the staccato sounds from katydids hiding in the tall grass alongside the road, listening to the shrill loud screaming of locusts from somewhere overhead, listening to the stumbling craunch of his own feet on the gravel, all sounds.

  Alone, he began to call up words from way inside him. A bird fluttered in one of the poplar trees, and he looked for it between the white leaves. It sang sleepily way up, and he went on. He went instinctively, not having to think where he was going. Because it was quiet the words came easily but formed slowly, one by one, and he waited for them to come as he walked.

  When he had been in the quiet for about a mile, he began to remember: music. He stored up words to go with the music. After a while he remembered the horse, and he stored up words to go with the horse. He remembered the wind.

  He turned out of the moonlight and went through the dark again, his feet following surely the thin side road.

  When he saw the little house, with one lighted window, he went up to it and looked inside. A woman knelt by a bed, and he watched her. As she stood up and got into bed, he saw without surprise that it was his mother and knew he was home. His mother sat in the bed by the lamp and he knew she was waiting for him. He waited, watching her. The night sounds continued around him; they had become part of his hearing now, and he did not have to listen to them consciously. With the sounds around him, with the words inside him, he felt again the uncontrollable thing that guided him, and he wanted to make sounds too. He moved his hands out in a sweeping gesture, stood outside the window, nodded his head up and down, shook it once.

  But the words still stirred him, wanting to be said. Suddenly he found himself going away from the window, and he went, went as if he were following himself.

  He went quietly through the tall, dew-wet grass, felt it itch his leg, but he forgot it before he could remember to stop and scratch. He went on with the words carefully inside him. The music began, churned inside him with the words, words about the horse with its mane waving in the wind, and he held everything inside him together as much as he could, till the moment to tell them.

  He found himself at the gate, lifted it and set it back in its rut. Then he went silently, smelling the ragweed, heard frog music, and he heard it and set it apart slowly from his own music. Instinctively he went on through the dark and circled wide around the place where he had seen the snake.

  As he went down into the summer-dried ditch, came up again, the words jarred loose from his chest and he started running, telling them.

  As he heard the first faint bell tinkle, he was running faster, telling about the wind, waving his arms.

  He smelled the pasture for the first time as he came up to her, and he lay down immediately with his head on her soft flank. When he felt her stillness and her warm breath smelling of grass, he began to tell her about the music, and he knew, as much as he could, that through the long summer he would come here again and again.

  Chapter Two

  Jake’s mother, standing at the kitchen window, saw him come up out of the potato cellar beneath the house, trip over the top of the ladder, and hit his chin sharply on a rock as he fell to the ground. But before she could move, he had gotten up. In one swift, unusual, sure movement, he collected the spilled potatoes.

  Like one of those cartoon shows, she thought, when things spilled out of a person’s arms jump back into them.

  The blow on the chin had been quite hard, she saw now that he was directly beneath the window. Blood had appeared where the skin had broken open and a faintly blue lump had formed. He seemed either not to mind or to be completely oblivious to what had happened. His expression never changed. It was altogether concentrated on carrying the potatoes for her. He brought them up the back steps and dropped them into a basket. She smelled faintly the odor of dirt that arose from them. Then he went away again, down the back steps.

  Soup simmering on the wood stove rattled the lid of its iron pot. Corn bread was baking in the oven. She stood in the kitchen full of heat and steam and thought of that dark cool cellar in the earth out of which Jake had just come. She would like to go down there and stay a long time, with perhaps a candle to light it by night. The fear of it she had once felt had passed gradually after so many years.

  The wooden door of the cellar was of two parts that opened outward, and flush to the ground. It was thirty years ago she had gone down into the cellar and left one side of the door closed and locked on the outside. She had been in the farthest reaches selecting potatoes when suddenly she was closed completely into the earth.

  Terrified, she had turned, and all she could see was a faint crack of daylight that was the outline of the door.

  “Jake!” she had called.

  But the same instinct which made her call made her call hollowly, tonelessly, and not loud enough for him to hear; he did not know how to open the door, and he did not know how to close and lock it either.

  Dropping potatoes, she put her hands out blindly to the dark and made her way through it, across the damp earth floor, at each step feeling snakes slithering toward her worn and split-open shoes. She found the ladder and gripped it and went up quickly to the top. She crouched, her face as close as possible to the crack of daylight: security now and life itself. Once, she pushed without hope at the unyielding weight of the door.

  It was early morning. There would be no strangers on the place at this hour. To wh
oever had closed the door, this was home.

  “Jud!” she called loudly to her oldest son.

  It seemed she heard heavy breathing on the other side of the door. But she could not be sure and told herself afterward it was only imagination.

  She drifted into semisleep, and heard the stealthy unsliding of the bolt. Half asleep, half awake, she argued with herself over whether she had heard it or dreamed it, and suddenly she was wide awake knowing she had heard it. She pushed violently with all her weight against the door; unnecessarily, for it came easily open.

  Dazed and blinking, she came into the bright sunlight. For a moment she stared about foolishly at the familiar and spring-filled countryside with a feeling that she should not have recognized it.

  On the back steps Jake sat in the sun, alternately patting the heads of Jud’s two hounds. So Jud is back from hunting, she thought.

  She went slowly toward Jake, watching as the hounds, their whole behinds wagging, pushed their noses against his hands. When her shadow overcame him, he looked up. Warmth and recognition came into his eyes. She leaned close and smoothed back his hair. “You can feed them,” she said softly,, and made appropriate gestures so that he understood her. He came alive and went up the back steps for the coarse white cornmeal bread she baked weekly for the dogs; it was kept in a blue enamel pan on the back porch. He broke off large pie-shaped wedges and came back and fed the dogs out of his hands.

  She had followed him up the steps. Jud was whistling inside his room, and she went down the hall to it. His boots were on the front porch beside the door; the door was slightly ajar, as if he had just come in that way, from the road and the town. He stood before the mirror of his highboy removing the clothes he had been out in all night.

  “Did you get anything?” she said.

  He drew his shirt over his head and then from his arms. “Those damn dogs,” he said. “Ran a fox all night as close as from here to the porch and never did catch up to him.”

  “Jake’s feeding them now,” she said.

  “Oh sh——,” he said, the sound in his throat afterward one of disgust.

  Anger, cold as a chill, ran through her. But she would not say anything. She was afraid to. She stared, newly aware of his strong arms and the muscles like taut cords across his chest and stomach. The thought of this enormous strength and what he could do with it made her feel sick. It was with wonder she thought back to the time when she had carried him inside her. It seemed impossible that anything as large as he could have ever been a baby. She remembered that the first time she held him, a great bunch of pink roses had been beside the bed. A petal had fallen from one onto the table. Picking it up, she had wrapped his tiny fist completely inside it. She had thought, I always want to remember this, that his fist fit inside a rose petal.

  She said, “Will you go to the cellar for potatoes? I thought I saw a snake in it and run back up. I just want about five. Just enough for potato salad at noon.”

  Watching his face, she thought it remained as coldly expressionless as always, except, perhaps, for a slight shifting of his eyes away from her.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’ll go.” And he made a great show of taking the poker in case he saw the snake.

  Before he went under the house he hesitated, and she wondered if he was considering that she might, in turn, lock him up. Would he open both sides of the door, or dare risk leaving one side locked? Curious as she was, she was afraid to go outside and look. Suppose he turned on her out of fear? His fear would be more dangerous than the hate she believed caused the other incident. How many times had he told her, I hate this town, and this place, and Jake!

  She did not believe he truly hated her. But she was the reason he had to stay at home. It was as if he had wanted her to know just how much he meant it when he said he hated those things; as if he had had to get back at something, she thought.

  She did not remember much more, in detail, of that afternoon almost thirty years ago, except that much later she had had to go onto the porch and tell Jake to leave the dogs and come inside. It had begun to lighten and to drizzle rain.

  Jud, she thought, had been such a handsome boy! At the window she watched Jake again. He had stopped the bleeding of his chin against his shirt sleeve. Now he was headed toward the pasture. She would let him go. She was too tired to bring him in and clean him up. Walking away from her, he was thin and slight and angular, where Jud had been massive. She had never seen any resemblance between the two of them until a few nights ago when Jake came home from the picture show. When she got into bed, she had glanced at the window just as he looked in. His face framed by the night behind him had been lit in the center by the lamp indoors. His eyes usually were squinted, their color impossible to see; but staring, they had widened, and she had seen as if for the first time that they were the same clear white-blue color as Jud’s. His nose, caught in shadows, had had something to its bridge that reminded her of Jud’s handsome aquiline one. Though Jake’s looked as if it had been broken, she thought, or pushed aside. It just missed being, not perfect, but all right. Like him, she thought, near tears, like most everything about him.

  She wanted to go to the door and call him back from the pasture. Repeatedly she dreamed, until it had become almost real, that Sarah Jane had turned into an enormous pawing bull, with great horns and flame-filled nostrils. And Jake was walking toward her, his hands outstretched to scratch between her ears. When she woke, her nightclothes would always be as wet as if drenched by rain. The feeling would hang on that something dreadful had happened to Jake. And unaccountably she had had the feeling the night he looked in on her after the picture show. She had gotten out of bed and walked to the door and called him. But he had gone. She went back to bed and lay awake, fearful and waiting. Then long afterward she heard in town the starting up of many motors and knew the show had just let out. Why had Jake come home so early? All that time she had been lying awake waiting to find out, without knowing it. She waited the night through for a knock at the door and someone to tell her, but no one ever came. And no one had told her at any time afterward. She comforted herself with the thought that whatever it was, it was not as bad as it could have been.

  It was her belief that Jake was as he was as punishment for the one infidelity of her life. It had happened several years before he was born, in the summertime, with the leader of a revival meeting that had come to town for two weeks. She had been drawn to the man from her first sight of him. And the second week of the revival she had realized that just as she had stared at him longingly, distantly, so now night after night he stared at her. The Sunday afternoon before the final meeting that night, she had come to the church as if by prearrangement, though she had no recollection of ever having spoken to him alone. He had been there. Everything was over very quickly. But it had been the surprise and delight of her life to find herself the woman she had been in that instant. She would never be the same again; she knew that. She had walked out of the church that afternoon with a great burden of guilt upon her, but not regret; she had learned too much. She had wanted to turn around and nod to him as he stood at the window watching her; but she had thought, If I do, I’ll see he’s just a man. And the memory was as if she had been in touch with God Himself, or been brushed with gold by angel’s wings.

  When Jake was born some years later, it was out of this greater measure of love that she bore him for her husband, Cecil, and out of it that she loved them both. But before Jake was a year old, Cecil died; he came from a line of people who did not live past sixty, and she had not expected him to. Still, it was a great shock the day he walked through the front gate and dropped dead just short of his fiftieth birthday. Afterward when she thought of their life together, she thought it had been all right. Their marriage had fallen early into a pattern from which it seldom deviated. When it was daylight, they had gotten up; when it was dark, they had gone to bed. The hours between, they worked the farm. Their lives had been exactly like those of the whole community except for sli
ght variations: people were born, died, took sick and got married at different times. A few met unexpected accidents. One young couple even got a divorce, and once Miss Alma, Miss Rubye Brown, Selma Murphy and some others had taken a bus tour to Williamsburg and New York City; they said another summer they would go out West, to San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Seattle and Lake Louise, but they never did. Sometimes she felt only her own life was any different, and it was Jake that made it so.

  After Cecil’s death, she did the farm work with only Jud’s help; he was then eleven, ten years older than Jake. At first she put down to this difference in age Jud’s behavior to Jake. She thought it was normal that he be jealous and resentful, but what was not normal was his scornful laughter. Whatever Jake did, Jud laughed.

  Jake had walked late and was slow about everything, but she excused away even his not learning to talk. The one thing finally she could not excuse away was what she had seen this morning: his imperviousness to hurt. If he fell, he did not cry. Whatever his cut, scratch, bruise, however much blood he shed, he seemed unaware of it. Eventually, when it was confirmed that something was wrong with him, she believed Jud had known it all along, that he had some instinct peculiar to animals and children alike, sensed what was weaker, imperfect, unable to escape him and was, therefore, his prey. She believed also that Jake’s inability to feel hurt was God’s compensation for what else He had done.

  One day after she had been sick for a long time, Jake’s inabilities were definitely established. A Negro, Lou, had been living in to do the work. She had not said a word about Jake, but the mother had seen her watching him and the words right ready on Lou’s lips to confirm any suspicions the mother might voice. Then it was her first day out of bed. Impatient with her long idleness, she had been in the kitchen rolling out dough for the noon biscuits when she heard Lou come in behind her and stand. Without turning, she said, “You want something, Lou?”