To the market place, p.1
To the Market Place, page 1
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To the Market Place
Berry Fleming
New York
CONTENTS
Part One
THE CITY OF THE BEAUTIFUL TOWERS
Part Two
THE PROMISED LAND
PART ONE
THE CITY OF THE BEAUTIFUL TOWERS
And Esau said, “Behold I am at the point to die: and what profit shall this birthright do to me?”
CHAPTER ONE
1
Autumn,—trailing out through the early Kentucky sunlight as if drawn up from the ripened fields, drifting over the damp green rolls of Clarence Menifee’s Elkhorn Farm like wood smoke, clinging to the emptied land, harvest time and the melancholy of fulfillment, of passion spent, the indefinable dove-note of fall. It was only the twenty-eighth of August and most of the tobacco was still uncut, but the dew was heavy that morning and in the wet shadows of the tobacco barns, black and striped with the yellow bands of the ventilators, a cool draught seemed to be rising from the bluegrass. You could hear a rain crow now and then moaning rhythmically over the cornfield by Elkhorn Creek and the brown mares with their foals beside them left the shade trees to graze in the sun.
A wagon loaded high with tobacco stalks, the fading leaves already beginning to shrivel, creaked into Barn Number 6 and stopped under the web of unpainted rafters from which the stalks would hang to dry. George Griggs, Clarence Menifee’s manager, stood inside the broad door with the backs of his sunburnt hands against his belt, his head tilted back over his frayed shirt collar, and watched the Negro on the highest rafter, almost invisible in the semi-darkness of the roof like a chameleon the color of his leaf, reach down for the end of the stick with the tobacco stalks hanging from it, straighten up, and lay it between the beams.
“Watch yourself, Ike.”
“Yassa.”
“It’s a long way from there to the ground.”
“Yassa,” Ike laughed melodiously. “Yassa.”
A young Negro unloading from the truck beneath said, “Lemme know ’fo’ you start down, Mister Ike.”
“I let you know. I don’ reckon the ground’s no harder’n yo’ head.”
George Griggs went out in the sun.
He ducked into an old coupé and drove off over the matted bluegrass toward the gate in the black fence and the field of half-cut tobacco beyond it. The Negroes were working at the south side, slicing through the tough stalks close to the ground with the oblique ends of their spade-like knives, piercing half a dozen stalks on to a pointed stick driven in the ground and piling the bunches on the bed of a wagon.
Pete, the head farmer, a mulatto, lurched across the furrows to George Griggs’s car and put a foot confidentially on the runningboard.
“Well, Pete, we got a good day.”
They talked for a few minutes, then George Griggs said, “Sleepy brought you your other knives yet?”
“No, sir. I reckon he ain’t done sharpenin’ ’em yet.”
“I’m going by the shop, I’ll tell him to bring on over what he’s got done.”
He backed round over the stubs and drove through the gate, heading straight across the smooth pasture for the road.
He stopped beside a gasoline pump in front of the white machine-shop where, when he cut off his motor, the whine of an emery wheel filled the silence. He went inside and stood across from a Negro with goggles over his slow-moving eyes, sharpening the knives, the fine shower of bright specks of metal dancing off the blade when it touched the wheel; they sprayed off in a long fan and sometimes a red spark would follow the wheel on a complete circuit.
“How you coming, Sleepy?” he said, putting the backs of his hands against his belt; he had got that habit after he was married from often having his fingers dirty and not wanting to soil the waist of his khaki trousers his new wife had just washed for him.
Sleepy stopped the current and the noise died out. “Coming all right, Mr. George.” He pulled the goggles out from his face and lifted them up to his forehead shiny with sweat.
George Griggs picked up one of the knives and examined the fresh blue edge. “Don’t bear down on ’em too much, Sleepy; you’ll take all the temper out of ’em.—Here, lemme show you something.”
Sleepy moved apologetically round to the other side of the wheel, willing to learn.
George Griggs stepped up to the machine and pushed his faded imitation Panama back from his forehead. He was wondering just what he ought to do about the glasses; if they had been hanging there from their hook he would have put them on, no matter how many niggers had been wearing them. Or if he had been going to work at the wheel for more than a minute he would have taken them off Sleepy’s wet head anyway; but this would take only a few seconds, and he could imagine so well the clammy damp of the leather where the goggles had been sticking against the Negro’s skin—
“Want the glasses, Mr. George?”
“No. This won’t take a minute; I just want to show you something.”
He reached behind him on the wall, glancing through the open window as he turned at the rolling green of the meadows and the sorrel mare Shoo Fly and her filly with their noses in the deep grass, and threw in the switch. The wheel jerked into motion with a rising hum.
2
Clarence Menifee looked out of his bathroom window, rubbing his fingers absent-mindedly over his unshaved cheeks. Beyond the roof of the garage he could see the hands in the west field, black midges against the rich green wall of the tobacco. It was good tobacco, top-price tobacco; and it looked like they might get it all in without a rain. Good field; too bad this was the second year of tobacco on it. Next year he would have to put it in clover and the next year in bluegrass; he wouldn’t see any tobacco growing from his bathroom for—eight years. Not until 1935! The next time he could stand in front of that window and look out at his tobacco he would be—good Lord!—fifty-seven years old. Julia would be twenty-six. Carolyn would be thirty. Carolyn would be thirty-two. It was funny how he could never remember immediately how old Carolyn was; no trouble remembering Julia’s age. Even Carolyn’s age was difficult; he grinned, thumping himself lightly on the chest with both fists. She didn’t get that from his people; she got it from her mother’s people. Theresa had been a little—that way. Even her mother, even Lucy herself, now and then—but that was different. Poor Lucy. He was glad the children didn’t know about it. Or maybe Carolyn did; you couldn’t quite tell what Carolyn knew.
He lifted his eyes for a moment from his razor strop to watch the little black square that was George Griggs’s car, back round on the cleared corner of the tobacco field and roll off behind the heavy foliage of the locust trees beside the garage. George Griggs was a good man. He probably had a better manager in George Griggs than if he had had a son as manager; too bad not to have a boy to grow up and take George Griggs’s place, but—he ought to have those locust trees cut down sometime; the niggers said locust trees drew lightning—
He turned on the cold shower, tossed his pajamas on a corner of the blue tile floor, and felt the water, leaning over not to let it splash on his bare legs.
He was in his bedroom tucking the tail of a clean white shirt into his trousers when one of the telephones on his bedside table began to ring. It was the buzzing ring of the farm phone and it kept buzzing. He looked at it; they didn’t usually call him before breakfast like this. Why didn’t they ask George Griggs? He held up his trousers with one hand and staggered across to the bed.
“All right,” he said carelessly.
Then his voice changed. “All right, Sleepy.—Mr. George!—God damnit, I told nobody to use that wheel without glasses!—All right, all right; never mind that. Now here’s what you do. You got a car there?—All right, put him in his car. You know where Saint James Hospital is.—Yes, that’s right. Now take him right on in there and don’t waste any time about it. He liable to lose his eye.—No, don’t wait for me. I’ll follow y’all in soon as I get my clothes on. Go ahead.”
He swished over the pages of the telephone book. God damn it to hell, what does he think I put goggles down there for! “Limestone 8500, and hurry it.” Suppose this boy loses his eye, who’ll I get to manage the farm then! Joe? Ben Knight? Ben don’t know—“Hello. Is Dr. Featherston there?—All right, Miss, just get him on the phone. This Clarence Menifee talking.” He fingered a corner of the bed sheet for a moment, waiting; then a man’s voice said, “What’s the matter, Cla’ence?” “Hello, doc,” he said. “One of my men just got a steel splinter in his eye, George Griggs, you know him. One of the boys is on the way in there with him now; he’ll be there in five minutes.—Do everything in the world you can for him, doc. I’ll take care of the bill.—Yes, get everything ready. I’ll be there myself soon as I get my clothes on.”
He opened the door into the upstairs hall, still holding up his trousers with one hand, and yelled for his butler: “Charlie!” Then he saw his elder daughter standing at the top of the stairs. “Oh, Carolyn, honey, run down there and tell Charlie to fix me a cup of coffee right now. Just put it on the table. I got to go to town in a hurry.”
“Don’t you want anything else—”
“No, just do what I tell you, that’s all I—”
3
She heard her father’s voice die away as he turned fro m the door and disappeared back into the room across from her mother’s. “The boss.” And he really was the boss, too; there she was instinctively going down the stairs at a run. Her sister would have laughed at her; Julia didn’t jump when the boss spoke. Or when anybody else spoke, either. But her mother jumped,—most of the time.
She skirted a sharp corner of the table in the dining room, noticing as she pushed through the swinging door into the pantry that Charlie hadn’t yet begun to set the table for breakfast.
Charlie was standing in a long white apron beside an electric orange-juice squeezer, the strings of his bowtie hanging loose from his open collar. “Mornin’, Miss Car’lyn.” He smiled and pressed the half of an orange on the spinning cone.
“Charlie, father wants a cup of coffee right away. You get the coffee; I’ll set a place at the table. He’s in a hurry.”
Charlie clicked off the machine, ran some water over his hands, and started for the kitchen with long strides, drying his hands on his apron and reaching for his collar.
She went back into the dining room, took a mat out of the shallow drawer in the inlaid front of the sideboard, and twisted it round on the glassy table with her palm until it was straight. She laid out some silver on it, put down a plate and a napkin, and returned to the pantry and poured him a glass of orange juice out of the pitcher. She liked the way her muscles moved in doing all this, straight out to what she wanted, never faltering, sure, no steps wasted. Steps! She was wasting her life; another year like this last one and—
“I do that, Miss Car’lyn.”
“You get the cream and sugar.” She wanted to do something, even this little something.
She set the orange juice on the plate as her father came in from the hall stuffing a clean handkerchief into his coat pocket. “Hello, honey,” he said. “Where’s the coffee?”
She thought he looked as if something were bothering him but she doubted if he was going to tell her what it was. And she doubted if she was going to ask him; he didn’t think much of women’s minds, did he? She had a good mind, a damned good mind, a damned good mind to ask him what the hell was going on—
“Here it is,” she said. Charlie, in a white coat with his black tie in place, came in through the swinging door with a silver coffee pot. She watched Charlie set the pot lovingly on a glass coaster.
Clarence Menifee drank the orange juice, stopping in the middle to say, “Good morning, Charlie,” then finishing it. He sat down on the edge of his chair and dug the broad spoon into the sugar; he held the spoon in mid air while he turned his head slightly and said, “Charlie, tell somebody out there to bring up my car,” then he dumped it into the empty cup.
She picked up the pot and poured a black rod of coffee, soft through its bent length with the steam. “Are you coming back this morning?”
“Don’t know yet,” he said with finality. He stirred the coffee solidly, the handle of the spoon between his first two fingers.
She didn’t want to smoke but she thought she couldn’t ask him any more without a cigarette and she wanted to ask him; she took a cigarette out of a silver cylinder. “Anything the matter?” she said, holding a match up casually to the end.
There was a silence while he took a sip of the coffee, then he held the cup before him, looking into it, and said briefly, “Had a little accident this morning out in the machine shop.”
“Somebody hurt?”
“Um-humh.”
“Who?”
“George Griggs.”
She glanced at him quickly. “Bad?”
“George Griggs got a splinter in his eye, honey,” he said impatiently.
She watched him sipping the coffee, looking over the cup rim out into the hall; she thought if she made an exclamation he wouldn’t tell her any more. She swallowed and said, “You think he may lose his eye?”
“Now, honey, how do I know? Don’t ask me any more about it; I just don’t know.” He put the cup down and stood up. “And don’t bother your mother about it. I’m going in to the hospital now.”
Almost before she thought, she said, “I’ll go down to the office and keep an eye on things until you get back.”
He frowned at her, hesitating. Then he said, “All right.”
She followed him out into the hall.
He stopped in the front door with a straw hat on his head. “If anybody wants George or me, just say we not there. Don’t go into—”
“I understand.”
He was gone. She heard the door of his car bang, heard the starter grind angrily a second, heard him rush away. She stood there in the shade of the door, looking down the long straight driveway to the open pull-gate on the pike. In a minute his car was through it and she watched the top shooting along the crest of the gray stone wall, gone,—they were probably giving George Griggs ether now. She blinked her eyes with a sort of shudder and turned into the dining room.
Her father had given her a funny look when she spoke of going down to the office, a quick flash of a look as if for a brief second he saw her as another person, as if for a moment she ceased being for him one of the women of the house with their ignorance of the farm and indifference to it, became for him an individual. Then, as if his reason had instantly reassured him, the look was gone. But she wondered if the same picture had shot across his mind as across hers, a picture of George Griggs, blind, incapacitated, and a girl of twenty-four moving precisely about the office, driving purposefully over the farm—
She put her bare elbows on the table and stared out the window through the shade of the porch at the pastures and the black fences dipping up and down the slopes between the bordering cherry trees. There were cherry trees along every old fence line; the birds perched on the fence and dropped the seeds. If you needed to change the shape of a field you pulled up the fence and built it somewhere else; but the line of cherry trees stayed there and it never looked as though you had changed the field at all. Her father didn’t pull up his fences; they pierced the hem of cherry trees, just as they had in her grandfather’s day. What she was thinking of was changing a fence line; no woman had ever had anything to do with running Elkhorn Farm.
Charlie passed her a plate of toast, set it down in front of her, and stood back hesitating, pressing the serving napkin between his pink palms; “Mr. George bad off, Miss Car’lyn?”
She answered him vaguely, liking his concern but not knowing any more about it than he did. He put a bell within reach of her hand and went out.
She remembered how, during the past year’s emptiness, she had sometimes wondered idly whether she could learn to do his job, learn to take a real hand in the management of the farm; she needed something like that. She had been away from the farm for a long time, but she could learn; she was used to learning. She could learn anything he had learned. It might take two or three years, but—she could learn to do for the farm things George Griggs probably couldn’t have learned. If she couldn’t, what was the use of school? School, school, school, ever since you were six years old; for what? To cultivate your sense of emptiness? Your ability to sense yourself drying up, twisting, withering, like a young tree in a drought? They fed you for fifteen years and then one fine spring day they said to you, “All right, you are full; next please.” Unless you could use it, it was a curse. Life wasn’t a void for Julia. Julia didn’t know anything and didn’t want to know anything—
Charlie opened the pantry door and asked her if she wanted some hot toast; she knew he had really looked in to see if she had gone. She stood up, wondering if she had been there a long time.
She took a cigarette and lit it walking out of the dining room. She heard a bell ring as she laid her hand firmly on the knob of the screen door to the back porch; she paused, almost more mentally than physically, then she realized it was one of the upstairs bells; it was Julia ringing for Millie to bring her breakfast.
She burst on through the door and let it swing shut behind her, a little sorry about that gadget at the top that would shut it without a sound. She would have liked to bang it. She must be jealous of Julia. Why should she care whether Julia had breakfast in bed? Jealous of Julia’s popularity—
