Golden Apples
by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Author of "South Moon Under"
Illustrations by Harold von Schmidt
A new novel of heroic proportions, drenched with the sunny splendor of our South-the story of:
Richard Tordell, English remittance man, who reclaimed his own soul
Luke and Allie, children of earth, whose faith worked a miracle
Camilla Van Dyne, who believed in living to the full
Dr. Albury, wise in the ways of humanity
Claudius, tortured victim of his own brilliance
A RED BIRD trilled from the coral honeysuckle on the whitewashed fence of the burying ground. The small plot, a mile east of the cracker village of Purley, lay in a clearing in the heart of hammock. Live oaks and magnolias, palms and sweet gums had been felled and their stumps dug to make room for men and women who had no more need of the forest or any other thing but peace. The company gathered for the burying of Luke Brinley and his wife stuffed closer to the broad open grave. The redbird twitched his tail and flew to a wild mulberry by the gate.
The boy, young Luke, watched the crimson flashing a moment, then brought his eyes back to the business in the sand in front of him. The itinerant preacher motioned him forward. The girl-child, Allie Brinley, tightened her hand on his. He was obliged to loosen her fingers one by one. He was conscious that she was trembling. He stepped to the first of the two rough pine coffins and at the parson's sign lifted his corner.
He was fourteen. His strength was equal to that of any of the three under-sized men who acted as the other pallbearers. They lowered the box into one side of the opening, then followed with its mate.
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| Young Tordell would never forget that afternoon in the Hampshire Library-the wicked lie of his stepmother, the testimony of the maid, the torture of not being believed by his father. |
An instant of confusion seized Luke. The preacher handed him a shovel, saying, "You can throw the first earth, boy."
The tightening of his muscles as he dug into the sand relieved him. He shoveled steadily, lowering his head against the circle of curious and compassionate eyes that swung from him to the girl and back again. They were plainly brother and sister, with the identical mark sometimes put by a strong-featured parent on a succession of children. In these two, the eyes were unforgettable. They were wide, of a gray smoky-blue. They were grave and direct and disconcerted the villagers.
Bart Newton, the village storekeeper and owner of the Brinley place, said, "Dogged if it don't make you shuddery-like, them big-eyed young uns lookin' right at you acrost their mammy's and daddy's stone-cold corpses."
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"They’s a way o' gittin' sweet orange trees to grow here,"
said Luke. evaeL"Leave me begin clarin'-"
"Do as you pLease," said Tordell. "Anything."
continued on page 144
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A woman said in a low voice, "Hit’s too much to ask of a young un, throwin' dirt on his own mammy and daddy."
An old man answered belligerently, "Hit's fitten he should do 'em honor."
The woman shook her head slowly. Other men joined in the shoveling, and in a few minutes the rectangle of heaped sand stood high and golden above the ground. Osey Lewis remained to tramp it level.
The woman who had spoken was the Widow Raynes. She gave the preacher a handful of silver money that had been collected to pay him. He eyed the boy and girl. He sighed and handed Luke, in small coins, a reluctant dollar.
He said, "Let me know if you need help," and turned away.
Luke Brinley and his sister stood hand in hand, waiting, as though presently gates would open and a road would show plainly before them down which they might go. The burying had centered around them. They had ridden to it with the Lewises, directly behind the coffins. Now they were superfluous.
The Widow Raynes called aloud, "Ain't nobody makin' room for them young uns?" Men and women stirred uneasily. She shouted, "Go on, the hull lot of you! You scairt you wouldn't git shut of 'em. I got room myself."
Her children filled an open spring wagon. She pushed them aside and motioned to Luke and Allie. They climbed over the wheels and sat down on the floor of the wagon. The widow lifted her bulk to the seat and clucked to her horse.
At the cemetery gate the woman halted and Luke jumped down to close it. He returned to the wagon and sat down. He felt suddenly stiff and sore and as though he wanted to sleep deeply. He shut his eyes against the fresh mound like a swollen wound in the earth, and dropped asleep.
The widow's farm lay beyond the Brinleys' small rented acreage. She drove in silence through the village and down the outlying road and drew up at the shabby house Brinley had rented with the land. Luke awakened with a start.
The woman said to her own wagonload, "You young uns don't jump out nor nothin'," and went with Luke and Allie up the path and through the open door.
Inside the house, she went direct to the kitchen safe. It was filled with cooked food the village women had brought. She nodded, She stood in the center of the main room, She looked around the bare pine walls at the crayon portraits of the Brinley relatives.
She said, "Son, you got no kin in the state o’ Floridy. Do you want I should write for you to them Alabama Brinleys?"
"Would some of 'em likely come and work the place?" "No man wouldn't leave his own home and come to land was only rented, like your daddy's. They'd likely send for you and Allie to come to them."
The girl pressed close to Luke, and a shiver passed over her small thin body. Alabama was strange and distant, The cold terror of the unknown was in its name.
He said, "I don't someway reckon me and Allie'd love to go to Alabama."
The widow said, "I wouldn't swop a piece o' Floridy fatback for the hull state, myself."
Luke said, "The rent ain't been paid. Is Bart Newton like to take back the land?"
"I reckon so. You know Bart as good as I do. He's mighty close." She pointed to the overflowing wagonload of Raynes offspring. "Luke, boy, they’s room for you two, by crowdin', in my wagon. I cain't make no more room in my house nor more room in my cook-pot, without I jest put more water to the grits and quit siftin' the husks outen the corn meal. You best leave me write to Alabama."
"Me and Allie had rather make out here."
She shrugged her heavy shoulders. She said, "Well, if you change your mind about the upcountry leave me know. Don't jest set here and starve to death."
He was relieved to have her go away, Her sharp-tongued goodness touched on places raw with sorrow and fear. He was bewildered. The reluctant kindness of folk was offensive. He opened his wet palm and looked at the coins the preacher had given him, He turned to the mantel and dropped them into the box his mother had kept for missions. He looked at Allie.
The Purley women had dressed the child of ten in her one white frock, outgrown and a little ragged. Under it her legs were thin and spindling. The women had drawn back the soft honey-colored hair and plaited it into two tight braids. In the small pointed face the blue eyes were wide and frightened.
She said, "My hair hurts."
Luke unbraided it awkwardly and ran his fingers through it to loosen it. He started toward the door and she followed him in a panic as though he too might vanish underground if he left her sight.
He stood in the open doorway. The sun was setting. Smoke from the Raynes chimney rose thinly and joined the sunset. Beyond the widow's farm, almost out of sight, a dark mass against the sky to the west was not wind clouds or rain clouds, but distant hammock. Here the tropical forest filled, dense and dark, the remaining miles between the village and Sawgrass Lake.
Luke closed the door and came back into the room. It was chill with the March twilight, and he went to the hearth and kindled a fire.
He rose and said, "Allie, I kin likely git work some'eres. Reckon I hadn't best send you off to them Alabama people?"
A convulsion passed over the slight body. Tears rained down her face as though she were dissolved in terror.
She sobbed, "Luke! Luke!"
It seemed to the tall boy that a hot millstone turned over in the pit of his stomach. She continued to cry out only his name, and the burning within him was followed by a coolness, as of running water over the hot stone. He was filled with a tenderness so great, so sweet, he thought he would burst with it.
He said, "Allie, honey, you ain't got to go to Alabama."
He sat down in the big cowhide rocker near the fire, lifted her to his lap and rocked back and forth, her small bones sharp against his big ones, her wet face burrowed into his chest. After a time the sobbing stopped. He pushed her hair back of her ears.
"I'm goin' to give you some o' that fine supper now," he said.
The miasma of death hung about the funeral foods in the kitchen. Unaccustomed delicacies were in ornate dishes. At first the boy and girl had no appetite for the strangeness. Then the young bodies responded to the good tastes and savors, and both ate hungrily. They felt better. The March night closing in around the house was less ominous.
Luke lighted a lamp and gave it to Allie to go to bed by, She came to him to unfasten a clumsy pin in her clothing, then went quietly to the bedroom, blinking drowsy eyes, Her small store of vitality was exhausted.
Luke sat by the fire, rubbing his thin wrists. He looked about the room in the flickering light, It contained the crayon portraits of mythical kin; a few chairs and small tables; such luxuries as a green plush cover on a lamp stand, a velvet-backed album and a strip of Brussels carpet under the west window. The two bedrooms contained furniture as scanty.
In the shed at the rear of the house were a heifer with her first calf, a good mule, a few shoats and chickens, and enough feed to last until the next corn and potatoes should be made. These were his only possessions. Luke recognized their meagerness.
He thought of Allie. She had pressed against him like a motherless kitten. He would never speak of Alabama again, but he wondered if he ought not to beg Mrs. Raynes to take her in with her own. Then a fear for her came over him like a chill, and it seemed to him that no one but himself could cherish her.
He went to the door of the bedroom. He said, "Honey, we ain't beholden to nobody. Let's us move out to the old house yonder in the hammock."
She asked, "Don't folks say the furriner owns it'll likely be back some day?"
"Ain't no furriner com in' or he'd of done come long ago. You go to sleep now. It just come to me, we kin make out in the hammock."
In midmorning the Widow Raynes looked up from her scrubbing and saw the household train of the young Brinleys going by. The mule drew the wagon. The milch cow was tied to the tailboard. Her spotted calf, bleating, followed behind. The wagon was piled with their goods. A pen had been made with chairs and dressers for Allie's pet sow. The long snout lifted above the arm of the cowhide rocker. The crates of chickens swayed on top.
Luke was driving and Allie sat big-eyed beside him, holding tight a lean black cat that struggled to be free. Luke lifted his hand in greeting to the neighbor he was leaving. The small Rayneses crowded to the door and stood gaping as the shabby procession moved down the sand road in the hot sun and disappeared into the darkness of the hammock to the west.
THE HAMMOCK lightened with the stir of morning. Blue smoke from a fatwood fire curled from the chimney of the house. It spread in a canopy under the live oaks and magnolias. The vast branches formed an impenetrable roof over the floor of the forest, and the smoke eddied back on itself, smothering the low dwelling.
Suddenly the nine-o'clock breeze moved across the treetops. The branches parted, and smoke and vapor lifted through them. An iron kettle clattered inside the house. A door opened on rusty hinges, and Allie Brinley came to the stoop with a cooking pot in her hands. She stood uncertainly searching the forest. She was seventeen years old, but the mark of the child was on her still.
A few yards from the house a palmetto shot clear of the heavy growth about it, making a narrow well toward the sky. Sunlight shot down it in a shaft. The girl moved quickly to the palm, as though the sun were irresistible.
She was barefooted. She walked noiselessly on the moist leaves. She carried her thin body arched a little backward, with the throat and head bent forward like a swan. Her feet moved ahead of her, precise and sure.
At the palm she gave a sharp high call and scraped scorched grits from the pot to the ground. Half a dozen game chickens, lean, bright-eyed and belligerent, scurried in from the hammock and fought over the scraps with relish.
The girl leaned against the smooth trunk of the palmetto. The sunlight flowed down her body, warming the flat young breasts and lank thighs. Her head was small, the tawny hair brushed flat behind her ears. Her skin was the dull gold of palmetto honey, paled a little since childhood by the years of living in the shaded hammock. Because of the light coloring, her eyes seemed of a brighter blue against it.
She stood passive under the palm, looking into the forest. It had sheltered the young Brinleys for seven years, but for the girl there was still a strangeness in its shadows.
Luke had gone to Purley at daylight to sell a load of hand-hewn cypress shingles. He had not yet returned. There was no hurry about her work, and she left the palm and went to the house leisurely. It stood inside an opening created by a circle of live oaks of so vast a spread that no smaller things could grow in the shade beneath them.
The house was standing only because it was built of swamp cypress and heart pine. It was older than Luke's memory. Moss grew thick across the shingles, and the boarding was weathered to the color of a speckled perch, but the house was sound.
A foreigner had built it long ago and had gone away. Luke and Allie Brinley had been for years uneasy, expecting daily to see the owner returning to claim his house and land. They had gone unmolested. Their fears had faded, until at last the hammock seemed secure.
Living had been scanty. The boy Luke was wise in the ways of sugar cane and corn, of hogs and sweet potatoes. He had raised these on a patch of cleared ground adjoining the hammock, supplementing their meager return with the hewing of cypress shingles from blocks he cut in the swamp. The boy and girl had been content, for to comfort any mortal, one other is enough.
The February morning was cool. Under the dense shade the old house had a raw chill through its rooms. The girl Allie hurried across the dank breezeway and into the warm kitchen. A rich pine fire had burned on the hearth since before daylight. She crouched a moment by the embers, huddling her thin shoulders. Then she threw wide the hand-hewn door and braced herself against the cold to do her sweeping.
Well before noon she heard the creak of wagon wheels in the road. The mule turned under the live oaks. Allie waved to Luke on the wagon seat as he turned in by the lean-to.
"Dinner ain't yit ready, Luke," she called.
He unhitched the mule and gave it food and water. He came to the kitchen. The girl sensed at once his concern. His blue eyes were fierce in his tanned face. With his shaggy mane of hair, he looked like a bony lion reared back on its hind legs to face an unfriendly world. He sat down by the hearth without speaking.
Allie busied herself with the meal, glancing sideways at him from time to time. When she served the dinner on the bare pine table, he moved to it and ate absently. The girl had no appetite and sat with her hands folded in her lap, waiting for him to finish and to speak.
The kinship between the two was still plain. They were cut from the same cloth, but the youth's end of it was rougher, as though the material had been dragged through brambles from which the other had been protected. Luke was twenty-one. In the glow from the open fire his face was seamed, so that he might have been any mature man who had worked against odds a little heavy.
He was still large-boned where the girl was slight. Hunched on the low cowhide chair, he was massive; shaggy. But his shoulder blades were sharp through his blue denim shirt, and the cords of his big hands and arms were like taut plowlines. His body suggested violence. Yet when he turned his eyes now to his sister, they showed the same candid blue as hers; clear, appealing, somehow defenseless.
He said, "Allie, the feller owns the hammock is comin'."
One word had long held terror for her.
She asked, "From Alabama?"
HE SHOOK his head. "From a sight longer ways than Alabama. From sure-enough furrin places."
The news struck her like a phyical blow. Luke had often thought that her slight body was like a young palm that the slightest wind set to stirring. The trembling that seized her when she was frightened always distressed him. He gripped her thin arm to steady her.
He said, "I wouldn't of told you about it if I could of he'ped it."
She asked finally, "How come you to know?"
He relaxed his hold on her. He said, "A letter come to Purley quite a while back, marked for the postmaster. That's Bart Newton. Bart, he read it to me. He said he figgered it didn't make no difference to anybody but you and me, us livin' on the place.
"The letter said the owner of the prop’ty four miles west o' Purley was comin' to it. He was some kin to the feller built the house. It asked would the house be put in order. It said would somebody send a carriage to Sawgrass Landin' to meet the orange steamer the second week in February." He drew a fragment of wrapping paper from his pocket. "Bart wrote out the feller's name and where-all he come from."
She stared at the meaningless letters: "Richard Tordell, Tordell Manor, Hampshire, England."
She asked in panic, "Has Bart gone a’ready to fetch him?"
"Bart ain't goin'. He said the feller'd take one look at the place and turn tail and go back ag'in where he come from, like his kin before him." Luke folded the wrapping paper. He added, "Bart said ain't no carriage in Purley noway."
The girl's breath came after a long interval, and then was indrawn sharply, like a sob. "Luke, what you fixin' to do?"
"I cain't figger. Mr. Bart says we should hide out 'til the furriner is gone."
"Where kin we hide?"
He did not answer. He rose from his chair and went to the door. The sun was high overhead, and there was a semblance of brightness through the forest. He sat down in the open doorway.
Allie washed the dinner dishes, wiping out the cooking pots with handfuls of fresh Spanish moss. She swept up the hearth and sat down beside her brother. From the rooftree of the house a mourning dove sounded its plaintive cry and from the forest was answered. The girl blinked her eyes.
She called, "Y'all better be quick about your courtin'. You likely to git th'owed out, too."
She tried to picture life away from the hammock, but could not. Living had been meager, but there was nothing else. She knew that Luke could find work by leaving her behind. There was nothing for him in the village. The thought set her to quivering again. He looked at her. He moved close to her and tugged at a corner of her skirt.
"Quit that now, Sugar. I ain't goin' to let nobody th'ow you out o' nowhere."
She quieted and leaned her head against his arm.
They sat close, thinking the same thoughts, as though side by side they fished the same dark pool.
He said, "I kin likely git work some'eres."
"Would it pleasure you, workin' for somebody?"
"Not rightly." He turned to her fiercely. "But I got nothin'. I got nothin' to call my own but my hands and back." He stared into the dark forest. "I could of done good with my own land," he said.
It seemed to him that he had a claim on the hammock. During the past year or two he had often imagined himself owning it. He had cleared a small plot near the house and planted it to collards and sweet potatoes. He had recognized the lush fertility of the soil. The first year he had pulled the choking moss and grapevines from a wild sweet-seedling orange tree south of the house, had hoed around it and had seen it respond with a lavish bearing.
He had longed to clear further spaces. He had imagined a cleared field where the growth was lightest, rich enough to grow cotton or tobacco. He had walked under the wild sour-orange trees across the dim path from the house. He had imagined them budded to sweet stock, pruned and cared for, as men of property were doing on the other side of Sawgrass Lake. When he closed his eyes he could see the orange grove, green and civilized, where the jungle sprawled.
His desire was to cut away the hindering tangle with his own ax. In his own mind and body he possessed the means for creating order in this dark chaos. His muscles had flexed, eager to fell sweet gum and hickory. Live oaks and magnolias and palms, he had thought, he would leave untouched, even in the orange grove, because they were so beautiful. As fast as he built his pictures, they had faded.
"‘Tain’" mv land."
There had been no ignoring of that fact. The distant owner of the forest had been a mythical obstacle, an obscure terror, as Alabama had been to Allie.
Suddenly he was strangely less terrifying. Luke was conscious of a hope mingled with his fear. It seemed to him that he had been waiting all these lean years for the alien to come. If he and the other might walk together through the hammock, something would come of it.
He rose and went to the shed. Allie followed him, her eyes questioning. He cut a strip of leather from an old piece of harness and began to bind it around the cracked axle of a rear wagon wheel.
"'Tain't right, the way Bart Newton was figgerin'," he said. "Not sendin' nobody to meet a stranger."
"Luke, what you fixin' to do?" the girl asked.
He dug his heel into the sand to pull his binding tighter. "I'm fixin' to set out for the landin' to fetch the furriner."
The orange steamer warped in to the dock at Sawgrass Landing at daylight. The early morning fog was dense. The lake, the shore, the surrounding marsh and cypress swamp and farther hammock were obliterated, and the steamer was only visible when it grated against the pilings. The handful of passengers left to disembark at the last stopping point were crowded forward in the blunt bow. Luke Brinley had been waiting two days and nights for the steamer, sleeping in his wagon, eating sparingly from the food Allie had prepared for him, washing himself at the shallow border of the lake. Now, as the passengers crowded down the gangplank, Luke walked anxiously among them, looking for the foreigner. He saw no one distinguishable from the prosperous orange growers and settlers of the surrounding section.
Negroes began unloading freight from the steamer. Boxes and trunks dropped on the wooden dock. Whips cracked over horses and wheels rattled as the passengers began to drive away.
Luke moved from the road to the dock and back again. At last no one was left among the Negroes but himself and a tall, gaunt young man with dark eyes deep over high white cheekbones. The young man questioned the Negroes in a tone of anxiety. One or two did not understand him and dropped their hauling to stare stupidly at him.
Luke was startled by the strange speech. But this could not be the foreigner. This man was young. He thought, "He's likely a Yankee, or such as that."
The young man passed from the road to the dock and back again. At last he walked abruptly to Luke and stopped him. He said, "I am Richard Tordell. Can you by chance tell me anything of a carriage to meet me from Purley?"
Luke stared. Now that he was face to face with the owner of the hammock, he was in a panic. He swallowed desperately before he could speak.
He said, "I got a wagon waitin' for you yonder."
Tordell eyed him mistrustfully. The two were of the same height, and the foreigner's dark eyes probed Luke's like smoky torches. The ragged big native with shaggy hair protruding in tufts through a broad hat was as fantastic as the untidy narrow river he had been traveling. Everything was a meaningless tangle-rivers, their jungle banks, and this disheveled youth who had come to fetch him.
The landing in the fog was meaningless; the arrival, unknown and unwelcomed, at the invisible shore. He had a sense of stepping now into unreality, as though all the American Florida were a dream; as though in it he passed into a life that was beyond life.
He said to Luke, "Very well.
Luke turned toward the spot where the mule stood nodding.
Tordell said, "Can you take my bags and boxes?"
Luke said, "The wagon’ll hold right smart.".
They hailed a Negro on the dock. Luke went with him, under the newcomer's direction, and a large assortment of luggage and crates was separated from the other freight. Luke drove the wagon to the end of the dock and with the Negro loaded the collection.
Tordell looked uncertainly at a handful of American silver and gave the black man three of the larger coins. The Negro flashed white teeth and ducked away. The Englishman hesitated. There was no place to ride except beside Luke on the high wagon seat.
He said, "There is no carriage?"
"Ain't nary carriage in the hull o' Purley." Again the stranger said, "Very well"
He mounted to the seat. Luke climbed up beside him and lifted the lines of knotted rope. He turned the mule down a road that to Tordell was invisible. It wound through cypress swamp and low hammock and by a wooden bridge across the River Styx. The River styx was no more than a channel from one lake to another.
The labor of loading the luggage had cleared Luke's brain and relieved him of his embarrassment. He waited eagerly for the owner of the hammock to begin questioning him, so that he might tell of his uneasy years of living on the other's land. The Englishman seemed unconscious of his presence. Now and then Luke lifted his eyes from the ruts of the road and looked furtively at him.
The foreigner was almost as young as he. He thought he had never seen so strange a coloring-the skin pallid, the eyes like pools of marsh water. The black hair was smooth under the fine hat. The dark eyes probed the fog. There was in them something of panic, as though the unknown was at once to be faced and feared.
The road was visible only directly ahead for a yard or so. Luke kept his eyes on the ruts for guidance. Marsh lay on either side, blanketed and invisible.
Tordell asked, "What is the distance to Purley?"
"'Bout ten miles to the hammock. Fourteen to Purley. We don't go clare to the town."
The gaunt young man asked, "Does your fog clear as the day goes on?"
"Hit’ll clare time the sun's two-three hours high." The fog lifted suddenly a few feet at the marsh edge, like a curtain rising to show another world. The marsh, the river, the cypress swamp, appeared startlingly around them.
The River Styx was broad with its periodic overflow. Unseasonable rains had raised it until the narrow stream merged with the marsh waters, and river and marsh were one. The broad expanse of waters was copper-colored in the sun. The flat pads of water lilies lay in clusters, and arrowhead lilies lifted white spears of bloom. Floating tussocks were alive with soldier blackbirds and ricebirds. Their din filled the air, shrill and tuneless. Tordell stared over the miles of marsh.
The wagon crossed a high wooden bridge. The road dropped steeply to a narrow ledge, plunged into a growth of cypress and was inundated with the lowlying river. The mule's hoofs churned through the water and the wagon wheels threw it like steamer paddles. The cypresses lifted gray trunks and leafless tops above the shallow overflow. Blue irises bloomed thickly among them.
The cypresses thickened and then thinned. Larger trees began to show among them-bay and hickory and then live oak. The rippling water grew still shallower, and here and there a patch of hammock soil lifted clear above it.
Tordell asked, "What is the stream that has overflowed into the forest?"
Luke said, "Bart Newton says oncet it used to have a Injun name, but the feller lived awhile in your house done named it the River Styx."
He was surprised at the effect of his words. The Englishman turned sharply. He exclaimed, "The Styx!" and stared at the water, fascinated by something the other could not see. Not he alone, he thought, had crossed into this place as into the ultimate darkness. But the traveler ahead of him had returned. For him, there was no returning.
Luke said, "We 'bout to git clost to our own hammock."
He flushed. He had not meant to convey his own sense of ownership. He had not had the opportunity to explain his position on Tordell's property. He wished the Englishman would ask him the direct question, so that he might relieve himself of the burden that had become intolerable. The youth of the stranger-twenty-three or -four-made him bold.
He said, "I be Luke Brinley."
Tordell said politely, with a cold detachment, "I see."
Luke thought, "I just got to wait for him to come right out and ask it."
The land grew higher. Away from the sun-warmed marsh water the hammock was chill. Live oaks spread broad limbs over the black leaf mold. The miles slipped away in the steady jogging. Luke turned the mule between a red bay tree and a clump of low palmettos.
The house came into view under the circle of live oaks, low and gray, the porch sagging at one corner. Allie stood in the central breezeway, barefooted, in a faded blue frock, with a blue frilled sunbonnet pushed back from her smooth tawny hair. Luke stopped the mule. He saw that his sister was in great terror.
The stranger did not stir. Luke waited uneasily for him to dismount. It occurred to him that the young man had no means of recognizing his property.
He said, "Here us be. This is the place."
Tordell stared at him, as though to determine the young cracker's sanity. He dismounted slowly, watching the house. He took a step toward it, then turned back to the wagon. Allie darted out of sight down the breezeway.
"But where is the main dwelling? This must be the tenant house."
"Ain't but the one house."
The Englishman said wildly, "There must be some mistake. This can't possibly be right. My name is Tordell. You've brought me to the wrong place."
Luke said, "Ain't no other place belongs to a furriner."
"Where is Purley? Where is the town. or city, of Purley? My father wrote to the postmaster."
"I seed the letter."
"But where is Purley?"
"Four mile east. This is the prop'ty was wrote about in the letter. Time the mule's rested tomorrer, I kin carry you to Purley. The postmaster'll tell you this is the prop'ty"
It occurred to Luke that the owner was ,disappointed in the house.
He said eagerly, "Some folks thinks it ain't much of a house. Hit's got a good chimbley draws mighty good. The floors is good, all excusin' the porch, and the new roof don't leak a drop."
It came to him that the mention of the roof made it possible to unburden himself. He drew a deep breath.
He said, "I got to tell you. Me and Allie's been usin' your land."
Tordell said quickly, "Poaching?"
"We been livin' here. We been here seven yare, livin’ in the house. Nobody hadn't never come back to it, and we figgered nobody wouldn't pay us no mind. All I done cold-out wrong was cuttin' cypress, where the hammock runs into the swamp. I been cuttin' blocks and drawin' shingles. I done traded two- three wagonloads. The first shingles I draward I laid a new roof to the house. Me and Allie laid hit, and I figgered maybe the work would make up for tradin' 'tother shingles."
The mule stamped, impatient to be in the stall. Luke moved to his head. Tordell covered his face with his long hands.
Luke was puzzled. He said, "I be ready to do whatever you figger is right about the shingles."
The young Englishman said, "It's quite all right." He walked decisively toward the steps. "Fetch my bags," he said.
He walked with long strides. For all his angularity he moved with the rhythmic grace of a man who has walked much in open places. Luke stopped to watch him a moment, then unloaded the assortment of boxes and luggage. The newcomer plunged into the house. Luke swung a small trunk to one shoulder.
He took pride in carrying heavy loads into the house. He deposited them on the breezeway outside the door of the east bedroom. Allie had prepared the room for the visitor. The plain wooden bed was spread with her mother's best patchwork quilt. A burlap sack bound about with a strip of brown-and-white gingham made a rug on the bare pine floor by the side of the bed. A white crocheted mat was under the kerosene lamp on a small stand made of twisted hickory. A battered chest of drawers stood near the one window.
Tordell had passed through the house into the yard. He came onto the breezeway when Luke brought the last load of luggage.
Luke said, "Allie fixed the best room for you."
Tordell's face was white. He said gravely, "Thank you."
He turned his back, to dismiss the fellow. He sorted out two bags from the pile and opened them. Luke stood watching with interest.
The foreigner looked up. "Tea is possibly all I need," he said. Luke said, "We got no tea."
"Anything, then."
Luke went to the kitchen. Allie had cooked dinner and left it standing, ready to serve, on the warm hearth. Plates and tin knives and forks were laid out.
Luke decided to let Allie return when she was ready, without forcing her in her fright. He dished up the beans boiled with white bacon and seasoned heavily with pepper. He turned the corn bread out of the skillet onto a tin pie plate. He brought wild-orange preserves from the kitchen safe and poured coffee. He went hesitantly to the Englishman's door.
He said, "Dinner's on the table."
Tordell followed him to the kitchen. He asked, "Is this your only dining place?"
"This is the onliest."
Tordell sat down and helped himself to a little of the food. Luke poured coffee and seated himself opposite in his accustomed place. The stranger ate sparingly of the beans and corn bread, but helped himself a second time to the sour-orange preserves. Luke brightened.
He said, "My sister Allie put up them preserves."
Tordell ate stiffly and did not answer. He rose hurriedly from the table and returned to his bags and boxes. Luke was depressed. He opened the door but Allie was not in sight.
He went a short distance, looking for her. When he returned, the newcomer had left his unpacking. He had gone out of the house and into the sandy yard. He stood looking about him in the shade of the live oaks, boyish and bewildered.
Luke thought, "I'll bet he feels the way I'd of felt if I'd goed to Alabama."
He went to the shed and spent the afternoon repairing harness. Just before sunset he saw a fluttering among the low palmettos. Allie broke from the cover and ran toward him. Her soft hair was tangled and she was trembling. He put his arm around her.
"Honey," he said, "what’ll strangers think o' you? You got to git over bein' so rabbity."
She nodded.
"You come meet the gentleman now."
Tordell walked slowly toward the house from the road. He passed close, ignoring the brother and sister. It seemed to Luke that the stranger's dark eyes held the same panic as Allie's, as though the coming night had forced him, too, homeward from a protecting cover. He moved blindly into the house. Luke and Allie found him sitting by the kitchen hearth. They stood hand in hand in the doorway, watching him, then retreated into Allie's bedroom and sat on her bed, whispering.
Allie said, "Reckon we'd orter git him cold rations?"
"He don't act hongry. You move a dog, now, he don't. want nothin'to eat the first day or two."
They fell silent, breathing hard. The foreigner was silent in the kitchen. It would be easy to imagine that he had never come. Yet the house was black with more than the night's darkness.
Tordell looked about him vaguely. A pile of fat pine-wood lay near by. He threw a few sticks on the fire. The oily wood smoked a moment, then burst into a blaze. He moved closer. It was inconceivable that nothing better was waiting for him than this decrepit shack in an appalling jungle. The only justice in his exile had been the choice he had been given-the abandoned Florida estate of a long-dead uncle, or Australia.
He had seen Australia as fiat and dun and treeless. Florida would of course be tropical-the Spanish land of flowers, of oranges like gold coins, the golden apples of mythology. The property would be a gentleman's estate. He would live, with Negroes to serve him, in a cross between India, as his brothers had described it, and the forest regions of rural England.
His youth had betrayed him with its imaginings. The hammock into which he had briefiy penetrated was lush and fertile. It was also black and sunless and tangled, like a tropic nightmare; savage and unbeautiful. He had thought that he was prepared for anything. Now he understood that some farthest consciousness within the human mind is perpetually unprepared for the harsh, the unfamiliar and the unbeautiful, and is freshly wounded at each encounter.
He recalled the ten miles of marsh and forest he had traversed with the native Brinley to reach this place. But Purley was beyond. He rose and crossed the breezeway. White-faced in the twilight, the brother and sister looked up at him from the bed.
He said, "Please. Purley town of Purley. Is it a town of some size? Are there plantations near it? Manor farms?"
Luke rose and faced him. "Purley ain't no more'n a post office and a place the train stops. They's around thirty houses. Ain't no farms, no more'n folks' cornfields and cane patches and pasture."
The Englishman hesitated. "Does no one have Negro servants?"
"Not around Purly. Folks does for theirselves."
Luke thought, "I got to speak out to him."
He braced himself. He said, "I ain't aimin' to be meddlesome. I done a'ready what I had no right to do, livin' here and cuttin' cypress. But if you fixin' to be here a whiles, mought be you'll want somebody to do for you-me to work the place and Allie to cook and clean and sich as that. You a stranger and all."
Tordell did not speak. Luke wanted to be honest. He had spoken as though their staying would be a favor to the newcomer.
He said, "Me and Allie has got no place to go."
There swept across the Englishman a picture of the gray shack with no one in it; no voice but his own; no hearth fire except one of his own lonely kindling.
He said precipitouly, "Please stay. We'll arrange something." Luke drew a long breath. He asked, "How long you figgerin' to stay?"
Tordell faced Luke like an animal at bay. He said, "All the rest of my days."
Luke gaped at him in dismay. Tordell quieted himself. His lips trembled, and he tightened them over his teeth.
He said, "It happens, I have no choice."
He turned abruptly across the breezeway and into his room. They listened. After a time his bed creaked, and then there was no further sound.
Luke gathered a pile of quilts from the box under Allie's bed and took them to the kitchen to make himself a pallet. She followed to help him.
"Luke," she whispered, "what mus' I call the gentleman, do I see him in the mornin'?"
"I never did rightly understand his name. He ain't nothin' scarcely more'n a young feller, but he's someway right biggety. I reckon it'd pleasure him did you call him 'Cap'n.'''
"Cap’n," she repeated, and went to her bed.
Luke awakened at daylight with a start, conscious of an appalling strangeness in the house. He threw aside his coverings and tiptoed down the breezeway to awaken Allie. The foreigner's door was ajar. Luke saw him lying with one arm across his eyes, as though he had fallen so asleep in his despair.
Luke led Tordell toward the marsh. Allie followed. Tordell was struggling to look at his land without despair. His" hope, he recognized, lay in seeing in it the possibilities the young cracker saw. Luke had talked of oranges. Florida had long, for England and the Continent, signified the glamorous fruit, yet Tordell did not see how any fruit could flourish among the dark shadows of the hammock.
Luke had spoken of the long expanse of marsh where the hammock ended at the lake edge, and Tordell had asked at once if rice might not be profitable. His semiannual remittance was exactly calculated, he thought, not to make a young man's fortune, but to hold him forever on the spot to which he had consigned himself.
He knew nothing of subtropical crops. He knew only the oats and barley of his father's Hampshire farms, neat green and golden crops in tidy stacks on immaculate fields.
Luke took a trail through small cypresses and buttonwood that came out abruptly on the marsh. The appearance of the humans startled a flock of white egrets into a lunging upward flight. Their yellow legs hung limply. As the birds gained speed and balance, they folded their legs under them. The snowy wings flapped, and the egrets were no longer of the earth. They circled leisurely, settling in a white cloud in the tallest cypress. Allie watched them with wide eyes.
Luke asked, "Ain't them purty, Cap'n?"
He was eager to show the stranger everything that he found good. Tordell inclined his head absently. His eyes were fixed on the broad sweep of marsh and the lake beyond it. The lake was a deep blue under the March wind, and the marsh was golden. He stared across as though, if he might see far enough, some bright hope would appear like a shining tower on the horizon. There was no tower. Only a distant line of hammock bordered the lake, low-lying like a cloud.
Tordell turned to Luke. His dark eyes were hazy. Beside the big sun-tanned sturdy cracker he looked to Allie very young and white-skinned and helpless.
He said, "It's very difficult to know what to do."
The personal equipment of the newcomer was lavish. Luke had conceived of him as stupendously rich. The ownership of the hammock alone gave him importance. He was disturbed at the young man's concern over some means of income, yet it brought him closer to Tordell. "
He said, "You figger out what-all you want to do, and me and you had orter be men enough between us to clare the land."
He was immediately sorry that he had spoken. Tordell grew rigid and walked stiffly back to the house.
Luke said to his sister, " 'Tain't that he don't want us on the place. He done tol' us to stay. What you figger ails him?"
Allie said Simply, "He fig gel's we-uns ain't as good as him."
They walked side by side, moving flatfooted, with a rhythmic grace, making no sound in the forest. Luke pondered.
"Well," he said finally, "in a way o' speakin', we ain't." He flexed the muscles of his arms and back. "You jest give him a ax and me a ax, Miss Allie, and you'll see who's the turkey on the highest limb."
"You jest as biggety as he be," she said. "Ain't a mite o' difference between you."
"I'm a heap more accommodatin' than him," he said earnestly, and Allie laughed, and Luke at last with her.
Luke said, "You got to be accommodatin' when hit's 'tother feller owns the land."
The comment sobered them, and they walked home in silence. Luke glanced sideways at his sister. The thought came to him that it was necessary to be accommodating only on her account. Without her, he might set out for some place where a man could earn wages and save his money and buy his own acreage. For an instant the longing to be gone stirred him. He looked about him. They had reached an opening in the hammock where high winds had felled old trees. The sunlight streamed in richly, and the tangle of brierberry bushes was a mass of white bloom.
Luke rested his hand on a tree limb, and something stirred under it. A king snake was shedding its skin in the good warmth of the March sun. Luke started instinctively; then, seeing the nature of the reptile, broke a twig and scratched the paper-thin film away from the smooth black-and-gold back. The king snake stirred appreciatively.
Allie said in distaste, "How kin you tech them things?"
"Ain't a mite o' harm to 'em, honey- girl."
Suddenly he was filled with a sense of having lived here in the hammock always. Standing in the patch of sunlight, in the rich mixture of growth and decay, scratching the shedding skin from a king snake's back, with Allie, soft-voiced and fragile and protesting, beside him, was something familiar that he had done before and would do again. Something in him and in the hammock had no beginning and no end, but had existed side by side forever. He could "not leave it. It was dear to him as Allie was dear. He pitied the foreigner, who could not see its beauty.
They had reached the house. Tordell stood aimlessly on the front stoop.
Luke said belligerently, "Cap’n, you never did look good at them old wild orange trees. You come look again."
Growth was a natural thing here, and anything, to grow, needed no more than a clearing away of the great shadowy live oaks and magmolias. A little freedom and a little sun, and the dark moldy soil of the hammock would do the rest.
"If wild oranges grows this-a-way," he said, "the tame uns had orter grow like a gourd vine."
He was on fire. His pent-up hopes burned in him. Tordell looked at him curiously and followed, a little infected. across the dim road to the higher area of hammock interspersed with hundreds of wild orange trees, ragged and straggling. The area was more open. Palm trees grew thickly, opening wells of sunlight. Scarlet trumpet vines and yellow jasmine grew riotously up the tall trunks. Luke led Tordell into the interior.
Wild orange trees grew in all available spaces. They were high and spindling. The leaves were a little yellowed, so that the ripe fruit hung inconspicuously. The trunks were gray with lichens. The upper limbs were burdened with long swaying strands of gray Spanish moss, so that the trees were patriarchal, like tall thin old men, bearded and resistant.
The fruit was rough and coarse in texture. It was deeply indented at the stem end, with wartlike knobs over the surface. It riped unevenly. Long vicious thorns grew every few inches along trunk and limbs. None of the oranges grew within easy reach. Luke jumped and caught the end of a bough, bending it to his hand. He pulled an orange and cut it in half with his pocketknife.
He sunk his teeth into his half. Tordell copied the gesture with the portion Luke handed him. He was not prepared for the mingled acidity and bitterness of the wild fruit. He flung the orange away.
He said angrily, "Why did you hand me that abominable thing to taste?"
Luke himself found the fruit palatable, but he was not surprised that Tordell had not enjoyed it. He was astonished at the man's resentment.
He said uncomfortably, "I didn't go to displeasure you o' purpose." He added, "Heap o' folkses cain't hardly wait for wild oranges to sweeten up a mite. They fine for the blood in the early spring."
Tordell was picking his way in distaste among the vines and creepers.
Luke said, "They's a way o' cuttin' down these here wild trees and gittin' sweet uns to grow instid. They's some rich fellers acrost the lake has got acres and acres growed jest that way."
"Do you understand the process?"
"I got no idee jest what 'tis they does. Must be a way you kin find out."
Tordell walked around one of the larger trees. A mass of vegetation grew about its base, dropping its own dead leaves, growth mingling with decay. Young palmettos, thorny vines, cow-itch, made a thick mass, waist-high. He kicked it carelessly with his foot and the rank accumulation swarmed into life. Cockroaches, small gray lizards, a wood rat and an oak snake darted out, the intrusion upsetting their world.
Tordell stepped back in alarm. A spray of moss swung against him and wrapped itself about his throat and shoulders.
Luke pulled it away from him.
Tordell said, "What a rotten crawling place!"
Luke pressed his advantage. He said obstinately, "Leave me begin clarin' it, then. Clared hammock and clared grove is neat and purity."
"Neat! I've seen nothing neat since I left England. I don't know what I expected, Brinley. But somehow, God help me, I expected tidiness."
"You kin git it tidy if you o' mind to."
"Do as you please. Anything."
The young cracker stood tall and square, his legs apart like twin tree trunks, his big-knotted arms like strong limbs. The Englishman felt an instinct for apology, as though he had gashed a fine tree for no reason.
He said hesitantly, "I'm sorry, Brinley. I see you have plans. They seem hopeless to me. You couldn't understand, but I-I have no heart for them."
He turned and walked back to the house, his thin young back unhappy, a little bent. Luke watched him despondently. Then he pushed his way among the orange trees, studying the terrain.
His spirits lifted. The live oaks and sweet gums and hickories could come down first. Here and there, he decided, he would leave a fine magnolia tree. The large waxed leaves, the great white blossoms, would stand proud and handsome among the delicate citrus trees. He would leave standing all the palms. Allie would approve his leaving of the palms and magnolias.
A horse and wagon came lumbering down the dim road from Purley way. Luke Brinley paused between ax strokes to listen. The rattling ceased, as though the wagon had halted outside the yard. Luke left the wild grove and walked to the roadway. Allie had heard the unaccustomed sound and had left her kitchen. The wagon standing under the live oaks held the Widow Raynes and several of her offspring, including a flat-faced girl of Allie's age, Bess.
The woman waved to the brother and sister, converging on the wagon. She called, "I hear tell you got a new somebody livin' here. We comin' neighborin'."
Allie looked across at Luke in a panic. She said, "He'll maybe not keer to visit."
The Widow Raynes was a personage. Tordell could not be permitted to evade her.
Luke said, "He jest about got to come out. I'll call him."
He went across the yard and walked down the breezeway of the house. The door of Tordell's room was closed. Luke knocked. Tordell opened it, his face morose. He held a bottle of spirits and a small fancy glass.
Luke said, "They's a lady come neighborin' to see you."
Tordell frowned. "I don't wish to see anyone."
"Hit's Mis' Raynes. She's the most nighest neighbor. She's a mighty fine woman."
Tordell set down the bottle and glass and followed Luke to the front of the house. Allie and the boys of the Raynes group were leading the horse to the shed. The widow and her girls were overflowing the porch. The big woman boomed her greetings to the stranger.
"I ain't yit got a good holt o' your name, but you be our neighbor and that's enough. Neighbor, proud to meet you."
He inclined his head without speaking and stood waiting. She was disconcerted but his youth was reassuring. She laid a maternal hand on his arm and drew him into the front room of the house.
Luke said, "I'll start a fire," and went away for fatwood.
The woman settled her bulk in a cowhide rocker and gave her attention to Tordell, standing by the fireplace. "You mighty young-lookin' to come from a fur country."
He knew and understood the type of maternal farm-woman, he told himself. He smiled a little. "I am twenty-three."
" 'Bout Luke's age. I reckon you've done had a different kind o' raisin' from him. Luke's been scratchin' gravel since he were a leetle boy. You and him'll git on all right. Ary mortal could git on with Luke and Allie."
Allie and the boys entered the room furtively. Luke came in with an armful of lighter'd knots and knelt to kindle a fire. The room seemed to Tordell to swarm, as the underbrush in the wild grove had swarmed. He moved out of Luke's way. He thought, "There's no reason to subject myself to this."
He said with a frigid courtesy, "Thank you so much for calling," and hurried from the room.
The room was a vacuum, as though the air had been sucked from it. The big woman said loudly, "He's a furriner, a'right."
The word set him apart. Luke and Allie exchanged glances. They were disturbed that the newcomer had alienated the widow so speedily.
The dinner hour was near.
Allie said, "You 'scuse me, Mis' Raynes. I'll go finish dinner."
The woman said, "We done et before we come, Sugar. I've did some mean things in my day, but I ain't never takened this many young uns nary other place to eat dinner, lessen the folks knowed a hull herd of us was comin'." She heaved her bulk from the rocker. "You go finish and I'll stir you up a lard cake."
Luke and the boys sat by the fire with the immobility of all males waiting for women to prepare their meals. The girls followed Allie and their mother to the kitchen. When the dinner was served, Luke and the boys washed at the water shelf and came to the kitchen.
The Raynes children sat about, watching with interest. When it became apparent that Allie had fried a large platter of bacon and had baked a large corn pone, they slipped to the table and accepted doles handed out by their mother. Allie's tacit preparation of uncalled-for food pleased the older woman.
She said, "Allie, you gittin' right peert."
The girl was dishing food onto a large white plate. She started out of the room bearing it, along with a pitcher of milk.
The woman said sharply, "He too good to eat with you?"
Allie flushed. She said, "He don't eat hardly nothin'."
Luke said, "He ain't so biggety as he 'pears to be. They's somethin' about him, times, right humble."
The widow said acridly, "Ain't nobody so humble they's scairt to eat with folks."
The girl disappeared down the breezeway. The woman lifted her knife and tapped Luke on the forearm with it. She said in a low voice, "Don't let him git to Allie."
Luke pushed his plate away. Anger at the woman filled him. He roared, "Ain't I takened keer' o' Allie? What call you got to talk that-a-way?"
She said placidly, "You see, you ain't never even studied on it." She continued, "You been father and mother to her, boy. If I seed a rattlesnake in your path, wouldn't you want I should speak?"
The conception of the unhappy young man as a rattlesnake suddenly amused Luke. He guffawed. He said impudently, "I knowed you'd have it in for him if he didn't do to suit you. He ain't even looked good at Allie."
She said, rankled, "You laugh. You cain't never tell what no furriner'll do."
Allie returned to the kitchen. She looked questioningly about, expecting information of Luke's noisy anger. None was given her. She sat down and ate sparingly. The Raynes brood departed in mid-afternoon to spread word of the stranger's aloofness.
The sun set, and the late winter chill spread into the decrepit house. There were still embers on the hearth in the front room, and Luke brought in oak logs and blew the fire there to life.
A step sounded on the breezeway. The brother and sister looked up. Tordell was at the door. He looked longingly at the hearth fire.
He said hesitantly, "You are alone?"
Luke understood that if he was invited he would join them by the fire. The memory of the Widow Raynes' words struck him with the sharp pain of a poison.
He said bluntly, "Me and Allie figgers on bein' alone."
Tordell hesitated an instant, then returned to his room.
Luke whispered to Allie of the day's accomplishment. He had the owner's promise that he might clear the hammock across the road. Something would be done about the wild grove.
The fire burned into coals, and the coals became ashes. Allie went to her room, and Luke went to his pallet on the kitchen floor.
He awakened in the middle of the night. The ashes were cold, and he had tossed from underneath his covers. He was uncomfortable. Gradually he became aware that his distress was of more than his stiff uncovered body. The stranger had come to him for comfort, and in his jealousy of Allie he had turned him away, pitiful and lonely, like a dog.
Tordell sat listlessly in the shade of a low palmetto. He was conscious of stupor; of a fever that was mounting to take a slow possession of his blood. He attributed his discomfort to the fierce heat of the tropical June day.
The sound of Luke Brinley's cane knife came closer, slashing into the underbrush. The knife was similar to a machete, and Luke had found it better than an ax for cutting away the lesser growth of the hammock. He cut his way through intervening brambles and stopped before Tordell.
He was panting in the heat. He said, "Whooey!" and dropped beside Tordell.
Tordell said, "You'd better stop for the day. It's so beastly hot."
"Hit's a good while to sundown. I'll go as fur as the roadway and then quit."
The wild orange trees around which he had roughly cleared stood ragged and unbeautiful in their isolation. The agitation of the soil had produced a second flowering, and the June bloom was a scattering of white against the leaves. A tree frog hummed stridently over their heads. The palm fronds crackled in the dry heat.
Luke said, "Hit'll likely rain by night."
At the beginning, in the month of March, Luke had brought with him into the hammock two axes, thinking the property owner would work beside him Tordell had made no move to join him, coming only occasionally to watch. Luke had not been resentful. The owner's withdrawal, he felt, was only because he thought the business hopeless.
Looking over the wild trees, he could himself see no
improvement over the riot of jungle. Tordell's indifference gave him the sense of swinging his cane knife in the darkness. Yet somehow, he knew, men cut down these wild groves and went about some mysterious process, and in due time sweet oranges grew in their stead and the fruit went away on the orange steamer to northern markets.
He looked sideways at the face near him. The dark eyes were brooding, fixed on a distant palm top. There came to young Brinley the vague sense of watching a man whose concern was with matters so remote from this hammock that it did not exist around him.
Luke thought, "He's likely thinkin' of his kin-folks."
Yet the man's nostalgia went beyond a casual homesickness, soon forgotten in the interests of a new land. He had gone away into a black region of his own, rejecting the hammock. To him it was unimportant, and Luke and Allie came and went for him like shadows.
Tordell rose and gave an unwilling look about him. "Any time you've had enough of this-it's all one to me," he said, and walked slowly to the house.
Luke could not understand how any man might turn his back on the hammock. Nothing was more important than growth. He could not see how a man could ask more of living than to choose his crops and to command them; to merge himself with the earth; to follow the seasons and let the sun and rain unite the sweat of his body with the soil he tended.
He returned to his work. The sun blazed fiercely. The air grew oppressive. The June afternoon was a hot bowl of silence, waiting to be filled with the cool stir of the impending rain.
The sky turned green under the gray clouds; then there was only grayness. The palm fronds rattled with an impalpable wind. The first drops came suddenly. The whole hammock was agitated. Luke saw the rain moving forward, a lateral downpour like a gray wall.
At one instant the earth where he stood was dry. At the next, the advancing rush had swept over him in a tidal wave and the hammock was in flood.
Luke threw out his arms and let the rain stream over his upturned face, across his broad chest. His cotton workpants were saturated. He unbuttoned them and stepped out of them. He pulled a ball of moss from a limb and scoured his tanned skin. Small particles of the moss clung to his body, and he stood until the rain had washed away the last of it. He held his pants around his waist and ran for the house. Allie was watching for him from the stoop.
She asked, "What you been up to?"
He stopped in the breezeway to shake himself like a dog. "I been takin' me a bath in ol' God's washtub," he said.
"Luke, you'll git struck with the lightnin', talkin' that-a-way," she reproved.
"Not me," he said complacently. He pulled open the chest drawers in her room for clean shirt and breeches. "God and me understands each other right good."
She stood gravely in the doorway.
"Git along now," he said. "I don't want no blue-eyed rabbit watchin' me when I'm plumb naked."
He made a gesture to release his protective coverings, and she scurried to the kitchen. He came out clean and dry.
"Where's Cap'n?"
"He came to the house a good whiles before the rain." Her tone was hesitant.
"He in the room?"
She nodded. "He acks like he's got the fever."
Luke knew that Tordell had shut himself up to drink. "I wisht Cap'n'd think to offer me a swaller o' that whisky now and again," he said.
The girl said maturely, "One man in the house doin' sich as that is aplenty."
Luke strolled to the front stoop. The tropical rain was passing north and west. A roll of thunder sounded, moving into the distance. As swiftly as it had come, the downpour was gone. The gray curtain of clouds lifted upwards. In the east a round mass of cloud bank took form, whiter than cotton. It filled slowly with an intense glow, as though it drew into itself, across the earth, the substance of the westerly sun.
Tordell came to the stoop. He gave no sign of his drinking, except that it seemed to Luke he swayed a little on his long legs, as the palms swayed. He stared at the dripping hammock across the roadway. The air was fresh and cool.
As though the rain water had distilled their essence to make a perfume, the wild orange blossoms sent out a swelling wave of fragrance. In spite of himself, Tordell breathed deeply. A faint smile touched the thin tight mouth.
He said, "The orange bloom?"
The blackness about him parted for an instant. He longed to know beauty in all its strangeness; to give himself to it. He fixed his eyes on the brick-redness of the sun-touched palm fronds. The rain was draining from them. Each point glistened with a raindrop, flashing like a diamond.
He thought, "Diamond earrings."
The palm heads were like shaggy-headed concubines. The hair was hennaed, and under it shone diamond earrings.
He said aloud,
"The palm heads. Slaves at the court of Sheba."
The words disturbed Luke. He understood that Tordell was talking to himself about something in the hammock.
Luke said, "Hit ain't the same place since the rain."
Tordell turned his dark eyes to Luke. He said, "Brinley, a eunuch might manage very nicely in the Florida hammock." He lifted one hand slightly toward the palm tops. "A eunuch at the court of Sheba." He laughed and mumbled, "So hot. Everything is so hot-so slow-so dark." He pulled his shirt away from his throat as though it suffocated him. Luke said, "You ain't shore enough got the fever, is you, Cap'n?"
Tordell said, "Listen!"
The sound was the drumming in his own ears. Luke strained to hear. There was nothing. Tordell left the stoop. He moved toward the hammock and disappeared among the shadows. Its darkness, usually revolting to him, drew him. The back of his head ached as though he had fallen on stones. The bruised pain spread down his spine. His thighs ached.
He pushed his way through a bramble thicket. He longed for cool shadows in which to lose himself. He thought of the dusk of English lanes, of the profound blackness of yew trees. Forests in Hampshire were as dark as this subtropical hammock. Yet there was about them an orderliness, a beneficence, so that one went to them for peace and comfort and came out of them into bright neat fields and meadows. This forest was a venomous tangle, evil and oppressive. It did not comfort. It smothered. And there was nothing beyond, neither beauty nor peace.
He put the thought of England desperately from him, as usual, with a mingled hate and longing. He would allow himself to think of nothing with tenderness, because in all love, inherent, was betrayal. The alcohol, the fever of his blood and of his thoughts, rose to take him. He felt drugged. The pain in his head was an acute throbbing.
He began to be uncertain of his footing. He tripped over roots and logs. He found himself at the edge of a small dark pool. He was vastly thirsty and bent down to drink from it. The effort to rise sickened him, and he crawled a little way on his hands and knees. A magnolia tree offered harbor. He stopped, swaying on all fours.
A magnolia petal lay like an alabaster cup before him. He groped for it. It seemed to recede from him. He panted, stretching out his hand. The drumming in his ears became a roar. He dropped face down on the magnolia leaves. The hammock closed in on him. He sank into the fever as though he drowned in dark whirling waters.
Luke waited until sunset for Tordell to return. Allie was certain that the foreigner was coming down with chills and fever. She made up freshly the disheveled bed. Luke set out to trail him.
The tracks of the fine shoes left the sand yard and struck into the hammock to the east and south. Luke's heart pounded at sight of the sprawled figure under the magnolia.
Luke bent to rouse him. Tordell collapsed as he lifted him. He was dead weight, and Luke half dragged, half carried him.
Tordell's long body was solid bone. The last hundred yards of movement seemed to Luke without end. He stumbled into the yard. He called Allie for help in dragging Tordell to his bed.
She asked, "Where-all was he at?"
"Off in the hammock. The fever takened him."
He went to the well for fresh cold water, and Allie dipped cloths in it to lay across Tordell's forehead. His skin was fiery to the touch. When Luke was asleep, she slipped into Tordell's room to fan him and brush away the mosquitoes. He cried out all through the night in his delirium.
Doctor Albury said, "Come, come, boy. We only want to help you."
Allie untied her clean apron and brushed away the powdered medicine strewn down the physician's trousers; the glass of water lay shattered on the bedroom floor, where Tordell had knocked it from his hand. The physician mopped his red bald head. The sick man lay panting from his struggle. His eyes were open, glazed with fever.
The girl dipped a towel in a pail of cold water which Luke held, wrung it out and laid it lightly across Tordell’s forehead.
Doctor Albury said, "Let him rest a few moments. He may sleep. We'll try again in a little while."
He walked from the room, balancing his round pudgy body on its short legs in order to move quietly. He motioned to the brother and sister to come with him. In the breezeway he laid a hand on Luke's arm and looked up into his face.
He said, "Son, I want to talk to you."
Two days before, a knock had sounded at daylight at the doctor's door at his home in Sawgrass Landing. He had answered in person. He had been startled at the massive bulk of the young cracker in the dim light of the first dawn.
He had asked, "What's the trouble?"
Luke had answered, "They's a furriner in the hammock acrost the lake, this side o' Purley, like to die o' the fever."
"How did you come?"
"I rowed the lake since midnight. I couldn't ketch my mule."
"If you'll go to the barn and hitch my horse to the light trap, I'll dress. That will save time."
Albury had answered occasional calls from Purly. Luke gave him directions for finding the house in the hammock, and the doctor had reached the place before midmorning. By the time Luke had tied his rowboat to a cypress and made his way through the hammock, Albury was at work in his shirt sleeves, with Allie waiting on him.
The physician had slept little in the forty-eight hours since his arrival. During the day he lay now and then on the immaculate quilt of Allie's bed and dozed. He roused every three hours to give quinine and cooling treatments.
Doctor Albury was a little egg-shaped man. His round paunch rose smoothly to his short neck. His bald head completed the ovule. A fringe of soft sandy hair curled a little in the nape of his neck. He was a perpetual rosy color, deepening under heat or exertion or excitement to a fiery red. His visible skin, full cheeks, double chin, neck and pate, shone as if polished with pumice.
He was a widower of long standing, with a grown son, Claudius, who ran wild and was the delight of his soul.
His two days and nights of struggle with the delirious young Englishman had finally wearied him. Tordell had shown signs of returning consciousness and at such times had fought violently. He would swallow no medicine, no water. Albury's shoulders drooped. He eased his chubby body now to the front stoop and motioned Luke to sit beside him.
He said, "Tell me everything you know about the English lad in yonder."
Luke's shaggy eyebrows drew together. He said, "Doc, I don't know nary thing."
"How long has he been here?"
"Since February, iffen I don't disremember."
"This is his own property? Of course. I remember the name of Tordell years ago. The man was here only long enough to build the house and get out. Low hammock isn't healthy, young fellow."
"That's what folkses say. Me and Allie has got along right good."
"Does he have any friends who come to see him?"
"Seems like he ain't acquainted with ary livin' soul but Allie and me. Him and Mis' Raynes don't git along."
"Has he seemed particularly lonely?"
"Doc, I couldn't rightly say. He'll shut hisself up so, git off by hisself, until you wouldn't know did he crave comp'ny or didn't he." He added hesitantly, "Kind o' drinkin' along, like."
"Ah, I see." The physician sensed the young cracker's reluctance to talk of the sick Englishman. He said, "You understand, son, I'm not prying. I'm trying to get at something. When that chap comes a little to his senses, he seems to be fighting everything and everybody."
Luke hunched toward him eagerly. "Doc, you said it. I had me a wildcat in a coop, oncet, acted that very way. He scraped half the hair offen his own hide, knockin' hisself around in the coop, Seemed like he knowed he was ketched and wouldn't admit it nor try to git used to it. Whenever he'd quiet down a mite, he'd jest set and sull."
Albury said, "He's been unhappy from the beginning, then?"
"Yes, sir."
"Taken no interest at all in fixing up his place?"
Luke jumped from the stoop into the yard. He paced up and down, his bare feet scuffling the loose sand. He said excitedly, "Doc, wouldn't you figger now, him with money comin' in, he'd aim to clare the hammock? Ain't no better land in the county than right here." He stamped his foot against the earth.
Albury said dubiously, "It's pretty low. What will it grow?"
"Hit 'll make nigh ary crop you're o' mind to make. But ever since I been knowin' this piece o' hammock, I've said to myself, 'Oh, my God, this'd make the noblest orange grove in the state o' Floridy.' And I'll be dogged if I kin git him to even set and watch me whilst I clare the ground."
Albury nodded gravely. He looked at his watch and rose from the stoop. Allie followed the two men into the room. Albury prepared a capsule and poured a small glass of water from the gourd dipper in the pail.
He said to Allie, "I'll lift his head and perhaps he'll let you give it to him."
He lifted the pillow with the face lean and white under the dark hair. Tordell's eyes fluttered open.
Allie said, "This here is good for you, Cap'n."
He showed no signs of recognition, yet when she put the edge of the glass against the tight lips he relaxed them and allowed her to slip the capsule into his mouth. He swallowed most of the water and closed his eyes, Albury lowered the pillow slowly. He laid the back of his hand against Tordell's cheek. It was burning to his touch.
Allie asked, "Is it bad?"
Albury said, "Oh, yes. But this sort of fever is always at its highest in mid-afternoon. It ought to be breaking soon. Don't disturb him now. I'll take a little nap myself."
He went to Allie's bed and was snoring in an instant.
She said hopefully to Luke, as though he had only now arrived, "Doc's lookin' for the fever to break."
"I heered him."
They went together to the stoop. Allie wrapped her full skirt about her feet against the sand gnats. There were dark rings under her eyes. Her pointed face was almost as white as Tordell's. Her blue eyes were as large as an owl's.
Luke said, "Honey girl, I heered you up all times o' the night, goin' in to fan him and sich. We got to take good keer of him, but I cain’t have you gittin' down sick, too."
She said, "Don't you fret about me none now."
She leaned her head against the post. Luke stretched out on his back and folded his arms across his eyes. It seemed strange and luxurious to be lying idle at this time of day.
The surge of fever-ridden blood in Tordell's body was a sea he rode in torment. He lay flat on a raft and his torso and the raft were one and indissoluble. The waters under him were dark. He felt a swell lift beneath him, long and rolling. He swung helplessly with It, his heart beating with its beat. It rose steadily. It reached its crest.
He was suspended high above the water, He thought the wave he rode would break. A great darkness rose to meet him. Seas mightier than the earth towered over him. They crashed over him with a vast roaring, and the waters that engulfed him were hot and black, The raft plunged down and again downward, and at the bottom of the world he lay quivering.
Each time he lay so, until he should rise irresistibly with the next swell, he was conscious of faces a long way off, He tried to call out to them but his cries were muffled by the roaring of the seas, and he saw that they only stirred with a confused agitation. Then he hated them. One face came closer than the others, It was small, and he hated it less than the other two.
Doctor Albury said, "Good girl, Allie,"
A lamp burned on the chest in the corner. The night was hot and heavy.
Luke crouched outside by a smudge pot, feeding it with twigs and leaves, The physician had said they must all have mosquito bars over their beds, He had sent away for three, and they would arrive now any day. He had a set of springs he would give Luke, and Luke meant to make himself a good pine bedstead to replace the pallet on the floor where he had slept since Tordell's arrival. He left his smudge and went into the sickroom.
The June frogs were singing in all the pools and ditches. The sound was a prolonged high bleat. Luke could never tell whether it was made by one frog or by many. He stood in the doorway, waiting for a sign from the doctor to come or go.
As he waited uncertainly, sweat appeared on the white forehead of the sick man. Albury brought the lamp from the chest in the corner and held it high over the bed. In its light, Tordell's white skin turned golden. His breathing altered, Where it had been short and explosive, it became long and even.
Allie turned down the sheet, and Al- bury touched Tordell's body. It was dripping. His night clothes were soaked, and the sheet under him.
"He's reacting," Albury said tremulously. "The fever's broken."
Tordell's eyes opened. He looked intelligently from one to another of the three people in the room. He lay some minutes, quiet and cool and exhausted, His eyes turned to Albury. His expression was suddenly startled.
He whispered, "The lambs!"
The three agitated faces stared at him.
He whispered again, impatiently, "The lambs are bleating. Up on the downs."
His consciousness, his sanity, were at variance with his words. Albury's forehead puckered anxiously.
Tordell whimpered fretfully, "You're not listening to the lambs."
Albury said, "Hush!"
The frogs' cacophony rang through the hammock, The adjacent marsh was vibrant with it. Albury recognized the sound, Colonel Melrose kept sheep on his plantation. The June frogs' bleating was indeed identical with the bleat of lambs.
Albury said, "You hear the frogs, boy." He said to Luke, "The frogs sound to him like the lambs in the country he came from."
The brother and sister stood close together, pitying the foreigner's nostalgia. Tordell's eyes roved about the bare room, focused on the kerosene light, then on the open window that framed the night. An expression of pain appeared.
He said, "Florida!" He turned his head and buried it in the pillow.
The physician subsided unhappily in his rocker by the bedside. Luke and Allie slipped away. Tordell slept.
In the morning he asked for tea. He accepted ungraciously through the day the medicines Albury administered and the milk Allie brought him. At noon Albury gave Allie several directions, so that his way of speech struck on Tordell's ears as that of a gentleman. The doctor noticed that the dark eyes looked at him curiously a moment, then closed defensively.
In the afternoon the fever returned, but lightly. A shower of rain pattered across the hammock toward sundown and cooled the air. Tordell roused, plainly refreshed, and drank eagerly a tumblerful of milk and eggs and rum Albury concocted. He slept again. Albury sent Luke and Allie to bed and sat rocking beside Tordell, his fingers interlaced across his paunch.
The house was still. Doctor Albury looked at his watch. The time was midnight. He replaced his watch and his chair creaked. The man in the bed stirred and a wakened. Albury nodded in greeting.
Tordell asked hesitantly, "Doctor-?"
"Doctor Albury."
Tordell said, "I wonder if I might have just a spot of whisky."
The physician rose and went to the Englishman's bottles. He poured a few spoonfuls into a whisky glass and handed it to him. He said, "Brandy. A little less harsh."
"Thanks." Tordell sipped slowly. "I'm afraid I've been rather beastly, doctor."
"You've been a very bad patient."
"Sorry."
He drained the brandy but kept his fingers curled around the glass, nursing it. Albury drew his rocker close to the bed abruptly.
"What's wrong, young man?"
Tordell tipped the glass for a nonexistent drop. He said coldly, "Everything's quite all right."
He was very weak. The glass slipped from his fingers and crashed on the floor. Suddenly he was sobbing.
Albury bolted from his rocker and paced up and down the room, looking away.
The young man cried out, "Oh, God, this rotten, crawling, miserable place!" Albury continued to pace. He spoke from near the doorway. "Why do you stay?"
"I have no choice."
Albury pondered. He struck reluctantly and deliberately. He said, "That's where the American character has the advantage over you Old Word-decadents. An able-bodied young man in this country never admits that he has no control over his destiny."
"You wouldn't understand. I couldn't possibly explain!" Tordell cried. "But to swim up from the hot black nightmare I've just been through and find the reality as great a nightmare. Heat- blackness-all over again."
"In that case"-Albury hesitated, calculating the possible effect of his words -"in that case, I'm sorry I brought you through your illness. It would have been kinder, no doubt, to let your life slip away without pain in your fever."
Tordell struggled to raise himself. He was panting. "And play into their hands? Nothing would please them more than to know I was dead, and no more trouble to them. I'll be damned if I'll accommodate them!"
He fell back on his pillow. Albury continued, as though he probed with a sharp instrument.
"So they packed you off for misbehavior. We've had lots of you young rascals sent off to us to raise sugar cane and oranges and hell. What did you do?"
"Nothing!" The word passed from Tordell with pain and relief. "Nothing?" The sandy eyebrows lifted innocently. "Young men are seldom sent away from England for nothing."
"For nothing, I tell you."
"I don't mean to doubt your word."
"You wouldn't doubt it if you knew. You don't know the torture of not being believed."
Albury said quietly, "I'll believe anything you tell me."
Tordell drew a long breath. He said, "My own father was cruelest about it."
Albury nodded. He said, "That must have been very painful."
Tordell faltered. An obscure necessity for loyalty to his own people halted him. He said, "I can't speak of these things."
Albury said, "Don't tell me, if there's someone you feel you should protect."
The words came in a rush, with a hard distinctness. "There's no one left to protect. No one who'd lift a finger for me. There's nothing to hide. The trouble was Ellen-my father's wife. I'd been in two or three scrapes with girls. No worse than anyone else, only the family had begun to row about it.
"Ellen was thirty-ish when Dad married her. He was-oh, fifty-five then. Sixty or so now. I never really liked her. Always sly. Somehow not quite right. I put up with her-we all did-because the old gentleman was simply mad about her. And jealous-Lord! Never took her anywhere much because the younger men made a fuss over her. I give you my word I never even thought of her that way."
The dark eyes closed a moment, then opened. "The old gentleman and I were great chums. Shot together, and all that. I have two brothers older, but I always thought he meant to make a place for me at the Hampshire estate, because we both loved it." Tordell laid an arm across his eyes, shutting something away.
"It was all hideous-like a vicious picture. Ellen had been saying odd things to me, but I never dreamed what was back of them. You wouldn't, you know- your father's wife. Ellen simply bowled me over. I was passing her door, shortly before teatime. She opened it and asked me to step inside a moment. I could see she was disturbed. When I was inside she threw her arms around my neck and burst out crying. She was wretched; she was married to a man too old for her. She couldn't stick it. She was frightfully fond of me, and couldn't I-oh, Lord!"
Albury sighed. "And you took her?"
The sick man rolled his head in torment. "I didn't touch her. I was furious. I lost my head. I called her a rotten name. I pushed her away. I told her the family honor was of concern to me, even if she had none. I bolted out of the room, and of course one of the maids was passing down the hall.
"I can't forget the afternoon when everything went to pieces. It was in the library. The fire in the grate was so cozy. Nothing dreadful had ever happened in that room. It was like Ellen-I wasn't prepared.
"They sent for me. The maid who'd seen me barge out of Ellen's room was twisting her apron by the table. Ellen was standing beside Dad in front of the fire. He looked puzzled and was rocking on his toes.
"He said, perfectly friendly, you know, 'Richard, Ellen tells me something very serious has happened.' My blood ran cold. Ellen stood as stiff as anything.
"She said to Dad, 'Walter, this will be a great blow to you, but I don't think either you or I will fancy having Richard about after what's happened.'
"I thought, 'The fool is going to give herself away.'
"She said, 'I'm sorry to tell you, but yesterday just at teatime he forced himself into my room and made advances to me.' I couldn't believe the thing I'd heard. She said, 'Elsie, tell the squire what you saw.'
"Elsie twisted her apron. She said, 'I saw Master Richard dash out of the missus' room all confused-like, and his face brick-red.'
"It was like a snare drawn around me. I suppose Ellen was afraid-the maid, and all that. Afraid I'd do her in. I shouldn't have. I suppose she hated me, knowing how I must despise her. She said to Dad, 'I'm so frightfully sorry, but it's not safe to keep him here.'
"I suppose I made a mistake in speaking as I did. It seemed to me my father must stand with me against such persons as servants and that woman. I walked over to my father, and I said, 'Do you believe that lying woman?' and he knocked me down.
"I was lying between the table and the hearth when I came to, and the room was dark, all but a few coals in the fire. And everything I'd ever counted on, everything good and secure, had gone all to pot as if there'd been an earthquake." Albury said, "I'm so sorry, boy. Everything is confused for you because you're young. I can't do much to help. It's the injustice that's destroying you. It's important to be just to other people. It takes years and years of living to learn that injustice against oneself is always unimportant."
Doctor Albury was saying, "At any rate, you agree with your good man Luke, and with me, that you're likely to be ahead by clearing part of your hammock and developing the wild orange grove." "I shouldn't dream of interfering with the fellow's passion for cutting down trees."
"Then I'll take him back with me and put him under the best orange grower in the country, Mrs. Van Dyne, to learn how it's done."
Luke shuffled his feet in the breezeway. He had tried to close his ears against the talk from the bedroom. Yet the sound of his own name spoken made him impatient to join them.
Albury called, "All right, Luke," and he went into the room eagerly. Albury said, "Mr. Tordell has decided to go ahead with the orange grove."
It seemed to Luke that all his life he had been walking, head down, against a stiff wind, Now the wind had ceased. He was free to walk forward, unobstructed. Where he had been voluble, he now had nothing to say.
The physician continued, "Mr. Tordell will be a very weak young man, physically, for some weeks. If I'm not mistaken, this is the proper period - for budding the sour citrus stock, or grafting, whatever it is they do. If it's agreeable to you, Luke, I'll take you home with me today and put you on my neighbor's grove for two or three weeks, just to get you started."
Luke's heart pounded. He was sorry he had sent Allie down the road. He wanted to hurry to her, to tell her that he was free, at last, to wrestle lovingly with the hammock. A swift fright struck at him, harrying his joy. He could not go away and leave Allie. He could not speak of this to the alien. It came to him that he must talk with the doctor alone.
He said falteringly, "I'll study on it a whiles and leave you know."
He bolted from the room. Tordell and Albury looked at each other, astonished.
Albury was disturbed. He had counted on young Brinley's eagerness to bring the Englishman to some interest in his property.
He walked out of the room in search of Luke. He found him in the mule-shed.
Albury asked directly, "Why do you hesitate about going to study grove work? I thought you wanted it very much."
Luke said, "Doc, I want it more’n I want the rations I set down to. But I jest as lief say it-I cain’t go traipsin' away, leavin' Allie here. Alone in the house with a man-furriner."
Albury said, "Very well. I'll send a man from Sawgrass to start the work." Luke glared. "I'll not leave no other man set foot in this hammock!" Albury shrugged and turned away. Luke followed. He spoke cajolingly.
"Look a-here, doc. Leave Allie go with, me. Us kin git us somebody from Purley to come nuss him whilst we're gone."
"I won't turn him over to some shiftless woman I know nothing about. See here, can't you arrange for one of the Raynes girls to stay with Allie? Would that satisfy you?"
Luke said slowly, "I reckon so." He added, "I most mistrust Mis' Raynes'd leave one o' her young uns come here. Her and Cap'n come clost to havin' a go-round."
"I'll order the woman to send me one of her girls. I'll send a note to her my- self. This man's welfare is important." Luke brightened. "I reckon she'd not keel' to be disaccommodatin' to the sick."
"Of course not. Now, son, hurry along. My trap- Pack a change of clothes."
The danger to his patient was over, and the doctor was eager to go. He entered Tordell's room, his manner professional. Tordell smiled ingratiatingly.
"Won't you have a stirrup cup with me, doctor, before you go?" Albury welcomed the invitation. He poured two drinks. He said, "Ah, when you're well- We live a delightful life at the landing. I want you to know my friends. Camilla, where I'm taking your Brinley. Camilla-she'd make you think of Juno-Juno running an orange grove."
He added eagerly, "I haven't even mentioned my son Claudius to you. But I have high hopes of the contact. A little older than you, and a delightful rascal- delightful. A master with horses-he breeds them. And a magnificent pianist, Tordell, magnificent." He sipped his drink, beaming.
Tordell said, "It's very good of you."
Albury said, "Temperamental, of course. You'd expect that." The rosy face dulled. He said, "I think you may be good for him; I think you may become his friend."
Tordell wondered what he might conceivably have to offer the doctor's son.
The trap was ready. Albury set down his glass. He drew out pencil and paper and scribbled a note. He took the sick man's hands and patted them hastily.
"Be careful now, young man. The quinine faithfully. Good-by." "Thank you. Good-by."
The physician hurried into the yard. The bags were in the trap. Albury stepped in and lifted the reins. Allie ran toward them. Luke waited to meet her. He laid an arm across her thin shoulders.
"Honey girl," he said, "hit come out like we was hopin'. I'm goin' off with doc to git learned about the orange trees. Hit won't be but two-three weeks. Doc's wrote Mis' Raynes to send one of her gals down to stay with you."
Albury handed her the note he had scrawled. "Run down to Mrs. Raynes with this, child. Good-by."
She said shyly, "'By, doc."
Luke said, "You be good now and take good keer' o' Cap'n."
A slight panic showed in the grave eyes, then was gone. Allie blinked and smiled. She buried her face an instant in his sleeve. He patted her back. She turned and ran away down the road. Luke longed to hurry after her and overtake her. It was intolerable to step into the trap and ride away from her. The grove and hammock, certainly the foreigner, seemed of less consequence than the small figure disappearing under the live oaks, swinging a blue sunbonnet by the strings.
On her stoop, the Widow Raynes took the physician's note from Allie and turned it over in her hands. Her children swarmed about her. The peremptory order infuriated her. She decided instantly that she was not called upon to endanger any of her brood to accommodate the foreigner.
She said, "Bess, you and Joey go on out with Allie, but you be back sure tomorrer evenin'."
She marched into the house, rummaged among loose papers on the pine mantelpiece and found a flyspecked post card. She addressed it, "Luke Brinley, Sawgrass Landing."
She looked at it. Luke would not be known at the landing. She should have addressed it to the doctor, but she did not know the spelling of the doctor's name. She turned the card over impatiently. She wrote:
Dear Luke. I just someway can't leave none of my girls go out to the hammock. I don't think you'd ought to of gone off. I will leave Bess and Joey go tonight and tomorrow but they got to come home then. You come on home too or send a growed woman. You know I got my hands full or else I would go. Your friend Mrs. Ina Raynes.
If there was movement, it was soundless. No air stirred. The palms quivered in the heat. Their heads glittered, high in the scalding sunshine. The summer afternoon was an amber honey to hold all life stilled within its heavy sweetness.
Tordell found himself listening from his bed with strained ears. The silence was portentous, since in its completeness it must inevitably be broken. High over the hammock a hawk cried. The stillness closed together again. The man relaxed. He had not known he was so weary of all sound. For two days and nights after Luke Brinley's going, a Raynes boy of ten and a flat-faced girl of Allie's age had stayed in the house. The boy had been noisy. The girl Bess was moronic, given to outbursts of speech in a voice as flat as her face. Now they were gone again, and the house was still.
Somewhere about the house or yard or forest Allie was at her work. She had brought him yesterday a drink she had made by crushing the juice from a handful of the first wild grapes, sweetened with sugar and diluted with cold well water. The drink was refreshing.
She had said, "Luke says I be a pure varmint to find the first ripe grapes."
Tordell opened his eyes. He had heard no step, but Allie stood in the doorway. He was glad she had returned. His helplessness, and now his dependence on her alone, gave her boldness.
She said, "Cap'n, you wa'n't asleep. You jest possumin'."
He had not noticed her voice until he had heard it against that of the Raynes girl. It was small and sweet. It had the soft sound of a wood pigeon. He decided that he was feeling stronger.
He said, "I shall be out of bed soon."
She stepped backward, frightened at the thought of his rising. She said anxiously, "By rights, Luke had orter be here to hold you up. You best stay in the bed 'til he come."
"I shan't try it just yet. I was only indulging myself by thinking about it." He was surprised to find pleasure in the thought of rising.
She said, "I got a good will to show you somethin'. 'Tain't done yet, but I got a mind to show it."
She darted away and was gone a few moments. She returned with an unfinished palmetto hat in her hands. It was a large sun hat such as Luke wore at his plowing. She dropped it on the bed.
She said, "I been studyin' on when you got outen the bed. The sun's mighty fearsome this time o' yare."
He lifted the hat. It was as light as a handful of reeds, intricately woven of braided strands of fresh palmetto fronds.
"You made it for me?"
She nodded, her mouth tremulous. He was touched.
He could not remember when anyone had made him anything. His throat constricted. .
He said, "Allie, my dear."·
She said, "I takened the measurements from the hat you come with."
He turned it on his hand. He said, "I'm certain it will fit me."
She said, "Cap'n put hit on."
He lifted himself high enough to rest his shoulders against his pillows. He raised the hat gravely and set it on his dark head. The outer row of braiding had not been completed, and the ragged end hung between his eyes. The sight of him sitting so in his night clothes, his face solemn, the broad hat above it, the loose end making him a little cross-eyed, convulsed her. Her laughter came, choked and infectious.
She ran to the chest and brought him his shaving mirror. He lifted it and stared at himself. For a moment he was shocked at his pallor; his skeleton gauntness. Then the grotesqueness of his face under the great hat amused him, and he laughed with her.
She took the hat from him and sat on the hickory chair to finish it. When she was done, they admired it together. She put it away on top of the chest.
She left him to milk the cow, to feed the mule and chickens. She brought him his supper of fresh sweet milk, huckleberries and corn bread.
He said, "You will be alone. Wouldn't you like your own supper on the little table here?"
She brought her plate and cup to his room and sat near him, eating with small birdlike motions. It seemed entirely natural to be sitting so.
Every morning until he was able to leave the bed, she bathed him. She came to take a timid pleasure in the smoothness of his skin. A layer of flesh began to appear over his sharp ribs. The deep cavities under his cheekbones were filling out a little.
No word came from Luke or Albury.
She wondered vaguely where the woman might be whom Luke would send to help her, as Mrs. Raynes had told her. No one came. It occurred to her that she should write to Luke. Yet when he did not hear, he would know that she was managing and Cap'n was improving.
She had promised to report to the widow, who refused to come to the house at all unless she was greatly needed. Yet again, no report would indicate that all was well. An obscure instinct kept her moving in secret, guarding the privacy of her life with the strange sick man who was hourly dearer and less strange.
The morning was fresh and windy. Tordell swung his legs to the floor and rested a moment on the edge of the bed. He was lightheaded from the movement but after a time the blood pulsed normally through his body and he felt well and strong.
He stood up, his long legs quivering. He had lain on his back, he realized, for more than three weeks. His muscles were weak, all his strength depleted.
It was necessary to hold to the chair-back, then to the edge of the table, before he could move unsteadily across the room to the chest of drawers. He leaned over it and took out clean underlinens. When he straightened, he was dizzy and the room was black around him.
Allie heard the unaccustomed sounds and went to him. He stood in the center of the room in his night clothes, tall and thin. She asked, "How you feelin', standin' up that-a-way?"
"A bit trembly. But I had to get up. It's a grand morning."
It excited her to hear him speak so. The black sullenness was gone, and he was eager.
She said, "You set down now and leave me fetch you what-all you're after."
He sat down on the chair, and she laid out his clothes on the bed where he could reach them.
After he had dressed, he lay awhile on the bed, resting. Then he stood up and walked through the breezeway to the front stoop, clinging to the wall as he went. He lowered himself to the top step and stretched out his legs.
As Tordell sat, strength flowed into him. A sense of well-being possessed him. His close-hugged bitterness was muted, like melancholy music sounding in the distance His hate was helpless for the moment against the good blood that be gan to replace the fever-ridden cells in the strong young body. He lifted his head. A fragrance came to him, sweeter than any perfume. Allie came to him. He asked, "What is it, so very sweet and fragrant? "
She wrinkled her nose. She said, "I declare, my Cape jasmine has got a flower on it. I thought it was done a-bloomin'."
She walked down the steps and into the yard, where a shrub with dark pointed leaves grew in a spot of sunlight. Tordell rose and followed her. After a few steps, he walked easily. She pointed out the single late gardenia and stooped to break it for him, but he caught her arm.
"Leave it there. It will last longer."
A spot of brilliance flashed past him. Before his eyes, almost within reach of his hand, a hummingbird darted at the white flower. He thought he saw a reflection of the ruby throat against the waxen petals. He caught his breath.
Allie whispered, "Oh. Cap'n, hit's the June-bird."
The jewel-like fragment explored the blossom, its wings vibrating invisibly, so that it hung stationary in the air.
Allie said, "He's got so he don't pay me no mind. Stand right still now."
She took a slow step forward and halted. As though two boughs of a sapling stirred in the wind, her arms lifted. She cupped both hands about the hummingbird and held it a moment in their loose caging. When she released it, the bird returned to the gardenia as though it had never been restrained.
Allie said, "Step right clost behind me, Cap'n and put out your hands like I did. See kin we maybe fool him, and you ketch him and hold him."
He stepped behind her, pressing close to her. He stretched his arms from behind on both sides of her, and as he lifted them, she lifted hers with him, guiding him. Cautiously she brought his hands together and the hummingbird was there, imprisoned in his fingers.
The touch of feathers against his palms was softer than satin. The bird quivered, its bit of life vibrant. Through all consciousness beat such a pulsing, and no man could say it was not all one and the same. Ecstasy flooded him. Suddenly he was unhappy to hold the bird captive any longer and he opened his fingers.
As though it had sensed his strangeness, the hummingbird flew away, rising in a series of arcs until it was gone from sight. The man and girl stood still, watching the minute swift flight and disappearance. The girl was warm and soft against him.
As though his hands met again to hold the June-bird, he folded his arms from behind about the small body. She did not stir. He lowered his head to her. The tawny hair was as soft and smooth as the bird-feathers. He laid his cheek against it, then bent to press his mouth against the hollow of her throat. Her pulse beat there like the bird's heart.
He tightened his arms and felt her quiver as the bird had quivered. His lips moved across her throat and rested in the curve of her shoulder. When he released her, she ran from him into the hammock, as the hummingbird had gone.
He thought that he had frightened her. Yet she had only gone from him in the habit of flight. When the beating of her heart had quieted, she returned without fear. The strength had left him and he had groped his way, trembling, to the stoop. He sat with his head thrown back against the post, his eyes half closed.
She came to him and sat beside him. His hand reached for hers and she laid it in his palm. Their fingers interlaced. They sat a long time quiet, and it was as though the blood flowed from his fingers into hers, and there was no saying where the one life-stream ended and the other began.
In Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' next installment- Love transforms the wilderness for Tordell and Allie
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