HER name was Elsie
Leander and her girlhood was spent on her father's farm in Vermont. For several
generations the Leanders had all lived on the same farm and had all married
thin women, and so she was thin. The farm lay in the shadow of a mountain and
the soil was not very rich. From the beginning and for several generations
there had been a great many sons and few daughters in the family. The sons had
gone west or to New York City and the daughters had stayed at home and thought
such thoughts as come to New England women who see the sons of their father's
neighbours slipping, away, one by one, into the West.
Her father's house was
a small white frame affair, and when you went out at the back door, past a
small barn and a chicken house, you got into a path that ran up the side of a
hill and into an orchard. The trees were all old and gnarled. At the back of
the orchard the hill dropped away and bare rocks showed.
Inside the fence a
large grey rock stuck high up out of the ground. As Elsie sat with her back to
the rock, with a mangled hillside at her feet, she could see several large
mountains, apparently but a short distance away, and between herself and the
mountains lay many tiny fields surrounded by neatly built stone walls.
Everywhere rocks appeared. Large ones, too heavy to be moved, stuck out of the
ground in the centre of the fields. The fields were like cups filled with a
green liquid that turned grey in the fall and white in the winter. The
mountains, far off but apparently near at hand, were like giants ready at any
moment to reach out their hands and take the cups one by one and drink off the
green liquid. The large rocks in the fields were like the thumbs of the giants.
Elsie had three
brothers, born ahead of her, but they had all gone away. Two of them had gone
to live with her uncle in the West and her elder brother had gone to New York
City where he had married and prospered. All through his youth and manhood her
father had worked hard and had lived a hard life, but his son in New York City
had begun to send money home, and after that things went better. He still
worked every day about the barn or in the fields but he did not worry about the
future. Elsie's mother did house work in the mornings and in the afternoons sat
in a rocking chair in her tiny living room and thought of her sons while she
crocheted table covers and tidies for the backs of chairs. She was a silent
woman, very thin and with very thin bony hands. She did not ease herself into a
rocking chair but sat down and got up suddenly, and when she crocheted her back
was as straight as the back of a drill sergeant.
The mother rarely spoke
to the daughter. Sometimes in the afternoons as the younger woman went up the
hillside to her place by the rock at the back of the orchard, her father came
out of the barn and stopped her. He put a hand on her shoulder and asked where
she was going. "To the rock," she said and her father laughed. His
laughter was like the creaking of a rusty barn door hinge and the hand he had
laid on her shoulder was thin like her own hands and like her mother's hands.
The father went into the barn shaking his head. "She's like her mother.
She is herself like a rock," he thought. At the head of the path that led
from the house to the orchard there was a great cluster of bayberry bushes. The
New England farmer came out of his barn to watch his daughter go along the
path, but she had disappeared behind the bushes. He looked away past his house to
the fields and to the mountains in the distance. He also saw the green cup-like
fields and the grim mountains. There was an almost imperceptible tightening of
the muscles of his half worn-out old body. For a long time he stood in silence
and then, knowing from long experience the danger of having thoughts, he went
back into the barn and busied himself with the mending of an agricultural tool
that had been mended many times before.
The son of the Leanders
who went to live in New York City was the father of one son, a thin sensitive
boy who looked like Elsie. The son died when he was twenty-three years old and
some years later the father died and left his money to the old people on the
New England farm. The two Leanders who had gone west had lived there with their
father's brother, a farmer, until they grew into manhood. Then Will, the
younger, got a job on a railroad. He was killed one winter morning. It was a
cold snowy day and when the freight train he was in charge of as conductor left
the city of Des Moines, he started to run over the tops of the cars. His feet
slipped and he shot down into space. That was the end of him.
Of the new generation
there was only Elsie and her brother Tom, whom she had never seen, left alive.
Her father and mother talked of going west to Tom for two years before they
came to a decision. Then it took another year to dispose of the farm and make
preparations. During the whole time Elsie did not think much about the change
about to take place in her life.
The trip west on the
railroad train jolted Elsie out of herself. In spite of her detached attitude
toward life she became excited. Her mother sat up very straight and stiff in
the seat in the sleeping car and her father walked up and down in the aisle.
After a night when the younger of the two women did not sleep but lay awake
with red burning cheeks and with her thin fingers incessantly picking at the
bed-clothes in her berth while the train went through towns and cities, crawled
up the sides of hills and fell down into forest-clad valleys, she got up and
dressed to sit all day looking at a new kind of land. The train ran for a day
and through another sleepless night in a flat land where every field was as
large as a farm in her own country. Towns appeared and disappeared in a
continual procession. The whole land was so unlike anything she had ever known
that she began to feel unlike herself. In the valley where she had been born
and where she had lived all her days everything had an air of finality. Nothing
could be changed. The tiny fields were chained to the earth. They were fixed in
their places and surrounded by aged stone walls. The fields like the mountains
that looked down at them were as unchangeable as the passing days. She had a
feeling they had always been so, would always be so.
Elsie sat like her
mother upright in the car seat and with a back like the back of a drill
sergeant. The train ran swiftly along through Ohio and Indiana. Her thin hands
like her mother's hands were crossed and locked. One passing casually through
the car might have thought both women prisoners handcuffed and bound to their
seats. Night came on and she again got into her berth Again she lay awake and
her thin checks became flushed, but she thought new thoughts. Her hands were no
longer gripped together and she did not pick at the bed clothes. Twice during
the night she stretched herself and yawned, a thing she had never in her life
done before. The train stopped at a town on the prairies, and as there was
something the matter with one of the wheels of the car in which she lay the
trainsmen came with flaming torches to tinker it. There was a great pounding
and shouting. When the train went on its way she wanted to get out of her berth
and run up and down in the aisle of the car. The fancy had come to her that the
men tinkering with the car wheel were new men out of the new land who had
broken with strong hammers the doors of her prison away. They had destroyed for
ever the programme she had made for her life.
Elsie was filled with
joy at the thought that the train was still going on into the West. She wanted
to go on for ever in a straight line into the unknown. She fancied herself no
longer on a train and imagined she had become a winged thing flying through
space. Her long years of sitting alone by the rock on the New England farm had
got her into the habit of expressing her thoughts aloud. Her thin voice broke
the silence that lay over the sleeping car and her father and mother, both also
lying awake, sat up in their berth to listen.
Tom Leander, the only
living male representative of the new generation of Leanders, was a loosely
built man of forty inclined to corpulency. At twenty he had married the
daughter of a neighbouring farmer, and when his wife inherited some money she
and Tom moved into the town of Apple Junction in Iowa where Tom opened a
grocery. The venture prospered as did Tom's matrimonial venture. When his
brother died in New York City and his father, mother, and sister decided to
come west Tom was already the father of a daughter and four sons.
On the prairies north
of town and in the midst of a vast level stretch of corn fields, there was a
partly completed brick house that had belonged to a rich farmer named Russell,
who had begun to build the house intending to make it the most magnificent
place in the county, but when it was almost completed he had found himself
without money and heavily in debt. The farm, consisting of several hundred
acres of corn land, had been split into three farms and sold. No one had wanted
the huge unfinished brick house. For years it had stood vacant, its windows
staring out over the fields that had been planted almost up to the door.
In buying the Russell
house Tom was moved by two motives. He had a notion that in New England the
Leanders had been rather magnificent people. His memory of his father's place
in the Vermont valley was shadowy, but in speaking of it to his wife he became
very definite. "We had good blood in us, we Leanders," he said,
straightening his shoulders. "We lived in a big house. We were important
people."
Wanting his father and
mother to feel at home in the new place, Tom had also another motive. He was
not a very energetic man and, although he had done well enough as keeper of a
grocery, his success was largely due to the boundless energy of his wife. She
did not pay much attention to her household and her children, like little
animals, had to take care of themselves, but in any matter concerning the store
her word was law.
To have his father the
owner of the Russell Place Tom felt would establish him as a man of consequence
in the eyes of his neighbours. "I can tell you what, they're used to a big
house," he said to his wife. "I tell you what, my people are used to
living in style."
The exaltation that had
come over Elsie on the train wore away in the presence of grey empty Iowa
fields, but something of the effect of it remained with her for months. In the
big brick house life went on much as it had in the tiny New England house where
she had always lived. The Leanders installed themselves in three or four rooms
on the ground floor. After a few weeks the furniture that had been shipped by
freight arrived and was hauled out from town in one of Tom's grocery wagons.
There were three or four acres of ground covered with great piles of boards the
unsuccessful farmer had intended to use in the building of stables. Tom sent
men to haul the boards away and Elsie's father prepared to plant a garden. They
had come west in April and as soon as they were installed in the house ploughing
and planting began in the fields near by. The habit of a lifetime returned to
the daughter of the house. In the new place there was no gnarled orchard
surrounded by a half-ruined stone fence. All of the fences in all of the fields
that stretched away out of sight to the north, south, east, and west were made
of wire and looked like spider webs against the blackness of the ground when it
had been freshly ploughed.
There was however the
house itself. It was like an island rising out of the sea. In an odd way the
house, although it was less than ten years old, was very old. Its unnecessary
bigness represented an old impulse in men. Elsie felt that. At the east side
there was a door leading to a stairway that ran into the upper part of the
house that was kept locked. Two or three stone steps led up to it. Elsie could
sit on the top step with her back against the door and gaze into the distance
without being disturbed. Almost at her feet began the fields that seemed to go
on and on for ever. The fields were like the waters of a sea. Men came to
plough and plant. Giant horses moved in a procession across the prairies. A
young man who drove six horses came directly toward her. She was fascinated.
The breasts of the horses as they came forward with bowed heads seemed like the
breasts of giants. The soft spring air that lay over the fields was also like a
sea. The horses were giants walking on the floor of a sea. With their breasts
they pushed the waters of the sea before them. They were pushing the waters out
of the basin of the sea. The young man who drove them was also a giant.
Elsie pressed her body
against the closed door at the top of the steps. In the garden back of the
house she could hear her father at work. He was raking dry masses of weeds off
the ground preparatory to spading the ground for a family garden. He had always
worked in a tiny confined place and would do the same thing here. In this vast
open place he would work with small tools, doing little things with infinite
care, raising little vegetables. In the house her mother would crochet little
tidies. She herself would be small. She would press her body against the door
of the house, try to get herself out of sight. Only the feeling that sometimes
took possession of her, and that did not form itself into a thought, would be
large.
The six horses turned
at the fence and the outside horse got entangled in the traces. The driver
swore vigorously. Then he turned and stared at the pale New Englander and with
another oath pulled the heads of the horses about and drove away into the
distance. The field in which he was ploughing contained two hundred acres.
Elsie did not wait for him to return but went into the house and sat with
folded arms in a room. The house she thought was a ship floating in a sea on
the floor of which giants went up and down.
May came and then June.
In the great fields work was always going on and Elsie became somewhat used to
the sight of the young man in the field that came down to the steps. Sometimes
when he drove his horses down to the wire fence he smiled and nodded.
In the month of August,
when it is very hot, the corn in Iowa fields grows until the corn stalks
resemble young trees. The corn fields become forests. The time for the
cultivating of the corn has passed and weeds grow thick between the corn rows.
The men with their giant horses have gone away. Over the immense fields silence
broods.
When the time of the
laying-by of the crop came that first summer after Elsie's arrival in the West
her mind, partially awakened by the strangeness of the railroad trip, awakened
again. She did not feel like a staid thin woman with a back like the back of a
drill sergeant, but like something new and as strange as the new land into
which she had come to live. For a time she did not know what was the matter. In
the field the corn had grown so high that she could not see into the distance.
The corn was like a wall and the little bare spot of land on which her father's
house stood was like a house built behind the walls of a prison. For a time she
was depressed, thinking that she had come west into a wide open country, only
to find herself locked up more closely than ever.
An impulse came to her.
She arose and going down three or four steps seated herself almost on a level
with the ground.
Immediately she got a
sense of release. She could not see over the corn but she could see under it.
The corn had long wide leaves that met over the rows. The rows became long
tunnels running away into infinity. Out of the black ground grew weeds that
made a soft carpet of green. From above light sifted down. The corn rows were
mysteriously beautiful. They were warm passageways running out into life. She
got up from the steps, and walking timidly to the wire fence that separated her
from the field, put her hand between the wires and took hold of one of the corn
stalks. For some reason after she had touched the strong young stalk and had
held it for a moment firmly in her hand she grew afraid. Running quickly back
to the step she sat down and covered her face with her hands. Her body
trembled. She tried to imagine herself crawling through the fence and wandering
along one of the passageways. The thought of trying the experiment fascinated
but at the same time terrified. She got quickly up and went into the house.
One Saturday night in
August Elsie found herself unable to sleep. Thoughts, more definite than any
she had ever known before, came into her mind. It was a quiet hot night and her
bed stood near a window. Her room was the only one the Leanders occupied on the
second floor of the house. At midnight a little breeze came up from the south
and when she sat up in bed the floor of corn tassels lying below her line of
sight looked in the moonlight like the face of a sea just stirred by a gentle
breeze.
A murmuring began in
the corn and murmuring thoughts and memories awoke in her mind. The long wide
succulent leaves had begun to dry in the intense heat of the August days and as
the wind stirred the corn they rubbed against each other. A call, far away, as
of a thousand voices arose. She imagined the voices were like the voices of
children. They were not like her brother Tom's children, noisy boisterous
little animals, but something quite different, tiny little things with large
eyes and thin sensitive hands. One after another they crept into her arms. She
became so excited over the fancy that she sat up in bed and taking a pillow
into her arms held it against her breast. The figure of her cousin, the pale
sensitive young Leander who had lived with his father in New York City and who
had died at the age of twenty-three, came sharply into her mind. It was as
though the young man had come suddenly into the room. She dropped the pillow
and sat waiting, intense, expectant.
Young Harry Leander had
come to visit his cousin on the New England farm during the late summer of the
year before he died. He had stayed there for a month and almost every afternoon
had gone with Elsie to sit by the rock at the back of the orchard. One
afternoon when they had both been for a long time silent he began to talk.
"I want to go live in the West," he said. "I want to go live in
the West. I want to grow strong and be a man," he repeated. Tears came
into his eyes.
They got up to return
to the house, Elsie walking in silence beside the young man. The moment marked
a high spot in her life. A strange trembling eagerness for something she had
not realized in her experience of life had taken possession of her. They went
in silence through the orchard but when they came to the bayberry bush her
cousin stopped in the path and turned to face her. "I want you to kiss
me," he said eagerly, stepping toward her.
A fluttering
uncertainty had taken possession of Elsie and had been transmitted to her
cousin. After he had made the sudden and unexpected demand and had stepped so
close to her that his breath could be felt on her cheek, his own cheeks became
scarlet and his hand that had taken her hand trembled. "Well, I wish I
were strong. I only wish I were strong," he said hesitatingly and turning
walked away along the path toward the house.
And in the strange new
house, set like an island in its sea of corn, Harry Leander's voice seemed to
arise again above the fancied voices of the children that had been coming out
of the fields. Elsie got out of bed and walked up and down in the dim light
coming through the window. Her body trembled violently. "I want you to
kiss me," the voice said again and to quiet it and to quiet also the
answering voice in herself she went to kneel by the bed and taking the pillow
again into her arms pressed it against her face.
Tom Leander came with
his wife and family to visit his father and mother on Sundays. The family
appeared at about ten o'clock in the morning. When the wagon turned out of the
road that ran past the Russell Place Tom shouted. There was a field between the
house and the road and the wagon could not be seen as it came along the narrow
way through the corn. After Tom had shouted, his daughter Elizabeth, a tall
girl of sixteen, jumped out of the wagon. All five children came tearing toward
the house through the corn. A series of wild shouts arose on the still morning
air.
The groceryman had
brought food from the store. When the horse had been unhitched and put into a
shed he and his wife began to carry packages into the house. The four Leander
boys, accompanied by their sister, disappeared into the near-by fields. Three
dogs that had trotted out from town under the wagon accompanied the children.
Two or three children and occasionally a young man from a neighbouring farm had
come to join in the fun. Elsie's sister-in-law dismissed them all with a wave
of her hand. With a wave of her hand she also brushed Elsie aside. Fires were
lighted and the house reeked with the smell of cooking. Elsie went to sit on the
step at the side of the house. The corn fields that had been so quiet rang with
shouts and with the barking of dogs.
Tom Leander's oldest
child, Elizabeth, was like her mother, full of energy. She was thin and tall
like the women of her father's house but very strong and alive. In secret she
wanted to be a lady but when she tried her brothers, led by her father and mother,
made fun of her. "Don't put on airs," they said. When she got into
the country with no one but her brothers and two or three neighbouring farm
boys she herself became a boy. With the boys she went tearing through the
fields, following the dogs in pursuit of rabbits. Sometimes a young man came
with the children from a near-by farm. Then she did not know what to do with
herself. She wanted to walk demurely along the rows through the corn but was
afraid her brothers would laugh and in desperation outdid the boys in roughness
and noisiness. She screamed and shouted and running wildly tore her dress on
the wire fences as she scrambled over in pursuit of the dogs. When a rabbit was
caught and killed she rushed in and tore it out of the grasp of the dogs. The blood
of the little dying animal dripped on her clothes. She swung it over her head
and shouted.
The farm hand who had
worked all summer in the field within sight of Elsie became enamoured of the
young woman from town. When the groceryman's family appeared on Sunday mornings
he also appeared but did not come to the house. When the boys and dogs came
tearing through the fields he joined them. He was also self-conscious and did
not want the boys to know the purpose of his coming and when he and Elizabeth
found themselves alone together he became embarrassed. For a moment they walked
together in silence. In a wide circle about them, in the forest of the corn,
ran the boys and dogs. The young man had something he wanted to say, but when
he tried to find words his tongue became thick and his lips felt hot and dry.
"Well," he began, "let's you and me--"
Words failed him and
Elizabeth turned and ran after her brothers and for the rest of the day he
could not manage to get her out of their sight. When he went to join them she
became the noisiest member of the party. A frenzy of activity took possession
of her. With hair hanging down her back, with clothes torn, and with cheeks and
hands scratched and bleeding she led her brothers in the endless wild pursuit
of the rabbits.
The Sunday in August
that followed Elsie Leander's sleepless night was hot and cloudy. In the
morning she was half ill and as soon as the visitors from town arrived she
crept away to sit on the step at the side of the house. The children ran away
into the fields. An almost overpowering desire to run with them, shouting and
playing along the corn rows took possession of her. She arose and went to the
back of the house. Her father was at work in the garden, pulling weeds from
between rows of vegetables. Inside the house she could hear her sister-in-law
moving about. On the front porch her brother Tom was asleep with his mother
beside him. Elsie went back on the step and then arose and went to where the
corn came down to the fence. She climbed awkwardly over and went a little way
along one of the rows. Putting out her hand she touched the firm hard stalks
and then, becoming afraid, dropped to her knees on the carpet of weeds that
covered the ground. For a long time she stayed thus listening to the voices of
the children in the distance.
An hour slipped away.
Presently it was time for dinner and her sister-in-law came to the back door
and shouted. There was an answering whoop from the distance and the children
came running through the fields. They climbed over the fence and ran shouting
across her father's garden. Elsie also arose. She was about to attempt to climb
back over the fence unobserved when she heard a rustling in the corn. Young
Elizabeth Leander appeared. Beside her walked the ploughman who but a few
months earlier had planted the corn in the field where Elsie now stood. She
could see the two people coming slowly along the rows. An understanding had
been established between them. The man reached through between the corn stalks
and touched the hand of the girl who laughed awkwardly and running to the fence
climbed quickly over. In her hand she held the limp body of a rabbit the dogs
had killed.
The farm hand went away
and when Elizabeth had gone into the house Elsie climbed over the fence. Her
niece stood just within the kitchen door holding the dead rabbit by one leg.
The other leg had been torn away by the dogs. At sight of the New England
woman, who seemed to look at her with hard unsympathetic eyes, she was ashamed
and went quickly into the house. She threw the rabbit upon a table in the
parlour and then ran out of the room. Its blood ran out on the delicate flowers
of a white crocheted table cover that had been made by Elsie's mother.
The Sunday dinner with
all the living Leanders gathered about the table was gone through in a heavy
lumbering silence. When the dinner was over and Tom and his wife had washed the
dishes they went to sit with the older people on the front porch. Presently
they were both asleep. Elsie returned to the step at the side of the house but
when the desire to go again into the cornfields came sweeping over her she got
up and went indoors.
The woman of
thirty-five tip-toed about the big house like a frightened child. The dead
rabbit that lay on the table in the parlour had become cold and stiff. Its
blood had dried on the white table cover. She went upstairs but did not go to
her own room. A spirit of adventure had hold of her. In the upper part of the
house there were many rooms and in some of them no glass had been put into the
windows. The windows had been boarded up and narrow streaks of light crept in
through the cracks between the boards.
Elsie tip-toed up the
flight of stairs past the room in which she slept and opening doors went into
other rooms. Dust lay thick on the floors. In the silence she could hear her
brother snoring as he slept in the chair on the front porch. From what seemed a
far away place there came the shrill cries of the children. The cries became
soft. They were like the cries of unborn children that had called to her out of
the fields on the night before.
Into her mind came the
intense silent figure of her mother sitting on the porch beside her son and
waiting for the day to wear itself out into night. The thought brought a lump
into her throat. She wanted something and did not know what it was. Her own
mood frightened her. In a windowless room at the back of the house one of the
boards over a window had been broken and a bird had flown in and become
imprisoned.
The presence of the
woman frightened the bird. It flew wildly about. Its beating wings stirred up
dust that danced in the air. Elsie stood perfectly still, also frightened, not
by the presence of the bird but by the presence of life. Like the bird she was
a prisoner. The thought gripped her. She wanted to go outdoors where her niece
Elizabeth walked with the young ploughman through the corn, but was like the
bird in the room--a prisoner. She moved restlessly about. The bird flew back
and forth across the room. It alighted on the window sill near the place where
the board was broken away. She stared into the frightened eyes of the bird that
in turn stared into her eyes. Then the bird flew away, out through the window,
and Elsie turned and ran nervously downstairs and out into the yard. She
climbed over the wire fence and ran with stooped shoulders along one of the
tunnels.
Elsie ran into the
vastness of the cornfields filled with but one desire. She wanted to get out of
her life and into some new and sweeter life she felt must be hidden away
somewhere in the fields. After she had run a long way she came to a wire fence
and crawled over. Her hair became unloosed and fell down over her shoulders.
Her cheeks became flushed and for the moment she looked like a young girl. When
she climbed over the fence she tore a great hole in the front of her dress. For
a moment her tiny breasts were exposed and then her hand clutched and held
nervously the sides of the tear. In the distance she could hear the voices of
the boys and the barking of the dogs. A summer storm had been threatening for
days and now black clouds had begun to spread themselves over the sky. As she
ran nervously forward, stopping to listen and then running on again, the dry
corn blades brushed against her shoulders and a fine shower of yellow dust from
the corn tassels fell on her hair. A continued crackling noise accompanied her
progress. The dust made a golden crown about her head. From the sky overhead a
low rumbling sound, like the growling of giant dogs, came to her ears.
The thought that having
at last ventured into the corn she would never escape became fixed in the mind
of the running woman. Sharp pains shot through her body. Presently she was
compelled to stop and sit on the ground. For a long time she sat with her closed
eyes. Her dress became soiled. Little insects that live in the ground under the
corn came out of their holes and crawled over her legs.
Following some obscure
impulse the tired woman threw herself on her back and lay still with closed
eyes. Her fright passed. It was warm and close in the room-like tunnels. The
pain in her side went away. She opened her eyes and between the wide green corn
blades could see patches of a black threatening sky. She did not want to be
alarmed and so closed her eyes again. Her thin hand no longer gripped the tear
in her dress and her tiny breasts were exposed. They expanded and contracted in
little spasmodic jerks. She threw her hands back over her head and lay still.
It seemed to Elsie that
hours passed as she lay thus, quiet and passive under the corn. Deep within her
there was a feeling that something was about to happen, something that would
lift her out of herself, that would tear her away from her past and the past of
her people. Her thoughts were not definite. She lay still and waited as she had
waited for days and months by the rock at the back of the orchard on the
Vermont farm when she was a girl. A deep grumbling noise went on in the sky
overhead but the sky and everything she had ever known seemed very far away, no
part of herself.
After a long silence,
when it seemed to her that she was lost from herself as in a dream, Elsie heard
a man's voice calling. "Aho, aho, aho," shouted the voice and after
another period of silence there arose answering voices and then the sound of
bodies crashing through the corn and the excited chatter of children. A dog
came running along the row where she lay and stood beside her. His cold nose
touched her face and she sat up. The dog ran away. The Leander boys passed. She
could see their bare legs flashing in and out across one of the tunnels. Her
brother had become alarmed by the rapid approach of the thunder storm and
wanted to get his family to town. His voice kept calling from the house and the
voices of the children answered from the fields.
Elsie sat on the ground
with her hands pressed together. An odd feeling of disappointment had
possession of her. She arose and walked slowly along in the general direction
taken by the children. She came to a fence and crawled over, tearing her dress
in a new place. One of her stockings had become unloosed and had slipped down
over her shoe top. The long sharp weeds had scratched her leg so that it was
criss-crossed with red lines, but she was not conscious of any pain.
The distraught woman followed
the children until she came within sight of her father's house and then stopped
and again sat on the ground. There was another loud crash of thunder and Tom
Leander's voice called again, this time half angrily. The name of the girl
Elizabeth was shouted in loud masculine tones that rolled and echoed like the
thunder along the aisles under the corn.
And then Elizabeth came
into sight accompanied by the young ploughman. They stopped near Elsie and the
man took the girl into his arms. At the sound of their approach Elsie had
thrown herself face downward on the ground and had twisted herself into a
position where she could see without being seen. When their lips met her tense
hands grasped one of the corn stalks. Her lips pressed themselves into the dust.
When they had gone on their way she raised her head. A dusty powder covered her
lips.
What seemed another
long period of silence fell over the fields. A strong wind began to blow and
the corn rocked back and forth. The murmuring voices of unborn children, her
imagination had created in the whispering fields, became a vast shout. The wind
blew harder and harder. The corn stalks were twisted and bent. Elizabeth went
thoughfully [sic] out of the field and climbing the fence confronted her
father. "Where you been? What you been a doing?" he asked.
"Don't you know we got to get out of here?"
When Elizabeth went
toward the house Elsie followed, creeping on her hands and knees like a little
animal, and when she had come within sight of the fence surrounding the house
she sat on the ground and put her hands over her face. Something within herself
was being twisted and whirled about as the tops of the corn stalks were now
being twisted and whirled by the wind. She sat so that she did not look toward
the house and when she opened her eyes she could again see along the long
mysterious aisles.
Her brother, with his
wife and children, went away. By turning her head Elsie could see them driving
at a trot out of the yard back of her father's house. With the going of the
younger woman the farm house in the midst of the cornfield rocked by the winds
seemed the most desolate place in the world.
Her mother came out at
the back door of the house. She ran to the steps where she knew her daughter
was in the habit of sitting and then in alarm began to call. It did not occur
to Elsie to answer. The voice of the older woman did not seem to have anything
to do with herself. It was a thin voice and was quickly lost in the wind and in
the crashing sound that arose out of the fields. With her head turned toward
the house Elsie stared at her mother who ran wildly around the house and then
went indoors. The back door of the house went shut with a bang.
The storm that had been
threatening broke with a roar. Broad sheets of water swept over the cornfields.
Sheets of water swept over the woman's body. The storm that had for years been
gathering in her also broke. Sobs arose out of her throat. She abandoned
herself to a storm of grief that was only partially grief. Tears ran out of her
eyes and made little furrows through the dust on her face. In the lulls that
occasionally came in the storm she raised her head and heard, through the
tangled mass of wet hair that covered her ears and above the sound of millions
of rain-drops that alighted on the earthen floor inside the house of the corn,
the thin voices of her mother and father calling to her out of the Leander
house.