As in most older American homes, the kitchen at the rear of the
Butterworth farmhouse was large and comfortable. Much of the life of
the house had been led there. Clara sat in a deep window that looked out
across a little gully where in the spring a small stream ran down along
the edge of the barnyard. She was then a quiet child and loved to sit
for hours unobserved and undisturbed. At her back was the kitchen with
the warm, rich smells and the soft, quick, persistent footsteps of her
mother. Her eyes closed and she slept. Then she awoke. Before her lay a
world into which her fancy could creep out. Across the stream before her
eyes went a small, wooden bridge and over this in the spring horses went
away to the fields or to sheds where they were hitched to milk or ice
wagons. The sound of the hoofs of the horses pounding on the bridge was
like thunder, harnesses rattled, voices shouted. Beyond the bridge was a
path leading off to the left and along the path were three small houses
where hams were smoked. Men came from the wagon sheds bearing the meat
on their shoulders and went into the little houses. Fires were lighted
and smoke crawled lazily up through the roofs. In a field that lay
beyond the smoke houses a man came to plow. The child, curled into a
little, warm ball in the window seat, was happy. When she closed her
eyes fancies came like flocks of white sheep running out of a green
wood. Although she was later to become a tomboy and run wild over the
farm and through the barns, and although all her life she loved the
soil and the sense of things growing and of food for hungry mouths being
prepared, there was in her, even as a child, a hunger for the life of
the spirit. In her dreams women, beautifully gowned and with rings on
their hands, came to brush the wet, matted hair back from her forehead.
Across the little wooden bridge before her eyes came wonderful men,
women, and children. The children ran forward. They cried out to her.
She thought of them as brothers and sisters who were to come to live in
the farmhouse and who were to make the old house ring with laughter. The
children ran toward her with outstretched hands, but never arrived at
the house. The bridge extended itself. It stretched out under their feet
so that they ran forward forever on the bridge.
And behind the children came men and women, sometimes together,
sometimes walking alone. They did not seem like the children to belong
to her. Like the women who came to touch her hot forehead, they were
beautifully gowned and walked with stately dignity.
The child climbed out of the window and stood on the kitchen floor. Her
mother hurried about. She was feverishly active and often did not hear
when the child spoke. “I want to know about my brothers and sisters:
where are they, why don't they come here?” she asked, but the mother did
not hear, and if she did, had nothing to say. Sometimes she stopped to
kiss the child and tears came to her eyes. Then something cooking on the
kitchen stove demanded attention. “You run outside,” she said hurriedly,
and turned again to her work.
* * * * *
From the chair where Clara sat at the wedding feast provided by the
energy of her father and the enthusiasm of Jim Priest, she could see
over her father's shoulder into the farm house kitchen. As when she was
a child, she closed her eyes and dreamed of another kind of feast.
With a growing sense of bitterness she realized that all her life, all
through her girlhood and young womanhood, she had been waiting for this,
her wedding night, and that now, having come, the occasion for which she
had waited so long and concerning which she had dreamed so many dreams,
had aborted into an occasion for the display of ugliness and vulgarity.
Her father, the only other person in the room in any way related to
her, sat at the other end of the long table. Her aunt had gone away on
a visit, and in the crowded, noisy room there was no woman to whom she
could turn for understanding. She looked past her father's shoulder and
directly into the wide window seat where she had spent so many hours of
her childhood. Again she wanted brothers and sisters. “The beautiful men
and women of the dreams were meant to come at this time, that's what
the dreams were about; but, like the unborn children that ran with
outstretched hands, they cannot get over the bridge and into the house,”
she thought vaguely. “I wish Mother had lived, or that Kate Chanceller
were here,” she whispered to herself as, raising her eyes, she looked at
her father.
Clara felt like an animal driven into a corner and surrounded by foes.
Her father sat at the feast between two women, Mrs. Steve Hunter who was
inclined to corpulency, and a thin woman named Bowles, the wife of an
undertaker of Bidwell. They continually whispered, smiled, and nodded
their heads. Hugh sat on the opposite side of the same table, and when
he raised his eyes from the plate of food before him, could see past the
head of a large, masculine-looking woman into the farmhouse parlor where
there was another table, also filled with guests. Clara turned from
looking at her father to look at her husband. He was merely a tall man
with a long face, who could not raise his eyes. His long neck stuck
itself out of a stiff white collar. To Clara he was, at the moment, a
being without personality, one that the crowd at the table had swallowed
up as it so busily swallowed food and wine. When she looked at him he
seemed to be drinking a good deal. His glass was always being filled and
emptied. At the suggestion of the woman who sat beside him, he performed
the task of emptying it, without raising his eyes, and Steve Hunter,
who sat on the other side of the table, leaned over and filled it again.
Steve like her father whispered and winked. “On the night of my wedding
I was piped, you bet, as piped as a hatter. It's a good thing. It gives
a man nerve,” he explained to the masculine-looking woman to whom he was
telling, with a good deal of attention to details, the tale of his own
marriage night.
Clara did not look at Hugh again. What he did seemed no concern of hers.
Bowles the Bidwell undertaker had surrendered to the influence of the
wine that had been flowing freely since the guests arrived and now got
to his feet and began to talk. His wife tugged at his coat and tried to
force him back into his seat, but Tom Butterworth jerked her arm away.
“Ah, let him alone. He's got a story to tell,” he said to the woman,
who blushed and put her handkerchief over her face. “Well, it's a fact,
that's how it happened,” the undertaker declared in a loud voice. “You
see the sleeves of her nightgown were tied in hard knots by her rascally
brothers. When I tried to unfasten them with my teeth I bit big holes in
the sleeves.”
Clara gripped the arm of her chair. “If I can let the night pass without
showing these people how much I hate them I'll do well enough,” she
thought grimly. She looked at the dishes laden with food and wished she
could break them one by one over the heads of her father's guests. As a
relief to her mind, she again looked past her father's head and through
a doorway into the kitchen.
In the big room three or four cooks were busily engaged in the
preparation of food, and waitresses continually brought steaming dishes
and put them on the tables. She thought of her mother's life, the life
led in that room, married to the man who was her own father and who no
doubt, but for the fact that circumstances had made him a man of wealth,
would have been satisfied to see his daughter led into just such another
life.
“Kate was right about men. They want something from women, but what do
they care what kind of lives we lead after they get what they want?” she
thought grimly.
The more to separate herself from the feasting, laughing crowd, Clara
tried to think out the details of her mother's life. “It was the life
of a beast,” she thought. Like herself, her mother had come to the
house with her husband on the night of her marriage. There was just such
another feast. The country was new then and the people for the most part
desperately poor. Still there was drinking. She had heard her father and
Jim Priest speak of the drinking bouts of their youth. The men came
as they had come now, and with them came women, women who had been
coarsened by the life they led. Pigs were killed and game brought from
the forests. The men drank, shouted, fought, and played practical jokes.
Clara wondered if any of the men and women in the room would dare go
upstairs into her sleeping room and tie knots in her night clothes. They
had done that when her mother came to the house as a bride. Then they
had all gone away and her father had taken his bride upstairs. He was
drunk, and her own husband Hugh was now getting drunk. Her mother had
submitted. Her life had been a story of submission. Kate Chanceller had
said it was so married women lived, and her mother's life had proven
the truth of the statement. In the farmhouse kitchen, where now three or
four cooks worked so busily, she had worked her life out alone. From the
kitchen she had gone directly upstairs and to bed with her husband. Once
a week on Saturday afternoons she went into town and stayed long enough
to buy supplies for another week of cooking. “She must have been kept
going until she dropped down dead,” Clara thought, and her mind taking
another turn, added, “and many others, both men and women, must have
been forced by circumstances to serve my father in the same blind way.
It was all done in order that prosperity and money with which to do
vulgar things might be his.”
Clara's mother had brought but one child into the world. She wondered
why. Then she wondered if she would become the mother of a child. Her
hands no longer gripped the arms of her chair, but lay on the table
before her. She looked at them and they were strong. She was herself
a strong woman. After the feast was over and the guests had gone away,
Hugh, given courage by the drinks he continued to consume, would come
upstairs to her. Some twist of her mind made her forget her husband,
and in fancy she felt herself about to be attacked by a strange man on
a dark road at the edge of a forest. The man had tried to take her
into his arms and kiss her and she had managed to get her hands on his
throat. Her hands lying on the table twitched convulsively.
In the big farmhouse dining-room and in the parlor where the second
table of guests sat, the wedding feast went on. Afterward when she
thought of it, Clara always remembered her wedding feast as a horsey
affair. Something in the natures of Tom Butterworth and Jim Priest, she
thought, expressed itself that night. The jokes that went up and down
the table were horsey, and Clara thought the women who sat at the tables
heavy and mare-like.
Jim did not come to the table to sit with the others, was in fact not
invited, but all evening he kept appearing and reappearing and had the
air of a master of ceremonies. Coming into the dining room he stood by
the door, scratching his head. Then he went out. It was as though he had
said to himself, “Well, it's all right, everything is going all right,
everything is lively, you see.” All his life Jim had been a drinker of
whisky and knew his limitations. His system as a drinking man had always
been quite simple. On Saturday afternoons, when the work about the barns
was done for the day and the other employees had gone away, he went
to sit on the steps of a corncrib with the bottle in his hand. In the
winter he went to sit by the kitchen fire in a little house below the
apple orchard where he and the other employees slept. He took a long
drink from the bottle and then holding it in his hand sat for a
time thinking of the events of his life. Whisky made him somewhat
sentimental. After one long drink he thought of his youth in a town in
Pennsylvania. He had been one of six children, all boys, and at an early
age his mother had died. Jim thought of her and then of his father. When
he had himself come west into Ohio, and later when he was a soldier in
the Civil War, he despised his father and reverenced the memory of his
mother. In the war he had found himself physically unable to stand up
before the enemy during a battle. When the report of guns was heard
and the other men of his company got grimly into line and went forward,
something happened to his legs and he wanted to run away. So great
was the desire in him that craftiness grew in his brain. Watching his
chance, he pretended to have been shot and fell to the ground, and when
the others had gone on crept away and hid himself. He found it was not
impossible to disappear altogether and reappear in another place. The
draft went into effect and many men not liking the notion of war were
willing to pay large sums to the men who would go in their places. Jim
went into the business of enlisting and deserting. All about him were
men talking of the necessity of saving the country, and for four years
he thought only of saving his own hide. Then suddenly the war was over
and he became a farm hand. As he worked all week in the fields, and in
the evening sometimes, as he lay in his bed and the moon came up, he
thought of his mother and of the nobility and sacrifice of her life. He
wished to be such another. After having two or three drinks out of the
bottle, he admired his father, who in the Pennsylvania town had borne
the reputation of being a liar and a rascal. After his mother's death
his father had managed to marry a widow who owned a farm. “The old
man was a slick one,” he said aloud, tipping up the bottle and
taking another long drink. “If I had stayed at home until I got more
understanding, the old man and I together might have done something.”
He finished the bottle and went away to sleep on the hay, or if it
were winter, threw himself into one of the bunks in the bunk house.
He dreamed of becoming one who went through life beating people out of
money, living by his wits, getting the best of every one.
Until the night of Clara's wedding Jim had never tasted wine, and as
it did not bring on a desire for sleep, he thought himself unaffected.
“It's like sweetened water,” he said, going into the darkness of the
barnyard and emptying another half bottle down his throat. “The stuff
has no kick. Drinking it is like drinking sweet cider.”
Jim got into a frolicsome mood and went through the crowded kitchen and
into the dining room where the guests were assembled. At the moment the
rather riotous laughter and story telling had ceased and everything
was quiet. He was worried. “Things aren't going well. Clara's party
is becoming a frost,” he thought resentfully. He began to dance a
heavy-footed jig on a little open place by the kitchen door and the
guests stopped talking to watch. They shouted and clapped their hands. A
thunder of applause arose. The guests who were seated in the parlor and
who could not see the performance got up and crowded into the doorway
that connected the two rooms. Jim became extraordinarily bold, and as
one of the young women Tom had hired as waitresses at that moment went
past bearing a large dish of food, he swung himself quickly about and
took her into his arms. The dish flew across the floor and broke against
a table leg and the young woman screamed. A farm dog that had found
its way into the kitchen rushed into the room and barked loudly. Henry
Heller's orchestra, concealed under a stairway that led to the upper
part of the house, began to play furiously. A strange animal fervor
swept over Jim. His legs flew rapidly about and his heavy feet made a
great clatter on the floor. The young woman in his arms screamed and
laughed. Jim closed his eyes and shouted. He felt that the wedding party
had until that moment been a failure and that he was transforming it
into a success. Rising to their feet the men shouted, clapped their
hands and beat with their fists on the table. When the orchestra came
to the end of the dance, Jim stood flushed and triumphant before the
guests, holding the woman in his arms. In spite of her struggles he held
her tightly against his breast and kissed her eyes, cheeks, and mouth.
Then releasing her he winked and made a gesture for silence. “On
a wedding night some one's got to have the nerve to do a little
love-making,” he said, looking pointedly toward the place where Hugh sat
with head bent and with his eyes staring at a glass of wine that sat at
his elbow.
* * * * *
It was past two o'clock when the feast came to an end. When the guests
began to depart, Clara stood for a moment alone and tried to get herself
in hand. Something inside her felt cold and old. If she had often
thought she wanted a man, and that life as a married woman would put an
end to her problems, she did not think so at that moment. “What I want
above everything else is a woman,” she thought. All the evening her mind
had been trying to clutch and hold the almost forgotten figure of her
mother, but it was too vague and shadowy. With her mother she had never
walked and talked late at night through streets of towns when the world
was asleep and when thoughts were born in herself. “After all,” she
thought, “Mother may also have belonged to all this.” She looked at the
people preparing to depart. Several men had gathered in a group by the
door. One of them told a story at which the others laughed loudly. The
women standing about had flushed and, Clara thought, coarse faces.
“They have gone into marriage like cattle,” she told herself. Her mind,
running out of the room, began to caress the memory of her one woman
friend, Kate Chanceller. Often on late spring afternoons as she and Kate
had walked together something very like love-making had happened between
them. They went along quietly and evening came on. Suddenly they stopped
in the street and Kate had put her arms about Clara's shoulders. For
a moment they stood thus close together and a strange gentle and yet
hungry look came into Kate's eyes. It only lasted a moment and when it
happened both women were somewhat embarrassed. Kate laughed and taking
hold of Clara's arm pulled her along the sidewalk. “Let's walk like the
devil,” she said, “come on, let's get up some speed.”
Clara put her hands to her eyes as though to shut out the scene in the
room. “If I could have been with Kate this evening I could have come to
a man believing in the possible sweetness of marriage,” she thought.