Peace, p.11
Peace, page 11
“Now, Prince, it hath reached my ears that in the fullness of time the years all were gone past, and the dust of their camels had left ben Yahya everywhere gray, so that he stood as old men stand, and coughed much, and was even as him for whom the poet speaks when he sayeth:
‘Time gars me tremble Ah, how sore the baulk!
While Time in pride of strength doth ever stalk:
Time was I walked nor ever felt I tired,
Now am I tired albe I never walk!’
“Then upon the day when the thirty years were past, ben Yahya made suit to the marid, saying: ‘O Master, thou knowest I have served thee these thirty years, and now by thy word I am free, and am to have the maid.’
“Then the marid snatched him up, and with him flew over seas perilous and deserts dangerous too many to count, and at last came to a land of great mountains, all of marble and jasper and lapis lazuli, with lions about their feet, and black apes upon their slopes, and snow upon their summits; and in the midst of these there abode a great metropolis, and at its gate he set ben Yahya upright, slapped him, and said: ‘Thy love is within, and by Allah thou art free of me and I of thee.’ Then said ben Yahya: ‘What is the name of this place? For I find myself in foreign parts wherein my feet have never trod.’ And the marid replied, ‘It is called the Haunted City,’ then vanished he like smoke.”
And Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day and ceased to say her permitted say,
A raindrop struck my face, and then another and another, and lightning cracked the sky just ahead of the car. I beat upon the flat glass of the rear window until Mr. Macafee stopped and allowed me to sit—already somewhat damped—in the narrow space between my aunt Olivia and himself. I remember that it was just as the Studebaker started to move forward again that the rain began in earnest, furious waves of water driven horizontally by the storm until they hammered the windshield like hail. Mr. Macafee said to my aunt, “We’ll have to try to get there before the road gets soft—we could be stuck out here.”
Several times the Studebaker’s engine seemed to hesitate and almost to die as water drove under the hood. Each time my aunt would grasp my arm tightly; and Mr. Macafee, shaking his head, would say, “Don’t worry—the rain’s shorting out the spark plugs, but the block’s hot and it will dry us out again.”
Suddenly my aunt threw out her arm (impelled by what magic I have never known) and shouted, “Here! Here!”
“Where?” Mr. Macafee asked, then realized, as I did, that she was pointing toward a gate in a wire fence that ran alongside the road. Two very narrow ruts led away from it, into the gray rain. Mr. Macafee twisted the steering wheel sharply and said, “I hope this is really it; we could get struck in there, Vi.”
My aunt, who had regained all her composure, said confidently, “Oh, we could always make a run for the house, Jimmy.”
“If there is a house.”
The rain slacked a bit and we saw it, a massive brick-and-fieldstone farmhouse whose solid masonry walls had probably been standing since before the Civil War. Beside the front door a white June rosebush as big as a laurel still displayed the year’s last three blossoms, now being flailed to ruin by the rain; under the spreading, thorny gray-green branches a lonely hen sheltered herself; there was no porch but the bush, and only a single high stone step, to which Mr. Macafee drove as close as he could before tooting the horn. I could see a kerosene lamp burning in the parlor window. Mr. Macafee tooted again, and as he did so the door opened; a woman in a long, old-fashioned calico dress stood there, with a little girl behind her who watched us from the shelter, as it seemed, of her mother’s skirts. The woman made a gesture I did not understand and disappeared into the house, followed by the little girl, who had pigtails. My aunt Olivia said, “She’s gone to get an umbrella—we don’t need that, and she’ll get wet. Why don’t you make a run for it, Jimmy?”
Mr. Macafee opened the door and dashed out. I followed him, and in the three jumps it took me to reach the door got as wet as if I had fallen into the river. “Get out of Vi’s way,” Mr. Macafee said, and drew me aside. My aunt, of course, was wet, too, and we were all three standing in the doorway laughing about it when the woman in calico and the little girl returned with an umbrella like a black bird, and a huge old slicker of the kind favored by farmers.
“I’m Em Lorn,” the woman said. “I suppose you’re Eleanor’s friend Olivia Weer?”
My aunt acknowledged that she was, and introduced Mr. Macafee and me.
“Well, I’m glad you brought the boy,” the woman in calico said. “Those roads won’t be fit for a car before tomorrow afternoon earliest; you’ll have to stay the night with us, and you’d be troubled to think of him home alone. Where’d you say his mother and father was?”
“In Europe,” my aunt said. “In Italy now, I suppose, if they’ve stuck to their itinerary—I haven’t had a card from them, though, since Paris.”
“I’ve never been there. You know, we’re a real traveled family, and I’ve heard about all those places for so long I think I’ve been to them until I stop for a minute and remember I haven’t. I’d like to go someday and so would Carl. He’s been trying to get somebody to put some money behind the work of God so he could be a missionary in foreign lands, but so far we haven’t found anybody that would do it.”
My aunt said, “I should think you’d hate to leave this lovely farm,” and the woman answered, “Well, I suppose anybody always hates to leave home, but I guess fifty years from now it’s going to look just about like it does now, and we’ve seen it.” She gestured toward the back of the house (reached by a dark and narrow hallway). “It’s not polite to hustle your company into the kitchen, but the cookstove’s going there and you can dry out a little. Margie, did you put the kettle on like I told you?”
The girl did not reply—she was already skipping down the hall ahead of us—and I suddenly realized, with that shock which children feel when they gain some insight into feelings other than their own, that our coming—an automobile—strangers —my aunt in her beautiful clothes—even myself, a new playmate—were for this little girl a fearsome and yet thrilling experience.
“There’s doughnuts,” Mrs. Lorn said. “I made doughnuts today after church.”
I could smell them, the fresh, spicy odor fighting the musty air of the hall. I was wet, and already very much aware that the Lorn farmhouse (like my maternal grandfather’s house, which I had already, until then, nearly forgotten) lacked the cellar-ruling octopus of a coal furnace my father had installed in my grandmother’s house when I was almost too young to remember.
“And we can have tea,” Mrs. Lorn was saying behind me. “Us Murchisons picked up the tea habit in China and never let it go—that’s what my mother used to say. I’m a Murchison on my mother’s side and my father’s both; they was second cousins and could marry according to the rule. Look at this picture.” (I sensed that she had halted my aunt and Mr. Macafee, and I stopped, too, looking back to see why.) “This is the oldest Cardiff Brethren church that ever was in China—that’s a store on the other side of it with the card with the Chinese writing in the window. That store used to sell opium, is what my grandmother used to tell. My grandfather—Eli Murchison was his name—was the first pastor of that church and established it. He’s not in the picture, because he took it. I was born and raised in the Cardiff Brethren myself, but I go to the Approved Methodists now, because of Carl’s ministry there; but they aren’t generous about sending out them that would do God’s work among the heathen like the Cardiff Brethren are.”
My aunt Olivia said, “It’s a lovely Chinese street scene—look at the peddler with his cart, Jimmy; I’ll bet that’s ginseng root. And the old woman.”
The small girl was beckoning me from the kitchen; I left the adults and joined her in front of a huge cast-iron range. “There’s buttermilk,” she said, “if you don’t want tea.” It was the first time I had heard her speak, and I was suprised to find that she did not sound shy. Her hair was nearly as dark as my aunt Olivia’s, but her face was very pale. I had never been permitted to drink tea at home, but I had it regularly since coming to stay with my aunt, so I was able to say, “No, tea is all right,” with considerable sophistication, and even to add, “I like a lot of sugar in mine.”
“There’s white sugar for company,” the girl said. “But we use tree sugar.”
I told her I liked tree sugar better.
“I guess I ought to go ahead and set the tea to steeping, then. They’re going to talk out there a long time.” I nodded, and the girl, quite gracefully, and as matter-of-factly as a matron fetching an ashtray from the mantel, climbed upon her mother’s kitchen table to lift down a squat Chinese teapot from a high shelf. “We don’t use a tea ball,” she said. “Papa brought one from town once and mother said it spoiled the flavor and threw it out. It was real copper, too.” She spooned black tea into the pot and added boiling water from the kettle on the range. “Now it’ll be ready when they come. Wait a minute and I’ll get the cups.”
The pot, I noticed, was painted with hundreds of tiny faces done in orange and black; I was certain my aunt would be attracted to it, and studied it with interest, ready to call her attention to it as soon as she entered the room, so as to be able to claim exclusively that glory which is the just property of a discoverer. “It doesn’t go with the cups,” the girl said, “it’s real old. My name’s Margie.”
I mumbled that my name was Den, and pointed to one of the faces. “This one’s smiling.”
“It was all white when it was first made,” the girl said, “and whenever anybody that owns it dies their face goes onto it. My aunt Sarah had it before my mother—want to see her?”
Of course I said I did, and she indicated a tiny, rather grim-looking (and, I thought, also rather Oriental) face near the tip of the spout. “It was all white to begin with, and the first ones were around the little leg part—see? Those are the oldest. Then they came here around the main part, and now the room is almost used up; when it’s all gone, the pot will break.”
From the doorway my aunt Olivia said, “And this is your kitchen, Mrs. Lorn! Why, this is delightful—I love a country kitchen, I always have. I’ll bet that you have shelves and shelves of preserves and home pickles hidden away somewhere.”
“We don’t gamble in the Approved Methodists,” Mrs. Lorn said, smiling, “or in the Cardiff Brethren either—which is handy for me, because you’d win. I’ll give you some of my home-bottled corn relish at supper. Do you like corn relish?”
Mr. Macafee exclaimed, “I love it!” He perhaps felt my aunt was ingratiating herself too successfully with Mrs. Lorn, and wanted to catch up.
Mrs. Lorn turned her smile toward him. “You know,” she said, “it’s real funny having you in my house like this, Mr. Macafee. I shop at your store—we have for years, and Carl and I go into town about every month except just after Christmas, when it’s usually real bad weather—and I see you walking around in there and you’ve always got that flower in your coat just like now.”
“I remember you, too, Mrs. Lorn,” Mr. Macafee said. “It took me awhile to place you and your husband after Miss Weer mentioned your name, but we keep track of our good customers. We sold you folks a Maytag washer two years ago—I trust it’s working out all right?”
“I have to get Carl to start the engine for me,” Mrs. Lorn said, “but it don’t never give trouble and it’s a sight easier than using the board was, believe me.
“Margaret, is that tea steeped yet?”
“They’re wonderful for farm families,” Mr. Macafee told my aunt Olivia. “I wish someone would make a gas engine for an automobile that would run as well as the ones they put in those washing machines.”
My aunt said, “They would, Jimmy, if you sold cars.”
“Here, Miss Weer, let me give you some tea. Margie, get down the good sugar. I’m going to have to apologize to you folks if you’re expecting a big supper; dinner’s our main meal, and I set the table—Sundays—soon as we’re back from church. Naturally it takes us longer there than some people because Carl has to shake everybody by the hand and talk and then lock up when they’re all gone. When we get home, he goes out for a minute to look after the stock, and then we eat.”
“I have only a very light meal in the evening, Mrs. Lorn, and Jimmy will just have to suffer. But I hope your husband isn’t caught out in this rain.”
“Oh, Carl’ll make himself comfortable wherever he is—he was going down to the south pasture; there’s a curing shed close by there for the tobacco, and I suppose that’s where he fetched up. We don’t either of us smoke—the church is against it—but there isn’t anything that says you can’t grow it, though it’s hard on the land.”
I asked if I might have a doughnut, and found they possessed a deliciously hard and greasy crust. Under the table Margie handed me a small, gritty, sticky lump I soon managed to smuggle into my tea, which rendered it ambrosial.
“If it’s all the same to you folks, though,” Mrs. Lorn was saying, “I’d like to hold up eating a bit—if this rain ever lets up Carl’ll come in, and he may do it even if it don’t. Do you like those doughnuts, child?”
I nodded vigorously, and she added, “I put bee honey in them.”
My aunt said, “We’ve heard so much about this wonderful Chinese egg you own, Mrs. Lorn. Would it be possible—”
The woman in calico waved the suggestion away with an impatient gesture. “Not before you’ve finished your tea and got dry. Now, you’ve waited all your life up to this minute to see that thing, and you can wait another five minutes; I don’t know what all you’ve been told, but it’s not that much.”
“But I think Mr. Macafee would like it—I mean, like to see it. Wouldn’t you, Jimmy?”
“From the descriptions it must be fascinating,” Mr. Macafee said. He had gotten a doughnut, too, and seemed to be hesitating over whether or not to dip it into his tea. “That sort of thing is —well, you know, Mrs.- Lorn, more a woman’s business than a man’s; but I’m very interested in it.”
“Heaven help us, I used to play with it when I was a child. Of course I had to be careful—Mother made me set in the middle of the bed to look at it. But you know what those old beds was: so high you had to put foot to a stool to get up on them, and then all lumps and slopes. How old are you, Miss Weer?”
“Twenty-six,” my aunt said after a barely perceptible hesitation. “But can’t we be a little less formal? Call me Vi.”
“You know, you do have the sweetest smile, Vi,” Mrs. Lorn told her with an embarrassed laugh. “And I confess you’re the prettiest thing altogether—no wonder Mr. Macafee here’s sweet on you. I’m thirty-five myself and proud of it; I was twenty-six already when Margie was born; she’s my only chick-nor-child. She had a brother—Samuel, we called him—that never lived to christening. He’d be fourteen and a rising young man now if the Lord had willed it so. There was a time when Carl and I thought we saw the Lord’s purpose in Samuel’s dying; they don’t like to send couples that has children to the missions much; but we didn’t get to go then anyway, and then Margie come along, so that wasn’t it at all.”
Margaret said, “I’m sorry, Momma.”
“Didn’t you hear me say we didn’t go even when you wasn’t born? If the Lord wills us to go, we’ll go.”
“You’d like to go to China, of course,” my aunt said, leaning forward in her eagerness. “I’ve wanted to for years, but travel is so difficult for a single woman.”
Mrs. Lorn shook her head. “The South Seas is what I’d like,” she said, “but Carl, he wants Africa. We talked about it all one night—must have been eleven o’clock before we went to bed— and what we decided was we’d put in for everything, and whatever they give us we’d go to unless it was Eskimos.”
“What about you, Jimmy?” my aunt said suddenly. “Have you ever thought of where you’d like to go if you were a missionary? I confess I hadn’t, but I find it an easy question now that I have. I can picture myself aboard a junk on the Yellow River, letting the sailors teach me mah-jongg on the back of a big Bible.”
From the parlor a clock struck, and everyone fell silent, counting strokes that were nearly inaudible against the roar of the rain outside. Six. “Well, it ain’t letting up,” Mrs. Lorn said, “and I don’t guess Carl’ll come home in this, and the children ought to eat—something besides doughnuts, anyway. If you folks are about dried off now, I’ll get some supper out for us, and if Carl’s not here time we set down, he’ll have to take potluck.”
“You weren’t planning to have supper in your dining room, were you, Em?” my aunt asked, having divined more from some motion of our hostess’s eyes than I ever could. “You don’t mind if I call you Em—I feel we’re such old friends already.”
“Well, you are company,” Mrs. Lorn said weakly.
I shivered (and no doubt Mr. Macafee did, too) at the thought of that icy, clammy “company” dining room.
“We’d much prefer to eat here, by the stove—and it would be so much handier for you.”
And so we did. As Mrs. Lorn was setting the table, I saw my aunt—and Mr. Macafee as well—cast several longing glances toward the parlor; but both seemed to feel it would be impolite for them to suggest again (at least before the meal was over) that the Chinese egg be brought in. The tension, the desire to see what was so close and yet could not be named, affected them in different ways, and I have thought since that this same emotion—and perhaps even the response the individual makes to it, its visible manifestations—is more common than we suppose, as when, particularly before marriage, or carnal knowledge, or indeed intimacy of any sort, we wish to see and touch and even to smell the body of a woman to whom we are attracted, someone now near us, aware of us, perhaps even attracted to us, but whose reality is hidden from us by clothing and the iron conventions that govern us as long as other people are present—and even when they are absent, as long as their intrusion is, or at least is feared to be, imminent.
