Now in November by Josephine W. Johnson

Author:Josephine W. Johnson [Johnson, Josephine W.; Hoffman, Nancy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781558617308
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY

5

BY JULY half of the corn was dead and flapped in the fields like brittle paper. The pastures burned to a cinder. I stumbled once in the woods and the ash of dry leaves flew up like a dust. Milk shriveled up in the cows. Prices went up, we heard again, but Dad got no more for his milk and got less for the cows he sold, since nearly all other farmers were selling off. The creeks were dry rock-beds then, hot stones that sent up a quiver in the air. The ponds were holes cracked open and glazed with a drying mud. I kept hearing the calves bawl all the time, hot and thirsty in the pastures, but could only water them in the evenings. We had to haul from a pond three miles away, and the horses got sores, even with rest when we borrowed Ramsey’s mules. The heat was like a hand on the face all day and night. When everything was finally dead, I thought that relief from hope would come, but hope’s an obsession that never dies.—Perhaps the ponds will fill up again . . . the fall pastures might come back with rain . . . the cistern get deep again. . . . There was still the awful torture of hope that would die only with life.

Merle alone didn’t seem to mind the heat. She worked out in the fields with Grant and Dad, and was burned deep to a kind of smouldering brown. I noticed she grew more quiet in those days, not from the thing that was wasting Kerrin, draining her like black tallow: but something had started to worry her out of mildness. A sort of fear and responsibility. She tried to avoid Grant, and talked to him with a queer mixture of hesitancy and frankness. I pitied Grant and wondered if he was learning, as I had, the numbness of patience made possible only by blindly shoving away all doubt. He never complained, and sometimes I wished that he would say more. Shout or curse. His silence seemed like a wall against some rising flood.

Because I was quiet and dull I noticed Grant more than the others did, and sometimes even in the middle of talking he would seem years away from us and gone into himself. He was always kind; joked with us and praised the food, and asked sometimes for a special thing—for rice-balls or fritters with gravy. But even living day after day with him as we did and having to share the most trivial things, he seemed remote and grave, and there was a dignity about him that I loved.

It came on me suddenly once, with no reason for knowing, but with a certainty nothing could shake or change, that neither Mother nor Grant looked up to or envied any man. It was not a self-pride or a feeling of being different.—Not that at all. But a sort of faith in the dignity of the human spirit.

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