One
Her eyes, Stella thought, were the colour of Spanish mahogany, but they lacked the lustre of organic fibre. The soul had gone out of the wood, had dissipated. What was life, she asked herself, that the soul could escape so. She had come into the valley to find life for herself. It is not difficult, she thought, to recall all the fine things which have been written about life. She could summon to witness Taylor’s rose, Browne’s flame, and Harvey’s micro cosmic sun, the palpitating radiance of the life-streak seen with the naked eye in the egg of a barnyard fowl. With inevitable logic her mind pursued the theme from generation to decay, for aboutdeath, too, fine things had been written. But death – short as the circuit between cradle and grave – presumed life; and the flame, however thin, must be lit before it can be blown out by the thousand unsuspected gusts noted by the compilers and annotators, and amassers of vital statistics within the universal bills of mortality.
Rose stood at the door with a jug of hot water.
You get this every morning, she said. You use cold at night.
Stella took the jug and placed it in the grey-white basin. The room was completely square. Beside the iron bedstead Rose’s husband had placed the trunk and the box of books Stella had brought with her to eke out the experience she hoped to have. At the end of the bed was a purple quilt come fresh from the hands of Eaton’s or Simpsons packers. On a wooden table stood a coal-oil lamp. Stella pulled the trunk across the six-inch floor boards to make a seat at the window. The window was a narrow oblong pane set vertically in a hinged frame which hooked up to the low ceiling. The trunk dragged under it provided a seat from which she could smell the air sharp with sage – no more. She could see nothing. The house was set under the hill and between the window and the gravel bank there was a space only a few feet wide – a narrow track – wide enough to trap a cow or to let the house dog slink through to the brow of the hill.
From beyond the wooden door came the noise of the family at breakfast – the clink of the frying-pan, the scraping of benches, the ring of spoon or fork on plate, an occasional grunt or the quick querulous voice of a child and the sudden silence following a half-audible hist.
You can have yours, Rose had said to Stella, when they get out.
No doubt Stella’s being there, despite the tenacity with which Sam, the husband, had fought for the privilege, had complicated the ordinary domestic routine. Sam had been quite frank. The privilege was a matter of board. Arriving at the station to fetch Stella the day before, he had made his announcement with toneless finality:
When Mockett said to me you haven’t got the room you got six children, I said it’s my turn and I’m not going to be fooled any longer. You had the last and you had the one before that and the girl that married old Buzzard’s foreman. I’ve had none since Mr. Jones. It’s my turn to have her – and here I am to get you. The kids are sleeping up and Mrs. Sam Flower, he mentioned the name defiantly, has got the room all fixed. I brought her down for the ride. Don’t believe what he tells you. He’s one of hers at the stopping house and she makes a fool of him and Bill and the whole lot of them. Come with me.
Are you the brother the school secretary wrote about, Stella asked, looking at the grey curls which reached tendrils from under the inner edge of the brim of his small black felt hat.
His thin features tightened.
If he wrote against me that’s me – if he said that you could stay at the stopping house that’s Bill and her and him too and the others.
It was Rose’s eyes that Stella had first noticed. Between the shocks of stiff brown hair, which branched from under the circle of an orange tam-o’-shanter, lay the eyes. Only the tamo’-shanter glowed in the sunlight, with mock vitality. Rose was standing at the edge of the dusty road waiting to be picked up. She wore a blue cotton dress, brown cotton stockings, and a pair of flat-heeled rubber-soled shoes.
It’s her, Sam said, as she climbed into the back seat of the car, pulling by the hand a child in a white organdy dress. The child’s face was hidden by its roughly cut hair. Its feet, cased in black patent leather slippers, shuffled on the step.
Stella had looked about as the car crossed the bridge, which was balanced like a plank across the river. The hill rose on the other side – brown banks, dust-greyed sagebrush, and yellowed grass on the sheering, off-rolling hills.
This here, said Sam, was the old stage road. Freight went up and down here, hauled by horses. Then they brought camels, they did.
He glared defiance.
Shod ’em, he went on. The beasts should of done in the dry heat. They should of done, but they didn’t. Couldn’t stand the stones and lonesomeness.
Mrs. Sam said nothing.
We ran the first cars here, he said. We ran them – me and my brother-in-law, him as was husband to my sister before she left him and began to live with him who lives now with Bill and her at the stopping house.
They were fine cars too, he said, but that’s not the point now. It’s trucks. I just get my truck and he writes to the government and takes the contract for hauling mail and other things away for themselves. Now they live fine at the House.
High up the road wound. Below on the left the river flowed between reddish banks – flat to the eye’s sheer vertical. To the right stretched sand and sagebrush and gilded lifeless grass. Around the corner, over the bank – this way and that – balls of withered Russian thistle crept in the warm breeze like giant spiders.
Tumble-weed – snorted Sam Flower, as he flattened out a ball with his wheel. Made by the Almighty with the prime and only purpose of scaring a finicky mare.
The rest had been silence. Up hill – the road crumbling away at the shoulder – they climbed, close into the bank, with a sudden jerk of the wheel as the red hood of a truck rounded the corner wheels close to the inner bank. All else tended to the river-like artery which twisted below as the land sloped off – fell off roughly – tumbled stones down. All things converged to it. Only the car climbed tenaciously up the slope, challenging God’s providence and the laws of gravitation.
Breakfast was obviously over. The door slammed, feet rounded the corner of the house. There was a tap on the door.
You can have yours now, Rose said. I didn’t get it, not knowing what you’d want.
Stella scanned the domestic debris – greasy plates streaked with egg, bits of scorched fried potato.
Toast, she said. All I ever have is toast.
Rose cut slices off the loaf. Stella could see only the browned crust. When she ate she knew that something had gone wrong with the working of the yeast. The bread had soured in the bottle. The bread was cold and grey and sour. Only the surface had been charred a little on the flat rack over the flame.
Every morning as Stella washed she heard the scraping in the kitchen. Every morning she ate her toast while Rose stood behind her at the stove fingering the handle of the granite coffee pot. Every morning when she had finished her breakfast Rose swept up the crumbs and threw them to the chickens and cut more bread to pack in pails for the lunches. Every day at noon the children unpacked their pails in the space behind the partition in the schoolhouse. They accepted the bread as they accepted what Stella taught them, with out comment.
The bread, Stella thought, was Rose’s peculiar emblem – the emblem of a failure which Rose’s sister-in-law Mamie Flower let no one forget.
——
Can the validity of this emblem – or of any other emblem – she wondered, be assessed. I see the hand, the compass, the dragon when the book falls open. The hand reaches over the ledge spilling one knows not what of essence or substance into the narrow cleft. Through Sassetta’s eyes or Edmund Spenser’s I see in the shadow of Limbo the red cross – and they see it because the light glances off and reflects from the fire which warms their shoulders as they work. I have always taken the compass as a thing to be held. Yet the hand falters measuring the fleeting body of flame.
Any day looking from Sam’s house on the hill, Stella could see the angled roof of the stopping house diagonally to the right against the downfalling drop of the land which she thought seemed to contract and fall into the narrow valley from the flat outreaching land above. Only with difficulty, she thought, can I raise my eyes. They focus inevitably on the stopping house – the inn at which, after the fashion of the country, one may stop for the payment of a fee – one may stop, she thought, if one is merely a traveller or a salesman with his commodity and not, in the nature of the now and here, more than a momentary commodity himself.
Over at the stopping house Rose’s sister-in-law would shake a knowing head. Arranging and rearranging the folds of black crepe to show a slim city-bred ankle, Mamie Flower measured Rose’s failure by her own success.
Mamie tells her story, Stella thought, with the abandoned fluency of the lady of quality in Smollett’s – or was it in Defoe’s tale.
——
Sam married one of the local girls, Mamie would say. A peculiar lot they were – she and those before ...
