The Face of the Fields

by Dallas Lore Sharp

The toad seems to feel it all, but feels it whole, not analyzed and itemized as a memory. Here in the hickory for four years (for seven, I am quite sure) he lived, single and alone. He would go down to the meadow when the toads gathered there to lay their eggs, but back he would come, without mate or companion, to his tree. Stronger than love of kind, than love of mate, constant and dominant in his slow cold heart is his instinct for home.

If I go down to the orchard and bring up from the apple tree another toad to dwell in the hole of the hickory, I shall fail. He might remain for the day, but not throughout the night, for with the gathering twilight there steals upon him an irresistible longing, the Heimweh which he shares with me; and guided by it, as the bee and the pigeon and the dog are guided, he makes his sure way back to the orchard home.

Would he go back beyond the orchard, over the road, over the wide meadow, over to the Baldwin tree, half a mile away, if I brought him from there? We shall see. During the coming summer I shall mark him in some manner, and bringing him here to the hickory, I shall then watch the old apple tree yonder. It will be a hard, perilous journey. But his longing will not let him rest; and guided by his mysterious sense of direction—for this one place—he will arrive, I am sure, or he will die on the way.

Yet I could wish there were another tree here, besides the apple, and another toad. Suppose he never gets back? Only one toad less? A great deal more than that. Here in the old Baldwin he has made his home for I don’t know how long, hunting over its world of branches in the summer, sleeping down in its deep holes during the winter—down under the chips and punk and castings, beneath the nest of the owls, it may be; for my toad in the hickory always buried himself so, down in the débris at the bottom of the hole, where, in a kind of cold storage, he preserved himself until thawed out by the spring. I never pass the old apple in the summer but that I stop to pay my respects to the toad; nor in the winter that I do not pause and think of him asleep in there. He is no mere toad any more. He has passed into a genius loci, the Guardian Spirit of the tree, warring in the green leaf against worm and grub and slug, and in the dry leaf hiding himself, a heart of life, within the tree’s thin ribs, as if to save the old shell to another summer.

A toad is a toad, and if he never got back to the tree there would be one toad less, nothing more. If anything more, then it is on paper, and it is cant, not toad at all. And so, I suppose, stones are stones, trees trees, brooks brooks—not books and tongues and sermons at all—except on paper and as cant. Surely there are many things in writing that never had any other, any real existence, especially in writing that deals with the out-of-doors. One should write carefully about one’s toad; fearfully, indeed, when that toad becomes one’s teacher; for teacher my toad in the old Baldwin has many a time been.

Often in the summer dusk I have gone over to sit at his feet and learn some of the things my college professors could not teach me. I have not yet taken my higher degrees. I was graduated A. B. from college. It is A. B. C. that I am working toward here at the old apple tree with the toad.

Seating myself comfortably at the foot of the tree, I wait; the toad comes forth to the edge of his hole above me, settles himself comfortably, and waits. And the lesson begins. The quiet of the summer evening steals out with the wood-shadows and softly covers the fields. We do not stir. An hour passes. We do not stir. Not to stir is the lesson—one of the majors in this graduate course with the toad.

The dusk thickens. The grasshoppers begin to strum; the owl slips out and drifts away; a whippoorwill drops on the bare knoll near me, clucks and shouts and shouts again, his rapid repetition a thousand times repeated by the voices that call to one another down the long empty aisles of the swamp; a big moth whirs about my head and is gone; a bat flits squeaking past; a firefly blazes, but is blotted out by the darkness, only to blaze again, and again be blotted, and so passes, his tiny lantern flashing into a night that seems the darker for the quick, unsteady glow.

We do not stir. It is a hard lesson. By all my other teachers I had been taught every manner of stirring, and this unwonted exercise of being still takes me where my body is weakest, and it puts me painfully out of breath in my soul. “Wisdom is the principal thing,” my other teachers would repeat, “therefore get wisdom, but keep exceedingly busy all the time. Step lively. Life is short. There are only twenty-four hours to the day. The Devil finds mischief for idle hands to do. Let us then be up and doing”—all of this at random from one of their lectures on “The Simple Life, or the Pace that Kills.”