“No, not Betty Hawthorne. No. A sprig of hawthorn flower in the spring from the bushes at the top of the pasture, or a handful of bright red haws in the fall. I’ll string a string of beads out of them, or I’ll eat the little haw-apples. A handful of haws.”
“Betty Hawthorne, I aim to give you, if you’ll be so good as to take her. The finest cow I ever owned, and the prettiest. Sister to Princess, full sister, and half-sister to Queen. She’s taken three premiums at the state fair and not yet come to her prime. If you’ll be so good as to take her.”
She reheard the argument, their voices falling together, one over the other or waiting for a reply, one voice for a moment stilled but answering in turn with swifter fervor. “Whenever I touch you,” his voice making the saying, “I have to take a deeper breath to accommodate the new life that’s grown in me.” He had marks—what kind of marks? she questioned—beside his mouth. They were deep marks, put there by a woman, or perhaps they had been put there by the cows in their failures to fulfil the promises he devised for them.
Then she remembered hell. A clear sharp memory, acutely realized, the more acutely realized in that it fell in this moment of pleasure. Self appeared, saturated with memory-realization, herself subtracted from the earth and elevated to a pinnacle of searching, her body hungering, seeing itself slipping into decay. All the disconnections operating, everything was lost then but Frank. Frank in her hands and her fingers, her shoulders, her name, her sight, her sleep. Pure and excruciating distress shook her as if it were a chill and she called to her grandfather, Anthony Bell, but when she was more quiet again, the memory receding, she called in mind the newer name.
She heard the noises of the night, the treefrogs and crickets, the frogs at the wet place beyond the milk house. The frogs set themselves against the night as if to saw a hole into the dark, but when they were done there was a season of quiet. The night was warm and the people indoors slept noisily, their breathing and their sighs in sleep a protest against the heat. She heard them faintly as they moved or threshed at their beds or sucked inward at the hot close air. Outside the purity of the night spread over the cut fields and the cows were laid down on the open pasture-top near the ragged tree. Steps came off the farther slope, man’s steps, sublimated and hollowed by the distance, feet walking through the grass, about the barns, off to the farther end of the pasture. They were lost then and denied as being delusion, an impossible. The night was warm and all but herself were asleep, drugged by the heat indoors. She saw them laid out to sleep or crumpled into relaxed postures, in their beds, up and down the countryside, from farm to farm, abstracted, a man asleep. Man lies down to rest, but the cows rest half kneeling, their crumpled forefeet ready to arise. She saw Caleb Burns asleep.
The leaves of the poplar tree lifted and turned, swayed outward and all quivered together, holding the night coolness. The steps returned to the pasture, going unevenly and stopping, going again, restless. They went across the hollow place and came back again toward the rise where the cows lay. They walked among the sleeping cows, but these did not stir for it was a tread they knew.
THE END
