Barren Ground

by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

She had crossed the threshold to the porch, when, wheeling abruptly, she went back into the hall and from the hall into her mother's chamber, where the family Bible lap open on the table and the big fly was still knocking against the ceiling. She had not known that flies lived so long! It seemed an eternity, not a few hours ago, when her mother had sat there reading the Psalms and the fly had buzzed in the stillness. The peaceful room, pervaded by the Sabbath lethargy, with the open Bible waiting for family prayers, and the battered old furniture arranged in changeless order, seemed to close over her like a trap. "I must do something, or this misery will never end," she thought again. But there was nothing that she could do. There would never be anything that she could do in her life. It was over. Everything was over, and she might live to be ninety. "And the child coming too." There also she could find no escape. "No matter what I do, I can change nothing." Something had caught her. Life had caught her. She could not get away, no matter how hard she struggled. A drop of blood fell on her fingers, and glancing into the mirror, she saw that she had bitten her lip until it bled, yet she had not felt it. Nothing like that, nothing on the outside of herself, could ever hurt her again. "If I could only do something," she said in a whisper, and walked from the chamber to the spare room, and from the spare room, which looked as if it were hiding something, out into the hall. Suddenly, like a person moving in delirium, she walked out of the house, and along the path between the pear orchard and the vegetable garden. The green afterglow had faded; but a sallow moon was riding high over the big pine, and gave light enough for her to see her way. Like a wet sheet the twilight folded about her, clinging to her arms and legs when she tried to shake herself free from it. She would have moonlight in the woods, and besides she had nothing to fear. A dry sob broke from her, hurting her throat. You had reached the worst, she realized, when you had nothing to fear.

She followed the path rapidly. By the pear orchard, by the big pine on the hill, by the tobacco field, through the pasture, and into the dark belt of woods. Here the smell of wet earth stifled her, and she lived over again the moment when she had waited there, listening, in the suspense which was more terrible than any certainty. "I didn't know what it was when I went through with it," she thought. "I didn't know what it was until afterwards." Memory, she felt, was gathering like an ulcer in her mind. If she could not let out the pain, the sore would burst from its own swelling. "If I don't do something, I shall die," she said aloud, standing there, on the edge of the woods, among the wet leaves and rotting mould. Then, swift as an inspiration, there came to her the knowledge of what she must do. She must find Jason. Yes, she must find Jason. This knowledge, which was as infallible as instinct, went no further than the imperative necessity of seeing him. Beyond this, the impulse gave way, like a bridge that breaks in the middle of a stream. It left her there, without prop, without direction, hanging over the black current of emptiness.

As she hurried on, a bough struck her so sharply that it bruised her cheek, but she did not feel it. With the act of decision her body had become so airy and transparent that she was no longer conscious of it as a drag on her spirit. Though she ought to have been tired, she felt instead amazingly strong and fresh, amazingly full of vitality. Only now and then, as she walked rapidly through the willows and over the log bridge, lights flickered and vanished and flickered again before her eyes. At first she thought that a million sparks glittered out there in the moist purple twilight; then she realized that they were not there at all but within her brain. And these lights, which flitted round her as she went on, illumined the blind impulse that directed her movements. It was as if she were harnessed to this impulse and driven by it toward some end of which she was ignorant, but which she would presently discern in the fog.

She moved quickly, with her gaze fixed straight in front of her. The dusk was gilded with fireflies, but she could not distinguish these vagrant insects from the roving lights in her brain. The earth underfoot gave out, when it was crushed, a strong, warm, vital odour. Very near and loud, there was the hoot of an owl, followed presently by another; but the cries seemed to be a part of the inner voice which was urging her on. Her feet slipped on the logs. She recovered herself and went on more quickly, more lightly, as if her body did not exist, or existed merely as a cloud. Now she could see the lamps glimmering in the lower windows of the house. There were lights in the hall, in the dining room, in the old doctor's retreat; but all the upstairs windows were dark except for the reflected rays of the moonbeams. Was the old man still crouching over his fire, she wondered, with his rat eyes watching out of a hole?

Around the house there were puddles of water and the piles of trash that she had seen in the afternoon. Like a fawn, she sped over them and stopped, unaware of her panting breath, with her eyes on the back door, which was open. She could see within the hall, where a kerosene lamp was fastened in a bracket near the staircase. The same heaps of bagging and boxes and empty bottles were scattered about; the same collection of rusty guns and broken fishing-poles. For the first time she thought clearly, while her gaze travelled over these ordinary objects, "Why did I come? What is the meaning of it? Why am I waiting out here in the night?" But there was no answer to her question. She could not remember why she had come, why she was standing there alone, with her eyes on the open door, watching. Vacancy was around her, was within her; she was drowning in vacancy. Looking away from the house, she saw that there was a light in the barn, and that the big musty place was deserted. The buggy, from which the horse had been taken, was standing near the door, and one of those formless thoughts which she could not distinguish from feeling told her that Jason would come out to put it under the shed. "If I wait here long enough, I shall see him." Though the words were spoken outside her brain, she knew that she must wait there all night if he did not come.

Stepping over the loosened boards of the threshold of the barn, she glanced about at the disorder, which was like the disorder of the house, only it seemed to her cleaner because it was less human. Wheat, corn, fodder. Farming implements. A reaping machine. Medicine for stock. A jumble of odds and ends that had been thrown out of a tool house. Against a barrel by the door there was the gun with which the old doctor had shot the hawk in the afternoon. Her hands moved over it caressingly, wonderingly. A good gun, not rusty, like everything else on the place. Jason's probably. Far away over the fields a voice was speaking, and the sound floated to her, thin and clear as distant chimes. "He never came to Christ till he had thirsted for blood." A strange way—but she knew now, she understood.

There was a noise at the house. A figure darkened the lamplight on the porch; she heard a familiar step; she saw a shadow approaching. It was Jason, she knew, and as he came toward her, she left the barn and went out into the moonlight to meet him. She felt calm now, fresh, strong, relentless; but the ulcer in her mind throbbed as if it were bursting. Yes, it was Jason. He was coming down the steps. He was coming along the path to the barn. In a minute he would see her standing there, another shadow in the moonlight. In a minute he would speak to her.

Suddenly, while she stood there in silence, the gun went off in her hands. She saw the flash; she heard the sound, as if the discharge were miles away; she smelt the powder. The next instant she felt the tremor of the shock as the weapon, recoiled in her hands; and she thought quietly and steadily, "I tried to do it. I wanted to do it."

"Dorinda," he called out, while the smoke drifted past him, and she saw his face go as white as paper in the dimness.

Then, as swiftly as it had come, her resolution went out of her. The gun slipped from her hands to the ground, and lay there in the mud at her feet. Her will, with all its throbbing violence, urged her to shoot him and end the pain in her mind. But something stronger than her conscious will, stronger than her agony, stronger than her hate, held her motionless. Every nerve in her body, every drop of her blood, hated him; yet because of this nameless force within the chaos of her being, she could not compel her muscles to stoop and pick up the gun at her feet. Like a dream, like a fantasy of delirium, her resolution vanished, and she knew that it would not return. "Why am I here? What is the meaning of it all?" she asked wildly of the emptiness within her soul.