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THE NEW ENGLANDER
Her name was Elsie Leander and her girlhood was spent on her father's
farm in Vermont. For several generations the Leanders had all lived on
the same farm and had all married thin women, and so she was thin. The
farm lay in the shadow of a mountain and the soil was not very rich.
From the beginning and for several generations there had been a great
many sons and few daughters in the family. The sons had gone west or to
New York City and the daughters had stayed at home and thought such
thoughts as come to New England women who see the sons of their
fathers' neighbors slipping away, one by one, into the West.
Her father's house was a small white frame affair and when you went out
at the back door, past a small barn and chicken house, you got into a
path that ran up the side of a hill and into an orchard. The trees were
all old and gnarled. At the back of the orchard the hill dropped away
and bare rocks showed.
Inside the fence a large grey rock stuck high up out of the ground. As
Elsie sat with her back to the rock, with a mangled hillside at her
feet, she could see several large mountains, apparently but a short
distance away, and between herself and the mountains lay many tiny
fields surrounded by neatly built stone walls. Everywhere rocks
appeared. Large ones, too heavy to be moved, stuck out of the ground in
the centre of the fields. The fields were like cups filled with a green
liquid that turned grey in the fall and white in the winter. The
mountains, far off but apparently near at hand, were like giants ready
at any moment to reach out their hands and take the cups one by one and
drink off the green liquid. The large rocks in the fields were like the
thumbs of the giants.
Elsie had three brothers, born before her, but they had all gone away.
Two of them had gone to live with her uncle in the West and her oldest
brother had gone to New York City where he had married and prospered.
All through his youth and manhood her father had worked hard and had
lived a hard life, but his son in New York City had begun to send money
home, and after that things went better. He still worked every day
about the barn or in the fields but he did not worry about the future.
Elsie's mother did house work in the mornings and in the afternoons sat
in a rocking chair in her tiny living room and thought of her sons
while she crocheted table covers and tidies for the backs of chairs.
She was a silent woman, very thin and with very thin bony hands. She
did not ease herself into a rocking chair but sat down and got up
suddenly, and when she crocheted her back was as straight as the back
of a drill sergeant.
The mother rarely spoke to the daughter. Sometimes in the afternoons as
the younger woman went up the hillside to her place by the rock at the
back of the orchard, her father came out of the barn and stopped her.
He put a hand on her shoulder and asked her where she was going. "To
the rock," she said and her father laughed. His laughter was like the
creaking of a rusty barn door hinge and the hand he had laid on her
shoulders was thin like her own hands and like her mother's hands. The
father went into the barn shaking his head. "She's like her mother. She
is herself like a rock," he thought. At the head of the path that led
from the house to the orchard there was a great cluster of bayberry
bushes. The New England farmer came out of his barn to watch his
daughter go along the path, but she had disappeared behind the bushes.
He looked away past his house to the fields and to the mountains in the
distance. He also saw the green cup-like fields and the grim mountains.
There was an almost imperceptible tightening of the muscles of his half
worn-out old body. For a long time he stood in silence and then,
knowing from long experience the danger of having thoughts, he went
back into the barn and busied himself with the mending of an
agricultural tool that had been mended many times before.
The son of the Leanders who went to live in New York City was the
father of one son, a thin sensitive boy who looked like Elsie. The son
died when he was twenty-three years old and some years later the father
died and left his money to the old people on the New England farm. The
two Leanders who had gone west had lived there with their father's
brother, a farmer, until they grew into manhood. Then Will, the
younger, got a job on a railroad. He was killed one winter morning. It
was a cold snowy day and when the freight train he was in charge of as
conductor left the city of Des Moines, he started to run over the tops
of the cars. His feet slipped and he shot down into space. That was the
end of him.
Of the new generation there was only Elsie and her brother Tom, whom
she had never seen, left alive. Her father and mother talked of going
west to Tom for two years before they came to a decision. Then it took
another year to dispose of the farm and make preparations. During the
whole time Elsie did not think much about the change about to take
place in her life.
The trip west on the railroad train jolted Elsie out of herself. In
spite of her detached attitude toward life she became excited. Her
mother sat up very straight and stiff in the seat in the sleeping car
and her father walked up and down in the aisle. After a night when the
younger of the two women did not sleep but lay awake with red burning
cheeks and with her thin fingers incessantly picking at the bed clothes
in her berth while the train went through towns and cities, crawled up
the sides of hills and fell down into forest-clad valleys, she got up
and dressed to sit all day looking at a new kind of land. The train ran
for a day and through another sleepless night in a flat land where
every field was as large as a farm in her own country. Towns appeared
and disappeared in a continual procession. The whole land was so unlike
anything she had ever known that she began to feel unlike herself. In
the valley where she had been born and where she had lived all her days
everything had an air of finality. Nothing could be changed. The tiny
fields were chained to the earth. They were fixed in their places and
surrounded by aged stone walls. The fields like the mountains that
looked down at them were as unchangeable as the passing days. She had a
feeling they had always been so, would always be so.
Elsie sat like her mother, upright in the car seat and with a back like
the back of a drill sergeant. The train ran swiftly along through Ohio
and Indiana. Her thin hands like her mother's hands were crossed and
locked. One passing casually through the car might have thought both
women prisoners handcuffed and bound to their seats. Night came on and
she again got into her berth. Again she lay awake and her thin cheeks
became flushed, but she thought new thoughts. Her hands were no longer
gripped together and she did not pick at the bed clothes. Twice during
the night she stretched herself and yawned, a thing she had never in
her life done before. The train stopped at a town on the prairies, and
as there was something the matter with one of the wheels of the car in
which she lay the trainsmen came with flaming torches to tinker it.
There was a great pounding and shouting. When the train went on its way
she wanted to get out of her berth and run up and down in the aisle of
the car. The fancy had come to her that the men tinkering with the car
wheel were new men out of the new land who with strong hammers had
broken away the doors of her prison. They had destroyed forever the
programme she had made for her life.
Elsie was filled with joy at the thought that the train was still going
on into the West. She wanted to go on forever in a straight line into
the unknown. She fancied herself no longer on a train and imagined she
had become a winged thing flying through space. Her long years of
sitting alone by the rock on the New England farm had got her into the
habit of expressing her thoughts aloud. Her thin voice broke the
silence that lay over the sleeping car and her father and mother, both
also lying awake, sat up in their berth to listen.
Tom Leander, the only living male representative of the new generation
of Leanders, was a loosely built man of forty inclined to corpulency.
At twenty he had married the daughter of a neighboring farmer, and when
his wife inherited some money she and Tom moved into the town of Apple
Junction in Iowa where Tom opened a grocery. The venture prospered as
did Tom's matrimonial venture. When his brother died in New York City
and his father, mother, and sister decided to come west Tom was already
the father of a daughter and four sons.
On the prairies north of town and in the midst of a vast level stretch
of cornfields, there was a partly completed brick house that had
belonged to a rich farmer named Russell who had begun to build the
house intending to make it the most magnificent place in the county,
but when it was almost completed he had found himself without money and
heavily in debt. The farm, consisting of several hundred acres of corn
land, had been split into three farms and sold. No one had wanted the
huge unfinished brick house. For years it had stood vacant, its windows
staring out over the fields that had been planted almost up to the
door.
In buying the Russell house Tom was moved by two motives. He had a
notion that in New England the Leanders had been rather magnificent
people. His memory of his father's place in the Vermont valley was
shadowy, but in speaking of it to his wife he became very definite. "We
had good blood in us, we Leanders," he said, straightening his
shoulders. "We lived in a big house. We were important people."
Wanting his father and mother to feel at home in the new place, Tom had
also another motive. He was not a very energetic man and, although he
had done well enough as keeper of a grocery, his success was largely
due to the boundless energy of his wife. She did not pay much attention
to her household and her children, like little animals, had to take
care of themselves, but in any matter concerning the store her word was
law.
To have his father the owner of the Russell place Tom felt would
establish him as a man of consequence in the eyes of his neighbors. "I
can tell you what, they're used to a big house," he said to his wife.
"I tell you what, my people are used to living in style."
* * * * *
The exaltation that had come over Elsie on the train wore away in the
presence of the grey empty Iowa fields, but something of the effect of
it remained with her for months. In the big brick house life went on
much as it had in the tiny New England house where she had always
lived. The Leanders installed themselves in three or four rooms on the
ground floor. After a few weeks the furniture that had been shipped by
freight arrived and was hauled out from town in one of Tom's grocery
wagons. There were three or four acres of ground covered with great
piles of boards the unsuccessful farmer had intended to use in the
building of stables. Tom sent men to haul the boards away and Elsie's
father prepared to plant a garden. They had come west in April and as
soon as they were installed in the house ploughing and planting began
in the fields nearby. The habit of a lifetime returned to the daughter
of the house. In the new place there was no gnarled orchard surrounded
by a half-ruined stone fence. All of the fences in all of the fields
that stretched away out of sight to the north, south, east, and west
were made of wire and looked like spider webs against the blackness of
the ground when it had been freshly ploughed.
There was however the house itself. It was like an island rising out of
the sea. In an odd way the house, although it was less than ten years
old, was very old. Its unnecessary bigness represented an old impulse
in men. Elsie felt that. At the east side there was a door leading to a
stairway that ran into the upper part of the house that was kept
locked. Two or three stone steps led up to it. Elsie could sit on the
top step with her back against the door and gaze into the distance
without being disturbed. Almost at her feet began the fields that
seemed to go on and on forever. The fields were like the waters of a
sea. Men came to plough and plant. Giant horses moved in a procession
across the prairies. A young man who drove six horses came directly
toward her. She was fascinated. The breasts of the horses as they came
forward with bowed heads seemed like the breasts of giants. The soft
spring air that lay over the fields was also like a sea. The horses
were giants walking on the floor of a sea. With their breasts they
pushed the waters of the sea before them. They were pushing the waters
out of the basin of the sea. The young man who drove them also was a
giant.
* * * * *
Elsie pressed her body against the closed door at the top of the steps.
In the garden back of the house she could hear her father at work. He
was raking dry masses of weeds off the ground preparatory to spading it
for a family garden. He had always worked in a tiny confined place and
would do the same thing here. In this vast open place he would work
with small tools, doing little things with infinite care, raising
little vegetables. In the house her mother would crochet little tidies.
She herself would be small. She would press her body against the door
of the house, try to get herself out of sight. Only the feeling that
sometimes took possession of her, and that did not form itself into a
thought would be large.
The six horses turned at the fence and the outside horse got entangled
in the traces. The driver swore vigorously. Then he turned and started
at the pale New Englander and with another oath pulled the heads of the
horses about and drove away into the distance. The field in which he
was ploughing contained two hundred acres. Elsie did not wait for him
to return but went into the house and sat with folded arms in a room.
The house she thought was a ship floating in a sea on the floor of
which giants went up and down.
May came and then June. In the great fields work was always going on
and Elsie became somewhat used to the sight of the young man in the
field that came down to the steps. Sometimes when he drove his horses
down to the wire fence he smiled and nodded.
* * * * *
In the month of August, when it is very hot, the corn in Iowa fields
grows until the corn stalks resemble young trees. The corn fields
become forests. The time for the cultivating of the corn has passed and
weeds grow thick between the corn rows. The men with their giant horses
have gone away. Over the immense fields silence broods.
When the time of the laying-by of the crop came that first summer after
Elsie's arrival in the West her mind, partially awakened by the
strangeness of the railroad trip, awakened again. She did not feel like
a staid thin woman with a back like the back of a drill sergeant, but
like something new and as strange as the new land into which she had
come to live. For a time she did not know what was the matter. In the
field the corn had grown so high that she could not see into the
distance. The corn was like a wall and the little bare spot of land on
which her father's house stood was like a house built behind the walls
of a prison. For a time she was depressed, thinking that she had come
west into a wide open country, only to find herself locked up more
closely than ever.
An impulse came to her. She arose and going down three or four steps
seated herself almost on a level with the ground.
Immediately she got a sense of release. She could not see over the corn
but she could see under it. The corn had long wide leaves that met over
the rows. The rows became long tunnels running away into infinity. Out
of the black ground grew weeds that made a soft carpet of green. From
above light sifted down. The corn rows were mysteriously beautiful.
They were warm passageways running out into life. She got up from the
steps and, walking timidly to the wire fence that separated her from
the field, put her hand between the wires and took hold of one of the
corn stalks. For some reason after she had touched the strong young
stalk and had held it for a moment firmly in her hand she grew afraid.
Running quickly back to the step she sat down and covered her face with
her hands. Her body trembled. She tried to imagine herself crawling
through the fence and wandering along one of the passageways. The
thought of trying the experiment fascinated but at the same time
terrified. She got quickly up and went into the house.
* * * * *
One Saturday night in August Elsie found herself unable to sleep.
Thoughts, more definite than any she had ever known before, came into
her mind. It was a quiet hot night and her bed stood near a window. Her
room was the only one the Leanders occupied on the second floor of the
house. At midnight a little breeze came up from the south and when she
sat up in bed the floor of corn tassels lying below her line of sight
looked in the moonlight like the face of a sea just stirred by a gentle
breeze.
A murmuring began in the corn and murmuring thoughts and memories awoke
in her mind. The long wide succulent leaves had begun to dry in the
intense heat of the August days and as the wind stirred the corn they
rubbed against each other. A call, far away, as of a thousand voices
arose. She imagined the voices were like the voices of children. They
were not like her brother Tom's children, noisy boisterous little
animals, but something quite different, tiny little things with large
eyes and thin sensitive hands. One after another they crept into her
arms. She became so excited over the fancy that she sat up in bed and
taking a pillow into her arms held it against her breast. The figure of
her cousin, the pale sensitive young Leander who had lived with his
father in New York City and who had died at the age of twenty-three,
came into her mind. It was as though the young man had come suddenly
into the room. She dropped the pillow and sat waiting, intense,
expectant.
Young Harry Leander had come to visit his cousin on the New England
farm during the late summer of the year before he died. He had stayed
there for a month and almost every afternoon had gone with Elsie to sit
by the rock at the back of the orchard. One afternoon when they had
both been for a long time silent he began to talk. "I want to go live
in the West," he said. "I want to go live in the West. I want to grow
strong and be a man," he repeated. Tears came into his eyes.
They got up to return to the house, Elsie walking in silence beside the
young man. The moment marked a high spot in her life. A strange
trembling eagerness for something she had not realized in her
experience of life had taken possession of her. They went in silence
through the orchard but when they came to the bayberry bush her cousin
stopped in the path and turned to face her. "I want you to kiss me," he
said eagerly, stepping toward her.
A fluttering uncertainty had taken possession of Elsie and had been
transmitted to her cousin. After he had made the sudden and unexpected
demand and had stepped so close to her that his breath could be felt on
her cheek, his own cheeks became scarlet and his hand that had taken
her hand trembled. "Well, I wish I were strong. I only wish I were
strong," he said hesitatingly and turning walked away along the path
toward the house.
And in the strange new house, set like an island in its sea of corn,
Harry Leander's voice seemed to arise again above the fancied voices of
the children that had been coming out of the fields. Elsie got out of
bed and walked up and down in the dim light coming through the window.
Her body trembled violently. "I want you to kiss me," the voice said
again and to quiet it and to quiet also the answering voice in herself
she went to kneel by the bed and taking the pillow again into her arms
pressed it against her face.
* * * * *
Tom Leander came with his wife and family to visit his father and
mother on Sundays. The family appeared at about ten o'clock in the
morning. When the wagon turned out of the road that ran past the
Russell place Tom shouted. There was a field between the house and the
road and the wagon could not be seen as it came along the narrow way
through the corn. After Tom had shouted, his daughter Elizabeth, a tall
girl of sixteen, jumped out of the wagon. All five children came
tearing toward the house through the corn. A series of wild shouts
arose on the still morning air.
The groceryman had brought food from the store. When the horse had been
unhitched and put into a shed he and his wife began to carry packages
into the house. The four Leander boys, accompanied by their sister,
disappeared into the near-by fields. Three dogs that had trotted out
from town under the wagon accompanied the children. Two or three
children and occasionally a young man from a neighboring farm had come
to join in the fun. Elsie's sister-in-law dismissed them all with a
wave of her hand. With a wave of her hand she also brushed Elsie aside.
Fires were lighted and the house reeked with the smell of cooking.
Elsie went to sit on the step at the side of the house. The corn fields
that had been so quiet rang with shouts and with the barking of dogs.
Tom Leander's oldest child, Elizabeth, was like her mother, full of
energy. She was thin and tall like the women of her father's house but
very strong and alive. In secret she wanted to be a lady but when she
tried her brothers, led by her father and mother, made fun of her.
"Don't put on airs," they said. When she got into the country with no
one but her brothers and two or three neighboring farm boys she herself
became a boy. With the boys she went tearing through the fields,
following the dogs in pursuit of rabbits. Sometimes a young man came
with the children from a near-by farm. Then she did not know what to do
with herself. She wanted to walk demurely along the rows through the
corn but was afraid her brothers would laugh and in desperation outdid
the boys in roughness and noisiness. She screamed and shouted and
running wildly tore her dress on the wire fences as she scrambled over
in pursuit of the dogs. When a rabbit was caught and killed she rushed
in and tore it out of the grasp of the dogs. The blood of the little
dying animal dripped on her clothes. She swung it over her head and
shouted.
The farm hand who had worked all summer in the field within sight of
Elsie became enamoured of the young woman from town. When the
groceryman's family appeared on Sunday mornings he also appeared but
did not come to the house. When the boys and dogs came tearing through
the fields he joined them. He also was self-conscious and did not want
the boys to know the purpose of his coming and when he and Elizabeth
found themselves alone together he became embarrassed. For a moment
they walked together in silence. In a wide circle about them, in the
forest of the corn, ran the boys and dogs. The young man had something
he wanted to say, but when he tried to find words his tongue became
thick and his lips felt hot and dry. "Well," he began, "let's you and
me--"
Words failed him and Elizabeth turned and ran after her brothers and
for the rest of the day he could not manage to get her out of their
sight. When he went to join them she became the noisiest member of the
party. A frenzy of activity took possession of her. With hair hanging
down her back, with clothes torn and with cheeks and hands scratched
and bleeding she led her brothers in the endless wild pursuit of the
rabbits.
* * * * *
The Sunday in August that followed Elsie Leander's sleepless night was
hot and cloudy. In the morning she was half ill and as soon as the
visitors from town arrived she crept away to sit on the step at the
side of the house. The children ran away into the fields. An almost
overpowering desire to run with them, shouting and playing along the
corn rows took possession of her. She arose and went to the back of the
house. Her father was at work in the garden, pulling weeds from between
rows of vegetables. Inside the house she could hear her sister-in-law
moving about. On the front porch her brother Tom was asleep with his
mother beside him. Elsie went back to the step and then arose and went
to where the corn came down to the fence. She climbed awkwardly over
and went a little way along one of the rows. Putting out her hand she
touched the firm stalks and then, becoming afraid, dropped to her knees
on the carpet of weeds that covered the ground. For a long time she
stayed thus listening to the voices of the children in the distance.
An hour slipped away. Presently it was time for dinner and her sister-
in-law came to the back door and shouted. There was an answering whoop
from the distance and the children came running through the fields.
They climbed over the fence and ran shouting across her father's
garden. Elsie also arose. She was about to attempt to climb back over
the fence unobserved when she heard a rustling in the corn. Young
Elizabeth Leander appeared. Beside her walked the ploughman who but a
few months earlier had planted the corn in the field where Elsie now
stood. She could see the two people coming slowly along the rows. An
understanding had been established between them. The man reached
through between the corn stalks and touched the hand of the girl who
laughed awkwardly and running to the fence climbed quickly over. In her
hand she held the limp body of a rabbit the dogs had killed.
The farm hand went away and when Elizabeth had gone into the house
Elsie climbed over the fence. Her niece stood just within the kitchen
door holding the dead rabbit by one leg. The other leg had been torn
away by the dogs. At sight of the New England woman, who seemed to look
at her with hard unsympathetic eyes, she was ashamed and went quickly
into the house. She threw the rabbit upon a table in the parlor and
then ran out of the room. Its blood ran out on the delicate flowers of
a white crocheted table cover that had been made by Elsie's mother.
The Sunday dinner with all the living Leanders gathered about the table
was gone through in a heavy lumbering silence. When the dinner was over
and Tom and his wife had washed the dishes they went to sit with the
older people on the front porch. Presently they were both asleep. Elsie
returned to the step at the side of the house but when the desire to go
again into the cornfields came sweeping over her she got up and went
indoors.
The woman of thirty-five tip-toed about the big house like a frightened
child. The dead rabbit that lay on the table in the parlour had become
cold and stiff. Its blood had dried on the white table cover. She went
upstairs but did not go to her own room. A spirit of adventure had hold
of her. In the upper part of the house there were many rooms and in
some of them no glass had been put into the windows. The windows had
been boarded up and narrow streaks of light crept in through the cracks
between the boards.
Elsie tip-toed up the flight of stairs past the room in which she slept
and opening doors went into other rooms. Dust lay thick on the floors.
In the silence she could hear her brother snoring as he slept in the
chair on the front porch. From what seemed a far away place there came
the shrill cries of the children. The cries became soft. They were like
the cries of unborn children that had called to her out of the fields
on the night before.
Into her mind came the intense silent figure of her mother sitting on
the porch beside her son and waiting for the day to wear itself out
into night. The thought brought a lump into her throat. She wanted
something and did not know what it was. Her own mood frightened her. In
a windowless room at the back of the house one of the boards over a
window had been broken and a bird had flown in and become imprisoned.
The presence of the woman frightened the bird. It flew wildly about.
Its beating wings stirred up dust that danced in the air. Elsie stood
perfectly still, also frightened, not by the presence of the bird but
by the presence of life. Like the bird she was a prisoner. The thought
gripped her. She wanted to go outdoors where her niece Elizabeth walked
with the young ploughman through the corn, but was like the bird in the
room--a prisoner. She moved restlessly about. The bird flew back and
forth across the room. It alighted on the window sill near the place
where the board was broken away. She stared into the frightened eyes of
the bird that in turn stared into her eyes. Then the bird flew away,
out through the window, and Elsie turned and ran nervously downstairs
and out into the yard. She climbed over the wire fence and ran with
stooped shoulders along one of the tunnels.
Elsie ran into the vastness of the cornfields filled with but one
desire. She wanted to get out of her life and into some new and sweeter
life she felt must be hidden away somewhere in the fields. After she
had run a long way she came to a wire fence and crawled over. Her hair
became unloosed and fell down over her shoulders. Her cheeks became
flushed and for the moment she looked like a young girl. When she
climbed over the fence she tore a great hole in the front of her dress.
For a moment her tiny breasts were exposed and then her hand clutched
and held nervously the sides of the tear. In the distance she could
hear the voices of the boys and the barking of the dogs. A summer storm
had been threatening for days and now black clouds had begun to spread
themselves over the sky. As she ran nervously forward, stopping to
listen and then running on again, the dry corn blades brushed against
her shoulders and a fine shower of yellow dust from the corn tassels
fell on her hair. A continued crackling noise accompanied her progress.
The dust made a golden crown about her head. From the sky overhead a
low rumbling sound, like the growling of giant dogs, came to her ears.
The thought that having at last ventured into the corn she would never
escape became fixed in the mind of the running woman. Sharp pains shot
through her body. Presently she was compelled to stop and sit on the
ground. For a long time she sat with closed eyes. Her dress became
soiled. Little insects that live in the ground under the corn came out
of their holes and crawled over her legs.
Following some obscure impulse the tired woman threw herself on her
back and lay still with closed eyes. Her fright passed. It was warm and
close in the room-like tunnels. The pain in her side went away. She
opened her eyes and between the wide green corn blades could see
patches of a black threatening sky. She did not want to be alarmed and
so closed her eyes again. Her thin hand no longer gripped the tear in
her dress and her little breasts were exposed. They expanded and
contracted in spasmodic jerks. She threw her hands back over her head
and lay still.
It seemed to Elsie that hours passed as she lay thus, quiet and passive
under the corn. Deep within her there was a feeling that something was
about to happen, something that would lift her out of herself, that
would tear her away from her past and the past of her people. Her
thoughts were not definite. She lay still and waited as she had waited
for days and months by the rock at the back of the orchard on the
Vermont farm when she was a girl. A deep grumbling noise went on in the
sky overhead but the sky and everything she had ever known seemed very
far away, no part of herself.
After a long silence, when it seemed to her that she had gone out of
herself as in a dream, Elsie heard a man's voice calling. "Aho, aho,
aho," shouted the voice and after another period of silence there arose
answering voices and then the sound of bodies crashing through the corn
and the excited chatter of children. A dog came running along the row
where she lay and stood beside her. His cold nose touched her face and
she sat up. The dog ran away. The Leander boys passed. She could see
their bare legs flashing in and out across one of the tunnels. Her
brother had become alarmed by the rapid approach of the thunder storm
and wanted to get his family to town. His voice kept calling from the
house and the voices of the children answered from the fields.
Elsie sat on the ground with her hands pressed together. An odd feeling
of disappointment had possession of her. She arose and walked slowly
along in the general direction taken by the children. She came to a
fence and crawled over, tearing her dress in a new place. One of her
stockings had become unloosed and had slipped down over her shoe top.
The long sharp weeds had scratched her leg so that it was criss-crossed
with red lines, but she was not conscious of any pain.
The distraught woman followed the children until she came within sight
of her father's house and then stopped and again sat on the ground.
There was another loud crash of thunder and Tom Leander's voice called
again, this time half angrily. The name of the girl Elizabeth was
shouted in loud masculine tones that rolled and echoed like the thunder
along the aisles under the corn.
And then Elizabeth came into sight accompanied by the young ploughman.
They stopped near Elsie and the man took the girl into his arms. At the
sound of their approach Elsie had thrown herself face downward on the
ground and had twisted herself into a position where she could see
without being seen. When their lips met her tense hands grasped one of
the corn stalks. Her lips pressed themselves into the dust. When they
had gone on their way she raised her head. A dusty powder covered her
lips.
What seemed another long period of silence fell over the fields. The
murmuring voices of unborn children, her imagination had created in the
whispering fields, became a vast shout. The wind blew harder and
harder. The corn stalks were twisted and bent. Elizabeth went
thoughtfully out of the field and climbing the fence confronted her
father. "Where you been? What you been a doing?" he asked. "Don't you
think we got to get out of here?"
When Elizabeth went toward the house Elsie followed, creeping on her
hands and knees like a little animal, and when she had come within
sight of the fence surrounding the house she sat on the ground and put
her hands over her face. Something within herself was being twisted and
whirled about as the tops of the corn stalks were now being twisted and
whirled by the wind. She sat so that she did not look toward the house
and when she opened her eyes she could again see along the long
mysterious aisles.
Her brother with his wife and children went away. By turning her head
Elsie could see them driving at a trot out of the yard back of her
father's house. With the going of the younger woman the farm house in
the midst of the cornfield rocked by the winds seemed the most desolate
place in the world.
Her mother came out at the back door of the house. She ran to the steps
where she knew her daughter was in the habit of sitting and then in
alarm began to call. It did not occur to Elsie to answer. The voice of
the older woman did not seem to have anything to do with herself. It
was a thin voice and was quickly lost in the wind and in the crashing
sound that arose out of the fields. With her head turned toward the
house Elsie stared at her mother who ran wildly around the house and
then went indoors. The back door of the house went shut with a bang.
The storm that had been threatening broke with a roar. Broad sheets of
water swept over the cornfields. Sheets of water swept over the woman's
body. The storm that had for years been gathering in her also broke.
Sobs arose out of her throat. She abandoned herself to a storm of grief
that was only partially grief. Tears ran out of her eyes and made
little furrows through the dust on her face. In the lulls that
occasionally came in the storm she raised her head and heard, through
the tangled mass of wet hair that covered her ears and above the sound
of millions of rain-drops that alighted on the earthen floor inside the
house of the corn, the thin voices of her mother and father calling to
her out of the Leander house.
THE NEW ENGLANDER [Sherwood Anderson's short story]
_
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