*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 79829 ***




                               Emptiness


                               War Story

                             Helen R. Hull

            The Touchstone, vol. 4, Dec. 1918, pp. 209-211.




Mary stood in the empty kitchen, listening. From the upper meadow came
the clicking of the hay rake, fainter than the talk of hens outside the
door. Ben was trying to get in all the hay. This clear, still day was a
weather breeder. She should go back to the pasture for another pail of
berries while the bushes were dry. She dragged a pan toward her and
poured out her pailful. The slate-blue berries moved queerly before her
eyes; she had stopped too long in the sun. David had always helped her
rake the berries. His eyes were that color—blue under gray.

The empty pail clattered to the floor. She listened again to the silence
swallowing the clatter. Some day she had to go upstairs and put that
room to rights.

She crossed the kitchen with slow movements of her tall, bent body; her
feet shuffled on the narrow stairs. She laid her fingers on the door at
the right of the stairs and after a moment thrust it open. The sun
glared on the sloping, whitewashed ceiling; warm, close air swirled
about her. She sat down on the edge of the bed, breathing thickly.

The room was just as David had left it, everything just the same except
those dead moths in the corners of the closed window. Two weeks this
morning, and she hadn’t dared open that door. Two weeks at seven in the
morning of this very day. When she caught her breath she would pick
things up a bit.

The tumbled bedclothes kept the mold of his long, thin body; in the dent
of the pillow lay his dark head, face hidden in his elbow, and she had
crept upstairs to call him a second time, before his father found him
still asleep. No. Mornings, when she came to call him, the sun wasn’t
there. Sun now on the pillow, instead of David’s head.

Queer she couldn’t see the other boys there. They had slept there for
years. David had moved up after they went, a year ago. But it was
David’s room, empty.

She had meant to patch those pants for him; they straggled over a chair,
the knee yawning. Now she needn’t. Tom and Bill were older, and she had
David left when they went. It was Tom’s letter had led David off, that
letter from the hospital about the fight he was in. The very day David
was eighteen. Tom wasn’t hurt bad, he wrote. She couldn’t understand
much about the war. The paper wasn’t very clear about it. The older boys
had to go. But a boy scarcely eighteen! He used to run away when they
butchered in the fall.

He had been afraid to tell her. His lips shook. She had just said, “They
ought to leave us somebody to work the farm.” He didn’t like her saying
that. But he had waved to her till he was out of sight beyond the hill.
She oughtn’t to have watched him out of sight. That was a bad omen. She
hadn’t been able to take her eyes off him.

She could be blamed for sitting there, brooding. Just this once she
would. She never had been one to think much, what with the children and
all the work. When everything is at your hand to do, you don’t sit down
to brood. But these last two weeks, something in her had been weaving in
steadily. She had to get it out, to look at it.

David was smarter than the other boys. She had his school certificates
put away, and there on the wall over his chest of drawers he had tacked
the blue first prize card his heifer took last year at the state fair.
She had counted on him doing things. This was a visitation on her for
setting her heart more on him. You should feel alike to all your
children. But the other boys, growing up so fast, just like their
father. And Alice—between them and David—silly, pretty face, sharp
tongue, running off and marrying against their will and never even
writing home.

She’d worked for them all, and never showed she cared more for David.
She’d been as pretty and silly as Alice when she married. There wasn’t a
shred left in her now the same as then. Her hands, with work-swollen
knuckles, moved over her tired knees. She was afraid of what she might
think next. If you stopped to think too much, you might never get up and
go on.

From the pasture, faint, raucous, came the lowing of Belle, the Jersey.
Still calling her calf, after all these days.

Something snapped together in the woman’s thoughts. Cradling her knees
in tense arms, she rocked, crouching on the bed.

“Oh, my God! What’s the odds between us? Me and Belle! All these years
of work, and what left out of them now?”

                   *       *       *       *       *

There it was, what had been weaving in her. She had borne and reared
those children. They had been taken from her. She was worn out—like the
old tools tossed back of the shed. Nothing to go on for. If they did
come back—David couldn’t be hurt, he was too lucky—they wouldn’t be hers
again. They were gone. David, her baby!

She stopped rocking, her head thrust forward, the cords in her old neck
rigid. Heavy feet in the kitchen. Then Ben’s voice, loud, “Mary!” She
hated him. Dull, heavy man, working, sleeping, eating. Not a word out of
him that the boys were gone except how hard he had to work. She was left
with him! Just as she had started, but then she hadn’t stopped to think.
He wanted his supper. Let him get it. She was finished.

Out of unsuspected corners she dragged old grievances, things he had
said, had done, and fed them to the smouldering flame. She had borne
with him too long. He had tricked her, he and the rest of life. She
would tell him she was through working for him! When the long finger of
the creeping sun touched David’s blue prize card, she would go down.

When she was halfway down the stairs she stopped, listening. A woman’s
voice and her man’s rumble. Some neighbor? It sounded like——Through the
voices shrilled a baby’s cry. Running heavily, she burst into the
kitchen. Her husband lifted his head, dropping the stove lid into place.
On his reddened face was a curious, half frightened smile.

“Why, Mother,” he said, “look-a-here what we got!”

Behind him, in the rocker, Mary saw her daughter, her fair hair
straggling about a white face, her young arms hushing a baby.

“I was buildin’ a fire to warm his milk,” boomed the man.

“Walter’s gone,” said the girl, defiantly. “He knew he’d have to go when
we got married.”

“Gone where?” Mary’s eyes clung to the tiny head with its soft, dark
fuzz.

“To war. I said I’d come here—and maybe you’d help me with him—baby—so’s
I could work.”

As the baby stiffened into a wail, Mary lifted him, fitted him closely
into her arms.

“I didn’t nurse him, so’s I could get a job.”

“Fix his milk then, Ally.” Mary looked at her daughter. “You need a rest
first. He ain’t very big. I guess we can see to him.”

The baby’s wail broke off, his puckered red eyelids folded back, and he
stared at Mary with round, slate-blue eyes.

David again! Little shooting, tender aches loosened the terrible rigid
anguish that bound her. She sat down, her body all a-quiver. Her husband
tiptoed nearer on clumsy feet.

“Cute, ain’t he? Sort of fill up the old house again, eh?”

Mary saw the twitching of his sandy mustache. He had known the
emptiness, too.

The small head nuzzled her old breast. Whatever it meant, all of it, she
had something to do again.




                          Transcriber’s Notes


Transcribed from The Touchstone, vol. 4, Dec. 1918, pp. 209-211.

New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public
domain.

The original spelling and punctuation were mostly preserved.




*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 79829 ***