Hill Girl

Eight

It was around the middle of January that I first met Jake. It was around seven of a cold night, with a mist of fine rain, and I was sitting before the fireplace in the back bedroom, whittling out a handle for a grubbing hoe and feeling a little low and alone, when I heard a car pull up in front of the house. I stopped to listen.

“Hello,” came a shout from the front yard.

I went down the dark hall and looked out. There was an old Ford touring car huddled under the bare trees.

“Come on in,” I called out

We went back into the warmth and light of the bedroom and I got a look at him.

“My name’s Hubbard,” he said, grinning. “Jake Hubbard. Yo’re Mr. Crane, ain’t you?”

I liked the grin. “My name’s Crane,” I said. “But it’s Bob Crane, not Mister.”

He laughed and I shoved a chair toward him for him to sit down. He was about my age, maybe a couple of years older, but smaller, and his movements were fast and decisive and there was an easy assurance about his eyes. He had a big chew of tobacco in his right cheek and now he sat down on the very front edge of the chair like a bird poised for flight, held his hands out toward the fire, and spat a brown stream into the ashes.

He had on new overalls and an old leather jacket, patched at the elbows, and a cap of the type that has ear flaps, and he had the flaps pulled down over his ears now. There was a pleasant homeliness about his face, with its oversized bony nose and the stubble of tough black beard and the long sideburns that came down almost to the bottoms of his ears.

“I hear you goin’ to farm this here place,” he said.

“That’s right.”

“It’s good land. Make a half bale to the acre.”

I nodded, waiting. I thought I knew what was on his mind and was trying to size him up.

“I looked her over a couple times,” he went on, rubbing his hands briskly together and holding them out toward the blaze.

“You live around here?” I asked. I had never seen him before,

“Nope. I’m from Gregg County. Jest a-visitin’ kinfolks. The Harperses, down the big road about four mile.”

I lit a cigarette and waited. He refused one, gesturing smilingly toward the swollen lump in his cheek.

“I’m sorta lookin’ around for some land to farm on the halves. Ain’t made a crop now in a couple years. Been doin’ public work mostly, workin’ on the highway over by Mineola, an’ some shingle-mill work, but it ain’t like havin’ a crop somehow. Now, I see you got a good tenant house over acrost the road, leastwise it would be with a little fixin’ up an’ a few window glasses, an’ you got more land than you can work by yourself. I kinda reckoned we might make a dicker.” He stopped and looked at me questioningly.

“Sounds all right to me,” I said. “I’ve been looking around for a tenant. You’ve farmed before, I suppose?”

“All my life except the last couple years. Give me a good pair of mules, ain’t air man I ever seen can plow more ground in a day or do it any better.”

“I think we could make a deal,” I said.

“You got any stock yet? What kind of mules you got?”

I shook my head. “Haven’t bought any yet. Haven’t had much time to look around, and thought I’d wait until I needed them.”

“Fine,” he said. “If’n we get together on this, mebbe I can help you pick ‘em out. I know mules like I know myself, an’ we want good mules with a lot of the old Ned in ‘em. None of them old poky bastards that’s dead from the ass both ways.”

“Sounds like a good idea,” I said.

He stood up abruptly. “Well, s’pose I come over tomorrow an’ we work it out. I better hightail now before the Old Lady freezes out there.”

“Good God,” I said. “Is your mother put there? Why didn’t you bring her in?”

“Not Ma,” he laughed. “My wife. I call her the Old Lady. She was kinda bashful about comin’ in, not knowin’ you an’ all.”

“Bring her in, man,” I told him. “I’ll warm up some coffee.”

He went down the hall and I heard him at the front door. “Hey, Old Lady, come on in.” I went out in the kitchen and picked up the coffeepot and brought it back and put it on a bed of coals on the hearth.

She was bigger than he, a robust girl with dark curly hair and happy black eyes that lit up when they rested on him. She had on an old dress of dark woolen material and lisle stockings and a coat with some kind of reddish fur on the collar, the fur looking moth-eaten and a little shabby. You could see she was destined always to be a big woman and someday she would be fat, but that she didn’t much care, for there was about her face the mark of a sweet and unruffled disposition and the serene content of a healthy woman who is well loved and likes it. There was a scrubbed cleanliness about her and her face was pink-flushed with the cold and possibly a little from embarrassment as she stood in the doorway, looking at me and then at him, and when her eyes were on him I envied him. It was that kind of look.

“Honey, this is Mr. Crane,” he said. “We jest about to make a dicker.”

She put out her hand, man-fashion. “I’m proud to know you, Mr. Crane,” she said, smiling a little self-consciously and staying close to Hubbard.

“I’m sorry we left you out there in the cold,” I said.

“It wasn’t nothin’,” she laughed deprecatingly. “I don’t mind the cold much. An’ I hadn’t orta come in. Men don’t want no womenfolks around when they’re a-dickerin’.”

I brought her a chair and she sat down and I poured the coffee.

“Do you live here all by yourself, Mr. Crane?” she asked wonderingly.

“Yeah,” I said. “Incidentally, my name’s Bob. Couldn’t we drop some of the formality?”

She said hers was Helen. He never called her that, though. “He jest calls me Old Lady,” she went on, smiling proudly at Jake.

“Who on earth cooks for you?” she asked then.

“I do my own,” I said. “It’s pretty bad.”

“Why, man,” Jake put in, “you cain’t do that an’ handle a crop too. Man’s got to have vittles ready for him when he comes in at night. He’s too tar’d to be putterin’ around cookin’.”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” I said. “But I don’t know of any answer to it. I don’t know what— Wait! Maybe I do.

“How does this strike you?” I went on. “I turn over half the land to you to work on the halves, with the usual arrangement, with me to furnish the tools and the seed and stock and so on. But instead of you living over there in the tenant house, why don’t all three of us live in this one? It’s big enough. There’s another bedroom up front. Helen could do the cooking for the three of us and I could pay half your grocery bill. That sound O.K. to you?”

They smiled enthusiastically. “Say, that sounds good. An’ the Old Lady can shorely cook, too, you jest wait an’ see.” And then the same idea must have hit them both, for they looked at each other and frowned.

“Well, now, I don’t rightly know,” Jake said. “Sounds like a right smart idea except fer one thing. You see—” He stopped uncertainly.

“What is it?” I couldn’t imagine what had come over them.

“Well, it’s jest that we don’t much cotton to the idea of livin’ with anybody in the same house. Oh, it ain’t nothin’ agin you, Bob. But we had to live with kinfolks the first few months we was married an’ it kinda disheartened us. You understand, it ain’t you, personal?” He looked at me earnestly.

“How long have you been married?” I asked.

“About six months,” Helen said, blushing.

I began to see what was troubling them and went on, “Well, if you want it that way, we can still fix up the house across the road and you can live over there. That is, you can sleep there, and we can use the kitchen and dining room here. How’s that?”

They liked that and we let it stand that way. I found a deck of cards after a while and we played rummy until ten o’clock and Helen made us some more coffee. It was the first good coffee I’d had since I had been out here.

They both came over early the next morning and we went to work on the house across the road. In two days we had it in good condition, and a week later they moved in.

The day after they moved in I bought a secondhand crosscut saw and Jake and I went to work on the new ground in earnest. We worked early and late and when we would come back to the house in the cold dusk with the bite of frost and the smell of wood smoke in the air Helen would have supper ready for us.

I saw Angelina in February. I had walked across the bottom with some plow points to see if Sam would shape them up for me in his home blacksmith shop, and found the family butchering a hog. It was a clear day with a cold northwest wind blowing and Sam was cutting up the hog on a table on the south side of the house. Mrs. Harley was helping him, dicing up the flat strips of fat for the lard-rendering kettle. The two little girls, bundled up in heavy coats and with their noses running, were standing around underfoot, and when I came up they backed away and regarded me silently with fright in their brown eyes.

“Howdy, Bob,” Sam said. Mrs. Harley nodded, a little shyly. She was a big woman, but somehow colorless and beaten-looking, and she always seemed to be trying to stand behind somebody or something when she was talking to you.

“You’re just in time for some spareribs. You all could use some over there, couldn’t you?” He had met the Hubbards already; Jake was a fellow fox-hunter.

We talked about the plow points and he said he would do them for me, and when I was ready to go he chopped up the spareribs and said, “Look jest inside the kitchen, Bob. They’s some brown paper to wrap ‘em in.”

I went around the corner and in the back door. Angelina was sitting at the kitchen table cutting a big sheet of newspaper with a pair of scissors. She had on a heavy blue woolen dress with long sleeves, and it was bigger than that thing she’d had on before, and looser, so she didn’t seem about to burst out of it in so many places. But even as loose as it was and as poorly as it fitted, it couldn’t disguise that figure. Her hair was down over her shoulders in two blonde braids, tied at the bottom with little wisps of pink ribbon. She didn’t look quite so much like a sex crime looking for somebody to happen to, but her eyes were still the same. They regarded me sullenly and she didn’t say anything.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hello.”

“Sam said there was some brown paper here.”

“Right there.” She nodded curtly to the end of the table. I walked over and picked it up.

It was warm in there, and the kitchen was clean, the pine boards of the floor gleaming white from long scrubbing, and there was the smell of boiling turnip greens coming from the pot on the cookstove. I could hear the big clock ticking out in the front room and the occasional crackle and pop from the fireplace, and I lingered a moment, glad to be in out of the cold, and feeling again that same unaccountable urge to get her to talk that I had felt before. She always puzzled me. And, too, she was a girl, and when you’re twenty-two and have lived for four months alone there’s something about even one you don’t like. She ignored me and went on working with the scissors.

“What’s that you’re cutting out?” I asked. It couldn’t be some clipping she wanted to save, for she was cutting it diagonally across columns and in every direction. “Aren’t you a little old for paper dolls?”

Her eyes looked up and hated me. “It’s a pattern.”

“Pattern for what?”

“A blouse I’m going to make.”

“What color is it going to be?” Clothes interested me very little, clothes of any kind, and hers not at all, but I wanted strangely to keep the conversation going.

“I don’t know.”

“Did you learn it in school?”

“Learn what in school?” she asked without looking up.

“How to make clothes and things.”

“No.”

I went out and closed the door. There wasn’t any use in trying to talk to her.