No One Hears but Him Read online

  He shook his head. “Damned if I’m not glad I’m seventy-five years old and lived when the world was solid and sound as a good winesap apple, even if everybody, town and country, worked ten–twelve hours a day. Everybody talks about ‘this wonderful era’ and it’s just like a play-act you see on the stage; everybody pretendin’ and runnin’ around and gaspin’ and makin’ a big show with their teeth and their eyes, and babblin’ like fools. They’re all so busy. They work eight-nine hours, even on the farm, and they don’t have no time! No time! No time to visit neighborly, to sit on the porch and talk and watch the fireflies on the bank and listen to the wind. No, they roar into town and they roar back, and they’re all exhausted, and they got yapping TV and radios, and they never read a thing in their lives after school, but damn! they all act like they’re educated when they’re just plain fools who don’t know anythin’ at all, either about themselves or the world. If they do read anythin’ it’s just dirty books, and they wink and feel up-to-date. Hell, all them words was written on the backs of barns when I was a kid, and you got the—whaled out of you if your dad caught you. What’s so all-fired modern about dirty words, anyways? I tell you what: The world’s full of grown-up kids now, with their fancy clothes, and I got a feelin’ they’ll never grow up.

  “Wonderful era. Space age. And everythin’ about as solid and real as the clown-faces we used to make ourselves when we was kids and it was Hollow’E’en. Everybody’s got clown-faces, maybe to hide the fact they don’t have real faces of their own. Makin’ little faces, as Beth used to call it, and not showin’ the sunburned flesh at all. Maybe they don’t have sunburn now; all I know is they don’t have real eyes and real souls.

  “Well, anyway. The Campbells, the big Dad, with his sport coat imported from New York, he keeps comin’ over to me and askin’ me to sell my farm to him, him with his big industrial farm like a factory. I say no, I won’t. And the taxes keep goin’ up on my farm all the time, and you know what? I think it’s that Campbell feller, he who had an honest dad with honest dirt on his hands, and not farm-experts as they call ’em now, with TV in their ‘units,’ and runnin’ hot and cold water, and big shiny cars. Maybe that’s progress. I call it gettin’ away from God and the earth, and knowin’ what you had to do. If it made ’em happy I wouldn’t mind. But, like I said, it’s makin’ them miserable and mean with hearts like old withered apples you’d find at the bottom of the barrels in the spring. No sap. No taste. Just old dried skin and dead seeds. Not even fit for hogs.

  “Sometimes I look at my cows and my horses and my dogs, and I go out walkin’ over my fields and see the polecats and possums and chipmunks and birds, and I say to ’em: ‘You’re real. You’re what you are. You are all cow or horse or dog or whatever. You ain’t tryin’ to be what you’re not. You got your nature, and no fake.’ And it kind of raises my heart and I come back to the house and feel that here, anyway, things are what they are and not just pretend. They’re as God intended: honest and sturdy and good.

  “Well. Beth and me, we had just the one boy, Al. We sent him to agricultural school. But he didn’t want that. He wanted to be a lawyer-feller, in the city. No more farm, no more drudgery for him, he says. He wants to make a lot of money, and even the money’s fake these days. Well, he was the only one we had and we wanted to make him happy, if he wanted to live in the city. So, now he’s a lawyer in a big city six hundred miles away, and doing well, and he’s got ulcers and three yappy kids who’re as miserable as could be, with all their advantages. I can tell. They sometimes come to the farm in summer. The girls just sit around and whine and do their hair and race into town and paint their faces; little girls, too, one thirteen and one sixteen. But there’s Roger. He kind of likes the farm—He quiets down here. He gets that restless look off his face, and walks slow, not runnin’ the way he does when he first comes. And last summer he runs the harvester for me, and didn’t mind gettin’ all sweat and dust.

  “Well, I had to borrow money from Al last year to pay the big taxes the Campbells got for me, to force me off the land. And Al—he’s a good boy and got a nice city wife—he says, ‘Dad, sell the farm at a good price and come to live with us. We love you, and we’ll make you happy.’ Happy! And he says, ‘Dad, I’m all you have since Ma died, and why’d you want to live there all alone when you have a family in this city who want you?’ The worst of it is, I know they’re tellin’ the truth. They do want me, and I like to see ’em when they come, and it’s almost like old times. But I don’t want their damn city and the cars racin’ around and not a piece of earth to set your foot down on.”

  He paused. “I forgot. Adam Faith’s the name. My mother was fanciful. But I kind of like the name now, though people used to laugh at it. It don’t matter. The thing is, the pressure of taxes is maybe goin’ to get worse, and maybe I’ll lose my farm. Al says he’ll send me the money to make up what I can’t pay, but I don’t like to take it, though Al remembers about honorin’ your father and mother, and he sure does that. Always did. What do you think? Think I should sell up and move to the city?”

  He’d always had a big imagination, Beth used to say, so it was only imagination—but a warming one—that assured him that the man behind the curtain was saying an emphatic “No!”

  “Comin’ down to it,” he said in a suddenly dreary voice, “I guess I’m just not important at all, just a nobody. Like Al says, all I ever knew was work. Hard work. Like Al says. I didn’t get to school much, that school five miles away, and hell and all in winter to get there, and it was only for six–seven years. Got up at sunup and fell into bed, upstairs in that room that burned all summer and froze all winter, when the sun went down and the cows were safe in the barn and the hogs and chickens fed. Fell right asleep, like I was dead. And up again, and the chores, and then runnin’ off to school, and then runnin’ home for more chores. Maybe Al’s right after all. I didn’t have a chance to be anythin’ but a fool farmer on a farm that don’t pay no more, what with the taxes and the acreage restrictions, from the government. I don’t take their checks, but they come a-threatenin’, and tell what I can raise and what I can’t, and is that a free country any more? No, it ain’t. But lots of farmers like it. They get ‘security,’ they say. Security from years of bad crops, and pullin’ in your belt. Security, they say, from the ‘whims’ of weather and good and bad years. Security to buy cars and run into town to them saloons and movie places, and buy TV sets and wear fancy clothes.

  “Maybe Al’s right. I’m seventy-five. Can’t afford to hire a hand no more, like I sometimes used to. Got to do it all myself. And it gets awful lonesome at nights and on Sundays. No neighbors to talk to like I used to do. Why, I remember the time I met Beth—”

  The Zimmers had the farm next to his father’s, good, industrious German folk, and they had made their farm rich and their farm buildings as solid as stone. Mrs. Zimmer, like his own mother, seemed to have lots of time to do everything. She was up before the sun, feeding the chickens and the hogs, and then milking the cows and attending to breakfast for her eight children, then working in her vegetable garden most of the day, and putting up preserves and sewing quilts and making clothes, then feeding the stock again, then having a Bible reading in the parlor, and prayers, then going to bed to prepare to start all over again. And she had time to work at the Ladies Aid at church, and church suppers and picnics, and go to quilting bees and help neighbors with their babies and young ones, and to knit and scrub her big house and take care of all her children, and make butter and collect her eggs and milk for the market, and to act as midwife, snow or no snow in the winter, and to read every book she could get her hands on which her husband would bring to her from town every week. All the time in the world. Placid, calm, unhurried Erna Zimmer, with her big rosy face and big jolly laugh. All the time in the world, unlike the frenzied Mrs. Campbell with her high blood pressure, and empty Causes.

  And the Zimmer kids, as big and rosy as their parents. His own mother used to envy that large brood, for
he, Adam Faith, was the only child. Well, they had their young cousin, Beth Steigel, visit them one summer, from far off in the West, a girl looking to be a schoolteacher right here. Graduate of teachers college, a big strapping girl with a glowing face and bundles of bright auburn hair and a deep breast and strong brown hands, and a mouth like a red apple. Great big blue eyes, too, lake-blue. All the young fellows around fell in love with her at once and wanted to marry her right off.

  The Zimmers gave a huge picnic for her, for dozens of people miles around, and Mrs. Zimmer and her girls cooked ten hams, sides of beef, countless pies, cakes, huge bowls of potatoes and summer squash and sauerkraut and cole slaw, and boats of gravy, and hot bread and gallons of coffee. It was all set out under the giant elms on the rough lawns, on the grass and on wooden tables, with real linen napkins and not paper as they had these days, and a big barrel of cold beer for the men, and all those sweet, sour, and dill pickles and all those cherry pies smelling like heaven, and the hams glazed with honey and cloves, and the children screaming and running and somebody playing a guitar and singing soft, and the sun coming through the trees in rays of quick bright light, and the soft summer wind laughing in the leaves, and the blue hills beyond, curving like velvet against the hot sky, and the river shining in the distance. Even the birds seemed excited and sang like crazy and flew everywhere, and the cows stood in the green fields and watched. And there was no sound but the laughter and talk of the people and the wind in the trees, and the shouting of the children and the clatter of plates. It was like heaven. It was a peace that was not really stillness. It was a living peace.

  “I took a shine to Beth the minute I saw her,” said Adam Faith, smiling all over his lean brown face which had been plowed by the years and by work and sun. “And she took a shine to me. We were married in time for the harvest.”

  The little country church, as white and brilliant as the moon in the hot noonday of early autumn. Everybody came from miles around, hundreds of them, dressed in their best store clothes, the men with ties about their warm sun-reddened necks, the women in flounces and lawn and voile, printed all over in bright colors, and the children with shiny shoes on their feet and their hair slicked down. All farm folk, smelling of sweet hay and clover. The horses standing in the shade of trees about the church, their heads hanging, their tails switching, and the bells in the steeple ringing, and the choir singing:

  “Holy, Holy, Holy,

  Lord God Almighty!

  Early in the morning our song shall rise to Thee!

  Holy, Holy, Holy,

  Merciful and Mighty,

  God in Three Persons, Blessed Trinity!”

  The sun on the roofs of the little village and glittering on the glass and making the stained glass of the church windows blaze like rainbows. And the people standing and singing their hearts out, while he and his father waited in the vestry and the parson stopped for a moment, pulling on his black robe, and some of the men helping to tie and button him up, and the cool purple shade in the church and the scent of grass outside and sweet dust. He, Adam, was sweating in his thick black suit and his feet were hurting in his new boots and his neck scratched from his new haircut, and his heart was beating like the rain on a summer roof. He could hear the singing of the people and the labored groaning of the old organ, and he did not know if he was frightened or not, and he wondered how Beth was feeling.

  The parson went into the church and when he opened the door the sound of the singing became the sound of rejoicing, the sound of faith and glory and gladness. Then Adam heard a different note in the church. A silence, a ringing silence. Suddenly the choir sang out, and it was the wedding march, tentative, and his father laughed in his face, caught his arm and hurried him out to the altar which was all-over mums and ferns, and the other men poured out after him and hurried to their wooden pews, which were sticky and newly varnished, and there was a storm of palm-leaf fans among the congregation and joyous faces looking up at him, all burnished by the sun, and children staring. And as the wedding march soared exultantly there came Beth up the aisle with her Uncle Zimmer—for she was an orphan—and she was dressed all in flowing white, a lovely dress she had made herself, and wearing her mother’s white lace veil over her face. Beautiful Beth, as strong and noble as the earth. When he had looked at her it seemed that he expanded, became great and tall, with a heart that was too big for him, and he wanted to weep.

  Then she was standing beside him, her large warm hand in his and her eyes shining at him through the meshes of her veil and the dimmed glow of her auburn hair framing her pink face. He had the impression that the women were crying and smiling and that the men were grinning, but he was only really aware of Beth and the blue twinkle of her eyes.

  “Dearly beloved,” said the parson, “we are gathered here today—”

  Gathered here with hearts truly full of love and earnest wishes for happiness, and neighborly rejoicing and simple pleasure! Neighbors on whom a man could depend for comfort, help, work, a strong hand, a good word, kindness, fortitude, hope, and honest prayer. The knowledge was a fortified city, a walled city, a sense of true security, of safety against storms and grief and terrors in the night, a familiar strength compounded of faith in God and faith in the good earth, and affection and promise, of manly and womanly acceptance.

  He kissed Beth through the veil, as her bridesmaid was a little slow in lifting it, and he recalled now the taste of starched lace and sun-warm lips as sweet as a pear, and Beth’s hand on his shoulder and the sight of blueness through the veil, and her silent promise to him that she would never leave him and that he was hers and she was his, as a tree belongs to the land through winter and summer and all the thunders and all the lightnings and the snows.

  “Weddings ain’t like that any longer,” said Adam Faith to the man behind the curtain. “I know. I’ve seen twenty or more over the last years. What do they promise each other now? Work and courage and strength, labor side by side? No, they don’t. The man promises to hurry to an office and make money; the woman promises to stay pretty and keep her figger. They promise new cars and a new washing machine and lots of gadgets and vacations. They don’t promise each other faith in God and themselves and help in pain. No, they don’t. It was wonderful, then.”

  He smiled at the curtain and it trembled through the mist in his eyes.

  “It was good. I remember.”

  Then young Albert was born, when the snow was as high as the windows, worst snow he could ever recall. He went through the blizzard for Mrs. Zimmer, and she came sturdily behind him with her oldest married daughter, and two sons with big baskets of hot food, and fresh warm linens. Within an hour Beth gave birth to her son, and she sat up in bed and laughed with everybody, and there was much bustle in the kitchen and the fragrance of new apple logs on the fire and the blizzard screaming against the windows and rattling them, and he, Adam, “breaking out” the barrel of beer which he had saved for this occasion and men suddenly knocking loudly at the farmhouse door bearing more gifts and their wives shaking off their snow-covered hats and coats. It was an Occasion, a new man born of and for the earth. The very frost on the windowpanes sparkled and shone as if it, too, was happy. Beth sat in the big poster-bed with her son in her arms and her first kiss was for her husband, the second for her child, and she shouted to the women in the kitchen that they’d find the new bread she had baked today under that counter where the pump stood, and the apple pies in the “safe.”

  “It was good. I remember,” said old Adam Faith now, rubbing the thick white hair on his head and smiling tenderly.

  It was an occasion, too, for the whole community when little Albert Fath was christened, for all respected the father as a good farmer, cherishing his land, and everyone loved Beth who stood so tall and whose voice was so gentle and kind. There was a prize heifer for the newborn, and a prize young bull—both established a very profitable line—and other proud gifts, joyfully given, joyfully received. “That was before the war, long before we got in
, the first one, I mean,” said Adam to the blue curtain over the alcove. “A wonderful, peaceful time. There wasn’t no dictatorships and fightings and murderers in government, then. Why, there was freedom all over the world for everybody, except in Russia where they had that Czar, and in some places in the bush in Africa! Real freedom, where nobody bothered an honest, God-fearing man with government forms, and everybody minded his own business and worked at an honest day’s work and raised his family to be decent men and women who loved their country and their God and went to church of a Sunday and took care of neighbors when they were sick or couldn’t work or had babies or were hungry. There wasn’t any juvenile gangs and girls gettin’ into mischief and social workers running around minding everybody’s business except their miserable own, and fighting in the streets. The woman who worked the hardest in the garden and in the house was the one who had this ‘status’ you hear about these days, and the man who took care of his land the best and raised the best stock—he was the one the community looked up to. You never heard, very often, of a man takin’ to drink or a woman to whorin’, in those days. We was too damn busy living and enjoying life! And workin’ as God intended men and women to work, in His clean sunshine and in His rain. Yes, it was a free world then, a really free world, and not a society hedged all ’round with a lot of nosy bureaucrats and freeloaders at the public trough. A man could walk tall and proud on his acres, and even on his streets, and feel safe, and that’s somethin’ no one feels these days—safe.”

  He sighed. “Guess the world’s now full of cryin’ men, seems like. Everybody’s afraid of everythin’ and they with their big pay and their cars and their mortgaged ranch houses and their kitchens full of shiny junk and their garages full of shiny cars. Scared to death of everythin’, jumpin’ at funny sounds and readin’ their newspapers, scared. What’re they afraid of? Dyin’? Hasn’t anyone ever told them that death is just as natural as life, and that all their vitamins and health foods, as they call it, won’t keep them alive any longer than their dads lived, or their granddads? And if it does keep them alive, why, anyway? What good are they to the world, scaredy-cats as kids used to call cowards? Why, they aren’t even free men any more! Not free like we knew it.”