Mr. Nathan

I

‘I DON’T feel we should go.’ Freda could see Mr. Nathan and the green cabbage heads in the sun where the pump was, and his hands picking up carefully the frosted tomatoes. ‘Even if he don’t know, I think we should stay.’

Mrs. Octerbeck leaned over the table : ‘Was sagst du?’

Freda said it all over again.‘Ich denke das wir nicht gehen sollen,’ she said, thinking the words out fast. Her mother was very small. She came up only to the funnel dent in Freda’s arm where her elbow was. She could have hidden behind half of Freda’s waist. She protested now, and tears popped out of her little old eyes. Freda was crazy! She herself wouldn’t stay here for Thanksgiving, — here out in the country, — and all the children at the Rausenbachs’ for turkey. Nein! She put down her spoon with a clang.

‘I think you’re right, Freda. We ought n’t leave Mr. Nathan here.’ Karl looked down at his feet. It was his way in the beginning of tears.

It was all settled, all definite and finished. Karl had said they ought to stay. ‘You can go, Mamma,’ Freda said, ‘but Mr. Nathan ain’t no place to go. So we won’t, neither.’ She hoped Mamma would n’t cry. She was so small it was like having a gnome or a child hurt. ‘You can go, Mamma, but not us. We’ll take you in on Tuesday.’

They heard Nathan coming in across the porch floor in his stocking feet. He never walked on Freda’s floor in his shoes. And, now the new linoleum was laid, he stepped with painful care. Karl turned red like a plum, and Freda got up so that the kitchen shook all around and the stove pans shuddered on the wall. She tried fast to think of something that would sound as though they had been saying it, and her face turned more distressed than ever. Nathan looked around at each one with his glasses tilted crooked by the cabbage leaves. He felt the end of talk, cut off because he came, and thought he should apologize perhaps, but was confused. Mrs. Octerbeck sucked aloud at her coffee, and he saw the dribbled tears that crept along her nose. It was on account of him, he knew.

‘It’s right nice outside,’ he said. ‘It’s a warm day for November, though.’ He smiled anxiously at all of them.

Freda’s face stretched out broad like a warm white pumpkin. She felt relieved and safe when people talked about the weather. ‘Karl says a rain’s coming soon. He says this weather won’t last long enough to plough, maybe.’ She poured Nathan’s coffee. Her round fingers clutched the handle and there was a comfortable and reassuring sound in her voice. ‘When Karl ploughs he’s pretty happy — I guess you know, Mr. Nathan. I think we better hope it don’t rain so his ground won’t freeze after.’ She talked on, spreading the warm blanket of her words over his suspicion and anxiety. She looked at Karl and he grinned back, there being between them a mutual understanding, perfect and inarticulate.

‘I picked up a bushel of tomatoes — only they’re green a little,’ Mr. Nathan said. He wanted to be right, not to misrepresent anything. ‘Frost sure got the vines. All black.’

‘Green ones are good.’ Karl put out the words kindly, with assurance.

Freda nodded. ‘They make a good canning. They look pretty like pickles on the shelf.’

Nathan looked pleased. The worried expression was away for a while, his mild old face wreathed in pipe smoke and the coffee steam. He forgot Mrs. Octerbeck’s tears in remembering the cabbage heads. He counted them on his fingers and sighed. There were only a few, hardly enough for kraut. Freda and Karl were fond of kraut. He wished he had planted another row and taken more care about the worms. He thought of himself sitting in the shade of lilac bushes and watching the cabbage butterflies like white paper scraps flutter over the heads, and the secret gnawing that went on in the heart leaves folded over. He was angry at himself that he should have been tired when it mattered so much now.

II

Nathan thought of how Karl used to work in the cornfields till the sweat got salty in his eyes. He remembered when he himself could n’t raise a finger for the heat, and Freda found him face down on the steps when she came out to call that it was noontime. Freda had been scared — scared white as a clean sheet, because Karl had n’t come up yet and she could n’t move him an inch. When he came to, Freda was sitting by holding an umbrella over his head and soaking his hair with pump water. And then Karl came up and grinned a little at her sitting there with the umbrella, but he had turned gray under the sunburn. Nathan remembered all this and how they had dragged him into the house, for he was heavy, though thin to bone, and put him on the couch in the front room. And how Mrs. Octerbeck had stood by peering under Freda’s arm with a ‘Gatt in Himmel!' coming over and over from her mouth.

‘What did I say, Freda, when you woke me up, laying there like an old coat on the steps?’

’You did n’t say nothing, Mr. Nathan. You mumbled something like another language. I sure was glad to see you wake up then. Karl and I was scared like sheep. I sat there holding up the umbrella, and all the time afraid you was never coming to — and me sitting there with an umbrella over a dead person! You must n’t do such a thing again. You work too hard, Mr. Nathan.’

She had talked fast so he would forget what it was he asked, and Nathan let it go by, feeling that he did not want to know more than she chose to tell him. Karl knew, though. Freda told him the awful expression on Mr. Nathan’s face when he came out of the stroke. She told Karl how he had tried to shout, ‘Don’t hit me!’ and it had come out in bursts as if rocks were piled on his chest. They never spoke of it again, but when the fall came Freda felt easier in her mind, not having to watch and see that he did not putter in the sun.

He had gotten less thin, too, eating her fried mush and ham, and fresh sausage from the Hempelmyers — fat fingers burst with heat and lying on red apple rings. He wanted to tell Mr. Hempelmyer himself how good they were. Time and again he spoke of stopping by some day on his way to town, though it was half a mile off the main road. Freda found some excuse to keep him away each time; she told Karl she got thin thinking up reasons why he should n’t stop there. She smiled, looking down at herself, fat like a great fungus ball, but there was a pulled and worried look around her face that made it older than before the time when Mr. Nathan came.

It was hard on her, not seeing the Hempelmyers or Landstetters any more. Freda loved to talk. She liked to talk about anything that came to mind and hear what other people did and liked. Now she never saw anybody except on Sunday, when she and Karl went back to her sister’s, wavering twenty miles in the old Ford with Karl holding tight on the wheel and Freda in the back seat to balance both the sides. Nathan always came out to the car with the Sunday paper in one hand and pulled the choke while Karl cranked, and then got out fast, waving good-bye with his pipe till they were out of sight.

Freda did n’t mind leaving him alone just once in the week. But not Thanksgiving; that was different. Last Thanksgiving he had eaten up in Jefferson City, sitting very quiet with his hair shaved off, and chewing at the pork balls that were supposed to be a special treat. Freda had read his dinner in the newspaper, but she knew it was n’t anything like the way it sounded. Nathan had to go to the prison hospital for a while, and the meat was examined, but nobody said anything more about it.

She thought of all the Octerbecks, and her sister’s new baby that was to be there and she never had seen yet, and the Hullhoff family coming, too. There would be twenty — more, maybe, for the dinner; relatives from Claire and Boone counties. And the talk . . . Freda felt sick inside every time she thought of it. She got to feeling so bad she could n’t eat her supper, and after Nathan had gone upstairs — walking carefully in his woolen socks up the clean steps — Karl saw her eyes were all red.

‘Mr. Nathan has n’t no friends anywhere he could stay with, Freda. Ye don’t want him sitting here alone Thanksgiving thinking about the other one.’

‘Maybe we could take him with us again.’

Karl picked up his shoes and turned the lamp wick down. ‘We ain’t never going to take Mr. Nathan home with us again.’ It was all said.

‘I guess you’re right, Karl.’ Freda sighed. She felt empty, but weighted down by more than all her ponderous flesh. Karl was right. He was always right. She lay there tired in the dark, remembering the one time they had taken Nathan home.

III

They had n’t wanted to take him home. They knew what her folks thought about people with a prison taint. There was something repulsive about a man’s being in prison, even though it was said he did n’t do anything. ‘Maybe it’s all right for you, Freda. You ain’t any children, but I don’t want no man who’s been in the pen around mine. How d’ you know he did n’t do something else? Men get hard in prison, Freda. Maybe he might do something now — you can’t tell.’ Their warning letters, their stolid advice, had hurt her terribly. It was like a reflection on Karl, someway.

But the first Sunday after he came he seemed to expect that they would take him with them, ‘I’d like to meet your folks, Freda,’ he said. There was something shy about his voice that made her want to cry, right out loud in front of him. ‘I’d like to tell your folks how it happened, so they would understand. You don’t think — you don’t suppose they would mind my hair this way?’ He looked at her and felt his hair uneasily.

She and Karl had a whispered discussion out behind the woodshed while Nathan scattered corn and talked kindly to the hatching hens when he picked them off the nests. He always tried to get them off before Freda came out with the slop, so that she would n’t know they were hatching and put them in a coop. They heard the gate shut and then a quiet, and knew that Nathan was leaning on the fence watching to see that each one got enough. He was a little wasteful with the corn, but they never said anything.

‘Maybe it’ll turn out nice, Karl. We can’t tell him excuses all the time. We got to take him and get it over with.’

‘Yes, we got to take him.’ Karl scraped a hole in the mud with his shoe. It was spring then, and everything seemed possible.

They took him with them the next Sunday. He sat up in the front with Karl, and let the warm smoky air blow through the gray stubbles on his head; but when they passed through a town he put on his hat carefully and held it tight until they came to broken fields again. Sometimes he was quiet, trying to think out clearly what he would say, and then excited like a boy, calling Freda to look at the colts that tore along the fences, or the stout terror of a hog erupting from his wallow. It was early yet, but they saw plum trees in bloom on the south side of a hollow, and wild ducks flying north. Nathan stretched his neck out the window and watched them till they were small as gnats in haze a long way off. It was as though he had never seen a spring before.

They reached the Rausenbachs’ by noon, and all the worn cars were already jammed in the yard. Freda had a fearful sinking of her heart when she saw the folks gathered on the porch and bulging from the door out to the car steps. Smoke drifted up from the loudsmelling pipes. Nathan twisted his hat back and forth in his hands and kept putting it on and off. Karl’s eyes had a hot, defiant look. Freda got out of the car, and it sagged on the springs and groaned down where her weight was moving. Her sister came to the door and disappeared suddenly while they were at the gate. The children piled together and stared at Nathan, standing awkwardly, almost hidden behind Freda’s enormous back. The men moved their pipes and said, ‘Hello, Freda,’ and stared over her shoulder at Nathan and Karl.

‘Where’s sister, Otto? She ought to come out and meet Mr. Nathan. This is Mr. Nathan, Otto. Mr. Nathan’s living with us now.’

Nathan put out his hand doubtfully, but Otto was staring into his pipe bowl. ‘Glad to know you,’ he said, and watched the ashes that fell out. Nobody said anything; all sat like logs, staring. When Leona came out at last, she looked at Nathan coldly and said, ‘ Glad to know you, ’ as though she had been trying it a long time in her mouth. Nathan kept his hands on the hat brim and said, ‘I’m glad to meet you, Mrs. Rausenbach.’ The men stared at the floor or looked at him and then away.

‘Dinner’s ready,’ Leona said. She wiped her fat red face. ‘You should have let me know, Freda. We had to squeeze an extra place in.’ Nathan had his back turned, but he must have heard. Freda did n’t say anything. She knew there had always been room enough before, and food more than anyone could eat.

IV

Nathan followed Karl in, his face dazed in confusion. The children walked near him because he was new, and whispered about his hair. Leona pulled them off and slapped Karine’s hand from his finger. She waited on the table, passing Nathan’s plate to Karl first, her face hot with steam and rage. Freda had counted on her lusty gossip and the booming voice to cover over Mr. Nathan’s being there, but Leona kept her mouth drawn tight shut and thudded the plates down in a deliberate silence.

The Werders muttered together about cholera in the hogs and the corn shortage. Karl never talked much anyway, but he felt now more than ever empty of all words. He piled the boiled onions on Nathan’s plate, probing without interest at his own. Nathan looked across at Otto. ‘These your onions, Mr. Rausenbach? They taste like the ones I used to eat when I was little down in Iron Creek. I was pretty small then. I —’

‘Yah,’ Otto said. He turned to Werder. ‘What’s Joe putting in along the bottom? Corn?’

‘Corn. Two acres. He ought. Drouth don’t matter down there.’

‘No, drouth don’t matter. That’s what he ought to do.’

Nathan opened his mouth and shut it up again. Karl said, ‘That’s right, Mr. Nathan, about the onions.’ He forked at them as if he had n’t seen any on his plate before.

Nobody said anything, but the children, whispering to each other, began to snicker all at once and put hands over their mouths. Leona gave an exasperated snap. ‘What’s the matter now? Keep still like you ought!’

‘What’s so funny, Dave?’ Otto winked and leaned over. Dave whispered loudly in his ear. Everybody could hear his words as though he were shouting. '. . . And I said he don’t look like he ought to be caged up, and Met said he looked like a dirty toothbrush with his hair that way — like a dirty toothbrush!’ He choked and got purple with a laugh. Otto snorted and turned red all over like his nose and hands. There was the nervous sound of knives and forks. Freda pretended not to hear, not to see Nathan’s face. Karl got hot till his face was covered over with sweat. Old Mr. Werder glared at Leona. ‘Shut those kids up, Leona. Shut ’em up!’

‘You mind your own business, Uncle!’

Otto slammed his plate aside, the gravy slopping over on his hands. ‘Let’s get on the pie, Leona. We don’t want no fight.’

‘You ain’t helping to start one, are you? No! You make Davey talk, and then he gets the blame. Yah!’ She shoveled out the pie, furious and red.

Nathan started to get up. His face was swollen tight with purpose, and his tongue kept licking around his mouth. Karl reached out and grabbed his sleeve. ‘What you going to do, Mr. Nathan? You forgot your pie here yet.’

Nathan grabbed the back of his chair hard as if it were a pick. He began in confusion to shout out without beginning at the right place. ‘They did n’t give me no chance to tell anything! They said,— you don’t knowhow it was, — they said, “You done it! You was the last person here!” They said . . . I did n’t know what they wanted, I hit back at ’em — I said, “You can’t take me like this when I don’t know nothing.” . . . You folks don’t know how it happens. They come up fast and they said, “You done it! Sure he done it. We got to get somebody for this. What you stay so late here for if you did n’t want nothing?” They took and hit me on the head so I could n’t knock back. They told me I was stopping arrest. I said what was they taking me for, and they shouted, “Yeh, what?” Karl knows what happened. You folks think that people don’t get caught if they don’t do nothing. You don’t know how it was. . . . I was setting there and they came in. That’s the way it happens. They come get you and you can’t do nothing. . . . They give me papers to sign. They told me I’d get life if I did n’t sign. . . . They took away my glasses so I could n’t read nothing — I could n’t read what they wrote there for me to sign. ... I could n’t read nothing without my glasses. . . . They took them away and I did n’t know what it was. I did n’t see nothing on the paper. . . .’ He went all to pieces and started crying like a crazy person.

Leona turned across, furious, to Freda. ‘You take him out of here, Freda. You take him away. I ain’t going to sit here and have my children see such an exhibition! You should n’t never have brought him here. It’s enough to turn anybody’s stomach out!’ All the stolid faces around were shaken, outraged, as though they had seen something indecent.

Freda got up, her face puckered around like a persimmon. She wanted to cry and she was mad all through her wide body — mad and wanting to cry like a baby.

Karl got up, too. ‘All right, I guess we’ll go,’ he said. ‘But there ain’t a word he said that was n’t so. Freda told you all before. She told you everything just like it happened. You ain’t even tried to believe anything.’ They went out with Nathan and nobody said a word, only sat and stared at them going out.

This had been in the spring, seven months ago. Freda could n’t get to sleep thinking and remembering these things. Karl was right. They could n’t ever take Mr, Nathan back home again.

V

In the dark Nathan got up and sat over by the window. It was a queer night for November, with the south wind coming in as though off a spring marsh. Almost he thought there were frog voices coming up along it. But that could n’t be. Sometimes damp leaves came and stuck along the window sill. He put out his hand and picked them up for the wet smell. He liked there being no screens any more. Freda always took down the screens right after the first frost; there was n’t any sense in letting weather get hold when their use was over. He had stored them away for her, wiping each wire carefully to keep off rust. He was very particular. It seemed the least he could do in return for everything. He sat there a long time with his pipe, living the year all over again because it was almost dead.

But for the one visit that Sunday, which he never let himself remember, or think long about when he did, it seemed as if the year had been a sort of harbor where life had accidentally left him and forgotten. He did not want to be remembered. He prayed each night that he might go on, as now, with nothing different. Even the Sundays, when Karl and Freda and Mrs. Octerbeck went home, he liked. Freda always left him something special on Sundays,—a ‘slump,’ or cream pie, sometimes a steak to cook for himself, — and he ate very carefully everything she left; more than usual or than he really wanted, because he knew she would have expected it if she had been there. He slept most of the afternoon with the Sunday papers scattered around him on the floor, and the cat licking at the dishes on the table. She was never let to do this except on Sundays, but Nathan thought perhaps Freda would n’t mind and it might teach the cat that this was different and better than other days, even though she could not understand exactly why. At four-thirty he would wake up and jump to his feet, looking in terror at the clock for fear that it was later. If it was four thirty-five, he looked distressed and called himself a blundering old fool, and would run heavily to the door, pulling on his shoes with grunts of pain. But if it was only striking, he got up slowly and piled the papers in neat stacks. Sometimes he stopped to wash his face at the pump.

The cows did not seem to mind his milking, but he only got a fourth of what Karl did. It might have been his hands or only something stubborn about the cows. Sometimes he was dismayed at the smallness of his buckets, but it always made Freda laugh and say it was a good thing they had come back before he ruined all the stock. Almost, he thought, she would be disappointed if he brought up more. He liked to turn the cows loose and watch them walk off, never hurrying. It gave a sense of time without end, or even a beginning — a sense of safety and of quiet. In the summer it was the best hour, with rising coolness and the shadows lying east and lavender from haycocks in the field. The doves clung to the fence wires and made a loud sound with their wings when he came near — loud because all other things were still. It pleased him that now, after all the years full of noise and confusion and worry, dove wings were strong enough to echo in his ears. He would put the milk carefully away in the summer evenings and sit smoking on the cistern top until it was quite dark.

He did not try to think very much, afraid that when he thought he might remember. But sometimes he would shove forward into his mind the early years and hold them between him and the ones that followed after. He remembered the farm in Calhoun County, and thought how strange to be young and walk all night in the woods and sleep in the soaked fields in the early cold of morning. He could remember being tired, but not as he was now — not tired as with a stone on his chest. When he came in his mind to where the eighteenth year was, he would thrust it all away and walk up and down under the elm dark, or go over to peer at the dim cabbages pushing out of the earth. In time it came easier to set aside the roaring of trains and crash of baggage cars together in the yard, the fog of smoke and stale cigar smell in the air, the confusion of iron rails and the monotonous cinders lying in every direction from the station house. The fields of sunflowers with dark sootcovered leaves came sometimes, forcing themselves without reason into his mind, and the air would be hard to take. But even this stopped coming back after a while.

He never asked Karl where his daughter had been buried. He never asked about anything that had to do with the time he was in prison. ‘You ought to make him talk, Karl,’ Freda said. ‘It ain’t like a person to never say anything about what happened to them.’ But whenever they tried he looked as though they had set upon him with clubs, or else dazed and foolish, something going out like a smothered light in his head; and after a while they let him be.

VI

The days went and came for him with the even way of water. When his back and arms hurt like coals, he would sit a bit and consider things that Freda wanted. It pleased him to discover something and have it done before she even spoke of it. He was a handy man and particular, Freda said. She liked it when he sat near her in her perpetual cooking so she could say aloud to somebody the things that wandered through her mind. It made her feel more comfortable to see his sunk old body quiet in a chair. His puttering worried her until she saw that he was more easy in his mind doing these things he thought up for himself. He put in new steps where they were rotted on the porch, and cleaned the chicken house as though it were the rooms of people. In a storm one night two shingles were ripped from the shed roof, and Nathan spent a morning shaping wood to fit the places. He climbed cautiously to the edge and nailed them down with fine precision. Every day Freda could see these shingles, slightly different from the rest. ‘They look mighty nice, Mr. Nathan,’ she would always say, and stand looking at them from the porch.

In July Nathan spent his time in caring for the tomato vines, and turned each tomato to the light as far as its stem would go. He caught the worms and squashed them carefully under his boots, looking hard at something else each time. No worm escaped, because he lifted up each leaf in search. ‘You done it,’ Freda sometimes heard him saying to the worms, and when their skins burst out he put a trowel full of dirt over what was left.

He always tried to get up earlier than Freda, groping his way down the dark stairs at four, and put her kettles on to heat. Sometimes he went on out and wandered down the path to the barn, because there was no one to stop him. Karl met him sometimes coming back, his pockets bulged out where wild raspberries oozed through. Karl could never translate the ironed-out look he had.

The autumn came sombrely and warm. It was long and the leaves showed no change until November. Nathan gathered the fallen apples and dug a pit for them. Sometimes it seemed to Freda that he would never finish before winter. When she looked out the window he would be sitting on a box, his hands on the shovel, wailing for the wornness in his arms to go away. Then he would get up and dig another shovelful. All day he was getting up and sitting down again, but there was a look of satisfaction on his face.

‘Why don’t you dig it deeper?' Karl asked him.

Nathan looked confused, as though he hadn’t noticed. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘I must of thought it was for something else.’

Freda did n’t understand when he told her. ‘What’s Mr. Nathan mean by that, Karl? He knew it was for apples.’

‘Mr. Nathan don’t remember very good sometimes, I guess. Maybe he thought there were n’t so many.’

‘I think Mr. Nathan don’t like to put those apples under ground before he has to,’ Freda said, and after that they let him do it as he wanted.

The days were like a long nocturne to life. The walnuts fell and Nathan piled them by the chopping block, and smashed them sometimes for the jays and cardinals that came in the noon quiet. Freda noticed that he sat still more often these days, reading to her out of the paper while she cooked or washed, instead of rummaging through the woodshed or working with his saw. He looked purple under the eyes and probed around his plate instead of eating. Sometimes he sat propped up all night to make his breath come easier, but they did not know this.

‘You ought to see a doctor, Mr. Nathan,’ Freda said. She offered to drive him, but it was a long way to town and each time he always felt better the day after she said this.

‘I don’t know it’s anything a doctor could place exactly. I’m just getting old,’ he protested.

‘You ain’t any business getting old, Mr. Nathan,’ Freda said. She did take him in once, but Nathan was right; it was n’t anything you could place, and the doctor gave him medicines for different things, which he stopped taking after a while.

VII

The Tuesday before Thanksgiving they took Mrs. Octerbeck in to Leona’s and brought back a duck for themselves. Nathan had supposed they would go to Leona’s. Each morning he had reminded himself that they would, so that he could get used to the idea. When Freda told him they wanted to stay home this year, he was so pleased that he forgot to ask them why. He whistled and chattered as if he were young again, and helped Freda to pick the duck, sticking its feathers in his hair like an Indian war bonnet. They opened the dwarf tomato pickles, and Freda went clear out of her head and made three different kinds of pies, because it was for Thanksgiving.

They made a sausage stuffing for the duck, and in the morning Nathan sat by the stove and watched the oven while Freda rested on the porch. It was warm and like the beginning of the year’s things instead of their end. The Landstetters went by on their way to a reunion. They waved and looked surprised to see Freda sitting there alone. She was glad they went too fast to ask her why. It made her feel lonesome, and she went inside where Nathan was peering anxiously into the oven. The duck’s skin crackled when he touched it. It looked beautiful sitting on their plates.

Nathan did his best to show them his gratitude. He raked up into memory all the stories of when he was young. He amazed even himself at his memory. Names and faces came back more clearly than in years. He remembered anecdotes and legends from the history of Calhoun that everyone had forgotten. They laughed a great deal and forgot to notice that he ate only little slivers of each thing. Freda’s cheeks ached with laughing. They all felt excited and young again, not like themselves, and yet not strange.

There was a good deal of pie left. On other Thanksgivings the neighbors had come in later on and eaten slices of it with the beer and cider, but she did not expect anybody now, and yet put the plates up carefully on the shelf.

They sat on the front porch, talking sometimes of things they had already said, but pleasant because they were familiar. The brush piles were raked into great heaps like giant porcupines along the fence, and there were brown stalks of yuccas, dry and full of seed. ‘We ought to cut them down, Karl,’ Freda said, but nobody moved. The sun was warm, almost hot along the porch.

‘I got all the apples in last night,’ Nathan said. ‘They ought to keep a long time the way I fixed them.’

‘They ought to do that,’ Karl said.

They sat and looked down dreamily at the road where a wagon crawled a long way off. ‘It might be somebody coming to see us,’ Nathan said. Freda looked at Karl, but they did n’t say anything. The wagon came nearer and they knew the white faces of the Hempelmyers’ team. They could see Mrs. Hempelmyer sitting spread out by her husband.

Freda got up and went inside fast. She pretended there was something she had forgotten. She shoved the coffeepot on the stove and lifted down the pies — gently, so they would n’t hear her. When she came back the team was stopping at the gate. Mr. Hempelmyer got out, heavy on his feet, waving his great arms. Karl sat and stared at him, hardly understanding what it meant. Then he got up, excited. Mr. Hempelmyer came up to the porch, his face hot and stretched into a smile. He carried a heavy box, and Mrs. Hempelmyer’s wadded arms were pressed around a jar. Freda saw it was full of pear pickles, dark and stuck with cloves.

‘Too warm for hog killing,’ Mr. Hempelmyer burst out, ‘so we brought you honey with some pickle.’

‘Yah,’ said Mrs. Hempelmyer. ‘They are this year’s, Freda, with a new recipe.’ She held them to the light.

Freda’s words came one on top of the next. All the months of never seeing them she tried to say in one breath.

‘This is Mr. Nathan, Otto,’ Karl put in. ‘Mr. Nathan’s living with us now. Maybe you knew —’

Mr. Hempelmyer shook his hand lustily. ‘Glad to know you,’ he boomed. ‘This is my wife. Mr. Nathan, Thelma —’

Mrs. Hempelmyer smiled at him. ‘We ain’t been over a long time. No. We heard — I mean we had a lot of work this year. We ain’t done much visiting any place.’

Freda pretended she did n’t know what it was Mrs. Hempelmyer had been going to say. She brought out the pie and coffee.

They stayed almost two hours, going over the year as it had been each day since they last came. Nathan talked sometimes, too. He looked pleased and excited, but there was a blueness coming underneath his skin and his eyes looked glowing in their hollows. When it was five the Hempelmyers left. They made Karl and Freda promise to bring Mr. Nathan down next Sunday. They drove off, waving a long way down the road.

Freda picked up the empty plates and went inside. Nathan and Karl sat in the dark. It was warm and smelled of spring. Even the maples had begun to bud because of the long warmth.

‘It’s been a nice day,’ Nathan said.

‘Yeh, a nice day.’ Karl leaned his back against the post and blew strong clouds of smoke down the slow-moving wind.

After a while Nathan’s pipe went out, but he did not light it up again.

‘Need a match?’ Karl said. He looked at Nathan sitting there in the half-darkness, not moving or saying anything. Freda came out with a lamp and told him to shut up the chickens. They could see Nathan’s face, as if it were asleep. Only they both knew someway that he was dead. There was n’t any smile on his face, but even in their sudden confusion and fear they thought he looked content and pleased.