Coming of a Road

AT five the great storm wind came from the south and blotted out the sky. There was a down-river rain a long way off. We rode for three hours, and there was a cool wind until sunset, and then the lower roads were chill with mist. There is, in these evenings, a great quietness that words are thin or maudlin to express. Everywhere were the wild rose vines, with buds still hard, and the young walnuts were like them, only swollen larger, with a green dust on their shells. But it was hard to forget the red tags and the blazed bark of the trees: the new road will cut through here, slag down, mow straight across a pawpaw thicket, fill up the shallows. There is no need of it. The old was wide and hard enough — might even be remade with care and plan. But nobody does things in a slower way any more.

There is no use in being bitter, no use in hate. As well say, ‘The one that you loved most is dead — be still, be reasonable, do not grieve. It is inevitable. Best.’ Be reasonable? What reasoning to strip a bank of silver locust and leave it bare to wash down in the rains?

The thorn trees, where the shrikes have nested, and the wild crabs are still here, and the moonseed vines are flowering. Beyond the oat fields, with their malty scent, Miss Virgy’s house, with its sick and yellow shutters, a few sheep grazing on the lawn. The cattle are all sold, the place looks desolate. A few elms cluster still around the barn. Last year she put in new wire fences, cut down all the young oaks and the maples that had grown up near the old rail bars. Dickcissels sing along the wires, and once — only once — we heard a quail call out. . . .

Part way the trees are near, heavy with leaves and undergrown with shad and elder bushes, roped with wild grapevines. It is cool here, even in the early afternoon, and there is the sense of nearness, of intimacy. These are more than shadow masses, and made up of small and separate things grown large with meaning — green fruit of gooseberry bushes like globes of goblin light, the lacewings walking underneath a leaf. Almost we looked into a snail’s eye as it crawled along the bark ... a chickadee grown large as either of its parents, yet still pursuing them for food.

We came on hunters in an open space. We should have liked — but of what use? Not even poison ivy will do harm to them — nor any snake. Ask a hunter if he read the signs. Says, ‘Yes, sir—just passing through,’ and shoots a rabbit down before your eyes. A hunter understands exactly one thing only — a shotgun in the hands, a rifle with the drop on his prey. Nothing else will ever penetrate. . . . The great horned owls are disappearing fast, the vultures grow more scarce each year. We stopped to watch their long wings drifting back and forth above the blue ravines. There is an awful grace in these slow and dwindling ares of flight.

Pastures where the great hogs go walking on the sky ridge, small against the clouds. Milkweed in bloom, and daisies studded in the fields. The black-eyed Susans, the Indian doe-eyes, and the purple mint. . . . More burned fence rows. . . . Scrub oak and rabbits. . . . Hard maples here once, and the pawpaw trees with young leaves that looked like green moths pinned all up and down the twigs. . . . Passed a field of young mules trotting light as deer, and pigs bounced through the Jimson weed. And all the time on the air was the changing scent of dry weeds and wild grape, honeysuckle and the hot fir needles. . . . Aromatic, pungent — sometimes overpoweringly sweet. . . .

We came back in the clear light that follows when the sun is gone, a light in which things are more clearly seen than even in high noon. . . . Blackberries sprawled into the road, and nighthawks came. Whippoorwills started up monotonous calling from the pasture edge. It will be a long time before the fields are built and scarred, the mulleins and the gray sheep gone, but the peace and nearness will be lost this year, and soon there will be no place at all to turn for quiet. . . . We can go faster on this new road perhaps, but where shall we go? For what? No acre of earth will differ from the next.

JOSEPHINE W. JOHNSON