A Daughter of the Morning

CHAPTER I

I found this paper on the cellar shelf. It come around the boys' new overalls. When I was cutting it up in sheets with the butcher knife on the kitchen table, Ma come in, and she says:

"What you doin' now?"

The way she says "now" made me feel like I've felt before – mad and ready to fly. So I says it right out, that I'd meant to keep a secret. I says:

"I'm makin' me a book."

"Book!" she says. "For the receipts you know?" she says, and laughed like she knows how. I hate cooking, and she knows it.

I went on tying it up.

"Be writing a book next, I s'pose," says Ma, and laughed again.

"It ain't that kind of a book," I says. "This is just to keep track."

"Well, you'd best be doing something useful," says Ma. "Go out and pull up some radishes for your Pa's supper."

I went on tying up the sheets, though, with pink string that come around Pa's patent medicine. When it was done I run my hand over the page, and I liked the feeling on my hand. Then I saw Ma coming up the back steps with the radishes. I was going to say something, because I hadn't gone to get them, but she says:

"Nobody ever tries to save me a foot of travelin' around."

And then I didn't care whether I said it or not. So I kept still. She washed off the radishes, bending over the sink that's in too low. She'd wet the front of her skirt with some suds of something she'd washed out, and her cuffs was wet, and her hair was coming down.

"It's rack around from morning till night," she says, "doing for folks that don't care about anything so's they get their stomachs filled."

"You might talk," I says, "if you was Mis' Keddie Bingy."

"Why? Has anything more happened to her?" Ma asked.

"Nothing new," I says. "Keddie was drinking all over the house last night. I heard him singing and swearing – and once I heard her scream."

"He'll kill her yet," says Ma. "And then she'll be through with it. I'm so tired to-night I wisht I was dead. All day long I've been at it – floors to mop, dinner to get, water to lug."

"Quit going on about it, Ma," I says.

"You're a pretty one to talk to me like that," says Ma.

She set the radishes on the kitchen table and went to the back door. One of her shoes dragged at the heel, and a piece of her skirt hung below her dress.

"Jim!" she shouted, "your supper's ready. Come along and eat it," – and stood there twisting her hair up.

Pa come up on the porch in a minute. His feet were all mud from the fields, and the minute he stepped on Ma's clean floor she begun on him. He never said a word, but he tracked back and forth from the wash bench to the water pail, making his big black footprints every step. I should think she would have been mad. But she said what she said about half a dozen times – not mad, only just whining and complaining and like she expected it. The trouble was, she said it so many times.

"When you go on so, I don't care how I track up," says Pa, and dropped down to the table. He filled up his plate and doubled down over it, and Ma and I got ours.

"What was you and Stacy talkin' about so long over the fence?" Ma says, after a while.

"It's no concern of yours," says Pa. "But I'll tell ye, just to show ye what some women have to put up with. Keddie Bingy hit her over the head with a dish in the night. It's laid her up, and he's down to the Dew Drop Inn, filling himself full."

"She's used to it by this time, I guess," Ma says. "Just as well take it all at once as die by inches, I say."

"Trot out your pie," says Pa.

As soon as I could after we'd done the dishes, I took my book up to the room. Ma and I slept together. Pa had the bedroom off the dining-room. I had the bottom bureau drawer to myself for my clothes. I put my book in there, and I found a pencil in the machine drawer, and I put that by it. I'd wanted to make the book for a long time, to set down thoughts in, and keep track of the different things. But I didn't feel like making the book any more by the time I got it all ready. I went to laying out my underclothes in the drawer so's the lace edge would show on all of 'em that had it.

Ma come to the side door and called me.

"Cossy," she says, "is Luke comin' to-night?"

"I s'pose so," I says.

"Well, then, you go right straight over to Mis' Bingy's before he gets here," Ma says.

I went down the stairs – they had a blotched carpet that I hated because it looked like raw meat and gristle.

"Why don't you go yourself?" I says.

"Because Mis' Bingy'll be ashamed before me," she says; "but she won't think you know about it. Take her this."

I took the loaf of steam brown bread.

"If Luke comes," I says, "have him walk along after me."

The way to Mis' Bingy's was longer to go by the road, or short through the wood-lot. I went by the road, because I thought maybe I might meet somebody. The worst of the farm wasn't only the work. It was never seein' anybody. I only met a few wagons, and none of 'em stopped to say anything. Lena Curtsy went by, dressed up in black-and-white, with a long veil. She looks like a circus rider, not only Sundays but every day. But Luke likes the look of her, he said so.

"You're goin' the wrong way, Cossy!" she calls out.

"No, I ain't, either," I says, short enough. I can't bear the sight of her. And yet, if I have anything to brag about, it's always her I want to brag it to.

Just when I turned off to Bingy's, I met the boys. We never waited supper for 'em, because sometimes they get home and sometimes they don't. They were coming from the end of the street-car line, black from the blast furnace.

"Where you goin', kid?" says Bert.

I nodded to the house.

"Well, then, tell her she'd better watch out for Bingy," says Henny. "He's crazy drunk down to the Dew Drop. I wouldn't stay there if I was her."

I ran the rest of the way to the Bingy house. I went round to the back door. Mis' Bingy was in the kitchen, sitting on the edge of the bed. She had the bed put up in the kitchen when the baby was born, and she'd kept it there all the year. When I stepped on to the boards, she jumped and screamed.

"Here's some steam brown bread," I says.

She set down again, trembling all over. The baby was laying over back in the bed, and it woke up and whimpered. Mis' Bingy kind of poored it with one hand, and with the other she pushed up the bandage around her head. She was big and wild-looking, and her hair was always coming down in a long, coiled-up mess on her shoulders. Her hands looked worse than Ma's.

"I guess I look funny, don't I?" she says, trying to smile. "I cut my head open some – by accident."

I hate a lie. Not because it's wicked so much as because it never fools anybody.

"Mis' Bingy," I says, "I know that Mr. Bingy threw a dish at you last night and cut your head open, because he was drunk. Well, I just met Henny, and he says he's down to the Inn, crazy drunk. Henny don't want you should stay here."

She kind of give out, as though her spine wouldn't hold up. I guess she had the idea none of the neighbors knew.

"Where can I go?" she says.

There was only one place that I could think of. "Come on over with me," I says. "Pa and the boys are there. They won't let him hurt you."

She shook her head. "I'd have to come back some time," she says.

"Why would you?" I asked her.

She looked at me kind of funny.

"He's my husband," she says – and she kind of straightened up and looked dignified, without meaning to. I just stood and looked at her. Think of it making her look like that to own that drunken coward for a husband!

"What if he is?" I says. "He's a brute, and we all know it."

She cried a little. "You hadn't ought to speak to me so," she says. "If I go, how'll I earn my living, and the baby's?" she says.

I hadn't thought of that. "That's so," I says. "You are tied, ain't you?"

I couldn't get her to come with me. She's got the bed made up in the front room up-stairs, and she was going up there that night and lock her door, and leave the kitchen open.

"He may not be so bad," she says. "Maybe he'll be so drunk he'll tumble on the bed asleep, or maybe he'll be sick. I always hope for one of them."

I went back through the wood-lot. It was so different out there from home and Mis' Bingy's that it felt good. I found a place in a book once that told about the woods. It gave me a nice feeling. I used to get it out of the school library whenever it was in and read the place over, to get the feeling again. Almost always it gave it to me. In the real woods I didn't always get it. They come so close up to me that they bothered me. I always thought I was going to get to something, and I never did. And yet I always liked it in the wood-lot. And it was nice to be away from home and from Mis' Bingy's.

I forgot the whole bunch of 'em for a while. It was the night of a moon, and you could see it in the trees, like a big fat face that was friends with you. When a bird did just one note, it felt pleasant. After a while I stopped still, because it seemed as if something was near to me; but I wasn't scared, even if it was quite dark. I thought to myself that I wisht my family and all the folks I knew was still and kept to themselves same as the trees does, instead of rushing at you every minute, out loud. I never knew any folks that acted different from that, though. Luke was just like that, too.

I was thinking of this when I see him coming to meet me, down the path. He ain't a big man, Luke.

"Hello, Cossy," he says. "That you?"

"Hello, Luke," I says. I dunno why it is – with the boys at home I can joke. But Luke, he always makes me feel just plain. I just says "Hello, Luke," and stood still, and waited for him to come up to me. He turned and walked along beside me.

"I was afraid I wouldn't meet you," he says. "I was afraid I'd miss you. My, it's a good thing to get you somewheres by yourself."

"Why?" I says.

"Oh, the boys are always around, or your pa, or somebody. I've got a right to talk to you sometimes by yourself."

"Well, go ahead, then. Talk to me."

All of a sudden he stopped still in the path.

"Do you mean that?" he ask.

"Mean what?" I says. I couldn't think what he meant.

"That I can talk to you now? My way?"

"Oh," I says. I knew then. I guess I should have known before, if I'd stopped to think. But someway I never could put my mind on Luke all the time he was saying anything.

"Cossy," he says, "I've tried to talk to you; you always got round it or else somebody else come in. You know what I want."

I didn't say anything. I sort of waited, not so much to see what he was going to do as to see what I was going to do.

Then he didn't say anything. But he put his arm around me, and put his hand around my arm. I let him. I wasn't mad, so I didn't pretend.

"Let's us sit down here," he says.

We sat under a big tree and he drew my head down on his shoulder.

"You're all kinds of a peach," he says, "that's what you are, Cossy – I bet you've known for weeks I want you to marry me. Ain't you?"

"Yes," I says, "I s'pose I have."

He laughed. "You're a funny girl," he says.

"It's silly to pretend," I says.

"You bet," he says, "it's silly to pretend. Give me a kiss, then. Kiss me yourself."

I did. I had to see whether I was pretending not to want to, or whether I really didn't want to. I see right away that I didn't want to.

"Marry me, Cossy," he says. "Will you?"

I was twenty years old. For a long time Ma had been asking me why I didn't marry some nice young man. "Marry some nice young man," she says. "You'll be happier, Cossy." Why would I be happier, I wondered. What would make me happy? There would be, I supposed, a great deal of this kind of thing. I thought it was honest to talk it over with Luke.

"What for?" I says.

"Because I love you," says Luke serious; "and I want you."

I laughed out loud. "Them's funny reasons for a bargain," I says.

He kind of drew off. "Oh, well," he says, "it's all I've got. If you don't think it amounts to anything – "

"That's why you should marry me," I says. "But I want to know why I should marry you."

"Don't you love me?" says Luke.

"I donno," I told him. "I don't like to kiss you so very well."

"Cossy, listen," Luke said. "All that'll come. Honest, it will, dear. Just trust me, and marry me. I need you."

"Well, but, Luke," I says, "I donno if I need you. I don't believe I do."

"You listen here," he says, sort of mad. "You'll have a home of your own – "

"Why, wouldn't I live on your folks's farm?" I says.

"Oh, well, yes," Luke says. "But – I love you, Cossy!" he ends up. "Can't you understand? I love you."

He said it like the reason. I begun to think it was.

"You've got to marry somebody," says Luke.

I knew that well enough. Home was bad enough now, but when one of the boys brought a wife there it would be worse. I'd have to marry somebody.

"I'd like to get away from home," I says. "Ma and I don't get along, and Pa's like a bear the whole time."

"You'd ought not to say such things, Cossy," says Luke.

"Why not?" I says. "They're true. That is about the only reason I can think of why I should marry you. That, and because I've got to marry somebody."

I thought he'd be mad. Instead, he had his arms around me and was kissing me.

"I don't care what you marry me for," he says. "Marry me, anyhow!"

I thought: "I s'pose I'd get used to him. I don't like the boys, either. I can't bear Henny. Every girl seems to act as if it was all right, after she gets away. Maybe it is."

Two people were coming along the path. Luke and I sat still – it was so dark nobody could notice us where we were. I heard them talking and then I heard Ma's voice. I knew right off Henny had told her about Keddie, and she was going to try to get Mis' Bingy to come home with us.

" … On my feet from morning till night," she was saying, "till it seems as though I should drop. I don't know how I stand it."

Pa was with her. "Stand it, stand it!" he says. "Anybody'd think you had the pest in the house. I'm sick of hearin' you whine."

"I know," says Ma, "nobody thinks I'm worth anything now. But after I'm dead and gone – "

"Oh, shut up," says Pa. And they went by us.

I stood up, all of a sudden. Anything would be better than home.

"Luke – " I says.

In a few years maybe him and me would be talking the same as Ma and Pa. Maybe he'd be hanging around the Dew Drop Inn, same as Keddie Bingy. What of it? All women took the chance.

"Luke," I says, "all right."

"Do you mean you will?" says Luke. I liked him the best I'd ever liked him, the way he says that.

"I said 'all right,'" I says. "You be a good husband to me and I'll be a good wife to you."

Luke kind of scared me, he was so glad.

On the way home he didn't talk much. As soon as we got to our house I made him go. I'd begun to feel the tired way I do every time I'm with him – as if I'd ironed or done up fruit.

Ma and Pa hadn't come back yet. I went up to Ma's and my room and lit the lamp. It was on a bracket, and stuck up behind it was a picture of me when I was a baby. I just stood and stared at it. I hadn't thought of it before – but what if Luke and I should have one?

"No, sir! No, sir! No, sir!" I says, all the while I put myself to bed.

CHAPTER II

Toward morning I heard somebody scream. I was dreaming that I was with Luke in the grove, and that he touched my hand, and that it was me that screamed. I heard it again and again, with another noise. Then I woke up. It wasn't me. It was somebody else.

I sat up in bed and shook Ma. She snores, and I couldn't hardly wake her. By the time she sat up I heard Pa move. When we got to the stairs I heard him at the back door.

"What's wanted?" I heard him say.

"Quick, quick! Lemme in! Lemme in!" I heard from outside. I knew it was Mis' Bingy. We got down-stairs just as Pa opened the door, and she come in. Everything about her was blowing – her long hair and her outing nightgown and the baby's shawl. She could hardly breathe, and she leaned against the door and tried to lock it. I went and locked it for her. She sat down, and the baby was awake and crying, so she jounced it up and down, without knowing she was doing it, while she told what was the matter. She twisted up her hair, and I didn't think she knew she done that, either. She had on a blue calico waist to a work dress, over her nightgown, and her bare feet were in shoes, with the laces dangling. Ma took one look at her, and went and put on the teakettle. She said afterward she never knew she done that, either.

Mis' Bingy told us what happened. She had been laying awake up-stairs when he come home. He called her, and she didn't answer. Then he brought a flatiron and beat at the door. Then he yelled that he'd bring the ax. When he went for it, she slipped out of her bedroom and locked the door, and hid in the closet under the stairs till she heard him run up 'em. Then she started.

"He'll kill me," she says. "He said he'd kill me. I've never known him like this before."

Pa come back from his room, part dressed.

"I'll go and get the constable," he says.

"Oh," says Mis' Bingy, "don't arrest him! Don't do that!"

"Lookin' for to be killed?" says Pa. "And us, too, for a-harborin' you here?"

She fell to crying then, and the baby cried. Mis' Bingy said things to herself that we couldn't understand. Ma come and brought her a cup of hot water with the tea that was left in the teapot poured in it. Ma had a calico skirt around her shoulders, and she was in her bare feet.

"He'll kill you," Ma says to Pa, "on your way to the constable. I wouldn't go past that house for anything, to-night."

I remember how anxious she looked at him. She was anxious, like Mis' Bingy'd been when she said not to arrest Keddie.

Pa muttered, but he didn't go out. In a little while, Ma said best get some rest, so we went up to the room again, and took Mis' Bingy. Her and Ma laid down on the bed, and I got the canvas cot that was folded up in there. My feet stuck out, and I couldn't go to sleep. But the funny thing to me was that both Ma and Mis' Bingy went to sleep in a little while.

I laid there, waiting for it to get light. The window was a little bit gray, and off in the wood-lot I could hear a bird wake up and go to sleep again. I liked it. Early in the morning always seemed to me like some other time. Things acted as if they was something else. Even the bureau looked different… Pretty soon the sky changed, and the dark was thin enough so I could see Ma and Mis' Bingy. Ma's light-colored hair had got all around her face. I thought how young she looked asleep. She looked so little and soft. She looked as if she'd be nice. I guess she would have been if she hadn't had so much to do. I never remembered her when she didn't have too much to do, except once when she broke her arm; and her arm hurt her so that she was cross anyway. Once, when the boys bought her a plaid silk, she was nice for two days; but then wash-day come and spoiled it again, and she couldn't get back.

Ma never had much. I don't believe any of us know her like she'd be if she had things to do with, and didn't have to work so hard, and Pa and the boys wasn't all the time picking on her. They all say mean things. I do, too, of course. I always dread our meals. We don't scrap over anything particular, but everything that comes up, somebody's always got some lip to answer back. And Ma's easy teased and always looking for slaps. That's me, too; I'm easy teased, though I don't look for it. Laying there asleep, Ma seemed like somebody I didn't know, and I felt sorry for her. She was having a rotten life.

And Mis' Bingy. The bandage was off her head, and I saw the big red mark. She was awful thin and blue-looking, with cords in her neck. She was young, not more than thirty. Ma was old; Ma was forty, and, awake, she looked it. I could see Mis' Bingy's bare arm, and it was strong as an ox. It laid around the baby, that was sleeping on her chest. I liked to look at it. But I thought about her life, too, and I wondered how either Ma or her kept going at all. And what made them willing to. Neither of 'em was having a real life. Look what love had brought them to…

And there was me, starting in the same way, with Luke.

It was broad daylight by then, so I could see around the room. There wasn't a carpet, and the plaster was cracked. So was the pitcher, that was just for show, anyhow, because we washed in the kitchen. I'd tried to fill it for a while, but Ma said it was putting on. In a little bit we would all be sprucing up in the kitchen, with Ma trying to get breakfast and everybody yipping out at everybody else.

And I'd just fixed it so's that all my life would be the same thing as their lives.

I slipped out of bed and began to dress. It wasn't Sunday, but I opened the drawer where my underclothes were, and took out them that had lace edging. I put on my best shoes and my white stockings. Then I went out in the hall closet and got down my new muslin that I'd worn only once that summer, and I took it over my arm and went down in the kitchen. When I was all ready I went through the door that opened stillest, and outdoors.

Out there was as different as if it didn't belong. You thought of the fresh smell of it before you thought of anything else. Nothing about it had been used. And the thin sunshine come right at you, slanting. Over the porch the morning-glories were all out. I pulled off a whole great vine of 'em and put it around my neck. Then I ran. I wasn't going to go anywheres or do anything. But I was clean and dressed up, and outdoors was just as good as anybody else has.

I went down the road toward the sun. It seemed as if I must be going toward something else, better than all I knew. I felt as if I was a person, living like persons live. I wondered why I hadn't done this every morning. I wondered why everybody didn't do it. I kind of wanted to be doing it together with somebody. Everybody I knew done things so separate. I wisht everybody was with me.

I wanted to sing. So I did – the first thing that come into my head. I put my head back, so's I could see the two rows of the trees ahead, almost meeting, and the thick blue between them. And then I sung the first thing that come into my head, and I sung it to the top of my voice:

And when I got to the end of the verse somebody said:

"I don't believe you can possibly mind if I thank you for that?"

The man must have been sitting by the road, because he was right there beside me, standing still, with his hat in his hand.

I says, "I can't sing. I just done that for fun."

"That's what was so delightful," he says. And then he says, "Are you going to the village? May I walk along with you?"

"No, I ain't going to town," I says. "I ain't going anywheres much. But you can walk where you want to. The road's free."

He walked side of me. I looked at him. He was good-looking. He was so clean – that was the first thing I noticed about him. Clean, and sort of brown and pink, with nothing more on his face than was on mine, and yet he looked manly. He was big. He had a wide way with his shoulders, and he held his head nice. I liked to look at him, so I did look.

And all at once I says to myself, What did I care so I got some fun out of it. Other girls was always doing this. Lena Curtsy would have talked with him in a minute. Maybe I could get him to ask me to go to a show. I couldn't go, but I thought I'd like to make him ask me.

"Was you lonesome?" I ask', looking at him.

He didn't say anything. He just looked at me, smiling a little. I thought I'd better say a little more. I wanted him to know I wasn't a stick, but that I was in for fun, like a city girl.

"You don't look like a chap that'd be lonesome very long," I says. "Not if you can get acquainted this easy."