I
ALL that midsummer month Carol was sensitive to Kennicott.
She recalled a hundred grotesqueries: her comic dismay at
his having chewed tobacco, the evening when she had tried
to read poetry to him; matters which had seemed to vanish
with no trace or sequence. Always she repeated that he had
been heroically patient in his desire to join the army. She
made much of her consoling affection for him in little things.
She liked the homeliness of his tinkering about the house; his
strength and handiness as he tightened the hinges of a shutter;
his boyishness when he ran to her to be comforted because he
had found rust in the barrel of his pump-gun. But at the
highest he was to her another Hugh, without the glamor of
Hugh's unknown future.
There was, late in June, a day of heat-lightning.
Because of the work imposed by the absence of the other
doctors the Kennicotts had not moved to the lake cottage
but remained in town, dusty and irritable. In the afternoon,
when she went to Oleson & McGuire's (formerly Dahl &
Oleson's), Carol was vexed by the assumption of the youthful
clerk, recently come from the farm, that he had to be
neighborly and rude. He was no more brusquely familiar than
a dozen other clerks of the town, but her nerves were
heat-scorched.
When she asked for codfish, for supper, he grunted, "What
d'you want that darned old dry stuff for?"
"I like it!"
"Punk! Guess the doc can afford something better than
that. Try some of the new wienies we got in. Swell. The
Haydocks use 'em."
She exploded. "My dear young man, it is not your duty to
instruct me in housekeeping, and it doesn't particularly
concern me what the Haydocks condescend to approve!"
He was hurt. He hastily wrapped up the leprous fragment
of fish; he gaped as she trailed out. She lamented, "I
shouldn't have spoken so. He didn't mean anything. He
doesn't know when he is being rude."
Her repentance was not proof against Uncle Whittier when
she stopped in at his grocery for salt and a package of
safety matches. Uncle Whittier, in a shirt collarless and soaked
with sweat in a brown streak down his back, was whining
at a clerk, "Come on now, get a hustle on and lug that pound
cake up to Mis' Cass's. Some folks in this town think a
storekeeper ain't got nothing to do but chase out
'phone-orders. . . . Hello, Carrie. That dress you got on looks
kind of low in the neck to me. May be decent and modest—
I suppose I'm old-fashioned—but I never thought much of
showing the whole town a woman's bust! Hee, hee, hee!
. . . . Afternoon, Mrs. Hicks. Sage? Just out of it.
Lemme sell you some other spices. Heh?" Uncle Whittier was
nasally indignant "Certainly! Got
plenty other spices jus'
good as sage for any purp'se whatever! What's the matter
with—well, with allspice?" When Mrs. Hicks had gone, he
raged, "Some folks don't know what they want!"
"Sweating sanctimonious bully—my husband's uncle!"
thought Carol.
She crept into Dave Dyer's. Dave held up his arms with,
"Don't shoot! I surrender!" She smiled, but it occurred to
her that for nearly five years Dave had kept up this game of
pretending that she threatened his life.
As she went dragging through the prickly-hot street she
reflected that a citizen of Gopher Prairie does not have jests—
he has a jest. Every cold morning for five winters Lyman Cass
had remarked, "Fair to middlin' chilly—get worse before it
gets better." Fifty times had Ezra Stowbody informed the
public that Carol had once asked, "Shall I indorse this check
on the back?" Fifty times had Sam Clark called to her,
"Where'd you steal that hat?" Fifty times had the mention
of Barney Cahoon, the town drayman, like a nickel in a slot
produced from Kennicott the apocryphal story of Barney's
directing a minister, "Come down to the depot and get your
case of religious books—they're leaking!"
She came home by the unvarying route. She knew every
house-front, every street-crossing, every billboard, every tree,
every dog. She knew every blackened banana-skin and empty
cigarette-box in the gutters. She knew every greeting. When
Jim Howland stopped and gaped at her there was no possibility
that he was about to confide anything but his grudging, "Well,
haryuh t'day?"
All her future life, this same red-labeled bread-crate in
front of the bakery, this same thimble-shaped crack in the
sidewalk a quarter of a block beyond Stowbody's granite
hitching-post—
She silently handed her purchases to the silent Oscarina.
She sat on the porch, rocking, fanning, twitchy with Hugh's
whining.
Kennicott came home, grumbled, "What the devil is the kid
yapping about?"
"I guess you can stand it ten minutes if I can stand it all
day!"
He came to supper in his shirt sleeves, his vest partly open,
revealing discolored suspenders.
"Why don't you put on your nice Palm Beach suit, and take
off that hideous vest?" she complained.
"Too much trouble. Too hot to go up-stairs."
She realized that for perhaps a year she had not definitely
looked at her husband. She regarded his table-manners. He
violently chased fragments of fish about his plate with a knife
and licked the knife after gobbling them. She was slightly
sick. She asserted, "I'm ridiculous. What do these things
matter! Don't be so simple!" But she knew that to her they
did matter, these solecisms and mixed tenses of the table.
She realized that they found little to say; that, incredibly,
they were like the talked-out couples whom she had pitied at
restaurants.
Bresnahan would have spouted in a lively, exciting,
unreliable manner. . . .
She realized that Kennicott's clothes were seldom pressed.
His coat was wrinkled; his trousers would flap at the knees
when he arose. His shoes were unblacked, and they were of
an elderly shapelessness. He refused to wear soft hats;
cleaved to a hard derby, as a symbol of virility and
prosperity; and sometimes he forgot to take it off in the house.
She peeped at his cuffs. They were frayed in prickles of
starched linen. She had turned them once; she clipped them
every week; but when she had begged him to throw the
shirt away, last Sunday morning at the crisis of the weekly
bath, he had uneasily protested, "Oh, it'll wear quite a while
yet."
He was shaved (by himself or more socially by Del Snafflin)
only three times a week. This morning had not been one of
the three times.
Yet he was vain of his new turn-down collars and sleek ties;
he often spoke of the "sloppy dressing" of Dr. McGanum;
and he laughed at old men who wore detachable cuffs or
Gladstone collars.
Carol did not care much for the creamed codfish that
evening.
She noted that his nails were jagged and ill-shaped from
his habit of cutting them with a pocket-knife and despising
a nail-file as effeminate and urban. That they were invariably
clean, that his were the scoured fingers of the surgeon, made
his stubborn untidiness the more jarring. They were wise
hands, kind hands, but they were not the hands of love.
She remembered him in the days of courtship. He had tried
to please her, then, had touched her by sheepishly wearing
a colored band on his straw hat. Was it possible that those
days of fumbling for each other were gone so completely?
He had read books, to impress her; had said (she recalled it
ironically) that she was to point out his every fault; had
insisted once, as they sat in the secret place beneath the walls
of Fort Snelling—
She shut the door on her thoughts. That was sacred ground.
But it was a shame that—
She nervously pushed away her cake and stewed apricots.
After supper, when they had been driven in from the porch
by mosquitos, when Kennicott had for the two-hundredth
time in five years commented, "We must have a new screen
on the porch—lets all the bugs in," they sat reading, and she
noted, and detested herself for noting, and noted again his
habitual awkwardness. He slumped down in one chair, his
legs up on another, and he explored the recesses of his left
ear with the end of his little finger—she could hear the
faint smack—he kept it up—he kept it up—
He blurted, "Oh. Forgot tell you. Some of the fellows coming
in to play poker this evening. Suppose we could have some
crackers and cheese and beer?"
She nodded.
"He might have mentioned it before. Oh well, it's his
house."
The poker-party straggled in: Sam Clark, Jack Elder,
Dave Dyer, Jim Howland. To her they mechanically said,
" 'Devenin'," but to Kennicott, in a heroic male manner,
"Well, well, shall we start playing? Got a hunch I'm going
to lick somebody real bad." No one suggested that she join
them. She told herself that it was her own fault, because
she was not more friendly; but she remembered that they
never asked Mrs. Sam Clark to play.
Bresnahan would have asked her.
She sat in the living-room, glancing across the hall at the
men as they humped over the dining table.
They were in shirt sleeves; smoking, chewing, spitting
incessantly; lowering their voices for a moment so that she
did not hear what they said and afterward giggling hoarsely;
using over and over the canonical phrases: "Three to dole,"
"I raise you a finif," "Come on now, ante up; what do you
think this is, a pink tea?" The cigar-smoke was acrid and
pervasive. The firmness with which the men mouthed their
cigars made the lower part of their faces expressionless, heavy,
unappealing. They were like politicians cynically dividing
appointments.
How could they understand her world?
Did that faint and delicate world exist? Was she a fool?
She doubted her world, doubted herself, and was sick in the
acid, smoke-stained air.
She slipped back into brooding upon the habituality of the
house.
Kennicott was as fixed in routine as an isolated old man.
At first he had amorously deceived himself into liking her
experiments with food—the one medium in which she could
express imagination—but now he wanted only his round of
favorite dishes: steak, roast beef, boiled pig's-feet, oatmeal,
baked apples. Because at some more flexible period he had
advanced from oranges to grape-fruit he considered himself an
epicure.
During their first autumn she had smiled over his affection
for his hunting-coat, but now that the leather had come
unstitched in dribbles of pale yellow thread, and tatters of
canvas, smeared with dirt of the fields and grease from
gun-cleaning, hung in a border of rags, she hated the thing.
Wasn't her whole life like that hunting-coat?
She knew every nick and brown spot on each piece of the
set of china purchased by Kennicott's mother in 1895—discreet
china with a pattern of washed-out forget-me-nots, rimmed
with blurred gold: the gravy-boat, in a saucer which did not
match, the solemn and evangelical covered vegetable-dishes,
the two platters.
Twenty times had Kennicott sighed over the fact that Bea
had broken the other platter—the medium-sized one.
The kitchen.
Damp black iron sink, damp whitey-yellow drain-board with
shreds of discolored wood which from long scrubbing were
as soft as cotton thread, warped table, alarm clock, stove
bravely blackened by Oscarina but an abomination in its
loose doors and broken drafts and oven that never would keep
an even heat.
Carol had done her best by the kitchen: painted it white,
put up curtains, replaced a six-year-old calendar by a color
print. She had hoped for tiling, and a kerosene range for
summer cooking, but Kennicott always postponed these expenses.
She was better acquainted with the utensils in the kitchen
than with Vida Sherwin or Guy Pollock. The can-opener,
whose soft gray metal handle was twisted from some ancient
effort to pry open a window, was more pertinent to her than
all the cathedrals in Europe; and more significant than the
future of Asia was the never-settled weekly question as to
whether the small kitchen knife with the unpainted handle or
the second-best buckhorn carving-knife was better for cutting
up cold chicken for Sunday supper.