Now in November

by Josephine Winslow Johnson

It’s a queer experience for a man to go through, to work years for security and peace, and then in a few months’ time have it all dissolve into nothing; to feel the strange blankness and dark of being neither wanted nor necessary any more. Things had come slow to him and gone fast, and it made him suspicious even of the land.

even then we felt we had come to something both treacherous and kind, which could be trusted only to be inconstant, and would go its own way as though we were never born.

And things that have cost more than they’re worth leave a bitter taste.

1066

William the Conqueror and King Harold II (the last Anglo-Saxon king of England) fought the Battle of Hastings on 14 Oct 1066

They were as much part of us as the sight of white-boned sycamores flung up against the sky,

The stars were windy and brilliant, and one enormous planet burned down along the west. It was dark with no moon, but the white patches of everlasting gleamed out disk-like in the grass.

There was a fierce sweet smell from the crab-trees, and I peered up at the stars through their twisted branches.

The sun was hot like a blanket of fire across the shoulders,

The earth was overwhelmed with beauty and indifferent to it, and I went with a heart ready to crack for its unbearable loveliness.

As long as I can see, I thought, I shall never go utterly starved or thirsty, or want to die… and I thought this because I did not know, because I still had hope that Grant was not beyond me, and because I could still see him and hear him at least. I was afraid, though, and prayed. Lord make me satisfied with small things. Make me content to live on the outside of life.

Turner have to yank pretty hard to get this big black tick out of his ol’ houn’s ear!”

Pretty funny metaphor!

Old Koven lives off their steers and savings.

The steers will die with no water

Don’ feel like a frost anyway.”

A frost?? In June? wbere do these people live?

was glad to get the mules, but uneasy with the obligation and afraid already that it would never be paid—having debt enough now, without adding the weight of kindness to it.

the ache of tiredness like a stone on top of my lungs.

The stars were foolish pin-points of pain,

Kerrin’s light went out and I heard her move in bed, and the old haunting fear came back—a kind of dark stain over all other thoughts. We seemed to lie here locked and coffined inside ourselves, and only Merle still free of the love or hate or fear that was shut inside.

Every new thought seemed to open a door, but when the mind rushed forward to enter, the door was slammed shut, leaving it dazed outside.

I seemed often on the threshold of some important and clarifying light, some answer to more than the obvious things; and then it was shut away.

June dragged on with a heavy heat. By seven the birds were still as at noon, and the sun was a weight of fire on the leaves.

There was talk of strikes,

Milk strikes of 1933

It was from this time on that he seemed to trust Grant less; and things began going wrong between them.

when we walked down the road it seemed as if larks flew up from every post, singing and yellow-vested. The fields were daisy-flooded and white with yarrow.

Aaron was different from the rest, with more shape to his face and less thickness between him and his feelings. He saw that things weren’t always just black or white, but that there were shades between.

It was as though faith were a thing one was born with, like color or eyes or arms, and wouldn’t be otherwise obtained.

By July half of the corn was dead and flapped in the fields like brittle paper.

hope’s an obsession that never dies.

There was still the awful torture of hope that would die only with life.

neither Mother nor Grant looked up to or envied any man. It was not a self-pride or a feeling of being different. Not that at all. But a sort of faith in the dignity of the human spirit.

The drouth went on. Trees withered, the grass turned hay, even the weeds dried into ashes, even the great trees with their roots fifty years under ground.

The last evening of July we sat out on the porch, quiet, Father thumbing over the almanac in search of August rains.

“Next year’ll be different,” Mother said. “I’ve never known drouth for three years straight together.

“I don’t pay you to help at Rathman’s,” Father said, forgetting he never paid Grant anyway.

In August the smell of grapes poured up like a warm flood through the windows.

The fifth month of the drouth began with nothing but clouds and the taunt of an hour’s drizzle.

She died that night. It was early in October a month ago, and the autumn storms began. The first rains since February…. Once I thought there were words for all things except love and intolerable beauty. Now I know that there is a third thing beyond expression—the sense of loss. There are no words for death.

I do not see in our lives any great ebb and flow or rhythm of earth. There is nothing majestic in our living. The earth turns in great movements, but we jerk about on its surface like gnats, our days absorbed and overwhelmed by a mass of little things—that confusion which is our living and which prevents us from being really alive.

We have no reason to hope or believe, but do because we must,

Love and the old faith are gone. Faith gone with Mother. Grant gone. But there is the need and the desire left, and out of these hills they may come again. I cannot believe this is the end. Nor can I believe that death is more than the blindness of those living. And if this is only the consolation of a heart in its necessity, or that easy faith born of despair, it does not matter, since it gives us courage somehow to face the mornings. Which is as much as the heart can ask at times.