Free serial

Four O'Clock

A prequel to Milk and Cornbread by J.B. Fox

Part One: Setting Out

Casey County, Kentucky. May 1939.

The season came on the eleventh of May. It was a slow gray rain that started before daylight and quit about nine, and Mae Whitaker stood on the porch and watched it quit and knew she had run out of reasons.

A season was what people called a rain heavy enough to set tobacco in. You did not wait around for a better one, because a better one might not come.

She had burned the plant bed herself in March, three weeks after the funeral, because the ground did not know anything had happened and would not have cared if it did. She had mixed the seed with wood ashes so she could see where it fell, raked it in, and stretched the canvas over it on stakes the way she had watched Cleo do it for nine springs. Every morning since, she had lifted one corner of that canvas the way you lift a blanket off a sleeping baby, to see if it was still breathing. Now the plants stood four inches high and crowded together, green as a June bug, and it was time.

"Get your bonnet," she said.

Elsie got her bonnet. She was five years old that spring and had been told what she was going to do, and she took it seriously, the way children take any work they have been told is real.

They pulled plants until the basket was full and carried it down to the bottom along the branch, where the ground was black and the rain still stood in the furrows. Mae went first with the setting peg. It was a piece of seasoned hickory whittled to a point, and her father had made it before she was born. She drove it into the row, rocked it, and pulled it out. Elsie came behind her and dropped a plant into the hole, root first. Mae closed the hole with the peg and a press of her heel. Then she took one step and did it again.

"Drop it like you mean it," Mae said. "Don't lay it in there like it's going to break."

"It might break."

"It won't. They're tougher than they look."

Elsie thought about that and dropped the next one so hard it bounced, and Mae laughed out loud for the first time since February, and then stood still in the row a second, surprised at herself.

The dog came behind them the length of every row. His name was Bruce, and he was the worst farm dog in Casey County and knew it and did not mind. When they stopped, he lay down in the wet. When they moved, he got up and followed. He would not have gone a foot out of his way for Mae, but he would have followed that child into the river.

Verlin Bastin rode down the field road on his mule about two o'clock, sat looking at the rows for a while, and said that was a good stand if it held. Mae said she expected it would. He said if the ground dried out before the plants took hold, he would send a barrel of water down on the sled. She said she was obliged to him, and meant it, and hated meaning it, and he rode on.

In that hollow the sun went off the bottom early. By four o'clock the shadow of the west ridge had come down across the branch and was climbing the field toward them, and the air in the shade went cool all at once, the way it does near water.

"Go to the springhouse," Mae said, "and bring the buttermilk. Watch the path. It's slick."

Elsie went, and the dog went with her all the way down and all the way back. She came up the hill carrying the jar against her chest with both arms, the way she carried everything that mattered.

"It's cold as anything down there," she said.

"It always is."

"It sounds like somebody whispering."

"That's the water, Elsie."

"I know it's the water," said Elsie, very patient, and handed her the jar.

They set till dark. Mae counted the rows in her head on the walk up to the house and found she had lost count somewhere and did not care.

That night, after supper, Elsie lay curled under the sheet and looked across the room at the mantel. There was a clock on it, an eight-day clock with a painted glass door. Cleo had wound it every Saturday night of their marriage, and it had run down a week after he was buried. Mae had not had the heart to start it again. Then she had not had the time. After a while it was just one more true thing about the room.

"What time is it?" said Elsie.

"Bedtime."

"No. What time on the clock?"

"The clock don't know. It quit."

Elsie studied it for a long while, the way she studied the hole in the dirt before she dropped the plant.

"Could it start back?"

"It could," said Mae, "if somebody wound it."

She blew out the lamp. In the dark she could hear the branch going, far down the hollow, and the child breathing, and nothing at all from the mantel.

Next: Part Two, "The Fox."

Parts Two through Five arrive through the free Springhouse Society newsletter, October 15–29. Get the next part