“But he didn’t get your land, did he?”
“Of course he didn’t, the big fool. He didn’t have a chance. I had my permission right enough, and the day after he’d filed the claim he come down to look at my house, and a good neighbor of mine that see him coming fired off a six-shooter in the air, and he said Jack Kelley ran like a whitehead. And up in Miami Mr. Barnes that owned the restaurant told me he’d go to court himself to see I kept my place. He said Jack Kelley’d ought to be run out of the county for trying to take a woman’s land from her. I don’t mean you should put that in the paper, though.”
Larry pondered regretfully the news value of that story. But she was quite right that he couldn’t print it. The paper wouldn’t stand for it, and besides it was libel.
They were running past pineland now, and he turned and stared at the passing ranks. They were like no pine trees he had ever seen in his life, these Caribbean pine. Their high bare trunks, set among palmetto fans that softened all the ground beneath them, rose up so near the road that he could see the soft flakes of color of their scaly bark, red and brown and cream, as if patted on with a thick brush. Their high tops mingled gray-green branches, twisted and distorted as if by great winds or something stern and implacable in their own natures. Their long green needles were scant, letting the sky through. They were strange trees, strange but beautiful. The brilliance of the sun penetrated through their endless ranks in a swimming mist of light. They were endlessly alike, endlessly monotonous, and yet with an endless charm and variety.
Every tree held its own twist and pattern; every tree, even to the distant intermingled brown of trunks too far away to distinguish, was infinitely itself. Sometimes the pine woods came so near the road he could smell their sunny resinous breath. Sometimes they retreated like a long, smoky, green-frothed wall beyond house lots and grapefruit groves or open swales of sawgrass or beyond cleared fields where raw stumps of those already destroyed stood amid the blackness of a recent burning. Against the horizon their ranks rushed cometlike and immobile into the untouched west. He felt the comprehension of them growing upon him — the silence of their trunks, the loveliness of their tossed branches, the virginity of their hushed places, in retreat before the surfaced roads and filling stations, the barbecue stands and signboards of the new Florida.
“They’re wonderful, aren’t they, the pines?” he said abruptly. “There’s something beautiful and fresh about them, different from any trees I’ve ever seen.”
The woman beside him took a great deep breath, as if what he said had released something in her.
“I remember the first time I went to see my place,” she said. “Twenty years ago. In those days the nearest road was six miles away. You could take a horse and carriage from Miami to a place near Goulds where the road branched. Then you’d have to walk across country to where my land began. It wasn’t my land then, though. The land agent had it surveyed and told me where the boundary stob was. The palmetto was deeper than it is now, but I was younger and nothing was too much for me. When I’d walked a ways through the palmetto under those pines and come to the place where they said would be good for a clearing, I just stood still and listened, I don’t know how long. It was so still you could hear little noises a long ways off, like a bird rustling up on a branch or an insect buzzing.
“The tops of the trees were higher up than these here, and they didn’t move any. The light was all soft and kind of bright, and yet green and dim too. Those trees were the quietest things I ever see. It did you good just to feel them so quiet, as if you’d come to the place where everything began. I couldn’t hardly believe there was places outside where people were afraid and worried. I just — I tell you I just started crying, but not to hurt. I never was one for crying, but this was just good easy tears, the way you cry when you’re so happy you don’t believe it’s true.”
Larry hardly dared to speak, keeping his hands tight on the wheel and his eyes on the road. Yet when she continued to maintain the silence into which she had fallen he ventured, “What made you come down here homesteading in the first place, Mrs. McDevitt?”
“I was in the freeze years ago, up in Orange County.” Her reply came with a little effort, as if she had lost her present self in a sturdy dark-haired woman, wiping her eyes all alone among silent acres of pineland. “Eh, law!” she sighed. “That was a long time. McDevitt bought an orange grove and we were froze out.”
“Tell me about that,” Larry insisted.
Presently she went on speaking, with her chin on her breast and her eyes staring forward at the road racing and racing toward them, between the straight gleaming rails and the dusty palmettos, the few pines, half dying, with patent-medicine signs tacked to them, that followed this part of the road. She talked as if it were as easy as thinking — easier. “McDevitt would have it that we mustn’t sell the oranges until the season was later and the prices better, although I told him to sell. The fruit was coloring wonderful that winter. ’Ninety-four and five. In those days in Orange County the orange trees were tall and dark and glossy, on strong thick trunks. When you walked in an orange grove the dark leaves met overhead and you walked on bare brown earth in a kind of solid shadow, not like the pines that strain the light through clear and airy. Up in the dark branches you could see the oranges in clusters, growing gold color like there was sun on them. I never saw fruit like ours that winter. It seemed like the branches would break with it. Then came the big freeze. There never was one like it before and there never has been since.
“That was about the last difference McDevitt and I had.”
Larry felt a pricking in the back of his neck at the even depth of hatred in her voice, the first naked emotion she had shown.
“He was a smooth one, a smooth, smiling, hateful man, with easy ways and eyes boring in for the weak place in you. It was what made him furious, not finding mine. ‘I’ll be stronger than you are,’ I’d say to myself often and often. ‘And stiller and more of a man. You see if I won’t.’ That was even as soon as after George was born. I’d grit my teeth and bear that look in his eyes until he’d fling off and leave me a week or two for spite. We come down to Orange County from Vermont state, where his mother was. He got this orange grove with money my own mother left me, but I knew he’d never be one for holding it. So I held it.”
The car dipped and rose on the swinging levels of the road. The sun was beginning to crawl down from its zenith and the burning white of the sky was turning a faint flower-petal blue. The wind from the invisible sea to eastward came to them in steady, freshening gusts.
“Turn here,” she said. “That winter he had a great beard that was the color of the oranges, and he’d sit around barefooted on the porch of the shack we had and comb it. Joe was — Joe was a year old then.” Her tongue thickened as she spoke the name for the first time. Larry heard the sticky parting of her lips. The car was running almost silently on a dirt road in the shadow of pines that seemed stronger and more dense than those by the main highway.
“I was a thick stumpy woman then, and the heat behind all those trees there in the middle of Florida was like a tight hand over your lungs. But I’d leave the baby and little George on a mattress in the breeze-way between the two rooms of the house and go out to see that the nigras were working. McDevitt wouldn’t ever. He’d sit there smiling, with those eyes over his beard and never sweated. The heat was terrible. That’s what made the fruit ripen early. I was wild with nerves at it, but I wouldn’t let McDevitt know. Only when he come home from Orlando and said he’d got an offer to sell the crop on the trees for ten thousand, only he’d decided not to, that night I had to go out and walk up and down the road that had a place where there wasn’t any orange trees. That night I thought I’d choke with orange trees.