“The first time I got a good look at it, it was as dead as a piece of string, and there was bullet holes through it and around it right into my new floor. You can go in and see where they are right now. And that afternoon there was a man here and we were planting some orange trees, for I thought I’d see how they’d do here. He says, ‘Look, there’s a snake,’ and I turned around, and sure enough there was another one. I guess maybe two snakes in one day was too much for me, for everything went all kind of black and I didn’t know what I was doing until I see the man looking and laughing at me. I was killing that snake with a stick and then stamping and dancing on its head like I was crazy, with my six-shooter bumping on my hip. He says he never see anything so funny in his life the way I looked, but I didn’t remember much of anything, I was so blind mad. I always did hate a snake. But that was about all I ever saw on my place. Though that time I told you about when it rained so hard and I waded in from Goulds there were moccasins on some of the stumps. You don’t see them hardly any now, except out in the deep Glades.”
The chair creaked. The high great pillar of cloud was turning a soft pink. A mockingbird, tail and wings all a-cock, landed on the ground before the steps with a flirt and stared at them first out of one eye and then the other, and flew off as suddenly as he had come, with a flash of white wing bars and three or four notes of song like sweet impertinent words.
Larry fumbled in his mind for the right question. “Were you — did you stay here all alone, always?” he asked cautiously. “You were very brave, I think.”
Her profile in the softening light was bold and bony, he saw as he stared up at her. The gray hair blew straight back from her forehead and the scanty knob of it behind hardly altered the shape of her head. The skin over the cheekbones was smooth in spite of the soft wrinkles about the mouth and eyes. Her body was a bony shapelessness under the cotton dress, but her head, from the angle at which he gazed, seemed fine and distinguished. There was about it that sexless look which approaching age sometimes takes on, in which men seem like old women and old women like delicate, bony old men. She looked like a worn old statesman, wise, weary, patient.
He found himself thrilling to all this she had been telling him, as if the courage and drama of it had stirred deeply his sensitive imagination. She was indeed a better man than McDevitt, this shapeless old woman. She was unique, she was magnificent. Staring at her he saw what it was really to be a pioneer, a woman, lonely, afraid of snakes, sustained by no dream of empire, but only by a six-shooter and the enduring force of her own will. He felt at once humbled and exalted at this glimpse of the dumb, inevitable thrust forward of the human spirit. Her name was Sarah McDevitt and her sons were—
As if in the brooding into which she had fallen she had come to a similar place in her thoughts, she turned her bright gray eyes on him slowly, and he remembered that he had asked her a question.
“I sent for the boys as soon as I could,” she said. “George was big for his age and Joe was — Joe wasn’t a baby anymore. They come down with some people that were coming to Miami, and I met them there. I was afraid they wouldn’t recognize me. I was sunburned more than they had ever seen me and I guess I was a lot heavier. George said I was taller, and maybe I was. Carrying boxes of tomatoes makes you stand straight, and grubbing palmettos and planting and hoeing and picking kind of stretches your spine. I couldn’t seem to sleep much the night the boys got here. I’d have to keep getting up and light the lamp to look at them all over again. Sleeping that heavy way children have, they looked beautiful. George was black-haired and heavy, like my father, and Joe was all kind of gold color then. He used to — he used to wrinkle up his nose and laugh right out loud in his sleep.”
Larry studied carefully the nearest knot hole. He felt a stinging behind his eyes at the careful monotony of her voice. Her words were labored. And yet when he looked up again there was only on her eyelids that look of a worn, distinguished old statesman with silence lying heavy upon her mouth.
“It didn’t seem — I guess it was pretty lonely here for the boys after a while,” she went on slowly. “They’d been to school in Vermont state and there wasn’t any school here nearer than Coconut Grove. They were used to playing with children, and I was busy from daylight to dark. George liked to help with the tomatoes sometimes, but Joe was too little at first. They got to like to roam around the pine woods. Once George shot a wild cat. I gave them the orange trees if they’d take care of them, but they didn’t take to that much, and anyway, oranges aren’t so good here as in Orange County. I saw that right off, and besides, I didn’t want to bother with them.
“Times when my tomatoes failed or the crop was short I could always go over to Goulds or Peters and work in the tomato-packing house. It was easier money than waiting on table in Miami, and I could walk home nights. Sometimes the boys liked to pack a little when the season was good and I saved up money for them. I knew they’d have to go to school sometime, but I kind of kept putting it off. There’s a lot of company in a couple of kids fighting and hollering and yoo-hooing around. I’d got used to baking big batches of bread and pies and having to patch trousers. And besides, I was afraid of McDevitt.
“It didn’t seem any time at all before they was big. Time goes fast down here, with the pine trees. There isn’t much difference, summer or winter. In the winter the warm dark comes early and there’s maybe cool nights, and once in two-three years maybe a slight touch of frost, and there isn’t any rain, and the grass and leaves are yellow-green and brittle. In the summer you can hear the rains come booming and hissing in from the sea way out beyond and trampling down the dry grass. And afterward everything springs up juicy and green and the palmetto blossoms are sweeter than orange bloom, and little yellow and purple wildflowers grow up around the pines, and on a west wind the mosquitoes come. The nights are like pieces of black-and-white velvet laid on the earth, and the mockers go crazy, and all kinds of little birds that come from hot countries farther south sing all night in the moonlight.
“The old leaves fall off the trees and the next day the new leaves are rich and glossy and the young pine trees carry long white candles on their tips. But summer and winter smooth into each other so you don’t notice how time goes creeping, except by watching young trees grow taller and boys grow big and try to act like men. Springs they would get excited to see the fires that start in the dry time leaping and roaring off in the pines. Falls, when the big rains filled up the roads, and the swales and all low places and everything was sopping, they’d run around splashing in it and having fun with plank boats. But all the time I knew they ought to be in school.
“The country around here was changing too. When they’d put the railroad through, gangs of men camped out not ten miles from here, and the boys liked to hang around the camps. That was what started me to send them to school. I was afraid they’d learn things that wouldn’t be good for them, and I guess they did. Then the railroad was being finished way to Key West and the roads were better and people begun to come through and buy up land and talk of grapefruit groves and the tomato prairies.
“So I sold some of my land nearest to the main highway and sent the boys to Miami, where a woman I knew that used to cook for Mr. Barnes promised she’d board and room them and darn their stockings and look out for them. Sometimes Saturdays and Sundays they’d come down here or I’d go in and see them there. But they didn’t like school so well as they thought they would and George was crazy to go to work. I didn’t like him to. All my people in Massachusetts were educated and I wanted my boys to have all the learning they could. But the next two years my tomato crop failed, once with too much wet and the next year with nail-head rust, and I had to get a job cooking for a woman over to Perrine.