In her distress, and her soreness that she should be distressed, she drew off from the others, spoke little, spent hours away from the house, wandering in a not unpleasant abdication of thought and feeling. So, in the hot, sunny stillness of an August afternoon, she heard the music.
She knew immediately. There was no mistaking its relation to Ash’s humming and its even closer kinship to the polyphony he drew from the radio. For a vanishing instant she thought, heart-beatingly, that young Ash—but this was far far beyond fumbling experiment. It could only come from someone—-something—as far ahead of Ash as he was of her.
She listened, shocked, anguished, exhaled. There was nothing to see except the distant mountains, the cloudless sky, ripe fields, straight road, groups of slender trees, scrabbly knots of wild berries, untrammeled weeds. Nothing hovered overhead, no stranger in unearthly clothes strolled from behind the nearest hillock. Yet she had no doubt. She hurried back to the house and found Ash. “They are looking for you.”
“I know. I’ve known for days.”
“Why? What do they want?”
He did not answer directly. “Nan, do you think I’ve completely failed to fit into thus life?”
She was genuinely astonished. “Failed! You’ve brought life, wisdom, health, goodness to everything you’ve touched. How can you talk of failing?”
“Because, after all... I haven’t become one of you.”
“Add, Thank God.” You’ve done much more than become one of us. You’ve changed the face and spirit of everything around here. The land and those who live off it are better because of you. You changed me from a silly girl to—to whatever I am. You fathered young Ash. Don’t ask me if a spoonful of sugar sweetens the ocean—let me believe it makes it that much less salt.”
“But you are unhappy.”
She shrugged. “Happiness is for those satisfied with what they have and want nothing more.”
He asked, “And what do you want?”
“A world where I wouldn’t have to hide you,” she answered fiercely. “A world you and young Ash and his children and grandchildren could better without inviting suspicion and envy. A world outraged—not happy—with bickering, distrust, animosity and terror. I think you’ve brought such a world a little closer to becoming.”
He said abruptly, “They want me back.”
She heard the four words without comprehension; they conveyed no message to her. She searched his face as though the expression would enlighten her. “What did you say?”
“They want me back,” he repeated. “They need me.”
“But that’s outrageous! First they send you to this savage world, then they decide they’ve made a mistake and whistle for you to come back.”
“It isn’t like that,” protested Ash. “They didn’t force me; I didn’t have to accept the suggestion. Everyone agreed, on the basis of the very little we knew, that the people and society here (if either existed) would most likely be closer to the epoch I would naturally have fitted than the one into which I was born. I needn’t have come; having come, I could have returned.”
“Force! What do you call the pressure of ‘everyone agreed’ if not force? And it was for your own good too. That excuse for wickedness must prevail from one end of the universe to the other. I wonder if your people are really less barbarian than mine.”
He refused to argue, to defend the beings who threatened—if vainly—the life she led with her husband and son, the minute good Ash was doing in Evarts County, the hope that he could do more and on a larger scale. Ash in his humility thought them superior to him; she had never questioned this till now. But suppose their evolution had not been toward better than the development Ash represented, but worse—a subtle degeneracy? Suppose in gaining the abilities so awesome to Ash they had lost some of his probity and uprightness, reverting to a morality no higher— little higher, she amended in all honesty—than that of the earth in the year 1960?
“Of course you won’t go?”
“They need me.”
“So do I. So does young Ash.”
He smiled tenderly at her. “I will not weigh the need of millions, nor the need of love and comfort against the need for life. Such judgments lead only to self-justification, cruelty disguised as mercy, and destruction for the sake of rebuilding.”
“Then you won’t go?”
“Not unless you tell me to.”
Next day she walked through the orchard, recalling again its desolate condition before Ash came, Josey’s face, her own unsettled heart. She walked through the new orchard where the young trees flourished without a twisted limb or fruitless branch. She walked through the new farm, never so hopeless as the homeplace, yet abused, exploited, ravaged. The fields were fair and green, the pasture lush and succulent. She came to the spot where she had been the day before and the music filled her ears and mind.
Fiercely she tried to recapture her reasoning, her indictment. The music did not plead, cajole, argue with her. It was itself, outside such utility. Yet it was not proud or inexorable; removed from her only in space and time and growth; not in fundamental humanity. It was far beyond the simple components of communication she had learned from Ash, yet it was not utterly and entirely outside her understanding.
She listened for a long time—hours, it seemed. Then she went to the house. Ash put his arms around her and again, as so often, she was amazed how he could be loving without a tincture of brutality. “Oh, Ash,” she cried. “Oh, Ash!”
Later she said, “Will you come back?”
“I hope so,” he answered gravely.
“When—when will you go?”
“As soon as everything is taken care of. There won’t be much; you have always attended to the business matters.” He smiled; Ash had never touched money or signed a paper. “I’ll take the train from Henryton; everyone will think I’ve gone East. After a while you can say I’ve been kept by family affairs. Perhaps you and the boy will leave after a few months, presumably to join me.”
“No. I’ll stay here.”
“People will think—”
“Let them,” she said defiantly. “Let them.”
“I can find you anywhere, you know, if I can come back.”
“You won’t come back. If you do you’ll find me here.”
She had no difficulties with the harvest. As Ash said, she had taken care of the business end since her father’s death. Hands were always eager to work at the Maxill’s; produce merchants bid against each other for the crop. But next year?
She and the land could wither together without a husband’s care. The lines on her face would deepen, her hair would gray, her mouth sag. The trees would die little by little, the fruit grow sparser, less and less perfect. The corn would come up more irregularly year by year, sickly, prey to parasites; stunted, gnarled, poor. Finally so little would grow it wouldn’t pay to plant the fields. Then the orchards would turn into dead wood, the hardier weeds take over, the land become waste. And she ...
She knew she was hearing the sounds, the music, only in her imagination. But the illusion was so strong, so very strong, she thought for the moment she could distinguish Ash’s own tones, his message to her, so dear, so intimate, so reassuring.___
“Yes,” she said aloud. “Yes, of course.”
Because at last she understood. In the winter she would walk all over the land. She would pick up the hard clods from the ground and warm them in her fingers. In the spring she would plunge her arms into the sacks of seed, deeply, to the elbows, over and over. She would touch the growing shoots, the budding trees; she would walk over the land, giving herself over to it.