Free Now in November by Josephine W. Johnson

gods!”
    She talked like this, not with malice but believing it till one day that first week when he came up at noon and found her washing. He came up walking tired and slow the way Dad did, but his face more alive. He never smiled much, but strong and warm when he did, and his whole face lighted up (“Turns on,” Merle said). He’d been ploughing and looked half-starved and his shirt was doused in sweat. Merle was tired, too, her big booming voice getting less loud until her singing was like a croak, and she only jerked her head at him for notice. Grant sat down solid and heavy on the steps, the way Father does—as though he were sunk there forever. Merle twisted the towels out, then pulled up the shirts and flapped them over the edge so he could see they were his own.
    Grant jerked himself up fast, came over and told her to let him do the rest. “I’ve got the time now,” he said. “You let me finish up these old sacks.” Merle stained red as rust and started to blurt out something rude.—“What’s the matter?” she started to say. “—You in a rush for the food?”—but managed to smear it over. Grant pulled out three shirts at onceand twisted them all together. Squashed the buttons in half. Then he slung them over the line and stood back grinning, red and embarrassed. They were dryer already than the one he had on his back. Merle sat down on the steps, sagged up against the post, and told him to pull out the overalls. She thought him a little mad, I guess, but hoped that he’d finish before the spell passed over. Grant wrenched out the rest and emptied the tubs, and she stared at him as if he were a strange dinosaur or ghoul. I could see her mind changing before my eyes, a hard core softening up. “You’re better than most,” she told him. “Maybe just being a man isn’t all the excuse you need for living.”
    â€œIt’s a good enough one,” Grant said. He looked at her and laughed, and then asked why she didn’t go in and start cooking.
    â€œYou’ve worked for nothing,” Merle told him, “if that’s why you wanted to help. Marget’s done everything already.” She snapped it at him, but not either angry or believing what she said. And I saw Grant watching her when she went away,—a sort of pleased look on his tired face.

14
    I WENT back up to the pasture with him that afternoon. I’d never have gone but that he had left the water-jug there and needed more, drinking nearly a gallon in one morning. “You come up and get it,” he said. “Let Merle finish the dishes. She’s had her rest.” Then went out fast before she could slop the water at him. (Only I doubt that she would have now that the pond had shriveled so,—shrunk two feet even then.) We went up the creek-road and he talked to me as though he had really wanted me to come and not just as someone to bring the water back. He never spoke of himself except when I asked him things. He remembered coming that time for the horse when Merle met him out in the yard. She was red and stumpy, he said, and her hair was fuzzy behind. When she saw the horse she had marched right past him “as though I were air or nothing, and pumped him some water from the tank.—Then glared at me like a little bull. Thought maybe I’d steal it from him!” Grant laughed as at something he’d thought of often andgrinned over to himself.—I liked to think of her coming back to his mind that way.
    The wild cherries were in bloom. It was hot still, and ink-blotter clouds messed up the sky but brought no rain. The spring green was like green sunlight or green fire—something, anyway, more lovely than just leaves—and there were yellow clouds of sassafras along the pasture. We found a snake in the hollow limb of a sycamore, peered close and saw that his eyes were like milk-blue stones, hard and round and