Free Now in November by Josephine W. Johnson Page A

without any pupils. I thought he must be blind, but Grant said that for a wild thing to be blind was death, and that it was only the old skin thickened over his eyes before he shed. I felt ashamed to have seen things like this year after year and never stopped to find out the reason or know more about them. Because there had seemed always time ahead, I guess, and never time then. Grant seldom let anything go past without trying to find the meaning of it. “I’ve got a fool hopeless belief,” he said, “that the more we know the more we’ll be able to understand.”
    â€œMaybe for you,” I told him, “but for me only more confusion.”
    â€œBetter to be confused than blind,” he said. Wewatched the snake gliding back, and his coils made a dry and scratching sound. Grant said that the scales would split off from his eyes first. “New eyes first, and then a new skin all over—there’s a text for you, Marget! Lord, I should have been a preacher like Dad!” He put one hand on the fence post and threw himself over the wires, easy as if he had hurled a stone. He frightened the team and they started off, jerking the plough out of the ruts and lurching against each other. Grant didn’t shout or bellow. He turned quick and grinned at me, then started off in a lumbering run. The horses got hooked up in the lines and didn’t go far, but plunged around when he tried to untangle their feet. He didn’t come back when the mess was over, only waved and shouted out something about long-legged fools, which meant all three of them, I guess, and started off up the row singing louder and worse than Kerrin.
    Coming back it occurred to me how Dad would have been if this had happened. Hot and howling and angry, not being able to keep things from making him seem ridiculous, and fearful of anything that might tip over his dignity, poor-balanced and easily overthrown. Grant’s furrows were straighter than Dad’s orMax’s ever were. He ploughed deeper, too, and it made me believe that seed might get underground before winter after all.

15
    THAT month was unreal and beautiful. No rain came, but it did not seem to matter much. I did not care any more. I forgot the mortgage and the payment due next month, forgot there was anything to fear, and lived in a sort of fog of nameless happiness, indefinable and seeming to have no source, like the spring smell that comes in March before there is even a shred of leaf or flower. I was happy without excuse or reason. The pear trees seemed more beautiful than in all other years, with a strong musk-sweetness on the wind. But even spring was only a lesser miracle. I think now—almost unbelieving—of those first few weeks, remembering the blind happiness that not even the worry over Kerrin could change. Father was for a while more cheerful too, having someone besides just us to talk to now, and someone who felt as he did; although the rest of us could see from the beginning that they were acres apart in thought, and Grant ahead in a hundredways. Grant liked our father, liked him so much that he never or seldom would show him up before us, though he could have done it whenever we talked together. And only when they were alone would he cancel out arguments, sometimes in a single line or word, with facts that Father either had overlooked or more often not known about. I’d overhear them sometimes and marvel, not so much at all that Grant knew and his way of seeing things whole, as at his power of toppling Dad’s pyramids of thought so that the crash was plain enough and yet without angering him. And Dad thought of Grant as one a little radical and free-thinking perhaps, but a man with sound reason for everything that he had to say.
    Grant was a much kinder man and less hard than his own beliefs—beliefs that had grown out of acrid and salty experiences—but there was a layer of stoniness inside him. Some people are soft