Barren Ground” by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

PART THIRD

LIFE-EVERLASTING

IX

 

Withdrawn from the road, behind the fallen planks which had once made a fence, the poor house sprawled there in the midst of the life-everlasting, like the sun-bleached skeleton of an animal which buzzards had picked clean of flesh. The walls and roof were covered with whitewash; there was whitewash on the smooth, round stones that bordered the path to the door; and the few starved cedar trees in the yard were whitewashed to the thin foliage at their tops. At one side a few coarse garments were fluttering from clotheslines, and several decrepit paupers were spreading wet things on the bushes that grew by the back porch.

Like other relics of an abruptly changing era, the county poorhouse possessed both the advantages and the disadvantages of desuetude. The seven aged paupers and the one indigent young mother who now accepted its charity were neglected, it is true, but they were neglected in freedom. Where there was no system there was less room for interference. If the coarse clothes were thin, they were as varied as the tempers or inclinations of the paupers. Though the fare was mean, the complaints over it were bountiful. It is hard to be a pauper; it is particularly hard to be an aged pauper; but if these nine inmates (including the week-old infant) could have chosen between liberty and fraternity, they would probably have preferred the scant food and the rough clothes to the neat livery of dependence. Dorinda, however, perceived none of the varied blessings attendant upon orderless destitution. All she saw was the ramshackle building and the whitewashed cedars, which reminded her vaguely of missionary stories of the fences of dry bones surrounding the huts of Ethiopian kings. “It looks as bare as the palm of my hand,” she said aloud.

The doctor’s Ford car was standing in front of the door, with one wheel in a mudhole and one in a pile of trash; and when they stopped, an old woman, who was hanging the wash to dry on the bushes, put down the wet clothes and came over to meet them. She was so old that her skin was like bark; her mouth was closed as tight as nutcracker over her toothless gums; and her small red eyes flickered between eyelids which looked as if they had worn away. As she mumbled at them, she wiped her steaming wet hands on her skirt.

“You ain’t got any sweet stuff, is you, honey?” she whined, until the doctor appeared at the door and beckoned them round the corner of the house where the sunshine was falling. As usual he looked brisk, kindly, incurably optimistic.

“There is no longer any question. These county poorhouses must go,” he said, as they followed the beaten track which wound by the side of the building. “It costs the county not a cent under two thousand dollars a year to keep this place open for these eight inmates. It would be cheaper in the end to board them at the City Home where there is some system about the way things are managed.” Then he lowered his voice, which had been high and peremptory as if he wished to be overheard. “We brought Doctor Greylock here because he couldn’t be left alone and none of the negroes would go near him. There’s a scare about him, though he’s perfectly harmless. A little out of his head now and then, but too weak to hurt anybody even if he tried.”

“Is he delirious now?”

“No, he’s in his senses this morning, and quiet – you’ll find him as quiet as you could wish. Is there anybody to look after him at Five Oaks?”

“We’re not taking him to Five Oaks. There’s no place for him there. But I’ve got a nurse for him. Aunt Mirandy Moody. She knows how to take care of the sick, and I believe she can manage him.”

“Oh, anybody can manage him now,” Doctor Stout said reassuringly.

A tremor of weakness passed over Dorinda. She felt that her knees and elbows were shaking, and there was a meaningless noise in her ears. Was it Jason of whom they were speaking? No, it was not Jason, for it seemed to her that Jason had died long ago, so long ago that she couldn’t remember him. She was standing by the wall of the poorhouse, and an obscure pauper, somebody who could be “easily managed”, was dying within. She dropped her eyelids to shut out the brown cloud, as thick as the smoke of burning leaves, which rolled up from the meadows. When she opened her eyes again the sunshine of the whitewashed wall dazzled her. If only she had known! If only she could have looked ahead to this moment! Those summer evenings thirty years ago, and this autumn day beside the wall of the poorhouse! The whitewashed cedars, the sunken road, the flat fields, the ridged earth where labourers moved slowly, and over all the glittering dust of the ever-lasting.