Chapter III

I had begun with the beans, fearing an early frost, and remembering the many summer dawns I had preciously invested in keeping the rows clean. They hung in green multiplicity, in spite of the choking weeds that had reared their heads high, unmolested by Coretta’s hoe. In fact, there was a disconcerting abundance all about me. Having set out to be an example of thrift, opportunity hung from every bush.

In this hand-to-hand engagement, I lost sight of general aims and purposes. The fourteen points were laid by for later digestion. My New York daily, ordered for filing through a momentous period, served excellently for wrapping winter stores. I did not quite cease to look at the labor horizon for epochal phenomena; but one day, after talking with a farmer on the relative value of two varieties of sweet potatoes, the Texas White and Early Beauty, I found this pencilled among my farm-notes: “The Bisbee deportation is mealy for fall use, but the Soviets are the best winter keepers.” Then I began to have misgivings; but I crushed the seditious rumbling and kept on the path indicated by the Department.

Serena returned, but went at once, as I had known she must, to the fodder-pulling, and I had only an occasional friendly hand lent me for help. I had moved my typewriter into the kitchen, thinking that odd moments might go to the making of a masterpiece; but if genius gave a surviving flutter, its tremolo was drowned by the drums and tabors of conservation pomp. To Nature’s tender surprises I became callous; and for her beauty that challenged obviously, I could say with Coretta that I had no heart.

Coretta, who knew of old that I rather liked sunsets, coming one day to borrow my last machine-needle, called my attention to an aggressively colored sky by saying it was like a pile of “greenlins an’ ’maters.” (Greenlands and tomatoes--yes.) I assented so readily that Coretta flushed with the success of her venture in poetics.

When she was gone, I reflectively picked a letter from my batch of half-read mail. It began: “Your last filled me with a veritable nostalgia for your mountain. The odor of ripened grains and fruits and new-cut wood overcomes me whenever I think of it. I see great white clouds rearing their domes against a deep, blue sky; and at my feet gentians star my way to you.”

I dropped the letter. Where was Autumn? How had I lost her? Like a spear-thrust the question kept recurring until the next day, when Aunt Janey Stiles came.