606
PARTISAN
REVIEW
and the sabre of his rank and his defeatIess pride for a stocking full
of seed corn, whom she had not known or even spoken to long
enough to have learned his middle name or his preference in food,
or told him hers, and no time for that even now: riding, hurrying
toward a country she had never seen, to begin a life which was not
even simple frontier, engaged only with wilderness and shoeless savages
and the tender hand of God, but one which had been rendered into
a desert (assuming that it was still there at all to be returned to)
by the iron and fire of civilization;
Which was all your host (guide) could tell you, since that wa5 all he
knew, inherited, inheritable from the town: which was enough, more
than enough in fact, since all you needed was the face framed in its
blonde and delicate vail behind the scratched glass ; yourself, the
stranger, the outlander from New England or the prairies or the
Pacific Coast, no longer come by the chance or accident of kin or
friend or acquaintance or roadmap, but drawn too from ninety years
away by that incredible and terrifying passivity, watching in your
turn through and beyond that old milk-dim disfigured glass that
shape, that delicate frail and useless bone and flesh departing pillon
on a mule without one backward look, to the reclaiming of an aban–
doned and doubtless even ravaged (perhap even usurped) Alabama
hill farm-being lifted onto the mule (the first time he touched her
probably, except to put the ring on: not to prove nor even to feel,
touch, if there actually was a girl under the calico and the shawls;
there was no time for that yet; but simply to get her up so they
could start), to ride a hundred miles
to
become the farmless mother
of farmers (she would bear a dozen, all boys, herself no older, still
fragile, still workless among the churns and stoves and brooms and
stacks of wood which even a woman could split into kindlings; un–
changed), bequeathing to them in their matronymic the heritage of
that invincible inviolable ineptitude;
Then suddenly, you realise that that was nowhere near enough,
not for that face-bridehood, motherhood, grandmotherhood, then
widowhood and at last the grave-the long peaceful connubial progress
toward matriarchy in a rocking chair nobody else was allowed to
sit in, then a headstone in a country churchyard-not for that passivity,
that stasis, that invincible captaincy of soul which didn't even need
to wait but simply to be, breathe tranquilly, and take food-infinite
not only in capacity but in scope too: that face, one maiden muse
which had drawn a man out of the running pell mell of a cavalry
