Argosy: The Short Story Magazine — page 37: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE GOOD CORN 37 The thick fingers of the girl were stained red with the juice of currants as she gathered them. Her finger-marks were bright smears across the heavy front of her cotton pinafore. As the two women knelt among the bushes, in alleyways of ripe fruit, lifting the bleached creamy curtains in the July sun, Mrs. Mortimer said, “I’m glad of another pair of hands. I don’t know what I should have done without another pair of hands. Your mother will miss you back home, I reckon.” ‘““ She’s got six more to help,” the girl said. “ She don’t need me all that much.” “Six? Not children?” ‘When I was home there was seven. Eight before the baby went.” ‘* Before the baby went? Whose baby? What happened to the baby?” “It was mine. I gave it away,” the girl said. “I didn’t know what to do with it no sense, so I gave it away. My sister adopted it. They all said it was best like that. I gave it to my married sister.” ‘“ Gave it away?’ Mrs. Mortimer sat on the earth, between the bushes, feeling sick. ‘“‘ Gave it away? A baby? You gave it away?” ‘“ Yes,”’ Elsie said. ‘‘ It’s no bother to me now.” Towards the end of the month the first corn began to ripen. The sheen of olive on the wheat began to turn pale yellow, then to the colour of fresh-baked crust on bread. As he looked at it Mortimer remembered what the doctor had said. ‘‘ You go away, and you come back, and your corn’s still there. It’s a wonderful thing, corn. There’s something mar- vellous about corn.”’ Now, as he looked at it, he could not help feeling proud of the corn. It helped him, too, as he thought of his wife. It hurt him to hear her cry that he must keep away from her, that the pride in her was still tortured, the love in her not smoothed out. The corn helped to soothe him a little. The wind that ran darkly across it on cloudy days had a beautiful twist, as if long snakes were slipping among the ears. In the evenings after supper, while the two women washed the dishes, he was often alone with the corn. And one evening, as he stood watching it, he did something he had always liked to do. He broke off an ear and began to thresh it in his hands, breaking the husk from the grain with the pressure of the bails of his thumbs. While he was still doing this, the girl came down the hillside A.*3e « © comiclooks.comnn