watchingThe Whistle

2021年1月20日发(作者：方式副词)

The Whistle
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Eudora Welty


(1909-2001)




Night fell. The darkness was thin, like some sleazy dress that has been worn and worn
for many winters and always lets the cold through to the bone. Then the moon rose. A farm
lay quite visible, like a white stone in water, among the stretches of deep woods in their
colorless
dead
leaf.
By
a
closer
and
more
searching
eye
than
the
moon’s,
eve
rything
belonging to the Mortons’ might have been seen—
even to the tiny tomato plants in their
neat rows closest to their house, gray and featherlike, appalling in their exposed fragility.
The moonlight covered everything, and lay upon the darkest shape of all, the farmhouse
where the lamp had just been blown out.
Inside,
Jason
and
Sara
Morton
were
lying
between
the
quilts
of
a
pallet
which
had
been made up close to the fireplace. A fire still fluttered in the grate, making a drowsy sound
now and then, and its exhausted light beat up and down the wall, across the rafters, and
over the dark pallet where the old people lay, like a bird trying to find its way out of the room.
The long-spaced, tired breathing of Jason was the only noise between the flutter of the
fire. He lay under the quilt in a long shape like a bean, turned on his side to face the door.
His lips opened in the dark, and in and out he breathed, in and out, slowly and with a rise
and fall, over and over, like a conversation or a tale
—
a question and sigh.
Sara lay on her back with her mouth agape, silent, but not asleep. She was staring at
the dark and indistinguishable places among the rafters. Her eyes seemed opened too wide,
the lids strained and limp, like openings which have been stretched shapeless and made of
no more use. Once a hissing yellow flame stood erect in the old log, and her small face and
pale hair, and one hand holding to the edge of the cover, were illuminated for a moment,
with shadows bright blue. Then she pulled the quilt clear over her head.


Every
night
they
lay
trembling
with
cold,
but
no
more
communicative
in
their misery
than a pair of window shutters beaten by a storm. Sometimes many days, weeks went by
without words. They were not really old
—
they were only fifty; still, their lives were filled with
tiredness, with a great lack of necessity to speak, with poverty which may have bound them
like
a
disaster
too
great
for
discussion
but
left
them
still
separated
and
undesirous
of
sympathy. Perhaps, years ago, the long habit of silence may have been started in anger or
passion. Who could tell now?
She was so tired of cold! That was all it could do any more
—
make her tired. Year after
year,
she
felt
sure
that
she
would
die
before
the
cold
was
over.
Now,
according
to
the
Almanac,
it was spring …
.
But year after year it was always the same. The plants would be
set out in their frames, transplanted always too soon, and there was a freeze …
.
When was
the last time they had grown tall and full, that the cold had held off and there was a crop?
Like a vain dream, Sara began to have thoughts of the spring and summer. At first she
thought only simply, of the colors of green and red, the smell of the sun on the ground, the
touch of leaves and warm ripening tomatoes. Then, all hidden as she was under the quilt,

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