with him could never be a superfluity, or even a sufficiency, and he
grudged the fame that these strange spiritual utterances were acquiring.
He had long enjoyed the distinction of being considered a miraculous
convert; his rescue from the wily enticements of Satan had been
celebrated with much shaking and clapping of hands, and cries of
"Glory," and muscular ecstasy. His religious experiences thenceforth,
his vacillations of hope and despair, had been often elaborated amongst
the brethren. But his was a conventional soul; its expression was in the
formulas and platitudes of the camp-meeting. They sank into oblivion in
the excitement attendant upon Purdee's wild utterances from the mystic
script of the rocks.
As Grinnell talked, he often paused in his work to imitate the
gesticulatory enthusiasms of the saints at the camp-meeting. He was a
thickset fellow of only medium height, and was called, somewhat
invidiously, "a chunky man." His face was broad, prosaic, good-natured,
incapable of any fine gradations of expression. It indicated an
elementary rage or a sluggish placidity. He had a ragged beard of a
reddish hue, and hair a shade lighter. He wore blue jeans trousers and
an unbleached cotton shirt, and the whole system depended on one
suspender. He was engaged in skimming a great kettle of boiling sorghum
with a perforated gourd, which caught the scum and strained the liquor.
The process was primitive, instead of the usual sorghum boiler and
furnace, the kettle was propped upon stones laid together so as to
concentrate the heat of the fire. His wife was continually feeding the
flames with chips which she brought in her apron from the wood-pile. Her
countenance was half hidden in her faded pink sun-bonnet, which,
however, did not obscure an expression responsive to that on the man's
face. She did not grudge Purdee the salvation he had found; she only
grudged him the prestige he had derived from its unique method.
"Why can't the critter elude Satan with less n'ise?" she asked,
acrimoniously.
"Edzackly," her husband chimed in.
Now and then both turned a supervisory glance at the sorghum mill down
the slope at some little distance, and close to the river. It had been a
long day for the old white mare, still trudging round and round the
mill; perhaps a long day as well for the two half-grown boys, one of
whom fed the machine, thrusting into it a stalk at a time, while the
other brought in his arms fresh supplies from the great pile of sorghum
cane hard by.
All the door-yard of the little log cabin was bedaubed with the scum of
the sorghum which Job Grinnell flung from his perforated gourd upon the
ground. The idle dogs--and there were many--would find, when at last
disposed to move, a clog upon their nimble feet. They often sat down
with a wrinkling of brows and a puzzled expression of muzzle to
investigate their gelatinous paws with their tongues, not without
certain indications of pleasure, for the sorghum was very sweet; some of
them, that had acquired the taste for it from imitating the children,
openly begged.
One, a gaunt hound, hardly seemed so idle; he had a purpose in life, if
it might not be called a profession. He lay at length, his paws
stretched out before him, his head upon them; his big brown eyes were
closed only at intervals; ever and again they opened watchfully at the
movement of a small child, ten months old, perhaps, dressed in pink
calico, who sat in the shadow formed by the protruding clay and stick
chimney, and played by bouncing up and down and waving her fat hands,
which seemed a perpetual joy and delight of possession to her. Take her
altogether, she was a person of prepossessing appearance, despite her
frank display of toothless gums, and around her wide mouth the unseemly
traces of sorghum. She had the plumpest graces of dimples in every
direction, big blue eyes with long lashes, the whitest possible skin,
and an extraordinary pair of pink feet, which she rubbed together in
moments of joy as if she had mistaken them for her hands. Although she
sputtered a good deal, she had a charming, unaffected laugh, with the
giggle attachment natural to the young of her sex.
Suddenly there sounded an echo of it, as it were--a shrill, nervous
little whinny; the boys whirled round to see whence it came. The
persistent rasping noise of the sorghum mill and the bubbling of the
caldron had prevented them from hearing an approach. There, quite close
at hand, peering through the rails of the fence, was a little girl of
seven or eight years of age.
"I wanter kem in an' see you-uns's baby!" she exclaimed, in a high,
shrill voice. "I want to pat it on the head."
She was a forlorn little specimen, very thin and sharp-featured. Her
homespun dress was short enough to show how fragile were the long lean
legs that supported her. The curtain of her sun-bonnet, which was
evidently made for a much larger person, hung down nearly to the hem of
her skirt; as she turned and glanced anxiously down the road, evidently
suspecting a pursuer, she looked like an erratic sun-bonnet out for a
stroll on a pair of borrowed legs.
She turned again suddenly and applied her thin, freckled little face to
the crack between the rails. She smiled upon the baby, who smiled in
response, and gave a little bounce that might be accounted a courtesy.
The younger of the boys left the cane pile and ran up to his brother at
the mill, which was close to the fence. "Don't ye let her do it," he
said, venomously. "That thar gal is one of the Purdee fambly. I know
her. Don't let her in." And he ran back to the cane.
Grinnell had seemed pleased by this homage at the shrine of the family
idol; but at the very mention of the "Purdee fambly" his face hardened,
an angry light sprang into his eyes, and his gesture in skimming with
the perforated gourd the scum from the boiling sorghum was as energetic
as if with the action he were dashing the "Purdee fambly" from off the
face of the earth. It was an ancient feud; his grandfather and some
contemporary Purdee had fallen out about the ownership of certain
vagrant cattle; there had been blows and bloodshed, other members of the
connection had been dragged into the controversy; summary reprisals were
followed by counter-reprisals. Barns were mysteriously fired, hen-roosts
robbed, horses unaccountably lamed, sheep feloniously sheared by unknown
parties; the feeling widened and deepened, and had been handed down to
the present generation with now and then a fresh provocation, on the
part of one or the other, to renew and continue the rankling old
grudges.
[Illustration: "SHE SMILED UPON THE BABY"]
And here stood the hereditary enemy, wanting to pat their baby on the
head.
"Naw, sir, ye won't!" exclaimed the boy at the mill, greatly incensed at
the boldness of this proposition, glaring at the lean, tender, wistful
little face between the rails of the fence.
But the baby, who had not sense enough to know anything about hereditary
enemies, bounced and laughed and gurgled and sputtered with glee, and
waved her hands, and had never looked fatter or more beguiling.
"I jes wanter pat it wunst," sighed the hereditary enemy, with a lithe
writhing of her thin little anatomy in the anguish of denial--"_jes
wunst!_"
"Naw, sir!" exclaimed the youthful Grinnell, more insistently than
before. He did not continue, for suddenly there came running down the
road a boy of his own size, out of breath, and red and angry--the
pursuer, evidently, that the hereditary enemy had feared, for she
crouched up against the fence with a whimper.
"Kem along away from thar, ye miser'ble little stack o' bones!" he
cried, seizing his sister by one hand and giving her a jerk--"a-foolin'
round them Grinnells' fence an' a-hankerin' arter thar old baby!"
He felt that the pride of the Purdee family was involved in this
admission of envy.
"I jes wanter pat it on the head _wunst_," she sighed.
"Waal, ye won't now," said the Grinnell boys in chorus.
The Purdee grasp was gentler on the little girl's arm. This was due not
to fraternal feeling so much as to loyalty to the clan; "stack o'
bones" though she was, they were Purdee bones.
"Kem along," Ab Purdee exhorted her. "A baby ain't nuthin' extry,
nohow"--he glanced scoffingly at the infantile Grinnell. "The mountings
air fairly a-roamin' with 'em."
"We-uns 'ain't got none at our house," whined the sun-bonnet,
droopingly, moving off slowly on its legs, which, indeed, seemed
borrowed, so unsteady and loath to go they were.
The Grinnell boys laughed aloud, jeeringly and ostentatiously, and the
Purdee blood was moved to retort: "We-uns don't want none sech ez that.
Nary tooth in her head!"
And indeed the widely stretched babbling lips displayed a vast vacuity
of gum.
Job Grinnell, who had listened with an attentive ear to the talk of the
children, had nevertheless continued his constant skimming of the scum.
Now he rose from his bent posture, tossed the scum upon the ground, and
with the perforated gourd in his hand turned and looked at his wife.
Augusta had dropped her apron and chips, and stood with folded arms
across her breast, her face wearing an expression of exasperated
expectancy.
The Grinnell boys were humbled and abashed. The wicked scion of the
Purdee house, joying to note how true his shaft had sped, was again
fitting his bow.
"An' ez bald-headed ez the mounting."
The baby had a big precedent, but although no peculiar shame attaches to
the bare pinnacle of the summit, she--despite the difference in size
and age--was expected to show up more fully furnished, and in keeping
with the rule of humanity and the gentilities of life.
No teeth, no hair, no sign of any: the fact that she was so backward was
a sore point with all the family. Job Grinnell suddenly dropped the
perforated gourd, and started down toward the fence. The acrimony of the
old feud was as a trait bred in the bone. Such hatred as was inherent in
him was evoked by his religious jealousies, and the pious sense that he
was following the traditions of his elders and upholding the family
honor blended in gentlest satisfaction with his personal animosity
toward Roger Purdee as he noticed the boy edging off from the fence to a
safe distance. He eyed him derisively for a moment.
"Kin ye kerry a message straight?" The boy looked up with an expression
of sullen acquiescence, but said nothing. "Ax yer dad--an' ye kin tell
him the word kems from me--whether he hev read sech ez this on the
lawgiver's stone tables yander in the mounting: 'An' ye shall claim sech
ez be yourn, an' yer neighbor's belongings shall ye in no wise
boastfully medjure fur yourn, nor look upon it fur covetiousness, nor
yit git up a big name in the kentry fur ownin' sech ez be another's.'"
He laughed silently--a twinkling, wrinkling demonstration over all his
broad face--a laugh that was younger than the man, and would have
befitted a square-faced boy.
The youthful Purdee, expectant of a cuffing, stood his ground more
doubtfully still under the insidious thrusts of this strange weapon,
sarcasm. He knew that they were intended to hurt; he was wounded
primarily in the intention, but the exact lesion he could not locate. He
could meet a threat with a bold face, and return a blow with the best.
But he was mortified in this failure of understanding, and perplexity
cowed him as contention could not. He hung his head with its sullen
questioning eyes, and he found great solace in a jagged bit of cloth on
the torn bosom of his shirt, which he could turn in his embarrassed
fingers.
"Whar be yer dad?" Grinnell asked.
"Up yander in the mounting," replied the subdued Purdee.
"A-readin' of mighty s'prisin' matter writ on the rocks o' the yearth!"
exclaimed Grinnell, with a laugh. "Waal, jes keep that sayin' o' mine in
yer head, an' tell him when he kems home. An' look a-hyar, ef enny mo'
o' his stray shoats kem about hyar, I'll snip thar ears an' gin 'em my
mark."
The youth of the Purdee clan meditated on this for a moment. He could
not remember that they had missed any shoats. Then the full meaning of
the phrase dawned upon him--it was he and the wiry little sister thus
demeaned with a porcine appellation, and whose ears were threatened. He
looked up at the fence, the little low house, the barn close by, the
sorghum mill, the drying leaves of tobacco on the scaffold, the
saltatory baby; his eyes filled with helpless tears, that could not
conceal the burning hatred he was born to bear them all. He was hot and
cold by turns; he stood staring, silent and defiant, motionless, sullen.
He heard the melodic measure of the river, with its crystalline, keen
vibrations against the rocks; the munching teeth of the old
mare--allowed to come to a stand-still that the noise of the sorghum
mill might not impinge upon the privileges of the quarrel; and the high,
ecstatic whinny of the little sister waiting on the opposite bank of the
river, having crossed the foot-bridge. There the Grinnell baby had
chanced to spy her, and had bounced and grinned and sputtered affably.
It was she who had made all the trouble yearning after the Grinnell
baby.
He would not stay, however, to be ignominiously beaten, for Grinnell had
turned away, and was looking about the ground as if in search of a thick
stick. He accounted himself no craven, thus numerically at a
disadvantage, to turn shortly about, take his way down the rocky slope,
cross the foot-bridge, jerk the little girl by one hand and lead her
whimpering off, while the round-eyed Grinnell baby stared gravely after
her with inconceivable emotions. These presently resulted in rendering
her cross; she whined a little and rubbed her eyes, and, smarting from
her own ill-treatment of them, gave a sharp yelp of dismay. The old dog
arose and went and sat close by her, eying her solemnly and wagging his
tail, as if begging her to observe how content he was. His dignity was
somewhat impaired by sudden abrupt snaps at flies, which caused her to
wink, stare, and be silent in astonishment.
"Waal, Job Grinnell," exclaimed Augusta, as her husband came back and
took the perforated gourd from her hand--for she had been skimming the
sorghum in his absence--"ye air the longest-tongued man, ter be so
short-legged, I ever see!"
He looked a trifle discomfited. He had deported himself with unwonted
decision, conscious that Augusta was looking on, and in truth somewhat
supported by the expectation of her approval.
"What ails ye ter say words ye can't abide by--ye 'low ye 'pear so
graceful on the back track?" she asked.
He bent over the sorghum, silently skimming. His composure was somewhat
ruffled, and in throwing away the scum his gesture was of negligent and
discursive aim; the boiling fluid bespattered the foot of one of the
omnipresent dogs, whose shrieks rent the sky and whose activity on three
legs amazed the earth. He ran yelping to Mrs. Grinnell, nearly
overturning her in his turbulent demand for sympathy; then scampered
across to the boys, who readily enough stopped their work to examine the
wounded member and condole with its wheezing proprietor.
"What ye mean, A'gusta?" Grinnell said at length. "Kase I 'lowed I'd cut
thar ears? I ain't foolin'. Kem meddlin' about remarkin' on our chill'n
agin, I'll show 'em."
Augusta looked at him in exasperation. "I ain't keerin' ef all the
Purdees war deef," she remarked, inhumanly, "but what war them words ye
sent fur a message ter Purdee?--'bout pridin' on what ain't theirn."
Grinnell in his turn looked at her--but dubiously. However much a man is
under the domination of his wife, he is seldom wholly frank. It is in
this wise that his individuality is preserved to him. "I war jes
wantin' ter know ef them words war on the rocks," he said with a
disingenuousness worthy of a higher culture.
She received this with distrust. "I kin tell ye now--they ain't," she
said, discriminatingly; "Purdee's words don't sound like _them_."
"Waal, now, what's the differ?" he demanded, with an indignation natural
enough to aspiring humanity detecting a slur upon one's literary style.
"Waal--" she paused as she knelt down to feed the fire, holding the
fragrant chips in her hand; the flame flickered out and lighted up her
reflective eyes while she endeavored to express the distinction she
felt: "Purdee's words don't sound ter me like the words of a man sech ez
men be."
Grinnell wrinkled his brows, trying to follow her here.
"They sound ter me like the words spoke in a dream--the pernouncings of
a vision." Mrs. Grinnell fancied that she too had a gift of Biblical
phraseology. "They sound ter me like things I hearn whenst I war
a-hungered arter righteousness an' seekin' religion, an' bided alone in
the wilderness a-waitin' o' the Sperit."
"'Gusta!" suddenly exclaimed her husband, with the cadence of amazed
conviction, "ye b'lieve the lie o' that critter, an' that he reads the
words o' the Lord on the rock!"
She looked up a little startled. She had been unconscious of the
circuitous approaches of credence, and shared his astonishment in the
conclusion.
"Waal, sir!" he said, more hurt and cast down than one would have
deemed possible. "I'm willin' ter hev it so. I'm jes nuthin' but a
sinner an' a fool, ripenin' fur damnation, an' he air a saint o' the
yearth!"
Now such sayings as this were frequent upon Job Grinnell's tongue. He
did not believe them; their utility was in their challenge to
contradiction. Thus they often promoted an increased cordiality of the
domestic relations and an accession of self-esteem.
Augusta, however, was tired; the boiling sorghum and the September sun
were debilitating in their effects. There was something in the scene
with the youthful Purdee that grated upon her half-developed
sensibilities. The baby was whimpering outright, and the cow was lowing
at the bars. She gave her irritation the luxury of withholding the salve
to Grinnell's wounded vanity. She said nothing. The tribute to Purdee
went for what it was worth, and he was forced to swallow the humble-pie
he had taken into his mouth, albeit it stuck in his throat.
A shadow seemed to have fallen into the moral atmosphere as the gentle
dusk came early on. One had a sense as if bereft, remembering that so
short a time ago at this hour the sun was still high, and that the
full-pulsed summer day throbbed to a climax of color and bloom and
redundant life. Now, the scent of harvests was on the air; in the
stubble of the sorghum patch she saw a quail's brood more than
half-grown, now afoot, and again taking to wing with a loud whirring
sound. The perfume of ripening muscadines came from the bank of the
river. The papaws hung globular among the leaves of the bushes, and the
persimmons were reddening. The vermilion sun was low in the sky above
the purpling mountains; the stream had changed from a crystalline brown
to red, to gold, and now it was beginning to be purple and silver. And
this reminded her that the full-moon was up, and she turned to look at
it--so pearly and luminous above the jagged ridge-pole of the dark
little house on the rise. The sky about it was blue, refining into an
exquisitely delicate and ethereal neutrality near the horizon. The baby
had fallen asleep, with its bald head on the old dog's shoulder.
After the supper was over, the sorghum fire still burned beneath the
great kettle, for the syrup was not yet made, and sorghum-boiling is an
industry that cannot be intermitted. The fire in the midst of the gentle
shadow and sheen of the night had a certain profane, discordant effect.
Pete's ill-defined figure slouching over it while he skimmed the syrup
was grimly suggestive of the distillations of strange elixirs and
unhallowed liquors, and his simple face, lighted by a sudden darting red
flame, had unrecognizable significance and was of sinister intent. For
Pete was detailed to attend to the boiling; the grinding was done, and
the old white mare stood still in the midst of the sorghum stubble and
the moonlight, as motionless and white as if she were carved in marble.
Job Grinnell sat and smoked on the porch.
Presently he got up suddenly, knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and
looked at it carefully before he stuck it into his pocket. He went,
without a word, down the rocky slope, past the old drowsing mare, and
across the foot-bridge. Two or three of the dogs, watching him as he
reappeared on the opposite bank, affected a mistake in identity. They
growled, then barked outright, and at last ran down and climbed the
fence and bounded about it, baying the vista where he had vanished,
until the sleepy old mare turned her head and gazed in mild surprise at
them.
Augusta sat alone on the step of the porch.
She had various regrets in her mind, incipient even before he had quite
gone, and now defining themselves momently with added poignancy. A woman
who, in her retirement at home, charges herself with the control of a
man's conduct abroad, is never likely to be devoid of speculation upon
probable disasters to ensue upon any abatement of the activities of her
discretion. She was sorry that she had allowed so trifling a matter to
mar the serenity of the family; her conscience upbraided her that she
had not besought him to avoid the blacksmith's shop, where certain men
of the neighborhood were wont to congregate and drink deep into the
night. Above all, her mind went back to the enigmatical message, and she
wondered that she could have been so forgetful as to fail to urge him to
forbear angering Purdee, for this would have a cumulative effect upon
all the rancors of the old quarrels, and inaugurate perhaps a new series
of reprisals.
"I ain't afeard o' no Purdee ez ever stepped," she said to herself,
defining her position. "But I'm fur peace. An' ef the Purdees will leave
we-uns be, I ain't a-goin' ter meddle along o' them."
She remembered an old barn-burning, in the days when she and her husband
were newly married, at his father's house. She looked up at the barn
hard by, on a line with the dwelling, with that tenderness which one
feels for a thing, not because of its value, but for the sake of
possession, for the kinship with the objects that belong to the home. A
cat was sitting high in a crevice in the logs where the daubing had
fallen out; the moon glittered in its great yellow eyes. A frog was
leaping along the open space about the rude step at Augusta's feet. A
clump of mullein leaves, silvered by the light, spangled by the dew, hid
him presently. What an elusive glistening gauze hung over the valley far
below, where the sense of distance was limited by the sense of
sight!--for it was here only that the night, though so brilliant, must
attest the incomparable lucidity of daylight. She could not even
distinguish, amidst those soft sheens of the moon and the dew, the
Lombardy poplar that grew above the door of old Squire Grove's house
down in the cove; in the daytime it was visible like a tiny finger
pointing upward. How drowsy was the sound of the katydid, now loudening,
now falling, now fainting away! And the tree-toad shrilled in the
dog-wood tree. The frogs, too, by the river in iterative fugue sent
forth a song as suggestive of the margins as the scent of the fern, and
the mint, and the fragrant weeds.
A convulsive start! She did not know that she slept until she was again
awake. The moon had travelled many a mile along the highways of the
skies. It hung over the purple mountains, over the farthest valley. The
cicada had grown dumb. The stars were few and faint. The air was chill.
She started to her feet; her garments were heavy with dew. The fire
beneath the sorghum kettle had died to a coal, flaring or fading as the
faint fluctuations of the wind might will. Near it Pete slumbered where
he too had sat down to rest. And Job--Job had never returned.
* * * * *