1
Stud Brailsford stopped his team of sorrel mares beside the old
mill and blacksmith shop, led Jinny in through the wide doorway
and tied her to a wrought-iron ring worn with sixty-five years of
friction. He lit the charcoal in the forge, pumped the ancient
foot-bellows, and buried a shining shoe in the bright coals.
"This ain't going to hurt you a bit," he told the nervous mare.
"Your ma, and your ma's ma, and a long ways back of that got nice
new shoes in this same smithy."
He whistled happily as he rolled up his sleeves, showing huge brown
arms with bulging biceps, tied on a leather apron, and lifting
the heavy hammer gave the anvil a couple of preparatory whangs,
bell-like strokes which rang out across the valley of the stream
all the way to Cottonwood Hill and back again.
"Blamed if I don't like shoeing a horse," he told the sorrel.
"Nothing like it to set a fellow up in the morning."
Stud had a weakness for his blacksmith shop and the adjoining mill
which had once ground all the grist and cut all the lumber for the
entire countryside. The old stone building was in ruins now, the
mill-wheel fallen, and the dam washed away, moss and vines covered
the rotting roof; but Stud would not tear it down.
He liked to come down here on a wet day and tinker around in the
pile of wheels and machine parts which littered the floor. At a
bench in one corner he kept his paraphernalia for stuffing birds,
in another his saws and planes and chisels, his brace and bits
and other woodworking equipment. He liked to make things, and fix
things, and whang away at his anvil.
"Have to fix that bellows with a new cowskin," he announced to no
one in particular. "Must have been made before the Civil War by my
Granddaddy--and what a great old fellow he was!" Stud fished the
glowing crescent of iron out of the coals and set to work with his
hammer.
"Tailor made shoes for a pretty lady," he told the anxious mare.
"Can't go barefoot like a blamed little foal."
So he had heard his father talk to sleek and shining mares in this
same blacksmith shop, and so his father's father had doubtless
talked to _his_ horses on this very spot. Stud had a sneaking
fondness for horses and ancestors. Particularly the big men who had
come swinging into Wisconsin in the eighteen-forties to open up
this country as if by miracle.
He had heard his father tell of the stormy voyage from England in a
sailing ship, the long journey up the canal and through the Great
Lakes, the landing at Milwaukee where the candle-lit taverns were
over-run with settlers, frontier merchants, gamblers, whores, and
itinerant ministers of the gospel who shared the unpartitioned
floors, and waded democratically through the deep mud in the tavern
yard where scores of oxen were tethered beside their clumsy carts.
Stud himself remembered the last of these "toad-crushers" with
wheels cut from cross-sections of huge oak trees. Loaded with lead
and pulled by as many as eight yoke of oxen, these carts drew the
metal mined in Galena and Exeter across the wilds of intervening
Wisconsin to the lake port of Milwaukee. The drivers were a wild
and frisky crew, Stud had been told. It shocked and titillated his
righteous old Daddy (who had watched the ox teams from this very
window) knowing how the drivers whored and played at cards in
Milwaukee and the thriving town of Galena.
Great fellows and great times, thought Stud Brailsford, dipping the
hissing shoe into the tub of green water beside the anvil. Men who
could carry a three-hundred pound barrel of salt up a steep loft
stairs, Big Jock Macreedy who had set the nine-hundred pound oak
cornerpost on the lower eighty. His grandfather's brother (for whom
Brailsford Junction was named) who had single-handed lifted the
millstone in this very mill into its place.
"Hold up there, Jinny," he admonished, lifting her tasseled leg and
catching the hoof between his leather knees. "This ain't going to
hurt you a bit, Jinny. Nice new shoes for a pretty lady."
There had been a log house on the farm where the brick one stood
now, and Stud had often heard his father tell how the deer came
to eat the cabbages, and how one night a cougar had looked in at
the window.... Rain came in through the cracks in the hand-split
hickory shingles, it whipped into the faces of the eight children
sleeping in the loft on the corn-husk mattresses ... rain and snow
in the winter, mosquitoes in the summer. Cracks between the logs
which no amount of mudding would completely fill.
Stud could just remember the log house; it had been torn down the
year he was five. There were wide stone fireplaces at either end of
the big downstairs room, tallow candles made in a mold brought over
from England on the sailing ship, a flintlock rifle with which his
father could hit a squirrel at one hundred yards. There had been
sweet-smelling roots and herbs hanging from the beams, seed corn,
hams, and traps for catching bobcats and foxes that came to steal
the chickens.
And kids all over the place. Three girls and five boys.... Stud
wished he could have a family of husky youngsters like that. He
didn't blame Sarah for the fact that all of her babies had died
except Peter. But he did wish that Peter could have been a real
farmer. He wished that he would quit mooning around and find a girl
and use his fists more often. He wondered if the boy would actually
run away to Chicago to work in an automobile or trailer factory. It
made him bitter to think that farming wasn't good enough for his
son.
Stud drove home the tapered horse-shoe nails with a viciousness
which made the mare dance like a tumble-weed.
"Whoa, there, you ornery piece of horseflesh. Act like a lady or
I'll larrup the living daylights out of you."
Times were soft, Stud argued. Kids got notions in their heads.
Like Peter wanting to build automobiles or trailers. Everyone
riding instead of walking, talking about a device to milk cows by
electricity, wearing gloves for husking in the fields.
When Stud was a boy men husked corn bare-handed. He could remember
how his fingers cracked and bled in the cold, how one could follow
his trail across the snow by the drops of blood. At night the men
laughed about their split fingers, rubbed in hot tallow, and next
morning went at it again.
Underwear was a luxury and almost unknown. Men wore their coarse
homespun against their skin. The burrs in the virgin wool scratched
like pins and needles.
Stud put another horse-shoe into the charcoal and worked the
bellows. He tossed a handful of hickory nuts through the open
window into the pig pen where the big sows cracked them between
their teeth and swallowed them with noisy gusto. Stud noticed that
the sick sow was back on her feet again and as greedy as any of her
fantastically enormous sisters.
Better hogs than we raised in the old days, he thought. That's
one place we've improved. Men get meaner and weaker and filthier,
while hogs and cattle get to be better animals every year. That's
on account of the way we breed the beasts. No romance. No guessing
what's under a bustle. Just hard-headed facts and scientific
breeding. Do the human race some good to have a first rate breeder
put in charge for a few generations.
"Whang, whang," went the hammer on the anvil as sparks flew out
like Fourth-of-July. "Hissss" went the second shoe in the tub of
scummy water. The smithy was filled with the delectable odor of hot
metal and scorching hooves and dung, age old dust and the first
breath of crab-apple blossoms now bursting on the scraggly black
trees beside the smithy window.
Man got meaner and smaller while the animals got greater and finer,
thought Stud again, and that was why a man could give his best
years to raising Jersey bulls like Napoleon, or Percheron stallions
like Teddy Roosevelt ... could care for his cattle almost more than
his family. There was a decency about animals not to be found in
men.
This he had known ever since as a young man--a spoiled but
good-looking young fellow who dominated his daddy and bought the
big farm for a song--he had found that one can't trust bankers,
share farmers, renters, or hired men, but one can trust horses,
cows, and pigs....
"Give 'em your best and they'll give you their best," thought Stud.
And no stock in the Rock River valley had better care or better
feed than the Brailsford stock.
Stud thinks now, seeing Peter dash down the road like mad on his
new red motorcycle, that a buggy was good enough for him at that
age. No, he didn't get his first buggy until he was eighteen. It
had red wheels and a fringed whip-socket, and his father had given
him a spanking bay gelding to go with it. What a figure he cut
courting Sarah to the tune of "I'm the Man Who Broke the Bank at
Monte Carlo".... Black curls, a little mustache turned up at the
ends, derby hat, pants tight over strong rippling thighs, smart
checked coat. A dashing young giant, muscled like a bull.
And Sarah in her long flaring gown, curls down the back of her
neck, rows and rows of buttons, puff sleeves and a waist so small
he could reach around it with his two hands.
"Ah, Sarah, you were beautiful then," Stud says aloud. He slaps the
mare sharply across her gleaming flank. "Get going, you lazy piece
of horse flesh."
2
Miss Temperance Crandall bustled along the road with the air of a
woman who has a mission in life. She noticed with shocked delight
that there were several pairs of young women's bloomers on the
Barton wash lines, no corset covers, and scarcely any petticoats.
Bloomers, of all things! That was really too much. Temperance
Crandall still wore drawers, and she always said the underwear her
mother wore was good enough for her.
The diapers hanging in snowy squares behind the tumble-down Oleson
household reminded her that the Oleson baby was born less than
seven months after the young couple were married.... September,
October, November, December, January, February, March, she counted
again. And you couldn't tell her it was a seven-month baby. She had
traipsed all the way out from town the second day after it was born
to bring Mrs. Oleson a baby sweater she had knitted, and she had
had a good look at the cute little brat. Perfectly good fingernails
and a huge mass of blond hair.
Peter Brailsford and Dutchy Bloom were coming down the road a mile
a minute on their motorcycles, and just before they reached the
spot where she was standing Dutchy stood up on the seat, let go the
handlebars, and started yelling like a wild Indian. Why, he might
have killed her! He might have run right over her.
"You better watch out, young man," she shouted after him, shaking
her parasol. "You can't go up the narrow road to heaven on a
motorcycle. You're just tearing down the wide, primrose path to
hell."
The motorcycles were making so much noise that Dutchy did not catch
the full import of her remarks, but he turned, nevertheless, and
thumbed his nose in answer.
She went in at the Brailsford gate, took the letters out of the
mail-box as she went by, stopped behind the lilac bush at the turn
of the flagstone walk to peer through the envelopes, then composing
bonnet, shawl, flounced skirt, and lace parasol climbed briskly up
the wooden steps and opened the front door.
"Sarah!" she called. "Oh-h, Sarah! It's just me, Temperance
Crandall. I just came to tell you...."
"Why, do come in, Miss Crandall," said Sarah, wiping her hands on
her apron. "Won't you sit down?"
"I really haven't a minute," said the determined and bright-eyed
person. "I've got to tell everybody along the road about the church
supper next Wednesday night. I knew you'd bake the pies, Sarah.
You do bake the loveliest pies if you would only use a little more
shortening in the crust and be careful not to put too much cinnamon
on your apples."
"Yes," said Sarah, "I suppose I can bake the pies."
"Oh, not all of them. Just ten or fifteen. I'll have the Barton
girls bake the rest. They ought to do something for the good of
their souls. Why, when I went past there a minute ago I saw they
had bloomers on the line."
"I think bloomers are real sensible," said Sarah Brailsford.
"Oh, you do!" said Temperance. "Well, I don't. And what's more when
I was listening in this morning to see if old man Whalen had got
over his D.T.'s I heard Kate Barton and that good-for-nothing Joe
Whalen going on something scandalous, throwing kisses over the wire
and whispering about Saturday night. You can't tell _me_ that silk
bloomers do a girl's morals any good."
"Why shouldn't a girl have pretty underclothes?" asked Sarah. "They
won't have many years to dress pretty and have a good time."
"I'm going to tell Reverend Tooton to preach a sermon on girls'
bloomers," said Temperance. "What those girls need is a good
dressing down and not so much dressing up. I must hurry back to
town and see him this very afternoon.... But what I came to tell
you about, Sarah...."
"Yes?"
"Well, now I sorta hate to do it. But it's for your own good."
"I'm sure we understand each other," said Sarah Brailsford, coolly,
sitting proudly in her straight-backed chair.
"Well, I'm no one for beating about the bush," said Miss Crandall.
"And far be it from me to stir up any trouble in a Christian
household. But if you ask me, I'd watch that Early Ann."
"Would you mind if I closed the door into the kitchen?" Sarah asked
quietly.
"No, shut the door so the hussy can't hear us," said Miss Crandall,
"not that you can ever keep a secret from a hired girl so long as
there are keyholes."
"What was it you were going to say?"
"Well, now, Sarah. I just want to do you a good turn same as I
would expect you to do for me."
"Will you please come to the point, Miss Crandall?"
"Since you insist, Sarah, and may the Lord forgive me for telling
you. But I think you ought to know that Early Ann Sherman is
Stanley Brailsford's daughter, and the way they cut up together
makes it all the nastier."
Sarah Brailsford swayed faintly, caught herself, and rose
unsteadily to her feet. Her face was white and pinched, but her
voice was clear and proud.
"I'll bake the pies, Miss Crandall." She opened the door with a
hauteur which quieted even the garrulous Temperance Crandall. And
it was not until she was beyond the lilacs that Temperance started
worrying. "Now I've done it again. But someone had to tell her."
3
"You're a jinx," Gus told Early Ann as he stood beside her in the
lamp light helping with the dishes. "Nothing but rain since the
night you came. Never knew it to fail. That's what comes of having
a strange girl on the farm."
"I ain't a strange girl," said Early Ann. "I certainly ain't as
strange as you are. You're the strangest guy I ever seen."
"All Gundersons have got faces like mine," said Gus sadly.
"You ain't homely," said Early Ann. "You're awful handsome. Can you
tango or sing,'You Great Big Beautiful Doll'?"
"I can't sing nothing," Gus said. "Can't carry a tune worth a cent.
Stud says maybe I could sing better if I had my tonsils cut."
Early Ann giggled. She looked up with flashing eyes at the dour
hired man and winked wickedly. She giggled again.
"You ought to see the picture postcards I got and the bon bon
boxes, and the dance programs with silk tassels." (How she wished
she _did_ have these lovely, unattainable things!) "I bet I could
teach you how to do the Castle Walk."
"Not me," said Gus. "No you don't." He cast an apprehensive glance
at the girl and all but let a tureen slip out of his hands.
"You bust that tureen and I'll run you out of the kitchen with a
broom," said Early Ann.
"My, my!" said Gus. "You're a wild woman, ain't you?"
"You bet I'm wild." She tossed her shining curls in the lamp light
and added a kettle to the gleaming row of copper vessels hanging
along the wall. "I used to bite like everything when I was a little
girl."
"Let's see your teeth," said the hired man.
She flashed her white teeth, then opened wide her pretty mouth.
"Yep, you're a biter," Gus said. "But you ain't a day over
seventeen by the looks of your molars."
"You don't know anything about girls," said Early Ann. "All you
know about is horses."
From the other room came the voice of Sarah reading to Stanley by
lamp light. Her voice was sweet, but particularly colorless this
evening.
"Where'd you come from anyway?" Gus wanted to know. "And who are
your folks? There ain't no Shermans in Brailsford Junction."
"None of your beeswax," the girl said firmly. "It's none of your
beeswax where I came from."
"Not that I care," said Gus. "Not that I'm curious. Ishkabibble! I
should worry."
"Oh, no. You ain't curious. You just got your tongue hanging out
and your eyes popping, that's all. You're just running around like
a couple of strange new dogs. You ain't curious."
"It ain't nice for a girl to talk the way you talk," said Gus. "It
ain't proper for a girl to talk about dogs like that."
"I wasn't talking about dogs, I was talking about you," Early Ann
said.
"Don't you ever want to be a lady, Early Ann? Don't you ever want
to ride in a hansom cab or a limousine, with ostrich plumes in your
hat, and a parasol? Don't you ever want to learn how to be sweet
and talk nice like Sarah Brailsford?"
"She's lovely," said Early Ann with a sigh. "I sure wish I could
be like Mrs. Brailsford. But I got a tongue like a little snake.
I can't help what my tongue says.... Sure I want to be a lady and
ride in a limousine. I want to be as graceful as Irene Castle, and
dance like an angel, and have a house with swell brass beds and
fumed oak mission furniture like you see in the Hartman catalogue,
and a big cut-glass dish for the center of my table, and real lace
curtains, and a new Ford with a Disco self-starter and...."
"Gee whiz, you must be figurin' on marrying a millionaire," Gus
said.
"I want things," the girl said. "All I've had all my life is work,
work, work."
Her fervor had flushed her cheeks and brightened her eyes until the
vision of young loveliness before him made Gus forget that he was
a woman-hater. He wished he were a good-looking young fellow with
some money. She'd get everything she wanted soon enough.
"You better not let Temperance Crandall hear you talk like that,"
warned Gus. "She'd tell everybody from Stoughton to Fort Atkinson."
"What does she look like?" Early Ann asked with excitement. "Has
she got a long scraggly neck and a raggedy black parasol, and a
black shawl, and does she wear glasses?"
"That's her," said Gus.
"Let me get my fingers around that hag's neck," said Early Ann.
"You certainly do talk rough," said the hired man. "I wouldn't want
to meet you alone somewhere on a dark night."
"She was over here today telling tales about me," said Early Ann.
"They shut the door and I was too proud to listen. She's just a....
Oh, Gus, she's just a nasty old busy-body. Mrs. Brailsford came out
in the kitchen as white as a ghost after she left and asked for the
camphor."
"There's something mysterious about you," said Gus. "I knew it from
the night you came."
"It's just talk," said Early Ann. "They don't know a thing. There's
nothing in my life to be ashamed of.... But it seems like old
ladies just can't leave a girl alone. There's nobody in my past
who...."
Early Ann broke off abruptly in the middle of her sentence. Her
eyes grew large and the terror crept down her cheeks and caught
at the comers of her mouth. She started to scream, then bit
her knuckles and with great deliberation turned away from the
apparition at the window-pane. By the time Gus had rushed out into
the yard no one was to be seen and the starlit night was silent and
empty.
In the parlor Sarah still read to Stanley, unaware of anything
beyond her own circle of lamp light. But as Early Ann listened in
the throbbing stillness she heard the older woman falter and stop.
Then she heard quiet weeping.
"Why ... what are you crying about, Mother?" she heard Stanley ask.
"Nothing, nothing at all," Sarah said. "I--I guess I'm just tired,
that's all."