1
When Stud returned from Horicon there was little time to think of
Tess, Early Ann, Sarah, or any other woman for the farm was up to
its ears in preparation for the Rock County Fair. Three magnificent
stud animals were to be entered: Napoleon, the bull; Teddy
Roosevelt, the stallion; and Ulysses S. Grant, the boar.
Napoleon, the dark and silky black Jersey bull, whose pedigree
covered several pages and included such ancestors as Imperial
Delight, sired by Royal Edward out of Queen of the Channel Islands,
looked every bit an aristocrat. National and international
prize-winning blood ran in his veins. Mothers and grandmothers with
amazing udders were listed on his family tree, and two or three of
his bovine ancestors had sailed from the Isle of Jersey on a cattle
boat named the _Mayflower_. With massive head and fiery eyes, he
seemed to challenge the whole world to battle. In reality he was as
gentle as a lamb and loved to be scratched behind the ears with a
corn cob.
As for Teddy Roosevelt, the Percheron stallion, with arching neck
and melodramatic proportions, undoubtedly the blood of medieval
chargers ran in his veins. Sired by the pride of Normandy, and
himself the sire of scores of the finest Percherons in Southern
Wisconsin, he walked as though a golden armored youth were on his
back and plumes behind his ears.
Finally there was Ulysses S. Grant, the mettlesome and vicious
Poland China boar, who was growing more temperamental daily about
his highly commercial amours. Stud often threatened to turn this
valuable piece of breeding machinery into second rate ham and
bacon, for as sure as some admiring farmer came ten miles with
a seductive and highly amenable sow, Ulysses would sulk in his
private bath of mud, capricious as a Roman emperor. There was no
accounting for his taste which was usually plebeian.
But to the judges at the county fair, Ulysses was annually the
sweetest thing on cloven hooves. Manicured and groomed as he always
was, his pink snout pointed at a most entrancing angle, his tightly
curled tail and glowing bristles the picture of health and good
breeding, this porcine Apollo usually won in a walk.
"All personality and no character," was the way Stud fondly put it.
Although a cholera epidemic was rampant that summer, and Gus with
pardonable pessimism predicted that Ulysses would contract the
disease from sheer pig-headedness, no such thing occurred. He did
acquire a singular case of temperament, however.
Like the other animals which were to be entered Ulysses was
brushed, beautified and pampered for days preceding the fair, and
in former years he had seemed to enjoy not only the extra corn
but the effortless scratching. This year, however, he squealed
with rage whenever Stud entered the pen, gleamed wickedly at his
trainers out of small, blood-shot eyes, and more than once tried to
annihilate his owner.
The boar's private quarters were closed off from the main pig pen
by a stout, narrow gate through which one entered at his own risk.
One day when Stud brought Sarah down to observe how beautifully the
boar was pointing up, he started into the inner pen and was charged
by the infuriated animal. Brailsford took one step backward,
tripped over a trough, and falling struck his head on a stone. The
next moment the boar was upon him.
Sarah seized a five-pronged manure fork which was leaning against
the fence and drove it with all her strength into the shoulder of
the boar, turning him at the crucial moment.
Stud leapt to his feet, one arm bleeding, and despite Sarah's cry
of warning plunged barehanded into the fight. He kicked the great
ringed nose again and again with his heavy boot, grabbed a large
hind leg for a brief but titanic struggle to drag the beast back
into his pen, at last drove him through the gate with a piece of
two-by-four.
Gus and Early Ann came running. Sarah managed to use the pitch fork
effectively from the top of the fence. But Stud motioned them all
away. This was now his fight and he wanted to handle it alone.
To their cries that he come away Stud turned a deaf ear. Years
of pent up fury went into the struggle. The boar was blind with
rage yet respectful of the giant with his heavy stick. The man was
filled with righteous anger against this stubborn beast and ready
for a showdown. They fought and maneuvered, charged and leapt
aside, the man shouting incoherently, the big animal squealing and
tearing up the earth.
"I'll fix the bastard," Stud cried. His shirt was ripped. His
muscles knotted and gleaming.
Again and again the boar charged and went crashing into the fence
as Stud scrambled to safety. And time after time Stud brought the
two-by-four crashing down between the maddened animal's eyes.
At last they were both too tired to fight. The boar lay squealing
and panting in impotent rage across the pen, while Stud, proud that
he could walk from the arena, smiled as he climbed the fence.
"Well, there's one blue ribbon gone to holy blazes," said Gus. "But
by golly it was worth it."
2
The fight with the boar had two immediate consequences: Sarah
suffered a nervous collapse, and Ulysses S. Grant, although
carefully tended, proved conclusively that he would not be
prize-winning material for the fall of 1913.
It was the veterinarian who was called first and later the family
doctor.
"Now don't you worry about me," Sarah said. "I'm all right. You
just take care of Ulysses and go on getting ready for the fair. I
don't need to go this year."
"Why, I couldn't go without you, Mother," Stud said, "and ... and
without Ulysses."
Old Doc Carlyle, the vet who had tended Ulysses ever since he was
a small, squealing red suckling, shook his head sadly. He had a
genuine fondness for the vicious old boar and had always claimed
that he would make blue ribbon material.
"You hadn't ought to beat no dumb animal like you beat Ulysses," he
told Stud. "It ain't Christian."
The less efficient and far more callous general practitioner,
Doctor Whitehead, who came to see Sarah, took her pulse with his
inch-thick stem-winder and as usual lost count at eleven. He took
her temperature with a thermometer which had not been properly
sterilized in three years, and looked down her throat with a spoon.
He pooh-poohed her fear that she had been internally injured during
the fight with the boar.
"Probably some female ailment," he insisted, shaking several
harmless pink powders onto papers which he folded deftly and left
upon the dresser. "You ain't bad off. You'll be up and around in no
time."
Sarah watched a spider making his web in the corner of the
ceiling. She continued to watch him long after the doctor's Ford
could no longer be heard down the road.
"Spin your pretty web," she told him. "I won't brush it down. I'm
just going to let myself be sick. I reckon I got a right to lie
back and be sick one time in my life."
3
Stud tried to straighten his back at the end of the row. The sweat
poured from his temples and the grizzled creases of his stubbled
cheeks. The pain went in wide, flat bands down the heavy muscles on
either side of his spine.
It was weakness to show this pain. One must laugh, throw down the
shining tobacco hatchet beside the shagbark hickory, snatch up the
heavy, brown-earthenware jug, tip it deftly over the shoulder and
slosh long, cool swigs of cider down one's parched and dusty throat.
"Uuufff, Uuuggg," said the big tobacco harvester, wiping his mouth
with the back of his sleeve and spitting into the dust. "Sure
tastes good, don't it?"
"Fair to middling," said Gus.
"It's darn good cider," said Ansel Ottermann, "even iffen it is
full of rotten apples and worms and such."
"Don't need to drink no more than you like," said Stud, holding the
jug just out of Ansel's reach. "Is it good cider or ain't it?"
"It's good cider," Ansel said.
The almanac had predicted early frost that year, and although the
entire family scoffed at almanac predictions Stud had cleaned and
sharpened his tobacco axes, suckered his tobacco plants, cleaned
out the sheds and gathered together a crew.
On the stroke of six one hazy blue Indian summer morning the
noisy crowd of farmers and men from Brailsford Junction began
the backbreaking labor. Up one row and down the next went the
sweating workers. The left hand grasped the stalk, the right sent
the tobacco hatchet cleanly through the heavy-fibered stem. Flash,
flash went the bright steel in the sunlight.
"Great crop this year," said Vern Barton. "Just heft them stalks."
"Too darned good a crop," growled Gus. "I got a crick in my back
like a he-dog in April."
"That's what you get gallivantin' around nights," said Stud. The
men laughed.
"How you do talk," said Gus. "You know I ain't took a girl into a
haymow for twenty years."
"How about a cornfield?" Stud asked.
Laths tipped with steel were spudded through the butt ends of the
stalks--five or six plants to each lath. The tobacco was then
loaded upon wagons and hauled to the sheds. Men climbed nimbly
among the poles hanging the heavily laden laths, tier upon tier.
The hot, suffocating air was pungent with the smell of green
tobacco.
The thick, moss-green leaves were soft and heavy as velvet to the
touch. Later they would be brown and brittle. Still later, when to
the vast excitement of the countryside "case" weather began, they
would be fine and pliable as thin brown leather.
The swallows had gathered long weeks before, and, as though at some
invisible signal sent along the thousands of miles of wire on which
they were mobilized, had left over night for the south. The fields
were strewn with yellowing pumpkins and swelling hubbard squashes,
knobbed, burly, and deep green. The first ducks were dropping in
from the north. Soon it would be time for the Rock County Fair.
As fair week approached, however, Stud announced his decision to
remain at home. He declared that since Ulysses and Sarah were both
laid up, Peter still thrashing, and Early Ann of necessity tied to
the housework, he too would pass up the event of the year.
He looked over the fence into the pen of Ulysses S. Grant and shook
his head sadly.
"We're just a couple of darned old fools!"
"Oink," said the boar.
"First fair you and me have missed in five years."
The boar sighed gustily and lay down in his consoling bath of mud.
Stud helped Gus give the bull and stallion their final beauty
treatments, loaded the big bull into the wagon, and hitched the
Percheron on behind. Early Ann gave the bow of blue ribbon on the
stallion's tail a final twist and pat. Stud slipped Gus a twenty
dollar bill. And off went the shining green wagon, its bright
yellow wheels looking like huge sunflowers as they flashed in the
sunlight. The tug links played a merry tune, the stallion whinnied
gently, while Stud and Early Ann cheered the debonair farm hand on
his way.
"You better bring home some cups and ribbons," Early Ann called
after the retreating cavalcade.
"Trust me," shouted Gus, waving his derby.
The girl and man stood as if entranced until they could no longer
hear the rattle of the wagon, and until the dust had settled on the
roadway.
4
Sarah continued to feel ailing despite pink powders, herb tea, and
a highly advertised variety of vegetable compound.
The work was thrown completely upon the shoulders of Early Ann.
Stud would have been blind not to have noticed how well she bore
up under this burden and how gladly she cared for Sarah. The girl
could cook as fine a meal as he had ever tasted, and be as gay and
fresh after hours over the cook stove as when she came clicking
down the stairs with the chamber pots at four in the morning.
She never asked Stud to kill chickens for her. She went to the
chicken house herself, chased down a pair of plump friers, and
chopped off their heads without more ado. These she scalded,
plucked, singed, drew, washed in cold well water, rolled in egg
and flour, and fried to a crisp golden brown. It made Stud's mouth
fairly water to think of those chicken dinners: hot biscuits,
mashed potatoes, lots of chicken gravy, coffee with Jersey cream,
and hot mince pie for dessert.
Such roasts, fries and stews! Such homemade bread, dumplings, pies
and cakes! Her cooking was better than hotel dinners, Stud averred.
There was a tang to everything she cooked and everything she did.
Stud had never before been completely aware of the work a woman
must do around a farm. He had rather thought that Sarah was having
the best of the bargain all these years. Now, perversely, he was
conscious of every task a farm-wife must perform.
He noticed how from Monday morning when she started pumping cistern
water for the week's washing, until Saturday night when she put
over water for baths Early Ann never sat down to rest. He noticed
particularly how clean she kept the house and milk house; how
shining and sweet-smelling were the milk pails and separator;
how the meals were always on the dot and the dishes cleared away
promptly after the meal. She canned, churned, carried in cords of
wood.
Stud found himself wondering if there were not some way to heat
flatirons save over a roaring cook stove. Somehow the mountains of
dishes seemed unnecessary.
But Early Ann did not complain. She sang as she worked.
Watching her now, as with hair and dress blowing she fed five
hundred snowy chickens, Stud told himself she was a "darned good
hired girl and would make some lucky fellow a good wife."
The phone rang two longs and three shorts the following Saturday.
It was Gus calling jubilantly from Janesville. He had squandered
a quarter to inform the family that Napoleon was not only the
greatest _Jersey_ bull in the county, but, according to the judges
who awarded him a silver loving cup, the greatest bull of _any_
variety. Teddy, the stallion, had won a blue ribbon, while Sarah's
raspberry preserves had been judged the best in their class.
Peter's pumpkin was three pounds and four ounces heavier than its
nearest rival, and Gus had won a kewpie doll for Early Ann by
hitting a nigger baby with a baseball.
Stud could hear the subdued exclamations from every kitchen on the
party line.
"But I didn't get nothing in the wood-chopping contest," Gus
complained. "I got licked seven-ways-for-Sunday by a lady from East
Fulton."
The family celebrated with homemade ice cream eaten in Sarah's
bedroom.
That evening at dusk a storm arose. Lightning quivered along the
horizon, and a wind sprang up. Early Ann, throwing her apron over
her head to protect it from the spattering drops, hurried down to
the old mill to get in a late brood of chicks raised by the fierce
old one-legged hen who every summer stole her nest.
As she reached the doorway of the mill Joe Valentine grabbed her
around the waist and put a large, hairy hand over her mouth. He
pulled her into the dark building and began talking to her in a
hoarse whisper.
"You're my step daughter," he said. "You're coming with me."
She bit his fingers in fury and cried out for help, but the moaning
of the wind and the rush of the rain muffled her words. She forgot
all the nice ways and pretty talk she had learned from Sarah
Brailsford and kicked and fought and swore.
"I'll scratch your eyes out, Joe!"
"You're my girl. You ran away from me." He nursed his bitten hand.
"I'll tell everybody how you treated Maw."
"Come along now." He tried to pull her toward the door, then
stopped. "I was good to your maw," he said.
"You killed her," the girl cried. "You made her take in washings,
and ... and worse."
"You can't teach an old cat new tricks."
"You killed her," Early Ann shouted.
"Shut your mouth, you little bastard," Joe said.
He tried to kiss her and she began to fight again. He slapped her
face methodically a dozen times.
"You're my girl," Joe said. "You're my step daughter, and you ain't
eighteen yet."
"I am eighteen," she panted. "Let me go, Joe." She sunk her teeth
into his arm while he screamed.
"Now you're going to get it," he said. He ripped her dress and
bent her backward until she thought he would break her back. Then
she went limp and did not fight any more, but nothing happened. A
moment later he flung her away.
"You ain't any good to me, either," he said with a great, wistful
sigh. She saw his face in a flash of lightning. There was no lust
there nor anger. A cat rubbed against her leg purring loudly.
She went out past the man who did not try to stop her. She hurried
through the rain toward the hollow of lantern light which was
approaching.
"Are you all right, Early Ann?" Stud cried. He came running and
held up the lantern to look at her. He saw the torn dress and
disheveled hair.
"Who was it?" he cried. "Where is he?"
She shook her head.
"You know, but you won't tell."
"Yes."
He pushed past her angrily and went into the mill holding the
lantern high. He snatched up a piece of iron pipe and plunged
through the dark rooms shouting. A cat rubbed against him, a big
black fellow. Stud heard laughter out in the storm, hurried out
into the rain, but could find no one.
In the kitchen once more he threw off his wet jacket, hung up the
lantern, took Early Ann by the shoulders and tried to make her meet
his eyes.
"You're not my daughter," he said. "I ... I could...."
"No, Mr. Brailsford, please!" She was crying quietly.
He let his hands drop from her shoulders, turned and looked out
through the black, dripping window toward the lake. He could hear
the waves rushing up on the shore and breaking, the wind soughing
through the elms and maples. He thought of Sarah lying pale and
weak on her bed, and he thought of the robust girl standing in the
lamp light behind him.
Very deliberately he left the kitchen and climbed the narrow, dark
stairs to his bed.
BOOK THREE