1
_In the early autumn of 1913 a French flyer looped the loop to the
amazement of an incredulous world. More troops were ordered to the
Mexican border. In Chicago the Bon Ton girls were the last word in
burlesque. Smart horses wore bobbed tails and well-cropped manes.
Forty-four thousand eight hundred tons of dynamite tore away the
barrier at the Pacific end of the Panama Canal while Shriners
cheered. Prime favorites on the piano rolls were "Good-bye Boys,"
"The Trail of the Lonesome Pine" and "You're a Great Big Blue-Eyed
Baby." Wheat sold at around ninety cents in Chicago with hogs
close to nine dollars. Aunt Martha of the Needle Notes column
found that one could cut whalebone to any desired length by
warming it first before the fire. German and American yachts raced
off Marblehead, and Lieutenant Governor Thomas Morris of Wisconsin
told an attentive audience that never again would his fair state
become a coaling station for Wall Street, nor a water tank for the
Rockefeller and Morgan interests._
But to Peter Brailsford, impatient with his youth; torn with fear
of God, of hell, and of sex; romantic, inexperienced, wistful;
anxious to get ahead in the world, yet essentially unworldly;
intolerant, rebellious, headstrong; filled with hatreds,
jealousies, and a morbid interest in death; saddled with concepts
of duty, patriotism, and courage which were fatal to millions of
his generation; big, clumsy, lovable; obsessed with the idea that
he was only a country boy; almost as supersensitive as Sarah and
nearly as lusty as Stud; fine, intelligent, mechanically minded,
and above all a considerate and good hearted young fellow....
To this healthy but unhappy product of English ancestry, Methodist
theology, and the American public school system the tumult of the
outer world meant little compared to the tumult within his brain.
Now, striding along Main Street in greasy coveralls, glowering at
the Saturday afternoon sun through eyes dark with anger, kicking
defiantly through drifts of yellow elm leaves, flaunting rebellion
and stubborn pride at every step, he was just a kid coming home
from work at the "Trailer" to those he met; but to himself, Peter
was quite naturally the center of the Universe.
He would show the world and particularly Mike O'Casey and the front
office gang what sort of a boy they had greasing their trailers.
He would invent some new and world-revolutionizing trailer which
would make them pop-eyed with amazement. And when he had been made
vice-president of the company he would call Bud Spillman into his
office and dismiss him with great dignity.
Peter told himself that he was talking nonsense and acting like an
unbroken yearling. He knew that he should be the happiest boy in
the world and should thank God for his good fortune. Nevertheless
as he elbowed his way through clots of gossiping farmers whose rigs
and Fords lined Main Street he knew that he was far from being
happy.
Maybe life in town wasn't so perfect after all. Perhaps after he
had taken a crack at this trailer job.... But no. He would never go
back to the farm. Not even if he could be thrashing boss every year
with twenty men under him. He would stick it out greasing trailers
until the day he died. Bud Spillman or anyone else couldn't whip
Peter Brailsford.
He stopped before the Bentley Brothers' Hardware store,
irrepressibly drawn by the beautiful stag and pearl-handled
jack-knives in the window, and remembered the jack-knife he had
stolen from a boy at country school and how he had known that God
had seen him steal the knife, and how for days he went in constant
dread that God would strike him dead for his sin. He still had an
overwhelming desire for pearl-handled jack-knives. He remembered
how he had thought that eternal damnation was not too great a price
to pay for that shining knife, which was as cool and smooth as
slippery elm between his fingers.
Looking in at the hardware store window cluttered with milk pails,
muskrat traps, fish poles, pitchforks and spades he suddenly caught
sight of his own offensive image in the glass: ears that stuck out
on either side of his head like sails, a thatch of dark, unruly
curls which would never stay combed, big brown calf's eyes which
might have graced a Jersey heifer, and pouting lips.
He wondered how anyone could look so ugly. "What you need," he said
irrelevantly, "is a good swift kick in the pants." Undoubtedly,
with a face like that, he was getting more than he deserved from a
most generous world.
He began to count his blessings, unconvinced but hopeful. He was
away from the farm at last, had freedom, a job, and a room in town.
His third weekly paycheck of twenty-two dollars and fifty cents was
in his pocket. He had a girl who some day might give him a kiss,
and a dapper little employer, Mike O'Casey, whom he admired beyond
all power of expression.
Still he was miserable.
The very eminence of O'Casey was deflating to Peter. How could a
country lout with big feet and clumsy red hands ever hope to reach
such pinnacles of success? The president of O'Casey Trailers was
not only a man of the world, a fine mechanic, an inventor of proven
genius, a baritone soloist, and a buck and wing dancer. He was
also the most popular and best dressed man in town. Peter bet that
nobody in New York's Four Hundred was better looking or a classier
dresser.
The boy leaned against the hitching rail and sighed as his hero
went roaring past in his big red car with cutout open. Peter wished
that Mr. O'Casey would turn and nod, but no such miracle occurred.
Peter asked himself what he was mooning about. But he knew all
too well. Bud Spillman, out of all the hundreds of thousands of
possible men, had been made his straw-boss at the "Trailer." Peter
remembered once when he was going to kill Bud Spillman. He had
waited for hours behind the Methodist church with a piece of pipe.
He had stood all that he could possibly stand from the bully, had
been kicked in the stomach when he was down, had been insulted in
the showers before all the other boys, had had his clothes tied in
knots in the locker room, and his tennis shoes filled with tacks.
He had stood in the cold behind the Methodist church waiting for
Spillman who usually took that short cut home. He had envisioned
just how the bully would look when he lay there pale and dead,
and he had planned all his own actions: what he would do if he
were chased, and where he would jump the freight which was to take
him from Brailsford Junction forever. A wishful little song from
childhood echoed and re-echoed in his brain:
"_Moonlight, starlight,
I guess the bears ain't out tonight._"
But Bud had gone home another way.
And now, out of all the possible fellows in Brailsford Junction,
Bud Spillman had been made his straw-boss. Bud, his rival for
Maxine, and his instinctive enemy since childhood.
Ruthaford S. Spillman, Bud's father, and owner of the biggest
livery stable in Brailsford Junction had been one of the twenty
backers who had put up money with which O'Casey had built his
factory. It had been a snap for Bud to get the job.
Peter's adventure had started so auspiciously that he could
scarcely believe this new turn of events. He had come steaming into
town sixty miles an hour on his motorcycle, dressed in his best
serge suit and wearing his brightest tie. After an hour of agony
and anticipation he had been ushered into the awe-inspiring offices
of president Mike O'Casey.
"Know anything about trailers?" asked O'Casey.
"No, but I could learn."
"Is that your motorcycle out in front?"
"Yes sir."
"Can you take'er apart and put'er together?"
"You're darned right I can ... I mean, yes sir. And I know all
about Fords and thrashing machines."
Mr. O'Casey smiled at the serious, eager young man before him.
"I'm seventeen going on eighteen," Peter said.
"I guess you'll do, Kid."
Peter walked out, floating on air.
He started work the next morning and was temporarily assigned to
the paint shop where a shipment of the crude semi-trailers of that
day, based on the early Martin patents, were being painted a snowy
white for a Chicago milk company. He was clever with a brush and
soon acquired the knack of enameling and varnishing without leaving
a sag or a brush mark. All went well until the second week when Bud
Spillman came to work at the "Trailer." From that moment on Peter
was miserable.
"So you wanted a job as a mechanic?" asked Bud. "I'll see what I
can do."
Several days later Peter was transferred to the assembly plant
where from morning until night he greased trailers and plant
machinery. Bud promised to have him cleaning out toilets and
spittoons by the end of the month.
To hell with all of them! Some day Brailsford Junction would wake
up to the fact that Peter was a genius. They would go around
telling anecdotes of his youth, and laugh about the time he quit
school, told "Indian Face" Bolton where he could go, and tossed
his school books into the creek. He would invent an "equalizer" to
take the "whip" out of the action between car and trailer. He would
make a half a million dollars and would live in a large house on
Shannon's Hill with Maxine Larabee and their many children.
The day began to brighten all about him as he dreamed. The farmers
and their wives looked more kindly, the girls more handsome and
the men more noble. By the time Peter had reached the Brailsford
Junction National Bank he was noticing how blue the sky seemed
overhead, how bright the leaves, how keen the wood-smoke in the
air. Not even the appearance of the prissy Mr. Clarence Bolton,
principal of the Brailsford Junction high school of recent and
unpleasant memory could take the sunshine out of this newly
discovered Saturday afternoon.
Peter stopped to admire a brace of mallards which Hank Vetter the
butcher was just taking from his Ford roadster. Hank said that
in his opinion Mike O'Casey was a card and highly worthy of the
admiration of every young man in town. In front of the pool hall,
men sat on the hitching rail watching the farm girls go by. Cats
dreamed happily on piles of fresh vegetables in the grocery store
windows. The loafers sitting on the steps of the cigar store spat
idly at the wooden Indian.
In Peter's new frame of mind even Old Man Mulroy who was teaching
his bow-legged grandson to say "God damn" before a highly
appreciative male audience in front of the livery stable, was
mildly amusing on this day.
"Dod damn," said the toddler.
The men slapped their thighs and guffawed.
Old Man Mulroy, drooling tobacco juice at the corners of his
toothless mouth, grinned slyly.
A job in town. A paycheck in his pocket. The boy whistled gayly as
he marched along.
He looked in over the swinging half-doors of the Red Moon Bar and
felt that the time would never come when he would be twenty-one and
could stand with one foot on the brass rail and drink with the rest
of the men. A new and brilliant bock-beer billy goat was charging
out of a sign on the back wall. A large red bull, and a superior
cowboy rolling a cigarette with one hand advertised a well-known
brand of cigarette tobacco.
Peter wished that he dared to smoke on the street. He wished quite
violently that he could roll a cigarette with one hand like the
superior cowboy in the picture.
He paused before the Palace theater where he examined the bright
billboards displaying a serial queen poised in midair between
precipice and precipice, another view of the same harassed young
woman to whom the villain was touching a torch, while the hero of
the affair looked on calmly from his rearing mount.
Life was very full and romantic, thought Peter Brailsford. He
realized that he could see every movie that came to Brailsford
Junction without making the least impression upon his nearly
inexhaustible weekly stipend. He could even buy himself a new suit
and some dazzling new ties.
A room of his own, no school work. He could skip church and Sunday
School if he wished.
But no, he could not. A momentary cloud passed over his sunny
landscape as Peter came abreast of the Dingle Brothers' General
Store into which Temperance Crandall was just disappearing. He
really liked the fussy creature even if she did make him go to
church, knit him wristlets which he dared not wear and equally
dared not refuse, brought him soapstones on chilly autumn nights,
and saw that his flannel nightgown was warmed before the base
burner before he went to bed. But he did wish that she would be a
little less curious as to where he went evenings and what time he
got in.
Rooms were scarce in Brailsford Junction with the "Trailer"
booming. Peter had taken what he could get. He could abide the
games of Authors and Flinch played with Temperance and her mother
in the latter's upstairs bedroom, with the oil heater making weird
patterns of light and shadow on the ceiling, and the kerosene lamp
spluttering. But he did not like to be crossquestioned about Maxine
Larabee.
"Maxine Larabee!" He rolled the syllables over his tongue and felt
the excitement that even her name produced. How delicate and fine
and unattainable she was. He felt like a great clumsy oaf beside
her. He felt as awkward and shy as the boys in the milling stag
corner at the Firemen's Ball.
He only asked to be allowed to watch her from a distance, to wait
outside the library hoping that she would speak to him, or to
wander disconsolately back and forth before her house, wondering
which room was hers, wishing that some marauder might attempt to
break in so that he could prove his love by cracking the fellow
over the head.
Love-sick and divinely miserable he walked the streets at night
listening to the wind in the trees, holding imaginary conversations
with his beloved, devising tests and trials for his devotion.
Sometimes the sweet pain of his affliction seemed more than he
could bear. But when he had a chance to speak to her there was
nothing of this he could express. He was apt to be rough and
boisterous, or merely shy and dumb.
His emotions could scarcely have been phrased by Shakespeare nor
captured in music by Beethoven, yet the most that found utterance
was:
"Gee, you look swell tonight."
Coming upon her as he rounded the corner at Main Street and Albion
he managed a loud and joyous greeting. But Maxine had no answering
shout. She took one look at his greasy coveralls, his blackened
hands and face, then turned away. She did not speak as she passed.
2
At the iron sink in the Crandall kitchen Peter Brailsford labored
to remove the dirt and grease so offensive to the eyes of Maxine
Larabee. He scoured with violence, grimly pleased by the stinging
of his outraged skin and the smart of the soap in his eyes. He
scowled at himself in the broken mirror, scrubbed his ears until
they burned, wiped the last trace of his recent shame on Temperance
Crandall's roller towel and was running a comb through his wet
curls when Early Ann burst radiantly through the kitchen door
followed by the less impulsive Gus.
"Early Ann! Gus!" cried the young fellow.
"Peter! Peter!" cried the girl. "I've inherited a farm. We'll all
go to the movies."
"Not really?" said the astonished Peter as Early Ann danced him in
mad circles about the kitchen.
"Really," said Early Ann. "And it's been sold, and I've got the
three hundred dollars above the mortgage."
"Look out," cried the hired man. But his warning came too late.
They had jarred the lamp from its shelf, and it fell with a crash
scattering glass all over the kitchen floor.
At this inopportune moment Temperance Crandall returned from
shopping. She had been cheated two cents on eggs, sniggered at by
the pool hall gang, and despite two trips the length of Main Street
had not caught so much as a glimpse of Timothy Halleck. Now she
discovered her kitchen strewn with glass. Early Ann had her hat
over one eye, Peter's shirt tail was out, and Gus was studying the
floor.
"I didn't mean to," said Gus. "I was just hunting for some matches
for my pipe."
"Didn't mean to," mimicked Temperance. "Didn't mean to. Well you'd
just better get busy and clean up that mess."
"Yes, mam," said Gus, looking around for broom and dustpan.
Early Ann giggled. Peter tucked in his shirt tail. Temperance
Crandall whisked off shawl and bonnet, donned an apron, clattered
the griddles and stoked the fire preparatory to getting supper.
"You're Sarah's hired girl, ain't you?" she asked over her shoulder.
"I'm Early Ann Sherman."
"When your maw used to work for us...." Temperance began. Then
catching a murderous look in the kitchen mirror she changed her
tune. "Well now, you and Gus had better stay for supper," she said.
"There's plenty for all."
"No," said Early Ann. "We're eating at the Ritz Royal this evening.
I've inherited a farm." She pulled her coat about her in an Anna
Held gesture, adjusted her hat, tilted her lovely chin and started
for the door. "Come along, Gus."
"Oh, stay," said Peter.
"A farm!" said Temperance.
"Yes, a farm," said Gus, bent double with the dustpan and feeling
surly.
"Nevertheless," said Temperance, "you'd just better stay for
supper. What would Sarah ever think if I didn't feed you? Take off
your coat, Miss Sherman. And Gus, you can dump that busted glass
out on the ash pile."
Smiling again, Early Ann tossed her hat and coat over a chair, tied
an apron about her waist, and with the uncanny instinct of one
woman in another woman's kitchen began to set the table and to help
get supper.
Watching the girl, Temperance sighed. She felt old and tired today.
She had never inherited a farm, and never in her life had she had
such a peaches-and-cream complexion as Early Ann's. She wished she
might have a girl like this one to help her about the house. She
supposed that Miss Sherman wouldn't be working any more now that
she had come into property, and she put the question to the newly
made heiress.
"You bet I'll go on working," said Early Ann. "I'm going to save my
money. Except enough for some dresses and maybe a two-week trip to
Chicago."
"Are you going to Chicago all by yourself?" asked the horrified
Temperance. But Early Ann had made up her mind that she had told
the town gossip more than enough.
Gus returned from the ash pile and settled himself in the kitchen
rocker with a copy of the "Modern Priscilla" replete with corset
advertisements, while Peter loudly announced that if he were taking
Early Ann to the movies he would have to shave.
"Shave," scoffed Early Ann. "Let's see...." She ran her fingers
over the soft down which covered his cheeks.
"Pin feathers," she said.
Peter ignored her. He dipped hot water from the reservoir at the
end of the stove, examined his beard critically in the mirror, and
began to lather in a business-like manner. He wished that Maxine
might see him now.
* * * * *
Upstairs, Old Mrs. Crandall lay in her bed wondering what it was
that had shaken the house a few minutes before. After a time she
smelled coffee and knew that there must be company. Temperance and
Peter always drank tea for supper.
Deaf and bed-ridden, the old woman still kept in touch with the
world with her other senses. Through a rift in the trees she could
see the front of the Methodist Episcopal church and in through one
of the basement windows. She knew what went on in the elderberry
bushes to the south of the church, and she had seen a flash of Kate
Barton's red dress through the blinds of the belfry last Thursday
and had seen the pigeons and sparrows come out in dreadful fright.
You couldn't tell Mrs. Crandall that Kate was practicing and Joe
Whalen pumping the organ that afternoon.
Mrs. Pat O'Toole looked to be about five months along with her
ninth. Peter Brailsford, from the way he was mooning around, was
certainly in love, probably with Maxine Larabee.
Unlike Temperance, Old Mrs. Crandall had no desire to reform
mankind. She liked to hum popular music and feel the vibration. She
enjoyed love-making, fights, and all the other delightful and rowdy
actions of mortals. She lay in a world of almost complete silence,
looking out wistfully at the young people going by, and the blowing
autumn leaves; feeling the wind pushing against the house. She did
not want to die. She wanted passionately to be alive next spring
when the lilacs bloomed in her front yard.
The odor of frying meat came up to her from the kitchen, and
finally the vibration of her daughter's feet on the stairs. She
hastily brushed aside two big tears.
"Temperance," she scolded, "you're late with my victuals."
* * * * *
Supper that evening was of sufficient social importance so that
Temperance covered the kitchen oil cloth with her red and white
gingham table cloth, but not of a caliber which demanded the use
of the gloomy dining room adorned with chromos of dead ducks,
fruit, and fish; it was a function worthy of the Crandall cut-glass
teaspoon tumbler, but scarcely a feast which necessitated the
crocheted and paraffined napkin rings. Temperance brought out her
tureen which she herself had painted with blue birds and daisies,
but she used the bone-handled knives and forks rather than the
silver plate.
"I hear there's been a man snooping around out your way,"
Temperance began after a hasty blessing, followed by a pan to plate
service of fried potatoes, liver and bacon.
"No one you'd be interested in," said Early Ann, as saucily as she
dared.
"Don't try to be funny," said Temperance.
Temperance had little luck in eliciting any information about the
prowler or about Early Ann's farm. The conversation turned to
the latest antics of Ulysses, and of his son Ulysses Jr., who was
proving to be a chip off the old block, to Sarah's convalescence,
the fall plowing, the hickory nut crop and the plans for a new
silo. Not until the dishes had been cleared away and Gus had
gone his chaste and solitary way did Early Ann begin to feel
confidential.
On the way to the movies she was surprised to find herself telling
Peter all about how she had inherited the farm at Horicon, about
her mother, and a comic version of the latest Joe Valentine
business. She claimed that she had beaten off Joe with a stick of
stove wood and she had run him off the place.
"You don't need to worry about me," said Early Ann. "I can
certainly take care of myself. I'll bet I can even lick you in a
wrastle."
"I'll bet you can't," said Peter indignantly. "Any old day!"
3
Stud Brailsford and Timothy Halleck had been instrumental in
getting Early Ann her small inheritance. Now Stud wondered whether
he had been wise. Not that Early Ann had been spoiled by her
riches. She was still the same rosy-cheeked, hardworking, saucy
spitfire she had always been. She was still devoted to Sarah,
Peter, Gus and Stud, and she announced quite passionately that she
intended to live with the Brailsfords and do their work until the
day she died. But now, added to all the other barriers which kept
Stud from the girl, there was the fact that she was independently
wealthy.
Three hundred dollars was not to be sneezed at in 1913. True,
automobiles and mushroom-brimmed velvet hats smothered in ostrich
plumes were rather expensive, but the lisle stockings worn by all
the virtuous women of the period were priced at six pairs for a
dollar; high buttoned shoes usually described as classy, nobby,
or natty sold for two dollars a pair; and no woman dreamed of
squandering more than fifty-nine cents on a pair of drawers, a
corset cover, or a princess slip.
Free, white, eighteen, full of mustard and vinegar, and with three
hundred dollars in the bank, the Brailsfords' hired girl was
distinctly a person to be reckoned with. Her new clothes from Sears
Roebuck were the talk of the party line.
And now, to increase Stud's worries, Early Ann was insisting on a
two weeks' trip to Chicago. It was unheard of that a girl should
make such an excursion unchaperoned.
It took less than six hours on the C., M. & St. P. to reach the
sinful, brightly lighted metropolis on Lake Michigan; nevertheless
Chicago was fifty years and a half a world from the muddy village
of Brailsford Junction.
Chicago might rag; make fortunes in wheat, hogs, and steel; discuss
atheism, Freud, and the early H. L. Mencken. But Brailsford
Junction still attended barn dances and revival meetings. It lived
by the laws of Solomon and Moses only slightly conditioned by the
paganism of Omar and the invasion of the Ford.
These Junctionites lived by the crude practical joke, the rough and
ready generosity of their pioneer grandparents, by gossip and by
Jesus. They lived in a world of lamp light and lantern light, of
full corn cribs and Sunday School picnics. Chicago was almost as
remote as Mars.
Even Stud would have made the journey to Chicago with misgivings;
and for an unmarried young woman to make such a trip was
unthinkable. They all pleaded with her to be sensible.
"I'd never forgive myself," said Sarah. "It's up to me to keep you
safe from harm. I'd worry myself sick every day you were gone."
"Never heard of a girl going off to Chicago alone," said Stud. "It
ain't right."
"It's a big, wicked city," said Gus, knowingly. "I went to Chicago
once for the Columbian Exposition. And by golly, the way little
Egypt shook her ..."
"Sh-h-h," said Sarah.
"Well, I'm going," said Early Ann, "and that's that. But, Mrs.
Brailsford, you mustn't worry for a minute. I grew up as wild as a
chipmunk and I guess I can take care of myself."
"But why do you want to go?" Stud asked the bright-eyed girl,
whose ripe young breasts under her middy rose and fell with her
breathing, and whose well-turned ankles under her sailor skirt were
a treat to the eye.
"I've been wanting all my life to see Chicago," Early Ann said. "I
never seen a tall building, or rich ladies riding in limousines, or
the silver dollars in the Palmer House floor. I never seen Irene
Castle dance, or heard Grand Opera, or had people wait on me like
they do in a hotel."
"Yes, Early Ann, I know, I know," said Sarah, earnestly. "You got a
right to have one good time like that in your life. Everybody has
got a right to be happy just once."
"But I won't budge out of this house if you ain't well enough
yet," said Early Ann. "You've only been up and around for six days,
Mrs. Brailsford."
"No, no, Early Ann. You mustn't stay on my account. I'm fit as a
fiddle. It's only for your own good I want you to stay."
"Then I'm going tomorrow on the ten o'clock train," said Early Ann.
She began to pack in the parlor while the family showered advice
and ran errands.
Sarah kissed her goodby tearfully. Gus was suspiciously misty-eyed
as he carried her telescope suitcase out to the Ford, and Stud
drove her recklessly to the station where he insisted on paying for
her round-trip ticket and for a chair on the parlor car--a luxury
he had never allowed himself.
"You hang on to your money, young lady," he said. "And don't make
up to any city fellows."
He stood watching the train until it had passed out of sight around
the curve, then leaping into his Ford roared back to the farm
where he began two weeks of mad labor. He worked on the fences,
set posts, strung shining lines of new barbed wire, pruned several
trees and filled a small ravine with boulders. He trapped a weasel
that had been getting his chickens, put barrels around his young
fruit trees to save them from the rabbits. He sent for a new
stump-puller, seductively described in the mail order catalogue,
hoping to clean out the brush lot in the slack months which were
ahead.
One morning he noticed that the barns needed painting. He called
in Mack Curren, who had finally given up hope of being a great
portrait painter. Mack and his crew gave the buildings a new red
coat visible for miles.
"Might as well be fancy and add white trimmings," Stud told the
willing Mr. Curren.
Stud himself was hard at work on the new silo. He drove himself
happily these days, and he drove Gus who was not so happy
concerning his employer's sudden desire to move the world, to paint
the farm from end to end, and to add a wing to the milk house.
Stud remembered to bring in frosty asters and goldenrod to Sarah.
He told her that what she needed was a wild duck dinner, and he
fixed himself a blind beside the lake and waited, watching his
decoys.
The shotgun shells were heavy and cool in his hand. The long, clean
barrels of his gun shone like blue fire when he looked through them
at the sun. Not a speck of dust! Every part oiled and working like
a seventeen-jewel watch. The carved walnut stock was as smooth as
satin to his fingers, and the gun balanced perfectly as he threw it
to his shoulder.
He had carved the decoys himself from white pine and had painted
the intricate markings from memory. He knew the glossy green head
and bold coloration of the drake mallard, as well as the more
modest hues of his mate. He was familiar to the last tail feather
with the tones and patterns which distinguish canvasback, redhead,
bluebill, widgeon, goldeneye, and black mallard. He could imitate
the quack of a duck or the honk of a Canadian goose almost too well
for his own safety.
Bright water bugs skimmed the quietly heaving surface of the lake.
A muskrat with reeds in his mouth, his nose barely above the
water, his tail trailing for a rudder, swam past the blind. Stud's
live decoys anchored in the shallow water, preened, tipped for
food, gossiped of the days when they themselves were free to skim
southward ahead of the storms, bound for southern bayous.
Stud lay back looking up at the immensity of sky, never more deeply
blue, he thought, than above Wisconsin in the autumn. He watched a
flight of coots but let them pass; followed a wood duck with his
gun but did not shoot. A hell-diver was playing among his decoys,
and a couple of green-winged teal went by just out of gunshot,
their wings whirring like toy windmills in a cyclone.
"Nothing but a ruddy can outfly them," Stud observed, "and the
ruddies fly so darned fast it's a wonder they don't catch fire."
Toward sunset the flight began in earnest, and for about ten
minutes Stud banged away like the Federal gunboats before
Vicksburg. He shot his bag limit without crippling a bird, waded
out in hip boots to bring them ashore, and went singing home,
loaded down with rice-fattened mallards.
One morning he crossed the field of wheat stubble stretching yellow
and frosty on either hand and went into the brown woods to choose
his trees for winter cutting. It would be good to swing an axe
again, to take big white chips out of a tree, to hear it crash to
the ground and settle with a sigh. It would be good to get on one
end of a cross-cut saw again, to make Gus cry out for mercy as they
sliced through three feet of oak. His big muscles yearned for the
sixteen pound mall he used for driving wedges, a sledge which made
the average man pant like a one-cylinder gas engine, but which was
a plaything for Stud.
At night he came in tired, soaked with sweat, but almost happy.
Sarah noticed and was glad.
Fall, with the red of sumac and of hard maple, the leathery brown
of hickory leaves, and the pale yellow of elm was upon the land.
The leaves drifted in the brisk winds, and the wind sighed through
the pines of the front yard. The marshes turned to brown and almost
overnight the muskrat houses sprang up in rough brown piles along
the deeper channels through the grass. The orchard was a wilderness
of ripening, fragrant fruit, yellow, scarlet and deep red. The
house was banked about with shocks of corn. Five cords of wood were
already sawed and split, and more would come out of the woods as
the days grew colder.
Gus came running in from the mail box one morning with a postcard
from Early Ann. It had a picture of a huge hotel where Early Ann
was staying and in a large, girlish hand:
"Having a good time. Wish you were here!"