THE REVERCOMBS
On the morning after the meeting at Bottom's Ordinary, Abel Revercomb
came out on the porch of the little house in which he lived, and looked
across the steep rocky road to the mill-race which ran above a silver
stream known as Sycamore Creek. The grist-mill, a primitive log
building, worked after ancient methods, had stood for a hundred years
or more beside a crooked sycamore tree, which grew mid-way of the stream
and shaded the wheel and the shingled roof from the blue sky above. The
old wooden race, on which the young green mosses shone like a coating of
fresh paint on a faded surface, ran for a short distance over the brook,
where the broad yellow leaves drifted down to the deep pond below.
Across the slippery poplar log, which divided the mill from the road and
the house occupied by the miller, there was a stretch of good corn land,
where the corn stood in shocks after the harvest, and beyond this the
feathery bloom of the broomsedge ran to the luminous band of marshes on
the far horizon.
From the open door before which the miller was standing, there came the
clatter of breakfast dishes and the sound of Scripture text quoted in
the voice of his mother. Above his head several strings of red pepper
hung drying, and these rustled in the wind with a grating noise that
seemed an accompaniment to the speaker in the kitchen.
"The Lord said that, an' I reckon He knew His own mind when He was
speakin' it," remarked Sarah Revercomb as she put down the coffeepot.
"I declare there's mother at it again," observed Abel to himself with
a frown--for it was Sarah's fate that an excess of virtue should have
wrought all the evil of a positive vice. From the days of her infancy,
when she had displayed in the cradle a power of self-denial at which her
pastor had marvelled, she had continued to sacrifice her inclinations
in a manner which had rendered unendurable the lives around her. Her
parents had succumbed to it; her husband had died of it; her children
had resigned themselves to it or rebelled against it according to the
quality of their moral fibre. All her life she had laboured to make
people happy, and the result of this exalted determination was a cowed
and resentful family.
"Yo' buckwheat cakes will be stone cold if you don't come along in,
Abel," she called now from the kitchen. "You've been lookin' kind of
sallow these last days, so I've got a spoonful of molasses and sulphur
laid right by yo' plate."
"For heaven's sake, take it away," he retorted irritably. "I don't need
it."
"I reckon I can tell by the look of you better than you can by the
feelin'," rejoined Sarah grimly, "an' if you know what's good for you,
you'll come and swallow it right down."
"I'll be hanged if I do!" exclaimed Abel without moving, and his tone
implied that the ceaseless nagging had got at last on his nerves. He
was a robust, well-built, red-brown young fellow, who smelt always of
freshly ground meal, as though his body, from long usage, had grown to
exhale the cleanly odour of the trade he followed. His hair was thick,
dark and powdered usually with mill-dust. His eyes, of a clear bright
hazel, deep-set and piercing, expressed a violence of nature which his
firm, thin-lipped mouth, bare of beard or moustache, appeared to deny.
A certain tenacity--a suggestion of stubbornness in the jaw, gave the
final hint to his character, and revealed that temperamental intolerance
of others of the rustic who has risen out of his class. An opinion once
embraced acquired the authority of a revelation; a passion once yielded
to was transformed into a principle. Impulsive, generous, undisciplined,
he represented, after all, but the reaction from the spirit of racial
submission which was embodied in Reuben Merryweather. Tradition
had bound Reuben in thongs of steel; Abel was conscious only of his
liberated intelligence--of a passionate desire to test to the fullest
the certainty of that liberation. As the elder had suffered beneath the
weight of the established order, so the younger showed the disturbing
effects of a freedom which had resulted from a too rapid change in
economic conditions rather than from the more gradual evolution of
class. When political responsibility was thrust on the plainer people
instead of sought by them, it was but natural that the process of
adjustment should appear rough rather than smooth. The land which had
belonged to the few became after the war within reach of the many.
At first the lower classes had held back, paralyzed by the burden of
slavery. The soil, impoverished, wasted, untilled, rested under the
shadow of the old names--the old customs. This mole-like blindness of
the poorer whites persisted still for a quarter of a century; and the
awakening was possible only after the newer authority was but a shadow;
the past reverence but a delusion. When the black labourer worked, not
freely, but for hire, the wages of the white labourer went up as by
magic. To rise under the old system had been so impossible that Abel's
ancestors had got out of the habit of trying. The beneficent charity of
the great landowners had exhausted the small incentive that might have
remained--and to give had been so much the prerogative of a single
class, that to receive had become a part of the privileges of another.
In that pleasant idyllic period the one act which went unhonoured and
unrewarded was the act of toil. So in the odour of shiftlessness Abel's
father had died; so after ninety years his grandparents still sat by the
hearth to which his mother had called him.
The house, an oblong frame building, newly shingled, was set back from
the road in a straggling orchard of pear-trees, which bore a hard
green fruit too sour to be used except in the form of preserves. Small
shanties, including a woodhouse, a henhouse, and a smokehouse for drying
bacon and hams, flanked the kitchen garden at the rear, while in front a
short, gravelled path, bordered by portulaca, led to the paling gate at
the branch road which ran into the turnpike a mile or so farther on. In
Abel's dreams another house was already rising in the fair green meadow
beyond the mill-race. He had consecrated a strip of giant pine to this
purpose, and often, while he lingered in the door of his mill, he felt
himself battling against the desire to take down his axe and strike his
first blow toward the building of Molly's home. His mother might nag
at him about Molly now, but let them be married, he told himself, with
sanguine masculine assurance, and both women would reconcile themselves
to a situation that neither could amend. Before the immediate ache of
his longing for the girl, all other considerations evaporated to thin
air. He would rather be unhappy with her, he thought passionately, than
give her up!
"Abel, if you don't stop mopin' out thar an' come along in, I'll clear
off the dishes!" called his mother again in her rasping voice
which sounded as if she were choking in a perpetual spasm of moral
indignation.
Jerking his shoulders slightly in an unspoken protest, Abel turned
and entered the kitchen, where Sarah Revercomb--tall, spare and
commanding--was preparing two bowls of mush for the aged people, who
could eat only soft food and complained bitterly while eating that. She
was a woman of some sixty years, with a stern handsome face under harsh
bands of yellowish gray hair, and a mouth that sank in at one corner
where her upper teeth had been drawn. Her figure was erect and flat as a
lath, and this flatness was accentuated by the extreme scantiness of
her drab calico dress. In her youth she had been beautiful in a hard,
obvious fashion, and her eyes would have been still fine except for
their bitter and hostile expression.
At the table there were Abner Revercomb, some ten or twelve years
older than Abel, and Archie, the youngest child, whom Sarah adored and
bullied. Blossom was busy about something in the cupboard, and on either
side of the stove the old people sat with their small, suspicious eyes
fixed on the pan of mush which Sarah was dividing with a large wooden
spoon into two equal portions. Each feared that the other would receive
the larger share, and each watched anxiously to see into which bowl the
last spoonful would fall. For a week they had not spoken. Their old age
was racked by a sharp and furious jealousy, which was quite exclusive
and not less exacting than their earlier passion of love.
With a finishing swirl of the big wooden spoon, the last drops of mush
fell into grandfather's bowl, while a sly and injured look appeared
instantly on the face of his wife. She was not hungry, but it annoyed
her unspeakably that she should not be given the larger portion of food.
Her rheumatism was severer than her husband's, and it seemed to her that
this alone should have entitled her to the greater share of attention.
There was a fierce contempt in her manner when she alluded to his age
or to his infirmities, for although he was three years her elder, he was
still chirpy and cheerful, with many summers, as she said resentfully,
left in him yet.
"Breakfast is ready, grannies," remarked Sarah, who had allowed her
coffee to grow cold while she looked after the others; "are you ready to
eat?"
Grandmother's sly little eyes slanted over her hooked nose in the
direction of the two bowls which her daughter-in-law was about to
sprinkle with sugar. An idea entered her old head which made her chuckle
with pleasure, and when her mush had been covered, she croaked out
suddenly that she would take her breakfast unsweetened. "I'm too bad to
take sugar--give that to him--he has a stomach to stand it," she said.
Though her mouth watered for sweets, by this trick she had outwitted
grandfather, and she felt that it was better than sugar.
The kitchen was a large, comfortable room, with strings of red peppers
hanging from the ceiling, and boards of sliced apples drying on upturned
flour barrels near the door. The bright homespun carpet left a strip of
bare plank by the stove, and on this stood two hampers of black walnuts
ready for storing. A few coloured prints, culled from garden magazines,
were tacked on the wall, and these, without exception, represented
blossoms of a miraculous splendour and size. In Sarah's straitened
and intolerant soul a single passion had budded and expanded into
fulfillment. Stern to all mortal things, to flowers alone she softened
and grew gentle. From the front steps to the back, the kitchen
was filled with them. Boxes, upturned flour barrels, corners of
china-shelves and window-sills, showed bowers of luxuriant leaf and
blossom. Her calla lilies had long been famous in the county; they
had taken first prizes at innumerable fairs, and whenever there was a
wedding or a funeral in the neighbourhood, the tall green stalks were
clipped bare of bloom. Many were the dead hands that had been laid in
the earth clasping her lilies. This thought had been for years the chief
solace in her life, and she was accustomed to refer to it in the heat
of religious debates, as though it offered infallible proof of her
contention. After calla lilies, fuchias and tuberoses did best in her
hands, and she had nursed rare night blooming cereus for seven years
in the hope that it would arrive at perfection the following June. Her
marriage had been a disappointment to her, for her husband, a pleasant,
good-looking fellow, had turned out an idler; her children, with the
exception of Archie, the youngest, had never filled the vacancy in her
life; but in her devotion to flowers there was something of the ecstasy
and all of the self-abandonment she had missed in her human relations.
As he sat down at the table, the miller nodded carelessly to his
brothers, who, having finished their bacon and cornbread, were waiting
patiently until the buckwheat cakes should be ready. The coloured
servant was never allowed to cook because, as Sarah said, "she could not
abide niggers' ways," and Blossom, standing before the stove, with her
apron held up to shield her face, was turning the deliciously browning
cakes with a tin cake lifter.
"Ain't they done yet, daughter?" asked Abner in his amiable drawling
voice. He was a silent, brooding man, heavily built, with a coarse
reddish beard, stained with tobacco juice, which hung over his chest.
Since the death of his wife, Blossom's mother, some fifteen years
before, he had become more gloomy, more silent, more obstinately
unapproachable. He was one who appeared to dwell always in the shadow of
a great grief, and this made him generally respected by his neighbours
though he was seldom sought. People said of him that he was "a solid
man and trustworthy," but they kept out of his way unless there was road
mending or a sale of timber to be arranged.
Blossom tossed the buckwheat cakes into a plate and brought them to her
father, who helped himself with his knife. When she passed them to Abel,
who was feeding his favorite hound puppy, Moses, with bacon, he shook
his head and drew back.
"Give them to mother, Blossom, she never eats a bite of breakfast," he
said. He was the only one of Sarah's sons who ever considered her, but
she was apt to regard this as a sign of weakness and to resent it with
contumely.
"I ain't hungry," she replied grimly, "an' I reckon I'd rather you'd say
less about my comfort, Abel, and do mo'. Buckwheat cakes don't come well
from a son that flies into his mother's face on the matter of eternal
damnation."
Without replying, Abel helped himself to the cakes she had refused and
reached for the jug of molasses. Sarah was in one of her nagging moods,
he knew, and she disturbed him but little. The delight and the desire of
first love was upon him, and he was thinking rapturously of the big pine
that would go to the building of Molly's house.
Grandmother, who wanted syrup, began to cry softly because she must eat
her tasteless mush. "He's got the stomach to stand it," she repeated
bitterly, while her tears fell into her bowl.
"What is it, granny? Will you try a bite of buckwheat?" inquired Sarah
solicitously. She had never failed in her duty to her husband's parents,
and this virtue also, she was inclined to use as a weapon of offense to
her children.
"Give it to him--he's got teeth left to chaw on," whimpered grandmother,
and her old chest heaved with bitterness because grandfather, who was
three years the elder, still retained two jaw teeth on one side of his
mouth.
A yellow-and-white cat, after vainly purring against grandmother's
stool, had jumped on the window-sill in pursuit of a belated wasp, and
Sarah, rushing to the rescue of her flowers, cuffed the animal soundly
and placed her in grandfather's lap. He was a lover of cats--a harmless
fancy which was a source of unceasing annoyance to his wife.
"Abel, I wish you'd mend that leak in the smokehouse after breakfast,"
remarked Sarah, in an aggressive tone that meant battle. "Two shingles
are gone an' thare four more that want patchin'."
"I can't, I've got work to do at the mill," replied Abel, as he rose
from his chair. "Solomon Hatch sent me his corn to grind and he's coming
over to get the sacks."
"Well, I reckon I'm worth as much as Solomon Hatch, a little pasty faced
critter like that," rejoined Sarah.
"Why can't Archie do it? What is he good for?"
"I'm going hunting with Jim Halloween," returned Archie sullenly, "he's
got some young dogs he wants to break in to rabbit running."
"I might have known thar warn't nobody to do what I ask 'em," observed
Sarah in the voice and manner of a martyr. "It's rabbits or girls,
one or the other, and if it ain't an old hare it's some light-moraled
critter like Molly Merryweather."
Abel's face had changed to a dull red and his eyes blazed.
"Say anything against Molly, mother, an' I'll never speak to you again!"
he cried out angrily.
"Thar, thar, ma, you an' Abel are too pepper tongued to get into a
quarrel," remarked Abner, the silent, who seldom spoke except for the
promotion of peace. "I'll mend the roof for you whenever you want it."
"I reckon I've got as much right to use my tongue as anybody else has,"
retorted Sarah, indignant because a solution had been found and her
grievance was annulled. "If a girl ain't a fast one that gets as good as
engaged to half the young men in the county, then I'd like to know who
is, that's all?"
Then, as Abel called sharply to his fox-hound puppy and flung himself
from the room, she turned away and went to sprinkle her calla lilies.
There was an agony in her breast, though she would have bitten out her
tongue sooner than have confessed it. Her strength lay in the fact that
never in her life had she admitted even to herself, that she had been in
the wrong.