time in two weeks since I settled down to do my worst or best by Peter,
with my Grandmother Nelson's garden-book locked up in the
preserve-closet down in the darkest corner of the cellar, and Sam lost
in the fastness of The Briers.
Everybody wanted to dance with me at the same time, and the girls
kissed me into a lovely, warm cheerfulness. The girls in Hayesboro are
the sustaining kind of friends, like pound-cake, sweetened and
beautifully frosted. "Has he consented to let the hero kiss the poor
thing's hand before he goes to fight the case of the miners?" Julia
whispered, warmly, as she took a few tango steps with me in her arms
before Billy Robertson claimed her and Tolly picked me up to juggle with
me in his new Kentucky version of the fox-trot.
"I'm expecting a letter to-morrow," I answered her as Tolly slid me away
three steps, skidded two, and slid back four. And then, having begun, I
danced; all of me danced; even my heart, which had started out as heavy
as lead, got into the feather class before I went around the room three
times. It is strange how even great responsibilities melt away before
dance music like icicles on the southern side of the house. It was in a
perfectly melted condition that I at last dropped from Tolly's grasp
into a pair of new arms which cradled me against a broad breast with
such gentleness that I might have thought it was mother come to the
dance if I hadn't caught a whiff of cedar woodsiness when I turned my
nose into a miniature brier-patch of blue-berried cedar in the
buttonhole of the coat against which my face was pressed as my feet
caught step with a pair of smart shoes bearing a smear of moss loam on
one side.
"Sam!" I gasped, with emotional indignation that had a decided trace of
joy.
"Yes, I feel that way, too," answered Sam, roughing my hair slightly
with his chin as both his hands were employed holding me to him while we
slid and skidded and slid again. "I don't forgive you; I never shall," I
said, haughtily, as I drew away from him the fraction of an inch that
came very near making us collide with Sue and Billy, who were dancing
wildly, but in perfect accord.
"You'll have to when you hear the worst," answered Sam, as he firmly
pressed my shoulder into his while he manoeuvered me first past Edith
and Tolly and then across right in front of Pink Herriford, who weighs
all of two hundred, dancing with Julia Buford, who must tip the scales
at one hundred and sixty. It was a hairbreadth rapture of escape.
"Is anything the matter with the cows or anybody else?" I demanded,
anxiously, from his shoulder.
"Worse!"
"Oh, Sam, has anything died at The Briers?"
"Worse," he answered again, while he defied Tolly with a double cross
and then took a chance with Pink and Julia as I pressed him closer with
my arms and my questions.
"Dance me out on the porch through the window and tell me, Sam," I
demanded.
"Not when this music and Julia and Pink hold out like that, Bettykin.
It'll be bad enough when you do hear it," answered Sam, laughing down at
me with the same wide-mouthed smile he had always used on me when
holding something over my head and making me reach up for it. "Besides,
it has been two whole weeks since I've--had you," he added, and again
his strong arms cradled as well as guided. Getting back into some
people's atmosphere is like recovering the use of a lung a person had
temporarily lost; breathing improves. I've always breathed easily in
Sam's friendship. That was why I could dance with him as I did even up
to the last bar of the music. Then he swung me out through one of the
long windows on to the porch under the dusky spring starlight.
"I hate to tell you, Betty, though I have walked a five-mile blister on
my left heel in these dancing-shoes just to break the news to you," Sam
answered my repeated demand to be told his "worse."
"Oh, Sam, a real blister?" I exclaimed, losing sight of the threatened
catastrophe at the thought of his blistered heel. I knew how tender
Sam's feet were, for I had doctored them since infancy. I used to pay
tribute in the form of apples and tea-cakes for the privilege of binding
up his ten and twelve year old wounded toes, and I suppose I hadn't
really got over my liking for thus operating.
"Oh, not all from the walk," answered Sam, as he smiled down on me
consolingly. "I've got a brand-new mule and I nearly plowed him and
myself to death to-day. I don't seem to be well heeled enough to plow
and dance both."
"What did you plow, Sam?" I came close up to his shoulder so that the
bit of woods in his buttonhole grazed my cheek as my head drooped with
an embarrassed hope.
"I plowed for the early potatoes on the south slope and--and--"
"And what?"
"I'm thinking of growing a crop of--hollyhocks, if I get time to plant
'em."
"Where did you plow, Sam?"
"In spots all over the place."
"Where?"
"Well, then, about a hundred feet south by southwest from my door-step,
if you must have it. Great sakes! do you think this heel is going to
swell, Betty, from your deep experience?"
"I--I'm so happy, Sam," I faltered, with more emotion than I knew Sam
liked, but I think all apologies ought to be met enthusiastically at the
front gate, whether they intended to come in or not.
"Well, I'm not--I'm blistered." He again plaintively referred to his
sufferings which I had forgotten in my joy at having him back in the
bonds of friendship, even if slightly damaged.
"Come over home with me and I'll plaster it so it won't break or swell.
You know I know how," I answered, eagerly.
"Cold cream and an old handkerchief like you used to keep. Um--um! the
thought is good, Betty," he answered, as he stood on his left foot for a
second and then lifted it as if he were a huge crane.
"Come, now, so I can get the cream before mother goes to bed," I said,
with energy; and I led him, faintly remonstrating, through the Bankhead
back gate that opens opposite ours.
Mother was glad to see Sam, heel and all, and sympathetically supplied
the cream and handkerchief and a needle and thread without laying down
the mat she was putting in a difficult hundred-and-fifty round on.
Mother is so used to Sam that she forgets that he is not her fifth or
sixth son, and she treats him accordingly. After she had given us all
the surgical necessities she retired into the living-room by the lamp to
put her mind entirely on the mat, in perfect confidence that I could do
the right thing by my wounded neighbor. And I did.
First, as I had always done, I bathed Sam's great big pink-and-white
foot in hot water and then in cold, sitting on the floor with a
bath-towel in my lap to get at it while Sam wriggled and squirmed at
both hot and cold just as he had always done.
"Go on, boil me," he said, as I poured the last flash of heat from the
tea-kettle on the floor beside me.
"Now a frost," he groaned, as I dashed ice-water out of a pitcher on the
blister and lifted the foot into my lap on the bath-towel.
"If you touch the bottom of my foot I'll yell 'murder,'" he said as I
began to pat all around the blister in the gentlest and most considerate
manner possible. I knew he meant what he said, so I was careful as I
wound and clipped and sewed.
"I never fixed as nice a one as that for you before," I said, with
pride, as he drew on his silk sock with its huge hole over as neat a
bandage as it was possible for human hands to accomplish. "I love to tie
you up, Sam."
"Thank you, and I return the compliment," answered Sam, both smouldering
and smiling down at me as if he were saying something to tease me. "And
now as a reward for your kindness I am going to knock you down with some
news." And as he spoke we went on out to the porch, Sam walking like a
new man.
"Oh, the 'worse' thing! I had forgotten about that. Tell me, Sam," I
answered, as I leaned against one of the pillars of the porch and he
seated himself on the railing beside me.
"Well," said Sam, slowly, "this is not worse for you, just for me; that
is, at the present speaking, with nothing but the hay-loft handy. I
don't know just how I'll manage."
"What?"
"Pete," answered Sam.
"What about Peter? Oh, Sam, Peter isn't ill, is he?" And I reached out
and clutched Sam's arm frantically. It takes alarm to test the depths of
one's affection for a friend. I found mine for Peter deeper than I knew.
If anything had happened, Sam would know it first. "Don't be cruel to
me, Sam." And I shook his arm.
"Forgive me, Betty," said Sam, quickly. "Pete's all right and he'll be
here to demonstrate it to you just as soon as I can get a stall built
for him out at The Briers."
"At The Briers? Peter?" I gasped.
"Even at that humble abode, Betty, whose latch-string is always out to
friends," answered Sam. And I felt his arm stiffen under my fingers in a
way for which I could see no reason.
"Just as I was going to begin my garden," I wailed. And Sam's stiff arm
limbered again and made a motion toward my hair that I dodged. "What
does he want?"
"Direct life. I can give it to him," answered Sam. "At least that is
what he asked for in his letter to me. I don't know what he will request
in the one I wager you get by the morning mail."
"Why, I had been writing him all that he needed of that, and we are
going to be so busy gardening, how can we help him live it also? Peter
does require so much affectionate attention." I positively wailed this
to Sam, in the most ungenerous spirit.
"Betty dear," said Sam, gently, as he puffed at a little brier which he
had substituted for the adorable cob on account of the formality of
Sue's dance, which we could hear going on comfortably without us, beyond
the privet hedge whose buds were just beginning to give forth a
delicious tang, "Peter is a great, queer kind of sensitive plant that it
may be we will have to help cultivate. You know that for several years
his poems have really got across in great style with the writing world,
and I'm proud of him and--I--I--well, I love him. Suppose, just suppose,
dear, that Keats had had a great hulking farmer like me to stand by.
Don't you think that maybe the world would have had some grown-man stuff
from him that would have counted? I always have thought of that when I
looked at old Pete and promised myself to back him up with my brawn and
nerve when he needed it. Why, in the '13 game it was Pete's flaming face
up on the corner of the stadium that put the ginger in me to carry
across as I did. Yes, I am going to put Pete's hand to my plow and his
legs under old Buttercup at milking-time if it kills us both, if that is
what he needs or you have made him think he needs."
"Oh, Sam, I'm ashamed! I'm ashamed of not wanting precious Peter in my
garden. He can have half of all of it. You know I love him dearly. I'll
work all day with him and attend to all his blisters and get everybody
to give him work and help him."
"Well, I don't believe I'd do all that to him, Betty," answered Sam,
with a laugh. Then his eyes glinted past mine for a second. "And say,
Betty, you know my blisters are kind of--kind of old friends to you;
Pete's might not have so many--many landmarks for you to work by," he
added, as he knocked the ashes carefully out of the brier and picked up
his hat. "Let's go for one fox, and then I'll trot on out to my patch."
"I'll get Tolly to run you out in Redwheels while I do my promised
dances, and then I'll be out early in the morning to help plan about
Peter. And--and, Sam, do you want to--to give me that garden?"
"Everything that is is yours, Bettykin," he answered as we went down the
steps out on to the springy greening grass and across to the back gate.
Some friends taste like bread and butter and peach preserves. Sam does
and he's a peach.
When I got back to the Bankheads' everybody was wondering where we had
been, and as Sam and Tolly got right off in the car without answering
any questions, I was left to explain about Sam's foot and Peter. I paid
no attention at all to Billy Robertson when he said his foot was
blistered, too; but I told them how beautiful Peter was, and how
distinguished, and all about the poor young Keats that most of them
hadn't grieved over since their Junior years at school, telling it all
in such an eloquent way that Julia's great blue eyes filled with tears,
and I saw I could depend on her to be nice to our friend.
"I knew most poets were kind of calves, but I didn't know they had to
milk their poetry out of a genuine cow," said Pink, with a vulgar
attempt to be funny, at which nobody laughed, not even Julia, and she is
almost too tall and big to dance with anybody but Pink. She and Edith
and Sue and I forgot to save him the dances we had promised him; and he
had to dance with other girls he didn't like so much, until we all went
home in time to meet the sun coming down over Paradise Ridge with his
dinner-pail.
Then for five days it rained--heavy, determined, soggy drops; but the
next morning introduced one of those wily, flirtatious days that come
along about the last week in April in Tennessee. I awoke to the sound of
sobbing wind and weeping clouds in which I had no confidence, and
succeeded in convincing mother that it would be a beautiful day for me
to go out to see Sam and Byrd and Mammy. She sent Byrd half a jelly-cake
and a bag of bananas, and I got a jar of jam for him when I went down in
the cellar to exhume Grandmother Nelson's garden-book. A bottle went to
Mammy, which I suspect of being a kind of liniment that mother had to
learn to make on account of the number of the boys and their bruises.
Eph was a tragedy over my taking out Redwheels, and I am glad that
neither he nor I could prevision the plight the shiny new runabout would
be in before it was many hours older. With a stoical reserve he loaded
in the two young lilacs that were in the exact state of sappiness
Grandmother Nelson had recommended for transplanting, but his calmness
nearly gave way when I had him put in a dandy old rake and spade and hoe
that I had found in my raid on the cellar.
"Please ma'am, Miss Betty, don't go and leave ole mistis's gyarden tools
out in no rain," he entreated, plaintively.
"Oh, Eph, are they really Grandmother Nelson's?" I exclaimed, with such
radiance that it reflected from Eph's polished black face.
"Yes'm, and they is too good to be throwed away on playing gyarden or
sich," he answered, with feeling.
"Eph," I answered, with almost a choke in my voice, "they'll be--be
sacred to me. Oh, thank you for telling me."
"Go on, child! you shore is ole mistis herself, with your pretty words
to push along your high-haided ways," he answered me while he gave
Redwheels an affectionate shove as I started down the street.
I didn't spend much time down-town, but I stopped at the post-office and
got my mail to read while I waited at the drug-store for Mr. Simmons to
put up some of every kind of flower and vegetable grandmother
mentioned--if it was still in stock. He offered me a book of
instructions, which I declined. I meant to garden by ancestral
tendencies. And while I waited I looked over my letters. The volume from
Peter I put aside to enjoy in a leisure hour, as I felt sure that I knew
what was in it; but I opened another thin one that looked as if it might
be from him, if he had written it in an unpoetic mood. It was from Judge
Vandyne, and I then understood Peter's sudden determination to come down
and live with Sam for a time, though I don't believe Peter knew the real
reason of it himself. The judge is a great diplomat, and knows just when
and to whom to be frank. We have always understood each other from the
first vacation I spent with Mabel, and I value his confidence highly.
He wrote:
No man can get a hold on the complex problems of this day and
especially the next, who doesn't go at them with at least some
sunburn on his neck and a few horny spots on his hands. Put Pete at
it, you and Sam. Your description of Sam's habitation and vocation
in letter to Mabel made me feel twenty-five again. I never had the
real thing; but Peter shall. Ease him along. If he kicks over the
traces let me know. When are you coming North again? Soon, I hope,
Your aged admirer,
PETER VANDYNE, Sr.
_P.S._--Thought I'd better say that Dr. Herbrick doesn't like
Peter's weight--one sixteen. You understand.
I wonder what the paternal Keats was like. I don't remember, and I must
look him up to see. It's funny how sturdy-oak fathers can have
ferny-mimosa sons. Mothers can stand producing poets, but it is hard on
fathers. I felt that I must help out Judge Vandyne, and with that
resolve I headed Redwheels out along Providence Road.
As I had told mother, the sobs and tears of the April day had been
wilfully misleading demonstrations, for by ten o'clock the whole face of
nature wore a sun-sweetened smile that was positively entrancing. The
young April world seemed to spring dripping from a bath that glistened
all over with crystal water gems. Winter is staid and dignified and
grand with its stark trees and mantle of brown earth, and summer is
glowing and glorious; but very young spring is so sappy and curly and
yellow and green and lavender that you take it to heart and let it
nestle there to suck its pink apple-blow thumb, and curl up its young
sprout toes sheltered away from the cold that sets it back and the sun
that forces it to break bud. Sometimes it stays with you a day and
sometimes a week and a day, but you can't hold it back. You can just be
thankful that you had it. I was.
But if the five miles of Providence Road had been a delight, as
Redwheels and I ran along it, the dirt lane that led to The Briers was
an intoxicating joy. The wet earth, the drenched cedars, the oak buds,
the spongy moss, the reddening blackberry-bushes, and the sprouting
grain, all mingled in a queer creation odor that went right through the
pores of my skin into my vitals and made me feel as strong as an ox, or
rather, as Sam's new mule. I caught a glimpse of that mule through a
vista before I came out of the lane, plodding along before Sam and the
plow with a great splendid lurch of a gait that threw the black dirt as
high as Sam's knees as he plunged along at the plow-handles. I stopped
the car at the cedar-pole gate of Eden and stood up and shouted at the
top of my lungs, but Sam plowed on heroically, with never a glance in my
direction, and I just stood and looked at him and the mule. Seeing a man
plow cuts right down to the bottom of a woman's nature, because I
suppose it looks so--so fundamental. At least that is about the way I
felt though it was much more so until I remembered the blistered heel
and shouted again, this time in alarm. At my cry of distress Sam
suddenly looked up and jerked the mule's head so that he, too, stopped
and regarded me. They looked like wary jungle things that had been
belled from the thicket, but for just a second; then Sam threw his line
around the plow-handle, thus hitching the mule to himself, and came
running across the field to me, as lightly as the blue jay skimmed from
over my head into the branches of another cedar in answer to the same
twit I had heard the day I first came out into the habitation of the
birds. The pleasure of seeing Sam run to me was almost as keen as the
pain of seeing him run away from me, but it was mitigated by my alarm
over the poor sore foot.
"Gracious sakes, Betty! is that a mud-scow you came out in?" he asked,
as he started to take my hand in his, which was brown with mud, and
ended by rubbing his cheek in my palm. That seemed to be about the only
member he had kept clean enough for the greeting.
"Aren't you hurting your heel plowing like that, Sam?" I asked,
anxiously.
"Heel--what heel? Oh, that's all right. I haven't heard from it since
you tucked it away in the cream Tuesday night. I have cold-bucketed
myself every morning, standing on one leg with it up on the wash-bench
so as not to wake it up. Come on up to the house. I'll walk, because I'm
too muddy to get in with you in your sedan-chair."
"No; you go back to the plowing and I'll go and unload and begin my
work," I answered, with positive heroism. I wanted to get out and go and
be introduced to the mule, but I came to Sam to be not a clinging vine,
but a competent garden-hoe to him.
"All right," said Sam, in the nice way he has of acquiescing in all my
serious moods until they pass. "I'll be through after about three more
rounds and then I'll come and help you. Say, Bettykin, what do you think
of that for good land?" And as he looked back at the great square of
black earth he had upturned, Sam's eyes flecked with the blue sky and
snapped with enthusiasm.
[Illustration: THE BYRD WAS ATTIRED IN MINIATURES OF SAM'S OVERALLS]
"It looks good enough to eat," I answered, with a queer dirt enthusiasm
rising in me that I had never even heard of one's having before.
"Yes, and you will eat it in about four months' time in the form of
roasting ears," answered Sam, smacking his lips, which had a streak of
the mud delicacy across them at right angles. "But go on up and tell
Mammy to put your name in her dinner-pot and buy the Byrd to get you
anything you need or want to the half of our kingdom. I'll be there in
ten shakes of the mule's tail."
The road that leads from the cedar-pole gate through Sam's wilderness up
to the farm-house curves in and out and around the hill past as many
lovely spots as my enthusiasm could endure. Halfway up, there is a
glimpse past a gray old tree with crimson thorns, of the valley with Old
Harpeth looming opposite. Further on a rocky old road leads down around
a clump of age-distorted cedar-trees to the moss-greened stone
spring-house, from which the water gurgles and pours past Sam's huge
earthern crocks of milk. Over it all broods the low white house on the
plateau, from under whose wings I found one small blue chicken running
and cheeping wildly for a ride up the hill.
The Byrd was, as usual, attired in miniatures of Sam's overalls, and his
red mop stood on ends all over his head, while his freckles shone forth
resplendently from the excitement of my arrival.
"Say, Betty, what you think? Old Buttercup found a calf out in the woods
and it has got a white nose and two spots. Sam wanted to name it Chubb
for the doctor that saved its life 'fore it got borned, but I said
ladies first, and I calls it Betty. You can let it lick your fingers if
Sam milks on 'em first. And Dominick have hatched 'fore the white
hen--eleven, and one what Sam calls a half chicken, because he don't see
how it is black when the eggs was bought thoroughbreds; but Mammy says
because they is Yankee eggs. Come see all everything."
Sam's barn is an old tumble-down collection of sheds and the most lovely
place I ever got into. It is running over with new-born life, and you
can get an armful of first one variety and then another. I liked the
collie puppies best, but the Byrd was crazy about the little fawn calf
which old Buttercup is so proud of that she switches her tail in the
greatest complacency. He was just showing me how to tempt her little
white nose with a wisp of hay that she was learning to eat, and I was
luxuriating with one new-born wriggler in my arms and two yellow-down
puff-balls in my hand, when Sam and the mule came up from the field.
"My, it's great to have a nice family party like this to plow for!" he
said, as he led the mule into his stall and poured down his oats out of
a bucket the Byrd ran to bring him. "Any news from Petie, Bettykin?"
"I've got a letter from Peter that I haven't read, but one from Judge
Vandyne that I have. Here it is--read it," and I held the letter open
for Sam to read over my shoulder.
"Read it to me, Betty; I'm too dirty to come that near you," he said, as
he took the cob pipe out of his pocket and prepared to light up while
the Byrd scampered to the house to hurry Mammy's dinner.
"You're not exactly dirty, Sam," I answered, surveying him with a
satisfiedly critical eye. "You only look and smell like the earth and
the sky and the barn and--and--"
"Just call it cosmic, Betty, and let it go at that," he answered, as he
reached out and roughed my hair over my eyes with the long hickory
switch with which he had been merely threatening the mule all day. "Go
on, read me the judge's document on the subject of Peter while we wait
for Mammy's dinner cluck."
As he had asked me to do, I read it all, slowly, while my heart, that
had been climbing like a squirrel to the tops of the trees, began to
burrow down in the reverse manner of a chipmunk. I could see Sam's
spirits doing likewise.