The farmer came in from the fields somewhat earlier than usual on this
August afternoon. He walked, I remember, with a heavy step and bowed
head, and, when he had come into the shade on the porch and taken off
his hat, looked about him with a wearied air. The great heat, with
its motionless atmosphere and sultry closeness, had well-nigh wilted
everybody. But one could see that Abner was suffering more than the
rest, and from something beyond the enervation of dog-days.
He sank weightily into the arm-chair by the desk, and stretched out his
legs with a querulous note in his accustomed grunt of relief. On the
moment Mrs. Beech came in from the kitchen, with the big china wash-bowl
filled with cold water, and the towel and clean socks over her arm, and
knelt before her husband. She proceeded to pull off his big, dust-baked
boots and the woollen foot-gear, put his feet into the bowl, bathe and
dry them, and draw on the fresh covering, all without a word.
The ceremony was one I had watched many hundreds of times. Mrs. Beech
was a tall, dark, silent woman, whom I could well believe to have been
handsome in her youth. She belonged to one of the old Mohawk-Dutch
families, and when some of her sisters came to visit at the farm I noted
that they too were all dusky as squaws, with jet-black shiny curls and
eyes like the midnight hawk. I used always to be afraid of them on this
account, but I dare say they were in reality most kindly women. Mrs.
Beech herself, represented to my boyish eyes the ideal of a saturnine
and masterful queen. She performed great quantities of work with
no apparent effort--as if she had merely willed it to be done. Her
household was governed with a cold impassive exactitude; there were
never any hitches, or even high words. The hired girls, of course,
called her “M’rye,” as the rest of us mostly did, but they rarely
carried familiarity further, and as a rule respected her dislike for
much talk. During all the years I spent under her roof I was never clear
in my mind as to whether she liked me or not. Her own son, even, passed
his boyhood in much the same state of dubiety.
But to her husband, Abner Beech, she was always most affectionately
docile and humble. Her snapping black eyes followed him about and
rested on him with an almost canine fidelity of liking. She spoke to
him habitually in a voice quite different from that which others heard
addressed to them. This, indeed, was measurably true of us all. By
instinct the whole household deferred in tone and manner to our big,
bearded chief, as if he were an Arab sheik ruling over us in a tent on
the desert. The word “patriarch” still seems best to describe him, and
his attitude toward us and the world in general, as I recall him sitting
there in the half-darkened living-room, with his wife bending over his
feet in true Oriental submission.
“Do you know where Jeff is?” the farmer suddenly asked, without turning
his head to where I sat braiding a whiplash, but indicating by the
volume of voice that his query was put to me.
“He went off about two o’clock,” I replied, “with his fish-pole. They
say they are biting like everything down in the creek.”
“Well, you keep to work and they won’t bite you,” said Abner Beech. This
was a very old joke with him, and usually the opportunity of using it
once more tended to lighten his mood. Now, though mere force of habit
led him to repeat the pleasantry, he had no pleasure in it. He sat
with his head bent, and his huge hairy hands spread listlessly on the
chair-arms.
Mrs. Beech finished her task, and rose, lifting the bowl from the floor.
She paused, and looked wistfully into her husband’s face.
“You ain’t a bit well, Abner!” she said.
“Well as I’m likely ever to be again,” he made answer, gloomily.
“Has any more of’em been sayin’ or doin’ anything?” the wife asked, with
diffident hesitation.
The farmer spoke with more animation. “D’ye suppose I care a picayune
what _they_ say or do?” he demanded. “Not I! But when a man’s own
kith and kin turn agin him, into the bargain--” He left the sentence
unfinished, and shook his head to indicate the impossibility of such a
situation.
“Has Jeff--then--” Mrs. Beech began to ask.
“Yes--Jeff!” thundered the farmer, striking his fist on the arm of the
chair. “Yes--by the Eternal!--Jeff!”
When Abner Beech swore by the Eternal we knew that things were pretty
bad. His wife put the bowl down on a chair, and seated herself in
another. “What’s Jeff been doin’?” she asked.
“Why, where d’ye suppose he was last night, ’n’ the night before that?
Where d’ye suppose he is this minute? They ain’t no mistake about it,
Lee Watkins saw ’em with his own eyes, and ta’nted me with it. He’s down
by the red bridge--that’s where he is--hangin’ round that Hagadorn gal!”
Mrs. Beech looked properly aghast at the intelligence. Even to me it
was apparent that the unhappy Jeff might better have been employed in
committing any other crime under the sun. It was only to be expected
that his mother would be horrified.
“I never could abide that Lee Watkins,” was what she said.
The farmer did not comment on the relevancy of this. “Yes,” he went on,
“the daughter of mine enemy, the child of that whining, backbiting
old scoundrel who’s been eating his way into me like a deer-tick for
years--the whelp that I owe every mean and miserable thing that’s ever
happened to me--yes, of all living human creatures, by the Eternal! it’s
_his_ daughter that that blamed fool of a Jeff must take a shine to, and
hang around after!”
“He’ll come of age the fourteenth of next month,” remarked the mother,
tentatively.
“Yes--and march up and vote the Woollyhead ticket. I suppose that’s
what’ll come next!” said the farmer, bitterly. “It only needed that!”
“And it was you who got her the job of teachin’ the school, too,” put in
Mrs. Beech.
“That’s nothing to do with it,” Abner continued. “I ain’t blamin’
her--that is, on her own account. She’s a good enough gal so far’s I
know. But everything and everybody under that tumble-down Hagadorn roof
ought to be pizen to any son of mine! _That’s_ what I say! And I tell
you this, mother”--the farmer rose, and spread his broad chest, towering
over the seated woman as he spoke--“I tell you this; if he ain’t got
pride enough to keep him away from that house--away from that gal--then
he can keep away from _this_ house--away from me!”
The wife looked up at him mutely, then bowed her head in tacit consent.
“He brings it on himself!” Abner cried, with clenched fists, beginning
to pace up and down the room. “Who’s the one man I’ve reason to curse
with my dying breath? Who began the infernal Abolition cackle here? Who
drove me out of the church? Who started that outrageous lie about the
milk at the factory, and chased me out of that, too? Who’s been a layin’
for years behind every stump and every bush, waitin’ for the chance to
stab me in the back, an’ ruin my business, an’ set my neighbors agin me,
an’ land me an’ mine in the poorhouse or the lockup? You know as well as
I do--‘Jee’ Hagadorn! If I’d wrung his scrawny little neck for him
the first time I ever laid eyes on him, it ’d ’a’ been money in my
pocket and years added onto my life. And then my son--my son! must go
taggin’ around--oh-h!”
He ended with an inarticulate growl of impatience and wrath.
“Mebbe, if you spoke to the boy--” Mrs. Beech began.
“Yes, I’ll speak to him!” the farmer burst forth, with grim emphasis.
“I’ll speak to him so’t he’ll hear!” He turned abruptly to me. “Here,
boy,” he said, “you go down the creek-road an’ look for Jeff. If he
ain’t loafin’ round the school-house he’ll be in the neighborhood of
Hagadorn’s. You tell him I say for him to get back here as quick as he
can. You needn’t tell him what it’s about. Pick up your feet, now!”
As luck would have it, I had scarcely got out to the road before I heard
the loose-spoked wheels of the local butcher’s wagon rattling behind me
down the hill. Looking round, I saw through the accompanying puffs of
dust that young “Ni” Hagadorn was driving, and that he was alone. I
stopped and waited for him to come up, questioning my mind whether it
would be fair to beg a lift from him, when the purpose of my journey was
so hostile to his family. Even after he had halted, and I had climbed up
to the seat beside him, this consciousness of treachery disturbed me.
But no one thought long of being serious with “Ni.” He was along in
the teens somewhere, not large for his years but extremely wiry and
muscular, and the funniest boy any of us ever knew of. How the son of
such a sad-faced, gloomy, old licensed exhorter as “Jee” Hagadorn could
be such a running spring of jokes and odd sayings and general deviltry
as “Ni,” passed all our understandings. His very face made you laugh,
with its wilderness of freckles, its snub nose, and the comical curl to
its mouth. He must have been a profitable investment to the butcher who
hired him to drive about the country. The farmers’ wives all came out
to laugh and chat with him, and under the influence of his good spirits
they went on buying the toughest steaks and bull-beef flanks, at more
than city prices, year after year. But anybody who thought “Ni” was soft
because he was full of fun made a great mistake.
“I see you ain’t doin’ much ditchin’ this year,” “Ni” remarked, glancing
over our fields as he started up the horse. “I should think you’d be
tickled to death.”
Well, in one sense I was glad. There used to be no other such
back-aching work in all the year as that picking up of stones to fill
into the trenches which the hired men began digging as soon as the
hay and grain were in. But, on the other hand, I knew that the present
idleness meant--as everything else now seemed to mean--that the Beech
farm was going to the dogs.
“No,” I made rueful answer. “Our land don’t need drainin’ any more. It’s
dry as a powder-horn now.”
“Ni” clucked knowingly at the old horse. “Guess it’s Abner that can’t
stand much more drainin’,” he said. “They say he’s looking all round for
a mortgage, and can’t raise one.”
“No such thing!” I replied. “His health’s poorly this summer, that’s
all. And Jeff--he don’t seem to take hold, somehow, like he used to.”
My companion laughed outright. “Mustn’t call him Jeff any more,” he
remarked with a grin. “He was telling us down at the house that he was
going to have people call him Tom after this. He can’t stand answerin’
to the same name as Jeff Davis,” he says.
“I suppose you folks put him up to that,” I made bold to comment,
indignantly.
The suggestion did not annoy “Ni.” “Mebbe so,” he said. “You know Dad
lots a good deal on names. He’s downright mortified that I don’t get up
and kill people because my name’s Benaiah. ‘Why,’ he keeps on saying to
me, ‘Here you are, Benaiah, the son of Jehoiada, as it was in Holy Writ,
and instid of preparin’ to make ready to go out and fall on the enemies
of righteousness, like your namesake did, all you do is read dime novels
and cut up monkey-shines generally, for all the world as if you’d been
named Pete or Steve or William Henry.’ That’s what he gives me pretty
nearly every day.”
I was familiar enough with the quaint mysticism which the old
Abolitionist cooper wove around the Scriptural names of himself and his
son. We understood that these two appellations had alternated among his
ancestors as well, and I had often heard him read from Samuel and Kings
and Chronicles about them, his stiff red hair standing upright, and the
blue veins swelling on his narrow temples with proud excitement. But
that, of course, was in the old days, before the trouble came, and when
I still went to church. To hear it all now again seemed to give me a
novel impression of wild fanaticism in “Jee” Hagadorn.
His son was chuckling on his seat over something he had just remembered.
“Last time,” he began, gurgling with laughter--“last time he went for me
because I wasn’t measurin’ up to his idee of what a Benaiah ought to be
like, I up an’ said to him, ‘Look a-here now, people who live in glass
houses mustn’t heave rocks. If I’m Benaiah, you’re Jehoiada. Well, it
says in the Bible that Jehoiada made a covenant. Do you make cove-nants?
Not a bit of it! all you make is butter firkins, with now an’ then an
odd pork barrel.’”
“What did he say to that?” I asked, as my companion’s merriment abated.
“Well, I come away just then; I seemed to have business outside,”
replied “Ni,” still grinning.
We had reached the Corners now, and my companion obligingly drew up to
let me get down. He called out some merry quip or other as he drove off,
framed in a haze of golden dust against the sinking sun, and I stood
looking after him with the pleasantest thoughts my mind had known for
days. It was almost a shock to remember that he was one of the abhorrent
and hated Hagadorns.
And his sister, too. It was not at all easy to keep one’s loathing up to
the proper pitch where so nice a girl as Esther Hagadorn was its object.
She was years and years my senior--she was even older than “Ni”--and
had been my teacher for the past two winters. She had never spoken to me
save across that yawning gulf which separates little barefooted urchins
from tall young women, with long dresses and their hair done up in a
net, and I could hardly be said to know her at all. Yet now, perversely
enough, I could think of nothing but her manifest superiority to all the
farm-girls round about. She had been to a school in some remote city,
where she had relations. Her hands were fabulously white, and even
on the hottest of days her dresses rustled pleasantly with starched
primness. People talked about her singing at church as something
remarkable; to my mind, the real music was when she just spoke to you,
even if it was no more than “Good-morning, Jimmy!”
I clambered up on the window-sill of the school-house, to make sure
there was no one inside, and then set off down the creek-road toward the
red or lower bridge. Milking-time was about over, and one or two teams
passed me on the way to the cheese-factory, the handles of the cans
rattling as they went, and the low sun throwing huge shadows of drivers
and horses sprawling eastward over the stubble-field. I cut across lots
to avoid the cheese-factory itself, with some vague feeling that it was
not a fitting spectacle for any one who lived on the Beech farm.
A few moments brought me to the bank of the wandering stream below the
factory, but so near that I could hear the creaking of the chain drawing
up the cans over the tackle, or as we called it, the “teekle;” The
willows under which I walked stretched without a break from the clump by
the factory bridge. And now, lo and behold! beneath still other of these
willows, farther down the stream, whom should I see strolling together
but my schoolteacher and the delinquent Jeff!
Young Beech bore still the fish-pole I had seen him take from our shed
some hours earlier, but the line twisted round it was very white and
dry. He was extremely close to the girl, and kept his head bent down
over her as they sauntered along the meadow-path. They seemed not to be
talking, but just idly drifting forward like the deep slow water
beside them. I had never realized before how tall Jeff was. Though the
school-ma’am always seemed to me of an exceeding stature, here was Jeff
rounding his shoulders and inclining his neck in order to look under her
broad-brimmed Leghorn hat.
There could be no imaginable excuse for my not overtaking them. Instinct
prompted me to start up a whistling tune as I advanced--a casual
and indolently unobtrusive tune--at sound of which Jeff straightened
himself, and gave his companion a little more room on the path. In a
moment or two he stopped, and looked intently over the bank into the
water, as if he hoped it might turn out to be a likely place for fish.
And the school-ma’am, too, after a few aimless steps, halted to help him
look.
“Abner wants you to come right straight home!” was the form in which my
message delivered itself when I had come close up to them.
They both shifted their gaze from the sluggish stream below to me upon
the instant. Then Esther Hagadorn looked away, but Jeff--good, big,
honest Jeff, who had been like a fond elder brother to me since I could
remember--knitted his brows and regarded me with something like a scowl.
“Did pa send you to say that?” he demanded, holding my eye with a glance
of such stern inquiry that I could only nod my head in confusion.
“An’ he knew that you’d find me here, did he?”
“He said either at the school-house or around here somewhere,” I
admitted, weakly. ‘An’ there ain’t nothin’ the matter at the farm?’
“He don’t want me for nothin’ special?” pursued Jeff, still looking me
through and through.
“He didn’t say,” I made hesitating answer, but for the life of me, I
could not keep from throwing a tell-tale look in the direction of his
companion in the blue gingham dress.
A wink could not have told Jeff more. He gave a little bitter laugh, and
stared above my head at the willow-plumes fora minute’s meditation. Then
he tossed his fish-pole over to me and laughed again.
“Keep that for yourself, if you want it,” he said, in a voice not quite
his own, but robustly enough. “I sha’n’t need it any more. Tell pa I
ain’t a-comin’!”
“Oh, Tom!” Esther broke in, anxiously, “would you do that?”
He held up his hand with a quiet, masterful gesture, as if she were the
pupil and he the teacher. “Tell him,” he went on, the tone falling now
strong and true, “tell him and ma that I’m goin’ to Tecumseh to-night to
enlist. If they’re willin’ to say good-by, they can let me know there,
and I’ll manage to slip back for the day. If they ain’t willin’--why,
they--they needn’t send word; that’s all.”
Esther had come up to him, and held his arm now in hers.
“You’re wrong to leave them like that!” she pleaded, earnestly, but Jeff
shook his head.
“You don’t know him!” was all he said.
In another minute I had shaken hands with Jeff, and had started on my
homeward way, with his parting “Good-by, youngster!” benumbing my ears.
When, after a while, I turned to look back, they were still standing
where I had left them, gazing over the bank into the water.
Then, as I trudged onward once more, I began to quake at the thought of
how Farmer Beech would take the news.