EVERYBODY in Riverboro, Edgewood, Milliken's Mills, Spruce Swamp, Duck
Pond, and Moderation was “haying.” There was a perfect frenzy of haying,
for it was the Monday after the “Fourth,” the precise date in July when
the Maine farmer said good-bye to repose, and “hayed” desperately and
unceasingly, until every spear of green in his section was mowed down
and safely under cover. If a man had grass of his own, he cut it, and
if he had none, he assisted in cutting that of some other man, for “to
hay,” although an unconventional verb, was, and still is, a very active
one, and in common circulation, although not used by the grammarians.
Whatever your trade, and whatever your profession, it counted as naught
in good weather. The fish-man stopped selling fish, the meat-man ceased
to bring meat; the cobbler, as well as the judge, forsook the bench; and
even the doctor made fewer visits than usual. The wage for work in the
hay-fields was a high one, and every man, boy, and horse in a village
was pressed into service.
When Ivory Boynton had finished with his own small crop, he commonly
went at once to Lawyer Wilson, who had the largest acreage of hay-land
in the township. Ivory was always in great demand, for he was a mighty
worker in the field, and a very giant at “pitching,” being able to pick
up a fair-sized hay-cock at one stroke of the fork and fling it on
to the cart as if it were a feather. Lawyer Wilson always took a hand
himself if signs of rain appeared, and Mark occasionally visited the
scene of action when a crowd in the field made a general jollification,
or when there was an impending thunderstorm. In such cases even women
and girls joined the workers and all hands bent together to the task of
getting a load into the barn and covering the rest.
Deacon Baxter was wont to call Mark Wilson a “worthless, whey-faced,
lily-handed whelp,” but the description, though picturesque, was
decidedly exaggerated. Mark disliked manual labor, but having imbibed
enough knowledge of law in his father's office to be an excellent clerk,
he much preferred travelling about, settling the details of small cases,
collecting rents and bad bills, to any form of work on a farm. This sort
of life, on stage-coaches and railway trains, or on long driving trips
with his own fast trotter, suited his adventurous disposition and gave
him a sense of importance that was very necessary to his peace of mind.
He was not especially intimate with Ivory Boynton, who studied law with
his father during all vacations and in every available hour of leisure
during term time, as did many another young New England schoolmaster.
Mark's father's praise of Ivory's legal ability was a little too warm
to please his son, as was the commendation of one of the County Court
judges on Ivory's preparation of a brief in a certain case in the Wilson
office. Ivory had drawn it up at Mr. Wilson's request, merely to show
how far he understood the books and cases he was studying, and he had no
idea that it differed in any way from the work of any other student; all
the same, Mark's own efforts in a like direction had never received any
special mention. When he was in the hay-field he also kept as far as
possible from Ivory, because there, too, he felt a superiority that
made him, for the moment, a trifle discontented. It was no particular
pleasure for him to see Ivory plunge his fork deep into the heart of a
hay-cock, take a firm grasp of the handle, thrust forward his foot to
steady himself, and then raise the great fragrant heap slowly, and swing
it up to the waiting haycart amid the applause of the crowd. Rodman
would be there, too, helping the man on top of the load and getting
nearly buried each time, as the mass descended upon him, but doing his
slender best to distribute and tread it down properly, while his young
heart glowed with pride at Cousin Ivory's prowess.
Independence Day had passed, with its usual gayeties for the young
people, in none of which the Baxter family had joined, and now, at
eleven o'clock on this burning July morning, Waitstill was driving the
old mare past the Wilson farm on her way to the river field. Her father
was working there, together with the two hired men whom he took on for a
fortnight during the height of the season. If mowing, raking, pitching,
and carting of the precious crop could only have been done at odd times
during the year, or at night, he would not have embittered the month
of July by paying out money for labor: but Nature was inexorable in the
ripening of hay and Old Foxy was obliged to succumb to the inevitable.
Waitstill had a basket packed with luncheon for three and a great
demijohn of cool ginger tea under the wagon seat. Other farmers
sometimes served hard cider, or rum, but her father's principles were
dead against this riotous extravagance. Temperance, in any and all
directions, was cheap, and the Deacon was a very temperate man, save in
language.
The fields on both sides of the road were full of haymakers and
everywhere there was bustle and stir. There would be three or four men,
one leading, the others following, slowly swinging their way through a
noble piece of grass, and the smell of the mown fields in the sunshine
was sweeter than honey in the comb. There were patches of black-eyed
Susans in the meadows here and there, while pink and white hardhack grew
by the road, with day lilies and blossoming milkweed. The bobolinks were
fluting from every tree; there were thrushes in the alder bushes and
orioles in the tops of the elms, and Waitstill's heart overflowed with
joy at being in such a world of midsummer beauty, though life, during
the great heat and incessant work of haying-time, was a little more
rigorous than usual. The extra food needed for the hired men always
kept her father in a state of mind closely resembling insanity. Coming
downstairs to cook breakfast she would find the coffee or tea measured
out for the pot. The increased consumption of milk angered him beyond
words, because it lessened the supply of butter for sale. Everything
that could be made with buttermilk was ordered so to be done, and
nothing but water could be used in mixing the raised bread. The corncake
must never have an egg; the piecrust must be shortened only with lard,
or with a mixture of beef-fat and dripping; and so on, and so on,
eternally.
When the girls were respectively seventeen and thirteen, Waitstill
had begged a small plot of ground for them to use as they liked, and
beginning at that time they had gradually made a little garden, with a
couple of fruit trees and a thicket of red, white, and black currants
raspberry and blackberry bushes. For several summers now they had sold
enough of their own fruit to buy a pair of shoes or gloves, a scarf or
a hat, but even this tiny income was beginning to be menaced. The Deacon
positively suffered as he looked at that odd corner of earth, not any
bigger than his barn floor, and saw what his girls had done with no
tools but a spade and a hoe and no help but their own hands. He had
no leisure (so he growled) to cultivate and fertilize ground for small
fruits, and no money to pay a man to do it, yet here was food grown
under his very eye, and it did not belong to him! The girls worked in
their garden chiefly at sunrise in spring and early summer, or after
supper in the evening; all the same Waitstill had been told by her
father the day before that she was not only using ground, but time, that
belonged to him, and that he should expect her to provide “pie-filling”
out of her garden patch during haying, to help satisfy the ravenous
appetites of that couple of “great, gorming, greedy lubbers” that he was
hiring this year. He had stopped the peeling of potatoes before boiling
because he disapproved of the thickness of the parings he found in the
pig's pail, and he stood over Patty at her work in the kitchen until
Waitstill was in daily fear of a tempest of some sort.
Coming in from the shed one morning she met her father just issuing from
the kitchen where Patty was standing like a young Fury in front of the
sink. “Father's been spying at the eggshells I settled the coffee with,
and said I'd no business to leave so much good in the shell when I broke
an egg. I will not bear it; he makes me feel fairly murderous! You'd
better not leave me alone with him when I'm like this. Oh! I know that
I'm wicked, but isn't he wicked too, and who was wicked first?”
Patty's heart had been set on earning and saving enough pennies for a
white muslin dress and every day rendered the prospect more uncertain;
this was a sufficient grievance in itself to keep her temper at the
boiling point had there not been various other contributory causes.
Waitstill's patience was flagging a trifle, too, under the stress of the
hot days and the still hotter, breathless nights. The suspicion crossed
her mind now and then that her father's miserliness and fits of temper
might be caused by a mental malady over which he now had little or no
control, having never mastered himself in all his life. Her power of
endurance would be greater, she thought, if only she could be certain
that this theory was true, though her slavery would be just as galling.
It would be so easy for her to go away and earn a living; she who had
never had a day of illness in her life; she who could sew, knit, spin,
weave, and cook. She could make enough money in Biddeford or Portsmouth
to support herself, and Patty, too, until the proper work was found for
both. But there would be a truly terrible conflict of wills, and such
fierce arraignment of her unfilial conduct, such bitter and caustic
argument from her father, such disapproval from the parson and the
neighbors, that her very soul shrank from the prospect. If she could go
alone, and have no responsibility over Patty's future, that would be a
little more possible, but she must think wisely for two.
And how could she leave Ivory when there might perhaps come a crisis in
his life where she could be useful to him? How could she cut herself off
from those Sundays in the choir, those dear fugitive glimpses of him in
the road or at prayer-meeting? They were only sips of happiness,
where her thirsty heart yearned for long, deep draughts, but they were
immeasurably better than nothing. Freedom from her father's heavy yoke,
freedom to work, and read, and sing, and study, and grow,--oh! how she
longed for this, but at what a cost would she gain it if she had to
harbor the guilty conscience of an undutiful and rebellious daughter,
and at the same time cut herself off from the sight of the one being she
loved best in all the world.
She felt drawn towards Ivory's mother to-day. Three weeks had passed
since her talk with Ivory in the churchyard, but there had been no
possibility of an hour's escape from home. She was at liberty this
afternoon--relatively at liberty; for although her work, as usual, was
laid out for her, it could be made up somehow or other before nightfall.
She could drive over to the Boynton's place, hitch her horse in the
woods near the house, make her visit, yet be in plenty of time to go up
to the river field and bring her father home to supper. Patty was over
at Mrs. Abel Day's, learning a new crochet stitch and helping her to
start a log-cabin quilt. Ivory and Rodman, she new, were both away in
the Wilson hay-field; no time would ever be more favorable; so instead
of driving up Town-House Hill when she returned to the village she kept
on over the bridge.