Midsummer came to trim the old farm with her wreaths. It was the time
Luke loved best of all--the long, sweet, loam-scented evenings with Maw
and Tom on the old porch; and sometimes--when there was no fog--Paw's
cot, wheeled out in the stillness. But Maw was not herself this summer.
Something had fretted and eaten into her heart like an acid ever since
Aunt Mollie's visit and the news of Matty Bisbee's funeral.
When, one by one, the early summer festivities of the neighborhood had
slipped by, with no inclusion of the Hayneses, she had fallen to
brooding deeply,--to feeling more bitterly than ever the ignominy and
wretchedness of their position.
Luke tried to comfort her; to point out that this summer was like any
other; that they "never had mattered much to folks." But Maw continued
to brood; to allude vaguely and insistently to "the straw that broke the
camel's back." It was bitter hard to have Maw like that--home was bad
enough, anyway. Sometimes on clear, soft nights, when the moon came out
all splendid and the "peepers" sang so plaintively in the Hollow, the
boy's heart would fill and grow enormous in his chest with the
intolerable sadness he felt.
Then Maw's mood lifted--pierced by a ray of heavenly sunlight--for Nat
came home!
Luke saw him first--heard him, rather; for Nat came up the lane--oh,
miraculous!--driving a motor car. It was not a car like Uncle
Clem's--not even a stepbrother to it. It was low and almost noiseless,
and shaped like one of those queer torpedoes they were fighting with
across the water. It was colored a soft dust-gray and trimmed with
nickel; and, huge and powerful though it was, it swung to a mere touch
of Nat's hand.
Nat stood before them, clad in black leather Norfolk and visored cap and
leggings.
"Look like a fancy brand of chauffeur, don't I?" he laughed, with the
easy resumption of a long-broken relation that was so characteristically
Nat.
But Nat was not a chauffeur. Something much bigger and grander. The news
he brought them on top of it all took their breaths away. Nat was a
special demonstrator, out on a brand-new high-class job for a house
handling a special line of high-priced goods. And he was to go to Europe
in another week--did they get it straight? Europe! Jiminy! He and
another fellow were taking cars over to France and England.
No; they didn't quite get it. They could not grasp its significance, but
clung humbly, instead, to the mere glorious fact of his presence.
He stayed two days and a night; and summer was never lovelier. Maw was
like a girl, and there was such a killing of pullets and extravagance
with new-laid eggs as they had never known before. At the last he gave
them all presents.
"Tell the truth," he laughed, "I'm stony broke. 'Tisn't mine, all this
stuff you see. I got some kale in advance--not much, but enough to swing
me; but of course, the outfit's the company's. But I'll tell you one
thing: I'm going to bring some long green home with me, you can bet! And
when I do"--Nat had given Maw a prodigious nudge in the ribs--"when I
do--I ain't goin' to stay an old bachelor forever! Do you get that?"
Maw's smile had faded for a moment. But the presents were fine--a new
knife for Tom, a book for Luke, and twenty whole round dollars for Maw,
enough to pay that old grocery bill down at Beckonridge's and Paw's new
invoice of patent medicine.
They all stood on the porch and watched him as far they could see; and
Maw's black mood didn't return for a whole week.
Evenings now they had something different to talk about--journeys in
seagoing craft; foreign countries and the progress of the "Ee-ropean"
war, and Nat's likelihood--he had laughed at this--of touching even its
fringe. They worked it all up from the boiler-plate war news in the
_Bi-weekly_ and Luke's school geography. Yes; for a little space the
blackness was lifted.
Then came the August morning when Paw died. This was an unexpected and
unsettling contingency. One doesn't look for a "chronic's" doing
anything so unscheduled and foreign to routine; but Paw spoiled all
precedent. They found him that morning with his heart quite still, and
Luke knew they stood in the presence of imminent tragedy.
It's all very well to peck along, hand-to-mouth fashion. You can manage
a living of sorts; and farm produce, even scanty, unskillfully
contrived, and the charity of relatives, and the patience of tradesmen,
will see you through. But a funeral--that's different! Undertaker--that
means money. Was it possible that the sordid epic of their lives must be
capped by the crowning insult, the Poormaster and the Pauper's Field? If
only poor Paw could have waited a little before he claimed the
spotlight--until prices fell a little or Nat got back with that "long
green"!
Maw swallowed her bitter pill.
She went to see Uncle Clem and ask! And Uncle Clem was kind.
"He'll buy a casket--he's willin' fur that--an' send a wreath and pay
fur notices, an' even half on a buryin' lot; but he said he couldn't do
no more. The high cost has hit him too.... An' where are we to git the
rest? He said--at the last--it might be better all round fur us to take
what Ellick Flick would gimme outen the Poor Fund--" Maw hadn't been
able to go on for a spell.
A pauper's burial for Paw! Surely Maw would manage better than that! She
tried to find a better way that very night.
"This farm's mortgaged to the neck; but I calculate Ben Travis won't
care if I'm a mind to put Paw in the south field. It hain't no mortal
good fur anything else, anyhow; an' he can lay there if we want. It's a
real pleasant place. An' I can git the preacher myself--I'll give him
the rest o' the broilers; an' they's seasoned hickory plankin' in the
lean-to. Tom, you come along with me."
All night Luke had lain and listened to the sound of big Tom's saw and
hammer. Tom was real handy if you told him how--and Maw would be showing
him just how to shape it all out. Each hammer blow struck deep on the
boy's heart.
Maw lined the home-made box herself with soft old quilts, and washed and
dressed her dead herself in his faded outlawed wedding clothes. And on a
morning soft and sweet, with a hint of rain in the air, they rode down
in the farm wagon to the south field together--Paw and Maw and
Luke--with big Tom walking beside the aged knobby horse's head.
Abel Gazzam, a neighbor, had seen to the grave; and in due course the
little cavalcade reached the appointed spot inside the snake fence--a
quiet place in a corner, under a graybeard elm. As Maw had said, it was
"a pleasant place for Paw to lay in."
There were some old neighbors out in their own rigs, and Uncle Clem had
brought his family up in his car, with a proper wreath; and Reverend
Kearns came up and--declining all lien on the broilers--read the burial
service, and spoke a little about poor Paw. But it wasn't a funeral, no
how. No supper; no condolence; no viewing "the remains"--not even a
handshake! Maw didn't even look at her old friends, riding back home
between Tom and Luke, with her head fiercely high in the air.
A dull depression settled on Luke's heart. It was all up with the
Hayneses now. They had saved Paw from charity with their home-made
burial; but what had it availed? They might as well have gone the whole
figure. Everybody knew! There wasn't any comeback for a thing like this.
They were just nobodies--the social pariahs of the district.