"WHY HAVE YOU COME BACK HERE?"
Suddenly he rose, and striding across to his son, struck him one blow
with his mind:--
"OH, I ALWAYS KNEW THERE WAS NOTHING IN YOU!"
It was a kick of the foot.
X
More than two months had passed. Twilight of closing February was
falling over the frozen fields. The last crow had flapped low and
straight toward the black wood beyond the southern horizon. No sunset
radiance streamed across the wide land, for all day a solitude of cloud
had stretched around the earth, bringing on the darkness now before its
time.
In a small hemp field on an edge of the vast Kentucky table-land, a
solitary breaker kept on at his work. The splintered shards were piled
high against his brake: he had not paused to clear them out of his way
except around his bootlegs. Near by, the remnant of the shock had
fallen over, clods of mingled frost and soil still sticking to the
level butt-ends. Several yards to windward, where the dust and refuse
might not settle on it, lay the pile of gray-tailed hemp,--the coarsest
of man's work, but finished as conscientiously as an art. From the
warming depths of this, rose the head and neck of a common shepherd
dog, his face turned uneasily but patiently toward the worker. Whatever
that master should do, whether understood or not, was right to him; he
did not ask to understand, but to love and to serve. Farther away in
another direction leaned the charred rind of a rotting stump. At
intervals the rising wind blew the ashes away, exposing live
coals--that fireside of the laborer, wandering with him from spot to
spot over the bitter lonely spaces.
The hemp breaker had just gone to the shock and torn away another
armful, dragging the rest down. Exhausting to the picked and powerful,
the work seemed easy to him; for he was a young man of the greatest
size and strength, moulded in the proportions which Nature often
chooses for her children of the soil among that people. Striding
rapidly back to his brake, the clumsy five-slatted device of the
pioneer Kentuckians, he raised the handle and threw the armful of
stalks crosswise between the upper and the lower blades. Then swinging
the handle high, with his body wrenched violently forward and the
strength of his good right arm put forth, he brought it down. The
CRASH, CRASH, CRASH could have been heard far through the still air;
for it is the office of those dull blades to hack their way as through
a bundle of dead rods.
A little later he stopped abruptly, with silent inquiry turning his
face to the sky: a raindrop had fallen on his hand. Two or three drops
struck his face as he waited. It had been very cold that morning, too
cold for him to come out to work. Though by noon it had moderated, it
was cold still; but out of the warmer currents of the upper atmosphere,
which was now the noiseless theatre of great changes going forward
unshared as yet by the strata below, sank these icy globules of the
winter rain. Their usual law is to freeze during descent into the
crystals of snow; rarely they harden after they fall, covering the
earth with sleet.
David, by a few quick circular motions of the wrist, freed his left
hand from the half-broken hemp, leaving the bundle trailing across the
brake. Then he hurried to the heap of well-cleaned fibre: that must not
be allowed to get wet. The dog leaped out and stood to one side,
welcoming the end of the afternoon labor and the idea of returning
home. Not many minutes were required for the hasty baling, and David
soon rested a moment beside his hemp, ready to lift it to his
shoulders. But he felt disappointed. There lay the remnant of the
shock. He had worked hard to finish it before sunset Would there not
still be time?
The field occupied one of the swelling knolls of the landscape; his
brake was set this day on the very crown of a hill. As he asked himself
that question, he lifted his eyes and far away through the twilight,
lower down, he saw the flash of a candle already being carried about in
the kitchen. At the opposite end of the house the glow of firelight
fell on the window panes of his father's and mother's room. Even while
he observed this, it was intercepted: his mother thus early was closing
the shutters for the night.
Too late! He gave up the thought of finishing his shock, recollecting
other duties. But he remained in his attitude a few moments; for the
workman has a curious unconscious habit of taking a final survey of the
scene of his labor before quitting it. David now glanced first up at
the sky, with dubious forethought of to-morrow's weather. The raindrops
had ceased to fall, but he was too good a countryman not to foresee
unsettled conditions. The dog standing before him and watching his
face, uttered an uneasy whine as he noted that question addressed to
the clouds: at intervals during the afternoon he had been asking his
question also. Then those live coals in the rind of the stump and the
danger of sparks blown to the hemp herds or brake, or fence farther
away: David walked over and stamped them out. As he returned, he
fondled the dog's head in his big, roughened hand.
"Captain," he said, "are you hungry?"
All at once he was attracted by a spectacle and forgot everything else.
For as he stood there beside his bale of hemp in the dead fields, his
throat and eyes filled with dust, the dust all over him, low on the
dark red horizon there had formed itself the solemn picture of a winter
sunset. Amid the gathering darkness the workman remained gazing toward
that great light--into the stillness of it--the loneliness--the eternal
peace. On his rugged face an answering light was kindled, the glory of
a spiritual passion, the flame of immortal things alive in his soul.
More akin to him seemed that beacon fire of the sky--more nearly his
real pathway home appeared that distant road and gateway to the
Infinite--than the flickering, near house-taper in the valley below.
Once before, on the most memorable day of his life, David had beheld a
winter sunset like that; but then across the roofs of a town--roofs
half white, half brown with melting snow, and with lengthening icicles
dripping in the twilight.
Suddenly, as if to shut out troubled thoughts, he stooped and, throwing
his big, long arms about the hemp, lifted it to his shoulder. "Come,
Captain," he called to his companion, and stalked heavily away. As he
went, he began to hum an ancient, sturdy hymn:--
"How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord,
Is laid for your faith in His excellent Word.
The flame shall not hurt thee; I only design
Thy dross to consume and thy gold to refine."
He had once been used to love those words and to feel the rocklike
basis of them as fixed unshakably beneath the rolling sea of the music;
now he sang the melody only. A little later, as though he had no right
to indulge himself even in this, it died on the air; and only the noise
of his thick, stiffened boots could have been heard crushing the frozen
stubble, as he went staggering under his load toward the barn.