Joe awakened with a start to see his bobber gone down and his line
moving slowly out into the stream. He yanked on the pole, lifted a
two-pound bass clear of the water, and brought it, flopping, to the
grass beside him. Mike, who had been asleep in the grass, awakened with
a throaty bark and came over to inspect the catch. Joe shoved him aside,
and Tad said approvingly,
"Gee! That's a nice one!"
"It's not too bad," Joe agreed. "Mike, get away!"
He slid the bass onto a willow stringer that Tad cut and put it back in
the water, weighting one end of the stringer with a rock. Then he gave
all his attention to fishing. While he had been thinking of Oregon, the
bass must have started feeding for the minnows were more alert now. Even
as Joe watched, a school of them darted this way and that while
something dark and sullen lunged among them.
Two minutes later Joe caught another bass, and before the sun started to
set, he and Tad had fourteen. Joe borrowed Tad's knife, which was always
razor-sharp, and knelt beside their catch.
"I'll show you a trick," he promised.
He scaled the fish, removed their heads and fins, and made a clean cut
down the back. Deftly, needing only a moment, he worked the flesh away
and left the bones. Tad knelt near by, watching and admiring every move,
and Joe said patiently,
"Move a little away, will you? I'd sure hate to slice you up along with
these fish."
Tad grinned and moved a couple of inches back. Joe worked on. When he
was done he had only boneless fish, with all the offal left behind, and
there had been no waste of anything. Joe smacked his lips.
"You cook something out of a fish when you cook the bones into it," he
said. "Wait'll you try these."
"Maybe Mom will fix them tonight, huh?"
"Could be. Let's go find out."
Pete Domley's white horse was tied outside the door, and Pete came from
the house to meet them. Joe handed the filleted fish, which he was
carrying on a slab of wood, to Tad.
"Take these to your mother, will you? She'll want them soon if we're
going to have them for supper."
Pete Domley glanced down at the pile of fish and sniffed hungrily. "They
look downright good. It's a long while since I've had time to get any
for myself."
"Maybe you'll stay and help us eat these?" Joe invited. "There's
plenty."
Pete grinned. "I might just do that. Sorry about the cow. She stepped in
a chuck hole and broke a front leg. There just wasn't anything else to
do."
"I know. Thanks for taking care of it, Pete."
"Emma said to sell the beef to Les."
"Yeah, and I reckon she's right. Nobody here would eat it."
"Les gave me twenty-three dollars and seventy cents, cash money. I gave
it all to Emma."
"You should have kept something for your trouble."
"It wasn't any trouble. Emma says you're going to Oregon?"
"That's right, Pete. We are."
Pete said seriously, "I don't know but what it would be a good move for
anybody. Yes, I'm sure it would be."
"Why don't you come along?"
"I probably would, if I was fifteen years younger. But I'm pushing
fifty, and I've chased a lot of will-o'-the-wisps in my day. Guess I'm
getting chicken-hearted."
"Oregon's no will-o'-the-wisp."
"I know, but by the time a man gets to be my age he thinks everything
is. I stick to what I know, and I can't make out any place unless I
think so. I don't think I'd make out in Oregon. Want to sell me your
standing hay?"
"I'll give it to you."
"Don't be so open-hearted; you're going to Oregon and you'll need money.
Besides, I winter a lot of stock and hay's worth money to me. Would
twenty-five dollars be right?"
"Right enough with me."
"Good. I'll cut the hay when it's ready for cutting. I swear, Joe, you
look like a kid again."
"I almost feel like one, Pete. Doggone, it's not that I don't like
Missouri. It's just that I sort of felt myself batting my head against a
brick wall here, and now we're going to Oregon."
Pete nodded wisely. "The world would be just as well off if all men hit
down a new road when the old one ends blind. Only most of us lack the
courage to get off paths we know. Especially when we're older. I envy
you."
"Don't be so darn philosophical, Pete. Come on. Let's go in and wait for
something to eat."
Pete Domley finished his meal and rode away. A great restlessness gnawed
at Joe, and he felt his usual imperative urge to be doing something.
Only now it was a happy anticipation, and not a frustrating tenseness.
Joe glanced at the lowering sun, decided that at least an hour of
daylight remained, and a moment later Tad joined him.
"Hey, Pa, let's be doin' somethin'. Huh?"
"Sure. Let's bring some of that oak and hickory in from the wood lot."
Joe was amazed. Ordinarily Tad could be forced to work only under threat
of immediate punishment. Even then, unless he liked it, he would not
keep at whatever task was assigned him unless he were watched every
second. That he should offer of his own free will to help was itself a
minor revolution, and proof that he was infected with what Joe was
beginning to think of as Oregon fever.
They caught and harnessed the mules. Joe shouldered a peavey--a logger's
hook--and let Tad drive the mules to the wood lot. Joe used his peavey
to roll half a dozen of the seasoned oak and hickory logs over a long
chain, bound the chain around them, and hitched the mules to it. In the
gathering twilight, Joe and his son walked side by side while the mules
dragged the logs back to the house. They unharnessed the mules and let
them frolic in their pasture.
The logs lay ready to be taken to John Geragty's saw mill. Joe gave them
one final glance. When they were sawed into boards he would use part of
them himself. Part John Geragty would take as pay for his labor, and the
rest would be sold or traded for all the things they needed and did not
have for their trip to Oregon. It was the first short step.
Joe felt a surging, happy restlessness, but he had no wish to go to the
store. It seemed as though, somehow, his family had become a unique
group that had nothing to do with anybody else and were no part of
anyone else. They were going to Oregon while all the rest were staying
here, and that set them apart. Joe wanted to stay with them because of
this new-found and delightful kinship with each other.
He watched Barbara and Emma folding Emma's wedding dress, a long white,
frilly thing, between clean curtains. Obviously the dress was destined
to be part of the contents of a trunk that yawned on the kitchen floor.
Joe got up to lend a hand; the dress could be folded much more compactly
and thus occupy less space.
"Now you just sit down," Emma ordered. "This is not a mule or an ax."
"I was just trying to help."
"Not with this." The glance she gave him was one of mingled tenderness
and amusement.
Tad sat at the table, working expertly with a whetstone as he put a
razor edge back on his knife. Carlyle, still so young that the use of
his legs was new to him, wobbled precariously across the floor and
grasped Joe's knee. He paused, his fascinated eyes riveted on something,
and when Joe looked he saw a fish scale that clung to his trousers and
reflected rainbow tints in the lamp light. Joe lifted the youngster into
his lap, and Carlyle bent over so he could continue to watch the fish
scale.
"Come on," Joe invited the other. "I know a story."
His little fist closed, Alfred came to stand before Joe. The youngster's
eyes danced, a grin parted his lips.
"Present for you," he said, extending his closed fist.
Joe reached to take it, but when Alfred opened his fist there was
nothing at all there and the child howled with glee. Joe looked intently
at his hand, and he pretended to slip the gift into his pocket.
"Thanks," he said seriously, "that's just about the nicest present I
ever had!"
Alfred looked puzzled. Dainty little Emma and sober Joe came to him, and
Joe gathered all of them into his lap.
"Went fishing today," he said, "and the first thing you know there was
an old man with long white whiskers standing right on the bottom of the
creek...."
He improvised as his story unfolded, telling how the old man's white
whiskers hid an enormous mouth into which fish swam. Every now and
again, probably because he was angry, he spit a fish at Joe or Tad. Baby
Emma looked suspiciously at him and Tad turned with a knowing grin, but
all remained interested. Finally the biggest fish of all came along and
had trouble getting into the old man's mouth. There, and at once, he
grew half again as big. When the old man tried to spit that fish he
couldn't; he could get only half of it out of his mouth. Neither could
he take it all the way in. The last Joe saw of him he was walking up the
bottom of the creek with the fish still half in and half out of his
mouth.
Carlyle went to sleep in his arms and little Emma rested contentedly
against his shoulder. Little Joe frowned while he considered this new
problem, a fish stuck in an old man's mouth, and Alfred yawned. Emma
came to clasp baby Emma gently to her and she put the child to bed. One
by one, Barbara took the rest.
Joe sat nervously in his chair, too tense to sleep and not knowing what
to do. The night-to-be seemed an interminable time, and morning would
never come. Joe thought of a hundred things he must do and he ached to
be doing them so they could start for Oregon.
"You better go to bed," Emma told him.
"I couldn't sleep."
"Neither can you stay awake until we start for Oregon." She came to his
side and ran her hand through his hair, thinking, _He is part boy, part
man. Like a boy, he can't wait to start. Like a man--like Joe_, she
corrected herself, _he wants to make everything double-safe for his
young ones. Only, can he make things safe? Is there any safety in the
wilderness?_
Her hand stilled, then resolutely took up its stroking again.
"Tomorrow's another day," she said.