“I’m getting a chill.... Damn young pup—he’ll not drag our name in
dirt.”
“Winslow, you mustn’t get yourself into a state. Are you really cold?
Or just nervous? You don’t want the hot-water bottle?”
“Young puppy!” sobbed Winslow. “Over indulged. Gentleman farmer. Never
quite understood it all, anyhow. No son of mine comes home suspended
from college for loafing ... young puppy ... won’t have it. I’m getting
a chill.”
“Hot-water bottle, Winslow?”
He was sure not to want it or to endure it, once it was there, but his
silence meant acquiescence to her going for it. That meant padding down
through the dark, cold hallways, and the slow performance of waiting
for the water to boil in the black iron kettle.
“If it will make you feel better, Winslow, I’ll go down and heat water.”
“Amos Milliken,” said Winslow, from his pillow of misery.
That was a localism that needed no interpretation to a Schuyler. Emma
Schuyler’s father-in-law, Amos Milliken, had long since placed the
flavor of his hospitality in local ill-repute, by his habit of asking
a guest, “Have a cigar if I go upstairs and get you one?” instead of
passing around the box of his own excellent brand that always reposed
in the top sideboard-drawer.
It was just as well, though, not to act on Winslow’s jab of a reply.
It was only his nervous ague. She had first beheld him in the grip
of it in the days of their engagement, during a quarrel that had to
do with some trivial misunderstanding over the time and place of an
appointment.
High-strung! To Bek, whose nerves seemed to run through her body
with serenity of veins through marble; there was a preciousness to
Winslow. Standing there in her plain, white-muslin nightgown, vigorous,
deep-fleshed; her strong, brown hair, that even her own children seldom
saw down, hung in two plaits that were almost too enormous for beauty.
There _was_ something Christ-like to Winslow’s face as it pressed into
the pillow that way, with the profile ground against it in pain.
A picture of her father on the night he had screamed and raved about
the house when she announced her engagement, rose before Bek.
“You’ll get nothing out of a Renchler! It’s not in them to give.
They’re takers. His father before him would take a favor from you
like it was coming to him; And the dam’-fool part of it is he got the
whole town to thinking it was coming to him. Once a Renchler always a
Renchler. The whole tribe of them. Pretty folks. But not in them to
earn a penny or keep it, except when they marry money and catering
wives. I know the Renchlers. Mark my word, Winslow Renchler will ride a
girl like you to death. He’s a taker.”
Was Winslow riding her to death? Not while the rich flow of her
sympathies could well out to him, as he lay there, shivering of
the ague of nervousness. Theoretically perhaps, Bek was the giver.
Actually, though, she would have clawed for him; fought for the
qualities in him that were weaker than she was. There was pain in
loving like that. And fierceness and a certain glory. And, strangely
enough, reward.
“Damned young puppy!” sobbed Winslow again and again and again.... “I
won’t have it!”
“I’ll go down and heat you the water, Winslow,” said Bek in a
lusterless tone. “You _are_ chilled.”
Downstairs, in her enormous kitchen, spick, span, clean and cold,
putting match to the gas-stove to which she could never become quite
accustomed, playing its knobs as you would the stops of an organ, and
then standing by to watch the water come to a reluctant boil, a lump of
misery lodged itself in Bek’s throat.
Here she was, confronted with what must surely be one of the grim
climaxes of her life. Surely, surely, none grimmer could await her.
Leslie up there swinging himself softly to sleep on “Evoe! Evoe!” while
to that rather unearthly rhythm, downstairs in the chilled kitchen,
needing Winslow if she was ever to need him, she stood alone, faced
with the homecoming of a seventeen-year-old inebriate son. Here she
stood, as usual, administering solace to the husband who should have
been administering solace to her!
How unreal! Steve, who had grown, like a streak, from his adolescence
into a young-manhood that delighted her. A curious combination of his
Grandfather Schuyler and of Winslow. There was a threat of fine fettle
to Steve, which made his profile dance like a blooded horse about to
leave his post. A poet, or a peasant, or both. And now this.
Stevey must be helped. Cured. Men were. There was George Birkaway.
Carrie Birkaway used to drop something into his coffee. For five years
before his death, George had not touched a drop. Backs of magazines
were full of remedies. Stevey must be helped. There was yet time.
He must be made to have the power to resist. And without Winslow’s
knowing. Winslow was too high-strung. Without anyone’s knowing.
They must again fight it out alone. The Old Gentleman—why, the Old
Gentleman might have a stroke if he knew. Stevey must promise—Stevey
must promise—on Davey’s life! For Davey’s sake!
How good, how strangely comforting, the consciousness of the little nub
of him up there asleep in Stevey’s room. How good....
* * * * *
After a while, the shining tide began to slow—drowsily—“Evoe! Evoe”
sang Leslie to himself, and singing it, dropped off to sleep.
* * * * *
The hot-water bag, sure enough, lay unapplied on the floor when Winslow
finally dropped off to sleep with his head resting on the upper part
of Bek’s firm arm as she lay beside him, his hair damp and smoothed
backward in long strokes of Bek’s fingers, even after he slept.
What to be done? Repeated drunkenness, the letter had said.
Solitary-drinking vice, that, unless he left college at once, must soon
leak out among his colleagues. Solitary drunkard. It spread black wings
over all the things that mattered. And suddenly they were not mattering
at all. And they must! There was so much to be done. Tomorrow’s
workaday was spinning toward. Everything must matter as usual, if one
was to carry on. That broken plowshare-blade to be shipped back to the
factory for repair. Rock salt for pasture. Father to be broached at the
bank tomorrow for a loan.
Old Jessup’s eyes. They had turned at her like the reproachful eyes of
a dog that had served her well. Poor Jessup!
Emma’s Claire needed a talking-to. She had worrisome ways with her
mother. Sometimes a vagrant thought flashed through Bek’s mind. Claire
and Stevey. The eyes of those two cousins when they were together.
Nobody in the world had noticed except Bek. A disturbing thought that
never got more than half-born before she banished it.
Father must be got at before ten in the morning at the bank. If only
Phil weren’t needing that loan. Why couldn’t he have borrowed directly
from the bank, instead of crippling her this way? Three heifers due
Thursday by shipment from Tom Groady’s place. Groady must wait, now
that Phil had horned in for this loan. Foolish of her to have mentioned
Phil’s loan to Winslow. Winslow hated the perpetual financial cross
currents. And tomorrow Stevey. Oh, Stevey, how could you? All these
weeks of reassurance about him, and now the secret terror lifting its
head again. Oh, Stevey! She wanted to cry. She wanted Winslow to hold
out his arms that she might creep into them. Instead, her arms were
held out to him as he lay there asleep with his head on the pillow of
her shoulder.
But good, at least, to feel up there in the room under the rafters the
somehow reliable little old nub of Davey.
His being there, absurdly enough, gave a stability to the large white
night that was spinning tomorrow relentlessly toward.
The room was so bright. It’s shininess finally hypnotized her to sleep.
* * * * *
How bright! Davey waking into it, leaped up with a sense of broad
daylight. It was still only moonlight, except that the old fellow,
with his slightly swollen cheek, had moved entirely out of the window.
Davey, in his flannelette night-drawers that fastened about the waist
with large bone buttons, sitting up in bed, gouged his eyes with his
fists. Sense of awakening to something not right. What if Mother had
forgotten! What if they had let the fire in the range go out. The ewe
with the blue eyes and a black slit down their middle.
By day and to the routine doings of people about, there had even been
a wrench about it. But now, in the still white drown of a moonlit
three-o’clock-of-a-morning, what had seemed fairly all right by day,
was dreadfully all wrong.
The little old thing in its blanket beside the stove had pulled at
his finger as if it had been the teat of a mother lamb. That little
old thing had looked up so and trusted Davey, sitting up there in his
cotton-flannel night-drawers, with the moonlight flooding over him, and
Davey had not gone back. But Bek had wanted him. That made it hard.
Being wanted by two people not in the same place. Ewe-lamb wasn’t
really a person, but the ewe wanted, just the same. And Bek was so big.
In a world full of big things, Bek was almost the biggest. Only Davey
and the ewe were small. And the ewe was smaller than Davey, and the ewe
trusted David.
Up through the window there was only a slant of sky, the color of
a grape. Cold. Terribly clear. If one could run home and back. Bek
needn’t know. The ewe-lamb had pulled at your finger so!
How cold it was! The cutting cold of a March that comes raw. It made
David shiver as he drew on his pants and almost with the same gesture
snapped down the little suspenders over his flesh. There was no time
for shoes and stockings, besides, shoes squeaked. In the _Book of
General Information_ on his mother’s kitchen shelf, from which Trina
could laboriously read, you took the squeak out of shoes by standing
them in a half inch of water overnight. “I know how to take the squeak
out of shoe-es. I know how to take the squeak out of my shoes.” It
helped to chant foolishly, against a rising tide of fear. One leg over
the sill. Two.
Many a time he had slid the galvanized rain spout that led from Bek’s
second-story room down into a black-mouthed barrel beside the porch.
From the third story, it was another and steeper matter. Ouch! His body
made a soft rush going down and the snag of tin that he struck took a
bit of the flesh too. Almost the only sounds, that tiny rush and tiny
tear, in this great white night that slept with one eye blazing open.
It was almost like a sun, that lopsided moon. It made the shadows short
and grotesque and a little frightening.
Something made a neighing sound that caused Davey to crouch for a
moment beside the rain-barrel. He knew that neigh. It was Flora, the
right gray mare of Bek’s huge plow-team. Except that in the white
night, the curious inverted noonday, it smote him with the strange
terror of unreality. The sound that by day made the world seem small
and friendly, was by night a thin cry of the mystery of all beasts.
Out across the pasture, toward the creek, there were almost no shadows.
Just the greenish grayness and the light-drenched silence. It made
Davey’s heart shy back so that he plunged his hands into his pockets,
and once out of earshot of the house, set up whistling. A pretentious
kind of whistling, mostly breath.
How good it was, even with scare at the pit of you, to be going to the
ewe-lamb, and then back to Bek, too. All that you had to do if you had
to choose between doing two things, was to do both of them.
It wasn’t fair to quit the ewe. It wasn’t fair to quit Bek. Now you
weren’t quitting either of them.
Sometimes something crackled and made him scurry.
There was a song Jessup was always singing as he mended harness in the
barn.
Ole Black Joe. Ole Black Joe.
There was something out there! Out there where the ghostly pale meadows
ran into the grape-colored sky. There was something. A cow?
“I’m coming, I’m coming,
For my head is bending low;
I hear their gentle voices calling,
‘Old Black Joe!’”
Bek’s cows slept in rows of long, clean stalls. Jessup’s cow? But
Jessup had no cow. Tarkington’s stray cow? Nobody’s cow was that tall!
It was hard to continue going toward it, with the tongue a stiff thing
in one’s mouth, and the throat so dry it would not swallow.
“Ole Black Joe.” You couldn’t sing with a throat that was parched with
terror. You only squeaked like something rusty, “Ole Black Joe....”
Here, now, was the creek to be crossed. At night, somehow, it became
a terrifying, bottomless divide, that by day trilled with water that
showed the stones it ran over and slid past the brilliant flanks of
minnows.
It was hard not to cry, and most difficult of all not to run back. That
something on the horizon, that object too tall to be a cow, was coming
toward him! Splash! The water came running up about the legs, greedily.
Sucking in a way it never did during the day. Pulling downward in a way
that terrified. Plunge, plunge went David’s knees, so that he came out
drenched to the waist, this time, shivering. And there was the thing
now almost upon him.
“Bek! Henry! Mother! Go way, you. Big Thing!” sobbed Davey, and began
to cry, and back toward the creek. “Go way,” screamed Davey and because
to really turn back was unthinkable, threw up his arm across his eyes.
Henry would not be afraid. Nor Bek. Mother might. If Mother might be
afraid, it was not wrong to be afraid. Sur-ren-der, in the histories
Henry read from, meant something like afraid. No. Lee surrendered.
There was a colored picture of his surrendering in Henry’s book, called
_General Lee_. Lee surrendered. But that wasn’t that kind of being
afraid. Of just a thing. A thing in the moonlight. One didn’t surrender
to things in the moonlight.
“Go way, you!” screamed Dave, and batted his eyes and plunged forward,
so that suddenly the thing swung into outline. An outline that suddenly
sent him limp as a bag, of relief.
The thing was a threshing-machine. Many a time his bare legs had kicked
its flanks. He gave it a punch as he passed. Corn runts began in rows
now, brittle against his feet, and then a bit of fallow land with
the turned earth in frozen little peaks that bit against his soles.
Jessup’s place came up over a ridge, huddling for all the world like an
old hen in her shoulders. That must be Jessup’s old rooster Cheetie,
who would never sleep under roof, perched on top of the hen-house like
a wart against the sky.
Dave’s six-year-old world, moonlit, flowing there under the feel of his
toes. Its reassuring familiarity warmed him clear into his being, like
a toddy going down when he had a cold. Lickity-split! He ran and spun
the fields back from under him. The gnarled old veteran fields lashed
by March that seemed to be resting from their day-by-day burden of the
toiling of the men who tilled their faces.
They smelled deeply. Known smells that you could rub between your
fingers in a nub of dirt. That was part of the warmth. The great
sleeping world that milled and tilled so by day, asleep and docile,
with its great bosom swept with moonlight.
When you were no longer frightened, and sick with the impulse of
surrender, it was good to be spinning through their March starkness on
that mission, between the ewe-lamb who needed you, and Bek who wanted
you.
The kitchen window opened from the outside, so that just by shinnying
up a tin water-spout, balancing tiptoe on the sill, and shoving down
the upper pane by the ends of your straining fingers, in you were! It
was dark inside, not even a red circle showed around the stove lid.
Mother _had_ forgotten! Trina had failed! No, Mother hadn’t forgotten.
It was just her way of thinking that with the little iota of red
coals over in the corner, there would be enough heat for the ewe. The
nickel-plated lifter in the stove-lid, you could raise noiselessly and
place on one end of the range. That threw the kitchen into faint glow.
Just a handful of red coals, supposed to be enough for one ewe.
The kitchen in the House on Sycamore Street was the oldest room in the
house. Full of sags. Sags that might almost have been scoured in. Two
white-pine wood tables that sagged and smelled perpetually cool and
sudsy. Mathilda ground into them with scrub-brush in grand semicircular
smears. A scrubbed floor that sagged. A safe with a perforated-tin
front, that sagged. Even the sheet of metal around the range, scoured
tin that shone, sagged. A scrubbed, scoured, spotless kitchen, with
everything turned to the wall, nights. And there, in a chip basket
beside the range, in its blanket, tiny thing, the ewe-lamb. With its
snout thrust up.[10]
There was milk in the pantry in a five-gallon pail. It was about the
same height as David. That made it difficult to tilt. The bottom made
a great clanging sound as it left the floor. What if it should awaken
Mother or Father? Or Henry, whose room was over the pantry, and who,
winter and summer, slept with his cot drawn up to the window and his
pillow on the sill so that his head was out-of-doors.
It was easier to find a dipper, stealthily, to save clatter, scoop down
into the pail and heat the bit of milk. Over the sink, so that he had
to climb, was the bottle, with the rubber nipple.
Funny ewe-lamb. Without opening its eyes, it sucked it all down, in
gurgles. Grateful, sleepy darling gurgles. The pulling against the
rubber nipple. It was like the thing that made the creek move. And the
lilac-bush to bloom. And worms to ooze up in the lower pasture after
rain. Gosh. Little thing. Little old thing. In a world of big things,
it was the littlest old thing.... “Getty back there. To bed. ’Nuff, I
said. Getty back! ’Night, you!”
Scampering back, up hillock, down hillock, lickety-split, over the
fallen tree-trunk that spanned a small ditch, up hill, down, around,
splash!—the already wet trousers sopping in more water—zither—through
cinder-paths. In less than twenty-five minutes, the return was
accomplished.
It was deliciously good to be in bed again under the quilt that was
gay with rabbits’ ears, and with the moonlight, now receding, leaving
enormous dark splotches in the room. Good, except that almost before
he could sigh out with the satisfaction of it, plomp! sleep was a
bottomless pit into which he had walked, open eyed.
Not so Henry, who, up in his window, cold pipe lax on his lips, had
seen Davey come and Davey go. Such a strangely beautiful steel-blue
night as this would not let a body sleep, for pondering and pondering
on a bit of everything and nothing in particular.