[13] Possibly Henriette was plain in appearance. To know her was
never to think one way or another about how she looked. It was what
she looked. And what she looked was all the calm competence in the
world. Henriette _was_ calm competence. A woman with a rare gift of
knowing how to bide her time. How frequently and with what success, in
the turbulent, stirring years that were to fall our lot, she imbued
members of our family with some of that secret of hers, I shall not
take time to record.... Suffice it to say that what this powder-dry
little lady taught us out of her innate culture of mind and spirit, her
wisdom-before-the-event, and her incalculable power of patience, no
Schuyler can ever repay.
[Illustration: Decorative Image]
_Chapter Nine_
Warm gush of spring in spurts of living, bubbling mud up between his
toes. Its ooze among the dog-violets and anemones flowed and tickled,
and there was still hard stubble here and there that bit up into the
soles of his feet and made him hop and screw up his face from the sting.
The soles of his feet, the first day of earliest spring that he went
barefoot, were pink, tender things from shoes, heel and ball spanned by
a thin strip of white arch that would tan soon enough, and toughen.
The sweet, flowing meadows seemed to rock a little of mud. It was like
swimming, to run through the soft splash of grasses.
When Davey was only six, there was a five-o’clock chore expected of him
three mornings a week. Carrying a pair of pails of sluggish looking
cream over to Jessup’s Mattie, who did the churning for the Schuylers,
now that Trina’s weight was rendering her more and more incapacitated
every year.
Lean, agile, and wiry as a cat, and with an endurance that seemed to
lodge somewhere in the steel wires of her nerves, butter simply would
not gather under Mathilda’s churning. Something gray and curdled
coagulated instead under her eager, thin fingers.
As a girl in Austria, they had used to chant about her, a farm-legend
that translates something like this. “Maid whose butter will not
churn, do not be downhearted. Unlucky at butter-making, lucky at
love-making.”[14]
Sometimes the rod onto which the pails were hooked cut deeply into
Davey’s shoulders. Then it was not so easy to swim through the meadows.
One plunged, instead, with short, high, stabbing steps, and the cream
in the pails swirled and sometimes slopped out.
It was richly sweet milk, that the Old Gentleman had pulled in long
even strokes from his Holsteins. Its sweetness was part of the grand,
teasing smell of spring.
Usually Mattie, who was all soft bulge of flesh through gray calico,
came out of the gray, shanty-colored house in the hollow behind the
Cider Mill, and waved to him, with arms that were exactly the shape of
the rows of hams that hung in the smoke-house at Bek’s.
“Hurry—Dav-ee!”
Ugh! Whew! Mattie must not know how the ridges, where the pole across
his shoulders dug in, were blazing, and that something heavy seemed
hung onto his heart, making him so terribly short of breath.
There was always that blessed moment of heaving up the last lap of hill
before the easy swoop of the descent into the hollow. Mattie lifting
the rod out of the blazing ridges and depositing the pails upon a bench
that stood against the rear of the shanty.
Mattie’s cookies had a spice-taste that came out best when you minced
them finely between the front teeth. There came a time for David when,
minus two front teeth, those cookies bit up sharp as needles into the
gums. But when the flavor came flowing over the prick that was a
magnificent kind of alleviation.
There was always the smell to these every-other-mornings in the spring,
of Mattie’s bacon-cracklings sizzling on her range. Sometimes, after
the cookies, there was a good tough piece of rind to chew on the way
home. It had about the consistency of leather, but flavor that could be
coaxed out every inch of the way, even if he took the long route, down
past the hedges that skirted the Tarkington place.
Curious, the pungent tenacity of those days of his first years. Apricot
haze that tasted and had a slow thickness of smell, like syrup.
Bacon-cracklings. Warm uddery smell of sweet milk. Winding of smoke
off burning leaves that writhed like human hands in pain. They were
the unforgettable smells. The leathery one of Henry’s office, that was
to persist through the years. The Old Gentleman’s short reefers that
smelled of fertilizer. Dora Tarkington’s breath when she darted at him
from the hedge, if he happened to take the longer road, and stuck out
her tongue in a little flame of naughtiness. Dora’s breath was exactly
the smell of a calf’s that has been chewing the yellow life out of a
buttercup. Flower sweet.
Dora’s breath scented those days of those earliest years. There came a
time when Davey never took a return-road except the longer one that led
past the hedge that was apt to conceal her crouching little figure.
The Tarkington place had a red roof that showed through the battalion
of maple trees and hedgerows that divided it from the Schuyler South
Meadow. There was a new silo, too, with a red trim at the top, that
remained pretty much in evidence from any two-mile radius.
Mornings, after the milk-lugging, to Dave’s whistle between the “V” of
two fingers, Dora Tarkington, who was sure to be playing around the
gunnysack-wrapped feet of Old Nemo, a black gardener, would scuttle
her plump little body through one particular spot in the hedge. Their
opening. Dora’s and Davey’s opening. It wasn’t much of an aperture,
just a little dug-out, large enough to belly through.
Sometimes Dora, who started every day in a fresh blue-and-white apron
edged in three bands of rick-rack tape, came through the aperture all
smudged. That was the signal, even before they raced down the slope
together, or started the morning sharply with a “Tag, you’re it!” for
them to stand scraping at the mud-clot together; nor was Dora above
aiding with saliva.
Dora’s old Mammy, who kept house for the widowed Tarkington, could be
stern about mud-smudge on freshly clean aprons. Besides, Dora had a
certain fastidiousness all her own. The dive through the hedge was one
thing, but the damp, black earth clinging to her made her say “Ugh!”
Davey liked her to say “Ugh!” The pink cave of her mouth came open,
all filled with the littlest teeth. One was missing now. In front. The
front of Davey’s own mouth was an excavation. Two fingers could pass
through the gap.
“Last tag,” though, was what set them into flame as if two matches had
been struck.
“Last tag!” and off they were through the lush of meadows. Spring-lit
mornings of tearing through dirt that smelled softly as it kicked up
after them.
Dora Tarkington was a little terror. She sometimes seemed to go
liltingly mad. “Last tag! Ba-a-a, you’re it! Lickety, lickety-split—I’m
a kitten having a fit! Meou! Dare you to catch me! Catch me if you can!
Davey’s mad, and I’m glad and I know what will please him. A bottle of
wine to make him shine, and three little niggers to squeeze him.”
“Don’t say ‘nigger,’ Dora. Nemo’ll hear. Nemo’s got feelings same as
you ’n’ me.”[15]
That was the signal for Dora to scuttle all the way back through the
hole in the hedge and throw her arms around the white cotton head of
Nemo, bent low and slow over his task.
“Nemo’s mine. Nemo’s my old Nemo.” That was pretty nearly true. Shaggy
old Newfoundland dog was what Nemo amounted to in the affections of the
child Dora. She rode him as if he were one, kicking her small heels
into his tranquil flanks. “Giddy-app—you can’t ride my Nemo—giddy-app!”
“Don’t want to. Wouldn’t. Get off. Get off, I say.” Once David jerked
her off so that she fell in a soft, little crab-like sprawl into a
strawberry patch, her mouth opening to an outraged howl of wounded
pride, and old Nemo floundering after David with a threatening gesture.
It hurt David for Dora to ride Nemo as if he were a pony. And his pain
and his sympathy, as always, took the form of impelling him to action.
When Dora said “Nigger” in front of Nemo, or rode his delighted back
and pummeled his flanks, when Davey did not knock her off or charge
head-first and bump Nemo in the stomach so that she bounced off, he
tore off homeward on scuttling legs to hack at wood in the shed, with
an ax that was almost as tall as he was.[16]
It helped to hack wood after Dora had ridden Nemo as if he were a dumb
beast. And Dora, who loved Nemo with a fierce inner ticking of her
small heart, took wicked delight in seeming to beat him with her heels,
which in reality slowed so by the time they reached Nemo’s flanks,
that part of his pretense at neighing was laughter from the tickling
sensation.
Dora was a tease, all right. And such fun. “Catch me if you can!
Whoop—double-dare me to jump clear across the creek without getting my
feet wet?” She could stick out her stomach and blow out her cheeks and
make herself into a fright. She could somersault without so much as
showing more than the ruffled rim of her panties, clasping her hands
about her knees, and then, in a little hoop of herself, over! Over!
Over! And climb! Dora, who was plump and full of curves, and with the
round bisque face of the doll that sat in a small toy rocker in the
Tarkington dining-room, could shinny up a tree on her toes and her
finger-ends, turning furiously if you gave her so much as a boost from
her rounded little legs. Sometimes Dora spiked all of her honey-colored
curls on the top of her head with a meat-skewer, and pulled an old
stocking-cap down over her forehead. Then it was precisely like playing
with a boy. You knocked her down without feeling the foolish crawl of
curls across your hand. You shinnied up a tree after her, prodding her
pedaling body unmercifully from the rear. Sometimes, when she wore the
stocking cap, you forgot far enough to clench in a wrestling-match, one
kicking, panting, struggling little body grinding down the other into
the tickling, tender grasses.
Warm, sweet mornings. Davey and Dora seven and six, fleeting
through them. Oh, but Dora was nice! There were usually cubes of
brown gingerbread in the patch-pocket of her apron. Sometimes still
deliciously warm. She let you bite, holding her finger, just so far.
Sometimes you bit at the tip of her finger, and she squealed. A warm,
delicious squeal that went through you like a corkscrew.
The sheep in lower South Meadow scarcely bounded, as the shouting,
running, children darted through the dusky snow-bank of them. The
feel of their undismayed, curly flanks gave Davey a warmth at the pit
of him. He could swing himself off the ground between two of them by
placing a hand on each of their backs. Dora had rather a frightening
way of throwing her arms too tightly about the necks of the nibbling
creatures, startling them so that they shied back like broncos, in an
effort to throw her off.
It was almost the only time she made Davey remember she was a girl. A
fellow didn’t hug things thataway. “Aw, quit, Dora! You don’t do that
to sheep. They don’t like it. Silly, you don’t do that to sheep.”
It was the sort of thing that women did. Like having one’s face tilted
back, by women, for a kiss from a grown-up. The back of Davey’s hand
was forever at streaking across his, wiping off Clara’s and Trina’s
and Mathilda’s kisses. Bek seldom kissed. She had a way of patting a
shoulder, that made one feel a man, every inch. Imagine Henry kissing!
Oh, yes, there was something else Dora did that made him remember
fleetingly that she was a girl. Her way with kittens. There were
constantly-replenished litters of them in the Tarkington and Schuyler
barns. Dora clasped them to her in violent, gleeful hugs that drew
small wails of misery.
Why, the way to handle a kitten, unless you were silly, like a girl,
was to lift it by the scruff of the neck. Silly of Dora, gritting her
teeth and squeezing thataway.
Dora herself was handled pretty much as she did the kitten. Jerked
toward. Squeezed. Pinched. Her cheeks were so round and plump. The
women were always pinching at them. The pinching, gritting women. Why?
And the Old Gentleman used to poke his finger against the round little
ball of her stomach and make a skewering noise along the side of his
mouth.
Frequently, these mornings of Davey having delivered the milk, Dora
turned a continuous string of somersaults down the slope of the lower
South Meadow. David after. Usually they wound up in a heap at the
salt-rock, staring at each other breathless and disheveled. Then
suddenly, and by some hidden secret signal, up simultaneously, quick,
staccato. Last tag! And off again.
Sometimes, by the time they reached the Schuyler summer-kitchen,
Mathilda, at her baking, had already three pans of fluffy bread, which
she painted by dipping a camel’s-hair brush into a teacup of water,
making the loaves sleek and varnished-looking as violins. Usually
there was a coffee-ring, sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar, and a
crescent-shaped bun of the sort the Old Gentleman loved to “dunk” all
steaming and smelling on the table. The cinnamon, and the sour, hot
smell of dough, cut into the very grooves of the mouth, causing saliva
to flow. Break that crescent in two, and its hot breath made little
fountains of the pores of your mouth.
From the leavings of the dough, were two cookie-cakes sprawling in
a pie-pan. A hunky little girl, with the spread arms of a semaphore,
and currents for eyes and a current for a nose, and a mouth done by
pricking it with a fork.
Dora, whose little incisors were as white and as sharp and as greedy as
a mouse’s, beheaded her girl-cookie with a snip. Sometimes Davey, with
little more than surreptitious rubs of his tongue over it, carried his
boy around in his pocket all day, bringing him out at bedtime a crumby
mass, and then trying to put him together like a picture-puzzle.
Long, sweet, innocent days, when Dora was barely turned six and Davey
was seven.