On this Saturday evening, while Rose was relating her day to Aunt Anne,
Joe Colkett sat, meditatively, astride of his wood-saddle.[5] In the
morning he had seen Dorothy Maybrook, and had been as cunning as he knew
how to be. He had found Dory engaged in “p’inting her man,” as she said;
he was to saw some wood, and to kill two chickens for Mrs. Lyndsay’s
table. “Now, two p’ints, Hiram, two!” The pale, square-shouldered man
considered her with dull eyes.
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Footnote 5:
The cross-pieces on which wood is laid for sawing.
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“You said two pairs.”
“Oh, you are not p’inted right yet. Don’t you kill more than two
chickens. Here,” and she set two pins in his sleeve, “you can look at
these.”
“There, one pin stands for each chicken,” he said. “Guess I’m p’inted,”
and he went away.
“What’s wanting,Joe?” she said. “How’s Susie?”
“Oh, she’s kind of upsot. She takes on ’bout that last boy like there
wasn’t a boy on airth.”
“There isn’t for her.”
“There’s no gainsayin’ that. She’s allus a-talkin’ about them Lyndsays,
and how they sot a stone, a right handsome stone, up on that there boy
of theirn,—and she ain’t got none. Women’s awful queer, Dory. I can’t
buy no tombstone.”
“It doesn’t seem so queer to me. Can’t you get some kind of a thing,
just to please the woman? Why, if it was only of wood, you see, it might
help.”
“That’s so. I was a sort of thinkin’ ’bout that. Queer how folks thinks
’bout the same things.”
“Were you? Well, you’re a better kind of man than I took you for, Joe
Colkett. Your wife’s about half off her wits with grieving. If I was
you, I wouldn’t—well, I wouldn’t take her too serious. People that are
troubled the way she is do have strange notions. I think the devil he’s
as like as not to get a grip on us when we are—”
“What was you a-thinkin’, Dory?” he broke in, suspiciously.
“I ain’t fully minded to tell you, Joe. But Susie’s a masterful woman,
and don’t you let her get you into trouble. If it’s money, my man and me
we’ve got a little put by. I’d a heap rather spend a bit of it than see
you tormented into some wickedness.”
“You must think I’m right bad, Dory. Can’t you talk out?”
“No; I might, but I won’t. Only you remember, Joe, I didn’t say you were
bad, but I do say anybody you care for might p’int you wrong. It’s a
queer thing how easy men can be p’inted.”
He was terribly scared, and, seeing that no more was to be had out of
Dory, resolved to profit by her warning. How she could have guessed
anything of his or his wife’s intentions he was at a loss to comprehend.
But he was timid, and eager to steer clear of trouble. After a few
moments of silent consideration, he spoke:
“It ain’t always easy to keep straight. Guess I’m p’inted now, like
Hiram,” and he grinned. “I don’t drink none neither, not now.”
“Stick to that and keep your mouth shut, or it may be worse for you—and
for Susie, too,” she added.
“I will. Don’t you be afraid.”
“And what fetched you, Joe?”
“I was minded to set a nice clean board over them boys. I was a-tellin’
you that. And I can’t read none nor write. But if you was to write big
on a paper just what a man might want to set on a board like I was
a-talkin’ of, guess I could copy it plain enough.”
Dorothy considered. “Can you wait? It’ll be quite a time.”
“Yes, I kin wait.”
She left him, and went into the house, and was gone a full hour. What
the man thought of as he leaned against the rails, or sat on top, I do
not know. He had the patience of an ant.
When he saw Dorothy again at the door he climbed down, and, with some
excitement in his face, went toward the cabin.
“It wasn’t right easy, Joe. I was thinking I might ask Mr. Carington
about it. Mr. Lyndsay he’d be best; but I guess I wouldn’t ask him.”
“No,” said Joe, promptly. He saw why this might not be well. “I don’t
want nobody to know, Dory, ’cept you and Susie. It’ll kind of surprise
her, and she’ll like it.” Then he added, with some cunning, “She hates
to have folks goin’ there where them children’s buried.”
“I shall never want to,” said Dorothy. She still carried an unpleasant
remembrance of the dismal burial.
“Well, I thought I’d tell you, Dory.”
“Yes, of course.” She took the hint as but another evidence of Susie’s
state of mind and of Joe’s dreads and anxieties, and failed to examine
it closely, not being of a suspicious turn, despite a life which had
given little and taken much. Whoever asked of Dorothy a favor approached
her on the side of her nature most open to capture.
“You are a good deal more patient than most men,” she said. “Come in;
come in.” Joe entered after her. A Sunday quiet was in the air of the
place. There was no fire, and the sun, as it looked in, disclosed no
want anywhere of neatness and care. It was not lost on poor Joe as he
looked around the small house. He had been here often, but there are
times when we see and times when we do not. Now, perhaps because of
being on guard, all his senses, and the inert mind back of them, were
more alive than usual. A book lying open on the spotless table struck
him most; a snow-white rolling-pin had been hastily laid on it to keep
the place at the moment of Joe’s coming.
He was bent on making himself agreeable to his hostess, who now stood by
an open window, well satisfied with her work, a large sheet of paper in
her hand. She had put on for Sunday a white gown which had known the
summers of Georgia. It was clean and much mended, but it set off her
fair rosiness and dark hair, and made her look larger than she was.
“Sit down, Joe.”
“Guess I will,” said Joe. “Top rail of Hiram’s fence is mighty sharp.”
He sat down with caution, being heavy. In his own home the furniture was
apt to go to pieces unless humored by a but gradual abandonment to it of
the full weight of the human frame. Satisfied as to this, he began to
use the weapon of his sex:
“You’re well fixed up here, Dory. There ain’t many women could keep a
man’s house lookin’ like yourn!”
“Oh, it’s only just to not let things get ahead of you, and to keep your
man p’inted right.”
“Might be the woman mostly,” he said. “Some women p’ints themselves, and
some women don’t. It isn’t every woman’s got your talents.”
“I don’t know, Joe. Sometimes I think it isn’t worth while to go on and
on this way, and then I let things go a while just any way they’re
a-minded. That’s burying your talents, Joe; and then at last I can’t
stand it, and I dig up my little talents, and dust them well, and say,
‘Get up on your legs, and attend to your business.’” Her parables were
never clear to him.
“We live just like hogs at my house.”
“No, you don’t,” cried Dorothy, laughing. “I hate to hear a man taking
away the characters of respectable animals. A hog has always got his
nose over the trough. He wants his feed like everything. He’ll work for
it all day—and smart! Why, he’ll be into your truck-patch and out, when
he sees you, before you can turn round. He knows what he wants, and he
goes for it; and he knows when he’s stealing as well as you or me. I
hate to hear an animal called pig-headed because he don’t mean to be
ordered here or there by a fellow that hasn’t got half his will or half
his brains. There!”
“Gosh, Dory, but you’re a funny woman.”
“Am I? There is more than fun in that sermon. Look here; this might do.”
And, as he came near and stood with huge square hands on the table, she
spread out the sheet of paper.
“Can’t you read any of it, Joe?”
“Not no word of it. I might know the letters—the big ones.”
He looked at it as a scholar might at some papyrus in an unknown
language. “You might read it,” he said.
Upon this, with a finger on each word, as she went on, and with his eyes
following it with interest, she read slowly:
“HERE LIE THE BODIES
OF
SUSAN FAIRLAMB,
PETER FAIRLAMB, AND
ISAIAH FAIRLAMB,
CHILDREN OF SUSAN AND
PETER FAIRLAMB.”
“I guess I’d leave him out,” said Joe, straightening himself.
“But children must have a father.”
“There ain’t no need to say it, though, Dory. Susie she won’t like it.”
“Well, it isn’t my tombstone,” said Dorothy. “He wasn’t much use to them
when he was alive; we’ll leave him out.” Untrammeled by the usages of
the world, she put a pen through the statement of parental relation.
“What about the dates—the days they died, and their ages?”
“Derned if I know, except about Isaiah. It don’t matter none.” He was
reflecting that the work before him might be reasonably lessened.
“It really don’t matter,” she returned. “But, Joe, don’t you want some
verse out of the Bible? They most generally do put that.”
“It makes a heap of work, and my knife ain’t none too sharp. Make it
short, anyways.”
Certain grim texts came into Dorothy’s mind, but she set them aside. At
last she wrote:
Of such are the kingdom of heaven!
and repeated the phrase aloud.
“That’s as short as you could make it?” he said.
“Yes. Do you come down to-morrow morning—no, on Monday. I’ll baste four
big sheets together, and print it all, the size you will want it. Then
you can easily copy the letters. How will that do?”
“First rate. I’m awful obliged to you, Dory.”
“Can Susan read it?”
“Well, she can manage to spell it out; and you’ll read it to me a couple
of times, so I’ll be able to tell her if she ain’t got the meanin’
straight. I’ll come, and don’t you let no one know.”
“Well, good-by.” She made no promise. She had too clear a sense of the
ridiculous to want to let this thing stand uncriticized. It was for her
a novel venture. Now she saw the man go, and stood herself a moment in
the sun, facing the doorway, and resting with both hands on the table.
Her own children lay in nameless graves in the far South, buried in days
when war and want had made record difficult. She was recalling the
live-oak grove where the two small mounds were crumbling to the common
level of earth. At last she smiled, and said aloud:
“I guess Christ will know where to find them.”
“What was you sayin’?” said Hiram, entering.
“I was only p’inting myself, Hiram.”
“Do you have need to do that, Dory? I’d’a’ never guessed that.”
“Oh, pretty often.” She herself would scarcely have said “p’inting” in
her talk with the Lyndsays, but that her husband used the word, and she
had come to regard it by habit as having a specific significance other
than that of its proper, unabbreviated parent.
Meanwhile Joe Colkett walked homeward, with so much mind as he possessed
at ease. The rest of the enterprise seemed small compared to the
difficulty over which poor Dorothy had so innocently helped him.
At times he had been inclined to content himself with a neat wooden
tomb-mark. Being clever enough with tools, this might easily have been
managed; but now, the hard, half-distraught woman, whose worn middle age
still had his love, for whom he would have dared all his nature let him
dare, was ever at his elbow with hints as to the possibility of crime.
He had, however, no natural tendency to grave wrong-doing, and it seemed
to him that if he could propitiate this relentless temptress by
gratifying her lesser desire, she might be content and cease to urge him
into worse ways. He was distinctly afraid of his wife, and, once or
twice, of himself, when she had set before him what they could do with
money, and how pleasant it might be to get drunk when he liked.
At least now she should have her more innocent wish satisfied. Nor was
it strange that he gave no thought to the people he was about to
plunder. He had lived too much of late in the black shade of the
possibilities of larger crime to be troubled by the smaller sin he was
so eager to commit. Nor could he supply to the minds of those he meant
to rob more motives than his own imagination supplied, and it taught him
nothing in the way of sentiment concerning these records of the dead.