THE SPARK IN THE CLOD
It did not cost Isom so many pangs to minister to the gross appetite of
his bound boy as the spring weeks marched into summer, for gooseberries
followed rhubarb, then came green peas and potatoes from the garden that
Ollie had planted and tilled under her husband's orders.
Along in early summer the wormy codlings which fell from the apple-trees
had to be gathered up and fed to the hogs by Ollie, and it was such a
season of blighted fruit that the beasts could not eat them all. So
there was apple sauce, sweetened with molasses from the new barrel that
Isom broached.
If it had not been so niggardly unnecessary, the faculty that Isom had
for turning the waste ends of the farm into profit would have been
admirable. But the suffering attendant upon this economy fell only upon
the human creatures around him. Isom's beasts wallowed in plenty and
grew fat in the liberality of his hand. For himself, it looked as if he
had the ability to extract his living from the bare surface of a rock.
All of this green truck was filling, as Isom had said, but far from
satisfying to a lad in the process of building on such generous plans as
Joe. Isom knew that too much skim-milk would make a pot-bellied calf,
but he was too stubborn in his rule of life to admit the cause when he
saw that Joe began to lag at his work, and grow surly and sour.
Isom came in for quick and startling enlightenment in the middle of a
lurid July morning, while he and Joe were at work with one-horse
cultivators, "laying by" the corn. Joe threw his plow down in the
furrow, cast the lines from his shoulders, and declared that he was
starving. He vowed that he would not cultivate another row unless
assured, then and there, that Isom would make an immediate enlargement
in the bill-of-fare.
Isom stood beside the handles of his own cultivator, there being the
space of ten rows between him and Joe, and took the lines from around
his shoulders, with the deliberate, stern movement of a man who is
preparing for a fight.
"What do you mean by this kind of capers?" he demanded.
"I mean that you can't go on starving me like you've been doing, and
that's all there is to it!" said Joe. "The law don't give you the right
to do that."
"Law! Well, I'll law you," said Isom, coming forward, his hard body
crouched a little, his lean and guttered neck stretched as if he
gathered himself for a run and jump at the fence. "I'll feed you what
comes to my hand to feed you, you onery whelp! You're workin' for me,
you belong to me!"
"I'm working for mother--I told you that before," said Joe. "I don't owe
you anything, Isom, and you've got to feed me better, or I'll walk away
and leave you, that's what I'll do!"
"Yes, I see you walkin' away!" said Isom, plucking at his already
turned-up sleeve. "I'm goin' to give you a tannin' right now, and one
you'll not forget to your dyin' day!"
At that moment Isom doubtless intended to carry out his threat. Here was
a piece of his own property, as much his property as his own wedded
wife, defying him, facing him with extravagant demands, threatening to
stop work unless more bountifully fed! Truly, it was a state of
insurrection such as no upright citizen like Isom Chase could allow to
go by unreproved and unquieted by castigation of his hand.
"You'd better stop where you are," advised Joe.
He reached down and righted his plow. Isom could see the straining of
the leaders in his lean wrist as he stood gripping the handle, and the
thought passed through him that Joe intended to wrench it off and use it
as a weapon against him.
Isom had come but a few steps from his plow. He stopped, looking down at
the furrow as if struggling to hold himself within bounds. Still looking
at the earth, he went back to his implement.
"I'll put you where the dogs won't bite you if you ever threaten my life
ag'in!" said he.
"I didn't threaten your life, Isom, I didn't say a word," said Joe.
"A motion's a threat," said Isom.
"But I'll tell you now," said Joe, quietly, lowering his voice and
leaning forward a little, "you'd better think a long time before you
ever start to lay hands on me again, Isom. This is twice. The next
time----"
Joe set his plow in the furrow with a push that sent the swingle-tree
knocking against the horse's heels. The animal started out of the doze
into which it had fallen while the quarrel went on. Joe grinned,
thinking how even Isom's dumb creatures took every advantage of him that
opportunity offered. But he left his warning unfinished as for words.
There was no need to say more, for Isom was cowed. He was quaking down
to the tap-root of his salt-hardened soul, but he tried to put a
different face on it as he took up his plow.
"I don't want to cripple you, and lay you up," he said. "If I was to
begin on you once I don't know where I'd leave off. Git back to your
work, and don't give me any more of your sass!"
"I'll go back to work when you give me your word that I'm to have meat
and eggs, butter and milk, and plenty of it," said Joe.
"I orto tie you up to a tree and lash you!" said Isom, jerking angrily
at his horse. "I don't know what ever made me pity your mother and keep
her out of the poorhouse by takin' in a loafer like you!"
"Well, if you're sick of the bargain go and tell mother. Maybe she is,
too," Joe suggested.
"No, you'll not git out of it now, you'll stick right here and put in
your time, after all the trouble and expense I've been put to teachin'
you what little you know about farmin'," Isom declared.
He took up his plow and jerked his horse around into the row. Joe stood
watching him, with folded arms, plainly with no intention of following.
Isom looked back over his shoulder.
"Git to work!" he yelled.
"You didn't promise me what I asked," said Joe, quietly.
"No, and that ain't all!" returned Isom.
The tall corn swallowed Isom and his horse as the sea swallowed Pharaoh
and his host. When he returned to the end of the field where the
rebellion had broken out, he found Joe sitting on the beam of his plow
and the well-pleased horse asleep in the sun.
Isom said nothing, but plunged away into the tall corn. When he came
back next time Joe was unhitching his horse.
"Now, look a-here, Joe," Isom began, in quite a changed tone, "don't you
fly up and leave an old man in the lurch that way."
"You know what I said," Joe told him.
"I'll give in to you, Joe; I'll give you everything you ask for, and
more," yielded Isom, seeing that Joe intended to leave. "I'll put it in
writing if you want me to Joe--I'll do anything to keep you, son. You're
the only man I ever had on this place I wouldn't rather see goin' than
comin'."
Isom's word was satisfactory to Joe, and he returned to work.
That turned out a day to be remembered in the household of Isom Chase.
If he had come into the kitchen at noon with all the hoarded savings of
his years and thrown them down before her eyes, Ollie could not have
been more surprised and mystified than she was when he appeared from the
smokehouse carrying a large ham.
After his crafty way in a tight pinch Isom turned necessity into profit
by making out that the act was free and voluntary, with the pleasure and
comfort of his pretty little wife underlying and prompting it all. He
grinned as if he would break his beard when he put the ham down on the
table and cut it in two at the middle joint as deftly as a butcher.
"I've been savin' that ham up for you, Ollie. I think it's just about
right now," said he.
"That was nice of you, Isom," said she, moved out of her settled
taciturnity by his little show of thought for her, "I've been just dying
for a piece of ham!"
"Well, fry us a big skilletful of it, and some eggs along with it, and
fetch up a crock of sweet milk, and stir it up cream and all," directed
Isom.
Poor Ollie, overwhelmed by the suddenness and freedom of this
generosity, stood staring at him, her eyes round, her lips open. Isom
could not have studied a more astounding surprise. If he had hung
diamonds on her neck, rubies on her wrists, and garnets in her hair, she
could quicker have found her tongue.
"It's all right, Ollie, it's all right," said Isom pettishly. "We're
going to have these things from now on. Might as well eat 'em, and git
some of the good of what we produce, as let them city people fatten off
'em."
Isom went out with that, and Ollie attacked the ham with the butcher
knife in a most savage and barbarous fashion.
Isom's old wife must have shifted in her grave at sight of the prodigal
repast which Ollie soon spread on the kitchen table. Granting, of
course, that people in their graves are cognizant of such things, which,
according to this old standard of comparison in human amazement, they
must be.
But whether the old wife turned over or lay quiescent in the place where
they put her when they folded her tired old hands upon her shrunken
breast, it is indisputable that the new one eased the pangs of many a
hungry day in that bountiful meal. And Joe's face glowed from the fires
of it, and his eyes sparkled in the satisfaction of his long-abused
stomach.
Next day a more startling thing happened. Twice each week there passed
through the country, from farm to farm, a butcher's wagon from
Shelbyville, the county-seat, a few miles away. Isom Chase never had
been a customer of the fresh meat purveyor, and the traveling merchant,
knowing from the old man's notoriety that he never could expect him to
become one, did not waste time in stopping at his house. His surprise
was almost apoplectic when Isom stopped him and bought a soup-bone, and
it almost became fatal when the order was made a standing one. It was
such a remarkable event that the meat man told about it at every stop.
It went round the country like the news of a wedding or a death.
Isom seemed to be satisfied with the new dietary regulations, for hams
were cheap that summer, anyhow, and the season was late. Besides that,
the more that Joe ate the harder he worked. It seemed a kind of
spontaneous effort on the lad's part, as if it was necessary to burn up
the energy in surplus of the demand of his growing bone and muscle.
Ollie had picked up and brightened under the influence of ham and milk
also, although it was all a foolish yielding to appetite, as Isom very
well knew. He had beaten that weakness in himself to death with the club
of abstinence; for himself he could live happily on what he had been
accustomed to eating for thirty years and more. But as long as the
investment of ham and milk paid interest in kitchen as well as field,
Isom was grudgingly willing to see them consumed.
Ollie's brightening was only physical. In her heart she was as gloomily
hopeless as before. After his first flash of fire she had not found much
comfort or hope of comradeship in the boy, Joe Newbolt. He was so
respectful in her presence, and so bashful, it seemed, that it almost
made her uncomfortable to have him around.
Man that he was in stature, he appeared no more than a timid boy in
understanding, and her little advances of friendliness, her little
appeals for sympathy, all glanced from the unconscious armor of his
youthful innocence and reserve. She was forced to put him down after
many weeks as merely stupid, and she sighed when she saw the hope of
comradeship in her hard lot fade out and give way to a feeling bordering
upon contempt.
On Sunday evenings, after he came back from visiting his mother, Ollie
frequently saw Joe reading the little brown Bible which he had carried
with him when he came. She had taken it up one day while making Joe's
bed. It brought back to her the recollection of her Sunday-school days,
when she was all giggles and frills; but there was no association of
religious training to respond to its appeal. She wondered what Joe saw
in it as she put it back on the box beside his bed.
It chanced that she met Joe the next morning after she had made that
short incursion between the brown covers of his book, as she was
returning from the well and he was setting out for the hog-lot between
two pails of sour swill. He stood out of the path to let her pass
without stepping into the long, dewy grass. She put her bucket down with
a gasp of weariness, and looked up into his eyes with a smile.
The buckets were heavy in Joe's hands; he stood them down, meeting her
friendly advances with one of his rare smiles, which came as seldom to
his face, thought she, as a hummingbird to the honeysuckle on the
kitchen porch.
"Whew, this is going to be a scorcher!" said she.
"I believe it is," he agreed.
From the opposite sides of the path their eyes met. Both smiled again,
and felt better for it.
"My, but you're a mighty religious boy, aren't you?" she asked
suddenly.
"Religious?" said he, looking at her in serious surprise.
She nodded girlishly. The sun, long slanting through the cherry-trees,
fell on her hair, loosely gathered up after her sleep, one free strand
on her cheek.
"No, I'm not religious."
"Well, you read the Bible all the time."
"Oh, well!" said he, stooping as if to lift his pails.
"Why?" she wanted to know.
Joe straightened his long back without his pails. Beyond the orchard the
hogs were clamoring shrilly for their morning draught; from the barn
there came the sound of Isom's voice, speaking harshly to the beasts.
"Well, because I like it, for one thing," said he, "and because it's the
only book I've got here, for another."
"My, I think it's awful slow!" said she.
"Do you?" he inquired, as if interested in her likes and dislikes at
last.
"I'd think you'd like other books better--detective stories and that
kind," she ventured. "Didn't you ever read any other book?"
"Some few," he replied, a reflection as of amusement in his eyes, which
she thought made them look old and understanding and wise. "But I've
always read the Bible. It's one of the books that never seems to get old
to you."
"Did you ever read _True as Steel_?"
"No, I never did."
"Or _Tempest and Sunshine_?"
He shook his head.
"Oh-h," said she, fairly lifting herself by the long breath which she
drew, like the inhalation of a pleasant recollection, "you don't know
what you've missed! They are lovely!"
"Well, maybe I'd like them, too."
He stooped again, and this time came up with his pails.
"I'm glad you're not religious, anyhow," she sighed, as if heaving a
trouble off her heart.
"Are you?" he asked, turning to her wonderingly.
"Yes; religious people are so glum," she explained. "I never saw one of
them laugh."
"There are some that way," said Joe. "They seem to be afraid they'll go
to hell if they let the Almighty hear them laugh. Mother used to be that
way when she first got _her_ religion, but she's outgrowing it now."
"The preachers used to scare me to death," she declared. "If I could
hear some comfortable religion I might take up with it, but it seems to
me that everybody's so sad after they get it. I don't know why."
Joe put down the pails again. Early as the day was, it was hot, and he
was sweating. He pushed his hat back from his forehead. It was like
lifting a shadow from his serious young face. She smiled.
"A person generally gets the kind of religion that he hears preached,"
said he, "and most of it you hear is kind of heavy, like bread without
rising. I've never seen a laughing preacher yet."
"There must be some, though," she reflected.
"I hope so," said Joe.
"I'm _glad_ you're not full of that kind of religion," said she. "For a
long time I thought you were."
"You did? Why?"
"Oh, because--" said she.
Her cheek was toward him; he saw that it was red, like the first tint of
a cherry. She snatched up her bucket then and sped along the path.
Joe walked on a little way, stopped, turned, and looked after her. He
saw the flick of her skirt as her nimble heels flew up the three steps
of the kitchen porch, and he wondered why she was glad that he was not
religious, and why she had gone away like that, so fast. The pigs were
clamoring, shriller, louder. It was no hour for a youth who had not yet
wetted his feet in manhood's stream to stand looking after a pair of
heels and try to figure out a thing like that.
As Joe had said, he was not religious, according to catechisms and
creeds. He could not have qualified in the least exacting of the many
faiths. All the religion that he had was of his own making, for his
mother's was altogether too ferocious in its punishments and too dun and
foggy in its rewards for him.
He read the Bible, and he believed most of it. There was as much
religion, said he, in the Commandments as a man needed; a man could get
on with that much very well. Beyond that he did not trouble.
He read the adventures of David and the lamentations of Jeremiah, and
the lofty exhortations of Isaiah for the sonority of the phrasing, the
poetry and beauty. For he had not been sated by many tales nor blunted
by many books. If he could manage to live according to the Commandments,
he sometimes told his mother, he would not feel uneasy over a better way
to die.
But he was not giving this matter much thought as he emptied the
swill-pails to the chortling hogs. He was thinking about the red in
Ollie's cheeks, like the breast of a bright bird seen through the
leaves, and of her quick flight up the path. It was a new Ollie that he
had discovered that morning, one unknown and unspoken to before that
day. But why had her face grown red that way, he wondered? Why had she
run away?
And Ollie, over her smoking pan on the kitchen stove, was thinking that
something might be established in the way of comradeship between herself
and the bound boy, after all. It took him a long time to get acquainted,
she thought; but his friendship might be all the more stable for that.
There was comfort in it; as she worked she smiled.
There was no question of the need in which Ollie stood of friendship,
sympathy, and kind words. Joe had been in that house six months, and in
that time he had witnessed more pain than he believed one small woman's
heart could bear. While he was not sure that Isom ever struck his wife,
he knew that he tortured her in endless combinations of cruelty, and
pierced her heart with a thousand studied pangs. Often, when the house
was still and Isom was asleep, he heard her moaning and sobbing, her
head on the kitchen table.
These bursts of anguish were not the sudden gusts of a pettish woman's
passion, but the settled sorrow of one who suffered without hope.
Many a time Joe tiptoed to the bottom of the staircase in his bare
feet and looked at her, the moonlight dim in the cheerless kitchen, her
head a dark blotch upon the whiteness of her arms, bowed there in
her grief. Often he longed to go to her with words of comfort and let
her know that there was one at least who pitied her hard fate and
sad disillusionment.
In those times of tribulation Joe felt that they could be of mutual help
and comfort if they could bring themselves to speak, for he suffered
also the pangs of imprisonment and the longings for liberty in that
cruel house of bondage. Yet he always turned and went softly, almost
breathlessly, back to his bed, leaving her to sob and cry alone in the
struggle of her hopeless sorrow.
It was a harder matter to keep his hands from the gristly throat of grim
old Isom Chase, slumbering unfeelingly in his bed while his young wife
shredded her heart between the burr-stones of his cruel mill. Joe had
many an hour of struggle with himself, lying awake, his hot temples
streaming sweat, his eyes staring at the ribs of the roof.
During those months Joe had set and hardened. The muscles had thickened
over his chest and arms; his neck was losing the long scragginess of
youth; his fingers were firm-jointed in his broadening hands. He knew
that Isom Chase was no match for him, man to man.
But, for all his big body and great strength, he was only a boy in his
sense of justice, in his hot, primitive desire to lunge out quickly and
set the maladjustments of that household straight. He did not know that
there was a thing as old as the desires of men at the bottom of Ollie's
sorrow, nor understand the futility of chastisement in the case of Isom
Chase.
Isom was as far as ever from his hope of a son or heir of any
description--although he could not conceive the possibility of fathering
a female child--and his bitter reproaches fell on Ollie, as they had
fallen upon and blasted the woman who had trudged that somber course
before her into the grateful shelter of the grave. It was a thing which
Ollie could not discuss with young Joe, a thing which only a sympathetic
mother might have lightened the humiliation of or eased with tender
counsel.
Isom, seeing that the book of his family must close with him, expelled
the small grain of tenderness that his dry heart had held for his wife
at the beginning, and counted her now nothing but another back to bear
his burdens. He multiplied her tasks, and snarled and snapped, and more
than once in those work-crowded autumn days, when she had lagged in her
weariness, he had lifted his hand to strike. The day would come when
that threatened blow would fall; of that Ollie had no consoling doubt.
She did not feel that she would resent it, save in an addition to her
accumulated hate, for hard labor by day and tears by night break the
spirit until the flints of cruelty no longer wake its fire.
Day after day, as he worked by the side of Isom in the fields, Joe had
it foremost in his mind to speak to him of his unjust treatment of his
wife. Yet he hung back out of the Oriental conception which he held, due
to his Scriptural reading, of that relationship between woman and man. A
man's wife was his property in a certain, broad sense. It would seem
unwarranted by any measure of excess short of murder for another to
interfere between them. Joe held his peace, therefore, but with internal
ferment and unrest.
It was in those days of Joe's disquietude that Ollie first spoke to him
of Isom's oppressions. The opportunity fell a short time after their
early morning meeting in the path. Isom had gone to town with a load of
produce, and Joe and Ollie had the dinner alone for the first time since
he had been under that roof.
Ollie's eyes were red and swollen from recent weeping, her face was
mottled from her tears. Much trouble had made her careless of late of
her prettiness, and now she was disheveled, her apron awry around her
waist, her hair mussed, her whole aspect one of slovenly disregard. Her
depression was so great that Joe was moved to comfort her.
"You've got a hard time of it," said he. "If there's anything I can do
to help you I wish you'd let me know."
Ollie slung a dish carelessly upon the table, and followed it with Joe's
coffee, which she slopped half out into the saucer.
"Oh, I feel just like I don't care any more!" said she, her lips
trembling, tears starting again in her irritated eyes. "I get treatment
here that no decent man would give a dog!"
Joe felt small and young in Ollie's presence, due to the fact that she
was older by a year at least than himself.
That feeling of littleness had been one of his peculiarities as long as
he could remember when there were others about older than himself, and
supposed from that reason to be graver and wiser. It probably had its
beginning in Joe's starting out rather spindling and undersized, and not
growing much until he was ten or thereabout, when he took a sudden shoot
ahead, like a water-sprout on an apple-tree.
And then he always had regarded matrimony as a state of gravity and
maturity, into which the young and unsophisticated did not venture. This
feeling seemed to place between them in Joe's mind a boundless gulf,
across which he could offer her only the sympathy and assistance of a
boy. There was nothing in his mind of sympathy from an equality of years
and understanding, only the chivalric urging of succor to the
oppressed.
"It's a low-down way for a man to treat a woman, especially his wife,"
said Joe, his indignation mounting at sight of her tears.
"Yes, and he'd whip you, too, if he dared to do it," said she, sitting
in Isom's place at the end of the table, where she could look across
into Joe's face. "I can see that in him when he watches you eat."
"I hope he'll never try it," said Joe.
"You're not afraid of him?"
"Maybe not," admitted Joe.
"Then why do you say you hope he'll never try it?" she pressed.
"Oh, because I do," said Joe, bending over his plate.
"I'd think you'd be glad if he did try it, so you could pay him off for
his meanness," she said.
Joe looked across at her seriously.
"Did he slap you this morning?" he asked.
Ollie turned her head, making no reply.
"I thought I heard you two scuffling around in the kitchen as I came to
the porch with the milk," said he.
"Don't tell it around!" she appealed, her eyes big and terrified at the
recollection of what had passed. "No, he didn't hit me, Joe; but he
choked me. He grabbed me by the throat and shook me--his old hand's as
hard as iron!"
Joe had noticed that she wore a handkerchief pinned around her neck. As
she spoke she put her hand to her throat, and her tears gushed again.
"That's no way for a man to treat his wife," said Joe indignantly.
"If you knew everything--_if you knew everything_!" said she.
Joe, being young, and feeling younger, could not see how she was
straining to come to a common footing of understanding with him, to
reach a plane where his sympathy would be a balm. He could not realize
that her orbit of thought was similar to his own, that she was nearer a
mate for him, indeed, than for hairy-limbed, big-jointed Isom Chase,
with his grizzled hair and beard.
"It was all over a little piece of ribbon I bought yesterday when I took
the eggs up to the store," she explained. "I got two cents a dozen more
than I expected for them, and I put the extra money into a ribbon--only
half a yard. Here it is," said she, taking it from the cupboard; "I
wanted it to wear on my neck."
She held it against her swathed throat with a little unconscious play of
coquetry, a sad smile on her lips.
"It's nice, and becoming to you, too," said Joe, speaking after the
manner of the countryside etiquette on such things.
"Isom said I ought to have put the money into a package of soda, and
when I wouldn't fuss with him about it, that made him madder and madder.
And then he--he--did that!"
"You wouldn't think Isom would mind ten cents," said Joe.
"He'd mind one cent," said she in bitter disdain. "One cent--_huh_! he'd
mind one egg! Some people might not believe it, but I tell you, Joe,
that man counts the eggs every day, and he weighs every pound of butter
I churn. If I wanted to, even, I couldn't hide away a pound of butter or
a dozen of eggs any more than I could hide away that stove."
"But I don't suppose Isom means to be hard on you or anybody," said Joe.
"It's his way to be close and stingy, and he may do better by you one of
these days."
"No, he'll never do any better," she sighed. "If anything, he'll do
worse--if he can do any worse. I look for him to strike me next!"
"He'd better not try that when I'm around!" said Joe hotly.
"What would you do to him, Joe?" she asked, her voice lowered almost to
a whisper. She leaned eagerly toward him as she spoke, a flush on her
face.
"Well, I'd stop him, I guess," said Joe deliberately, as if he had
considered his words. As he spoke he reached down for his hat, which he
always placed on the floor beside his chair when he took his meals.
"If there was a soul in this world that cared for me--if I had anywhere
to go, I'd leave him this hour!" declared Ollie, her face burning with
the hate of her oppressor.
Joe got up from his chair and left the table; she rose with him and came
around the side. He stopped on his way to the door, looking at her with
awkward bashfulness as she stood there flushed and brilliant in her
tossed state, scarcely a yard between them.
"But there's nobody in the world that cares for me," she complained
sorrowfully.
Joe was lifting his hat to his head. Midway he stayed his hand, his face
blank with surprise.
"Why, you've got your mother, haven't you?" he asked.
"Mother!" she repeated scornfully. "She'd drive me back to him; she was
crazy for me to marry him, for she thinks I'll get all his property and
money when he dies."
"Well, he may die before long," consoled Joe.
"Die!" said she; and again, "Die! He'll never die!"
She leaned toward him suddenly, bringing her face within a few inches of
his. Her hot breath struck him on the cheek; it moved the clustered hair
at his temple and played warm in the doorway of his ear.
"He'll never die," she repeated in low, quick voice, which fell to a
whisper in the end, "unless somebody he's tramped on and ground down and
cursed and driven puts him out of the way!"
Joe stood looking at her with big eyes, dead to that feminine shock
which would have tingled a mature man to the marrow, insensible to the
strong effort she was making to wake him and draw him to her. He drew
back from her, a little frightened, a good deal ashamed, troubled, and
mystified.
"Why, you don't suppose anybody would do that?" said he.
Ollie turned from him, the fire sinking down in her face.
"Oh, no; I don't suppose so," she said, a little distant and cold in her
manner.
She began gathering up the dishes.
Joe stood there for a little while, looking at her hands as they flew
from plate to plate like white butterflies, as if something had stirred
in him that he did not understand. Presently he went his way to take up
his work, no more words passing between them.
Ollie, from under her half raised lids, watched him go, tiptoeing
swiftly after him to the door as he went down the path toward the well.
Her breath was quick upon her lips; her breast was agitated. If that
slow hunk could be warmed with a man's passions and desires; if she
could wake him; if she could fling fire into his heart! He was only a
boy, the man in him just showing its strong face behind that mask of
wild, long hair. It lay there waiting to move him in ways yet strange to
his experience. If she might send her whisper to that still slumbering
force and charge it into life a day before its time!
She stood with hand upon the door, trailing him with her eyes as he
passed on to the barn. She felt that she had all but reached beyond the
insulation of his adolescence in that burning moment when her breath was
on his cheek; she knew that the wood, even that hour, was warm under the
fire. What might a whisper now, a smile then, a kindness, a word, a hand
laid softly upon his hair, work in the days to come?
She turned back to her work, her mind stirred out of its sluggish rut,
the swirl of her new thoughts quickening in her blood. Isom Chase would
not die; he would live on and on, harder, drier, stingier year by year,
unless a bolt from heaven withered him or the hand of man laid him low.
What might come to him, he deserved, even the anguish of death with a
strangling cord about his neck; even the strong blow of an ax as he
slept on his bed, snatching from him the life that he had debased of all
its beauty, without the saving chance of repentance in the end.
She had thought of doing it with her own hand; a hundred ways she had
planned and contrived it in her mind, goaded on nearer and nearer to it
by his inhuman oppressions day by day. But her heart had recoiled from
it as a task for the hand of a man. If a man could be raised up to it, a
man who had suffered servitude with her, a man who would strike for the
double vengeance, and the love of her in his heart!
She went to the door again, gripping the stove-lid lifter in her little
hand, as the jangle of harness came to her when Joe passed with the
team. He rode by toward the field, the sun on his broad back, slouching
forward as his heavy horses plodded onward. The man in him was asleep
yet, yes; but there was a pit of fire as deep as a volcano's throat in
his slumbering soul.
If she could lift him up to it, if she could pluck the heart out of him
and warm it in her own hot breast, then there would stand the man for
her need. For Isom Chase would not die. He would live on and on, like a
worm in wood, until some strong hand fed him to the flames.