LEST I FORGET
Mrs. Newbolt was cutting splints for her new sun-bonnet out of a
pasteboard box. She hitched her chair back a little farther into the
shadow of the porch, for the impertinent sun was winking on her bright
scissors, dazzling her eyes.
It was past the turn of the afternoon; a soft wind was moving with
indolence among the tender leaves, sleepy from the scents of lilac and
apple bloom which it had drunk on its way. And now it loitered under the
eaves of the porch to mix honeysuckle with its stream of drowsy sweets,
like a chemist of Araby the Blest preparing a perfume for the harem's
pride.
There was the gleam of fresh paint on the walls of the old house. The
steps of the porch had been renewed with strong timber, the rotting
siding had been replaced. Mrs. Newbolt's chair no longer drew squeaks
and groans from the floor of the porch as she rocked, swaying gently as
her quick shears shaped the board. New flooring had been laid there, and
painted a handsome gray; the falling trellis between gate and door had
been plumbed and renewed.
New life was everywhere about the old place, yet its old charm was
undisturbed, its old homeliness was unchanged. Comfort had come to
dejection, tidiness had been restored to beauty. The windows of the old
house now looked upon the highway boldly, owing the world nothing in the
way of glass.
Where the sprawling rail fence had lain for nearly forty years, renewed
piecemeal from time to time as it rotted away, its corners full of
brambles, its stakes and riders overrun with poison-vine; where this
brown, jointed structure had stretched, like a fossil worm, a great
transformation had come. The rails were gone, the brambles were cleared
away, and a neat white fence of pickets stretched in front of the house.
This was flanked on either hand by a high fence of woven wire, new to
that country then, at once the wonder of the old inhabitants, the
despair of prowling hogs and the bewilderment of hens. There was a gate
now where the old gap had been; it swung shut behind one with an eager
little spring, which startled agents and strangers with the sharpness of
its click.
The shrubbery had been cleared of dead wood, and the underlying
generations of withered honeysuckle vines which had spread under the
green upon the old trellis, had been taken away. Freshness was there,
the mark of an eager, vigorous hand. The matted blue grass which sodded
the yard had been cut and trimmed to lines along the path. A great and
happy change had come over the old place, so long under the shadow.
People stopped to admire it as they passed.
"Well, well; it's the doin's of that boy, Joe Newbolt!" they said.
Mrs. Newbolt paused in her clipping of bonnet slats to make a menacing
snip at a big white rooster which came picking around the steps. The
fowl stretched his long neck and turned his bright eye up to his
mistress with a slanting of the head.
"How did you git out of that pen, you old scalawag?" she demanded.
The rooster took a long and dignified step away from her, where he
stood, with little appearance of alarm, turning his head, questioning
her with his shining eye. She made a little lunge with her shears.
"Yes, I'm goin' to tell Joe on you, you scamp!" she threatened.
"_Coo-doot-cut!_" said the rooster, looking about him with a long
stretching of the neck.
"Yes, you better begin to cackle over it," said she, speaking in solemn
reproof, as if addressing a child, "for Joe he'll just about cut your
sassy old head clean off! If he don't do that, he'll trim down that wing
of yourn till you can't bat a skeeter off your nose with it, you
redick-lous old critter!"
But it was not the threat of Joe that had drawn the cry of alarm from
the fowl. The sound of steps was growing along the path from the front
gate, and the fowl scampered off to the cover of the gooseberry vines,
as Mrs. Newbolt turned to see who the visitor was. The scissors fell
from her lap, and her spool trundled off across the porch.
"Laws, Sol Greening, you give me a start, sneakin' up like that!"
Sol laughed out of his whiskers, with a big, loose-rolling sound, and
sat on the porch without waiting to be asked.
"I walked up over the grass," said he. "It's as soft under your feet as
plowed ground. They say Joe's got one of them lawn-cutters to mow it
with?"
"Well, what if he has?" she wanted to know. "He's got a good many things
and improvements around here that you folks that's lived here for
seventy years and more never seen before, I reckon."
"He sure is a great feller for steppin' out his own way!" marveled Sol.
"I never seen such a change in a place inside of a year as Joe's made in
this one--never in my mortal borned days. It was a lucky day for Joe
when Judge Maxwell took a likin' to him that way."
Mrs. Newbolt was looking away toward the hills, a dreamy cast in her
placid face.
"Yes," said she, "there's no denyin' that. But Joe he'd 'a' got along,
Judge Maxwell or no Judge Maxwell. Only it'd 'a' been slower and harder
for him."
"He would 'a'," nodded Sol, without reservation. "No discountin' on
that. That boy beats anything this here country ever perduced, barrin'
none, and I ain't sayin' that, either, ma'am, just to please you."
"Much thanks I owe you for what you think of Joe!" said she, scornfully.
"You was ready enough, not so very long ago, to set the whole world
ag'in' him if you could."
"Well, circumstantial evidence--" began Sol.
"Oh, circumstantial nest-eggs!" said she, impatiently. "You'd known Joe
all his life, and you know very well he didn't shoot Isom Chase any more
than you done it yourself!"
"Well, mistakes is humant," sighed Sol, taking advantage of that
universal absolution. "They say Judge Maxwell's goin' to leave
everything he's got to Joe, and he's got a considerable, I reckon."
"I don't know as Joe'd take it," said she, folding her hands in her lap.
"Judge Maxwell had a hard time to git Joe to let him put in the money to
do things around here, and send him to college over in Shelbyville last
winter. Joe let him do it on the understandin' that it was a loan, to be
paid interest on and paid back when he was able."
"Well, from the start he's makin' it don't look like the judge 'd have
very long to wait for his money," said Sol. "Twenty acres of apple trees
all in a orchard together, and twenty acres of strawberries set out
betwixt and between the rows!"
He looked over the hillside and little apron of valley where Joe's young
orchard spread. Each tiny tree was a plume of leaves; the rows stretched
out to the hilltop, and over.
"I can figger out how twenty acres of apples can be picked and took care
of," reflected Sol, as if going over with himself something which he had
given thought to before, "but I'll be durned if I can figger out how any
man's goin' to pick and take care of twenty acres of strawberries!"
"Joe knows," said his mother.
"Well, I hope he does," sighed Sol, the sigh being breathed to give
expression of what remained unspoken. No matter what his hopes, his
doubts were unshaken.
No man had ever taken care of twenty acres of strawberries--nor the
twentieth part of one acre, for that matter--in that community. No man
could do it, according to the bone-deep belief of Sol and his kind.
"Joe says that's only a little dab of a start," said she.
"Cree-mo-nee!" said Sol, his mouth standing open like a mussel shell in
the sun. "When'll they be ripe?"
"Next spring."
"Which?" queried Sol, perking his head in puzzled and impertinent way,
very much as the rooster had done a little while before him.
"Next spring, I said," she repeated, nodding over her bonnet, into which
she was slipping the splints.
"No crop this year?"
"No; Joe says it weakens the plants to bear the first year they're set.
It takes the strength away from the roots, he says. He goes through the
field and snips off every bloom he sees when he's hoein' among 'em, and
I help him between times. We don't git all of 'em, by a mighty sight,
though."
Sol shook his head with wise depreciation.
"Throwin' away money," said he.
"Did you ever raise any strawberries?" she inquired, putting down the
bonnet, bringing Sol up with a sharp look.
"Reckon I raised as many as Joe ever did, and them mainly with a spoon,"
said Sol.
The joke was not entirely new; it could not have been original with Sol
by at least three hundred years. But it did very well as an excuse for
Sol to laugh. He was always looking for excuses to laugh, that was the
one virtue in him. Without his big laugh he would have been an empty
sack without a bottom.
"Joe got them rows mighty purty and straight," said Sol, squinting along
the apple trees.
"Yes, he set 'em out accordin' to geog'aphy," said she.
"Which?" said Sol.
"Ge-og'a-phy, I said. Didn't you never hear tell of that before neither,
Sol Greening?"
"Oh," said Sol, lightly, as if that made it all as plain to him as his
own cracked thumbs. "How much does Joe reckon he'll git off of that
patch of berries when it begins to bear?"
"I never heard him say he expected to make anything," said she, "but I
read in one of them fruit-growin' papers he takes that they make as much
as three hundred dollars an acre from 'em back in Ellinoi."
Sol got up, slowly; took a backward step into the yard; filled his
lungs, opened his mouth, made his eyes round. Under the internal
pressure his whiskers stood on end and his face grew red. "Oh, you git
_out_!" said he.
"I can show it to you in the paper," she offered, making as if to put
aside her sewing.
Sol laid a finger on his palm and stood with his head bent. After a bit
he looked up, his eyes still round.
"If he even makes a hundred, that'll be two thousand dollars a year!"
It was such a magnificent sum that Sol did not feel like taking the
familiarity with it of mentioning it aloud. He whispered it, giving it
large, rich sound.
"Why, I reckon it would be," said she, offhand and careless, just as if
two thousand a year, more or less, mattered very little to Joe.
"That's more than I ever made in my whole dad-blame life," said Sol.
"Well, whose fault is it, Sol?" asked she.
"I don't believe it can be done!"
"You'll see," she assured him, comfortably.
"And Joe he went and stuck to the old place," reflected Sol. "He might
'a' got some better land for his sperimentin' and projeckin' if he'd 'a'
looked around."
"He was offered land, all the land a man could want," said she. "Ollie
wanted him to take over the Chase home place and farm it when she and
Morgan married and left, but Joe he said no; the Newbolts had made their
failures here, he said, and here they was goin' to make their success.
He had to redeem the past, Joe said, and wipe out the mistakes, and show
folks what a Newbolt can do when he gits his foot set right."
"He'll do it, too," said Sol, without a reserved grudge or jealousy;
"he's doin' it already."
"Yes, I always knew Joe would," said she. "When he was nothing but a
little shaver he'd read the _Cottage Encyclopedy_ and the _Imitation_
and the Bible, from back to back. I said then he'd be governor of this
state, and he will."
She spoke confidently, nodding over her work.
"Shucks! How do you know he will?"
Sol's faith was not strong in this high-flying forecast. It seemed to
him that it was crowding things a little too far.
"You'll live to see it," said she.
Sol sat with his back against a pillar of the porch, one foot on the
ground, the other standing on the boards in front of him, his hands
locked about his doubled knee. He sat there and looked up at the Widow
Newbolt, raising his eyebrows and rolling his eyes, but not lifting his
head, which was slightly bent. "Well, what's to be's to be," said he.
"When's he goin' to marry?"
"When he's through goin' to college."
"That'll be two or three years, maybe?"
"Maybe."
"Hum; Alice Price she'll be gettin' purty well along by that time."
"She's not quite a year older than Joe," Mrs. Newbolt corrected him,
with some asperity, "and she's one of the kind that'll keep. Well, I was
married myself, and had a baby, when I was nineteen. But that's no
sign."
"Joe'll build, I reckon, before then?" guessed Sol.
"No; Alice don't want him to. She wants to come here a bride, to this
house, like I come to it long, long ago. We'll fix up and make ready for
her, little by little, as we go along. It'll be bringin' back the
pleasure of the old days, it'll be like livin' my courtship and marriage
over. This was a fine house in the days that Peter brought me here, for
Peter, he had money then, and he put the best there was goin' into it."
"It looks better than any house around here now, since you fixed it up
and painted it," said Sol.
"It's better inside than outside," said she, with a woman's pride in a
home, which justifies her warmth for it. "We had it all plastered and
varnished. The doors and casin's and all the trimmin's are walnut, worth
their weight in gold, now, almost, Judge Maxwell says."
"Yes, the curly walnut's all gone, years and years ago," said Sol.
"It passed away with the pioneers," sighed she.
"I suppose they'll build in time, though?" Sol said.
"I 'low they will, maybe, after I'm gone," said she.
"Well, well!" said Sol. He sat silent a little while. "Folks never have
got over wonderin' on the way she took up with Joe," he said.
Mrs. Newbolt flashed up in a breath.
"Why should anybody wonder, I'd like for you to tell me?" she demanded.
"Joe he's good enough for her, and too good for anybody else in this
county! Who else was there for Joe, who else was there for Alice?"
Sol did not attempt to answer. It was beyond him, the way some people
figgered, he thought in the back of his mind. There was his own girl,
Tilda Bell. He considered her the equal to any Newbolt that ever
straddled a horse and rode over from Kentucky. But then, you never could
tell how tastes run.
"Well, reckon I'll have to be rackin' out home," said he, getting up,
tiptoeing to take the cramp out of his legs.
"Yes, and I'll have to be stirrin' the pots to get supper for my boy
Joe," she said.
The smoke from her kitchen fire rose white as she put in dry sumac to
give it a start. It mounted straight as a plume for a little way, until
it met the cool air of evening which was beginning to fall. There it
spread, like a floating silken scarf, and settled over the roof. It
draped down slowly over the walls, until it enveloped the old home like
the benediction of a loving heart.
The sun was descending the ladder of the hills; low now it stood above
them, the valley in shadow more than half its breadth, a tender flood of
gold upon the slope where the new orchard waved its eager shoots; the
blessing of a day was passing in the promise of a day to come.
Out of the kitchen came the cheerful sound of batter for the corn bread
being beaten in the bowl, and with it Sarah Newbolt's voice in song:
_Near the cross, O Lamb of God_----
The beating of the batter dimmed the next line. Then it rose to the
close----
_Let me walk from day to day,
With its shadow o'er me._
The clamp of the oven door was heard, and silence followed.
Sarah was standing on the porch again wiping her hands on her apron,
looking away toward the fields. The sun was dipping now into the forest
cresting the hills; the white rooster was pacing the outside of the wire
enclosure from which he had escaped, in frantic search of an opening to
admit him to his perch, his proud head all rumpled in his baffled
eagerness, his dangling wattles fiery red.
The smoke had found the low places in garden and lawn, where it hovered;
a dove wailed from the old orchard, where a pair of them nested year
after year; a little child-wind came with soft fingers, and laid them on
the waiting woman's hair.
Her face quickened with a smile. Joe was coming home from the field.
Over his shoulder he carried his hoe, and as he came on toward her in
yard-long strides his mother thought of the young soldiers she had seen
march away to the war, carrying their guns in that same free confidence
of careless strength. His hat was pushed back from his forehead, the
collar of his blue flannel shirt was open. His boyish suspenders had
been put away in favor of a belt, which was tight-drawn about his slim
waist.
Very trim and strong, and confident he looked, with the glow of youth in
his cheeks, and the spark of happiness in his gray eyes. He was well set
in the form of a man now, the months since his imprisonment having
brought him much to fasten upon and hold.
Joe made the same great splashing that he had made on that spring
evening of a year gone by, when he came home from work to step into the
shadow which so quickly grew into a storm. But there was no shadow ahead
of him this night; there was no somber thing to bend down the high
serenity of his happy heart.
He stood before the glass hung above the wash bench and smoothed his
hair. Mrs. Newbolt was standing by the stove, one of the lids partly
removed, some white thing in her hand which she seemed hesitating over
consigning to the flames.
"What've you got there, Mother?" he asked cheerily as he turned to take
his place at the waiting table.
"Laws," said she, in some perturbation, her face flushed, holding the
thing in her hand up to his better view, "it's that old paper I got from
Isom when I--a year ago! I mislaid it when the men was paintin' and
plasterin', and I just now run across it stuck back of the coffee jar."
For a moment Joe stood behind her, silently, looking over her shoulder
at the signature of Isom Chase.
"It's no use now," said she, her humiliation over being confronted with
this reminder of her past perfidy against her beloved boy almost
overwhelming her. "We might as well put it in the stove and git it out
of sight."
Joe looked at her with a smile, his face still solemn and serious for
all its youth and the fires of new-lit hope behind his eyes. He laid his
hand upon her shoulder assuringly, and closed the stove.
"Give it to me, Mother," said he, reaching out his hand.
She placed the bond of his transference to Isom Chase in it, and those
old heart-wrung tears of hers, which had been dry upon her cheeks now
for many a happy day, welled, and flowed down silently.
Joe folded the paper.
"I'll keep it, Mother," said he, "so that it will stand as a reminder to
me in prosperity that I was once poor and in bondage; and in my
happiness that it may tell me of the days when I was forsaken and in
prison, with only my mother's faithful hand to comfort me.
"I'll put it away and keep it, Mother, lest in my prosperity some day I
may forget the Lord; forget that He giveth, and that He taketh away,
also; that His hand chastiseth in the same measure that it bestows
blessings upon us. I'll leave it up here, Mother, on the old shelf;
right where I can see it every time I take down the Book."
W. B. C.