He began life characteristically, depreciated and disparaged. When he was
a white, thin, big-headed baby, his mother, stripping the suds from her
lean arms, used to inveigh to her neighbors against his existence. "Wa'n't
it just like that _do_-less Lem Warren, not even to leave me foot-free
when he died, but a baby coming!"
"_Do_-less," in the language of our valley, means a combination of
shiftless and impractical, particularly to be scorned.
Later, as he began to have some resemblance to the appearance he was to
wear throughout life, her resentment at her marriage, which she considered
the one mistake of her life, kept pace with his growth. "Look at him!" she
cried to anyone who would listen. "Ain't that Warren, all over? Did any of
_my_ folks ever look so like a born fool? Shut your mouth, for the Lord's
sake, Lem, and maybe you won't scare folks quite so much."
Lem had a foolish, apologetic grin with which he always used to respond to
these personalities, hanging his head to one side and opening and shutting
his big hands nervously.
The tumble-down, two-roomed house in which the Warrens lived was across
the road from the schoolhouse, and Mrs. Warren's voice was penetrating.
Lem was accepted throughout his school-life at the home estimate. The
ugly, overgrown boy, clad in cast-off, misfit clothing was allowed to play
with the other children only on condition that he perform all the hard,
uninteresting parts of any game. Inside the schoolroom it was the same.
He never learned to shut his mouth, and his speech was always halting and
indistinct, so that he not only did not recite well in class, but was
never in one of the school entertainments. He chopped the wood and brought
it in, swept the floor and made the fires, and then listened in grinning,
silent admiration while the others, arrayed in their best, spoke pieces
and sang songs.
He was not "smart at his books" and indeed did not learn even to read very
fluently. This may have been partly because the only books he ever saw
were old school books, the use of which was given him free on account of
his mother's poverty. He was not allowed, of course to take them from the
schoolroom. But if he was not good at book-learning he was not without
accomplishments. He early grew large for his age, and strong from much
chopping of wood and drawing of water for his mother's washings, and he
was the best swimmer of all those who bathed in the cold, swift mountain
stream which rushes near the schoolhouse. The chief consequence of this
expertness was that in the summer he was forced to teach each succeeding
generation of little boys to swim and dive. They tyrannized over him
unmercifully--as, in fact, everyone did.
Nothing made his mother more furious than such an exhibition of what she
called "Lem's meachin'ness." "Ain't you got no stand-up _in_ ye?" she was
wont to exhort him angrily. "If you don't look out for yourself in this
world, you needn't think anybody else is gunto!"
The instructions in ethics he received at her hands were the only ones he
ever knew, for, up to his fourteenth year, he never had clothes
respectable enough to wear to church, and after that he had other things
to think of. Fourteen years is what we call in our State "over school
age." It was a date to which Mrs. Warren had looked forward with
eagerness. After that, the long, unprofitable months of enforced schooling
would be over, Lem would be earning steady wages, and she could sit back
and "live decent."
It seemed to her more than she could bear, that, almost upon her son's
birthday, she was stricken down with paralysis. It was the first calamity
for which she could not hold her marriage responsible, and her bitterness
thereupon extended itself to fate in general. She cannot have been a
cheerful house-mate during the next ten years, when Lem was growing
silently to manhood.
He was in demand as "help" on the farms about him, on account of his great
strength and faithfulness, although the farmers found him exasperatingly
slow and, when it was a question of animals, not always sure to obey
orders. He could be trusted to be kind to horses, unlike most hired men we
get nowadays, but he never learned "how to get the work out of their
hide." It was his way, on a steep hill with a heavy load, to lay down the
whip, get out, and put his own powerful shoulder to the wheel. If this
failed, he unloaded part of the logs and made two trips of it. The
uncertainty of his progress can be imagined. The busy and impatient farmer
and sawyer at the opposite ends of his route were driven to exhaust their
entire vocabulary of objurgation on him. He was, they used to inform him
in conclusion, "the most _do_-less critter the Lord ever made!"
He was better with cows and sheep--"feller-feelin," his mother said
scornfully, watching him feed a sick ewe--and he had here, even in
comparison with his fellow-men, a fair degree of success. It was indeed
the foundation of what material prosperity he ever enjoyed. A farmer,
short of cash, paid him one year with three or four ewes and a ram. He
worked for another farmer to pay for the rent of a pasture and had, that
first year, as everybody admitted, almighty good luck with them. There
were several twin lambs born that spring and everyone lived. Lem used to
make frequent night visits during lambing-time to the pasture to make sure
that all was well.
I remember as a little girl starting back from some village festivity late
one spring night and seeing a lantern twinkle far up on the mountainside.
"Lem Warren out fussin' with his sheep," some one of my elders remarked.
Later, as we were almost home, we saw the lantern on the road ahead of us
and stopped the horses, country-fashion, for an interchange of salutation.
Looking out from under the shawl in which I was wrapped, I saw his tall
figure stooping over something held under his coat. The lantern lighted
his weather-beaten face and the expression of his eyes as he looked down
at the little white head against his breast.
"You're foolish, Lem," said
my uncle. "The ewe won't own it if you take it away so long the first
night."
"I--I--know," stuttered Lem, bringing out the words with his usual
difficulty; "but it's mortal cold up on the mounting for little fellers!
I'll bring him up as a cosset."
The incident reminded me vaguely of something I had read about, and it has
remained in my memory.
After we drove on I remember that there were laughing speculations about
what language old Ma'am Warren would use at having another cosset brought
to the house. Not that it could make any more work for her, since Lem did
all that was done about the housekeeping. Chained to her chair by her
paralyzed legs, as she was, she could accomplish nothing more than to sit
and cavil at the management of the universe all day, until Lem came home,
gave her her supper, and put her to bed.
Badly run as she thought the world, for a time it was more favorable to
her material prosperity than she had ever known it. Lem's flock of sheep
grew and thrived. For years nobody in our valley has tried to do much with
sheep because of dogs, and all Lem's neighbors told him that some fine
morning he would find his flock torn and dismembered. They even pointed
out the particular big collie dog who would most likely go "sheep-mad."
Lena's heavy face drew into anxious, grotesque wrinkles at this kind of
talk, and he visited the uplying pasture more and more frequently.
One morning, just before dawn, he came, pale and shamefaced, to the house
of the owner of the collie. The family, roused from bed by his knocking,
made out from his speech, more incoherent than usual, that he was begging
their pardon for having killed their dog. "I saw wh-where he'd bit th-the
throats out of two ewes that w-was due to lamb in a few days and I guess
I--I--I must ha' gone kind o' crazy. They was ones I liked special. I'd
brought 'em up myself. They--they was all over blood, you know."
They peered at him in the gray light, half-afraid of the tall apparition.
"How _could_ you kill a great big dog like Jack?" They asked wonderingly.
In answer he held out his great hands and his huge corded arms, red with
blood up to the elbow. "I heard him worrying another sheep and I--I
just--killed him."
One of the children now cried out: "But I shut Jackie up in the woodshed
last night!"
Someone ran to open the door and the collie bounded out. Lem turned white
in thankfulness, "I'm _mortal_ glad," he stammered. "I felt awful
bad--afterward. I knew your young ones thought a sight of Jack."
"But what dog did you kill?" they asked.
Some of the men went back up on the mountain with him and found, torn in
pieces and scattered wide in bloody fragments, as if destroyed by some
great revenging beast of prey, the body of a big gray wolf. Once in a
while one wanders over the line from the Canada forests and comes down
into our woods, following the deer.
The hard-headed farmers who looked on that savage scene drew back from the
shambling man beside them in the only impulse of respect they ever felt
for him. It was the one act of his life to secure the admiration of his
fellow-men; it was an action of which he himself always spoke in horror
and shame.
Certainly his marriage aroused no admiration. It was universally regarded
as a most addle-pated, imbecile affair from beginning to end. One of the
girls who worked at the hotel in the village "got into trouble," as our
vernacular runs, and as she came originally from our district and had gone
to school there, everyone knew her and was talking about the scandal. Old
Ma'am Warren was of the opinion, spiritedly expressed, that "Lottie was a
fool not to make that drummer marry her. She could have, if she'd gone the
right way to work." But the drummer remained persistently absent.
One evening Lem, starting for his sheep-pasture for his last look for the
night, heard someone crying down by the river and then, as he paused to
listen, heard it no more. He jumped from the bridge without stopping to
set down his lantern, knowing well the swiftness of the water, and caught
the poor cowardly thing as she came, struggling and gasping, down with the
current. He took her home and gave her dry clothes of his mother's. Then
leaving the scared and repentant child by his hearth, he set out on foot
for the minister's house and dragged him back over the rough country
roads.
When Ma'am Warren awoke the next morning, Lem did not instantly answer her
imperious call, as he had done for so many years. Instead, a red-eyed girl
in one of Mrs. Warren's own nightgowns came to the door and said
shrinkingly: "Lem slept in the barn last night. He give his bed to me; but
he'll be in soon. I see him fussin' around with the cow."
Ma'am Warren stared, transfixed with a premonition of irremediable evil.
"What you doin' here?" she demanded, her voice devoid of expression
through stupefaction.
The girl held down her head. "Lem and I were married last night," she
said.
Then Mrs. Warren found her voice.
When Lem came in it was to a scene of the furious wrangling which was
henceforth to fill his house.
"... to saddle himself with such trash as you!" his mother was saying
ragingly.
His wife answered in kind, her vanity stung beyond endurance. "Well, you
can be sure he'd never have got him a wife any other way! Nobody but a
girl hard put to it would take up with a drivel-headed fool like Lem
Warren!"
And then the bridegroom appeared at the door and both women turned their
attention to him.
When the baby was born, Lottie was very sick. Lem took care of his mother,
his wife, and the new baby for weeks and weeks. It was at lambing-time,
and his flock suffered from lack of attention, although as much as he
dared he left his sick women and tended his ewes. He ran in debt, too, to
the grocery-stores, for he could work very little and earned almost
nothing. Of course the neighbors helped out, but it was no cheerful
morning's work to care for the vitriolic old woman, and Lottie was too
sick for anyone but Lem to handle. We did pass the baby around from house
to house during the worst of his siege, to keep her off Lem's hands; but
when Lottie began to get better it was haying-time; everybody was more
than busy, and the baby was sent back.
Lottie lingered in semi-invalidism for about a year and then died, Lem
holding her hand in his. She tried to say something to him that last
night, so the neighbors who were there reported, but her breath failed her
and she could only lie staring at him from eyes that seemed already to
look from the other side of the grave.
He was heavily in debt when he was thus left with a year-old child not his
own, but he gave Lottie a decent funeral and put up over her grave a stone
stating that she was "Charlotte, loved wife of Lemuel Warren," and that
she died in the eighteenth year of her life. He used to take the little
girl and put flowers on the grave, I remember.
Then he went to work again. His sandy hair was already streaked with gray,
though he was but thirty. The doctor said the reason for this phenomenon
was the great strain of his year of nursing; and indeed throughout that
period of his life no one knew when he slept, if ever. He was always up
and dressed when anyone else was, and late at night we could look across
and see his light still burning and know that he was rubbing Lottie's back
or feeding little Susie.
All that was changed now, of course. Susie was a strong, healthy child
who slept all through the night in her little crib by her stepfather's
corded bed, and in the daytime went everywhere he did. Wherever he "worked
out" he used to give her her nap wrapped in a horse blanket on the hay in
the barn; and he carried her in a sling of his own contrivance up to his
sheep-pasture. Old Ma'am Warren disliked the pretty, laughing child so
bitterly that he was loath to leave her at home; but when he was there
with her, for the first time he asserted himself against his mother,
bidding her, when she began to berate the child's parentage, to "be
still!" with so strange and unexpected an accent of authority that she was
quite frightened.
Susie was very fond of her stepfather at first, but when she came of
school age, mixed more with the other children, and heard laughing,
contemptuous remarks about him, the frank and devouring egotism of
childhood made her ashamed of her affection, ashamed of him with his
uncouth gait, his mouth always sagging open, his stammering, ignorant
speech, which the other children amused themselves by mocking. Though he
was prospering again with his sheep, owned the pasture and his house now,
and had even built on another room as well as repairing the older part, he
spent little on his own adornment. It all went for pretty clothes for
Susie, for better food, for books and pictures, for tickets for Susie to
go to the circus and the county fair. Susie knew this and loved him by
stealth for it, but the intolerably sensitive vanity of her twelve years
made her wretched to be seen in public with him.
Divining this, he ceased going with her to school-picnics and
Sunday-school parties, where he had been a most useful pack-animal, and,
dressing her in her best with his big calloused hands, watched her from
the window join a group of the other children. His mother predicted
savagely that his "spoilin' on that bad-blooded young one would bring her
to no good end," and when, at fifteen, Susie began to grow very pretty and
saucy and willful and to have beaux come to see her, the old woman exulted
openly over Lem's helpless anxiety.
He was quite gray now, although not yet forty-five, and so stooped that he
passed for an old man. He owned a little farm, his flock of sheep was the
largest in the township, and Susie was expected to make a good marriage in
spite of her antecedents.
And then Frank Gridley's oldest son, Ed, came back from business college
with store clothes and city hats and polished tan shoes, and began idling
about, calling on the girls. From the first, he and Susie ran together
like two drops of water. Bronson Perkins, a cousin of mine, a big, silent,
ruminative lad who had long hung about Susie, stood no show at all. One
night in county-fair week, Susie, who had gone to the fair with a crowd of
girl friends, was not at home at ten o'clock. Lem, sitting in his doorway
and watching the clock, heard the approach of the laughing, singing
straw-ride in which she had gone, with a long breath of relief; but the
big hay-wagon did not stop at his gate.
He called after it in a harsh voice and was told that "Ed Gridley and she
went off to the hotel to get supper. He said he'd bring her home later."
Lem went out to the barn, hitched up the faster of his two heavy
plow-horses and drove from his house to Woodville, eight miles and
up-hill, in forty-five minutes. When he went into the hotel, the clerk
told him that the two he sought had had supper served in a private room.
Lem ascertained which room and broke the door in with one heave of his
shoulders. Susie sprang up from the disordered supper-table and ran to him
like a frightened child, clinging to him desperately and crying out that
Ed scared her so!
"It's all right now, Susie," he said gently, not looking at the man.
"Poppa's come to take you home."
The man felt his dignity wounded. He began to protest boisterously and to
declare that he was ready to marry the girl--"_now_, this instant, if you
choose!"
Lem put one arm about Susie. "I didn't come to make you marry her. I come
to keep you from doin' it," he said, speaking clearly for once in his
life. "Susie shan't marry a hound that'd do this." And as the other
advanced threateningly on him, he struck him a great blow across the mouth
that sent him unconscious to the ground.
Then Lem went out, paid for the broken lock, and drove home with Susie
behind the foundered plow-horse.
The next spring her engagement to Bronson Perkins was announced, though
everybody said they didn't see what use it was for folks to get engaged
that couldn't ever get married. Mr. Perkins, Bronson's father, was daft,
not enough to send him to the asylum, but so that he had to be watched all
the time to keep him from doing himself a hurt. He had a horrid way, I
remember, of lighting matches and holding them up to his bared arm until
the smell of burning flesh went sickeningly through the house and sent
someone in a rush to him. Of course it was out of the question to bring a
young bride to such a home. Apparently there were years of waiting before
them, and Susie was made of no stuff to endure a long engagement.
As a matter of fact, they were married that fall, as soon as Susie could
get her things ready. Lem took old Mr. Perkins into the room Susie left
vacant. "'Twon't be much more trouble taking care of two old people than
one," he explained briefly.
Ma'am Warren's comments on this action have been embalmed forever in the
delighted memories of our people. We have a taste for picturesque and
forceful speech.
From that time we always saw the lunatic and the bent
shepherd together. The older man grew quieter under Lem's care than he had
been for years, and if he felt one of his insane impulses overtaking him,
ran totteringly to grasp his protector's arm until, quaking and shivering,
he was himself again. Lem used to take him up to the sheep-pasture for the
day sometimes. He liked it up there himself, he said, and maybe 'twould be
good for Uncle Hi. He often reported with pride that the old man talked as
sensible as anybody, "get him off where it's quiet." Indeed, when Mr.
Perkins died, six years later, we had forgotten that he was anything but
a little queer, and he had known many happy, lucid hours with his
grandchildren.
Susie and Bronson had two boys--sturdy, hearty children, in whom Lem took
the deepest, shyest pride. He loved to take them off into the woods with
him and exulted in their quick intelligence and strong little bodies.
Susie got into the way of letting him take a good deal of the care of
them.
It was Lem who first took alarm about the fall that little Frank had, down
the cellar stairs. He hurt his spine somehow--our local doctor could not
tell exactly how--and as the injury only made him limp a little, nobody
thought much about it, until he began to have difficulty in walking. Then
Lem sent for a doctor from Rutland who, as soon as he examined the child,
stuck out his lower lip and rubbed his chin ominously. He pronounced the
trouble something with a long name which none of us had ever heard, and
said that Frank would be a hopeless cripple if it, were not cured soon.
There was, he said, a celebrated doctor from Europe now traveling in this
country who had a wonderful new treatment for this condition. But under
the circumstances--he looked about the plain farm sitting-room--he
supposed that was out of the question.
"What did the doctor from foreign parts ask?" queried Bronson, and, being
informed of some of the customary prices for major operations, fell back
hopeless. Susie, her pretty, childish face drawn and blanched into a wan
beauty, put her arms about her sick little son and looked at her
stepfather. He had never failed her.
He did not fail her now. He sold the land he had accumulated field by
field; he sold the great flock of sheep, every one of which he could call
by name; he mortgaged the house over the protesting head of his now
bedridden mother; he sold the horse and cow, and the very sticks of
furniture from the room where Susie had grown up and where the crazy
grandfather of Susie's children had known a peaceful old age and death.
Little Frank was taken to New York to the hospital to have the great
surgeon operate on him--he is there yet, almost completely recovered and
nearly ready to come home.
Back in Hillsboro, Lem now began life all over again, hiring out humbly to
his neighbors and only stipulating that he should have enough free time to
take care of his mother. Three weeks ago she had her last stroke of
paralysis and, after lying speechless for a few days, passed away, grim to
the last, by the expression in her fierce old eyes.
The day after her funeral Lem did not come to work as he was expected. We
went over to his house and found, to our consternation, that he was not
out of bed.
"Be ye sick, Lem?" asked my uncle.
He looked at us over the bedclothes with his old foolish, apologetic
smile. "Kind o' lazy, I guess," he whispered, closing his eyes.
The doctor was put out by the irregularity of the case.
"I can't make out anything _really_ the trouble!" he said. "Only the
wheels don't go round as fast as they ought. Call it failing heart action
if you want a label."
The wheels ran more and more slowly until it was apparent to all of us
that before long they would stop altogether. Susie and Bronson were in New
York with little Frank, so that Lem's care during his last days devolved
on the haphazard services of the neighbors. He was out of his head most of
the time, though never violent, and all through the long nights lay flat
on his back, looking at the ceiling with bright, blank eyes, driving his
ox-team, skidding logs, plowing in stony ground and remembering to favor
the off-horse whose wind wasn't good, planting, hoeing, tending his sheep,
and teaching obstinate lambs to drink. He used quaint, coaxing names for
these, such as a mother uses for her baby. He was up in the
mountain-pasture a good deal, we gathered, and at night, from his constant
mention of how bright the stars shone. And sometimes, when he was in
evident pain, his delusion took the form that Susie, or the little boys,
had gone up with him, and got lost in the woods.
I was on duty the night he died. We thought a change was near, because he
had lain silent all day, and we hoped he would come to himself when he
awoke from this stupor. Near midnight he began to talk again, and I could
not make out at first whether he was still wandering or not. "Hold on
hard, Uncle Hi," I heard him whisper.
A spoon fell out of my hand and clattered against a plate. He gave a great
start and tried to sit up. "Yes, mother--coming!" he called hoarsely, and
then looked at me with his own eyes. "I must ha' forgot about mother's
bein' gone," he apologized sheepishly.
I took advantage of this lucid interval to try to give him some medicine
the doctor had left. "Take a swallow of this," I said, holding the glass
to his lips.
"What's it for?" he asked.
"It's a heart stimulant," I explained. "The doctor
said if we could get you through to-night you have a
good chance."
His face drew together in grotesque lines of anxiety. "Little Frank
worse?"
"Oh, no, he's doing finely."
"Susie all right?"
"Why, yes," I said wonderingly.
"Nothing the matter with her other boy?"
"Why, no, no," I told him. "Everybody's all right Here, just take this
down."
He turned away his head on the pillow and murmured something I did not
catch. When I asked him what he said, he smiled feebly as in deprecation
of his well-known ridiculous ways. "I'm just as much obliged to you," he
said, "but if everybody's all right, I guess I won't have any medicine."
He looked at me earnestly. "I'm--I'm real tired," he said.
It came out in one great breath--apparently his last, for he did not move
after that, and his ugly, slack-mouthed face was at once quite still. Its
expression made me think of the time I had seen it as a child, by
lantern-light, as he looked down at the new-born lamb on his breast.