ABSALOM
Once, in the duck-season, as I lay hidden among the marsh-reeds with
an older boy, a crow passed over us, flying low. Looking up at him, I
realized for the first time how beautiful a creature was this common
black thief of ours—how splendid his strength and the sheen of his
coat, how proudly graceful the sweep and curves of his great slow
wings. The boy beside me fired, and in a flash what I had been admiring
changed—even as it stopped headlong in mid-air—into a hideous thing,
an evil confusion of jumbled feathers. The awful swiftness of that
transition from beauty and power to hateful carrion haunted me for a
long time.
I half expected that Abner Beech would crumple up in some such
distressing way, all of a sudden, when I told him that his son Jeff was
in open rebellion, and intended to go off and enlist. It was incredible
to the senses that any member of the household should set at defiance
the patriarchal will of its head. But that the offence should come from
placid, slow-witted, good-natured Jeff, and that it should involve the
appearance of a Beech in a blue uniform—these things staggered the
imagination. It was clear that something prodigious must happen.
As it turned out, nothing happened at all. The farmer and his wife
sat out on the veranda, as was their wont of a summer evening, rarely
exchanging a word, but getting a restful sort of satisfaction in
together surveying their barns and haystacks and the yellow-brown
stretch of fields beyond.
“Jeff says he's goin' to-night to Tecumseh, an' he's goin' to enlist,
an' if you want him to run over to say good-by you're to let him know
there.”
I leant upon my newly-acquired fish-pole for support, as I unburdened
myself of these sinister tidings. The old pair looked at me in
calm-eyed silence, as if I had related the most trivial of village
occurrences. Neither moved a muscle nor uttered a sound, but just
gazed, till it felt as if their eyes were burning holes into me.
“That's what he said,” I repeated, after a pause, to mitigate the
embarrassment of that dumb steadfast stare.
The mother it was who spoke at last. “You'd better go round and get
your supper,” she said, quietly.
The table was spread, as usual, in the big, low-ceilinged room which
during the winter was used as a kitchen. What was unusual was to
discover a strange man seated alone in his shirt-sleeves at this table,
eating his supper. As I took my chair, however, I saw that he was not
altogether a stranger. I recognized in him the little old Irishman who
had farmed Ezra Tracy's beaver-meadow the previous year on shares, and
done badly, and had since been hiring out for odd jobs at hoeing and
haying. He had lately lost his wife, I recalled now, and lived alone
in a tumble-down old shanty beyond Parker's saw-mill. He had come to
us in the spring, I remembered, when the brindled calf was born, to
beg a pail of what he called “basteings,” and I speculated in my mind
whether it was this repellent mess that had killed his wife. Above all
these thoughts rose the impression that Abner must have decided to do a
heap of ditching and wall-building, to have hired a new hand in this
otherwise slack season—and at this my back began to ache prophetically.
“How are yeh!” the new-comer remarked, affably, as I sat down and
reached for the bread. “An' did yeh see the boys march away? An' had
they a drum wid 'em?”
“What boys?” I asked, in blank ignorance as to what he was at.
“I'm told there's a baker's dozen of 'em gone, more or less,” he
replied. “Well, glory be to the Lord, 'tis an ill wind blows nobody
good. Here am I aitin' butter on my bread, an' cheese on top o' that.”
I should still have been in the dark, had not one of the hired girls,
Janey Wilcox, come in from the butter-room, to ask me in turn much the
same thing, and to add the explanation that a whole lot of the young
men of the neighborhood had privately arranged among themselves to
enlist together as soon as the harvesting was over, and had this day
gone off in a body. Among them, I learned now, were our two hired men,
Warner Pitts and Ray Watkins. This, then, accounted for the presence of
the Irishman.
As a matter of fact, there had been no secrecy about the thing save
with the contingent which our household furnished, and that was
only because of the fear which Abner Beech inspired. His son and
his servants alike preferred to hook it, rather than explain their
patriotic impulses to him. But naturally enough, our farm-girls took
it for granted that all the others had gone in the same surreptitious
fashion, and this threw an air of fascinating mystery about the whole
occurrence. They were deeply surprised that I should have been down
past the Corners, and even beyond the cheese-factory, and seen nothing
of these extraordinary martial preparations; and I myself was ashamed
of it.
Opinions differed, I remember, as to the behavior of our two hired men.
“Till” Babcock and the Underwood girl defended them, but Janey took the
other side, not without various unpleasant personal insinuations, and
the Irishman and I were outspoken in their condemnation. But nobody
said a word about Jeff, though it was plain enough that everyone knew.
Dusk fell while we still talked of these astounding events—my thoughts
meantime dividing themselves between efforts to realize these neighbors
of ours as soldiers on the tented field, and uneasy speculation as to
whether I should at last get a bed to myself or be expected to sleep
with the Irishman.
Janey Wilcox had taken the lamp into the living-room. She returned now,
with an uplifted hand and a face covered over with lines of surprise.
“You're to all of you come in,” she whispered, impressively. “Abner's
got the Bible down. We're goin' to have fam'ly prayers, or somethin'.”
With one accord we looked at the Irishman. The question had never
before arisen on our farm, but we all knew about other cases, in which
Catholic hands held aloof from the household's devotions. There were
even stories of their refusal to eat meat on some one day of the week,
but this we hardly brought ourselves to credit. Our surprise at the
fact that domestic religious observances were to be resumed under the
Beech roof-tree—where they had completely lapsed ever since the trouble
at the church—was as nothing compared with our curiosity to see what
the new-comer would do.
What he did was to get up and come along with the rest of us, quite as
a matter of course. I felt sure that he could not have understood what
was going on.
We filed into the living-room. The Beeches had come in and shut the
veranda door, and “M'rye” was seated in her rocking-chair, in the
darkness beyond the bookcase. Her husband had the big book open before
him on the table; the lamp-light threw the shadow of his long nose down
into the gray of his beard with a strange effect of fierceness. His
lips were tight-set and his shaggy brows drawn into a commanding frown,
as he bent over the pages.
Abner did not look up till we had taken our seats. Then he raised his
eyes toward the Irishman.
“I don't know, Hurley,” he said, in a grave, deep-booming voice,
“whether you feel it right for you to join us—we bein' Protestants—”
“Ah, it's all right, sir,” replied Hurley, reassuringly, “I'll take no
harm by it.”
A minute's silence followed upon this magnanimous declaration. Then
Abner, clearing his throat, began solemnly to read the story of
Absalom's revolt. He had the knack, not uncommon in those primitive
class-meeting days, of making his strong, low-pitched voice quaver
and wail in the most tear-compelling fashion when he read from the
Old Testament. You could hardly listen to him going through even the
genealogical tables of Chronicles dry-eyed. His Jeremiah and Ezekiel
were equal to the funeral of a well-beloved relation.
This night he read as I had never heard him read before. The whole grim
story of the son's treason and final misadventure, of the ferocious
battle in the wood of Ephraim, of Joab's savagery, and of the rival
runners, made the air vibrate about us, and took possession of our
minds and kneaded them like dough, as we sat in the mute circle in the
old living-room. From my chair I could see Hurley without turning my
head, and the spectacle of excitement he presented—bending forward with
dropped jaw and wild, glistening gray eyes, a hand behind his ear to
miss no syllable of this strange new tale—only added to the effect it
produced on me.
Then there came the terrible picture of the King's despair. I had
trembled as we neared this part, foreseeing what heart-wringing
anguish Abner, in his present mood, would give to that cry of the
stricken father—“O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would God I
had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!” To my great surprise, he
made very little of it. The words came coldly, almost contemptuously,
so that the listener could not but feel that David's lamentations were
out of place, and might better have been left unuttered.
But now the farmer, leaping over into the next chapter, brought swart,
stalwart, blood-stained Joab on the scene before us, and in an instant
we saw why the King's outburst of mourning had fallen so flat upon our
ears. Abner Beech's voice rose and filled the room with its passionate
fervor as he read out Joab's speech—wherein the King is roundly told
that his son was a worthless fellow, and was killed not a bit too soon,
and that for the father to thus publicly lament him is to put to shame
all his household and his loyal friends and servants.
While these sonorous words of protest against paternal weakness still
rang in the air, Abner abruptly closed the book with a snap. We looked
at him and at one another for a bewildered moment, and then “Till”
Babcock stooped as if to kneel by her chair, but Janey nudged her, and
we all rose and made our way silently out again into the kitchen. It
had been apparent enough that no spirit of prayer abode in the farmer's
breast.
“'Twas a fine bold sinsible man, that Job!” remarked Hurley to me, when
the door was closed behind us, and the women had gone off to talk the
scene over among themselves in the butter-room. “Would it be him that
had thim lean turkeys?”
With some difficulty I made out his meaning. “Oh, no!” I exclaimed,
“the man Abner read about was Jo-ab, not Job. They were quite different
people.”
“I thought as much,” replied the Irishman. “'Twould not be in so grand
a man's nature to let his fowls go hungry. And do we be hearing such
tales every night?”
“Maybe Abner'll keep on, now he's started again,” I said. “We ain't had
any Bible-reading before since he had his row down at the church, and
we left off going.”
Hurley displayed such a lively interest in this matter that I went over
it pretty fully, setting forth Abner's position and the intolerable
provocations which had been forced upon him. It took him a long time to
grasp the idea that in Protestant gatherings not only the pastor spoke,
but the class-leaders and all others who were conscious of a call might
have their word as well, and that in this way even the lowliest and
meanest of the farmer's neighbors had been able to affront him in the
church itself.
“Too many cooks spoil the broth,” was his comment upon this. “'Tis far
better to hearken to one man only. If he's right, you're right. If he's
wrong, why, thin, there ye have him in front of ye for protection.”
Bed-time came soon after, and Mrs. Beech appeared in her nightly round
of the house to see that the doors were all fastened. The candle she
bore threw up a flaring yellow light upon her chin, but made the face
above it by contrast still darker and more saturnine. She moved about
in erect impassiveness, trying the bolts and the window catches, and
went away again, having said never a word. I had planned to ask her if
I might now have a bed to myself, but somehow my courage failed me, so
stern and majestic was her aspect.
I took the desired boon without asking, and dreamed of her as a
darkling and relentless Joab in petticoats, slaying her own son Jeff
as he hung by his hay-colored hair in one of the apple-trees of our
orchard.