THE BREAKFAST
If there was ever a more curious meal in Dearborn County than that
first breakfast of ours in the barn, I never heard of it.
The big table was among the things saved from the living-room, and
Esther spread it again with the cloth which had been in use on the
previous evening. There was the stain of the tea which the Underwood
girl had spilled in the excitement of the supper's rough interruption;
there were other marks of calamity upon it as well—the smudge of
cinders, for one thing, and a general diffused effect of smokiness. But
it was the only table-cloth we had. The dishes, too, were a queer lot,
representing two or three sets of widely differing patterns and value,
other portions of which we should never see again.
When it was announced that breakfast was ready, Abner took his
accustomed arm-chair at the head of the table. He only half turned
his head toward Hagadorn and said in formal tones, over his shoulder,
“Won't you draw up and have some breakfast?”
Jee was still sitting where he had planted himself two hours or so
before. He still wore his round cap, with the tabs tied down over his
ears. In addition to his overcoat, someone—probably his daughter—had
wrapped a shawl about his thin shoulders. The boots had not come in, as
yet, from the stove, and the blanket was drawn up over his stockinged
feet to the knees. From time to time his lips moved, as if he were
reciting scripture texts to himself, but so far as I knew, he had said
nothing to anyone. His cough seemed rather worse than better.
“Yes, come, father!” Esther added to the farmer's invitation, and
drew a chair back for him two plates away from Abner. Thus adjured he
rose and hobbled stiffly over to the place indicated, bringing his
foot-blanket with him. Esther stooped to arrange this for him and then
seated herself next the host.
“You see, I'm going to sit beside you, Mr. Beech,” she said, with a wan
little smile.
“Glad to have you,” remarked Abner, gravely.
The Underwood girl brought in a first plate of buckwheat cakes, set it
down in front of Abner, and took her seat opposite Hagadorn and next to
me. There remained three vacant places, down at the foot of the table,
and though we all began eating without comment, everybody continually
encountered some other's glance straying significantly toward these
empty seats. Janey Wilcox, very straight and with an uppish air, came
in with another plate of cakes and marched out again in tell-tale
silence.
“Hurley! Come along in here an' git your breakfast!”
The farmer fairly roared out this command, then added in a lower,
apologetic tone: “I 'spec' the women-folks 've got their hands full
with that broken-down old stove.”
We all looked toward the point, half-way down the central barn-floor,
where the democrat wagon, drawn crosswise, served to divide our
improvised living-room and kitchen. Through the wheels, and under its
uplifted pole, we could vaguely discern two petticoated figures at
the extreme other end, moving about the stove, the pipe of which was
carried up and out through a little window above the door. Then Hurley
appeared, ducking his head under the wagon-pole.
“I'm aitin' out here, convanient to the stove,” he shouted from this
dividing-line.
“No, come and take your proper place!” bawled back the farmer, and
Hurley had nothing to do but obey. He advanced with obvious reluctance,
and halted at the foot of the table, eying with awkward indecision the
three vacant chairs. One was M'rye's; the others would place him either
next to the hated cooper or diagonally opposite, where he must look at
him all the while.
“Sure, I'm better out there!” he ventured to insist, in a wheedling
tone; but Abner thundered forth an angry “No, sir!” and the Irishman
sank abruptly into the seat beside Hagadorn. From this place he eyed
the Underwood girl with a glare of contemptuous disapproval. I learned
afterward that M'rye and Janey Wilcox regarded her desertion of them as
the meanest episode of the whole miserable morning, and beguiled their
labors over the stove by recounting to each other all the low-down
qualities illustrated by the general history of her “sap-headed tribe.”
Meanwhile conversation languished.
With the third or fourth instalment of cakes, Janey Wilcox had halted
long enough to deliver herself of a few remarks, sternly limited to
the necessities of the occasion. “M'rye says,” she declaimed, coldly,
looking the while with great fixedness at the hay-wall, “if the cakes
are sour she can't help it. We saved what was left over of the batter,
but the Graham flour and the sody are both burnt up,” and with that
stalked out again.
Not even politeness could excuse the pretence on anyone's part that the
cakes were _not_ sour, but Abner seized upon the general subject as an
opening for talk.
“'Member when I was a little shaver,” he remarked, with an effort at
amiability, “my sisters kicked about havin' to bake the cakes, on
account of the hot stove makin' their faces red an' spoilin' their
complexions, an' they wanted specially to go to some fandango or other,
an' look their pootiest, an' so father sent us boys out into the
kitchen to bake 'em instid. Old Lorenzo Dow, the Methodist preacher,
was stoppin' over-night at our house, an' mother was jest beside
herself to have everything go off ship-shape—an' then them cakes begun
comin' in. Fust my brother William, he baked one the shape of a horse,
an' then Josh, he made one like a jackass with ears as long as the
griddle would allow of lengthwise, and I'd got jest comfortably started
in on one that I begun as a pig, an' then was going to alter into a
ship with sails up, when father, he come out with a hold-back strap,
an'—well—mine never got finished to this day. Mother, she was mortified
most to death, but old Dow, he jest lay back and laughed—laughed till
you'd thought he'd split himself.”
“It was from Lorenzo Dow's lips that I had my first awakening call unto
righteousness,” said Jee Hagadorn, speaking with solemn unction in
high, quavering tones.
The fact that he should have spoken at all was enough to take even the
sourness out of M'rye's cakes.
Abner took up the ball with solicitous promptitude. “A very great man,
Lorenzo Dow was—in his way,” he remarked.
“By grace he was spared the shame and humiliation,” said Hagadorn,
lifting his voice as he went on—“the humiliation of living to see one
whole branch of the Church separate itself from the rest—withdraw and
call itself the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in defence of human
slavery!”
Esther, red-faced with embarrassment, intervened peremptorily. “How
_can_ you, father!” she broke in. “For all you know he might have been
red-hot on that side himself! In fact, I dare say he would have been.
How on earth can _you_ know to the contrary, anyway?”
Jee was all excitement on the instant, at the promise of an argument.
His eyes flashed; he half rose from his seat and opened his mouth to
reply. So much had he to say, indeed, that the words stumbled over
one another on his tongue, and produced nothing, but an incoherent
stammering sound, which all at once was supplanted by a violent fit of
coughing. So terrible were the paroxysms of this seizure that when they
had at last spent their fury the poor man was trembling like a leaf and
toppled in his chair as if about to swoon. Esther had hovered about
over him from the outset of the fit, and now looked up appealingly to
Abner. The farmer rose, walked down the table-side, and gathered Jee's
fragile form up under one big engirdling arm. Then, as the girl hastily
dragged forth the tick and blankets again and spread them into the
rough semblance of a bed, Abner half led, half carried the cooper over
and gently laid him down thereon. Together they fixed up some sort of
pillow for him with hay under the blanket, and piled him snugly over
with quilts and my comfortable.
“There—you'll be better layin' down,” said Abner, soothingly. Hagadorn
closed his eyes wearily and made no answer. They left him after a
minute or two and returned to the table.
The rest of the breakfast was finished almost wholly in silence. Every
once in a while Abner and Esther would exchange looks, his gravely
kind, hers gratefully contented, and these seemed really to render
speech needless. For my own part, I foresaw with some degree of
depression that there would soon be no chance whatever of my securing
attention in the _rôle_ of an invalid, at least in this part of the
barn.
Perhaps, however, they might welcome me in the kitchen part, as a sort
of home-product rival to the sick cooper. I rose and walked languidly
out into M'rye's domain. But the two women were occupied with a furious
scrubbing of rescued pans for the morning's milk, and they allowed me
to sit feebly down on the wood-box behind the stove without so much as
a glance of sympathy.
By and by we heard one of the great front doors rolled back on its
shrieking wheels and then shut to again. Someone had entered, and in
a moment there came some strange, inarticulate sounds of voices which
showed that the arrival had created a commotion. M'rye lifted her head,
and I shall never forget the wild, expectant flashing of her black eyes
in that moment of suspense.
“Come in here, mother!” we heard Abner's deep voice call out from
beyond the democrat wagon. “Here's somebody wants to see you!”
M'rye swiftly wiped her hands on her apron and glided rather than
walked toward the forward end of the barn. Janey Wilcox and I followed
close upon her heels, dodging together under the wagon-pole, and
emerging, breathless and wild with curiosity, on the fringe of an
excited group.
In the centre of this group, standing with a satisfied smile on his
face, his general appearance considerably the worse for wear, but in
demeanor, to quote M'rye's subsequent phrase, “as cool as Cuffy,” was
Ni Hagadorn.