John came out for a three months’ vacation the next year and worked
again for Wully. They had acres of sod corn that summer, and
wheat to make a miser chuckle. Both men, and whatever neighborly
passer-by they might be able to hire, worked day after day till they
staggered. To have stopped while yet there was sufficient daylight
to distinguish another hill of corn would have been shirking; to go
to supper while yet one could straighten up without a sharp pain in
his back would have been laziness. Yet John was never too tired to
choose an idiom as far removed as possible from the one he heard
about him. Now that he had been in Chicago he had a growing contempt,
which never failed to amuse Wully, for the speech of his own people.
What was it they spoke, he demanded scornfully, swinging a violent
hoe among the weeds. It was Scotch no longer. It wasn’t English.
It wasn’t American, certainly. It was just a kind of--he tried all
summer to describe it satisfactorily in a word. Once he called it
“the gruntings of the inarticulate forthright.” Mrs. Alex McNair
was the only one that spoke pure anything, he declared. John seemed
to like that woman, strange to say. Wully suspected he listened
to her because her pronunciation fascinated him, but at Wully’s he
was intolerant of any tendency towards Scotticisms. Wully’s and
Chirstie’s articulation he supervised continually, their grammar
and their diction. They were not allowed to say before John, “She
won’t can some,” or “I used to could.” A less happy man than Wully
might have resented correction from a younger brother. Wully took
it gratefully, feeling he was getting not a poor substitute for the
schooling he had been forced to miss. And when he saw his mother,
he would repeat John’s innovations to her with gusto. “Indeed!” she
exclaimed upon one such occasion. “The gruntings of the inar--what,
Wully? Lawsie me! You did well to remember that!” “Yes,” cried Wully.
“But John didn’t _remember_ them, mother. He makes them up!” Chirstie
would have been annoyed sometimes by John’s attitude, if her son
had not been so devoted to his uncle. Wee Johnnie refused to go to
sleep in the evening till he had had his daily romp with John on the
doorstep. And even if he did treat her like an unimportant younger
sister, she had to like her baby’s playmate.
The child was by this time the joyous little husky heart of the
family. John had noticed him dutifully at first because he was
Wully’s, but he came speedily to love him for his own diverting
charms. There had been an evening nearly two years ago, when he came
into the little room where he and his sister cooked their meals, and
had found her stretched out on the bed crying. He read the letter she
gave him in explanation. His mother had written about the impending
disgraceful baby. John hadn’t forgotten his sensation of amazement,
or the sharp wound that his disdainful sense of superiority
sustained, but now he seldom recalled either. It outraged his sense
of the fitness of things that he so well understood that scrape; that
he had to wonder at times that passion was ever less rampant, less
controlled, than in the case he had to consider. The information
encouraged a budding cynicism within him. If it had been anyone but
Wully--even Allen--he would have understood it better. He had read
the letter, and stood looking at it. Then without a word he went out,
and walked about the streets through the dusk. And never a mention of
it passed between the brother and sister. And then when he came home,
and saw Wully--when that brotherly, honest geniality shone out simply
towards him--he couldn’t think of that story. Wully’s presence denied
it, obliterated it. That was all. And wee Johnnie justified himself.
John was, of course, keen about having his nephew speak English
undefiled, and between their little games he begged him patiently to
say “Uncle John.” But, after hours of slipping gleefully away from
effort, the baby came no nearer the desired sounds than “Diddle!” He
had lovely, twinkling ways of making light of instruction. He would
duck his curly head, and hold it reflectingly to one side, and purse
up his little lips enough to have spoken volumes. Yet when he saw
his uncle coming towards the house, he would sing out that absurd
“Diddle,” delightedly, waiting an award for such perfect enunciation.
When his grandmother got him into her arms, she would beg him to
say “Grannie.” And he would say it, in a way that satisfied him
entirely. Only he called the word “Pooh!” And in that absurdity, too,
he persisted. “Mama” he said, and “Papa” and “chickie” and “Diddle”
and “Pooh.” And that was all. No coaxing could elicit more from him.
Chirstie grew vexed at times hearing other women tell how early and
plainly their children had talked. She longed to have Johnnie shine
vocally. Sometimes she almost wondered if he wasn’t “simple.” But her
mother-in-law consoled her by telling about her John. He had spoken
hardly a word till he was three, and she was really getting alarmed
about it, when suddenly he seemed to join the family conversation, so
rapidly he learned words and sentences.
So with that foolish “Ayn?” which was his question, and with the
“Ayn” which was his consent, Bonnie Wee Johnnie went on ruling his
domain. The men never started to the fields with a team without
letting the baby ride a few steps on the back of the old mare. No one
plowed into a bird’s nest without saving an egg to show the baby. No
one ran across a long gaudy pheasant’s feather without saving it for
Johnnie’s soft fingers to feel. At noon John carried him out to pat
the colt’s nose, or to see the little pigs nosing their way among one
another to their mother’s milk. The baby had just naturally become
Wully’s child. Wully could never bear the thought of Peter Keith. He
kept it resolutely out of his mind. He had to. He shrank from it as
he had never shrunk from the face of an enemy. Making the baby his
own helped the forgetting. Barbara McNair said to Isobel McLaughlin
that she had never seen a man with such a way with a baby as Wully
had with that child. And Isobel McLaughlin answered that it was
small wonder Wully had a way with babies, since he had carried one
in his arms ever since he was three years old. Month by month Wully
became in the eyes of that prairie-bound world a more exemplary and
unsuspected father to Chirstie’s son.
June came and went. The corn began hiding the black soil at its
roots entirely from sight. It was “knee-high by the Fourth of July”
according to the Scriptures. There was to be a great celebration that
year in Woolsey’s woods, and Wully had, of course, planned to take
his family to the picnic. All his army comrades would be there, and
neighbors for thirty miles round, talking crops and prices, and the
president’s troubles in Washington. It was to have been a grateful
change from hoeing.
However, when the day came, it was out of the question to take
Chirstie, who had been having fever, and the baby, who was unhappily
teething, for a twenty-five mile ride through the heat, even with the
new spring seat which Wully had bought for the wagon--extravagantly,
according to Alex McNair. John, therefore, rode away on horseback
before dawn. Not that John would have condescended to care to go if
it had been only what he would have called in our day a gathering
of “neighborhood fatheads.” But there was to be a speaker there who
helped to make laws and thwart the president in Washington, and John
wanted to hear what he had to say, and how he managed to say it.
Wully and Chirstie accordingly began their holiday by a most
unusually long sleep in the morning, the baby for some reason
allowing it. They had a late and lazy breakfast. If Chirstie
cared to, they would drive down to the creek and look for some
blackberries, Wully said. He dallied about, playing with the baby,
who was better than they had expected him to be. They sauntered out
to their garden of little trees, after Wully had wiped the breakfast
dishes, and spent some time there, weeding it, and cultivating it,
playing together. Were not the two of them quite content to spend
their holiday at home together now? It was not as if they were young,
unmated things, running about experimentally, investigatingly. When
it grew warm, and they sought the shade of the house to rest in, a
Sabbath peace brooded over them. Wully stretched out on the grass,
and the baby sat contentedly on his chest.
Chirstie looked at the morning-glories blooming on the fence of the
little vegetable garden. There were but few of them. The hens had got
into the garden earlier and scratched them almost all out. She hated
to kill the hens she had had the trouble of raising, just because
they spoiled her morning-glories. Her stepmother, she reflected,
had no such hesitations. If a rash hen flew into Barbara McNair’s
garden, she caught it and cut its wing feathers. If it repeated the
offense, into the boiling kettle it went. She had scarcely a hen
left. That famous wee white fowl-house was really little more than
an ornament. Yet when Chirstie sighed over her morning-glories,
Wully said at once that he would get a better fence around a bigger
garden by the next spring. He, too, was thinking of the McNair place.
Everyone thought of that place that summer, and planned to make his
own less desolate-looking. That McNairs’ was now the very show place
of the country. One driving up to it, unless he had heard reports,
could scarcely believe his eyes. No sty now! No bony cows trampling
knee-deep in mud! One saw a trim white house, inside a smart white
fence, upon a jaunty rise of ground, with a gay white fowl-house
in the rear, and in the front yard--what sights for pioneer eyes!
Crimson hollyhocks, just beginning to open, almost as high as the
lean-to, screening the porch. A grapevine halfway across the main
part of the building. Morning-glories on cunning arrangements of
hidden wires. Scarlet poppies and magenta petunias romping all along
the front walk, laughing to the confederate heavens, flaunting
their uselessness flippantly before the eyes of those who lived
slavishly, blossoms with the Scriptures behind them to justify their
toiling not, their spinning not, their being arrayed beyond kings’
glory--not economically. The garden scouted the very principles of
the hard-working, of those who would “get ahead.” It hooted aloud
at frugality. Barbara McNair kept a lamb, to be sure, but for no
utilitarian purpose. She kept it to mow her lawn. And when its hunger
had shaved its environments, she moved the stake which held it,
to another spot. She kept hens languidly, perhaps only to justify
artistically that supernumerary luxury, the white fowl-house. But let
those chickens beware how they turned their eyes towards her garden
spaces, lest they discover fatally her feelings towards them and
their like. No useless and ungardening orphan calf would she mother.
No bereaved young pigs owed their life to her. She did only what she
elected to do. Though there was at that time scarcely a servant girl
west of the Mississippi, Barbara McNair was almost never without some
neighbor girl to do her work for her, while in return she taught her
sewing, or made some pretty garment for her. Just now Wully’s sister
Mary, who was to marry a Yankee minister that fall, was working
at the McNairs’, while Barbara, in spite of Isobel McLaughlin’s
protests, was making her a famous blue silk dress, equaled in
grandeur only by that red wool one of Chirstie’s. Always some girl or
other eating that helpless McNair’s good bread, while his wife knit
tidies, and watered her trifling wee flowers--from a pump all painted
and handy just outside the kitchen door--and lived like a lady,
envied by all the women in the neighborhood, and distrusted by nearly
all the men.
Wully lay playing with the baby, who liked tickling his face with
a long spear of grass, and thinking just how he would make that
fence, and grinning, at times, to himself. The Sabbath before he
had taken Chirstie home for dinner, and when she had seen how the
flowers were blooming there, she had explained in vexation about her
morning-glories. Wully had been walking with his father-in-law and
the women among the trifling flowers, when Chirstie had spoken of
the accident, in answer to Barbara McNair’s question. And Alex had
turned to Wully, and remonstrated with him for not having a better
fence for Chirstie! A man ought to see that the women had such
things, McNair had assured him solemnly. That was one of the best
things he had had to tell his mother for a long time! Alex McNair
telling him, Wully McLaughlin, how to treat a wife! McNair strutted
about, taking all the credit for that garden, extremely proud of
having the best-looking place for miles around. As if he had been
able to help himself! Wully had said nothing about the incident to
Chirstie. He couldn’t seem always to be laughing at her father. Just
then she went on to tell him about the new dress Barbara had made
for little Jeannie. Whatever the neighbors might say enviously about
Barbara McNair, they must in justice agree that she was an excellent
stepmother to her husband’s children. The way she loved Jeannie and
Dod, and was loved in return, was a source of deep satisfaction to
Chirstie. And so she gossiped contentedly and harmlessly on about
the neighbors, and the baby kicked the protesting Wully gleefully in
the ribs. They felt cosily shut in to themselves by the sense of the
countryside emptied of its patriotic and picnicking dwellers. Wully
lounged about till almost eleven. There was a little hay cut which he
wanted to turn. He would be back by dinner time, he said.
He started down the path to the hayfield, taking the scythe with him.
It was a hot day, but there was a lively breeze blowing the grass
into waves and billows, and momentary disappearing swift maelstroms.
Safe white clouds were sailing on high, but along the horizon hints
of much rain were gathering slowly. It wouldn’t be safe to cut much
hay in face of them. He really need not have brought the scythe. He
began turning what was cut, forkful by forkful. Then he cut a few
swathes. Working, he lay bare a marsh hawk’s nest. He stopped for
breath, and stood watching the catlike birdlings turn on their backs
and offer fight with their pawing, scrawny claws, while the mother
circled angrily about him. He must tell Chirstie about those warlike
babies. He went on, to leave them in peace. He kept getting farther
and farther away from the house, towards the far edge of the plot of
prairie they had chosen for hay. He worked away, scarcely lifting his
head from his task, wondering occasionally if the rain, undoubtedly
gathering, would come by night.
Suddenly he heard a cry. He looked up. He threw down his scythe. He
started running. Chirstie was running towards him. She was crying out
to him, too far away to be heard. He gave a look towards the house.
There seemed to be no sign of fire. He tore on towards her. It must
be the baby. He saved his breath till he got near her. She stumbled
against him, gasping, fainting. What she managed to say brought the
contentment of his life crashing down to ruin.
“It’s Peter! Peter Keith! He’s back!”
She would have fallen. He caught her. He held her against him. She
couldn’t speak. He couldn’t believe his ears.
“You said he wouldn’t come back!” she began, again. “Wully, he took
hold of me! He--” She was weeping with rage and terror. “Look here!”
Her sleeve was torn half off. “You said he wouldn’t come back!” she
cried, shaking.
“You’re dreaming!” he cried. He couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t
possible.
“He came to the door,” she sobbed. “I didn’t see him till then. I’m
not dreaming! Look at my dress! Where you going? Don’t leave me
alone!”
He had started for his gun. Rage came over him like a fever mounting.
The sight of that torn sleeve made him suddenly blind with anger. He
couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t possible that man had dared to come
back and lay violent hands on his wife. It simply couldn’t be. She
was calling to him to wait for her. She wouldn’t be left alone.
He helped her along blindly. He had never known such murderous anger.
He wanted her to hurry. He lusted for that gun. He felt her trembling
against him. By God, his wife wouldn’t have to tremble much longer!
It seemed to him long before they came to their house--very long.
“Don’t you let him hurt you!” she moaned as they came up to it. He
strode into the kitchen. There the baby slept in his cradle, and
flies walked leisurely over the piecrust scattered over the floor. He
seized his gun. He went to the east door, and looked out. He went to
the west door. He stood looking. Before his eyes hens scratched for
their broods in peace. He searched the house. He turned to go to the
barn. She cried after him, “Oh, don’t let him _hurt_ you!” He went
without caution, madly. But in the barn there was no enemy. No sign
of a man behind the barn, where the grass billows chased one another.
No one hiding about the haystack. He strode about seeking. There
was no enemy in any place. But beyond the little tree bed, and the
garden, beyond the wheat fields--what might be there, to the east to
the west, to the north and the south, in those wild man-high grasses!
There a thousand men might hide and laugh at pursuers. Looking at
those baffling stretches, Wully choked. He was helpless.
He went back to his wife. She was trying vainly to compose herself.
“I never _thought_ he would come! I never imagined it! You said he
_wouldn’t_, Wully!” Didn’t she see how that reproach must madden him!
“I was just standing there, making the pie. He came to that door. I
thought it was you. And when I looked up, he was _looking_ at me,
Wully!” She wailed out that last. “He was _looking_ at me. I didn’t
know what to do. He just grabbed me!” She buried her face in her
arms, and sobbed.
God! If only he could get hold of that snake who hid in the grasses!
He turned abruptly again to the search.
“Stay with me!” she cried. “Where you going?”
“There’s no one here,” he answered, beside himself, wanting to
comfort her. “Come and see for yourself!” Trembling and crying she
came out with him to the barn. That morning there was no great
cement-floored barn to search through, in whose loft a hundred men
might lie, nor long feeding sheds for steers, nor any tower-like
silos. There were no scattered groups of lighted hog-houses, nor
garages nor heated drinking tanks. There were no machine sheds, nor
ventilated corn-cribs, nor power plants nor icehouses, as now there
are. Only that one little unconcealing barn, those small slight
plantings, that innocent wheat, that shaved patch of the prairie
which was the hayfield.
“He’s run out there!” Chirstie moaned, pointing to the distances.
Somewhere out there he had lain in wait, perhaps, seeing Wully
depart, maybe watching their just caresses. Somewhere out there he
must be pausing now, watching them hunt for him. Wully was shaking
with incredulous fury. It simply wasn’t possible that Peter Keith
should so have underestimated him! But no wonder, after he had been
such a fool as to let him go unpunished once! Oh, all Wully needed
was one more chance at him....
They ate no dinner. Chirstie lay down wearily. Wully with his gun in
hand, stood watching, promising her he wouldn’t go far, or leave her
alone more than a minute. She moaned as he came to her during the
afternoon, to give her the baby;
“Oh, what’ll we ever do now, Wully!”
“Leave that to me!” he said, in such a voice that she could say no
more just then.
“You won’t _hurt_ him, Wully!” she begged again, thinking only of her
husband’s safety.
“Will I not!” he answered grimly. She wept.
“There’s Aunt Libby!” she moaned.
“_Is_ there!” he cried. There was no auntie in his intentions. He was
thinking only of his wife--who trembled and wept, temporarily.
“Wully, you’ll get into trouble! If he won’t bother us, let him come
back!”
“He _does_ bother me!” She dared not answer that tone. Wully choked,
and turned away, to look out over the prairies again. A rattlesnake,
that man was, hiding in the grass, a damned poison snake, and like
a snake he should be treated. If it had been a windless day, one
might have traced him through the grasses. But now one second of the
wind swept away any trace of him. A good dog might have trailed him.
But there was no dog at hand. In many places before Wully’s very
eyes, a man--a snake--might walk upright and unperceived. Inside,
Chirstie lay moaning in fever. Outside, Wully patrolled his premises,
frustrated, raging.
In his excitement details came rushing back to his mind to which he
had long and obstinately refused entrance. He remembered all the bits
of confession that Chirstie had made to him the first night that,
knowing her trouble, he had gone to claim her. Peter had loved her,
he had wanted her for his, she had told him. But she wouldn’t listen
to him, because she thought of Wully. She thought of herself as
his. That was when she was living at her aunt’s, after her mother
had died. Then once Aunt Libby had gone to stay with her sister who
was having a baby. Wully could curse that woman’s name for having so
blindly, so fondly, trusted her knavish son. Why couldn’t she have
at least left Dod with his sister! But Chirstie hadn’t been afraid.
Wasn’t Peter her cousin? She hadn’t been at all afraid. And that
night, when there was no help within a mile, she had run out of the
house, undressed, barefooted, across the snow--till Peter caught her,
and brought her back. Wully hadn’t often thought of that, because he
couldn’t think of it and live. But it had no mercy on him now. That
story cried aloud to him, shrieking through his mind. He would kill
that man, and go to the sheriff and give himself up. He would stand
up and tell any twelve men in the county that story, and come home
acquitted. If only he could find the man! He went beating through the
grasses nearer him, maddened by the feeling that it was in vain. To
the west the treacherous grasses jeered at him wavingly, and to the
east. North and south they mocked him.
The afternoon passed. Neither of them could eat at supper time.
Chirstie wouldn’t stay alone in the house while he went to milk.
She insisted on crawling out to the barn, to be near him. She could
scarcely sit up, so worn and weak she was. The baby howled bitterly,
being neglected. Wully put him to sleep, laying him on the bed
beside his mother. He shut the door to the east. It had no lock. It
had never needed one. He put a chair against it, and sat down on the
step of the other door, fingering his gun as the stars came out,
watching, thinking sorely.
There was no jury that would not set him free when he told the story.
What sort of men would those be who would say he had not done right
to kill a poison snake? He would just tell them--ah, but to tell that
story, now, when it was being so well forgotten! To bring it all back
to sneering ears, as it had been brought back to him so painfully
fresh to-day! If only he could find the man, and kill him quietly,
and bury him somewhere in the tall grasses, without anyone knowing!
If only he might find him crouching there somewhere! So desirable
did that consummation seem that he turned abruptly and went to the
barn, to see if his spade, which his father had borrowed, had been
returned to its place. Yes, there it was. He could laugh as he dug
that grave in the farthest, most remote slough! By God, only two
years ago the government of the United States had been paying him for
digging graves, graves for honest men, who made no women tremble. Oh,
if he might find that man, and get it over quietly! That wish became
a drunken cursing prayer in his mind. If only in the morning he might
only say to her, “You needn’t be afraid he will ever come back
again!”
Terrible things rushed through his mind. Once when the baby had been
a few days old, he had asked her a question curiously, casually. She
had seemed so surprised in those days that she hadn’t had twins. He
had asked her why she had supposed she would, and when she had not
answered, he had asked her again. She said simply that after all that
had happened that night, she thought she couldn’t have less. He had
really so successfully pretended to make light of her situation that
she didn’t know how that must rankle in his mind. He had turned and
gone abruptly out into the darkness, when she had answered him so,
and she never realized what she had done. He had wondered then why he
had ever let that man go. He had wondered often at the time of the
child’s birth. Well, once he got a chance now, he would be done with
that regret forever....
He remained on guard, not realizing how the hours were passing, till
he heard John riding hurriedly in home. He went to look at the clock
then. It was midnight. The storm was almost upon them. The thunder
was growling about its coming.
John sat down on the step, and Wully sat down near him, intending
not to let John know what had happened. The speaker, John began, had
been traveling through the South, and strange things he had seen. He
said Johnson ought to be impeached. Wully had a vague idea what his
brother was saying. He didn’t want to excite his suspicion in the
least. He rallied, and asked if Stowe had been there. John had seen
Stowe, and Stowe had asked why Wully wasn’t there. Lots of friends
had asked about Wully. John talked on. The thunder grew louder. Rain
began falling, in big drops. They both rose to go in. Rising, John
said;
“Yes! And as I was coming home, guess whom I met, Wully! Our esteemed
kinsman, Peter Keith! I stopped in at O’Brien’s, and there he was,
drinking away as usual. Wasn’t that interesting, now, for us? And
Aunt Libby was going about all day as usual, asking if anyone had
seen her poor, sick blessed laddie. I brought him as far home as
the McTaggerts’ corner. Maybe auntie will lapse into sanity now,
comparative sanity, at least!”
Wully had risen with John, to follow him into the house, but at the
sound of that name he had paused outside the door, to hide his face
from his brother. John’s story made him heartsick. There seemed no
chance now of getting it over secretly. Peter had gone home! It
didn’t seem possible. He intended to defy Wully! He intended to hide
behind his mother. Well, he would speedily find that no woman’s
skirts could save him now from his deserts. He feigned a natural
interest, and tarried outside till he heard John going up the stairs.
Then he came in from the rain, and sat down. That room, that home of
theirs, all spoiled, all defiled. Their table, their chairs, their
clock, all the things that they had bought and enjoyed together,
seemed alien and sinister. He gave a look around all the little room
wonderingly, and then it all faded from his thought. He laid his arms
on the table, and buried his face in them, as if he was weeping. But
he was not weeping. Until almost morning he sat that way, scarcely
moving, not heeding the sharp breaking of the thunder. He was
planning ghastly things. Chirstie called to him sometimes, and he
answered. She called to him at length wearily to come to bed.
To take his place beside her! Oh, God!
She was his wife, and he hadn’t been able to defend her! But morning
was coming. The new day’s light would make things right.