One soft noon in the middle of August the farmer came in from the
corn-field that an early frost had blighted, and told his wife that they
must give it up. He said, in his weak, hoarse voice, with the catarrhal
catching in it, that it was no use trying to make a living on the farm
any longer. The oats had hardly been worth cutting, and now the corn was
gone, and there was not hay enough without it to winter the stock; if
they got through themselves they would have to live on potatoes. Have a
vendue, and sell out everything before the snow flew, and let the State
take the farm and get what it could for it, and turn over the balance
that was left after the taxes; the interest of the savings-bank mortgage
would soon eat that up.
The long, loose cough took him, and another cough answered it like an
echo from the barn, where his son was giving the horses their feed.
The mild, wan-eyed young man came round the corner presently toward the
porch where his father and mother were sitting, and at the same moment
a boy came up the lane to the other corner; there were sixteen years
between the ages of the brothers, who alone were left of the children
born into and borne out of the house. The young man waited till they
were within whispering distance of each other, and then he gasped:
“Where you been?”
The boy answered, promptly, “None your business,” and went up the steps
before the young man, with a lop-eared, liver-colored mongrel at his
heels. He pulled off his ragged straw hat and flung it on the floor of
the porch. “Dinner over?” he demanded.
His father made no answer; his mother looked at the boy's hands and
face, all of much the same earthen cast, up to the eaves of his thatch
of yellow hair, and said: “You go and wash yourself.” At a certain light
in his mother's eye, which he caught as he passed into the house with
his dog, the boy turned and cut a defiant caper. The oldest son sat down
on the bench beside his father, and they all looked in silence at the
mountain before them. They heard the boy whistling behind the house,
with sputtering and blubbering noises, as if he were washing his face
while he whistled; and then they heard him singing, with a muffled
sound, and sharp breaks from the muffled sound, as if he were singing
into the towel; he shouted to his dog and threatened him, and the
scuffling of his feet came to them through all as if he were dancing.
“Been after them woodchucks ag'in,” his father huskily suggested.
“I guess so,” said the mother. The brother did not speak; he coughed
vaguely, and let his head sink forward.
The father began a statement of his affairs.
The mother said: “You don't want to go into that; we been all over it
before. If it's come to the pinch, now, it's come. But you want to be
sure.”
The man did not answer directly. “If we could sell off now and get out
to where Jim is in Californy, and get a piece of land--” He stopped,
as if confronted with some difficulty which he had met before, but had
hoped he might not find in his way this time.
His wife laughed grimly. “I guess, if the truth was known, we're too
poor to get away.”
“We're poor,” he whispered back. He added, with a weak obstinacy:
“I d'know as we're as poor as that comes to. The things would fetch
something.”
“Enough to get us out there, and then we should be on Jim's hands,” said
the woman.
“We should till spring, maybe. I d'know as I want to face another winter
here, and I d'know as Jackson does.”
The young man gasped back, courageously: “I guess I can get along here
well enough.”
“It's made Jim ten years younger. That's what he said,” urged the
father.
The mother smiled as grimly as she had laughed. “I don't believe it 'll
make you ten years richer, and that's what you want.”
“I don't believe but what we should ha' done something with the place by
spring. Or the State would,” the father said, lifelessly.
The voice of the boy broke in upon them from behind. “Say, mother, a'n't
you never goin' to have dinner?” He was standing in the doorway, with a
startling cleanness of the hands and face, and a strange, wet sleekness
of the hair. His clothes were bedrabbled down the front with soap and
water.
His mother rose and went toward him; his father and brother rose like
apparitions, and slanted after her at one angle.
“Say,” the boy called again to his mother, “there comes a peddler.” He
pointed down the road at the figure of a man briskly ascending the lane
toward the house, with a pack on his back and some strange appendages
dangling from it.
The woman did not look round; neither of the men looked round; they all
kept on in-doors, and she said to the boy, as she passed him: “I got no
time to waste on peddlers. You tell him we don't want anything.”
The boy waited for the figure on the lane to approach. It was the figure
of a young man, who slung his burden lightly from his shoulders when he
arrived, and then stood looking at the boy, with his foot planted on the
lowermost tread of the steps climbing from the ground to the porch.