The end of school always meant the beginning of the yearly romance, the
beginning of the two months when Neale really lived all the time, not
just after four o'clock, and on Saturdays. And yet it was not all made
up of games! In fact there weren't any games at all. Queer!
Neale's life was largely made up of things that happened over and over
the same way, and so did this. The last day of school he always went
home and found the house smelling trunky and Mother with piles of
clothes folded on all the chairs, packing a Saratoga trunk. All the
afternoon she would pack it, putting things in and taking things out to
make room for other things, and when Father came home, things would be
all unfinished. It happened just that way, always. When Father came home
things _were_ all unfinished, and Father took out his watch, and said
the expressman had said he'd come at five-thirty, and Mother answered,
"You know they're always two hours late."
Nevertheless she stopped taking things out, and there was a scramble and
things put in any old way, with a good deal of laughing and funning from
Father and Mother, and finally with Mother and Neale sitting on the lid,
Father in his shirt sleeves strapped and locked it. Then while they were
eating supper, the expressman drove up (only an hour late, no, not even
quite an hour late, Neale thought), and took the trunk away, and now
Neale felt they were going.
He lay awake that night thinking of the coming adventure, his heart
beating faster, and then it was morning, and Mother was shaking him and
getting him into his clothes. A hurried breakfast on lukewarm oatmeal.
They went outside and got into a coupe standing there. Father and Mother
sat on the back seat, and Neale on the little front seat you had to
unfold. Then jog, jog, they went along Griffith Street down the
curlycue road, the horse's feet going clatter on the cobblestones. Then
jog, jog, jog again till at last they stopped and got out. They had come
to the ferry.
After they were on the ferry-boat, Father and Mother always waited so
that Neale could see the deck-hand pull down the gates that closed the
end of the boat and take out the iron hooks that held her fast to the
dock. Then the whistle blew, and the boat started, leaving the dock
looking as though a giant had bitten a half-circle out of it. Father
walked with him out to the front deck, where, holding to his
wide-brimmed sailor hat, Neale watched the waves and tug boats, and the
gulls flapping about. Father made him look at the city ahead, and
pointing out a building with a gold dome, told him that it was the World
Building, and the highest in the city. Neale looked, found it of no
interest and went back to his waves and gulls, which stirred something
of the quiver and wonder the wharves made him feel.
When the boat got across, it went smash into the piles and slid along
into the dock, where men hitched it fast with iron hooks and pulled the
hooks tight by turning a wheel around. Neale always noticed just how
such things were managed, and Father always gave him plenty of time to
look.
Then up went the gates and off went everybody. Outside they got into a
horse-car. After a while the horse-car began to run through a long,
white-washed cellar, and Father explained (just as he had last year and
the year before that), that _he_ could remember when the trains used to
be pulled through that tunnel by horses. At the other end of the tunnel
they all got out once more, and now, at last, you were really getting
quite "warm," for this was the railway station.
After Father had bought the tickets and checked the baggage, they got on
the train, and Father and Mother talked for a while, till Father said,
with a long breath, "Well, it might as well be soon as late," and kissed
Mother and she kissed him.
Until Neale was a pretty big boy, Father always stooped and kissed him
too. But Neale felt that this was quite a different sort of kiss, and he
noticed too, that after it, Father always kissed Mother again, and held
his cheek for an instant close to hers. But after this he always walked
right away, quietly, turning around once or twice to wave his hat at
them, his face as composed as that of any man in the crowd coming and
going beside the train.
Mother let Neale settle things in the train, making no comment as he
fussed over it, putting the satchel up in the rack, and then deciding
that it would be better to have it down where he could put his feet on
it, arranging his coat and her golf-cape over the back of the seat and
then remembering the hook between the windows. Then the train started. A
smoky tunnel, a scraggly belt of half-city--and then the real country.
Neale never called anything the real country unless there were cows in
the fields.
He was always astonishingly glad to see it, and stared and stared till
his eyes ached, and drooped shut, and he had a nap, hunched up with his
feet on the seat. When he woke up there was more real country, and
finally they got there.
There was Grandfather Crittenden waiting for them, with the team and the
three-seater, only the two back seats were out to make room for the big
trunk. This was something like living! Grandfather Crittenden let him
hold the lines. He remembered--_how_ he remembered--every step of the
eight miles, every hill, every house and barn and big rock, till finally
they drove into the yard, got out, were kissed, and went up to the same
room as last year, with its rag-carpet and painted yellow bed. Mother
washed his face very hard in the cold water from the big white pitcher,
there was supper of fried ham and scrambled eggs and _soft_ rolls, and
cherry pie--and that was all a tired little boy could remember that
night.
Next morning vacation really began with a rush outdoors to see the mill,
the saw-mill, the center of Neale's life in the country. There it was,
just as it ought to be, the big saw snarling its way through a pine log,
and old Silas with the lever in his hand, standing as though he hadn't
moved since the day Neale had gone away last September. Neale ran around
to the back, climbed on the carriage and rode back and forth as Silas
fed the log methodically down on the saw, and raced it back to set a
fresh cut. Silas only nodded without speaking. He didn't like wasting
words, and speaking was mostly wasted when the saw was screaming, the
belts slapping, and down below was the pound! pound! pound! of the
mill-wheel.
After a time Neale went down to the far end of the mill where the fresh
sawed boards fell off from the logs. A new lad he didn't know was
"taking away." He wasn't keeping up with the work very well, and to help
him Neale picked up a slab and started to cut it into stove lengths on
the cut-off saw.
"Hey there! Whacher doin'? You'll saw your arm off, boy!" yelled the
lad. But Silas, stopping the saw so that his voice could be heard, saved
Neale's face, "Let be, Nat. He won't get hurt. He knows more about the
mill now than you do, or ever will."
Neale felt his heart swell with pride. He sawed pine slabs till his back
ached from lifting and his shirt and hands were black from the dried
resin.
There were other things to do at Grandfather Crittenden's, all the other
things that boys do in the country, and Neale did them all. But none of
them came up to the mill. Day in and day out it was around the mill that
he spent his time, lying on the piles of fresh sawed boards in the
sunlight, watching teamsters roll huge logs on the skidway with
cant-hooks. Or he went below where you could look through the doorway at
the flapping belts, and watch the sawdust raining down and making a
great yellow pyramid. Even such an experienced millhand as Neale was not
allowed to go into the cellar while the mill was running, under pain of
all sorts of violent and disagreeable deaths. Getting your coat caught
by the shafting and being whirled round and round and beaten to a pulp
against the beams was one of the mildest.
But after supper, when the mill was shut down, he used to saunter out to
it, in the long soft twilight, and then tip-toe down into the cellar and
play uneasily in the sawdust, casting scared looks now and then at the
shining semi-circle of the saw, with its wicked hooked teeth just over
his head.
One day, as he played thus about the mill, his destiny came and tapped
him on the shoulder, and he knew not that day from any other day.
As he was watching Silas take up the slack in a belt, a strange man, an
elderly, powerful, bent, old countryman came into the mill, and asked,
without salutations to any one, "Where's Jo?"
"Gone to town for feed," said Silas. He added with a grin, "Mr. Burton,
make you acquainted with a relation of yours, Dan'el's boy." He jerked
his head at Neale.
The stranger looked hard at the boy, out of sharp gray eyes, and the
harder he looked the sharper grew his eyes.
"What's he doin' here?" he asked Silas.
"Oh, he's always hangin' round. He knows the trade as well as some folks
twice his size," said Silas.
"Well, what do you think of the sawyer's trade?" asked the old man
suddenly of Neale.
Neale could not think of anything to answer except that he guessed he
liked it all right.
The stranger seemed to dismiss him from his mind, fingered his gray
goatee, and looked all around as if seeing the establishment for the
first time. "Mebbe. Mebbe. All right for Massachusetts pine and saft
maple. But if you want to see a real mill, that'll handle tough Vermont
yellow birch and rock-maple, you come back to Ashley with me."
The stranger stayed to supper, and Neale learned that he was his
great-uncle Burton Crittenden. He asked many sharp-sounding questions
that made his brother, Neale's grandfather, snort and say hotly, "Oh, we
all know there ain't any proper mill practice outside Vermont, but the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts is managing to worry along somehow, in her
shiftless fashion."
But when the old man spoke to Neale there was a gentler note in his
voice. He talked of sugaring-off, and twenty-two-foot snowdrifts, and
asked Neale's mother if she wouldn't send the boy to Ashley some time,
to visit his great-uncle.
His mother agreed to do it--"some time."
_CULTURE IN THE AIR_