Johnny Dree found a little time, even during the busy weeks of the apple
picking, to go with Moore through his orchard, and to search out the
trees scattered along the stone walls. He began the work of pruning and
trimming them, showed Moore, and showed Lucy, how to continue it. Bade
Moore plow under the thick sod around the base of each tree. “Nothing
like grass to steal the water an apple tree needs,” he explained. “Grass
is worse than weeds.” Before the snow came, much had been done. Moore
said once, diffidently:
“I’d like to hire you to help me along with this, Dree!”
But Johnny shook his head. “You don’t want to hire help only when you
have to,” he said. “I just come up when I’m not busy at home. You can
help me with haying and things, some time.”
The seasons marched monotonously on. The crisp sunshine of fall days,
with frost tingling in the air, gave way to bleaker weather, and then to
the full rigors of harsh cold, when snow lay thick across the hills,
blanketing everything. The routine of little tasks laid itself upon
Moore, and upon his wife. Even Lucia, in greater and greater degree,
submitted to it. But revolt was always very near the surface in the
girl. One day she met Johnny Dree upon the road, and he asked in a
friendly way: “Well, you getting to like it here?”
She was in ill humor that morning, and she flamed at him. “Oh, I hate
it! I hate it!” she cried. “I wish to God I’d never seen this damned
hole. But papa’s got us into it, and we can’t get out, and there’s
nothing to do but work and work. Sometimes I wish I were dead.”
He had never heard her swear before; and he looked at her in some
astonishment. She was, he thought, so small, and so serenely sweet to
look upon that there was something incongruous in her profanity. But he
did not speak of his thought at that time; said merely:
“Why, that’s too bad. I thought you were getting to like it, maybe.” And
so passed on, leaving her curiously chastened by his very mildness.
There was an interminable sameness in the days. To rise early, to do the
morning chores, and cook, and eat, and wash dishes, and dust, and cook,
and eat, and wash dishes, and sew, and cook, and eat, and wash dishes,
and read the paper, and go fumingly to bed. This was Lucia’s bitter
life. But because it is impossible to hold indignation always at its
highest pitch, there were hours when she forgot to be unhappy; there
were hours when she found something like pleasure in this ordered
simplicity of life. Now and then Johnny came in of an evening, and sat
in the dining room with them all and talked with her father about apple
trees; and Lucia liked, at first, to practice her small cajoleries upon
him. He quickly began to call her Lucia, then Lucy as her father and
mother did. She preferred the simpler name, upon his simple lips. When
the snow thinned and disappeared, and new grass pushed greenly up
through the brown that clothed the fields, she was stronger than she had
ever been. Her arms were rounding, her figure assuming the proportions
for which it was designed; and her color no longer required external
application. When Johnny took Moore into his own orchards and showed him
how to apply the dormant spray, and how to search out the borers in the
base of the trees and kill them with a bit of wire, or with a plug of
poisoned cotton, and all the other mysteries of orchardry, Lucy liked to
go along, and learned to do these tasks as well as Johnny, and better
than her father did. The trees, fed with well-rotted manure which Johnny
preferred to any chemical preparation, and freed from the competition of
the grass and weeds which had surrounded them and blanketed their
thirsty roots, throve and put out a great burst of bloom, and all the
hillside was aglow with color. Lucy began to see hope of release from
this long bondage here. When the apples were sold, if the market was
good, Johnny thought they might make five or six hundred dollars in a
year....
Then one midnight she awoke shivering in a sharp blast from her open
window, and drew fresh blankets over her; and in the morning there was
white frost on the ground, and Johnny came up the hill with a
philosophic smile upon his face. Moore met him at the kitchen door.
“Well,” said Johnny slowly. “We won’t do well this year. This frost has
nipped them. I guess not bearing will give your trees a chance to get a
better start.”
Moore accepted the calamity with mild protest. Said blankly: “No apples.
Why, I’ve got to have something....”
But Lucy was not so mild. From the kitchen behind her father she pushed
past him and out upon the porch, her eyes ablaze. “No apples!” she
cried, in a voice like a scream. “Why not?”
“This frost has killed them,” said Johnny, his eyes hardening.
She almost sprang at him, beat on his broad chest with her fists, and
tears streamed down her face. “You fool! You damned fool!” she cried.
“There’ve got to be apples. There’ve got to be! You said there would be!
You said if we worked, there would be! If we sprayed the damned trees!
Oh, you make me sick, with your lies! Oh, I hate this farm! I hate the
damned trees....”
Johnny surprised her. He took her by the shoulders, gripping them till
she winced. “Stop it, Lucy,” he commanded.
“I won’t!” she cried. “Let go of me....”
“Be still your noise,” he said, no more loudly than before. But the
insistence in his voice constrained her, and she began to weep bitterly,
and slumped against him, shaken and half fainting. “You can’t talk that
way,” he told her. “It’s no way to talk. You got to be a sport. It’s a
part of the business, Lucy. Now you go in the house and wash your face
and help with breakfast. I want to talk to your father. Go along.”
Her father watched her; and his face was white with surprise and
consternation. But Lucy turned and went obediently into the house, and
he looked after her, and looked at Johnny Dree; and Johnny grinned, a
little sheepishly.
“You see,” he said, ignoring what had happened. “Thing is, you can raise
some garden stuff, and some chickens and things, and get along. We’re
due for a good year next year.”
Walter Moore nodded. “That’s all right,” he assented, and looked again
at the door through which Lucy had gone. “But I’d like to shake hands
with you, Dree. I’d like to shake your hand.”