Yet Dan’s father never laid down a moral precept. His teaching was all by indirection. He had a tremendous fund of anecdote, had many stories to tell; and some of them were stirring and some made the boys howl with glee; but through them all ran one consistent strain, which Dan came by degrees to recognize as the character of his father, as the distilled essence of all John Evered was and tried to be.
And everything that was his father, Dan learned to love with a fierce yet humble devotion, and with a pride so keen that just to think of the man might make the boy’s eyes fill happily.
III
There were other people in Dan’s youthful world. Mrs. McGaw in the kitchen, and Pat Tierney and Ruth and their children, were almost part of the family. Mrs. McGaw was outwardly querulous, sharp-tongued, forever scolding; but she did not mean half she said, and the boys knew it. The cooky jar was always filled; and if she were frying doughnuts and the delicious fragrance drew them to the kitchen door, she would give them samples, hot out of the boiling grease, so hot they could hardly be held at all and must be passed rapidly from one hand to the other while they cooled. The boys plagued her affectionately till she said they would be the death of her; but when Jenny one day offered to keep them out of the kitchen, Mrs. McGaw said briskly: ‘Thank you for nothing! I’ll never see the day I can’t run my own kitchen. Any time I want to be rid of them, I can scatter them like so many chickens. No, ma’am, leave them be.’
She had been widowed when her own son and daughter were babies, and she went sometimes now to her daughter’s in Brewer to sec her grandchildren. Her son was the boss of a lumber crew, in the woods all winter, with a small farm down Bucksport way and grown sons now of his own; but Mrs. McGaw did not like her son’s wife and spoke darkly of her goings on and never went there unless her son was at home.
Pat Tierney welcomed the boys to the stables which were his particular province and taught them to ride almost before they could walk. They delighted to help him curry the horses and brush them till their coats shone; and they helped him clean the harness and wash the carriages, and as they grew older they learned to harness the horses. Dan always remembered as a triumph the day he first succeeded in bridling old Charley, standing on the mounting block to do so, under Pat’s watchful eye. Pat kept them busy helping him with all the chores around the place. They cleaned stalls and raked the driveway and the paths, and cut the grass and clipped the borders and weeded garden beds and raked leaves in the fall and kept Mrs. McGaw’s woodbox filled—Pat himself carried the big logs for the fireplaces—and in summer they helped with the haying on the meadow lands behind the house, pitching on as soon as they were tall enough to do so, treading down the hay as Pat spread it in the great mow.
Pat they liked and trusted, but they were always a little afraid of Ruth. She was a quiet woman who flew sometimes into shrill tempers which passed as quickly as they came. She was much younger than Pat, and she preserved a youthful appearance, while Pat’s red hair was long since tinged with gray. Dan, for no reason he could define, was always a little sorry for her, and that made him like her. She was devoted to Pat, yet in her not infrequent fits of temper she berated him with outright violence, sometimes coming down into the stable to give him a piece of her mind. He at such times never defended himself, standing quietly under the storm; but when she was gone he would wink at Dan and say wisely:
‘Sure and she’ll feel better now that’s out of her system!’
Dan unconsciously acquired from Pat a habit of thinking of all womankind—except of course his mother, who was unique and incomparable—as weaker vessels, capable of being all sweetness and content, but subject to storms and stresses from which man was immune and with ways no man could understand. He understood that for woman’s frailties it was necessary to make allowances, and this conception fitted well with Dan’s own mysterious sympathy for Ruth, his feeling that she was unhappy and in need of kindliness. He adopted toward her Pat’s attitude, so that if she laid her tongue on him he attributed her wrath to what Pat called ‘the vapors’ and waited for it to pass.
She and Pat had three children, never any more. The oldest, named after Pat himself, was a year or so older than Dan; but young Pat was frail, with sandy hair and an appealing grin. Also, the truth was not in him. He was a chronic liar, and he was addicted even as a child to petty thieving, stealing not only Mrs. McGaw’s goodies out of the kitchen—that was a venial sin which they all committed—but such things as straps out of the harness room, the bright medallions attached to the check strap of bridles, or even on one or two occasions small treasured possessions belonging to Dan or the other boys. Dan hated and despised young Pat as soon as he was old enough to form an opinion. It puzzled him sometimes to see that Ruth seemed to prefer her oldest son to her other children; but he thought she hid this preference from Pat himself, as though it were something of which she was ashamed.
Their younger children were red-headed like Pat himself. The oldest, named John out of compliment to Dan’s father and called Jack, was Will’s age, freckled, full of a lively instinct for harmless mischief, and with a faculty for clowning which delighted Dan and the others. Elizabeth—Lizzie for short—two years younger, was like her mother quiet and reserved, but with none of those storms of temper which Ruth sometimes displayed. Except for young Pat, the children were all congenial enough, doing many things together; but young Pat was more apt to be alone or with his mother than with them.
Of the older people who came to the house which was at first Dan’s world—Judge Saladine, Elijah Hamlin, Colonel Black, Deacon Adams, General Veazie, Rufus Dwinel and all the leading citizens of the city—Aunt Meg and Uncle Line were the only ones who made on Dan as a youngster any particular impression. He liked them both, but he found in Uncle Line as in Ruth something wistful and unhappy and therefore curiously appealing. When Uncle Line brought them small presents, Dan understood that the man did this to win their liking; and he always pretended to be delighted with these gifts in order to please Uncle Line. It would always be true of Dan that sympathy and affection went hand in hand. For him to be even a little sorry for a person was to like him.
So he liked Uncle Line, but for Aunt Meg, on the other hand, he had a warm and forthright affection in which there were no qualifications. She was just pretty and nice and jolly and he loved her. He had loved her ever since he could remember; not as he loved his mother, possessively and protectively, but with a warm and merry adoration which was undiluted happiness. He never saw her without delight; and when as sometimes happened they were alone together and she talked to him—not as so many grown-ups talk to children but as to one as mature as she—he enjoyed it completely.
One of the things he liked best about her was her frank affection for his father. He liked to tell her of the pleasures he and his father had together, and of the things they planned to do ‘when I grow up,’ and he might repeat to her some of the stories John had told him, and they would laugh together at these tales. In many ways the happiest times Dan had, until Aunt Meg married Captain Pawl, were when he talked about his father with her. She seemed to know so exactly how he felt, seemed so completely to agree that his father was all the splendid, unnamed things which Dan knew him to be.
IV
When he was very young, Dan used to feel in the very air of his home the strong happiness which lay between his father and his mother. Without knowing why, he nevertheless knew that when he was with them he felt virtuous and warm and calmly content; and to see the way they looked at each other and how when their eyes met even casually each might become for a moment still and smiling, to hear them laugh together, to see their quiet amusement as they watched him and Will and little Tom and Mat, to listen while they talked to each other in grave, low tones about things he did not in the least understand—all these experiences contributed in secret and subtle ways to his own happiness. The first time he heard any other than a note of fondness in their tones frightened him almost to tears. That was while Mat was stil
l a very young baby, no more than two or three months old; and his mother was perched on his father’s knee as though she too were a child, teasing his father, pulling his nose, tickling him, her finger boring into his neck under his ear, whispering to him, begging for something, saying: ‘Please, please, pretty please! Pretty please, John?’ Dan thought she was incredibly sweet and beautiful, her cheek flushed, her eyes curiously lustrous; and he thought no one could deny her anything. But his father, though when this teasing began he had laughed good-humoredly enough, began as Dan could see to be a little irritated and severe; and once he said sternly: ‘Hush, Jenny! Dan’s watching you!’ But she laughed and buried her face against his neck, and pretended to bite his ear, worrying it with little growling sounds, till his father pushed her away. Dan could feel his father’s anger, oppressive and alarming, in the very air; and as though in response to it, his mother suddenly was angry too, for she got up off his father’s knee and walked toward the door, and she said over her shoulder in a hard, scornful tone:
‘I’m sure you’re admirably continent!’
She left the room, and Dan was embarrassed and unhappy; but an hour later his father and mother were laughing together again.
But after that there were other occasions when he felt this hard antagonism between them. Sometimes, passing their door, he heard in their voices an inflexible and unforgiving tone that made him uneasy.
Usually when Dan’s father and mother were thus at odds, it was over some issue which they veiled behind obscure phrases, or which even though they spoke plainly Dan could not understand; but he did understand their differences over Atticus, the black man who for a while helped Pat take care of the lawn and garden. Atticus appeared mysteriously one morning, having arrived after the boys were abed the night before; and at once he and the boys were on the best of terms. Their first shy curiosity led them to question him; his chuckling good humor made them like him; and they listened in fascination to the interminable tales he loved to tell, and they discovered that he could sing queer, haunting, formless songs about God and his children, and about heaven and hell, and they followed him around the place like cats behind a fishmonger’s cart, teasing him to sing while he worked.
They thought it hilariously funny because to him even pleasant summer days seemed uncomfortably cold; and when one night there was almost a frost and he appeared in the morning wearing two suits of their father’s old clothes and with chattering teeth, they laughed to the point of tears. He said this was the coldest winter he ever did see, and they told him scornfully that this was summer, and they boasted about how cold real Bangor winters were, and showed him 011 the trees how deep the snows might drift, and told him how water might freeze in their bedrooms at night even with the windows closed. They showed him the airtight stoves, stowed away for the summer in the shed, which in the fall would be set up indoors to keep the house warm; and they assured him, happily exaggerating, that even with fires in all the stoves they often wore heavy coats and shawls indoors. They reduced the colored man to a state of real and lively apprehension; till he said one day, wagging a rueful head:
‘M-m-man! Time it gits tuh be cold lak dat, I’m gwine wish’t I’d stayed in Savannah, Gawguh!’ He worried about the fact that there was no heat and no provision for a stove in the small room in the shed where a bed had been placed for him. ‘What I gwine do when it gits tuh be cold lak you say, Mistuh Dan?’ he protested dolefully. ‘Savannah, Gawguh—da’s de place I’m gwine want tuh be.’
Atticus began in fact to suffer from something like homesick pangs, and he would talk for hours about the charms and beauties of his life as a slave, his snug warm cabin, his Nancy, his Mr. Sagurs who valued him so highly. Dan told his mother that Atticus wanted to go home to Savannah, but she said Dan was foolish, that no one could possibly prefer to be a slave! Dan tried to argue with her. T told him that, mother,’ he declared, ‘and he said being a slave was just having a good master and plenty to eat and a warm cabin and having it warm weather all the time.’ But she silenced him almost indignantly, assuring him that Atticus did not mean what he said.
Dan was conscious of the fact that his father and mother disagreed about Atticus, and when two men came one day and took the negro away, he saw the frightening wrath in her, and knew that she was angry at his father. For most of the week after Atticus was taken away, she did not speak to Dan’s father at all, except with such a dreadful politeness that Dan and the other boys moved in hushed misery.
Since Mat was born it had been increasingly often true that there hung about Dan’s father and mother this red and angry cloud. On the occasions, more and more rare as time went on, when they were again completely happy together, Dan and the other children were apt to run and shout and laugh in sheer exuberance because all was once more well between their father and mother—and therefore in their world.
V
Dan never took sides between his father and mother even in his thoughts until a day soon after Atticus went away, and that day it was rather an instinct on his part to defend Mat than any other consideration which ranged him against his mother. She and his father had been at odds at breakfast; and after his father went away to the office, she paced up and down the living room, so engrossed in her own thoughts that once when Dan came to the door and spoke to her she did not even hear him. He watched her for a moment in a puzzled and increasing uneasiness and at last slipped quietly away, but he came back, drawn by a fascination he could not resist, to spy upon her; and he saw that as she walked and walked, her fists were clenched, and presently she began to beat her fists against her hips and to make low, wordless sounds. Dan was wholly frightened now, and he tiptoed away to the end of the hall, and out to the bam.
Later, he saw her go past the barn toward the woodlot behind the house. She walked purposefully, and yet with slow, hard steps as though someone were pushing her against her will, and he watched her through the window of a horse stall and saw her cut off a young birch sapling. It was not so long as the switch which she kept hanging behind the woodshed door and which these last two or three years, and especially on those days when she and Dan’s father were at odds, she had been apt to use at the most trivial offense. She brought the switch toward the house, stripping off the leaves as she came, and Dan stayed hidden in the stable till she went indoors.
Dan’s father came home to dinner; and at table she was quiet while his father joked with them as he always did. Afterward Pat drove John back to town and returned to take Mrs. McGaw to Brewer to see her daughter; and Dan and Will and the other children begged to go along, but their mother said no. She sent Ruth instead, and she even let Ruth taker her children; and Dan thought it unfair that they should go while he and his brothers must stay at home. The ride to Brewer, across the covered bridge, stopping to pay the toll, was an adventure which they all enjoyed.
The carriage drove away, and the four boys wandered across the front lawn, idly seeking a way to amuse themselves. Mat was by that time a chubby youngster who already displayed a will of his own, and who promised to be some day the biggest of them all. He and Dan were both large for their age, and Dan had once heard his mother tell Aunt Meg that they were like her father. Mat was a rowdy, with a trick of shouting down all opposition till he got his way. The other brothers, Will and Tom, were of slender mold, and though Will was tall enough for his years, Tom, despite the advantage in age which he possessed, was only a little taller than Mat, and not much heavier; and he lacked completely Mat’s bold truculence.
At the foot of the lawn, Jenny was planning to put in a lattice to support some climbing vines; and Pat had dug the holes in which two stout cedar posts would presently be set. The boys examined these holes and began to argue about how deep they were. Tom thought they were over his head, and Will said scornfully that he was crazy, and to prove his point Tom slid down into one hole. The top of his head did not reach the level of the ground, but Will accused him of scrooching down to make the hole seem deeper than it was, and demanded
that Tommy let Mat get down into the hole to make an honest test.
It proved necessary to use some force to insert Mat into the hole. Tommy was slender enough to wiggle in and out of it with no great difficulty, but Mat showed a tendency to stick; and once he was down in in the hole, a sense of suffocation seized him and he pleaded for rescue. This excited the other boys, who began to tease him, threatening to go away and leave him stuck in the hole; and the threats produced in him a sort of frenzy. He reached out and caught Tommy’s bare leg and set his fingernails in it so deeply that Tommy yelled in turn, dragging his leg free of Mat’s claws at the cost of astonishingly deep and bloody scratches.
The Strange Woman Page 48