“You could be wrong,” remarked Wade mildly. “What did you write about?” he added abruptly.
Though he hated himself for it, Frank found himself answering: “I wrote poems, first, then stories, then novels. I remember them. They were amateurish and ridiculous. And full of anachronisms and stupidities and ignorance. I—I always had to detour when I needed actual knowledge, because I didn’t know.” He paused a moment, then cried angrily: “I know what I’m talking about! It was hopeless for me. Now it’s behind me. I’m going on from there. I’m going to get money somehow, so I won’t have to live among the sort of people I despise.”
“What sort of people?”
“The poor. The dirty. The stupid and wretched. What they call ‘the masses.’ I hate them. I’m—afraid of them.” He stopped, and repeated as if in wonder: “Yes, that’s it. I’m afraid of them!”
Wade did not make any remark. He puffed contentedly on his pipe, gazing before him. Frank was drawn out of his miserable self-absorption as he looked at the other young man. There was something so calm, so quiet, about Wade O’Leary, so gentle and contained, yet strong. Frank said, with somber curiosity: “Why do you bother about them yourself, you a doctor and minister? Why do you waste your time in these mountains with these horrible people?”
“Because,” said Wade, “I’m sorry for them. They need help. You’ll see for yourself. And someone has to help them. There was no use waiting for the other fellow to do it. It was there, that need. So, we came out here, my brother and I.”
“What if they do need help?” cried Frank excitedly. “If a man needs help, it is because he hasn’t the brains to help himself, and why should others do the job he ought to have done, or lacks the intelligence to do?”
“In other words,” said Wade, smiling a little, “‘am I my brother’s keeper’? Yes, I think I am. When a man is drowning, or starving, I’m not interested in asking how he got in that position. I try to pull him out, or I feed him. That’s all.”
He added, very quietly: “Some day you’ll know it, completely, and then you’ll write again, better than you could ever believe.”
Frank bit back his contemptuous and bitter words. His wretchedness was like a sickness in him.
“You don’t really want money,” said Wade thoughtfully. “You just think you do.”
“You talk that way,” said Frank malevolently, “because you are a minister. Ministers are full of loving kindness. They don’t understand. They’re usually poor, and they have been taught to despise money.”
Wade smiled again. “I’m not poor, really. My father is quite a rich man, in Salt Lake City. But he never thought money important. You’d probably say that is because he never needed it. Perhaps you’re right; I don’t know. My brother Peter and myself had everything we wanted. But we needed something more valuable. That is why we came here. We’ve found it.”
“You probably have what they call ‘faith,’” said Frank, with hard loathing. “What is your faith, anyway? What is Mormonism?”
Wade laughed. “That is a long subject. I have books, down on Benton, and you may read them if you wish. But Peter and I don’t try to proselytize, in the accepted meaning of the word. We aren’t evangelists. We don’t believe we have the ‘only true faith.’ How can anyone really believe that? Do you remember what Samuel Butler wrote: ‘It has been said that all sensible men are of the same religion, and that no sensible man ever says what that religion is.’”
Frank felt a curious excitation in himself, and he perceived, unconsciously, that the flat and burning countryside had acquired depth and meaning and perspective. This, in itself, excited him as it had always excited him.
“But you think what you believe is the ‘truth’?”
“Yes, it is the truth. For me,” answered Wade gravely. “But I do not believe it is the truth for all men. There is no such thing as the absolute truth, of course. Truth, like everything else, is relative. But that does not change its intrinsic nature, nor give it falseness.”
He leaned back on his elbow and smiled humorously at Frank. “That is why I am trying to tell you that the ‘truth’ about yourself is not in others’ opinions. Nor, perhaps, is the ‘truth’ in yourself. You’ll have to find it in your own way.”
But the dreariness had fallen on Frank again, and again the landscape had flattened, become a blazing phonograph. With it, came that utter desolation of spirit with which he was now so familiar, that utter undesire for anything and weariness with all things.
Ben Calloway groaned, turned over, cursed, sat up.
“Well, boys,” he said, yawning, “reckon we ought to be on our way.”
CHAPTER 47
“Katydid-did-did-did!” came the thin high shrieking from the dark woods. “Whippoorwill!” mourned a chorus of other voices. The black foliage was splashed with moonlight, which could not pierce to the earth and brush below. An owl cried to the night, answered by raucous screams in rapid succession. Autumn scented the air with smoke and spice; the moon hung, a golden bowl, in a black sky, and gilded the tops of the low and somber hills.
Frank, sitting at the bare wooden table in the tent, listened to the voices in the darkness and to the snores of Ira Cunningham behind him on the cot. The kerosene lamp cast a pool of pale yellow light on the table, and on Frank’s book, a battered and ancient copy of one of Lord Lytton’s novels.
The tent was about sixteen feet square, with a wooden wall some four feet high, surmounted by another wall of screening which reached to the canvas roof. A thick iron pole supported that roof, and in the gusts of wind its fly now rose and fell and flapped the under canvas. The tent was set in a circle of thick oaks, maples and locust trees on the edge of the straggling woods, where squirrels and other animals rustled and quarrelled by day, and birds shrieked, moaned and cried, by night. Facing a long and casual clearing, the tent looked at plantings of tobacco and corn, now yellow in the moonlight, as they sloped down to a small and narrow valley. Frank could see the fire of the oil-well in the valley, now in the process of being drilled, and when a quick shadow passed before it he knew the shadow to be Tim Cunningham, his brother Ike, or one of their mountaineer helpers. Sometimes, when the constant pounding of the machinery was stilled momentarily, a faint voice reached him. But otherwise the beating and pulsing competed with the birds and the animals for the honor of shattering the silence.
The woods wound up to the hilltops, behind the tent. Here could be found blackberries and raspberries, trailing and poisonous vines, snakes and clumps of vivid wild flowers. But now everything was lost in the impenetrable night, with only the moonlight and the leaping red flame of the fire below, to give visibility to the wild scene.
The tent was furnished with two Army cots, covered with brown Army blankets, where Frank Clair and Ira Cunningham slept after their “shift,” which ended at midnight, and where Tom and Ike Cunningham slept by day; an oil stove where they did their rugged cooking, two wooden benches, and one large ancient trunk. The screened walls were festooned with work clothes hung on nails. The wooden floor was never cleaned, and great, gritty, oil spots decorated it at random. Everywhere, too, were boxes of foodstuffs, sent by oxcart over the roads, from Sears, Roebuck, in Chicago: powdered milk, cans of meat and fish, bags of sugar, coffee, smoked bacon, a ham or two wrapped in burlap, cans of baked beans and soups, hard cookies, and salt. The one general store “up on Benton” (as distinguished from “down on Benton”) supplied them with other necessities from its meagre shelves, and there were always “salat” greens to be dug in the woods and in open places, not to mention the sour wild apples and the berries, the squirrels, quail and ’possum to be brought down by the Cunningham guns. Sometimes the general store could supply them with oranges or bananas and “store bread,” also brought in by oxcart, and sometimes a farmer down on Benton could give them cheese and butter.
Among the furnishings were a number of iron skillets, one large iron pot for boiling the “salat” greens and salt pork (a hideous conc
oction to Frank, who had had romantic notions of “pot likker”), and a miscellaneous collection of always-dirty thick pottery and steel cutlery. The young men washed their oily clothing occasionally in the great wooden tub standing outside on a pile of stones, with water dragged laboriously up the hill from the artesian well sunk in the valley. As the washing was as sketchy as their housekeeping, and done in the iron-hard water from the well with cakes of mountain-made greasy soap, the clothing was always stiff with oil and dirt. Only dire thirst could bring Frank to drink of the well water, in spite of its vaunted purity and coldness, for, when it had stood an hour or so in its pails in the heat, it turned quite brown, and left a rusty rim at the water line. It smelled, too, of sulphur, which reminded Frank of the mountain privies or of rotten eggs. (There was no privy near the tent, but the woods and bushes served the purpose.)
Frank could smell the water now, as he sat at the table, bent over his book in the lamplight. He could smell the sweat curdled in the work-clothes along the walls, and the robust and virile Ira Cunningham, snoring on his tumbled cot in the shadow along the farther wall, exuded an acrid scent of his own. Then there was a pervading stink of annoyed skunk in the cool autumn air, and the odor of decaying vegetation. Sometimes, when the wind blew towards the tent, Frank could catch the stench of oil, pungent and choking, and the effluvium of gas released from deep in the earth. The Cunninghams had discovered oil near the well they were now drilling, and Frank could hear the low pounding of the pumps which filled the pipeline joining other wells in the vicinity. Thumpada-thump, said the pump; beat-dull-beat, answered the machinery of the well now in the process of being drilled. The fire flared and sank in the valley below; the katydids shrieked, the whippoorwills mourned, the owls hooted and cried dolorously. And overhead, the moon poured down upon the woods and fields its cataract of warm gold.
Frank was exhausted; he closed his eyes, and propped his head on his fists. He could feel nothing but his loneliness, his strangeness, his despair, and the sticky fabric of the blue shirt which clung to his back. It was not the work which so exhausted him, though he labored from noon until midnight every day, even on Sundays. In fact, he found release in tending the fire, in standing over the well and watching a new bit strike into the earth, in observing how the gray molten stone gushed up and poured out onto the green grass. But the Cunninghams struck dry wells more often than not, and even the few oil wells they successfully drilled produced poor surface oil, or a scant quantity. Frank had found out that the big wells had been struck when the Cunninghams had worked for other oil men. When they had gone into business on their own, their luck had incontinently changed.
But there was always the very good chance that the next well, or the next, would enrich them all, including Frank, whom they paid three dollars a day for his work. Frank marvelled at their gay enthusiasm, their unquenchable optimism, the bright sense of adventure which filled their every waking hour. Life itself, with its promise of a rich tomorrow, or just with its promise of a good drunk and a pretty wench, or, perhaps a rousing fight with other oilmen, a hunt in the woods, or a sound sleep, was sufficient. The riches for which they drilled without any abatement of hope were only happy afterthoughts, which, if they came true, would delight them. In the meantime, they were enjoying themselves vastly; simple, pleasant, laughing young animals who found Frank somewhat hard to understand, in spite of their easy liking for him.
They could not understand his grim obsession for money, his terrible disappointment when the well struck nothing but water, his despair when the bit was finally hauled up on its ropes, and the machinery moved to a more promising spot. He was having a good time, wasn’t he? He drank with them, and sometimes, on Sundays, they could hire a couple of mules and he would ride with them over the mountains, down or up on Benton, or would visit, with them, a certain distant cabin where lived two amiable young sisters and their senile grandmother, who smoked a pipe in the sun. They had taught him to shoot, and were happily amazed and congratulatory when he brought down squirrels and birds and ’possum with the best of them. They would stare, surprised, when, turning to talk to him in the green, sun-spangled depths of the woods, they caught a sudden expression of misery or pain or exhaustion on his face.
“What are the chances for this new well?” he would ask them, white-lipped and intent. They would stare at him wonderingly, and then, shrugging, would say: “Pretty good. Maybe. Goin’ up the hills to the girls tomorrow?”
Well, he was city folks, and a Yankee, too, poor critter. He worked like a dawg—for money. Not for enjoyment, not for today. Even after he had had a toss or two in the hay with the Crawford girls, he would rejoin them with a tense dark face, silent and unspeaking. It wasn’t nat’ral. Well, city folks—
They jeered at him affectionately when he bought money-orders, in the Benton post-office, to be sent to Sears, Roebuck for books, along with the orders for victuals and other supplies. They laughed at him when he walked the three miles to Benton every week for the pile of magazines for which he had subscribed, or when the oxcart delivered the boxes of books tumbled among the hams and the sugar and the bacon. Sometimes they would leave him for their excursions in the woods or the hills, and wonder what he found so absorbing in the literature strewn about him as he lay in the shade of the great locust tree near the tent.
But they liked him. He was quiet and cooperative; he never shirked. He had developed the ability to make an excellent rabbit or squirrel stew, with green peppers and tomatoes bought from a local farmer, and little round potatoes and onions. He had learned to bake corn pone, too, though he obviously hated it, and when he experimented with yeast and flour and lard, and produced exquisite bread, baked in the tin oven put over the oil burners of the stove, they enthusiastically declared that never ag’in would they eat the “store bread” brought in twice a week from Paintsville. They balked at his “salats” of fresh, uncooked greens mixed with hard-boilded eggs, vinegar and oil, but ate them politely on his insistence that they would get scurvy if they refused. In consequence, they eyed darkly the “medical book” which he had bought by mail-order from Sears, Roebuck, and direly threatened among themselves to “burn it one of these days.” But no one could “cook up” a better dried pea soup than he, and his beans, baked with molasses and salt pork and mustard, aroused their wild enthusiasm. He acquired the art of making “clabber biscuit,” too, rounds of tender white dough baked to a golden perfection, real Southern biscuit. Then he could fry chicken as could no one else. The Cunninghams, who had laughed at the cook-book bought from Sears, Roebuck, now regarded it with the reverence a true Southerner bestows on the Bible. Even when Frank produced strange and alien dishes, to be approached with caution and suspicion, the Cunninghams remained to praise them and groaningly to rub distended bellies. Frank was wonderful; they loved him. They did not know that he had learned to cook in self-defense, that he had found repulsive and inedible the usual Southern dishes of fried sow-belly, corn pone, “salat” greens cooked to oily black limpness with fat, and greasy fried pies. He had had to learn to cook, or starve to death. He preferred the first.
Besides the cooking, Frank managed to put in at least four hours on the wells. His obsession for money would allow nothing else. He saw how easily he could be assigned to the permanent job of full cook for the outfit at three dollars a day and probably no share of any possible riches. When he worked at least part of his usual shift, he retained his position as co-prospector, and would have his one-fourth stake. Though the Cunninghams had passionately told him he would have that stake anyway, he preferred not to trust too much in human nature.
Often he would go for days without thinking. But the nights were the worst. Then, in the silence, his despair and anguish would return; as they had returned, this autumn night, with the book on the table before him.
How was it possible to endure this life much longer, in these frightful hills, among these dreadful people? He knew to the dollar how much he had tucked away amid the tumbled clothing, his
own and the Cunninghams’, in the ancient Saratoga trunk. Four hundred dollars for five months’ work. Little more than a thousand dollars, if he remained until next summer, unless a rich well were struck. He doubted this, and began to hate the laughing exuberance of the Cunninghams, who found dry or watery wells hilarious.
He thought of the inhabitants of this lonely and illiterate semi-hamlet in the hills, and shuddered with disgust and loathing. Benton boasted no highway save an irregular, mule-flattened road which wound through the mountains to Paintsville, twenty-five miles away.
Benton itself boasted some nine hundred souls, all living in gray log cabins in which they, and their ancestors for scores of years, had been born. It boasted, too, a “crick,” which, with its “branches,” partially dried up in the summer. No one repaired its single road, which was impassable in the fall and spring. Here and there a more prosperous ex-farmer had built himself a clapboard house, with an inside pump, and once or twice, in the outlying regions, an old small house of gray stone could be found. The one street, at its center, served the post-office and general store, a smithy, a saddle shop, and a drugstore newly competing with the general store. At the far end stood a tiny white church with a pointed steeple and no cross, a Baptist church, visited every summer by the circuit-rider. Sun-baked, arid, dirty and muddy, Benton was hardly a village. The local doctor and his ancient wife occupied the lone stone cottage opposite the church. The O’Leary brothers had built a little schoolhouse beyond the church, and had hopefully painted it red. It consisted of half a dozen backless benches, a blackboard, a large black stove, and a table for the teacher: Peter O’Leary, himself. The O’Learys lived in a tent, similar to the tent of the Cunninghams, on a hillside a half mile from the village.
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