Early Sunday evening Amos filled two jugs with his last-year’s cider and took them with him to see Esther. When he got there, he wanted Esther to begin drinking with him right away. Esther liked cider, especially when it was a year old, and they drank one jug empty before nine o’clock. Amos had not said a word the whole evening about marrying. He figured that it would be better to wait and talk about that when they started on the second jug.
Esther took a good stiff drink from the new jug and danced a few steps before she sat down again.
“This is good cider, Esther,” he said preliminarily.
Esther put her hand over her mouth and swallowed two or three times in quick succession.
“You always have good apple juice, Amos,” she smiled at him. Amos rubbed the palms of his hands nervously over his knees, trying to erase the indigo stain of white birch from the skin. He liked to hear Esther praise his cider.
“The boys at the skewer mill promised to give me a whole barrel of cider when I get married,” he lied shamelessly.
He glanced at Esther, hoping to find on her face some sign of the effect the carefully planned story should have had on her. Esther looked blankly at the ceiling, as though she did not know why Amos came to see her every Sunday night with his last-year’s cider. Amos poured her another glass from the jug.
While she drank the cider, Amos studied the pile of thick quilts and comforters on the foot of her bed in the next room. Seeing Esther’s quilts made him more than ever determined to marry her right away. He could see no sense in his coming to her house every week and bringing her his good cider when, if she would marry him, he could be there every night and have all his cider for himself.
And this time, when he brought two jugs, he knew he had the best opportunity of his life. If Esther drank both jugs of cider and still continued to say that she would not marry him, then there would be no use in wasting any more of his cider on her.
Esther finished the glass and gave it to Amos. He put it on the table and turned around just in time to see Esther lifting her skirt near the hem with a thumb and forefinger and carelessly throwing one leg across the other. He knew at once that the second jug was doing all it should do, because Esther had never crossed her legs so gaily during all the other times he had been bringing one jug. He poured her another glass, and rubbed his birch-stained hands together enthusiastically while she was placing the glass to her lips.
“Esther, I’ve got more than seven thousand dollars in the savings bank,” he began. That was the first thing he said each time he asked her to marry him. “My farm and buildings are worth three thousand dollars, and I haven’t any debts.”
Esther lifted her eyelids and looked at Amos. Her eyes were sleepy-looking but she was wide awake.
“I don’t want to be married,” she said, beginning to giggle a little or the first time. “I want to stay like I am, Amos.”
This was the only time he had ever been with Esther when she had a cider-giggle. He watched her anxiously, startled by her prompt refusal.
“But blankets —” he cried out nervously.
“What blankets?” she asked, raising herself on her elbow and guiding herself across the room, The cider-giggle was getting beyond her control.
“Winter is coming — cold weather!” he shouted desperately.
“What about cold weather, Amos?” she giggled again.
“I was just thinking about blankets,” he said hopelessly.
Esther went to the door and looked into her bedroom. Amos came and stood behind her.
“I haven’t any blankets, Amos,” she giggled, “but I’ve got a lot of quilts and comforters.”
Amos looked hopefully over her shoulder at the pile of quilts and comforters on her bed.
“I want us to get married, Esther,” he said thickly. “How would you like to marry me?”
Esther pushed Amos roughly aside and went back into the room. She was giggling so foolishly she could not speak.
Amos went to the table and poured her another glass of cider. While she drank it he glanced at the almost empty jug, realizing that he would have to hurry Esther if he was to get her consent before all the cider was gone.
When she handed him the empty glass, Amos put it on the table and caught her hands before she could jerk away from him. Then, holding her arms so she could not push him away, he kissed her. Knowing that she would try to push him away when he did that, he put his arms around her and held her while he talked to her about marrying him.
“I want that you should marry me, Esther,” he struggled with her strength, “because if you don’t I’ll have to buy some blankets for the winter.”
Esther pushed and scratched but Amos held her all the tighter. He could see that she was mad, but at the same time she could not keep from giggling just as sillily as ever. Amos poured out the last glass of cider for her while he held her with one hand.
Still holding her with one hand he tried to force the cider into her mouth. Suddenly she shoved Amos with all her might, and both of them fell on the floor. Amos was not hurt, but Esther struck her knee on a chair and cut a deep gash in her leg. The blood ran through her stocking and dripped on the floor beside them.
“Esther, I want that you should marry me right away before —” he began a second time.
Before he could say another word Esther had grabbed the nearest cider jug and hit him over the head with it. The blow was glancing, and the jug only stunned him for a moment. She had swung the jug so hard, though, that it was jerked from her fingers and crashed against the cast-iron stove. She immediately reached for the second jug, but Amos was too quick for her. He ran to the door and out into the yard before she could throw it at him. When he got to the road, she had reached the door, and with all her strength she hurled the stone jug at Amos. Amos dodged out of the way and ran down the road toward his house.
When he got home, there was nothing to do but drink some cider and go to bed. He was so mad about the way things turned out that he drank almost three times as much cider as he usually did when he went down into his cellar.
By the time Amos started to the skewer mill the next morning he was resigned to his inability to marry Esther. His only regrets now were that he had wasted all his last-year’s hard cider on her and would have to buy two or three sets of blankets, after all.
When he got to the mill, a stranger was standing in the doorway. The man made no effort to move when Amos tried to enter.
“Your name is Amos Williams, isn’t it?” he asked.
“Amos Williams it’s been ever since I can remember,” Amos said sourly, trying to get into the mill.
“Well, you will have to come along with me to the county jail,” he said, holding out a folded paper.
“What for?” Amos demanded.
“The paper says ‘Assault on the Person of Esther Tibbetts.’”
The man who had promised Amos five gallons of cider the week before, when he suggested that Amos take Esther two jugs, came up the road to the mill door. He asked Amos what the trouble was and Amos told him.
“You got me into all this trouble,” Amos swore at him. “You said two jugs would make her marry me, and now she’s had me arrested for assault.”
“Well, it’s too bad you’ve got to go to jail and lose all that time here at the mill, Amos, but it was all your own fault.”
“How was it my fault?”
“It’s like this, Amos. There are three kinds of women. There are one-jug, two-jug, and three-jug women. You should have told me at the start that Esther was a three-jug woman. If you had done that, I could have told you to take her three jugs of cider instead of only two.”
(First published in This Quarter)
Midsummer Passion
MIDDLE-AGED BEN HACKETT and the team, Cromwell and Julia, were haying to beat hell when the thunderstorm broke on the east ridge. Ben knew it was coming, because all morning the thunder had rumbled up and down the river; but Ben did not want the storm to break until he had
drawn the hay to the barn, and when the deluge was over he felt like killing somebody. Ben had been sweating-hot before the storm came and now he was mad. The rainwater cooled him and took some of the anger out of him. But he still swore at the thunderstorm for ruining his first-crop hay.
The storm had passed over and the sun came out again as hot as ever, but just the same he had to throw off the load of hay he had on the rack. Swearing and sweating, Ben unloaded and drove Cromwell and Julia across the hayfield into the lane. Ben filled his pipe and climbed up on the hayrack. Clucking like a hen with a new brood of chicks, Ben urged the team toward the highroad half a mile away. The sun was out, and it was hot again. But the hay was wet. Damn it all!
“If God knows all about making hay in this kind of weather, He ought to come down and get it in Himself, by Jesus,” Ben told Cromwell and Julia.
Cromwell swished his horsehairs in Ben’s face and Julia snorted some thistledown out of her nose.
Glaring up at the sky and sucking on his pipe, Ben was almost thrown to the ground between the team when Cromwell and Julia suddenly came to a standstill.
“Get along there, Cromwell!” Ben growled at the horse. “What’s ailing you, Julia!”
The horse and mare moved a pace and again halted. Ben stood up, balancing himself on the hayrack.
“By Jesus!” he grunted, staring down the lane.
An automobile, unoccupied, blocked the narrow trail.
Ben climbed down, swearing to Cromwell and Julia. He paced around the automobile uncertainly, inspecting it belligerently. No person was in sight.
“Damn a man who’d stand his auto ablocking the lane,” Ben grumbled, glancing at Cromwell and Julia for confirmation. “I guess I’ll have to push the thing out of the way myself. By Jesus, if whoever left it here was here I’d tell him something he wouldn’t forget soon. Not by a damn sight!”
But Ben could not move the car. It creaked and groaned when he pushed and when he pulled, but it would not budge a single inch. Knocking out his pipe and wiping his face, Ben led the team around the automobile through the undergrowth. When he got back into the lane, he stopped the horses and went back to the car. He glanced inside for the first time.
“By Jesus!” Ben exclaimed high-pitched.
Hastily glancing up the lane and down, he opened the door and pulled out a pair of silk stockings.
Ben was too excited to say anything, or to do anything. Still fingering the stockings he presently looked in the driver’s seat, and there, to his surprise, under the steering wheel sat a gallon jug of cider almost empty. Ben immediately pulled the cork to smell if it was hard. It was. He jabbed his thumb through the handle hole and threw the jug in his elbow. It was hard all right, but there was very little of it left.
“Cromwell,” he announced, smacking his lips with satisfaction, “that’s Hetty good cider, for a windfall.”
As he carefully replaced the jug under the steering wheel, Ben saw a garment lying on the floor. It was entangled with the do-funnys that operated the car. Carefully he pulled the garment out and held it before his eyes. He could not figure out just what it was, yet he knew it was something women wore. It was pinkish and it was silkish and it looked pretty. And there was very little of it. Ben stared openmouthed and wild-eyed.
“By Jesus, Cromwell,” Ben licked his mustache lip, “what do you know about that!”
Cromwell and the mare nibbled at the road grass, unconcerned.
Ben fingered the drawers a little more intimately. He turned them slowly around.
“It’s a female thing, all right, Cromwell.” Ben danced excitedly. “It’s a female thing, all right!”
Holding the garment high in his hands, Ben climbed on the hayrack and drove down the lane into the highroad. The garment was nice and soft in his hands, and it smelled good, too.
He rode down the road thinking about the drawers. They filled him with the urge to do something out of the ordinary but he didn’t know what he could do. When he reached Fred Williams’s place, he drew up the team. Fred’s wife was stooping over in the garden. Ben pushed the garment carefully into his pants pocket.
“Nice day, today, Mrs. Williams,” he called airily, his voice breaking foolishly. “Where’s Fred?”
“Fred’s gone to the village,” she answered, looking around bent over her knees.
Ben’s hand stole into the pocket feeling the garment. Even in his pocket out of sight it made him feel different today.
Hitching the team to the horse rack, Ben went into the garden with Fred’s wife. She was picking peas for supper. She wasn’t bad-looking. Not by a damn sight!
Watching her while she pulled the peas from the vines, Ben strode around her in a circle, putting his hand into the pocket where the pink drawers were. The woman did not say much, and Ben said nothing at all. He was getting so now he could feel the drawers without even touching them with his hands.
Suddenly Ben threw his arms around her waist and squeezed her excitedly.
“Help!” she yelled at the top of her voice, diving forward. “Help!” she cried. “Help!”
When she dived forward, both of them fell on the pea vines, tearing them and uprooting them. She yelled and scratched, but Ben was determined, and he held her with all his strength. They rolled in the dirt and on the pea vines. Ben jerked out the pink drawers. They rolled over and over tearing up more of the pea vines. Ben struggled to pull the drawers over her feet. He got one foot through one drawers leg. They rolled down to the end of the row tearing up all the pea vines. Fred would raise hell about his pea vines when he came home.
Ben was panting and blowing like a horse at a horse-pulling, but he could not get the other drawers leg over the other foot. They rolled up against the fence and Fred’s wife stopped struggling. She sat up, looking down at Ben in the dirt. Both of them were brown with the garden soil and Ben was sweating through his mask.
“Ben Hackett, what are you trying to do?” she sputtered through the earth on her face.
Ben released her legs and looked up at her. He did not say anything. She stood up, putting her foot in the empty leg, pulling the drawers up under her skirt. That was where he had been trying all this time to put them. Damn it!
Ben got up dusting his clothes. He followed her across the garden into the front yard.
“Wait here,” she told him.
When she returned, she carried a basin of water and a towel.
“Wash the dirt off your face and hands, Ben Hackett,” she directed, standing over him, wearing the pink drawers.
Ben did as he was told to do. When he finished washing his face and hands, he slapped some of the dirt out of his pants.
“It was mighty nice of you to bring the towel and water,” he thanked her.
“You are halfway fit to go home now,” she approved, pinning up her hair.
“Good day,” Ben said.
“Good day,” said Fred’s wife.
(First published in Transition)
A Day’s Wooing
WHEN TUFFY WEBB woke up that morning, the first thing he saw was his new straw hat hanging on the back of the cane-bottomed chair beside the bed. The red, orange, and blue silk band around the hat looked as bright in the sunshine as the decorations in the store windows in town on circus day. He reached out and felt the rough crown and brim, running his fingers over the stiff brown straw. He would never have to step aside for anybody, in a hat like that. That was all he needed, to get the world by the tail.
“Maybe that won’t knock a few eyes out!” Tuffy said, throwing off the covers and leaping to the floor. “They’ll all be cross-eyed from looking at it.”
He placed the hat carefully on his head and walked over to the mirror on the wall. The new straw hat looked even finer Sunday morning than it had Saturday night, when he tried it on in the store.
“When Nancy sees this lid, she’ll come tumbling,” Tuffy said, stepping back and tilting the hat a little on one side of his head and winking at himself under the brim.
He walked past the mirror several times, free and easy in his loose knee-length nightshirt, turning his eyes to see himself in passing. It was easy to get up courage in a hat like that.
“I could have all the girls after me now if I wanted them,” he said to himself.
Tuffy got dressed in a hurry and made a fire in the cookstove. He pulled the hat down carefully over his head so it would not fall off and hit the floor while he was cooking breakfast.
During all the time he was in the kitchen he kept thinking to himself that he would not have to keep bach much longer after that, not after Nancy saw him in his new hat. She would be tickled to death to marry him now, the first time she saw him walking up to her house with the straw sailor tilted over one ear, sort of like a cock’s comb that always looked like it was going to fall off but never did.
After breakfast Tuffy had to drive the cows to the pasture on the other side of the creek because it had become time for them to have a change of feed, and the Johnson grass over there was ready for grazing.
He started off with his hat on his head, but he got to thinking about it and finally decided he ought to leave it at the house. Sometimes a yearling took to heels and bolted off into a thicket, and he did not like to think of taking any chances of having the hat fall off into the briers and mud, and maybe being trampled by the cows. Now that he was thinking about it, he remembered seeing a cow chew up a straw hat once and swallow it.
He hurried back to the house and hung the hat on the cane-bottomed chair beside the bed.
Tuffy got back from the pasture at about eleven o’clock, and he changed his clothes right away, putting on his coat and the hat. After hat he still had almost an hour to wait before he could leave home, because he did not wish to get to the Millers’ while they were eating dinner. If he did that, one of the Millers would be certain to say that he had got there then to get something to eat.
He walked out on the porch and leaned against the railing for a while. The sun was almost directly overhead, and there was not a cloud in sight. He knew he could not have chosen a finer day to go calling on Nancy in a new straw hat. There was not a single drop of rain in the whole sky above.
Stories of Erskine Caldwell Page 59