by Unknown
“It’s cold water,” he said. “Ten feet deep. It never changes level, summer or winter.”
Down in the well the bucket teetered, gulped, and sank. Joe’s hands bore down and brought it up brimming. Jerry caught a little in his hands to lather the soap and scrubbed himself.
“Put down your head.”
The icy water sloshed upon his head. The cold sank into his skull. When he bent up again the barnyard reeled before his eyes.
“You’re looking good,” said George, while Jerry dried himself.
“You too,” said Jerry. “You’ve got a handsome farm.”
“It’s good land. And we’ve been lucky. We built that barn last year. We’re notional about that barn. I’ll show you the inside of it this afternoon.”
Joe said, “There’s a comb and a piece of mirror alongside the door.”
Jerry combed the water from his hair, put on his shirt and coat. From the kitchen Ma called, “Dinner’s getting cold.”
They trooped in together.
With the sunlight full on her shoulders Ma faced them at the end of the long table. On her left the fireplace and oven lifted a dull-red mass of brick straight to the ceiling timbers. An enormous pickle cauldron, that hung on the crane, was bubbling softly, lifting its crust of foam in different places, and filling the room with a warm, vinegary smell.
“You set here, Jerry.”
Jerry saw that all the grown folks were paired off; man and wife sat side by side. On Ma’s right, next to Mary, was an empty chair. George moved over to Prue on Ma’s left, and Joe slid into an odd chair next the children.
“Maybe you’d ought to meet your children,” Ma said. “There’s Polly, growed to quite a girl. And next to her is Jerry we call him Jed.”
Jerry looked down at his children: Polly eyeing him shyly as a stranger; Jed putting his sturdy legs apart and giving him a frank, appraising scrutiny. He could not speak. She had run off from him and yet she had given the boy his name. “Not mad nor nothing.” He raised his eyes from their wondering stare and looked across the table. Mary was looking back at him. Her forehead was cool, her eyes steady.
But Ma said, “Come and set down here.”
She had carved a double chop from the loin and put it on his plate. Now from the steaming row of dishes she was heaping it with new potatoes boiled in their thin jackets, mashed carrots from an orange mountain running butter down its sides, stewed cabbage shot through with cheese, and strips of melon pickle. To finish it she loaded a knife blade with butter and scraped it off on the edge of the plate.
“You must be hungry after walking. Prue, cut him off a slice of bread. A man needs food.”
Mary sat at his side, eating quietly, and, when she had finished, letting her hands rest in her lap. He dropped his eyes to see them, and found them trembling. He dared not look at her face. She was wearing a lavender calico, a color that brought out the red in her hair, and her apron was blue checked gingham.
He found it hard to eat.
Ma said, “It’s a bit better meal than I used to give you on the turnpike, Jerry.”
“I can’t remember any better than those were, Ma.”
He smiled at her. But she said, “This is an actual dinner. Those was stewpot messes.”
Down the table, Joe said, “Ma likes to see a lot of dishes handy to her.
She likes to eat and eat and know she’ll have enough left over to stay her stummick with if it gets qualmish before supper time.”
“Joey!”
Ma gave a shriek.
“It ain’t true, is it, Mary? It’s only that I like the taste of real good food. Look, I’ve only had one help. Ain’t that a fact, Abijah?”
Abijah Judson stroked his pale moustache.
“It’s always seemed to me,” he pronounced heavily, “the person giving helps don’t have no call to help herself a second time.”
From the foot of the table where the children stood before their plates, a titter rose. Ma bent a frown upon them, but Joe laughed out loud.
Jerry passed Joe’s grinning wink to steal a look at Mary, but she was quiet. And suddenly Norah’s face rose up in his mind’s eye for him to put beside it, and he wondered how he had ever thought Norah beautiful. She had no strength, no quiet in her being. And seeing the strength in Mary’s face, he was afraid because of it.
Ma said, “You don’t seem hungry, Jerry. Don’t you like my dinner?”
“All people wasn’t born a Halleck, Ma,” George said.
Jerry looked gratefully over to him, meeting a smile from Prue, and saw her hand steal into George’s lap. But Angy sniffed as she reached across his shoulder to take out his half-empty plate.
Ma bent herself to conversation and the carving of the huckleberry pies. Their wide crusts shone brown with butter, and when she withdrew her knife the blade bled purple drops.
“What have you been doing these three years, Jerry? You seem like quite a stranger to me, and I want to know.”
He felt their eyes turn on him as he watched Ma’s deliberate cutting.
“I’ve been in Rochester, Ma. My partner, Roger Hunter, and I’ve been building boats and starting a freight company.”
“I believe a man can make good money in that business,” Abel said.
“We’re doing well enough to make a payment on the mortgage of our boatyard.”
“What do you call your company?”
“The Six-Day Line.”
“That’s a good name six days to the ‘Hio country, I expect.”
“What else have you been up to?” Ma demanded.
From the corner of his eye, Jerry saw Mary draw a breath and her cheeks flush up. But the fat woman was unabashed: she merely eased the yoke of her dress on her swelling bosom and bent herself to pie.
“I’ve spent a year building the Lockport locks.” Jerry ignored the caustic implication in Ma’s tone. “It was coming back from there I heard that you lived here. A crossing-tender by Oak Orchard had been seeing Harley Falk, and I thought Mary might have come here, even though George hadn’t told me of it back in Rochester. But I put an advertisement in the paper for six months for Mary.”
The men’s eyes dropped before his; but Angy snuffled in her nose as she pleated her napkin. Ma Halleck stopped her eating. But Jerry looked at Mary; for her eyes were large and looking directly into his.
And her flush deepened.
“I never was able to read, Jerry.”
“I remember that. But I thought whoever you might live with would read it to you.”
Mary looked round the table; then her eyes met Ma’s.
“Did you see it, Ma?”
Ma’s bold eyes showed no uneasiness.
“Yes, I seen it. I told the rest not to say nothing of it.”
“I think that was my business, Ma.”
“Perhaps it was, dearie. But sometimes other folks understand a person’s business better than their own selves.”
Mary’s voice was strained.
“I’d ought to be the judge of that.”
Ma shrugged her shoulders.
“A man that cuts his own pie gets what’s coming to him, seems to me.”
Abijah had already tramped off with Abel for the buckwheat field.
George said:
“Ma’s acting touchy because the butter didn’t make this morning. That’s what they’re working at right now.”
He was taking a final pull of his pipe on the kitchen stoop, and watching the barn doors for Joe’s emergence with the team. His eyes were troubled.
“It don’t seem friendly, us leaving you this way. But I’m afraid of early frost.”
He glanced aside at Jerry.
“Of course you’ll stay with us a spell?”
Jerry looked up from his hands.
“I ought to be getting back to Rochester. I’ve been away from the yard for quite a while, now.”
George tapped his pipe out.
“I’d like to see you stay awhile.” His e
yes followed the mincing arrogance of two young cockerels. “I’ll come in early this afternoon. I reckon you don’t feel like picking corn after your walk.”
“No thanks, George.”
The brown faces of the team appeared in the door. Their traces jingled as they walked to the shed. Joe hooked them to the eveners. George got to his feet. He stood a moment with his back to Jerry, clearing his throat. Then he said, “Maybe she felt jolted seeing you walk in the way you did. I’d give her time.”
He slowly strode over the yard, joined Joe upon the seat. The team rolled them round the corner of the barn. Jerry sat still, watching the motions of the poultry.
It seemed to him that he was more lonely than he had been in all the years since she had left him. He had had no chance to speak to her a few words after lunch, that was all; and she was cool and quiet, meeting his eyes with a glance that told him nothing. Then Ma had hinted her strongly to the pantry and Jerry had joined the men upon the stoop. The children had long ago dispersed. There was nothing for him to see, nothing to hear except the steady thump of the dashers in the churns beyond the kitchen, where Mary and Ma were wrestling with the cream, and the clatter the others made in clearing up the dinner. Out of sight in the bushes one of the dogs was chewing on a bone.
He got up slowly, for he couldn’t bear to sit by himself any longer. He walked over to the barn. Inside the doors, the long rows of wooden stan-chions ran down either side, with the horse stalls at the back and pens for the young stock and the bull. The runs smelled clean with straw, reminding him of Melville’s barn, a little place eight of them could be put inside of Halleck’s barn entire.
In the pen the bull rubbed up against the timbers to snuff his alien scent. The tight-curled forehead pressed against a crack, and, stooping down, Jerry met the dim glare of the eyes. The bull moaned softly as if he had caught Jerry’s restlessness.
At the back of the barn a set of steps led up to the wagon-well between the mows. There were no windows up above, but cracks left under the eaves for the escape of winter heat of cattle put a dim, sun-fused luminance against the rafters. The store of hay eaved over the mow wall level with his eyes and swelled upwards as a grey-green hill. The smaller mow gaped in its readiness for wheat and buckwheat straw, and there was no smell in the dusty air but the aromatic pungency of clover.
He sat down on a loose forkful on the floor with his back to the wall of the empty mow that he might look up at the hay and lose his thoughts against the rooftree. Here there was peace. The walls encompassed the quiet of fulfilled harvest. The high doors had been closed to a crack which allowed a spear of sunlight to lean against one corner of the hay; and in the light he heard the small sounds of the small things of the farm the stir of hens, the leathery slap of ducks’ feet returning from a marsh excursion, and distant voices from the house.
He felt himself remote. But as the quiet sifted through his beat of thoughts, his ears became aware of other lives imprisoned with the hay. He heard the rustle a grasshopper makes in drawing up its legs to spring, the chirp of crickets finding themselves dark burial places, and high on a rafter a cicada turned its grindstone feebly.
Through the crack in the doors he heard steps coming out on the kitchen stoop; then voices crossing the yard: Angy and Esther and Prue were going out to the buckwheat field to bind and shock the cradling Abel and Abijah had left upon the stubble. He saw the colored glint their bonnets made in passing the crack rose, lavender, and blue. For a moment their voices gave actualness. He caught a word: “I wouldn’t myself if I was her”; and Esther’s voice replying, “I couldn’t stand to be away from Abel no matter what there was.” The voices dimmed. The mow resumed its quiet.
Out of the stair door a cat came quietly. She paused for a sinuous breath, her tail just shivering its tip. A wave of metallic lustre crossed her eyes as she turned her head to see him. She stared at him with complete impersonality. Then she moved forward daintily over the hay. With no forewarning she bounded against the mow wall. Her claws hooked into the rough boards, her tail sheered up like a sword as she gained the crest of hay; she gave a low, guttural call, and dimly from a far corner kittens were breaking their long silence. Somewhere, the hay rustled. He heard a long-drawn breath, and he realized that he was not alone in the barn. Then the whispers of children came to him. He could not hear what they were saying; he had no way of knowing which they were; but with a queer sense of anticipation he began to watch the head of the ladder that reached up against the hay.
After a while they came towards him. They were still talking of their discovery, and one voice was adjuring the other to keep their secret. There had been some talk of drowning kittens, but the voice declared that only baby kittens were drowned. If they did not give away the hideout of the old cat, the kittens would grow up enough for them to keep them all.
Polly’s head appeared at the top of the ladder, and she was staring down, her eyes made round with consternation. It had been easy enough to get her little brother up ahead of her to lie in wait for the cat; she had not considered getting him down until this minute.
Her eyes roved down the ladder and round the floor. She did not see Jerry till he got quietly to his feet.
“Stay there, Polly. I’ll come up and get Jed and then you can come down.”
For an instant his unfamiliarity frightened her; but when he put his head above the ladder-top, she was sitting in the hay with a tight hand on her brother’s belt. He smiled at them and sat down on the edge of the ladder.
“Did you find the kittens?”
“Yes.”
His glance passed over her to his son. Jed, completely untroubled with the problem of descent, was examining him with a fresh interest.
“Where did you find them?”
Polly nodded her bright head. “Back there. This side of the hay chute.”
Jed nodded and pointed. “Right back there.”
“How many were there?”
“Four. Three of them have got spots.”
“Yes. One of them is all black.”
Jed drew a deep breath and put his fists upon his knees, impressed with his own observation.
Jerry grinned. “Maybe I’d better take you down now. We can talk on the floor.”
He had Jed put his arms round his neck and he crooked his left arm round the boy’s legs and backed down the ladder. The boy’s hard little body was perfectly relaxed. Then as they reached bottom and he looked up to watch Polly’s descent, Jed said, “Ain’t you going to set me down?”
Jerry obeyed; and Jed looked up at his sister.
“I got down first,” he said.
Jerry sat down in his former position, and the two children hunkered in front of him. Now that he was confronted by their eyes, he found it hard to think of anything to say.
Polly examined him gravely.
“You won’t tell on us, will you?”
He said, “No. But don’t take Jed up again, will you?”
She shook her head shaking her two bright braids across her shoulders.
“I won’t,” she promised. “But it was so easy going up.”
“I can climb up,” said Jed.
Where they sat, the bar of sunlight put a shine upon their skin, making it seem transparent. Both of them had their mother’s fair complexion; he thought they were more Mary’s children than his own.
“Where are the others?” he asked, to make conversation.
“I don’t know. We don’t play with them always.”
“Won’t they let you?”
“Oh yes, sometimes. But sometimes we’d rather not.”
“Why?”
“We aren’t family the way they are. Generally they make us it in games we play.”
“You’re my Pa,” Jed said with complete suddenness.
“Yes,” said Jerry. “You’re named after me.”
He looked at them gravely.
“Would you hate to leave here?”
“Are we going to?”
His eyes dropped before their wondering stares. Then Polly looked away.
“Yesterday, Mr. Falk was here. He wanted Ma to go away with him. Are we going away with him?”
“No, not with him maybe with me.”
“I don’t want to go away with him,” Polly said.
“Me neither,” Jed said, stoutly.
It made a period for conversation, and Jerry was still.
“Does Mr. Falk come here often?” he asked Polly after a while.
She shook her head.
“Not very. Uncle George don’t like him much, I guess. He makes us shoes. But mostly he sits where Ma is.”
“Does she like him?”
“Yes. I guess so. She sits with him after supper, generally, when she’s weaving.”
“Does she weave much?”
“Yes, a lot. She’s a handsome weaver, Uncle Joe says. He sells her weaving for a price.”
Jerry thought, “She’s earned her keep and made herself money.” He leaned his hands upon his knees.
“What are you looking at?” demanded Jed.
“Nothing,” he said.
Polly said, “Mr. Falk said he might come back tonight.”
“Did he?”
“Yes.” She looked at him honestly. “I don’t like him. Do you like him?”
He did not answer. Instead, he asked:
“Would you like to come away with me, if your Ma came too?”
“Yes, maybe.”
“Wouldn’t you miss living here?” he asked again.
Again their eyes were puzzled.
“I live in Rochester,” he said. “I’ve got a brand-new house there. I built it myself for your mother and you. It isn’t as big as Ma Halleck’s house, but it would seem big with just us in it.”
“Has it got two stories?”
“Yes, it has. It’s got some trees around it and a living spring. And a place for a garden.”
They stared at him.
“I’ve made the kitchen facing east for morning sun and to be cool in afternoon. There are dormer windows in the roof. It stands on the edge of the town, on Eagle Street.”
“I saw an eagle last fall,” Jed said with a flicker of interest. “Uncle George showed it to us.”