“I’ll go turn her in the pasture,” said Byron as he put the potatoes in the pot.
In the barnyard, a half-dozen men sat around upon inverted feed-buckets, the chopping-block, the ash-gum, the bales of clapboards riven to roof the old barn—anything rather than go in the house before the activities and lamentations of the womenfolk had come to a standstill. A certain cautious restraint was perceptible in the conversation here, an edging around the subject that was inevitably the center of interest to all, of which circumstances forbade direct mention.
“. . . That’s a powerful fine orchard. Might’ near all Limbertwigs, ain’t they?”
“Harmon Ridge took as good keer of his land as he did of his team.”
“I never seed a better quartered colt than that one Bar’n Standifer’s a-leadin’ yonder. Her dam was a fine pacer.”
But no one asked in so many words how much Harmon Ridge was worth or who would inherit the property.
In the lane three men conferred a little apart from the others; Absalom Ridge, the deacon of the Borden Springs church; Clifford, justice of the peace at Belview, affable and prosperous beneath due decorum; and with them the preacher, properly punctilious and punctiliously proper, as befitted the master of ceremonies. In the mountains a funeral sermon is seldom preached in seed-time or harvest; it may await for months the convenience of the family connection. Clifford urbanely offered the front rooms and ample porches of his house for the purpose; but Absalom, loth to relinquish the one bit of prestige life had granted him, insisted that his church should be the chosen site.
The preacher agreed. “Let ’em all bring a basket and spread dinner on the ground, Brother Ridge, and afterward protract the service into a praise meetin’.”
Clifford yielded the point with admirable grace, perhaps feeling that he could afford to. “That announcement will bring out a good crowd.”
“Then,” continued the preacher, “how ’bout havin’ it the third Sunday in next month? All crops ’ll be laid by again’ that time, and I haven’t got no appointmints for that date.” He cut a fresh chew of tobacco from the plug offered him by Clifford, and went on dolorously: “It’s a hard thing to be called on to preach the funeral of a man that never made any profession of faith. I’d rather be called on for any other duty of the ministry than that.”
“Hit’s hard; yes,” agreed Absalom sympathetically. “I’m afeared the one consolation you can set before our sorrowin’ family is the fact that not one of us ac-chilly knows anything about pore Harmon’s faith.”
“You might jist mention,” interrupted a new voice, “that he was honest as the open day, and the best-hearted friend a man ever had in time o’ need.”
They all jumped around, and came face to face with Byron; but ere they could frame a suitable reply he had passed on, the sorrel following. The very presence of Harmon’s helper was embarrassing to the justice and the deacon, reminding them that the brother whose large well-knit frame and lionlike flow of beard now reposed beneath a sheet on the rude scaffolding had served the devil and defied the law for the past ten years.
Yet as they halted, staring at each other, those two suddenly remembered the warm-hearted, wayward boyhood of the rover—the brightness of his blue eyes, the reddish-brown cowlick that swept down over his forehead in correspondence to some unruly twist in his nature. After all, in those far-off days, of what had Harmon been guilty except just being himself? Only his earthborn strength had affronted the careful propriety and thrift of the one, the saintly demeanor of the other. Slowly and in silence they walked toward the group under the tree.
Indoors, the wives, under cover of putting the house in order, essayed an examination; but the attempt failed dismally as closet after closet was found to be already immaculate.
“I wonder if she does keep things like this all the time; or did she take ’n hustle everything straight because she knew folks would be in?” whined Absalom’s wife, Marzela, between her prominent yellow teeth.
“Do you reckon he was prepared to go?” continued Marzela, piously. “I hoped, seein’ he’ lingered on for some days after—his injury, that he’d profess religion at the ’leventh hour—repent, and believe, in time. I even tried to git Absalom to ride over and talk to him; but he’s always had trouble when he tried to git pore Harmon to think of his soul, and there was only them three days left of the dark o’ the moon to plant in.”
“The fact is we didn’t none of us have any idy it was so serious; we would a-come, but we didn’t look for the end so suddent; it come on us a awful shock.” Susan began to weep in a ladylike fashion, rocking to and fro in the easiest chair.
The company had recourse to Scripture texts.
“And I know in reason,” she continued presently, “that Harmon himself didn’t expect it neither; ’r else he’d a-left some kind of a—will.” There seemed some thought behind the speech which it was not advisable to put into words.
“He always thought so much of N’omi and Paul; he was good to all the children, but them two was his favor-ites.” Marzela had awakened tardily.
The two women eyed each other for the first time with frank hostility. But Susan, feeling the necessity for making common cause against the enemy, resumed tearfully: “I wouldn’t want to ask her anything about the ‘last hours,’ but Lucy, maybe, ’ll know when she comes.”
“Why ain’t Lucy here, do you reckon?”
“She’ll be here to set up,” a neighbor volunteered. “She told me as I come on that she had been obliged to wash today; but she ’lowed to git here tonight.”
“Late, I expect,” said another, “for she’ll have to carry that heavy baby. And she’s been a-settin’ up, her and Fan, ever since—it happened.”
A low voice sounded from the doorway, and at least eight earbobs swung as one.
“Come to dinner,” Fan Walton bade them quietly, “and please bring out four chairs.”
From early candlelighting the house was full. And then, led on by those first comers, the whole gathering began covertly to watch Fan. Whatever she did was commented on. Sometimes when she passed there were whispered conversations; again an uneasy silence fell. Strange glances followed her through the doors, and when she was gone the subdued conversation began to fly back and forth. At last she caught the words, “He never would trust a bank, but—”
The significance of that phrase did not burn its way through her heavy thoughts until after she had quit the dimly lighted rooms and gained the quiet of the dark kitchen porch. Then, her noble strength deserting her suddenly, she dropped on the bench beside the crocks and churn; her cheeks burned in the darkness, and her mouth straightened to a hard line of suffering.
On the front porch Byron, half asleep after days of work and nights of watching, was stretched out with someone’s saddle for a pillow, when he became aware of a point of light too low for a star, and sat up.
“Some of ’em pokin’ about tryin’ to find out something ’at’s none o’ their business,” he decided, and roused himself with an effort. Visions of a lantern overturned in the hay hurried his feet across the lot. But it was no curious stranger; it was Fan, with her arms round Truelove’s neck, crying as though her heart would break.
“Fan,” he whispered, coming up, “don’t—don’t grieve so. . . . He was sure one good man; but he died about as he’d have chosen to,—all alive and hearty, and hard at work. He didn’t suffer but a few days. He’d much rather have gone this way than—behind the bars. He took his chance—”
She put out a work-hardened hand without speaking, and he led her to the piled hay in the midst of the wide shadowy spaces.
“What did you come out for?” he asked, seating himself below her. “I fed everything. You ought to git some sleep.”
“I wanted to get shut of all those folks,” she answered, dabbing at her eyes with her apron. “Not you, Byron—you know they all talk so much. Oh, they’re so—dirty! They shall not have Truelove, and the old man’s team that he had so long, an
d the Durham heifer he raised: I’ll kill the poor pets first!”
He nodded broodingly. “Fan—I don’t want to push myself, but—you know what you told me oncet. If you still feel so—as soon as you can get consent o’ your mind to let things loose here, why, turn ’em over to these folks. I want you to come to me. My house is a poor place—a poor home for a girl like you; but oncet you give me the right I’ll make ’em careful what they say.”
She shivered, and dropped her face into the cup of her palms.
“You’re a dear boy, Byron. I could leave any time; but I—I don’t know yet what I’m going to do. I want these folks out of the house, and I feel as if he does too . . .”
Byron was slow in replying. At last he said, “Well—I’ll be around, Fan, any time you need me.”
In the house the night wore on; the lamp burned strangely in the thick, drowsy air. The watchers seemed gradually to lose their individual characteristics, appearing neither young nor old,—like a row of images, presences vaguely unfriendly to each other and to the dead, they sat silent and grave, their shadows motionless on the wall. And still most of the men remained without, sitting on the steps, murmuring to each other in the desultory fashion of mountaineers; for death and birth are matters on which only women can bear to look.
“Mamma,” whispered the young girl fresh from the Select Academy, “did you notice how short that Miss Walton’s dress is made?”
The justice’s lady nodded ponderously. “I wouldn’t call it immodest exactly, but it don’t, today, show a proper respect.”
“What I want to know,” intoned Marzela, solemnly, “is what she’s a-doin’ in this house all the time, day and night.”
“You know she wouldn’t let none of us feed the stock, nor do about in the house. It looks as if—”
“It does!”
“. . . She might know we’d think strange of hit.”
“Don’t you?” The speaker addressed Lucy directly.
The dead man’s only sister had just come in. She was a small, worn, faded woman in blue calico, nursing her baby in a corner. Lifting her red-rimmed eyes, she answered from a kind of remoteness, as if rapt in sorrow: “Don’t I what?”
“Don’t you think strange of this Fan Walton bein’ here?”
“No, I don’t,” she replied with more spirit. “I’d certainly think stranger if he’d a-lived here all these years without nobody.”
“Well,” said Marzela, “We ’lowed you might maybe know something about her.”
“I know she took care of him like a own sister. I couldn’t a-done better if I’d a-been here all the time.”
“Well, but hit don’t look right—a young thing like her. I’m surprised at you, Lucy, upholdin’ such a—arrangemint.”
“I’m surprised to hear all o’ you’ns, that couldn’t come about whilst brother Harmon was down and hurted to see how he was conductin’ his house, come in now and take it all out on a defenseless gal!” cried Lucy. Then, remembering the presence of death, she rose hurriedly and carried her drowsy child out of the room.
The two in the barn looked up as the big doors swung a little apart, and Lucy glided like a mouse into the shadows which the lantern’s rays only made more gloomy.
“I laid my baby on your bed, Fan, and come to see why you wasn’t in it,” she said in her gentle monotone.
“I can’t sleep,” protested Fan; but she accepted gratefully the homespun shawl her friend had brought, and wrapped it round herself and Lucy as they both rested on the hay. “We better go get them folks something to eat.”
“I set it on the table afore I come out. You go to bed,” said Lucy.
“I can’t. . . . I can’t think what I ought to do. I’ll tell you and Byron how it really is . . .”
But a disturbance in the stalls had called the boy away. He found the stable overcrowded, and as he led the stamping intruders out, but few of Fan’s words reached his ear—scraps of which he could make nothing:
“. . . And I thought I should like it better here,—all quiet, with a whole house and farm to myself. I like to get out in the patch with a hoe—I like to make bread and wash clothes. So I wrote to him, and he said he’d be so glad to have me with him again. . . .”
When he passed a second time Lucy’s arms were round the girl, and Lucy’s voice was saying: “He was the best brother I ever had. If he hadn’t helped me I don’t know what we—”
From the house came the long strains of “Away Over in the Promised Land.” He distinguished the preacher’s “lead” and Clifford’s bass, and Grandma’ Bivins’ quavering “high tribble.”
“I can leave it all to them—I can make my way,” Fan was reiterating. “But he wouldn’t have wished that.”
“Then tell them, honey; tell all the folks,” counseled Lucy.
“He didn’t want it known here, because he always meant to wind up his business and take me away. But he put the day off too long.”
“Well, if I was you I’d stay right here,” said Lucy. “I always thought there was something—and I know in reason they would of too, if they wasn’t already eat up with suspicions. You’ll be obliged to let it be known.”
Byron approached the pair under the tentlike shawl.
“I’ve got three or four o’ them strangers roped in the sheds,” he told them. “I think they’ll be quiet now.” He sat at the women’s feet, drooping over the lantern.
“Byron,” said Lucy, “Fan’s just told me something that makes a difference all ’round—”
“Hush,” he bade her softly. “She’s might’ near asleep.”
And so resting, they remained silent through the night.
At last the gray dawn glimmered against the smoky lantern; the watch was over. Lucy and Fan awoke, and went back to the kitchen to get breakfast.
Afterward a little procession filed across the fields, Grandma Bivins warning each member not to break the line lest he be next to die; and Harmon Ridge was laid in the good earth’s embrace under soughing cedars of his own planting.
Immediately upon the closing of the grave, a clatter of harness-chains and much whoa-ing round the stable announced the general departure. But after each neighbor had spoken his farewell with a murmured phrase of gracious feeling for the family, Lucy looked out of a window and made mild eyes of surprise.
“Why, there’s Clifford and Absalom and all their folks still waitin’ round. They’ve corkussed and plotted and talked out there for I don’t know how long.”
“I thought they was gone long ago,” said Byron. “Why, they’re all a-comin’ back to the house!”
Fan re-set the chairs in the strangely vacant-looking best room with a sinking heart that asked no questions. If it must come now, she would face it.
“Miss Walton,” began the justice, clearing his throat, “we got a matter to bring up that we think needs namin’. If you—as you know all the house, and brother Harmon’s ways, probably better than anybody else—if you can find—find—that is—unearth the money he left, you know—why, we’d be prepared to offer you a liberal amount of it—a share, in short.”
The girl addressed lowered her eyes for very shame of his confusion. What a roundabout way he had taken to accuse her! She answered, “I don’t believe he had any such amount as you all think.”
She looked up. The silence was startling.
The next words were a veiled threat; they came from Absalom. “But we’d like to know what you—a young woman alone in the world, and without a home—propose to do? We cain’t leave you here. And there’s certain facts, if—if a heap o’ people was to tell about ’em, might not sound well—might not be the best start for a young gal that’s got her living to make, in fact!”
“In that case”—Fan lifted her head proudly, and faced the room-full—“I expect I had better stay right here.”
“Why—!” If they had held their breath, they caught it now, hard. “You don’t imagine you can hold this farm against the man’s own blood and kin, do ye?” C
lifford had not intended to go so far today; but neither had he looked to encounter such confident opposition.
“And Harmon not cold in his grave!” gasped Marzela.
“Don’t anger her,” whispered Susan pacifically behind her black veil. “I do believe she knows where the money’s at.”
“Can’t you explain yourself—tell us what claim you’ve got on the estate, anyway?” probed the questioner, his eyes troubled with an uncertainty that was growing in his mind. “It ain’t possible that—air you—a relative?”
Fan sprang forward with flushed cheeks and flashing eyes, throwing out her open palms. “God’s my judge!” she cried in a clear ringing voice. “Can’t you all see?”
And in her strong features, her firm neck and square-set shoulders so like those on which they had looked their last an hour ago through the glass of a coffin, they read the answer.
Byron was not the only one present whose heart leapt at her stand. At bay before them all, so young, brave, sweet, she stood, telling in a few words the story of her upbringing in the other valley. The blue of her eyes became brighter as she talked; she shook her head a little, and her rough reddish-brown hair came loose and swept down over her forehead in an unruly wave.
They did not ask to see the papers of evidence; not one but was glad to conceal discomfiture and mortal offense as inconspicuously and hastily as might be, on the road home.
“Well, I’m glad for ye, honey,” was Lucy’s parting word. “I’m a pore hard-run widder woman, but I’d rather have a niece like you than a share in what brother Harmon left. Now, run over to my house as often as you can, for you’ll be lonesome.”
“Don’t say that, Lucy.” Fan took the toil-worn hand and held it. “You come back tomorrow. As you say, I’ll be lonesome; and I know he’d rather you’d be with me than anybody else. So you and the children bring this chap—” she stroked the baby’s tow-colored head—“and move in with me, and help take care of the place and things. We’ll keep ’em just as they was left—” A shade of her grief filled her eyes, and she turned away.
The Common Lot and Other Stories Page 18