Deep Summer

by Gwen Bristow

  Judith was silent awhile, trying to tell herself what Philip said wasn’t true. At last she said in a low voice, “Is it—is it very wrong for me to dread losing him?”

  “Yes,” said Philip.

  Judith put both her hands in his. “I—I don’t think I ever thought of it quite that way,” she said.

  Philip smiled and kissed her, and left her there.

  David did manage to curtail his fondness for cards that autumn, and he bet only moderately on the cock-fights that had been imported from New Orleans. Judith told Philip he was settling down and Philip, looking over the tall ribbons of the cane, was inclined to agree with her. The Negroes were cutting David’s fourth crop and those who were not in the fields were busy enlarging the sugar-mill. There were three sets of crushers now, with stout wooden wheels and long yokes for the mules; and instead of one set of kettles there were six rows of them protected by the thatch of palm-leaves over their wooden shelter. He had the slaves construct another shed nearby for storage of stalks that had been through the mill; for the crushed cane, though it looked so limp and empty, was valuable. When it had dried it became what the Creole planters called bagasse, and bagasse was fuel for the sugar-sheds. No wood but the richest kindling could make so hot a fire as bagasse.

  “He’s a born planter,” Philip said again to Judith, one night in early December, just before they went to sleep.

  “I told you he’d be all right,” she murmured happily.

  “He can hardly bear to be away from the sugar-sheds at grinding time,” Philip told her. “Right after supper he went back to watch the fires.”

  Judith raised up on her elbow, and saw far off in the canefields a faint glow that she might have thought was only a reflection of the moon if she had not known the sugar-sheds were there. The fires burned all day and night in grinding time and were never left unguarded. David usually kept watch in the evening and was relieved by the Negroes after midnight. Judith snuggled down under the covers again with a secret thrill. Her men—how nobly they had brought the wilderness under their domain! The fields of Ardeith now stretched so far that it was only on very clear days she could see the border of forest from her bedroom window, like a dark fuzz edging the plantation. And the forest too belonged to Ardeith, miles and miles of it, and it was there they cut their firewood, and there was Christopher’s timber. Rita’s dowry had been increased to three hundred acres. She remembered with a pang that the increase included part of what would have been little Philip’s portion had he lived. But the children who had been spared to her, she reminded herself, were a noble group in whom any mother would take pride. She went to sleep with a feeling of triumphant peace.

  She woke up in confused fright. The night-light burned low in its deep glass container. By its fitful flame she could see Philip hurrying into his clothes, and she heard the shrill voices of Negroes in the hall outside.

  “What’s happened?” she cried.

  Philip made a gesture toward the window, hardly pausing in his haste to button his waistcoat. Sitting up in bed Judith saw that what had been the glow of the sugar-fires was a sheet of light. Pillars of smoke went up toward the sky, throwing sparks as they rose, and in front of the fire she could make out hurrying black figures. She gasped and demanded:

  “But what is it?”

  “That lunatic David left the sugar-fires and they’ve caught the bagasse,” said Philip over his shoulder as he opened the door.

  She sprang out of bed and caught him.

  “Was David hurt? Where is he?”

  “Nobody’s seen him,” Philip returned with grim haste. “Let me go, Judith! God knows what that fire will do if it’s not checked. Stay in the house.”

  He rushed out. Judith went to the window, shivering at the sweep of cold air as she pushed the shutters further back and looked out. The bagasse was a raging wall of flame. She sobbed with dismay. That David could have been such a fool! The cornstalks were dry in the fields, and between the plots were spaces overgrown with brown sedges. If the fire got beyond the cleared place where the sugar-mills were, it could destroy the orchards and the indigo vats and perhaps even reach the quarters—it might, if the wind changed to blow sparks in this direction, attack the big house.

  She thrust her feet into her shoes and wrapped a cloak around her, holding it together while she ran out to the kitchen to order buckets of coffee. She took them out herself, along with big slabs of bread and meat, and set up supper on a stump as close to the fire as she dared.

  The slaves, half dressed and frightened, were working hard under Philip’s direction. He had evidently abandoned hope of saving the mills or storehouse, and they were digging a trench around the fire. He saw her pouring coffee for the men and came to her.

  “Judith, what are you doing out here? Didn’t I tell you to keep away?”

  “I’m not going to let you freeze to death,” she returned, “or the Negroes either. I brought you a bottle of whiskey.”

  “Thanks,” he said with a grudging smile, and took a drink. She looked toward the fire, burning lower now.

  “Is it going to spread, Philip?”

  “I don’t think so. But the cane is gone, and the crushers, and all the bagasse.” In the flaring light his face was sooty. “A couple of the Negroes were pretty badly burned, and another—”

  “What?” she asked when he paused.

  Philip gestured to the far side of the cleared circle. Judith moved away from the stump to look, and gave a cry.

  “Is that man dead?”

  He nodded.

  Judith gripped both his arms. In spite of the heat of the flame on her face she shivered.

  “Philip,” she cried, “are you sure David’s not hurt?”

  “He’s nowhere around,” Philip rejoined curtly. “He went off—didn’t you understand me?—and left the fires burning in this wind.”

  Judith sat down weakly on the stump, too deeply hurt to shed tears.

  Philip turned and called some terse directions to the men. As he did so they heard the frightened neigh of a horse and the sound of running footsteps. David appeared in the ring of light. He ran up to the stump, panting.

  “Father, what happened?”

  Philip asked him, slowly, “David, where in God’s name have you been?”

  “Just riding up the road—I never meant to stay so long—the fires were low.”

  “Never mind,” said Philip. “Get over there and help them keep the fire where it is. We’ll talk about it in the morning.” He turned to Judith. “Honey, won’t you go back now? Thanks for the coffee and things, but you’ll catch your death of cold with only a bedgown under that cloak.”

  He spoke so gently that she did not argue with him. She stood up and went back to the house, stumbling over the soft ridges of the fields.

  David was vehemently remorseful. He hadn’t meant to let anything happen. The Negroes had been told to go to bed and come back an hour after midnight. He was just sitting about, watching the fires burning low under the kettles, and it was cold and pretty lonesome. While he was waiting there Roger Sheramy came up—he had spent the evening in town and seeing the glow of the sugar-sheds had ridden in to see if David was around and if he’d like a drink. “It’s mighty cold,” said David; “I think I’ll ride up the road a little way with you and get warmed up. Everything’s all right here.”

  How could he foretell the wind was going to rise like that, all of a sudden?

  He was so penitent that he was astounded not to be immediately forgiven. Hadn’t he promised to be more careful after this? What was the use of harping on it?

  “Has it occurred to you,” asked Philip, “that you endangered the whole plantation and the life of everybody on it?”

  “Yes sir, and I said I was sorry! I am sorry.”

  “I think,” said Philip, “a little solitude and leisure to reflect on how sorry
you are might be a good thing for you.”

  “What do you mean, father?”

  “I mean that if you’d left a Negro in charge of the fire and he’d gone traipsing off he’d be beaten within an inch of his life and then sent to the guardhouse, and he’d deserve it. If you haven’t learned to be more responsible than you’d expect a nigger slave to be—” He got up and walked over to face David. “Son, young gentlemen don’t go to the guardhouse for that sort of neglect. But the plantation will do fairly well for a substitute. You’ll stay within the limits of Ardeith for six months from today and if you behave yourself I may trust you again.”

  “Six months!” David gasped.

  “Yes.”

  “What am I going to tell people? That a man of my age can’t leave the front yard like a little boy?”

  “If you act like a little boy,” said Philip as he went out, “your age doesn’t make very much difference.”

  David raged and stormed. It would have been hard to devise a severer punishment. He liked gaming and balls and gatherings in taverns; to be confined for half a year to the house and fields was catastrophic. He was of age, he said, and could do as he pleased.

  “Not with my property,” said Philip.

  David endured imprisonment a week. Then they woke one morning to find that he had vanished.

  He had taken nothing with him but a horse and such few garments as might be stuffed into a saddlebag. Through several tormented days and nights Judith tried to tell herself this was only impulsive pique at having been punished and he would come home when his pocket-money gave out. But he did not return, and at the end of the third week she was forced to the anguished conclusion that he had no intention of doing so.

  Philip was more grave and stern than she had ever seen him. He had not expected this. But he should have, she flung at him, when she was exhausted with waiting and rushing to the window at every sound of horses’ hoofs to see if David had come home. “You treated him like a baby!” she exclaimed. “You might have known he wouldn’t stand it.”

  “Will you be quiet?” Philip said without looking at her. “This isn’t easy for me either, you know.”

  Judith walked up and down the room. Philip stood looking out of the window. “What are you going to do?” she asked at length.

  “I’m going down to New Orleans,” said Philip briefly.

  While he was gone she forced herself to control her nervous suspense with repeated assurance that of course Philip would find him. David hadn’t money enough to get very far, and it would be like him to think it amusing to take lodgings in a tavern and live awhile in gayer independence than he had been permitted at home. But Philip returned to say he had found nobody who had seen David. A week later he took a boat up the river as far as Natchez, stopping at every settlement on the way, but again he had to come home alone.

  Judith’s first emotions of anger and fear subsided into dreadful waiting. Two months passed and then two more. They heard nothing and found nobody who could help them. The rest of the cane was plowed under in the field, because there was no sugar-mill to refine the juice. Philip, as though desperately in need of work to give vent to his anxiety, had the Negroes rebuild the crushers with furious speed.

  “Why do you work so hard?” Judith asked him when he came in one night.

  “I can’t sleep unless I’m tired,” said Philip, and she did not question him further. Like him she could not endure idleness, and she got into the habit of taking long rides in the afternoon, trying to make herself tired enough to sleep at night, but though she slept she dreamed of finding David’s body on the wharf of some wild river settlement, or his scalp hanging to a wigwam in the Western forest. By spring her hair had begun to get white around the temples.

  She wished the canefields were not in such easy sight of the house. The shoots coming up in March were like little knives cutting into her with their reminder of how David had loved the cane.

  In August when David had been gone eight months, Christopher offered to take a boat and go North to look for him.

  “It’s no use,” Judith said wearily. “He might be anywhere in the world by now.”

  Christopher put his hand on her arm. “But he must be somewhere, mother! If he were dead we’d have—”

  She almost screamed. “Please, Christopher!”

  Christopher tried to soothe her, and went away. Judith took her horse and went out to ride in the fields, asking herself despairingly why people wanted to have children anyway. Rita was a dear little girl, but too young for companionship; of the others one was dead and one a homeless vagabond, and only Christopher to whom she had given less of herself than to the others was an adequate son in whom she could take satisfaction. Her sense of failure was as bitter as her tormenting thoughts of David.

  She looked ahead at the green shimmer of the canefields. The cane was not thriving without David. Philip’s management was half-hearted, and the stalks drooped as though aware their master had deserted them. But she had not come out here to blame anybody, but to be alone and probe down under the layers of protectiveness one so easily laid over one’s faults and make herself recognize as her own doing the fact that David at a man’s age still cherished a child’s petulance. With a rush of light she realized that she did not want to possess David any more. He was a man and did not need her sheltering; without being aware of it, he was fighting now to be as free of her spiritually as he was physically. She remembered the terrible night when he was born and thought how easy that was compared to the tortured months just past, and knew it was her own fault if she had found this second separation harder than the first.

  The sun vanished and the day hung poised in clear white hesitation. After a few minutes the dark dropped abruptly. Overhead the stars began to wink.

  Judith turned the horse homeward. By the candlelight from the hall she saw Philip sitting on the front steps. He waved to her.

  “Where’ve you been?”

  “Just riding.”

  He called Josh, who came out and led her horse away. Judith sat on the step by him. A colored girl put her head out of the front doorway.

  “No comp’ny for supper, Miss Judith?”

  “No,” said Judith. “Just plates for Mr. Philip and Miss Rita and me.”

  “Funny how she always asks that,” said Philip in a low voice.

  There was so seldom any company for supper now. This time last year she used to exclaim in exasperation that she never knew how many plates to order. There was hardly an evening when David did not turn up with guests. Judith caught a little short breath, remembering, and Philip reached out and put his hand over hers.

  They heard the rumble of a cart beyond the oak trees, and started, for the plantation wagons were not supposed to come in this way. Vaguely they made out the dark lumpy shape of the cart under the trees. “What on earth can that be?” Judith asked.

  Philip stood up. They heard a voice. “Hello! That you, father?”

  “David!” cried Judith, and she began to tremble so that for a moment she could not go after Philip, who was already running down the avenue. Then, snatching a candle from the table just inside the door she rushed after him, her throat so clogged with tears that she could not call out.

  “Hello, both of you!” David was exclaiming as merrily as if he had just come back from a party. “How’s everybody?”

  Steadying her quivering muscles and wiping the tears from her eyes so she could see, Judith stared. She saw an old and dilapidated cart drawn painfully by an old and dilapidated mule, and on the mule was David, waving and shouting as he came near the house.

  In garments so dirty and tattered they might have belonged to a tramp, David nevertheless straddled the decrepit mule with easy gallantry. He had a beard of red-gold curls that made him look like a legendary Viking, and he was sunburned close to the color of an Indian. He grinned as he clambered down, a
nd grasped his father’s hand and with his free arm hugged his mother.

  “Lord, but it’s fine to see you all! Mother, stop crying—I’m perfectly all right.”

  Judith clung to him, and Philip felt his arms and face as if afraid David might melt under his touch. “Are you really all right, David?”

  “Oh, absolutely! I’ve had a grand time.” He took the candle from Judith’s hand and hugged her again. “Is that Rita coming down the steps? How she’s grown!”

  “It’s David!” Rita was crying out. “With those whiskers!”

  He ran to meet her and swung her into his arms, but after her first welcome she called him a no-count trifling scamp. Rita was only twelve, and not sufficiently overwhelmed with delight to be entirely forgiving. “Everybody’s been so worried about you!” she told him crossly. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

  David laughed and set her down. They were all talking at once, but Rita’s voice rose above the rest.

  “Anybody’d think the way you’re strutting you’d brought back a thousand gold doubloons!”

  David pulled her hair. He put his hand on Philip’s shoulder and grinned from him to Judith and then down to Rita.

  “Honey,” he said, “I have.”

  He held up the candle close to the ramshackle cart. For the first time they noticed that it carried a big ungainly object covered with a piece of canvas. David called greetings to the Negroes who were pouring out of the house and fields to assure themselves that the young master was really back, and turned again to the cart.

  “Look,” he said portentously.

  Philip said, “What have you got there?” And Judith, who did not care, asked, “Dearest boy, where have you been all these months?”

  “Oh—nearly everywhere,” returned David. “To Savannah, and Charleston, and up the Carolina coast—that’s where I found this. The trouble I had getting it back!”