The Able McLaughlins

by Margaret Wilson

  From morning till noon they went on fighting their way through the impenetrable briary wall of green, stopping only for breath at the water’s edge, scratched, mosquito-bitten, baffled, exhausted. Once John and Wully happened to get to the bank at the same moment, and John, stooping down to wash his face, said to his brother, carefully lowering his voice;

  “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you are right, Wully. It would be just like Peter to have to leave some place suddenly, in some scrape. I think it probable, after all, that he had started on short notice for the west, and passing O’Brien’s, was unable to resist the smell. He wouldn’t even have had the decency to go to see his mother if he had been within half a mile of the house!”

  Wully said nothing to this, but it comforted him to know how low John’s opinion of Peter was. He could work with new energy after that. At noon the ten of them stopped at the nearest house for dinner.

  There was not a woman in the neighborhood who would not have been glad to set dinner before a party of searchers. Not a woman who had not been frightening her little ones more carefully about wandering into the tall grass, such helpless slight persons, with that tall menace always waiting at hand for them. Marget McDowell had all the morning been looking from time to time down the road, hoping to see a horseman coming with good news. But no news came. She served the men. They ate in silence, hungrily. Having finished, they went out and lay down in the shade of the house. Most of them slept. Davie McDowell sat next to Wully, smoking vile home-grown tobacco in a stern old pipe. Beyond him Geordie Sproul went on theorizing in a lullabying voice. Wully was half asleep himself when he heard him saying;

  “If we knew the girl to ask, we might learn something.” “Girl” when he pronounced it, rhymed with peril. He was a canny man, Geordie, and Wully was instantly awake.

  “Hoots!” replied Davie. “He was never one to run after girils!”

  “Was he not!” answered Geordie. His voice was so suggestive, so leering, that Wully sat up.

  “It’s one o’clock!” he hastened to announce. “We ought to be going on!” He woke all the lads up. They started by twos and threes back towards the creek.

  Wully might easily have asked Geordie privately what he meant by that comment of his. But he didn’t dare. Was it possible that Geordie, that unconsidered man, knew anything about Chirstie? Or about Wully McLaughlin’s private affairs? He must have meant something, and Wully wanted intensely to know what it was. Doubtless Davie McDowell would presently be inquiring, for gossip’s sake. But Wully assured himself that if Geordie really knew anything about the truth of the matter, he would never dare to tell it. Nor would he have dared to hint before Wully that he knew it! Only—would he not dare? Men dared strange things, nowadays, it seemed! Even cowards like Peter Keith! They seemed to think Wully McLaughlin a soft, easy-going man. They would speedily find out their mistake! They would get rid of the idea that he was a man with whom one might safely take unspeakable liberties. If only he might have the fortune, the one chance in a thousand, or ten thousand, to come upon that damned snake, lying somewhere hidden . . . Exhausted, sore in muscles and mind, he went on through the breathless thicket.

  At four he came again to the water’s edge, and saw Chirstie’s brother Dod just coming out from a swim. He threw himself down under a great linden tree for a rest, and under his hand he saw Dod’s hat full of choice blackberries. Dod was undoubtedly preparing to make himself as comfortable as possible. He was weary enough to defy the world, and relinquish his pretenses of being a man. He made his decision known flatly.

  “I’m not going back into that!” he announced. “I’m through!” It was plain that his swim hadn’t cooled his temper much.

  Wully repressed a smile. Dod was extremely thin. The ridges of his ribs showed under his skin, which gleamed white and wet in places, in vivid contrast to his tanned arms and neck, and he was stepping along gingerly to avoid thorns, lifting his bony legs high. One of his eyelids had been scratched so that his eye was swollen shut.

  “You’ve done enough,” said Wully. “You’ve got a bad eye there!”

  The boy struggled wet into his shirt and over-alls and stretching out near Wully, began dividing the berries. Wully had to notice how men’s zeal to help Libby Keith vanished as she grew distant. In her presence, in the presence of Motherhood itself, so to speak, they were shame-faced and eager, deploring their helplessness, as men are while their wives labor in childbirth. But away from her agony, they forgot . . . as men do after labor is over . . . and turned again to their own comfort. Dod broke the silence surprisingly.

  “Chirstie’d be glad if he was dead!” he said, resentfully.

  “Why, Dod!” exclaimed Wully.

  “She would that! She hates him!”

  “He’s your cousin, lad!”

  “He’s as much your cousin as he is mine! She can’t endure the sight of him!”

  Wully sat up. He looked at Dod. He had thought of him always as a child. He was a big, tall boy now. Fourteen years old he was, and doubtless able to put two and two together. How much did he know? He must have heard people talking. Wully suddenly wondered why he had not always been afraid of Dod. To be sure, he had always been careful to keep on the good side of his little brother-in-law.

  “He never done us any good!” Dod spoke vindictively.

  Now what could he mean by that? Wully was getting excited. Why had the boy so great a resentment against Peter, instead of against him, Wully, under the circumstances? Dod’s sudden and apparent preference for Wully at once grew odious to him. Dod had chosen that morning to work with Wully. He was always choosing to work with him. Why? It seemed unaccountable to him that he had never been suspicious of the lad before. Wully dared not say to him;

  “Well, he never did you any special harm, did he?” Suppose Dod would blurt out what he knew! He said, confusedly;

  “Look here, Dod. You oughtn’t to talk that way! Not at this time, I mean—you can’t speak ill of the dead, you know.”

  “I ain’t said half the truth!”

  “You know how Aunt Libby feels!” Wully urged stupidly. “And Chirstie wouldn’t like you to say that—not now, you know——”

  “Old fool!” commented Dod. Undoubtedly he was meaning his aunt. Wully couldn’t approve of such sentiments in one so young.

  “You ought to go home and get something put on your eye!” he began, hastily. “And if you feel like working in the morning, you come back with me again!”

  Dod went away, unsolved and uncomforting. Hour by hour the seekers, conquered by fatigue and the growing assurance of futility, stopped more often for breath. They had time to gather more and more berries, from bushes which obviously hid no dying man. They refreshed themselves more and more frequently in waters wherein no drowned man was floating. Most of them went home in time for their neglected chores that night, discouraged, hopeless.

  Isobel McLaughlin was still at the Keiths’, detained by Libby’s need of her. Libby, though she used men easily for her purpose, was not a woman to depend on them. Her mild old husband could give her no sufficient support in her affliction. He had never been a mother. He was just a man whom life and marriage had left blinking, swallowing as best he might his realization of his own unimportance in the universe. Libby would have Isobel with her. So Chirstie in her mother-in-law’s house put the younger McLaughlins and Bonnie Wee Johnnie to bed, and came out to sit on the doorstep with her weary and outraged husband. Presently she asked him wistfully;

  “Do you really think he’s dead, Wully?”

  “It’s getting to look like it.”

  She gave a great sigh. If only she could be sure he was dead!

  “You don’t think he’s just gone away now?” she continued.

  “Nobody thinks that now.”

  “Why don’t they?”

  “It don’t look reasonable to them.”

  “It looks reasonable enough to me.”

  He longed to reassure her.

  “If
he had gone back to town, he would have had to stop in some place to get something to eat. He didn’t stop anywhere.”

  She slapped away a mosquito.

  “But if he didn’t stop as he came, why should he stop going back?”

  “He may have stopped at a dozen places coming, and found no one at home. He may have gone to his mother’s when she was at the picnic. That’s what she keeps wailing about—because she wasn’t there when he came!”

  In the silence of the starlight, she gave a great sigh.

  “It’s all my fault!” she declared.

  He was too tired to listen to that.

  “Our fault, indeed!” he answered sharply. “We never told him to come sneaking back and get lost, did we! We didn’t tell him never to write to his mother.”

  “I didn’t say it was your fault. I said mine! Really, all auntie’s trouble seems to come from me. Sometimes I just seem to make everybody miserable.” She had been wondering what she was to do if Peter’s death made Wully’s lie permanent.

  “Havers, Chirstie!” he remonstrated, “her trouble comes through her own foolishness. She was never less than a fool about that—that——”

  “She was always good to me, Wully, whatever you say. I mind how she stayed with me after mother’s death. If she’s been foolish about Peter, she’s paid well for it.”

  “So’ve you!” said Wully. “He’s dead, I tell you!” And there was another thing to be said. Wully might be bewildered, uncomfortable, frustrated, cheated of any assurance of safety for Chirstie. But there was one triumph, and not a small one. “He’s dead. And we never speak ill of the dead, Chirstie!”

  She understood his triumph. She would have been glad to have him dead, and not putting Wully into danger. She would be relieved, too, of that sense of terror, if she saw him dead. Then she thought of that great sinful lie, and of Isobel McLaughlin.

  “I can’t tell what to wish!” she sighed miserably. “It can’t end well. I wish they’d find him dead. But if he’s dead, how can I ever . . .! Her voice gave way to despair.

  “Yes,” repeated Wully. “How can you ever . . .” They sat silent.

  “You never can!” he said securely, at length.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  THE night after the second day’s search Libby Keith had gone to bed for a while, because she was unable longer to stand up. Again she had risen when the moon rose, and Isobel McLaughlin, hearing her in the kitchen, had risen to find her washing out a shallow tin milk pan. Libby had managed to make her purpose known. Her voice was altogether gone now, after so much calling to her Lammie, and she was starting out with the pan and the poker, so that when her Peter heard the noise she was making, he would know that help was near. With Isobel following her as best she might, she beat back and forth up and down the roads again till morning, when she fell exhausted near the McCreaths’ at dawn, so that they had to hitch up and take her home. And lying in the wagon, she muttered and moaned. Isobel understood that sometimes she was simply saying her son’s name. Sometimes she was trying to tell what a good lad he had always been. And sometimes she said, “Only forty yards from home”; sometimes, “A wee’an’s bones!” But some of the neighbors gathering had heard her pan’s din and praying, and the hunt was on again, before the sun was well up.

  Later that morning Isobel McLaughlin sat telling Wully about that night, in the Keiths’ kitchen, whispering, looking carefully towards the door of the room where Libby was supposed to be resting. She was sitting by the breakfast table. On the red cloth three cold half-drunk cups of tea told how negligible a thing food was in that household. Suddenly she said passionately;

  “Wully, you’ve got to bring him home alive to-day!” and with that, to her son’s consternation, she burst into great weeping.

  Wully, fearing the sight of his aunt’s grief; hadn’t wanted to come that morning to the accursed house. But his father had asked him to, looking at him, Wully thought, with an unusual sharpness, so that hurriedly, to avoid suspicion, he had said he would come. He had dreaded the errand. But he had never foreseen this. He never remembered seeing his mother cry before, not even at the time of his brother’s death, though she must have wept then. And now—well, it was no wonder she was undone, after forty-eight hours of such nightmare. But he was beside himself at the sight. He got up and strode around the room, at his wits’ end. Life was upside down. Chirstie at his mother’s broken and nervous from her shock; his aunt raving mad; his mother crying noisily. . . .

  “You think he’s alive, don’t you, Wully?” she was asking him, between sobs and sniffles. “You don’t think he’s dead, do you?” He marveled to see how utterly she shared his aunt’s grief. She could scarcely have wanted more Peter’s return, if he had been her own son. He answered staunchly;

  “No! Of course he’s not dead, mother! A man don’t die from sleeping outdoors a couple of nights in July!”

  “You don’t think—he’s fallen into some slough—and drowned, do you?”

  “No, mother! Of course not! He’s around some place, drunk, likely! Don’t cry, mother!”

  “How could he be alive—some place—and let us all go on hunting him?”

  Suddenly she added, with a greater sob, lifting her head;

  “Wully, if Peter’s alive, and just letting his mother think he’s lost, we ought to whip him when he’s found! Every man that’s spent a day hunting him ought to give him a—beating! Wully, he’d never do that! I think he’s—he’s dead!”

  “Mother, mother! Don’t you cry so! It’ll be all right. They’ll find him soon!”

  “If you don’t find him soon, Auntie will go mad!”

  Wully could have cried aloud the conviction that came flooding over him that minute: “If we do find him alive, and I get my hands on him, you will go mad!” He began, like a child begging;

  “Mother, don’t you stay here! You come home with me! It’s enough to kill you, staying here with Auntie! Let someone else stay a while. Why can’t Aunt Flora stay with her to-day? You come on home with me!”

  “I can stay. She wants me. I can stand anything, if only he’s found. Wully!” she cried, raising a face toward him distorted with tears, “don’t you know where he is?”

  If Chirstie had been there to see that face, she would have thought that now, at last, Isobel McLaughlin was betraying her secret, so visibly did forbidden questions tremble on her tongue. Wully only said, soothingly, indulgently;

  “If I knew where he was, don’t you think I would go there and find him? Mother, you need a rest. You haven’t had enough sleep!”

  His mother sat bending towards him, beseeching him with all her soul to tell her the truth. But not one of her passionate unspoken entreaties reached him. It never occurred to him that she might know. He sat looking at her sympathetically, troubled that she spoke words of such unusual foolishness, being overwrought by all that had befallen her.

  “Won’t you come home with me?” he said again.

  “No, I won’t!” she said, with some asperity, and put her head down on her arms on the table, and went on crying.

  He rode away to his place in the hunt, and underneath all his greetings, his short and dry comments on the day’s possibilities, there stayed with him a troubled sense of pity for his mother. She was getting old. And he had treated her badly. Sometimes he even thought that he had treated her very badly in that affair, even though it was over now. All those hours, those murderous hours of the last days, he had never given her a thought. He hadn’t stopped in his hating long enough to imagine how deeply, how terribly, he was about to wound her. If he came upon Peter, and killed him—as he must—what would his mother do? How brokenly even now she grieved for Aunt Libby! What would her grief be like then? The thought sickened him. He said to himself bitterly that he was so tired, so confused, that if he came upon that damned snake alone, he’d likely shake hands with him and let him go! He scarcely knew what he was doing.

  All the parties had changed places that day. It seemed impo
ssible for men to hunt repeatedly, through the same place with any heart. It was a fifteen-hour nightmare. Added to the growing sense of futility, of frustration, of physical exhaustion, and the burden of the heat, Wully had that uneasiness about his mother to harrow him. He had gone with the men who were searching through his own lands, that day, through the low land were he had so prayerfully hoped to bury his enemy. And he seldom was allowed even to hunt about alone. Someone or other was always near him, so that if he came upon that—that—he would have no chance to work his quick will upon him safely.

  The fourth day they gathered again, going over routes that seemed hopeless. Peter, alive or dead, was simply in no place within miles. Not a little pebble, even, remained unturned now. The older men were sustaining themselves on strong drink more or less soberly, and the younger ones considerably less soberly. The first day of the alarm had been something of a picnic to thoughtless youngsters used to solitary hoeing, something of a diversion to men accustomed to plowing alone from dawn to darkness. But the excitement was dying away. Paths were beaten roads, and roads great wide highways. Miles of untrodden sloughs had become familiar ground, and acres of cryptic underbrush had become overworked monotony. What the slough had swallowed up, it would keep. If the tall grasses had treasures hidden, only the winter could bring low the tall grasses. The crowd dwindled.