by Peggy Gaddis
“Anything special on your mind, Lynn?” he asked quietly at last.
“A lot,” Lynn answered, and looked up at him, wishing that he were facing the moonlight so that she could see his expression. “Mother has been telling me how good you’ve been to them.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Steve interrupted her sharply. “That’s the silliest thing I ever heard of. Did she tell you that if I worked the rest of my life, I’d never be able to repay them for one-tenth, one-millionth of what they’ve done for me?”
“Well, no,” Lynn stammered, bewildered by the vigor of his words. “She said you had helped take care of Dad. Bud and I should have been here — we would have been if we’d known we were needed.”
“Dr. Anderson was against your being sent for,” Steve told her brusquely. “He felt that having you both come in the middle of your schooling would make the Judge feel he was much more seriously ill than it would have been wise for him to feel.”
“And, of course, with you here, Bud and I weren’t really needed.” Lynn hadn’t meant to let her jealousy escape in such words, and felt a hot tide of color burn in her face.
“That’s pretty small of you, Lynn,” said Steve grimly, “to be jealous of me.”
“Jealous?” She tried to deny it, but he wouldn’t listen.
“To resent the fact that I had a very small chance to do something to show how I felt about them both,” Steve went on as though she had not spoken. “I have no family. I’ve been an orphan since I was fourteen. I wanted to study law because ever since your father came to my rescue when my father was killed in the mills, and got a settlement that was enough to help me start the study of law, well, I’ve just about worshipped the Judge. I think he is the finest, the most decent, the best man I’ve ever known. And when he and your mother took me into their home, sort of adopted me, the burden of my gratitude, my feeling of obligation has been such that I felt I could never repay it. Now do you see why I am so grateful that I was lucky enough to be here, and to be of some very slight service to them both? And you’d dare be jealous, resentful …”
“Steve, Steve, be quiet!” Lynn protested, standing in front of him on the narrow, tree-lined sidewalk, half-laughing, half-crying. “I’m sorry, I mean I’m glad that you were here. I hope you’ll always he here, and they don’t feel that you are under any burden or obligation …”
“That was an awkward way of trying to say what I feel.”
“I think I understand, Steve. And I guess I was jealous that it was you and not Bud and I who were here to help when they needed it. After all, I love them very dearly and so does Bud; they’re the only parents we have, you know!”
“And two luckier people there couldn’t be than you and Bud,” Steve told her.
“I know, and I am sorry that I behaved so badly,” Lynn told him sincerely.
For a moment they stood smiling at each other, and then Steve looked up and beyond where they stood. A block away the lights from the three blocks of the business section were shining, and Steve said cheerfully, “Well, shall we celebrate our new understanding with a drink? The drugstore stays open until eleven o’clock!”
“Goodness! Aren’t we metropolitan in Oakville?” Lynn pretended to be deeply impressed.
“Oh, we’re no longer a town that rolls up the sidewalks and puts them away at eight-thirty,” he assured her grandly, and they both laughed as though that were very funny.
Lynn remembered the drugstore, of course, though it had been enlarged and restocked until it was a surprisingly reasonable facsimile of a big-city drugstore. It was well-filled, because the movie had just released its audience and a number of them were there. The tables were all occupied, and there was a double line at the soda fountain.
As Lynn and Steve entered, a group of boys were scuffling in front of the counter, their voices raised. One of them plunged from the group, turned toward the door and collided with Steve and Lynn, making them stagger.
Steve’s hand shot out and clutched the boy’s shoulder, and there was a dangerous glint in his eyes.
“Take it easy, young fellow.” His voice was low-pitched but angry. “You nearly knocked the lady down.”
The boy, fourteen or fifteen and large for his age, in skin-tight dungarees and a T-shirt, glared at Lynn. Then he seemed to recognize Steve, and some of the fight went out of him.
“Sorry, Steve,” he growled. “But that gang made me so mad I didn’t look where I was going.”
“Well, you’d better next time, Larry,” Steve told him grimly. “Now apologize to the lady.”
The boy’s sullen, murky eyes glanced indifferently at Lynn and widened slightly as they slid over her.
“Sure, sure, Steve,” he answered. “Sorry, lady, no offense meant. Hope I didn’t hurt you.”
“Oh, I’m sure you didn’t,” Lynn managed with a faint smile, and could not quite keep the distaste from her eyes.
“Aren’t you out a bit late, Larry?” asked Steve quietly.
The boy’s dark, sullen face was flooded with fury, and his eyes spat words he dared not speak.
“That’s what the gang’s been telling me, and it was what made me so mad,” he literally snarled. “Why do I have to obey a curfew and they don’t?”
“I’m sure you don’t want me to explain that in front of the young lady,” Steve said quietly. “She is Judge Carter’s daughter, you see.”
For just a moment a light of alarm flickered in the boy’s eyes, and he muttered something and slid out of the drugstore into the night.
Lynn looked up at Steve.
“And what was that all about?” she asked.
Steve had spotted a table just being vacated and guided her toward it, even as he answered, “Larry Holland’s been in some fairly serious trouble. He’s on probation; and it was your father who kept him from being sent to reform school. That’s why he is required to be at home every night by eleven, and to avoid bad company.”
A boy about fifteen or sixteen, very conscious of his position of authority, took their order and rushed back to the fountain.
Lynn’s eyes roamed over the other young boys approximately Larry’s age, then looked back at Steve.
“Well, I suppose it is very irritating to him to be the only one who has to be in by eleven, when the others are still roaming around,” she pointed out.
“Well, I’m sure he’d rather do that than be sent to reform school, and if it hadn’t been for the Judge, that’s where he would have been sent,” Steven assured her grimly. “Larry’s father runs a tavern on the mill side of the river, and his mother is dead. He’s an only child, and his father thinks the world of him. He’d give him the moon, if he could; he gets furious when anybody indicates that Larry is not the little tin angel he wants to believe. You can see it’s not a situation that could help Larry make a man of himself, without help from somebody like the Judge.”
Lynn nodded slowly, thoughtfully.
“Funny, you don’t think of small towns like Oakville being plagued with juvenile delinquency. You always think big cities are the ones that breed that sort of thing,” she said at last. “I had no idea that Oakville had changed so much.”
“Well, now you know,” Steve mocked her lightly. “Wherever there are young people, and too much money, or too little, I suppose there will be juvenile delinquency. Yet I wonder if money or the lack of it is really the root of the whole thing.”
Lynn smiled at his seriousness.
“Now you’re getting into an area that worries people all over the country, so don’t think you can settle it even in one small place like Oakville,” she reminded him, and looked about her, anxious to change the subject and get him out of his serious mood. “I suppose the girls and boys I used to know here have married and settled down, with families and budgets to worry about.”
“And that sort of thing never appealed to you?”
Steve asked curiously.
“Oh, I always had my heart set on being a top-flight career gal
, and I’ve never felt careers and marriage went hand in hand,” she answered.
Steve nodded thoughtfully. “Now, to me, that makes a lot of sense.”
Lynn laughed at him. “Oh, don’t tell me that you are one of those old-fashioned males who insists a woman’s place is in the home!”
“Only if that’s the way she feels about it too,” Steve told her firmly.
“But you would want your wife to be there in the rose-covered cottage, warming your slippers and filling your pipe, when you got home from a hard day over the torts and leases and habeas corpuses,” Lynn mocked.
“I’m afraid so,” he admitted without shame. “But then I can’t imagine ever being married to any other kind of wife. Career girls scare me.”
“Oh, come now,” Lynn teased him.
He was unexpectedly serious.
“I mean it,” he told her. “I admire a girl who can make a career for herself; I respect her; but I run from her! Not, of course, that I’ve had much experience with girls like that. Oakville doesn’t seem to run to careers that would interest such girls.”
“I’ll have to agree with that,” Lynn mused slowly. “It’s why I pulled up and went to Atlanta. A girl can rise to just about any heights she wants to there, if she’s willing to work hard enough. And I am!”
“I’m sure you are, and that you’ll achieve anything you set your heart on,” Steve told her, and his smile was friendly and admiring.
“Thanks,” said Lynn. “That takes in quite a lot of territory!”
“Oh,” Steve assured her lightly, “you’re a girl who can handle quite a lot of territory.”
Lynn eyed him with a trace of suspicion.
“You wouldn’t be making fun of me, would you?” she demanded.
Steve’s brows went up and he looked honestly surprised.
“Me? I wouldn’t dare!” he assured her. “No, Lynn, I have heard a lot about you from your parents and from friends here. I’m convinced that you’re a very smart girl and that you’re very definitely going places.”
“Well, that’s very kind of you,” Lynn told him briskly as she stood up. “At the moment, I’m smart enough to know it’s time we were both going home. It’s been quite a day.”
Steve nodded and rose with her.
Four
It took only a few days for Lynn to settle into the routine of being back home again. The greening trees, the lawns that were a matching green, the borders of tulips, the great sheets of yellow daffodils dancing in the crisp, fresh breeze were all a part of her delight.
Ruth mentioned a meeting of her Ladies’ Aid one afternoon and invited Lynn; but the woods surrounding the small town were too enticing to make Lynn agree to be shut up in the church’s recreation room and she begged off.
“Just be careful, won’t you honey?” Ruth warned. “I think it may be a little too early for snakes to be about, but you never can tell.” Ruth kissed her lightly as she got into her three-year-old car and set off for her meeting.
Lynn, in dark slacks and a thin shirt, a sweater slung about her shoulders just in case the breeze turned cooler later on, set off from the house. To her left was the town; to her right, the woods and the narrow, swiftly rushing creek where she and her father had fished when she was a little girl. It was to the right that she turned.
She walked with her shoulders back, her head lifted, drawing in deep breaths of the fresh, cool, fragrant air.
As she reached the woods she paused, lifted her head and sniffed. And then she nodded. Yes, somewhere in the depths of those woods crab-apple was blooming. There could be no other scent like that of blossoming crab-apple. Suddenly she came to a halt, thrilled and enchanted, for there was yellow jessamine. Even when she was a child, yellow jessamine had always seemed spring’s own special signature.
She walked on, bemused, enchanted, glorying in all the loveliness, until suddenly she was stopped in her tracks by a low, moaning, whimpering, half-animal, half-human sound. It lifted the hair at the back of her neck, and her first instinct was to flee wildly. But she went on listening, and realized that it was the sound of heartbroken sobbing.
She moved cautiously forward, her heart hammering. And then she saw the grieving thing, a great, hulking creature, whose thick, tangled locks half-concealed the big, darkly tanned face. In the two huge hands, held as delicately as a butterfly, lay the limp body of a small squirrel, and the man was bent above it, sobbing.
Even as she moved, almost without a sound, the big head lifted and the tear-smeared face turned toward her, and she stood still.
“Why’d anybody have to do a think like that?” he whimpered, his eyes accepting Lynn as a part of the forest scene, and one huge finger gently stroking the small, limp, gray body. “He was just a little feller. He wasn’t bothering anybody; he just lived here and played and ate hickory nuts and acorns and minded his own business. Then somebody come along and killed him! Why did they? Who’d want to do a thing like that?”
Lynn said gently, “You’re Bert Estes, aren’t you?”
He scrambled to his feet like one of the wild things of the woods; but even in his shock and his uneasiness, his hands still held the small, furry body with a tenderness that was indescribably pathetic.
“Yeah, I’m Bert. Who’re you?” he muttered, his voice still choked with sobs, tears streaking his ugly face, his eyes suspicious and wary.
“I’m Lynn Carter, Bert — Judge Carter’s daughter. Don’t you remember me?”
“Judge Carter?” he repeated, and paused. “You ain’t somebody wants to lock me up somewheres?”
“Oh, Bert, of course not,” Lynn soothed him. “I’m sorry about the squirrel. Was he a pet?”
Bert seemed to forget his fear of her in a returning surge of grief for the small thing held so gently in his two great hands.
“He was one of my little folks,” he answered. “All the livin’ critters here are my little folks. They know me and I can talk to them.” He broke off and glared at her defiantly. “Well, I can, if you believe it or not.”
“Well, of course I believe you, Bert!” Lynn’s voice was very gentle, the sympathy and pity in it reaching through to the poor creature’s twisted mind. “Animals know when people love them. Why, I’ve seen dogs smile, even laugh, when somebody they loved spoke to them.”
“Well, I can set right here on this log, and be real still, and the little folks will come right up to me and let me feed ‘em. Makes no nevermind how scary they are of other people, they know me. Nutsy here was so little and so smart and now he’s all dead!”
“I’m sorry, Bert, truly I am! Who did it?” asked Lynn.
“Oh, a feller with a gun. Seems like there’s always fellers with guns going ‘round shootin’ helpless critters like Nutsy here — even the birds ain’t safe from ‘em.” There was a vast bitterness in his tone, and once more a big finger caressed the small, furry thing that he held in his hands. “I reckon I’d best go and bury him.”
He turned away and then looked back over his shoulder.
“You want to come to the funeral?” he asked.
“Of course I do, Bert,” Lynn answered, and followed as he went plunging through the woods, brushing aside the underbrush with his big feet, using his shoulders to push past the low-growing branches that whipped back at Lynn, his hands cradling the small, furry gray body.
Lynn followed him, well back so that she could avoid the whipping branches, and came out into a small clearing at the far edge of the woods. Through the trees she could glimpse an old farmhouse, surrounded by ancient, dilapidated buildings. But here in this small clearing, there was a quiet untouched by any sound from the farmstead.
Bert laid the squirrel down very tenderly, and from behind a huge live-oak brought out an old shovel. She watched as his powerful shoulders and huge hands plunged the spade deep into the ground and uncovered a hole that would accept the small body. He knelt beside it, lifted the small body and very gently laid it in the hole. Then before he filled the hole
, he got up, walked across to a low-growing bush and plucked a handful of leaves. He came back and covered the squirrel with the leaves and then filled in the hole. He knelt beside it for a moment, looking down at it, tears once more sliding down his dark face.
When at last he stood up, he glanced at Lynn and said awkwardly, “Thank you for comin’ to his funeral; he would have ‘predated that.”
“Thank you for letting me, Bert,” said Lynn gently.
“I got to go get him a little stone, and Maw’ll give me something to put flowers in,” he told her over his shoulder. “You can come with me, if you want.”
“Of course I will, Bert,” answered Lynn, and walked behind him out of the woods and along a path across a small pasture that led to the house.
It was a typical tenant-farmer’s house, built of raw green lumber that had warped in the summer rains and the mild winter’s cold and that had never known the touch of paint. Its boards had weathered to a dark silver, and it had a touch of homely beauty because of the dooryard that was ablaze with snapdragons and tulips and daffodils.
As Bert went up the steps of the back porch, a woman appeared in the kitchen doorway, calling, “That you, son? Supper’s near ‘bout ready.” And then her eyes fell on Lynn, and Lynn saw her face go white and her eyes widen with fear. “Get in the house, son, and stay there!” she ordered.
“Maw, this here’s my friend, Lynn. Her Paw’s Judge Carter,” Bert said innocently. “Me and her’s been buryin’ Nutsy. Somebody shot him.”
Lynn heard the overtone of heartbroken grief in his voice as he spoke the last words and the woman hurried him into the house. Lynn waited, and a little later the woman came back out and across to where Lynn stood.
“Hello, Mrs. Estes,” said Lynn quietly.
“What you doing with my boy, Miss Carter? You nor nobody else is goin’ to have him locked up. He ain’t no danger to nobody, and there ain’t a mite o’ harm in him.”
Lynn put out her hand and laid it on the work-worn, twisting hands that were locked tight against the woman’s gaunt middle.