“Now what in the world would you do with a horse?”
“We could take her to the farm. She could work.”
“She’s too old. Let go, baby.”
“Please don’t untie her, Mama!”
“I’ve got to.”
“They’re going to shoot her!”
“Let go.”
“Oh, Mama!” Mathy flung herself on her mother. “They’re going to make soap out of Maude!”
Hobbled by the sobbing child, Callie looked at the old horse, who looked back in dumb and infinite patience. “Oh mercy,” she said limply. Mathy howled and pleaded. The old horse stood meekly. “All right,” she said at last, “come on, then. We’ll put her in the barn till Papa gets home. Maybe he’ll know what to do.”
There was only one thing to do, said Matthew when he had heard the story: take the horse back and apologize to Mr. Henshaw. Mathy started to howl again.
“Now no more of that!” he said. “You can’t have everything just the way you want it, and the sooner you learn that, the better. I understand your feelings”—his old mule Pharaoh made a brief appearance in his thoughts—“and I’m sorry it has to be this way. But it does, and you must learn to accept it. You’ve got to be made to respect the rights of others.”
Mathy ran out of the kitchen in tears. They heard Jessica comforting her on the stairs (where she and Leonie had hid, so they could hear everything that went on without getting involved). Matthew sat for a moment, resolving his grudging sympathy with his righteous anger. Another embarrassment!
“Well,” he said, starting to the telephone, “I guess I’ll just have to call Mr. Henshaw and tell him I’ll be over.”
“Matthew?” Callie was working at the oilstove with her back to him.
“Hm?”
“How much would they give him?”
“Give who?”
“Mr. Henshaw, for Maude’s hide?”
“Oh, five dollars, maybe.”
“Don’t seem like so much, does it?”
“Well, by the time they make the trip down here and haul her away, I guess that’s all she’s worth.”
“Kinda pitiful, isn’t it, to think of old Maude hauled away like that and knocked in the head.”
“Yes, it is,” he said, thinking again of Pharaoh, who died peacefully on bluegrass.
“Shame she just couldn’t be turned out to pasture somewhere.”
“Yes,” he said absently.
“She’s no good, but I reckon the children could ride her now and then—she’s so gentle.”
“Wha-at?” Matthew said in slow astonishment.
“Well, I just thought that if we gave Mr. Henshaw what those men would have give him—”
“Mama, for the mercy land of goodness!” Matthew looked at her in indignation. “I’m not going to spend five dollars on a worthless horse just to put it out to pasture!”
“Well, I thought—”
“We can’t humor the child that much! You’re always holding up for her. Why in the name of common sense—”
“I wasn’t thinking of her so much. I was thinking of Clabber. He trusted Mathy—he trusted us.”
“She’s only a child!”
“Well, so is he, in his mind. He thought his horse was safe with her, and if we make him lose it now, he’s going to feel worse than ever. He’s going to feel like he can’t trust nobody.”
Matthew exploded. “Well, what am I supposed to do! I’m just as sorry as I can be. But I have no use for the horse, I don’t want the horse, I can’t afford the horse, and I’m not going to spend five dollars and butt in on Mr. Henshaw’s business just to keep Clabber Dumpson from losing faith in humanity!”
There was a moment of silence. “All right,” Callie said quietly and went back to her cooking.
After supper, when Mathy had gone to bed, Matthew took Maude home. An hour later he came back, grim-faced. Callie was waiting up.
“My goodness,” she said, “was it that bad? What did he say?”
“Oh, he was pleasant about it.”
“I thought he would be. Mr. Henshaw’s a nice man.”
“I had to pay him two dollars.”
“Two dollars! What for?”
“That’s what it cost him for the men who came from the slaughterhouse. They were pretty ugly about making the trip for nothing.”
“Well, I guess you can’t blame them. All the way from Sedalia, and now they’ll have to turn right around and come back.”
“They’re not coming back,” said Matthew.
“They’re not?”
“He said it wouldn’t be worth it to go through all that again.”
“Well, I’m kind of glad, for Clabber’s sake. He’ll get to keep his horse, after all!”
“No, he’ll have a new one. Mr. Henshaw’s already bought it.”
“What’s he going to do with Maude?”
“He’s already done it.”
Callie clapped her hands to her face. “He didn’t shoot her himself!”
“No,” said Matthew, “he didn’t shoot her.”
“What did he do with her?”
“He gave her to me,” he said and started up the stairs. “There wasn’t a thing I could do but accept her.”
From the tone of his voice, Callie thought it best to say nothing.
Mr. Henshaw was delighted to shift the burden of Maude onto someone else’s shoulders. Clabber Dumpson was delighted that Maude had a good home. Mathy was wild with joy. She had saved Maude’s life and she had a pet of her own. Everyone was happy at Matthew’s expense.
He brooded over it often, pondering the uncanny ability of his youngest to make him pay for her mistakes. He believed that she did it in innocence, but simply without sense of right or wrong as he tried to teach it. The child seemed to operate outside morality. Hard as he tried to bring her in, she escaped him and always through some loophole that he hadn’t anticipated. Because of her he suffered inconvenience, interruptions, embarrassment in public, aggravations picayune and endless.
Sometimes it seemed to him that she was a judgment on him. Deny it he might, but he had begat her in sin. The child was the avenging angel, and from the moment of her birth she had exacted her price from him. But not in noble sums that would pay the debt quickly. She demanded it in pennies.
3
In the middle of her forty-fourth summer, Callie Soames gave birth to another child.
When Leonie, away at teachers college, first learned that her mother was pregnant, she thoroughly disapproved. She was embarrassed both by and for her parents.
Callie was a bit embarrassed too, at first. But secretly she was rather proud of herself. The bigger she grew, the less it bothered her. In private she and Matthew congratulated each other fondly, as two who had come a long way together and guessed they could make it the rest of the way.
Jessica came home to help. She had lived in the Ozarks for two years now, so happily, even without Tom, that she could hardly tear herself away. For the first time in her life, she had begun to have beaus (Tom was her husband before he’d had a chance to be her beau), and in her widowhood she was having more fun than she’d ever had in her girlhood. The year before, she had come home for a mere two weeks. But this time she came for the summer, in such high spirits that the whole household was infected by them. She and Mathy saw no reason at all why Mama shouldn’t have another baby if she wanted to. They thought it was pretty cute of her. They waited on her hand and foot and, when Papa wasn’t around, teased her gently. They carried on at such a rate and had so much fun that Leonie had to join in.
Callie had finally got them moved into the big Cooper house, where all of them, Matthew included, felt uncommonly grand. It was a cool spacious house with many bedrooms, a front stairs and a back stairs, and lots of porches. The yard was big and shady, full of fruit trees and maples. Petunias grew in an old stump, grapevines over the back walk, and by the barn door an inexhaustible supply of four-leaf clovers. An additional pleasantry was a grassy back-
yard tumulus which, beyond its convenience, was a great comfort to Callie: in case of cyclones, which she dreaded, she now had a cellar to run to.
Sometimes on hot afternoons while their mother napped, the girls opened the cellar door and sat on the bottom steps within reach of the cool stored-up air. With their stockings rolled down and their skirts pulled up, they read aloud to each other and told naughty jokes and laughed. Sometimes they read Good Housekeeping—lush romantic stories by Temple Bailey, Emma Lindsay-Squier, and Queen Marie of Roumania. Now and then they horrified themselves with a tattered copy of True Story which Jessica had found on the train. Mostly they just visited. Toward four o’clock, Callie would amble into the yard and call them. Whereupon the pace of the afternoon accelerated, reaching a noisy laughing crescendo as the girls got supper ready.
Matthew spent most of the summer at the schoolhouse.
With Callie luxuriating in the privileges of pregnancy and all his daughters at home together, he found that home, while somewhat of a castle, was no longer a man’s. Insurrection of the gentlest sort had nudged him from power. He stood beleaguered by the summer maneuvers of many women in a large house. They swept, they aired, they sewed, they canned and cooked, and most of all, they washed. They washed clothes and floors and vegetables and windows, fruit jars, front steps, sidewalks and cupboards, rugs and rags and window curtains and each other’s hair. They were forever pumping water. He resigned himself to the certainty that the well would run dry by August.
He found it impossible to pursue his studies at home. Say he was trying to do a correspondence lesson, in the cool of the morning, upstairs in a corner of the bedroom. Before he was good and started, he would have a dozen interruptions. Peals of laughter from the garden, titters on the back stairs, an exasperating quantity of passing to and fro. Though they tiptoed respectfully past his door, they never failed to drop the dustpan two steps beyond, or trip on a rug and have a laughing fit. And not one of them could make a bed alone. They had to work in pairs, which led to much dialogue and inexplicable hilarity. They couldn’t do anything in silence. His ears rang with the fortissimo of household instruments—washtubs, carpet sweeper, pump handle, egg-beaters—all of it overlaid by the constant piercing fifery of female laughter.
He didn’t really know what had come over the girls. They had gone plumb daft, as Callie put it indulgently, having lost half their manners and nine-tenths of their modesty. They painted their faces like savages—Jessica had come home with rouge! They slid down banisters, snickered during grace, and ran around in their nightgowns with all the lights on. Though Leonie maintained some trace of decorum, there was no holding the other two. Mathy alone was bad enough; she and Jessica together were a mob. Callie merely laughed at them, with soft reproaches that only made them worse. He had to admit that in spite of their silliness, the girls were diligent. If only they wouldn’t laugh so much! But they did, and he hadn’t the nerve to silence them, things being as they were. And so, as soon as the chores were done, off he went to the schoolhouse, where everything was arranged as he liked it and he could hear himself think. Having begat and having provided, he was of no further use at home.
The girls were delighted to have him out of the way. They acknowledged that their father was the foundation of all this good. Because of him they could live in this estimable house and sleep serenely, one to a room. Because of him the garden pushed up beans and tomatoes and roasting ears, and the delivery boy left sacks of groceries on the back porch. Their father’s hens laid eggs for them, and night and morning he brought in a foaming bucket of rich Jersey milk. They took this provender and they cooked and churned and baked and preserved it, and they sat their father down three times a day to a feast. They performed the filial rituals with willingness and grace and beamed with relief when the screen door closed behind him. It was just more fun without him, engrossed as they were in pure domesticity and the shared bearing of their mother’s baby.
The baby arrived in July, another girl. The sisters named her Mary Jo and received her as a new doll with which their parents had generously presented them. They adored her, bathed and dressed and rocked and cuddled her, and poured down her all sorts of faddish things that Callie thought unnecessary. Having raised her others on bacon gravy, she couldn’t see the point of orange juice, codliver oil, and such. But Leonie had bought a book and they were always running to see what the book said and that’s what it said. At any rate, the diet didn’t seem to hurt the baby. She gurgled and kicked in a most captivating manner.
Matthew found the new girl quite agreeable, especially as her presence made the others quiet down. They didn’t shriek so loud now, for fear of waking the baby. They received him into the fold again, where he preened himself with becoming dignity, and everyone was kindly toward the others. Thus the summer passed, a benevolent season.
4
Mathy, who for nearly fifteen years had been the youngest, adjusted happily to the status of older sister. She adored the baby. Denied a cat or a dog all of her life, she had a house pet at last. As soon as the child could toddle, Mathy took her on long journeys about yard and pasture. She made up stories for her and fanciful games; they fenced the yard with clover chains and made wild hats out of flowers and clothespins. Callie found her two youngest daughters enchanting—when they weren’t scaring her out of her wits. They had to watch Mathy. She was always dragging the child out in the rain to look at the rainbow, or rolling her in a snowdrift, or swinging her too high. The child’s influence on Mathy seemed helpful, but she wasn’t sure about Mathy’s influence on the child.
Mathy had grown up almost overnight. All at once she looked like a girl instead of a little boy, a comely young lady with slim pretty legs and a proper bosom. One night at a church supper, Callie observed a young man flirting with her. Oh dear, she thought, now this! And wondered what in the world they would do when Mathy got interested in boys. If Jessica, so good, so docile, could run away with the hired man, what might Mathy do! Matthew wondered himself. They tried conscientiously, however, not to levy undue restrictions. Searching their souls, they tried to avoid past mistakes.
“My land, Mama,” said Leonie, “you let Mathy do things you never would have let me and Jessica do.”
“I know,” Callie apologized. “But maybe if we’d given you more freedom, things wouldn’t have happened the way they did.”
“I didn’t run off with any hired man.”
“I know you didn’t, honey. You’re a good girl and Mama appreciates it. But you know Mathy—if we clamp down too hard, no tellin’ what she’d do. Anyway, times are a little different from what they used to be, I guess.”
Occasionally, when a motion picture came to town, and if Matthew thought it had educational value, Mathy was allowed to attend. She and her crowd went on wienie roasts, well chaperoned. There were class parties at school. In summer they went to Sunday School parties on farmhouse lawns lit by lanterns hung in the trees. While their elders visited on the porch and set out ice cream and cake, the boys and girls played run sheep run and other games which permitted them to hold hands. On rare occasions, at fourteen and fifteen, Mathy was allowed to ride out and back with her best friend and two boys (though it nearly gave Matthew apoplexy for a daughter of his to get into a car with a boy).
There were certain places, however, where he drew a firm line. The summer Mathy was sixteen, she and her friends began to learn to dance. In spite of the general community bias, a few of the parents turned their heads and allowed the children to fox-trot in the basement. When Matthew found out, he denounced the parents (not to their faces) and forbade Mathy to go to parties in those homes. Mathy sneaked out one night and went anyway. Whereupon Matthew, losing whatever restraint he had tried to show, canceled her social life for the rest of the summer. She could go to birthday parties and the like if they took place in the afternoon with no boys present; and she could go to the picture show if Leonie went with her. Otherwise, she would stay home and behave herself.
&nbs
p; “It’s too bad, honey,” Leonie said to her, “but you would sneak out and you’ll have to pay for it.”
“It was worth it,” said Mathy, lolling on the bed. “I had a wonderful time! Oh, I won’t do it again,” she said, answering Leonie’s frown, “but I had to do it this time—Ruthie’s cousin Bobby was here from California. All I’ve heard out of Ruthie for ninety years has been her hot-stuff cousin Bobby! Cousin Bobby was a twerp,” she said placidly. “The other girls didn’t know it, though. They thought he was just gorgeous and cute and a great lover, because Ruthie always told them he was. They fell all over him. But he liked me best. I was the one that couldn’t stand him.” She rolled over with a smug expression. “But gee, Leonie, there’s a time to dance! It says so in the Bible.”
“It also says honor thy father and mother.”
“Okay.” Mathy grinned. “Gee, Leonie, you’re so good,” she said, meaning it. “You never do anything wrong or get everybody into trouble. How do you keep from it? Don’t you ever want to do something Mama and Papa say not to?”
“Yes,” Leonie said, “sometimes I do.”
“But you don’t do it.”
“I try not, because I love them.”
“Well, I do too, but—”
“The way I love God,” Leonie said simply. “When you love someone, you try to do right for their sake.”
“Oh, I’ll never be as good as you are, Leonie!” Mathy flopped over on her back and waved her heels in the air. “Do you think I’ll go to hell when I die?”
“I doubt it,” Leonie said, smiling.
“Do you believe in hell?”
“Of course.”
“I don’t. I only believe in heaven!”
She and Leonie didn’t see eye to eye on a lot of things, but she admired Leonie greatly for her virtue and beauty. Leonie had been away for the last two winters, teaching school. She had visited friends in the city and seen some plays, read some books and learned a thing or two, and she was full of joyous plans for the future. Having outgrown the concert-pianist stage, she was now going to be a music professor, an eminence more easily obtained. She had it all planned out: In another four winters, she could save enough money to take a year off; she was going to school at the university. Then she would get a bigger job, save more money, take another year off, and study in New York City. Then a still bigger job, more money saved, another year off, and so on and on until she could spend a year studying in Europe.
The Moonflower Vine Page 23