Man's Country/Chapter 1
DID."
"Didn't."
"A wagon without any horse! It rolled right by me—lickety split."
"You're a darn liar!"
Bim! In the thickening dusk of an April night in the middle nineties, on a suburban street of the city of Detroit, two half-grown brothers leaped upon each other and fought, scratching, kicking, pommeling.
"George-e-e-e-ee! . . . Jimmee-e-e--ee! . . . Sup-per-r-r-r."
Borne upon the breath of a mother who was blissfully unaware what emprise engaged her sons at the moment, these words, with affectionate appeal in every syllable, floated out of a small cottage, from the side-door and one front window of which light was streaming.
At the gladsome call the battlers gave off the conflict abruptly and raced each other for the wash-basin which stood on a bench in the leanto at the back of the house. They were at the age when the call of the stomach claimed precedence over every other demand of lusty nature.
Malachi Judson, head of this house, father of these boys, husband of that slender woman whose tired, proud voice had summoned them to supper, was a hard-working man of stalwart frame, a quick temper, and a slow mind. His face, bearded below the jaw line, was cavernous above, and the responsibilities of life had carved anxious wrinkles deep in his bony brow. With scarce a glimpse at his sons when they sidled, belated and slightly shame-faced, to the table, Malachi was bowed above his food, eating as a man is entitled to eat who has laid bricks alt day.
When the last morsel of corned beef to which he had served himself so liberally was gone from his plate, Malachi, after an audible and gustatory draught from his tea-cup, straightened himself and gazed about him with an air of renewed interest in the world. For the first time he noticed that the faces of his sons bore fresh scratches, sundry discolorations, and certain swellings of obviously recent origin.
"Fighting again? You two brothers! Hain't you ashamed of yourselves?" demanded Malachi.
"But, Pa!" and Jim, who was the older brother, although but little the larger—a lad with narrow shoulders, thin features, and squirrel teeth—began to make his defense. "George said he saw a wagon out in the road tonight, running along without any horse."
"I did, all right," insisted George, who while younger was the more robust and the more pleasing to look upon had he not just then spoiled the fairness of his countenance by darting daggers of resentment and accusation at his tattling brother. "It nearly run over me."
Malachi Judson's close-set orbs of vision grew stern, and his thin lips tightened. Above all things Malachi hated a liar, and this younger son of his was known to be afflicted with a super-imagination.
"What's that?" he scorned. "A wagon running along without a horse?"
"Yes, sir," replied George, leaning forward, eyes still more aglow, tones frankly excited. "I saw it!"
"You—young—imp!" Malachi denounced, the words catapulting forth with an augmented emphasis on each successive one. "What do you mean—setting there and lying to me?"
"I'm not lying, Papa! Honest, I saw it!" avowed George, eyes literally blazing now, but cheeks blanched and voice manifesting a due and proper sense of alarm at his father's dangerous incredulity.
Malachi's face reddened. "You are, you impudent puppy!" he accused and, with a deft swing of his trowel hand, reached across the corner of the table and cuffed young George sharply upon the ear, whereat tears started in the luminous, brown, excited eyes.
"Did, too, see it!" persisted the boy, whimpering. "What you want to hit me for—just because I told you the truth!"
"Oh, Pa!" the mother importuned, eyes full of pain, sitting helpless but lifting appealing hands. "Don't hurt him, Mal!"
"I'm not hurting him, Mary!" protested Malachi, breathing quickly. "I'm learning him not to lie—the darn impudent cub."
Malachi sighed virtuously, took up the evening paper and sank once more into his chair, where he made an honest effort at composing his family and himself once more in peace. But ostentatious sniffings from the lounge made peace not easy to be composed. After enduring for a time, though with irritable twitchings of the shoulders, these unpleasant lachrymose reminders of the scene which had just been enacted, Malachi gave up in disgust. With an angry crackling of his paper he tossed it from him and arose. The charm of a restful evening in his own home, which the day's work had undoubtedly earned him, had been spoiled. With a manner theatrically deliberate and a frown that forbade questioning, he rolled down his sleeves and buttoned them at the wrists; he drew on his coat, picked up his hat, and started for the door.
Yet the parting glance bestowed upon his wife was not ill-natured or unkind. She was merely asked by lifted brows and a facial gesture to comprehend that his own house had been made unbearable to him and that he sought peace where peace could be found—at Kelley's. The front door closed upon him with a snap.
"I did, too, see a wagon without a horse!" blustered the blubbering boy, the minute that snap had echoed into the sitting-room. "I did, too. Give me a licking, will you—and then get me another one from Pa, will you?" he snarled and turned ferociously upon his brother.
"There, there, George," soothed the mother with a caressing hand upon the boy's shoulder. "Don't talk about it any more, that's a good boy. It's too unpleasant. Let's not think about it any more even." Fair-haired and gentle-faced, with large, fond eyes and a patient, wistful mouth, the hurt mother threw an arm about each boy and drew them lovingly to her. "You must have thought you saw it, George, of course, or you wouldn't have said so," she comforted tactfully.
"I know I saw it," declared George and stamped impatiently.
"Darn that boy!" soliloquized Malachi, fuming as he strode out of the yard. "I've got to learn him not to lie."
The street whereon his modest home was situated was within the city's limits, but unimproved and little better than a country road. The path to Kelley's being better on the other side of this road, Malachi started to cross it diagonally, picking his way over the spongy, oozy surface. As he angled thus, he became aware of a strange, mechanical rattle and an odd, persistent snorting in the darkness, but as the sounds were unaccompanied by hoof-beats, he judged them to be something far away and was busy with his thoughts till suddenly the strange noises were in his ears and he felt himself assailed from behind—violently, abruptly, undignifiedly—assailed and overturned, so that he went rolling, coasting, and skidding clear to a ditch that would some day be a gutter, while the rattle and the snort passed on, attaching itself to something totally invisible in the inky blackness.
But human voices, high-pitched and soaring distantly above the rattle and the snort, came back out of the void.
"I think we struck something!" shouted one voice.
"Only a chuck-hole. This road is rotten!" volleyed another.
"Gosh darn ye!" bellowed Malachi, furious, from his ditch, his hand closing on mud as he clenched his fist and shook it. "Gosh darn ye! What are ye, anyhow?"
Rising painfully, to the accompaniment of language he would not have wished his sons to hear, with mind engulfed in a fog of mist and amazement, Malachi gave up the intended visit to Kelley's and turned back toward his own house.
"Why, Pa! What's happened to you?" exclaimed Mrs. Judson in astonishment and alarm, as she viewed her husband's rueful countenance and mud-plastered body.
"Fell down!" said Malachi grumpily, and did not meet the gaze of his son, George, when that forgiving youth, all sympathy, rushed to his father's assistance and began currying him with that identical newspaper to whose perusal he had succeeded when the former flung it irately from him. A bathroom being an unknown luxury in the homes of such as Malachi in that period, the kitchen and the kitchen sink were given over to his purpose, while the boys quickened the fire in the cookstove to dry his clothes against the morrow.
Eventually the Judson family went to bed in average good humor with itself. But Malachi had a problem on his mind as he laid his stubbled cheek on the pillow.
"I wonder what the devil hit me?" he kept saying to himself throughout the night, but the night brought no answer.
Meagning, however, was more communicative. At the breakfast table he got his answer. It was while he gulped his coffee and glanced the Free Press through. Upon an inside page his eyes encountered that which made him growl and start.
"Well, I be darned," he muttered with incredulous wonder. "I do be darned."
"What is it, pop?" demanded George pertly. But the father's manner became at once confused and forbidding. He vouchsafed no reply, but folding the paper as for further perusal at noontime, pushed it down into his side coat-pocket.
The day was Saturday.
"Jim, you come with me today," his father directed. "There's a lot of broken scantlings and waste lumber Mulligan said I could have if I'd haul it away. Some of it will be good for kindling, and some for tomato and bean stakes, and some of it for fencing and chicken coops. It'll take you all day to gather it. George, you stay and help your mother."
George could not repress a grin and a gloating wink at his brother. Helping mother was a snap. Jim, on the contrary, would have to put in a day of grinding toil, get splinters in his hands, perhaps a nail in his sensitive flesh, and generally punish his lazy body.
But when Mr. Judson stepped out of his front door, he noted with surprise that the west wind, blowing all night, had dried the street surface completely, and reasoned that if it had dried the street completely, it would have dried the garden tolerably. To make proof of this he thrust a spading fork into the soil and brought up a huge lump of it. "George," he decided, "you spade up the cabbage patch today, and we'll be getting it in shape for the peas and beans."
He said this quite casually, as if spading up the erstwhile cabbage patch did not represent at least three hours of back-breaking toil to a lad of George's size. It was the elder brother who beamed more happily now and the younger whose smile was sickly.
Now it chanced that as Malachi had lifted that single experimental forkful of earth, the folded newspaper fell unnoticed from his pocket and lay amid the damp weeds unregarded.
George spaded one row across with fine vigor, then paused to reflect upon the hardness of toil in general and the magnitude of this task in particular. He decided to divide it into two parts—one hour's work in the morning and two in the afternoon, when he should have grown more accustomed to such herculean labors and when he would naturally be the stronger with increasing age and another meal inside him. He decided further that it would not hurt the ground to dry a little more, and therefore to the morning's portion of the task should be dedicated the last hour before noon.
So blithely he left the fork standing upright in the damp earth and went indoors to help mother. Helping mother consisted in yawning around, offering to do things he knew he could not do, and dawdling lazily through such tasks of sweeping and kitchen-floor scrubbing as were well within his powers. Casually and openly he visited the cooky jar twice, and secretly some half a dozen times more. Then he lay for one hour flat upon his stomach, reading "Golden Days." As the kitchen clock struck eleven, he regarded it malignantly.
"Coises on you!" he muttered in mock tragic humor and dragged himself out into the garden.