Man's Country/Chapter 4
GEORGE, hurrying homeward, knew well that he had banked away another huge purpose in his life, yet as he sped on his way his new purpose seemed somehow to belong entirely to tomorrow. Today became once more ominously imminent. For two hours or more he had forgotten time. Now he was painfully conscious of it. The cabbage patch bulked like a mountain; it stretched like a moral morass in which he saw himself struggling.
An unexplained fear forced him to hurry. Something made him sick with a vague, illdefined unescapable apprehension of impending calamity. He attributed this to mere guilty conscience.
Six o'clock and his father would be at home—grim and uncompromising when he found the spading but half-completed. To save time, the lad angled across lots, darting behind Flannigan's diminutive barn and making a dash for the Judson garden. But as he gained the fence on one side of it, something halted him.
There was an unusual stir around that loved little home. He thought he heard a cry of lamentation—a short, sharp, half-smothered wail of anguish. He saw Mrs. Flannigan and another neighbor woman run in hastily; he saw a second woman rush out of the house, hood her bare head in the end of an apron the other end of which was still fastened about the waist, and run frantically up the road. That woman was George's mother. He could not understand it, but a whir of alarm went off in his breast.
A procession of men was coming toward him—a little, short procession of workingmen, with their dinner-pails in their unoccupied hands, and between them they were carrying something. His mother had reached them now and was stumbling along beside that something, wiping her eyes with the apron and exclaiming hysterically. But George Judson still sat upon the fence, frozen stiff, for he saw that the thing the men were carrying was his father. They bore him crudely—but tenderly—upon a door with scantlings thrust underneath, and with his own coat rolled up for a pillow under his head.
All at once George Judson found his legs again. He leaped from the fence and flew to meet the procession.
"Ma! Oh, Ma!" he cried. "Pa! Pa!"
But his mother did not answer. Nobody answered. The solemn-faced bearers marched steadily, but slowly, forward. Eventually, however, the arm of the distracted mother swept out and enfolded George without seeing him. This occurred just at the moment when his father's groan of agony assured the boy he was not half an orphan.
Thereafter for a time detached sights and sounds registered themselves vividly but confusedly on the boy's consciousness. There were the feet of the solemn-faced bearers treading lightly and yet their foot-falls booming in his sensitive ears like thunder as they walked across the sitting-room floor and eased their heavy burden down on the bed. There was the crowd about the door. There were his father's groans; there was the wringing of his mother's hands, and the moaning and lamenting of the neighbor women, and the low-voiced, awed tones of the workingmen. There was rushing to get hot cloths for compresses, there was the smell of liniment and arnica; there was the doctor's buggy coming to the door, and by and by another doctor and another buggy. There were George and Jim running wildly past Kelley's to the nearest drug store and back on succeeding frantic errands; and there was his father, calmer now, but with face white and set, a kind of grim courage on it that George always knew was in his father.
"Dad!" he half-sobbed, and, creeping close, crouched to kiss the rough hand that hung over the edge of the bed—it was the trowel hand, the hand that had smitten him upon the ear but yesterday.
Malachi Judson needed not to have the doctor's verdict told to him. He knew within himself; hence this expression now of gray despair.
George, awed by this look growing upon his father's face, slipped out to join his mother bowed in the semi-darkness and facing all at once a world of semi-darkness. The doctors had gone away. Mrs. Flannigan watched the patient within.
"Ma!" the boy asked, crowding close and whispering, while he buried his face in her ginghamed arm. "What's—what's the matter with Pa?"
The boy knew, of course, that his father had fallen from the scaffold on which he worked; he had heard the men reciting that; but this question probed deeper. He felt a shudder shake the wiry and toil-hardened, but to him always soft and tender, frame against which he leaned.
"It's—it's Pa's back!" answered the mother, her voice a broken whisper, her words vague and indefinite as if she somehow lessened the calamity by not defining it.
But the boy's mind was intent to know the worst—the worst that all this gloom on every face portended. "Is it—is it broke?" he appealed.
The mother's answer was a sob, deep and farreaching as if her lungs would confess all her grief in a single expiration.
Something that felt like an icy dagger pierced the heart of George Judson. A broken back! A dog of his had once sustained a broken back. He knew the utter helplessness, the utter hopelessness, of a creature with a broken back. Yet of his father such a calamity seemed unbelievable. His father had been always to him the embodiment of towering strength. And now was he as helpless as the puppy? Would he never fight the battle of bread for them again? Never chastise his sons again? George felt that he could take a thrashing every day of his adolescent life if only his father could be strong enough to give it to him.
His mother rose heavily and went inside, tears conquered, tear-blotches unconquerable. She stooped and kissed her husband's pain-dewed brow.
"Courage, Mary, old girl!" he whispered. "We got to bear it."
"I know," she said, simply, mournfully, with eloquent resignation in every line of her face and pose.
The two boys were still crouching in separate loneliness upon the porch, with just the width of the mother's body between them, for Jim had been there upon the other side of her, leaning against her, too.
"Jim," said George in a husky whisper. "Where's the lantern? I'm going to spade that cabbage patch tonight, so that when father looks out in the morning, he'll see it's done."
"I'll get Flannigan's spade and help you," proposed Jim with an astounding generosity of spirit.
George responded with like generosity. "Shucks, no, Jim! You've worked hard all day. I'm going to do it—alone."
But they did it together, and two tired brothers crept into their common bed to sleep the sleep of utter weariness, sweetened by a sense of fraternal love that was new to them.
A few days later came the inevitable council over ways and means. It was conceded that the family savings would pay the doctors and leave a small nest-egg against the proverbial rainy day, but this must not be impaired or drawn upon for daily sustenance.
Jim seemed not to pay attention and sighted out the open door with his slingshot. George's face wore a stubborn cast, although his heart was beating quickly.
"I can take in washing and get some orders for rag rugs," proposed the mother hopefully, and then she rested her pleading, expectant glance upon her sons, own brothers and yet so different. "You boys will have to quit school and go to work," she sighed.
"I'm willing," said Jim with an alacrity almost suspicious yet having a grateful sound to the ears of his parents.
"I'm not!" declared the younger boy stubbornly, with what seemed the first jarring note of selfishness that had been struck since an untoward accident had sweetened the unity of the home life. Hearing it, the bewhiskered face upon the pillow, whitening on cheeks and forehead under its coat of weathered tan, shifted abruptly, and the quick, close-set eyes of gray slanted their piercing, pain-shot beams upon the face of this youngest child who had spoken his rebellion with such studied resolution as if he had been a man. His mother's lip quivered, and her startled, hurt eyes also reproached him.
"Son!" she chided.
"Oh, I'll help, mother," assured George with a worried look. "I'll help, Dad. I'll dig up as many dollars for the house every month as Jim will; only I won't quit school. I'll get a paper route to carry in the morning; I'll get another for the afternoon; I'll work Saturdays. I'll find ways to earn money and to earn enough, but I won't quit school."