The Able McLaughlins/Chapter 13
CHAPTER XIII
WULLY and Chirstie and their bonny wee Johnnie moved into their new house towards the first of May, and at the end of that month, Wully's brother John, having finished his second year in the snug little New England college, came to work for him. That institution was only fifty miles away, a distance that a lame McLaughlin, unfit for the army, walked to vote for Lincoln in sixty-four, not being able to give one great big valuable dollar for the hire of a horse. John himself walked when his sister Mary's company didn't necessitate a wagon. Having John at Wully's suited the whole family. His mother liked it because Wully was such an excellent example of patience and goodness for John, who needed just that. Chirstie liked it not only because she was spared the unpleasantness of having a strange hired man at the table, but because she saw in John the first of a succession of younger brothers, to whom, as they worked for Wully, she might in some degree repay their mother's kindness to her. Wully heartily admired John, and never neglected to point out the signs of his brilliancy to those who were interested, especially his mother. There was no one like John in the family, and therefore, of course, in the community, in Wully's estimation. The books which the other children in the little school studied ragged, John glanced at, and mastered. He never had anything to read, because the few books that Wully went slowly through, he read in an hour or two, getting more out of them in that fashion than Wully could in his. He had read every printed thing in the neighborhood: the books Wully had sent home from St. Louis, most of Scott, and some of Dickens, and Macaulay's histories. ("You understand that no stolen book comes into my house, Wully!" his mother had written him, enraged by the boys' stories of war plunder.) He had read those three hundred pious volumes that the governor of an eastern state had sent to the library of a Sunday school near by, in which he had become, in so romantic a manner, interested. He had read the college library from start to finish, and the more precious books his interested teachers would lend him. His teachers thought sometimes that John was to have a great career. But they were all amateurs in expectations, compared to his mother.
John had two very good reasons for wanting to work for Wully. The first was that at Wully's he could study all the Sabbath day in peace, which he was not allowed to do at his father's. To be sure, he was still expected to appear at church, which he did but seldom, and then only with great groans and complainings. Wully told him it wouldn't hurt him to rest his mind an hour or two once a week, and he retorted that after a week in the field, rest was the thing his mind needed least. He scolded about his father's intolerance. Wully only grinned at him, and remarked that he couldn't see that the father was much more intolerant than the son. However, if John was seized with a pain on the morning of the Sabbath, Wully wouldn't minimize his agony when his father inquired about it.
The other reason that John liked being with his brother was that there he could be sure of being paid. The summer before he had hired out to a Yankee at Fisher's Grove, for twelve dollars a month, payable in gold. He had endured food inexcusably bad, even for those circumstances, and when he had asked for his wages the man had given him, shamefacedly enough to be sure, instead of gold, one hundred and twenty acres of land! John had been barely seventeen at the time and it was years before he acknowledged that in his disappointment he had gone to the woods and cried bitterly. He could afford to tell that story with amusement when there was a town of forty thousand on that land, and he still owned most of it. That year his father had with much difficulty got a deed to the land, and mortgaged it for a little to help with the boy's schooling. He and his sister, living together on cornmeal carried from home, and working for their room rent for the kindly New Englanders with whom they lived, needed, fortunately, only a little cash. But this next year John was going to Chicago to study law. That was what the teachers advised and that would take real money.
It was one of those interested teachers who unknowingly changed the order of worship at Wully's that season. One morning, when breakfast was over at dawn, John's first week there, as Wully reached for The Book, he said in a voice which seemed, as usual, a little impatient, somewhat too eager;
"Let me do the reading, Wully, and you do the praying!"
Wully was rather surprised by such devotion on John's part.
"All right," he said, handing him the book.
John began abruptly at the first of Isaiah, which was not the place according to the custom of their fathers, and he read stumblingly, with pauses, so that his brother, turning toward him, saw that he was looking at the text only for occasional phrases, trying to read from memory. And when they sat around the table again, in the evening, almost stupid from weariness, John went over the same chapter, but with scarcely any hesitation. Wully asked him, after prayers, why he had repeated it. John had just picked up the lamp to go up to bed—he had the one lamp, because he studied—and he turned at the bottom of the stairs to answer, the light flickering across his neck, where his hickory shirt collar was open. He was six feet, even then, and he had huge broad shoulders strangely awkward. His head was long and narrow, and though he was blistered red just then from the sun, his untanned forehead was a clear yellow, unlike any other complexion in the family. He had the long upper lip that spoiled the symmetry of so many McLaughlin faces, and a long determined chin, and from his deep-set blue eyes he stood gazing at his brother with that speculating keenness with which he examined even the most familiar things.
"Professor Jamison advised me to learn Isaiah this summer. He said it would be a good thing to get the swing of the sentences. We might as well get some good out of worship, I suppose."
"Commit Isaiah to memory!" gasped Wully.
"Well, why not? We know most of it now, don't we? We've heard it all our lives. I told him we knew the Psalms. We'll read a chapter twice a day, and we'll know it."
"I won't," said Wully.
"You'll know enough of it," said John, starting up to his reading.
Wully gave Chirstie a significant look.
"Did ever you hear the equal of that?" he asked her. "I wouldn't know that chapter if I read it every day for a month." He considered John. It would not have been his father's way to use the few minutes of the day set apart for the worship of the Most High God, to learn the swing of sentences, whatever that might be. It certainly would not have been Wully's own way. But it was John's way, and doubtless a good way, and since John was living with them, he might as well have his way. Chirstie didn't mind. She only wanted John to be happy.
They were happy as the summer wore on, the three of them working from the first streak of dawn to the frog-croaking darkness. The stars in their courses and the clouds in their flights seemed to be working with them that season. Week after week, just as the ground grew ready for it, they watched the desired clouds roll up in great hills against the sky, and pour down long, slow, soaking rains. They watched the sun grow more and more stimulatingly warm, and then, just when their corn needed it, grow fiercely hot in its coaxing. They worked like slaves, of course. But then, they had always worked like slaves. Wully was at the height of his strength that year, apparently, and he tried to save John, who was, after all, still a growing boy. But John sharply refused to be considered less than any man. Chirstie was cruelly tired every night, with far too much fever. She had her new house to keep as clean as her mother's linen-hung cabin had been. She had more than a hundred little chickens to feed and water, and to guard from the slow-rising storms, and the low-hovering hawks. She had an orphan lamb to feed. She had washing to do, and ironing, and scrubbing and sewing and cooking, bread making and butter making, with pans and pails and churns to be scalded and kept sweet; she had yarn making, and knitting, vegetable drying and wild fruit canning. She had wee Johnnie to care for, and whenever she sat down to nurse him, she fell asleep worn out. More than one pie got itself scorched that way that summer.
And with it all, they were so happy that sometimes she had to say to Wully, although he didn't want her to mention it, "Oh, think of last summer, and of this!" And he would answer, "I certainly had a time without you, Chirstie!" Everything seemed to swell the sum of their well-being. Every noon, if the dinner was not entirely ready when Wully was washed for it, he seized his spade and transplanted two or three little trees from their seed-bed to their place in the windbreak. Every evening, tired to death, with the baby in his arms, he went with his wife to see if by chance any seedlings had halted, and needed water. Every leaf on the little trees called for comment. There they would stand, looking over their domain, brushing mosquitoes from their faces. Wheat and corn had surely never grown better than theirs did that year. To John, now, a field of wheat was a field of wheat, capable of being sold for so many dollars. To Wully, as to his father, there was first always, to be sure, the promise of money in growing grain, and he needed money. But besides that, there was more in it than perhaps anyone can say—certainly more than he ever said—all that keeps farm-minded men farming. It was the perfect symbol of rewarded, lavished labor, of requited love and care, of creating power, of wifely faithfulness, of the flower and fruit of life, its beauty, its ecstasy. Wully was too essentially a farmer ever to try to express his deep satisfaction in words. But when he saw his own wheat strong and green, swaying in the breezes, flushed with just the first signs of ripening, the sight made him begin whistling. And when, working to exhaustion, he saw row after row of corn, hoed by his own hands, standing forth unchoked by weeds, free to eat and grow like happy children, even though he was too tired to walk erectly, something within him—maybe his heart—danced with joy. Therefore he was then, as almost always, to be reckoned among the fortunate of the earth, one of those who know ungrudged contented exhaustion.