The Able McLaughlins/Chapter 14
CHAPTER XIV
JOHN came out for a three months' vacation the next year and worked again for Wully. They had acres of sod corn that summer, and wheat to make a miser chuckle. Both men, and whatever neighborly passer-by they might be able to hire, worked day after day till they staggered. To have stopped while yet there was sufficient daylight to distinguish another hill of corn would have been shirking; to go to supper while yet one could straighten up without a sharp pain in his back would have been laziness. Yet John was never too tired to choose an idiom as far removed as possible from the one he heard about him. Now that he had been in Chicago he had a growing contempt, which never failed to amuse Wully, for the speech of his own people. What was it they spoke, he demanded scornfully, swinging a violent hoe among the weeds. It was Scotch no longer. It wasn't English. It wasn't American, certainly. It was just a kind of—he tried all summer to describe it satisfactorily in a word. Once he called it "the gruntings of the inarticulate forthright." Mrs. Alex McNair was the only one that spoke pure anything, he declared. John seemed to like that woman, strange to say. Wully suspected he listened to her because her pronunciation fascinated him, but at Wully's he was intolerant of any tendency towards Scotticisms. Wully's and Chirstie's articulation he supervised continually, their grammar and their diction. They were not allowed to say before John, "She won't can some," or "I used to could." A less happy man than Wully might have resented correction from a younger brother. Wully took it gratefully, feeling he was getting not a poor substitute for the schooling he had been forced to miss. And when he saw his mother, he would repeat John's innovations to her with gusto. "Indeed!" she exclaimed upon one such occasion. "The gruntings of the inar—what, Wully? Lawsie me! You did well to remember that!" "Yes," cried Wully. "But John didn't remember them, mother. He makes them up!" Chirstie would have been annoyed sometimes by John's attitude, if her son had not been so devoted to his uncle. Wee Johnnie refused to go to sleep in the evening till he had had his daily romp with John on the doorstep. And even if he did treat her like an unimportant younger sister, she had to like her baby's playmate.
The child was by this time the joyous little husky heart of the family. John had noticed him dutifully at first because he was Wully's, but he came speedily to love him for his own diverting charms. There had been an evening nearly two years ago, when he came into the little room where he and his sister cooked their meals, and had found her stretched out on the bed crying. He read the letter she gave him in explanation. His mother had written about the impending disgraceful baby. John hadn't forgotten his sensation of amazement, or the sharp wound that his disdainful sense of superiority sustained, but now he seldom recalled either. It outraged his sense of the fitness of things that he so well understood that scrape; that he had to wonder at times that passion was ever less rampant, less controlled, than in the case he had to consider. The information encouraged a budding cynicism within him. If it had been anyone but Wully—even Allen—he would have understood it better. He had read the letter, and stood looking at it. Then without a word he went out, and walked about the streets through the dusk. And never a mention of it passed between the brother and sister. And then when he came home, and saw Wully—when that brotherly, honest geniality shone out simply towards him—he couldn't think of that story. Wully's presence denied it, obliterated it. That was all. And wee Johnnie justified himself.
John was, of course, keen about having his nephew speak English undefiled, and between their little games he begged him patiently to say "Uncle John." But, after hours of slipping gleefully away from effort, the baby came no nearer the desired sounds than "Diddle!" He had lovely, twinkling ways of making light of instruction. He would duck his curly head, and hold it reflectingly to one side, and purse up his little lips enough to have spoken volumes. Yet when he saw his uncle coming towards the house, he would sing out that absurd "Diddle," delightedly, waiting an award for such perfect enunciation. When his grandmother got him into her arms, she would beg him to say "Grannie." And he would say it, in a way that satisfied him entirely. Only he called the word "Pooh!" And in that absurdity, too, he persisted. "Mama" he said, and "Papa" and "chickie" and "Diddle" and "Pooh." And that was all. No coaxing could elicit more from him. Chirstie grew vexed at times hearing other women tell how early and plainly their children had talked. She longed to have Johnnie shine vocally. Sometimes she almost wondered if he wasn't "simple." But her mother-in-law consoled her by telling about her John. He had spoken hardly a word till he was three, and she was really getting alarmed about it, when suddenly he seemed to join the family conversation, so rapidly he learned words and sentences.
So with that foolish "Ayn?" which was his question, and with the "Ayn" which was his consent, Bonnie Wee Johnnie went on ruling his domain. The men never started to the fields with a team without letting the baby ride a few steps on the back of the old mare. No one plowed into a bird's nest without saving an egg to show the baby. No one ran across a long gaudy pheasant's feather without saving it for Johnnie's soft fingers to feel. At noon John carried him out to pat the colt's nose, or to see the little pigs nosing their way among one another to their mother's milk. The baby had just naturally become Wully's child. Wully could never bear the thought of Peter Keith. He kept it resolutely out of his mind. He had to. He shrank from it as he had never shrunk from the face of an enemy. Making the baby his own helped the forgetting. Barbara McNair said to Isobel McLaughlin that she had never seen a man with such a way with a baby as Wully had with that child. And Isobel McLaughlin answered that it was small wonder Wully had a way with babies, since he had carried one in his arms ever since he was three years old. Month by month Wully became in the eyes of that prairie-bound world a more exemplary and unsuspected father to Chirstie's son.
June came and went. The corn began hiding the black soil at its roots entirely from sight. It was "knee-high by the Fourth of July" according to the Scriptures. There was to be a great celebration that year in Woolsey's woods, and Wully had, of course, planned to take his family to the picnic. All his army comrades would be there, and neighbors for thirty miles round, talking crops and prices, and the president's troubles in Washington. It was to have been a grateful change from hoeing.
However, when the day came, it was out of the question to take Chirstie, who had been having fever, and the baby, who was unhappily teething, for a twenty-five mile ride through the heat, even with the new spring seat which Wully had bought for the wagon—extravagantly, according to Alex McNair. John, therefore, rode away on horse-back before dawn. Not that John would have condescended to care to go if it had been only what he would have called in our day a gathering of "neighborhood fatheads." But there was to be a speaker there who helped to make laws and thwart the president in Washington, and John wanted to hear what he had to say, and how he managed to say it.
Wully and Chirstie accordingly began their holiday by a most unusually long sleep in the morning, the baby for some reason allowing it. They had a late and lazy breakfast. If Chirstie cared to, they would drive down to the creek and look for some blackberries, Wully said. He dallied about, playing with the baby, who was better than they had expected him to be. They sauntered out to their garden of little trees, after Wully had wiped the breakfast dishes, and spent some time there, weeding it, and cultivating it, playing together. Were not the two of them quite content to spend their holiday at home together now? It was not as if they were young, unmated things, running about experimentally, investigatingly. When it grew warm, and they sought the shade of the house to rest in, a Sabbath peace brooded over them. Wully stretched out on the grass, and the baby sat contentedly on his chest.
Chirstie looked at the morning-glories blooming on the fence of the little vegetable garden. There were but few of them. The hens had got into the garden earlier and scratched them almost all out. She hated to kill the hens she had had the trouble of raising, just because they spoiled her morning-glories. Her stepmother, she reflected, had no such hesitations. If a rash hen flew into Barbara McNair's garden, she caught it and cut its wing feathers. If it repeated the offense, into the boiling kettle it went. She had scarcely a hen left. That famous wee white fowl-house was really little more than an ornament. Yet when Chirstie sighed over her morning-glories, Wully said at once that he would get a better fence around a bigger garden by the next spring. He, too, was thinking of the McNair place. Everyone thought of that place that summer, and planned to make his own less desolate-looking. That McNairs' was now the very show place of the country. One driving up to it, unless he had heard reports, could scarcely believe his eyes. No sty now! No bony cows trampling knee-deep in mud! One saw a trim white house, inside a smart white fence, upon a jaunty rise of ground, with a gay white fowl-house in the rear, and in the front yard—what sights for pioneer eyes! Crimson hollyhocks, just beginning to open, almost as high as the lean-to, screening the porch. A grapevine halfway across the main part of the building. Morning-glories on cunning arrangements of hidden wires. Scarlet poppies and magenta petunias romping all along the front walk, laughing to the confederate heavens, flaunting their uselessness flippantly before the eyes of those who lived slavishly, blossoms with the Scriptures behind them to justify their toiling not, their spinning not, their being arrayed beyond kings' glory—not economically. The garden scouted the very principles of the hard-working, of those who would "get ahead." It hooted aloud at frugality. Barbara McNair kept a lamb, to be sure, but for no utilitarian purpose. She kept it to mow her lawn. And when its hunger had shaved its environments, she moved the stake which held it, to another spot. She kept hens languidly, perhaps only to justify artistically that supernumerary luxury, the white fowl-house. But let those chickens beware how they turned their eyes towards her garden spaces, lest they discover fatally her feelings towards them and their like. No useless and ungardening orphan calf would she mother. No bereaved young pigs owed their life to her. She did only what she elected to do. Though there was at that time scarcely a servant girl west of the Mississippi, Barbara McNair was almost never without some, neighbor girl to do her work for her, while in return she taught her sewing, or made some pretty garment for her. Just now Wully's sister Mary, who was to marry a Yankee minister that fall, was working at the McNairs', while Barbara, in spite of Isobel McLaughlin's protests, was making her a famous blue silk dress, equaled in grandeur only by that red wool one of Chirstie's. Always some girl or other eating that helpless McNair's good bread, while his wife knit tidies, and watered her trifling wee flowers—from a pump all painted and handy just outside the kitchen door—and lived like a lady, envied by all the women in the neighborhood, and distrusted by nearly all the men.
Wully lay playing with the baby, who liked tickling his face with a long spear of grass, and thinking just how he would make that fence, and grinning, at times, to himself. The Sabbath before he had taken Chirstie home for dinner, and when she had seen how the flowers were blooming there, she had explained in vexation about her morning-glories. Wully had been walking with his father-in-law and the women among the trifling flowers, when Chirstie had spoken of the accident, in answer to Barbara McNair's question. And Alex had turned to Wully, and remonstrated with him for not having a better fence for Chirstie! A man ought to see that the women had such things, McNair had assured him solemnly. That was one of the best things he had had to tell his mother for a long time! Alex McNair telling him, Wully McLaughlin, how to treat a wife! McNair strutted about, taking all the credit for that garden, extremely proud of having the best-looking place for miles around. As if he had been able to help himself! Wully had said nothing about the incident to Chirstie. He couldn't seem always to be laughing at her father. Just then she went on to tell him about the new dress Barbara had made for little Jeannie. Whatever the neighbors might say enviously about Barbara McNair, they must in justice agree that she was an excellent stepmother to her husband's children. The way she loved Jeannie and Dod, and was loved in return, was a source of deep satisfaction to Chirstie. And so she gossiped contentedly and harmlessly on about the neighbors, and the baby kicked the protesting Wully gleefully in the ribs. They felt cosily shut in to themselves by the sense of the countryside emptied of its patriotic and picnicking dwellers. Wully lounged about till almost eleven. There was a little hay cut which he wanted to turn. He would be back by dinner time, he said.
He started down the path to the hayfield, taking the scythe with him. It was a hot day, but there was a lively breeze blowing the grass into waves and billows, and momentary disappearing swift maelstroms. Safe white clouds were sailing on high, but along the horizon hints of much rain were gathering slowly. It wouldn't be safe to cut much hay in face of them. He really need not have brought the scythe. He began turning what was cut, forkful by forkful. Then he cut a few swathes. Working, he lay bare a marsh hawk's nest. He stopped for breath, and stood watching the catlike birdlings turn on their backs and offer fight with their pawing, scrawny claws, while the mother circled angrily about him. He must tell Chirstie about those warlike babies. He went on, to leave them in peace. He kept getting farther and farther away from the house, towards the far edge of the plot of prairie they had chosen for hay. He worked away, scarcely lifting his head from his task, wondering occasionally if the rain, undoubtedly gathering, would come by night.
Suddenly he heard a cry. He looked up. He threw down his scythe. He started running. Chirstie was running towards him. She was crying out to him, too far away to be heard. He gave a look towards the house. There seemed to be no sign of fire. He tore on towards her. It must be the baby. He saved his breath till he got near her. She stumbled against him, gasping, fainting. What she managed to say brought the contentment of his life crashing down to ruin.
"It's Peter! Peter Keith! He's back!"
She would have fallen. He caught her. He held her against him. She couldn't speak. He couldn't believe his ears.
"You said he wouldn't come back!" she began, again. "Wully, he took hold of me! He—" She was weeping with rage and terror. "Look here!" Her sleeve was torn half off. "You said he wouldn't come back!" she cried, shaking.
"You're dreaming!" he cried. He couldn't believe it. It wasn't possible.
"He came to the door," she sobbed. "I didn't see him till then. I'm not dreaming! Look at my dress! Where you going? Don't leave me alone!"
He had started for his gun. Rage came over him like a fever mounting. The sight of that torn sleeve made him suddenly blind with anger. He couldn't believe it. It wasn't possible that man had dared to come back and lay violent hands on his wife. It simply couldn't be. She was calling to him to wait for her. She wouldn't be left alone.
He helped her along blindly. He had never known such murderous anger. He wanted her to hurry. He lusted for that gun. He felt her trembling against him. By God, his wife wouldn't have to tremble much longer!
It seemed to him long before they came to their house—very long. "Don't you let him hurt you!" she moaned as they came up to it. He strode into the kitchen. There the baby slept in his cradle, and flies walked leisurely over the piecrust scattered over the floor. He seized his gun. He went to the east door, and looked out. He went to the west door. He stood looking. Before his eyes hens scratched for their broods in peace. He searched the house. He turned to go to the barn. She cried after him, "Oh, don't let him hurt you!" He went without caution, madly. But in the barn there was no enemy. No sign of a man behind the barn, where the grass billows chased one another. No one hiding about the haystack. He strode about seeking. There was no enemy in any place. But beyond the little tree bed, and the garden, beyond the wheat fields—what might be there, to the east to the west, to the north and the south, in those wild man-high grasses! There a thousand men might hide and laugh at pursuers. Looking at those baffling stretches, Wully choked. He was helpless.
He went back to his wife. She was trying vainly to compose herself. "I never thought he would come! I never imagined it! You said he wouldn't, Wully!" Didn't she see how that reproach must madden him! "I was just standing there, making the pie. He came to that door. I thought it was you. And when I looked up, he was looking at me, Wully!" She wailed out that last. "He was looking at me. I didn't know what to do. He just grabbed me!" She buried her face in her arms, and sobbed.
God! If only he could get hold of that snake who hid in the grasses! He turned abruptly again to the search.
"Stay with me!" she cried. "Where you going?"
"There's no one here," he answered, beside himself, wanting to comfort her. "Come and see for yourself!" Trembling and crying she came out with him to the barn. That morning there was no great cement-floored barn to search through, in whose loft a hundred men might lie, nor long feeding sheds for steers, nor any tower-like silos. There were no scattered groups of lighted hog-houses, nor garages nor heated drinking tanks. There were no machine sheds, nor ventilated corn-cribs, nor power plants nor icehouses, as now there are. Only that one little unconcealing barn, those small slight plantings, that innocent wheat, that shaved patch of the prairie which was the hayfield.
"He's run out there!" Chirstie moaned, pointing to the distances. Somewhere out there he had lain in wait, perhaps, seeing Wully depart, maybe watching their just caresses. Somewhere out there he must be pausing now, watching them hunt for him. Wully was shaking with incredulous fury. It simply wasn't possible that Peter Keith should so have underestimated him! But no wonder, after he had been such a fool as to let him go unpunished once! Oh, all Wully needed was one more chance at him. . . .
They ate no dinner. Chirstie lay down wearily. Wully with his gun in hand, stood watching, promising her he wouldn't go far, or leave her alone more than a minute. She moaned as he came to her during the afternoon, to give her the baby;
"Oh, what'll we ever do now, Wully!"
"Leave that to me!" he said, in such a voice that she could say no more just then.
"You won't hurt him, Wully!" she begged again, thinking only of her husband's safety.
"Will I not!" he answered grimly. She wept.
"There's Aunt Libby!" she moaned.
"Is there!" he cried. There was no auntie in his intentions. He was thinking only of his wife—who trembled and wept, temporarily.
"Wully, you'll get into trouble! If he won't bother us, let him come back!"
"He does bother me!" She dared not answer that tone. Wully choked, and turned away, to look out over the prairies again. A rattlesnake, that man was, hiding in the grass, a damned poison snake, and like a snake he should be treated. If it had been a windless day, one might have traced him through the grasses. But now one second of the wind swept away any trace of him. A good dog might have trailed him. But there was no dog at hand. In many places before Wully's very eyes, a man—a snake—might walk upright and unperceived. Inside, Chirstie lay moaning in fever. Outside, Wully patrolled his premises, frustrated, raging.
In his excitement details came rushing back to his mind to which he had long and obstinately refused entrance. He remembered all the bits of confession that Chirstie had made to him the first night that, knowing her trouble, he had gone to claim her. Peter had loved her, he had wanted her for his, she had told him. But she wouldn't listen to him, because she thought of Wully. She thought of herself as his. That was when she was living at her aunt's, after her mother had died. Then once Aunt Libby had gone to stay with her sister who was having a baby. Wully could curse that woman's name for having so blindly, so fondly, trusted her knavish son. Why couldn't she have at least left Dod with his sister! But Chirstie hadn't been afraid. Wasn't Peter her cousin? She hadn't been at all afraid. And that night, when there was no help within a mile, she had run out of the house, undressed, bare-footed, across the snow—till Peter caught her, and brought her back. Wully hadn't often thought of that, because he couldn't think of it and live. But it had no mercy on him now. That story cried aloud to him, shrieking through his mind. He would kill that man, and go to the sheriff and give himself up. He would stand up and tell any twelve men in the county that story, and come home acquitted. If only he could find the man! He went beating through the grasses nearer him, maddened by the feeling that it was in vain. To the west the treacherous grasses jeered at him wavingly, and to the east. North and south they mocked him.
The afternoon passed. Neither of them could eat at supper time. Chirstie wouldn't stay alone in the house while he went to milk. She insisted on crawling out to the barn, to be near him. She could scarcely sit up, so worn and weak she was. The baby howled bitterly, being neglected. Wully put him to sleep, laying him on the bed beside his mother. He shut the door to the east. It had no lock. It had never needed one. He put a chair against it, and sat down on the step of the other door, fingering his gun as the stars came out, watching, thinking sorely.
There was no jury that would not set him free when he told the story. What sort of men would those be who would say he had not done right to kill a poison snake? He would just tell them—ah, but to tell that story, now, when it was being so well forgotten! To bring it all back to sneering ears, as it had been brought back to him so painfully fresh to-day! If only he could find the man, and kill him quietly, and bury him somewhere in the tall grasses, without anyone knowing! If only he might find him crouching there somewhere! So desirable did that consummation seem that he turned abruptly and went to the barn, to see if his spade, which his father had borrowed, had been returned to its place. Yes, there it was. He could laugh as he dug that grave in the farthest, most remote slough! By God, only two years ago the government of the United States had been paying him for digging graves, graves for honest men, who made no women tremble. Oh, if he might find that man, and get it over quietly! That wish became a drunken cursing prayer in his mind. If only in the morning he might only say to her, "You needn't be afraid he will ever come back again!"
Terrible things rushed through his mind. Once when the baby had been a few days old, he had asked her a question curiously, casually. She had seemed so surprised in those days that she hadn't had twins. He had asked her why she had supposed she would, and when she had not answered, he had asked her again. She said simply that after all that had happened that night, she thought she couldn't have less. He had really so successfully pretended to make light of her situation that she didn't know how that must rankle in his mind. He had turned and gone abruptly out into the darkness, when she had answered him so, and she never realized what she had done. He had wondered then why he had ever let that man go. He had wondered often at the time of the child's birth. Well, once he got a chance now, he would be done with that regret forever.. . .
He remained on guard, not realizing how the hours were passing, till he heard John riding hurriedly in home. He went to look at the clock then. It was midnight. The storm was almost upon them. The thunder was growling about its coming.
John sat down on the step, and Wully sat down near him, intending not to let John know what had happened. The speaker, John began, had been traveling through the South, and strange things he had seen. He said Johnson ought to be impeached. Wully had a vague idea what his brother was saying. He didn't want to excite his suspicion in the least. He rallied, and asked if Stowe had been there. John had seen Stowe, and Stowe had asked why Wully wasn't there. Lots of friends had asked about Wully. John talked on. The thunder grew louder. Rain began falling, in big drops. They both rose to go in. Rising, John said;
"Yes! And as I was coming home, guess whom I met, Wully! Our esteemed kinsman, Peter Keith! I stopped in at O'Brien's, and there he was, drinking away as usual. Wasn't that interesting, now, for us? And Aunt Libby was going about all day as usual, asking if anyone had seen her poor, sick blessed laddie. I brought him as far home as the McTaggerts' corner. Maybe auntie will lapse into sanity now, comparative sanity, at least!"
Wully had risen with John, to follow him into the house, but at the sound of that name he had paused outside the door, to hide his face from his brother. John's story made him heartsick. There seemed no chance now of getting it over secretly. Peter had gone home! It didn't seem possible. He intended to defy Wully! He intended to hide behind his mother. Well, he would speedily find that no woman's skirts could save him now from his deserts. He feigned a natural interest, and tarried outside till he heard John going up the stairs. Then he came in from the rain, and sat down. That room, that home of theirs, all spoiled, all defiled. Their table, their chairs, their clock, all the things that they had bought and enjoyed together, seemed alien and sinister. He gave a look around all the little room wonderingly, and then it all faded from his thought. He laid his arms on the table, and buried his face in them, as if he was weeping. But he was not weeping. Until almost morning he sat that way, scarcely moving, not heeding the sharp breaking of the thunder. He was planning ghastly things. Chirstie called to him sometimes, and he answered. She called to him at length wearily to come to bed.
To take his place beside her! Oh, God!
She was his wife, and he hadn't been able to defend her! But morning was coming. The new day's light would make things right.