“Oh, circumstantial nest-eggs!” said she, impatiently. “You’d known Joe all his life, and you know very well he didn’t shoot Isom Chase any more than you done it yourself!”
“Well, mistakes is humant,” sighed Sol, taking advantage of that universal absolution. “They say Judge Maxwell’s goin’ to leave everything he’s got to Joe, and he’s got a considerable, I reckon.”
“I don’t know as Joe’d take it,” said she, folding her hands in her lap. “Judge Maxwell had a hard time to git Joe to let him put in the money to do things around here, and send him to college over in Shelbyville last winter. Joe let him do it on the understandin’ that it was a loan, to be paid interest on and paid back when he was able.”
“Well, from the start he’s makin’ it don’t look like the judge ’d have very long to wait for his money,” said Sol. “Twenty acres of apple trees all in a orchard together, and twenty acres of strawberries set out betwixt and between the rows!”
He looked over the hillside and little apron of valley where Joe’s young orchard spread. Each tiny tree was a plume of leaves; the rows stretched out to the hilltop, and over.
“I can figger out how twenty acres of apples can be picked and took care of,” reflected Sol, as if going over with himself something which he had given thought to before, “but I’ll be durned if I can figger out how any man’s goin’ to pick and take care of twenty acres of strawberries!”
“Joe knows,” said his mother.
“Well, I hope he does,” sighed Sol, the sigh being breathed to give expression of what remained unspoken. No matter what his hopes, his doubts were unshaken.
No man had ever taken care of twenty acres of strawberries–nor the twentieth part of one acre, for that matter–in that community. No man could do it, according to the bone-deep belief of Sol and his kind.
“Joe says that’s only a little dab of a start,” said she.
“Cree-mo-nee!” said Sol, his mouth standing open like a mussel shell in the sun. “When’ll they be ripe?”
“Next spring.”
“Which?” queried Sol, perking his head in puzzled and impertinent way, very much as the rooster had done a little while before him.
“Next spring, I said,” she repeated, nodding over her bonnet, into which she was slipping the splints.
“No crop this year?”
“No; Joe says it weakens the plants to bear the first year they’re set. It takes the strength away from the roots, he says. He goes through the field and snips off every bloom he sees when he’s hoein’ among ’em, and I help him between times. We don’t git all of ’em, by a mighty sight, though.”
Sol shook his head with wise depreciation.
“Throwin’ away money,” said he.
“Did you ever raise any strawberries?” she inquired, putting down the bonnet, bringing Sol up with a sharp look.
“Reckon I raised as many as Joe ever did, and them mainly with a spoon,” said Sol.
The joke was not entirely new; it could not have been original with Sol by at least three hundred years. But it did very well as an excuse for Sol to laugh. He was always looking for excuses to laugh, that was the one virtue in him. Without his big laugh he would have been an empty sack without a bottom.
“Joe got them rows mighty purty and straight,” said Sol, squinting along the apple trees.
“Yes, he set ’em out accordin’ to geog’aphy,” said she.
“Which?” said Sol.
“Ge-og’a-phy, I said. Didn’t you never hear tell of that before neither, Sol Greening?”
“Oh,” said Sol, lightly, as if that made it all as plain to him as his own cracked thumbs. “How much does Joe reckon he’ll git off of that patch of berries when it begins to bear?”
“I never heard him say he expected to make anything,” said she, “but I read in one of them fruit-growin’ papers he takes that they make as much as three hundred dollars an acre from ’em back in Ellinoi.”
Sol got up, slowly; took a backward step into the yard; filled his lungs, opened his mouth, made his eyes round. Under the internal pressure his whiskers stood on end and his face grew red. “Oh, you git out!” said he.
“I can show it to you in the paper,” she offered, making as if to put aside her sewing.
Sol laid a finger on his palm and stood with his head bent. After a bit he looked up, his eyes still round.
“If he even makes a hundred, that’ll be two thousand dollars a year!”
It was such a magnificent sum that Sol did not feel like taking the familiarity with it of mentioning it aloud. He whispered it, giving it large, rich sound.
“Why, I reckon it would be,” said she, offhand and careless, just as if two thousand a year, more or less, mattered very little to Joe.
“That’s more than I ever made in my whole dad-blame life,” said Sol.
“Well, whose fault is it, Sol?” asked she.
“I don’t believe it can be done!”
“You’ll see,” she assured him, comfortably.
“And Joe he went and stuck to the old place,” reflected Sol. “He might ’a’ got some better land for his sperimentin’ and projeckin’ if he’d ’a’ looked around.”
“He was offered land, all the land a man could want,” said she. “Ollie wanted him to take over the Chase home place and farm it when she and Morgan married and left, but Joe he said no; the Newbolts had made their failures here, he said, and here they was goin’ to make their success. He had to redeem the past, Joe said, and wipe out the mistakes, and show folks what a Newbolt can do when he gits his foot set right.”
“He’ll do it, too,” said Sol, without a reserved grudge or jealousy; “he’s doin’ it already.”
“Yes, I always knew Joe would,” said she. “When he was nothing but a little shaver he’d read the Cottage Encyclopedy and the Imitation and the Bible, from back to back. I said then he’d be governor of this state, and he will.”
She spoke confidently, nodding over her work.
“Shucks! How do you know he will?”
Sol’s faith was not strong in this high-flying forecast. It seemed to him that it was crowding things a little too far.
“You’ll live to see it,” said she.
Sol sat with his back against a pillar of the porch, one foot on the ground, the other standing on the boards in front of him, his hands locked about his doubled knee. He sat there and looked up at the Widow Newbolt, raising his eyebrows and rolling his eyes, but not lifting his head, which was slightly bent. “Well, what’s to be’s to be,” said he. “When’s he goin’ to marry?”
“When he’s through goin’ to college.”
“That’ll be two or three years, maybe?”
“Maybe.”
“Hum; Alice Price she’ll be gettin’ purty well along by that time.”
“She’s not quite a year older than Joe,” Mrs. Newbolt corrected him, with some asperity, “and she’s one of the kind that’ll keep. Well, I was married myself, and had a baby, when I was nineteen. But that’s no sign.”
“Joe’ll build, I reckon, before then?” guessed Sol.
“No; Alice don’t want him to. She wants to come here a bride, to this house, like I come to it long, long ago. We’ll fix up and make ready for her, little by little, as we go along. It’ll be bringin’ back the pleasure of the old days, it’ll be like livin’ my courtship and marriage over. This was a fine house in the days that Peter brought me here, for Peter, he had money then, and he put the best there was goin’ into it.”
“It looks better than any house around here now, since you fixed it up and painted it,” said Sol.
“It’s better inside than outside,” said she, with a woman’s pride in a home, which justifies her warmth for it. “We had it all plastered and varnished. The doors and casin’s and all the trimmin’s are walnut, worth their weight in gold, now, almost, Judge Maxwell says.”
“Yes, the curly walnut’s all gone, years and years ago,” said Sol.
“It passed away with the pioneers,” sighed she.
“I suppose they’ll build in time, though?” Sol said.
“I ’low they will, maybe, after I’m gone,” said she.
“Well, well!” said Sol. He sat silent a little while. “Folks never have got over wonderin’ on the way she took up with Joe,” he said.
Mrs. Newbolt flashed up in a breath.
“Why should anybody wonder, I’d like for you to tell me?” she demanded. “Joe he’s good enough for her, and too good for anybody else in this county! Who else was there for Joe, who else was there for Alice?”
Sol did not attempt to answer. It was beyond him, the way some people figgered, he thought in the back of his mind. There was his own girl, Tilda Bell. He considered her the equal to any Newbolt that ever straddled a horse and rode over from Kentucky. But then, you never could tell how tastes run.
“Well, reckon I’ll have to be rackin’ out home,” said he, getting up, tiptoeing to take the cramp out of his legs.
“Yes, and I’ll have to be stirrin’ the pots to get supper for my boy Joe,” she said.
The smoke from her kitchen fire rose white as she put in dry sumac to give it a start. It mounted straight as a plume for a little way, until it met the cool air of evening which was beginning to fall. There it spread, like a floating silken scarf, and settled over the roof. It draped down slowly over the walls, until it enveloped the old home like the benediction of a loving heart.
The sun was descending the ladder of the hills; low now it stood above them, the valley in shadow more than half its breadth, a tender flood of gold upon the slope where the new orchard waved its eager shoots; the blessing of a day was passing in the promise of a day to come.
Out of the kitchen came the cheerful sound of batter for the corn bread being beaten in the bowl, and with it Sarah Newbolt’s voice in song:
Near the cross, O Lamb of God––
The beating of the batter dimmed the next line. Then it rose to the close––
Let me walk from day to day,
With its shadow o’er me.
The clamp of the oven door was heard, and silence followed.
Sarah was standing on the porch again wiping her hands on her apron, looking away toward the fields. The sun was dipping now into the forest cresting the hills; the white rooster was pacing the outside of the wire enclosure from which he had escaped, in frantic search of an opening to admit him to his perch, his proud head all rumpled in his baffled eagerness, his dangling wattles fiery red.
The smoke had found the low places in garden and lawn, where it hovered; a dove wailed from the old orchard, where a pair of them nested year after year; a little child-wind came with soft fingers, and laid them on the waiting woman’s hair.
Her face quickened with a smile. Joe was coming home from the field. Over his shoulder he carried his hoe, and as he came on toward her in yard-long strides his mother thought of the young soldiers she had seen march away to the war, carrying their guns in that same free confidence of careless strength. His hat was pushed back from his forehead, the collar of his blue flannel shirt was open. His boyish suspenders had been put away in favor of a belt, which was tight-drawn about his slim waist.
Very trim and strong, and confident he looked, with the glow of youth in his cheeks, and the spark of happiness in his gray eyes. He was well set in the form of a man now, the months since his imprisonment having brought him much to fasten upon and hold.
Joe made the same great splashing that he had made on that spring evening of a year gone by, when he came home from work to step into the shadow which so quickly grew into a storm. But there was no shadow ahead of him this night; there was no somber thing to bend down the high serenity of his happy heart.
He stood before the glass hung above the wash bench and smoothed his hair. Mrs. Newbolt was standing by the stove, one of the lids partly removed, some white thing in her hand which she seemed hesitating over consigning to the flames.
“What’ve you got there, Mother?” he asked cheerily as he turned to take his place at the waiting table.
“Laws,” said she, in some perturbation, her face flushed, holding the thing in her hand up to his better view, “it’s that old paper I got from Isom when I–a year ago! I mislaid it when the men was paintin’ and plasterin’, and I just now run across it stuck back of the coffee jar.”
For a moment Joe stood behind her, silently, looking over her shoulder at the signature of Isom Chase.
“It’s no use now,” said she, her humiliation over being confronted with this reminder of her past perfidy against her beloved boy almost overwhelming her. “We might as well put it in the stove and git it out of sight.”
Joe looked at her with a smile, his face still solemn and serious for all its youth and the fires of new-lit hope behind his eyes. He laid his hand upon her shoulder assuringly, and closed the stove.
“Give it to me, Mother,” said he, reaching out his hand.
She placed the bond of his transference to Isom Chase in it, and those old heart-wrung tears of hers, which had been dry upon her cheeks now for many a happy day, welled, and flowed down silently.
Joe folded the paper.
“I’ll keep it, Mother,” said he, “so that it will stand as a reminder to me in prosperity that I was once poor and in bondage; and in my happiness that it may tell me of the days when I was forsaken and in prison, with only my mother’s faithful hand to comfort me.
“I’ll put it away and keep it, Mother, lest in my prosperity some day I may forget the Lord; forget that He giveth, and that He taketh away, also; that His hand chastiseth in the same measure that it bestows blessings upon us. I’ll leave it up here, Mother, on the old shelf; right where I can see it every time I take down the Book.”
W. B. C.
* * *
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