Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  XV

  IN her borrowed trust Ann gave herself so entirely to the cares and labors which now fell to her that the days went by without her duly noticing the absence of any further word from Jessamy. When the time came for the raising, on a bright Saturday of September, she was so much more distracted that she accepted without the bitter regret which it would have brought to her in a freer mind the fact that Jessamy and Felix were really not coming. They sent out with their letter a basket of baker’s cakes, such as only the town could supply, with oranges up from New Orleans, and a bag of coffee to indemnify Ann for the coffee she must not stint for the raising. Jessamy wrote that Felix was not quite well enough to come, but she would write soon again; and in the excitement of applying their gifts to the feast, and the confusion of the time, Ann did not remember to grieve enough for him till the whole affair was over. She had made coffee by gallons; and there were crisp crusted chicken pies, wide and deep, which she baked in the brick out-oven in her milk-pans, and served smoking-hot with plates of cold ham and cold tongue, and platters of hot shortened biscuit, and bread and butter; it was the time for new apples, and dishes of apple-sauce alternated with the plates and platters.

  The table was contrived of boards stretched on the carpenters’ trestles, and the cold things were placed on it early in the day and covered with mosquito-netting against the flies, after due debate with Rosy and the little girls, indulged in minor details but overruled in the great essentials. Some of the farm wives had come to help, and Lizzie Bladen came with her father. He lent all the consequence to the affair that Powell had hoped, and here and there he helped a little. Lizzie helped a great deal, in spite of the flourishing politeness of Captain Bickler. He had come earlier than he had come to Bellam’s funeral, and his courtly zeal in seconding the girl at every movement made her part of the joke which he became with the other men waiting to be served. The jokers spared her as much as they could, but they were not skilful; Bickler made believe to like it, and encouraged it for himself in defending her from it. Ann saw his neglect of Rosy, to whom he scarcely spoke, and her heart burned, though she could not have wanted him to notice Rosy; she saw with helpless compassion the pain of the young girl he was making conspicuous.

  In all twenty six or seven farmers, counting their big boys, came to put up the frame which the carpenters had got ready. The smooth hewn sills, mortised for the studs, lay beside the stone foundation. When the sills had been placed and the studs and joists fitted into the mortises, the plates to bear the second story were raised with the heaviest lifting of the day, and a second row of joists and studs fitted into them. Then the timbers to support the roof were fitted on the studding, and the rafters raised in rows the whole length of the house on either side and pinned together at the comb of the roof.

  The work went on in the rivalry of separate gangs, with captains for each. At raisings where whiskey was furnished, the work was delayed by fights over disputed points between the chosen or self-chosen champions. Even now without whiskey it was slow work getting the frame of the house together, and the hill on the southwest of it was casting long afternoon shadows over the grassy space in front of the frame before the last pin was driven into the posts. On this grassy space Ann had put her tables, and now in the pleasant shadow she invited her steaming guests to sit down. The jollity of the day mounted to a climax; jokes that went round for the second or third season were hailed with the same hospitality as the sarcasms and railleries that remembered the events of the work or greeted the feats of the workers at the feast. The men were in their shirt-sleeves and bare heads; the women who passed behind them and filled their cups and heaped their plates were demurely clad in their second best and hid their smiles in the depth of their sunbonnets.

  The victuals were all praised, but Ann was praised most for her coffee and for holding out against whiskey. The men joked Powell for the weakening that some of them said he showed, when he asked them to the raising and acknowledged that there would be nothing stronger than coffee to drink. They roared at that, and then one of them called to him, “Owen, what did you say was the correspondence of a hoss?” and the rest waited for their pleasure in the gibe.

  “Oh, you’ve got hold of the wrong word, Mr. Blakeley,” Powell answered, with smooth formality. “What you want to know is the correspondence of a donkey.”

  The retort was on the local level; but it took time for it to reach home. Ann disliked it and dreaded the effect. Then the man rose jovially in the shout ‘ that went up, and stumbled over to Powell’s place, and put his arm round his shoulders and began to explain and apologize. The men all became better friends with Powell, and one after another they complimented him for his part in the raising, for his knowledge and his practical skill. Their praises brought him to his feet, and in a speech which made Ann ashamed and then proud as it went on he told how in his early backwoods days he had been captain at log-cabin raisings. He was beginning to own with modest pride, and Ann was beginning to fear for him again, that for notching a log to receive the next when it was in position, he had not his superior, if his equal, when he was stopped by one of his guests with a joyous shout.

  “Hello, hello, hello!” Every one turned with him toward the frame of the new house. The upright supporting the peak of the nearest gable had broken from the pin that held it and now swung dangling.

  Through the general laugh broke cries of “Why didn’t you drive in that pin, Owen?” and “I thought you was a better hand than that,” and “Oh, well, it ain’t a log cabin, anyway,” and “I reckon Owen was too excited to hit that last pin on the head.”

  Powell stood fixed and silent, smiling shamefacedly, till one of the men said: “Well, I’d like to go up and fix that pin, just to show Owen how he used to do it. But I couldn’t do it on no coffee. Hain’t you got a jug of corn juice around somewheres, Mrs. Powell?” Powell called out: “Nobody must think of touching it. Keep on at what you’re doing, friends, and I’ll see to that piece of studding in good time.”

  He was going to enlarge upon the incident and draw a moral from it for himself and others, but another noisy outbreak stopped him.

  “Well, here comes Jake, and I reckon he’s going to take a hand; he’s had some corn juice of his own.”

  “Why, he’s got it with him!”

  Powell saw Overdale reeling across the road from the side door of the mill and floundering toward the new house; he had a black jug in his hand; he shouted, “I’ll show you how to fix that; I’ve got the thing to do it with.”

  His voice was not drunk, though his gait was, but he corrected that, holding himself strongly erect as some of the men started toward him. “Better nobody touch me if he don’t want his head cracked,” and then he staggered on again, but securely enough.

  Powell came politely forward. “If Mr. Overdale wants to strike a blow on my new house, and mend my unworkman-like job, he’ll want a tool.”

  He held out the mallet he had used in failing to drive the pin home, and the miller took it, glancing back and forth from Powell to the mallet.

  Then he flung it from him with a roar: “Didn’t I say I got the thing to do it with? What the hell—”

  He got to the ladder which had been left standing against the house, and began to climb it. “Any one touch this ladder!” he threatened the half-dozen who rushed to stop him.

  “Owen!” Ann appealed, in her terror.

  “I’m going to, my dear,” Powell said, as if there had been a full explanation. He put his neighbors aside with authority, and took hold of the ladder. “ Get down, you tipsy fool! Do you think I’m going to have your blood on my house?” He shook the ladder and looked up at Overdale, lifting a hand to pull him down.

  Instead of stooping over to strike him with the jug, as every one expected, in terror or amusement, Overdale gave a crazy laugh, and clambered out of reach. He swung himself upward with one hand, holding to his jug with the other, and when he reached the roof-plate he twisted himself in and out through the ra
fters till he reached the gable where the stud was dangling loose. He gathered it in and fixed it in its place, and then drew back to hammer the pin home with the jug. “I’ll show you what whiskey can do.”

  The joking applause which would have hailed a safer feat failed on the open lips of the gazers below. Once, twice, three times the miller drove at the pin, shattering the jug and spilling the whiskey in the air. He drew back for a blow with what was left of the jagged neck and shoulders of the jug, but he missed his mark and lunged forward into the air. He turned and sprawled with a bat-like spread in his fall and struck in a heap at the base of the house on a loose mass of shingles lying there.

  XVI

  In the last hour which, close upon midnight, ended the day, Ann said to her husband, as she had said more than once before, “ I certainly thought he would kill you, Owen, when you shook the ladder under him.”

  “Oh, there wasn’t the least danger! But he may thank his stars that he didn’t kill himself, in his fall. If it hadn’t been for those shingles I had left there to season he wouldn’t have got off with a few broken ribs and a dislocated shoulder.” Powell was tempted to say “shoulder or two” for the joke, but Ann did not look as if she could bear even so good a joke, and he stopped short of it.

  “I suppose we’ll hear from Felix to-morrow. I’m glad, now, he and Jessamy didn’t come. It would have tried Felix. But still I’m anxious. I hope he isn’t worse.”

  “Oh, you may be sure of that,” Powell answered.

  “Dear, dear!” Ann said. “I don’t see how he can live on that hot feather-bed in that choking little room, swarming with mosquitoes.” She meant Overdale, now, in a natural reversion from Felix, and Powell understood.

  “Oh, he’s used to it, and it’s an improvement on the buffalo robe in the mill. I’m sorry for Dick sitting up with him in that atmosphere. But he probably doesn’t mind it.”

  “Yes, poor Richard! Everything comes on the child.”

  “Well, he’s got that other child to help him bear it. Why her father chooses to live here, with such a girl as that! He is really a gentleman in his breeding. He wasn’t much use at the hard work of raising, but his being there kept the others in check, and certainly lent all dignity to the occasion I could have wished. He quite conceived of that when I asked him.”

  “It was fortunate, after all, that Captain Bickler was there,” Ann said, reluctantly. “If it hadn’t been for him, I don’t know how we could have got the doctor so soon.”

  “If it hadn’t been for Bickler’s horse we couldn’t,” Powell consented, “by at least fifteen minutes. However, it enabled Bickler to make a display of public spirit, and it was a good stroke of electioneering. Though, as for the matter of that, I had got Overdale into very fair shape before the doctor came.”

  “Yes,” Ann assented, to his satisfaction. “Well, if it will only make them all like us a little better!”

  “I’m afraid it won’t make Overdale. But as for the others, they will like us better because they’ve done us a good turn, and because you gave them such a good supper.”

  Powell wound his watch for the night; but it was long before Ann slept, and she was up earlier than usual to have Dick’s breakfast for him as soon as he came home. He came at sunrise, and reported the miller restless through the night; he testified to the faithfulness of his own vigil by falling asleep in his chair. His mother had to wake him for his coffee.

  “Poor boy!” she said; and then she asked, “Why didn’t you bring Lizzie with you?”

  “I didn’t like to ask her, mother,” the boy explained. “Mrs. Overdale got her something. I’m going back, now, to let her off.”

  It appeared that Richard was to relieve yet another watcher, in the miller’s wife herself. It seemed as if he had scarcely gone out of the front door when she came through the corn-field to the back, with the sun at her shoulders, throwing her long shadow on the floor.

  Ann looked up from the table where she was pouring herself a cup of coffee.

  “He in?” the woman asked; and Ann understood that she was asking if Mr. Powell was at home.

  “Why, he’s still sleeping,” Ann said. “Won’t you come in and sit down — and have a cup of coffee?”

  The woman made no answer, but remained in the doorway. “‘Pears like as if he wanted to see him.”

  “Well, I will send him as soon as he’s had his breakfast. How did Mr. Overdale get through the night?” The miller’s wife remained irresponsive. “And you say he hain’t got nawthin’ ag’in’ him?”

  “Why, certainly not. What do you mean by asking that again, Mrs. Overdale? What could my husband have against yours?”

  “‘Pears like as if he thought he had.”

  “Very well, then; he had better tell Mr. Powell what it is when he comes.”

  “He won’t have to tell I been here?” the woman asked.

  “Not unless you want him to.”

  The miller’s wife made no more answer to this than to the other questions. After a moment of hesitation she went away as silently as she came.

  Ann let Owen sleep on like a child from his fatigue, and she kept the other children from waking him by sending them to play in the new house.

  By the time he had breakfasted and was looking for his hat to go over to the miller’s a friendly voice called to him from the front of the cabin. It was the doctor, who had his joke in saluting him as Dr. Powell, and said he had just come from the miller’s.

  “And how did you find him?” Powell asked.

  The doctor twisted himself between his saddle-bags and looked round. “It seems queer not to have either of your mills going.”

  “Yes, we’re left in pretty bad shape, and the silence sounds rather solemn. By the way, it does sound?”

  “So it does, so it does!”

  “But that wasn’t what you wanted to talk about?”

  “Well, not before company,” the doctor said, with a laugh. He lowered his voice. “There’s something I don’t understand about Overdale. He’s in no danger from his broken bones. But there’s something on his mind, and it seems to have been there a good while, and it seems to be about you—”

  “Would you mind my wife’s hearing?” Powell asked.

  “Why, if it won’t worry Mrs. Powell.”

  “The things that worry my wife are the things she doesn’t hear,” Powell said, and the two men had their laugh; and then he called into the cabin, “Ann!” She came to the door. “The doctor wants to talk to us about Overdale.”

  “Will he die?” Ann gasped.

  “No, I don’t think he will,” the doctor said, “unless Owen here” — Ann did not mind the doctor’s calling her husband by his first name—” wants to do his worst by him.”

  “What do you mean, doctor?” But Ann partly knew, though not clearly.

  “I can’t say, exactly. But there’s something on his mind, about the sale of the mills to your family. It isn’t anything reasonable; it’s something he’s ashamed of while he’s afraid of it. He seems to think Owen knows, but he won’t tell it himself. It’s some sort of hallucination. I can’t get it out of him; but unless somebody does — and I believe Owen can — at any rate, it seems to be connected with him and his brothers—”

  “I just knew it!” Ann broke in. That’s what that poor thing’s been groping after.” She told the doctor of the question the miller’s wife had only just now been with her to repeat from their first meeting. “She said he seemed to want to see Owen, and if you think—”

  “I think Owen had better see him, then.”

  Ann hesitated. “I don’t want him to take any risks with the crazy wretch.”

  “Oh, there isn’t the least danger,” Powell put in, eagerly. “Where is my hat? I’ll go at once.”

  “I’ve got half a mind to go with you,” she said. “If that wretch should have his shotgun—”

  The doctor laughed. “He hasn’t got his shotgun in bed with him, Mrs. Powell.”

  “Wel
l, then go at once, Owen. But don’t be a minute longer than you can help.”

  “I’ll be back directly, my dear,” and with the doctor’s riding off Powell was half-way to the miller’s house.

  It was sultry with the heat which in the Middle West comes with September when the summer ought to be gone. A swarm of flies buzzed up from the bed and out of the room where the miller lay when Owen entered from the kitchen, where Mrs. Overdale met him. He sat down where he could look the bruised and broken man in the face.

  “Now, what is it you’ve got on your mind, Overdale?” he demanded, severely. The fact, whatever it was, would interest him the more if it were something of mystical portent, but if it were merely resentment it would still interest him. “You have something on your mind concerning me, and for your own sake” — Powell was not indifferent for himself, but he repeated—” for your own sake, I want to know what it is.”

  The miller seemed clear enough to this appeal. “You reckon I’m a-goin’ to tell you?” he returned, sulkily.

  “Not necessarily. But I’m going to find out. When did you begin to harbor this grudge against my brothers and me? Was it because we bought the mills away from you?”

  “What if it was?”

  “Then that’s when it began. But we kept you on, and I have assured you that we wished to keep you, somehow, after we had put in the paper machinery. Then it wasn’t on business grounds that you hated us?”

  “Who ever said I hated you?” the miller demanded.

  “I didn’t know what other name to give your behavior. You must have had some strong objection, at any rate. Did you think we meant you some sort of harm?”

  “I don’t know what you meant, or what you done, or whether you done it. But there it was.”

  “What was?”

  “You think I’ll tell? It can kill me, but I’ll keep it to myself.”

  Powell glimpsed a darkling something which fascinated him. He took a longer turn about. “I know,” he said, almost tenderly, “that we often attach consequences to things which happen far beyond their reasonable effect. I remember when I was a boy that I would be throwing a stone at a tree or a post, and I would say to myself, ‘ Now if I hit it I shall live out the year, and if I don’t—’”