It did not cost Isom so many pangs to minister to the gross appetite of his bound boy as the spring weeks marched into summer, for gooseberries followed rhubarb, then came green peas and potatoes from the garden that Ollie had planted and tilled under her husband’s orders.
Along in early summer the wormy codlings which fell from the apple-trees had to be gathered up and fed to the hogs by Ollie, and it was such a season of blighted fruit that the beasts could not eat them all. So there was apple sauce, sweetened with molasses from the new barrel that Isom broached.
If it had not been so niggardly unnecessary, the faculty that Isom had for turning the waste ends of the farm into profit would have been admirable. But the suffering attendant upon this economy fell only upon the human creatures around him. Isom’s beasts wallowed in plenty and grew fat in the liberality of his hand. For himself, it looked as if he had the ability to extract his living from the bare surface of a rock.
All of this green truck was filling, as Isom had said, but far from satisfying to a lad in the process of building on such generous plans as Joe. Isom knew that too much skim-milk would make a pot-bellied calf, but he was too stubborn in his rule of life to admit the cause when he saw that Joe began to lag at his work, and grow surly and sour.
Isom came in for quick and startling enlightenment in the middle of a lurid July morning, while he and Joe were at work with one-horse cultivators, “laying by” the corn.
Isom stood beside the handles of his own cultivator, there being the space of ten rows between him and Joe, and took the lines from around his shoulders, with the deliberate, stern movement of a man who is preparing for a fight.
“What do you mean by this kind of capers?” he demanded.
“I mean that you can’t go on starving me like you’ve been doing, and that’s all there is to it!” said Joe. “The law don’t give you the right to do that.”
“Law! Well, I’ll law you,” said Isom, coming forward, his hard body crouched a little, his lean and guttered neck stretched as if he gathered himself for a run and jump at the fence. “I’ll feed you what comes to my hand to feed you, you onery whelp! You’re workin’ for me, you belong to me!”
“I’m working for mother–I told you that before,” said Joe. “I don’t owe you anything, Isom, and you’ve got to feed me better, or I’ll walk away and leave you, that’s what I’ll do!”
“Yes, I see you walkin’ away!” said Isom, plucking at his already turned-up sleeve. “I’m goin’ to give you a tannin’ right now, and one you’ll not forget to your dyin’ day!”
At that moment Isom doubtless intended to carry out his threat. Here was a piece of his own property, as much his property as his own wedded wife, defying him, facing him with extravagant demands, threatening to stop work unless more bountifully fed! Truly, it was a state of insurrection such as no upright citizen like Isom Chase could
“You’d better stop where you are,” advised Joe.
He reached down and righted his plow. Isom could see the straining of the leaders in his lean wrist as he stood gripping the handle, and the thought passed through him that Joe intended to wrench it off and use it as a weapon against him.
Isom had come but a few steps from his plow. He stopped, looking down at the furrow as if struggling to hold himself within bounds. Still looking at the earth, he went back to his implement.
“I’ll put you where the dogs won’t bite you if you ever threaten my life ag’in!” said he.
“I didn’t threaten your life, Isom, I didn’t say a word,” said Joe.
“A motion’s a threat,” said Isom.
“But I’ll tell you now,” said Joe, quietly, lowering his voice and leaning forward a little, “you’d better think a long time before you ever start to lay hands on me again, Isom. This is twice. The next time––”
Joe set his plow in the furrow with a push that sent the swingle-tree knocking against the horse’s heels. The animal started out of the doze into which it had fallen while the quarrel went on. Joe grinned, thinking how even Isom’s dumb creatures took every advantage of him that opportunity offered. But he left his warning unfinished as for words.
There was no need to say more, for Isom was cowed. He was quaking down to the tap-root of his salt-hardened soul, but he tried to put a different face on it as he took up his plow.
“I don’t want to cripple you, and lay you up,” he said. “If I was to begin on you once I don’t know where I’d leave
“I’ll go back to work when you give me your word that I’m to have meat and eggs, butter and milk, and plenty of it,” said Joe.
“I orto tie you up to a tree and lash you!” said Isom, jerking angrily at his horse. “I don’t know what ever made me pity your mother and keep her out of the poorhouse by takin’ in a loafer like you!”
“Well, if you’re sick of the bargain go and tell mother. Maybe she is, too,” Joe suggested.
“No, you’ll not git out of it now, you’ll stick right here and put in your time, after all the trouble and expense I’ve been put to teachin’ you what little you know about farmin’,” Isom declared.
He took up his plow and jerked his horse around into the row. Joe stood watching him, with folded arms, plainly with no intention of following. Isom looked back over his shoulder.
“Git to work!” he yelled.
“You didn’t promise me what I asked,” said Joe, quietly.
“No, and that ain’t all!” returned Isom.
The tall corn swallowed Isom and his horse as the sea swallowed Pharaoh and his host. When he returned to the end of the field where the rebellion had broken out, he found Joe sitting on the beam of his plow and the well-pleased horse asleep in the sun.
Isom said nothing, but plunged away into the tall corn. When he came back next time Joe was unhitching his horse.
“Now, look a-here, Joe,” Isom began, in quite a changed tone, “don’t you fly up and leave an old man in the lurch that way.”
“You know what I said,” Joe told him.
“I’ll give in to you, Joe; I’ll give you everything you ask
Isom’s word was satisfactory to Joe, and he returned to work.
That turned out a day to be remembered in the household of Isom Chase. If he had come into the kitchen at noon with all the hoarded savings of his years and thrown them down before her eyes, Ollie could not have been more surprised and mystified than she was when he appeared from the smokehouse carrying a large ham.
After his crafty way in a tight pinch Isom turned necessity into profit by making out that the act was free and voluntary, with the pleasure and comfort of his pretty little wife underlying and prompting it all. He grinned as if he would break his beard when he put the ham down on the table and cut it in two at the middle joint as deftly as a butcher.
“I’ve been savin’ that ham up for you, Ollie. I think it’s just about right now,” said he.
“That was nice of you, Isom,” said she, moved out of her settled taciturnity by his little show of thought for her, “I’ve been just dying for a piece of ham!”
“Well, fry us a big skilletful of it, and some eggs along with it, and fetch up a crock of sweet milk, and stir it up cream and all,” directed Isom.
Poor Ollie, overwhelmed by the suddenness and freedom of this generosity, stood staring at him, her eyes round, her lips open. Isom could not have studied a more astounding surprise. If he had hung diamonds on her neck, rubies on her wrists, and garnets in her hair, she could quicker have found her tongue.
“It’s all right, Ollie, it’s all right,” said Isom pettishly. “We’re going to have these things from now on. Might as
Isom went out with that, and Ollie attacked the ham with the butcher knife in a most savage and barbarous fashion.
Isom’s old wife must have shifted in her grave at sight of the prodigal repast which Ollie soon spread on the kitchen table. Granting, of course, that people in their graves are cognizant of such things, which, according to this old standard of comparison in human amazement, they must be.
But whether the old wife turned over or lay quiescent in the place where they put her when they folded her tired old hands upon her shrunken breast, it is indisputable that the new one eased the pangs of many a hungry day in that bountiful meal. And Joe’s face glowed from the fires of it, and his eyes sparkled in the satisfaction of his long-abused stomach.
Next day a more startling thing happened. Twice each week there passed through the country, from farm to farm, a butcher’s wagon from Shelbyville, the county-seat, a few miles away. Isom Chase never had been a customer of the fresh meat purveyor, and the traveling merchant, knowing from the old man’s notoriety that he never could expect him to become one, did not waste time in stopping at his house. His surprise was almost apoplectic when Isom stopped him and bought a soup-bone, and it almost became fatal when the order was made a standing one. It was such a remarkable event that the meat man told about it at every stop. It went round the country like the news of a wedding or a death.
Isom seemed to be satisfied with the new dietary regulations, for hams were cheap that summer, anyhow, and the season was late. Besides that, the more that Joe ate the harder he worked. It seemed a kind of spontaneous effort on the lad’s part, as if it was necessary to burn up the energy in surplus of the demand of his growing bone and muscle.
Ollie had picked up and brightened under the influence of ham and milk also, although it was all a foolish yielding to appetite, as Isom very well knew. He had beaten that weakness in himself to death with the club of abstinence; for himself he could live happily on what he had been accustomed to eating for thirty years and more. But as long as the investment of ham and milk paid interest in kitchen as well as field, Isom was grudgingly willing to see them consumed.
Ollie’s brightening was only physical. In her heart she was as gloomily hopeless as before. After his first flash of fire she had not found much comfort or hope of comradeship in the boy, Joe Newbolt. He was so respectful in her presence, and so bashful, it seemed, that it almost made her uncomfortable to have him around.
Man that he was in stature, he appeared no more than a timid boy in understanding, and her little advances of friendliness, her little appeals for sympathy, all glanced from the unconscious armor of his youthful innocence and reserve. She was forced to put him down after many weeks as merely stupid, and she sighed when she saw the hope of comradeship in her hard lot fade out and give way to a feeling bordering upon contempt.
On Sunday evenings, after he came back from visiting his mother, Ollie frequently saw Joe reading the little brown Bible which he had carried with him when he came. She had taken it up one day while making Joe’s bed. It brought back to her the recollection of her Sunday-school days, when she was all giggles and frills; but there was no association of religious training to respond to its appeal. She wondered what Joe saw in it as she put it back on the box beside his bed.
It chanced that she met Joe the next morning after she had made that short incursion between the brown covers of his book, as she was returning from the well and he was setting
The buckets were heavy in Joe’s hands; he stood them down, meeting her friendly advances with one of his rare smiles, which came as seldom to his face, thought she, as a hummingbird to the honeysuckle on the kitchen porch.
“Whew, this is going to be a scorcher!” said she.
“I believe it is,” he agreed.
From the opposite sides of the path their eyes met. Both smiled again, and felt better for it.
“My, but you’re a mighty religious boy, aren’t you?” she asked suddenly.
“Religious?” said he, looking at her in serious surprise.
She nodded girlishly. The sun, long slanting through the cherry-trees, fell on her hair, loosely gathered up after her sleep, one free strand on her cheek.
“No, I’m not religious.”
“Well, you read the Bible all the time.”
“Oh, well!” said he, stooping as if to lift his pails.
“Why?” she wanted to know.
Joe straightened his long back without his pails. Beyond the orchard the hogs were clamoring shrilly for their morning draught; from the barn there came the sound of Isom’s voice, speaking harshly to the beasts.
“Well, because I like it, for one thing,” said he, “and because it’s the only book I’ve got here, for another.”
“My, I think it’s awful slow!” said she.
“Do you?” he inquired, as if interested in her likes and dislikes at last.
“I’d think you’d like other books better–detective stories and that kind,” she ventured. “Didn’t you ever read any other book?”
“Some few,” he replied, a reflection as of amusement in his eyes, which she thought made them look old and understanding and wise. “But I’ve always read the Bible. It’s one of the books that never seems to get old to you.”
“Did you ever read True as Steel?”
“No, I never did.”
“Or Tempest and Sunshine?”
He shook his head.
“Oh-h,” said she, fairly lifting herself by the long breath which she drew, like the inhalation of a pleasant recollection, “you don’t know what you’ve missed! They are lovely!”
“Well, maybe I’d like them, too.”
He stooped again, and this time came up with his pails.
“I’m glad you’re not religious, anyhow,” she sighed, as if heaving a trouble off her heart.
“Are you?” he asked, turning to her wonderingly.
“Yes; religious people are so glum,” she explained. “I never saw one of them laugh.”
“There are some that way,” said Joe. “They seem to be afraid they’ll go to hell if they let the Almighty hear them laugh. Mother used to be that way when she first got her religion, but she’s outgrowing it now.”
“The preachers used to scare me to death,” she declared. “If I could hear some comfortable religion I might take up with it, but it seems to me that everybody’s so sad after they get it. I don’t know why.”
Joe put down the pails again. Early as the day was, it was hot, and he was sweating. He pushed his hat back from his forehead. It was like lifting a shadow from his serious young face. She smiled.
“A person generally gets the kind of religion that he hears preached,” said he, “and most of it you hear is kind of heavy, like bread without rising. I’ve never seen a laughing preacher yet.”
“There must be some, though,” she reflected.
“I hope so,” said Joe.
“I’m glad you’re not full of that kind of religion,” said she. “For a long time I thought you were.”
“You did? Why?”
“Oh, because–” said she.
Her cheek was toward him; he saw that it was red, like the first tint of a cherry. She snatched up her bucket then and sped along the path.
Joe walked on a little way, stopped, turned, and looked after her. He saw the flick of her skirt as her nimble heels flew up the three steps of the kitchen porch, and he wondered why she was glad that he was not religious, and why she had gone away like that, so fast. The pigs were clamoring, shriller, louder. It was no hour for a youth who had not yet wetted his feet in manhood’s stream to stand looking after a pair of heels and try to figure out a thing like that.
As Joe had said, he was not religious, according to catechisms and creeds. He could not have qualified in the least exacting of the many faiths. All the religion that he had was of his own making, for his mother’s was altogether too ferocious in its punishments and too dun and foggy in its rewards for him.
He read the Bible, and he believed most of it. There was as much religion, said he, in the Commandments as a man needed; a man could get on with that much very well. Beyond that he did not trouble.
He read the adventures of David and the lamentations of Jeremiah, and the lofty exhortations of Isaiah for the sonority of the phrasing, the poetry and beauty. For he had not been sated by many tales nor blunted by many books. If he could manage to live according to the Commandments, he sometimes told his mother, he would not feel uneasy over a better way to die.
But he was not giving this matter much thought as he emptied the swill-pails to the chortling hogs. He was thinking about the red in Ollie’s cheeks, like the breast of a bright bird seen through the leaves, and of her quick flight up the path. It was a new Ollie that he had discovered that morning, one unknown and unspoken to before that day. But why had her face grown red that way, he wondered? Why had she run away?
And Ollie, over her smoking pan on the kitchen stove, was thinking that something might be established in the way of comradeship between herself and the bound boy, after all. It took him a long time to get acquainted, she thought; but his friendship might be all the more stable for that. There was comfort in it; as she worked she smiled.
There was no question of the need in which Ollie stood of friendship, sympathy, and kind words. Joe had been in that house six months, and in that time he had witnessed more pain than he believed one small woman’s heart could bear. While he was not sure that Isom ever struck his wife, he knew that he tortured her in endless combinations of cruelty, and pierced her heart with a thousand studied pangs. Often, when the house was still and Isom was asleep, he heard her moaning and sobbing, her head on the kitchen table.
These bursts of anguish were not the sudden gusts of a pettish woman’s passion, but the settled sorrow of one who suffered without hope. Many a time Joe tiptoed to the bottom of the staircase in his bare feet and looked at her, the moonlight dim in the cheerless kitchen, her head a dark blotch upon the whiteness of her arms, bowed there in her grief. Often he longed to go to her with words of comfort and let her know that there was one at least who pitied her hard fate and sad disillusionment.
In those times of tribulation Joe felt that they could be of mutual help and comfort if they could bring themselves to
It was a harder matter to keep his hands from the gristly throat of grim old Isom Chase, slumbering unfeelingly in his bed while his young wife shredded her heart between the burr-stones of his cruel mill. Joe had many an hour of struggle with himself, lying awake, his hot temples streaming sweat, his eyes staring at the ribs of the roof.
During those months Joe had set and hardened. The muscles had thickened over his chest and arms; his neck was losing the long scragginess of youth; his fingers were firm-jointed in his broadening hands. He knew that Isom Chase was no match for him, man to man.
But, for all his big body and great strength, he was only a boy in his sense of justice, in his hot, primitive desire to lunge out quickly and set the maladjustments of that household straight. He did not know that there was a thing as old as the desires of men at the bottom of Ollie’s sorrow, nor understand the futility of chastisement in the case of Isom Chase.
Isom was as far as ever from his hope of a son or heir of any description–although he could not conceive the possibility of fathering a female child–and his bitter reproaches fell on Ollie, as they had fallen upon and blasted the woman who had trudged that somber course before her into the grateful shelter of the grave. It was a thing which Ollie could not discuss with young Joe, a thing which only a sympathetic mother might have lightened the humiliation of or eased with tender counsel.
Isom, seeing that the book of his family must close with him, expelled the small grain of tenderness that his dry heart
Day after day, as he worked by the side of Isom in the fields, Joe had it foremost in his mind to speak to him of his unjust treatment of his wife. Yet he hung back out of the Oriental conception which he held, due to his Scriptural reading, of that relationship between woman and man. A man’s wife was his property in a certain, broad sense. It would seem unwarranted by any measure of excess short of murder for another to interfere between them. Joe held his peace, therefore, but with internal ferment and unrest.
It was in those days of Joe’s disquietude that Ollie first spoke to him of Isom’s oppressions. The opportunity fell a short time after their early morning meeting in the path. Isom had gone to town with a load of produce, and Joe and Ollie had the dinner alone for the first time since he had been under that roof.
Ollie’s eyes were red and swollen from recent weeping, her face was mottled from her tears. Much trouble had made her careless of late of her prettiness, and now she was disheveled, her apron awry around her waist, her hair mussed, her whole aspect one of slovenly disregard. Her depression was so great that Joe was moved to comfort her.
“You’ve got a hard time of it,” said he. “If there’s anything I can do to help you I wish you’d let me know.”
Ollie slung a dish carelessly upon the table, and followed
“Oh, I feel just like I don’t care any more!” said she, her lips trembling, tears starting again in her irritated eyes. “I get treatment here that no decent man would give a dog!”
Joe felt small and young in Ollie’s presence, due to the fact that she was older by a year at least than himself.
That feeling of littleness had been one of his peculiarities as long as he could remember when there were others about older than himself, and supposed from that reason to be graver and wiser. It probably had its beginning in Joe’s starting out rather spindling and undersized, and not growing much until he was ten or thereabout, when he took a sudden shoot ahead, like a water-sprout on an apple-tree.
And then he always had regarded matrimony as a state of gravity and maturity, into which the young and unsophisticated did not venture. This feeling seemed to place between them in Joe’s mind a boundless gulf, across which he could offer her only the sympathy and assistance of a boy. There was nothing in his mind of sympathy from an equality of years and understanding, only the chivalric urging of succor to the oppressed.
“It’s a low-down way for a man to treat a woman, especially his wife,” said Joe, his indignation mounting at sight of her tears.
“Yes, and he’d whip you, too, if he dared to do it,” said she, sitting in Isom’s place at the end of the table, where she could look across into Joe’s face. “I can see that in him when he watches you eat.”
“I hope he’ll never try it,” said Joe.
“You’re not afraid of him?”
“Maybe not,” admitted Joe.
“Then why do you say you hope he’ll never try it?” she pressed.
“Oh, because I do,” said Joe, bending over his plate.
“I’d think you’d be glad if he did try it, so you could pay him off for his meanness,” she said.
Joe looked across at her seriously.
“Did he slap you this morning?” he asked.
Ollie turned her head, making no reply.
“I thought I heard you two scuffling around in the kitchen as I came to the porch with the milk,” said he.
“Don’t tell it around!” she appealed, her eyes big and terrified at the recollection of what had passed. “No, he didn’t hit me, Joe; but he choked me. He grabbed me by the throat and shook me–his old hand’s as hard as iron!”
Joe had noticed that she wore a handkerchief pinned around her neck. As she spoke she put her hand to her throat, and her tears gushed again.
“That’s no way for a man to treat his wife,” said Joe indignantly.
“If you knew everything–if you knew everything!” said she.
Joe, being young, and feeling younger, could not see how she was straining to come to a common footing of understanding with him, to reach a plane where his sympathy would be a balm. He could not realize that her orbit of thought was similar to his own, that she was nearer a mate for him, indeed, than for hairy-limbed, big-jointed Isom Chase, with his grizzled hair and beard.
“It was all over a little piece of ribbon I bought yesterday when I took the eggs up to the store,” she explained. “I got two cents a dozen more than I expected for them, and I put the extra money into a ribbon–only half a yard. Here it is,” said she, taking it from the cupboard; “I wanted it to wear on my neck.”
She held it against her swathed throat with a little unconscious play of coquetry, a sad smile on her lips.
“It’s nice, and becoming to you, too,” said Joe, speaking after the manner of the countryside etiquette on such things.
“Isom said I ought to have put the money into a package of soda, and when I wouldn’t fuss with him about it, that made him madder and madder. And then he–he–did that!”
“You wouldn’t think Isom would mind ten cents,” said Joe.
“He’d mind one cent,” said she in bitter disdain. “One cent–huh! he’d mind one egg! Some people might not believe it, but I tell you, Joe, that man counts the eggs every day, and he weighs every pound of butter I churn. If I wanted to, even, I couldn’t hide away a pound of butter or a dozen of eggs any more than I could hide away that stove.”
“But I don’t suppose Isom means to be hard on you or anybody,” said Joe. “It’s his way to be close and stingy, and he may do better by you one of these days.”
“No, he’ll never do any better,” she sighed. “If anything, he’ll do worse–if he can do any worse. I look for him to strike me next!”
“He’d better not try that when I’m around!” said Joe hotly.
“What would you do to him, Joe?” she asked, her voice lowered almost to a whisper. She leaned eagerly toward him as she spoke, a flush on her face.
“Well, I’d stop him, I guess,” said Joe deliberately, as if he had considered his words. As he spoke he reached down for his hat, which he always placed on the floor beside his chair when he took his meals.
“If there was a soul in this world that cared for me–if I had anywhere to go, I’d leave him this hour!” declared Ollie, her face burning with the hate of her oppressor.
Joe got up from his chair and left the table; she rose with him and came around the side. He stopped on his way to
“But there’s nobody in the world that cares for me,” she complained sorrowfully.
Joe was lifting his hat to his head. Midway he stayed his hand, his face blank with surprise.
“Why, you’ve got your mother, haven’t you?” he asked.
“Mother!” she repeated scornfully. “She’d drive me back to him; she was crazy for me to marry him, for she thinks I’ll get all his property and money when he dies.”
“Well, he may die before long,” consoled Joe.
“Die!” said she; and again, “Die! He’ll never die!”
She leaned toward him suddenly, bringing her face within a few inches of his. Her hot breath struck him on the cheek; it moved the clustered hair at his temple and played warm in the doorway of his ear.
“He’ll never die,” she repeated in low, quick voice, which fell to a whisper in the end, “unless somebody he’s tramped on and ground down and cursed and driven puts him out of the way!”
Joe stood looking at her with big eyes, dead to that feminine shock which would have tingled a mature man to the marrow, insensible to the strong effort she was making to wake him and draw him to her. He drew back from her, a little frightened, a good deal ashamed, troubled, and mystified.
“Why, you don’t suppose anybody would do that?” said he.
Ollie turned from him, the fire sinking down in her face.
“Oh, no; I don’t suppose so,” she said, a little distant and cold in her manner.
She began gathering up the dishes.
Joe stood there for a little while, looking at her hands as
Ollie, from under her half raised lids, watched him go, tiptoeing swiftly after him to the door as he went down the path toward the well. Her breath was quick upon her lips; her breast was agitated. If that slow hunk could be warmed with a man’s passions and desires; if she could wake him; if she could fling fire into his heart! He was only a boy, the man in him just showing its strong face behind that mask of wild, long hair. It lay there waiting to move him in ways yet strange to his experience. If she might send her whisper to that still slumbering force and charge it into life a day before its time!
She stood with hand upon the door, trailing him with her eyes as he passed on to the barn. She felt that she had all but reached beyond the insulation of his adolescence in that burning moment when her breath was on his cheek; she knew that the wood, even that hour, was warm under the fire. What might a whisper now, a smile then, a kindness, a word, a hand laid softly upon his hair, work in the days to come?
She turned back to her work, her mind stirred out of its sluggish rut, the swirl of her new thoughts quickening in her blood. Isom Chase would not die; he would live on and on, harder, drier, stingier year by year, unless a bolt from heaven withered him or the hand of man laid him low. What might come to him, he deserved, even the anguish of death with a strangling cord about his neck; even the strong blow of an ax as he slept on his bed, snatching from him the life that he had debased of all its beauty, without the saving chance of repentance in the end.
She had thought of doing it with her own hand; a hundred ways she had planned and contrived it in her mind,
She went to the door again, gripping the stove-lid lifter in her little hand, as the jangle of harness came to her when Joe passed with the team. He rode by toward the field, the sun on his broad back, slouching forward as his heavy horses plodded onward. The man in him was asleep yet, yes; but there was a pit of fire as deep as a volcano’s throat in his slumbering soul.
If she could lift him up to it, if she could pluck the heart out of him and warm it in her own hot breast, then there would stand the man for her need. For Isom Chase would not die. He would live on and on, like a worm in wood, until some strong hand fed him to the flames.
