Long before eight he was standing at the post office corner, and there he stood in the mist until long after nine. Maxine did not come.
On the Brailsford farm the season rushed tumultuously into June bringing honey-locust bloom, wild roses, blue spiderwort and vetch, changing black fields to the geometrical green of growing corn, transforming Attila, the black pony colt with his white star and fiery eyes into a frisking, mischievous rascal who worried his mother constantly, metamorphosing the Jersey calves from fawn-eyed babies delicate as gazelles into willful stubborn young ladies who butted their pails of skim milk all over the barn lot.
"You little she-devils," said Gus, "you carnsarned little hussies, keep your heads in your own pails and try to learn some table manners."
But either Gus was never cut out for a barnyard Emily Post, or the husky young heifers, shoats, and foals didn't give a tinker's damn which was the salad fork, for certainly to the most casual observer it was obvious that the little pigs thoroughly enjoyed wallowing in the deliciousswill that filled their feeding troughs, loved to hang on squealing and complaining while their matronly mothers wandered aimlessly about the pig yard, and had no objection to nosing through the fence for a sinful afternoon among the radishes, peas, and lettuce of the garden plot. Attila, with forefeet braced, tugged at the mare's black udders until she sometimes turned and nipped his downy hide, and once when the foolhardy little colt started nuzzling around his daddy's flank, the Admiral, insulted to the very core of his masculine being, kicked and bit his tactless son into temporary good behavior. Nor were the black kittens in the barn above stealing milk from the brimming milk pails.
Peter, his imagination soaring at the thought of a trailer factory in Brailsford Junction, dreamed through the corn on the sulky cultivator, went through the whole eighty acres of waving green, then started through it again in an endless battle against the weeds. Early Ann picked half a milk pail full of wild strawberries on a southern slope.
The tobacco land was worked and reworked until the soil was as fine as silk before the tobacco setter with its big red barrel began its monotonous journey back and forth across thefield leaving rows of green plants in its wake. Gus and Peter dropped plants from the low rear seats while Stanley drove the team, sitting high up on the barrel.
Evenings the men, covered with dirt and sweat, went down to the lake to bathe, waded out over hard sand nearly one hundred yards until they were in water deep enough for swimming. They splashed and roared and spluttered, sometimes raced half a mile out into the lake and back again.
The corn grew so fast that Stud claimed you could hear it if you listened carefully at night. The pumpkin vines between the hills of corn spread wide green leaves, and the spring lambs which Stud was pasturing in peas and clover began to look like something which would taste good with mint sauce.
At last it was haying time. And so with hard work and little time for play Stanley and Sarah Brailsford approached their twentieth wedding anniversary.
One evening Early Ann, Peter and Gus got out the croquet set for a dashing game on the front lawn. Stanley and Sarah brought out their rockersto furnish a gallery. A catbird who thought he was a bobolink was singing in the topmost branches of the poplar tree.
"I get the red ball and mallet," Early Ann announced.
"They're mine," cried Peter. "I always use the red ones."
"Try and get 'em," Early Ann taunted. Swinging the mallet menacingly she dashed behind the lilac bushes and out again, encircled the mail box and the big oak tree, and, laughing and screeching came to grips with Peter on an open strip of lawn. He tried to wrench the mallet from her hands and was surprised at her strength.
"Just try," Early Ann panted. She fought with a desperation which amazed the boy. Her hair came tumbling down and her eyes flashed fire. Suddenly she let go of the mallet and tore into Peter with small hard fists and flying feet. Stud was laughing until his sides hurt. Gus was rolling on the ground with mirth. While Sarah, seeing that the struggle was getting rough, cried out in consternation, "Children, children!"
"I hate you," Early Ann whispered passionately. "I'll scratch your eyes out."
"Don't hurt yourself," Peter advised with a superior, mocking note in his voice. He had herfirmly by the arms now in a grip which he knew was hurting, but she did not flinch.
In another moment she was laughing and straightening her hair, but she recovered and kept the red ball and mallet.
The game began in the fighting atmosphere of technical pride, and deadly serious rivalry, which had marked the pioneer stump-pullings and sod-breakings of an earlier day, and which lived on in mortal golfing and bridge frays of the 1920's. Gus and Peter handled their striped wooden balls on the smooth green lawn with an accuracy which would have done credit to an expert of the cue driving the ivories about a billiard table. Gus was known for miles around as the croquet fiend who had scored all the hoops in one turn at a Sunday School picnic, while Peter could often run a hoop from a most disadvantageous angle.
Early Ann made up in temperament what she lacked in technical skill, and, whenever she had a chance to roquet on Peter's ball, sent him flying off into the deep grass.
"If Taft had played croquet instead of that sissy game golf, he'd still be president," Stud said. "If he'd pitched a good game of horseshoes he could've been king."
"Think of them White House lawns," sighedGus. "Gee whiz! If I was president I'd make me the gol darndest croquet court you ever did see."
"Why don't we play like we used to, Stanley?" Sarah asked.
"The kids are too good for me," Stud admitted. "But I'll tell you what I'll do...."
"Tomorrow?"
"You bet! I'll challenge you to a game for our twentieth wedding anniversary, Sarah."
They touched hands for a moment, shyly, hoping the others would not see.
Playing grimly and consistently well, Peter overtook Gus and sent that doleful individual into loud and vituperative lament by driving the farm hand's ball under the distant front porch. He made his next hoop, roqueted on Early Ann, and continued his run to win the game.
He couldn't help comparing Early Ann Sherman to Maxine Larabee as they began their second game in the heat of bitter competition.
"Early Ann's all right for croquet, or swimming, or a tussle on the lawn. But she's not much of a lady," he decided, "and nothing at all like Maxine Larabee."
He shouldn't have let himself think of them in the same breath. Early Ann was nothing but a she wild-cat, and a tomboy. Once she had pushedGus over the wood box; and she said "damn" when she got mad; and Gus had even seen her trying to smoke a cigarette.
Maxine would never do anything like that. Maxine would be ashamed to tussle or swear or even raise her voice. Maxine was a lady in every sense of the word. She looked just like the beautiful women in the magazines, with her picture hats and delicate motoring veils.
Peter bet if he could only have a new White Steamer she would notice him again as she had that night at the church supper. She might even let him take her for a ride way down the river road where they could have a weenie roast and sing songs together. She might go to Janesville with him for a movie and a midnight supper. Except that Maxine wasn't the kind of a girl who would eat a midnight supper with any boy. One of the fellows had told Peter that she was that kind of a girl and Peter had blackened both his eyes and made him eat dirt and yell "enough." It made him fighting mad when any other boy even mentioned her name casually.
He always felt like saying, "You leave her name out of this," the way men did in stories. But he was afraid it might sound silly.
The way she walked! Just wheeling along asthough all her joints had ball-bearings. She was one girl who didn't need to practice with a book on her head to get a perfect carriage. And her golden hair, done up a new way every day. And such lovely white hands and pretty nails. No, Early Ann just wasn't in Maxine's class.
"Your turn," Gus shouted at Peter. "Better stop dreaming about your girl and try to learn croquet. I've got you down for the count this time around."
"Listen, hayseed," Peter said, "you better crawl into your cellar because this trip I'm going to blow down your shanty."
He took careful aim allowing for a little rise he knew in the lawn, curved gracefully and improbably through the distant hoop, roqueted on the astounded hired man's ball, drove him into a tangle of raspberry bushes, and made two more hoops before missing.
"Nothing but a greenhorn's luck," Gus complained. He fished his ball out of the thorns, brought it to within a mallet's-length of the court, and promised himself sweet vengeance with plays of prodigious technical brilliance when next it came his turn.
The summer dusk came down about them sweet and still. Far away over the hills they could hearthe church bell calling the faithful to Thursday night prayer meeting in Brailsford Junction. The chimney swifts and martins filled the evening sky with their graceful, airy geometry, and the nighthawks swooped so low above them that one might see the pale oval underneath each wing. Far down the lake in some deep tangle of woods the whip-poor-will began.
Sarah hurried off to the ice house to fetch the half freezer of homemade ice cream left from supper, and with it a bowl of sugared strawberries. The game over, Early Ann went in for soup bowls and table-spoons. And together on the lawn, under stars so large, soft, and near they seemed almost to be caught in the upper branches of the oak tree, they ate such a dish for the gods as one may never find in these later years in distant cities.
The frogs began in the marshes along the lake. The crickets shrilled. Silence was all about them like a song.
After they had eaten, Peter and Early Ann pulled up the hoops and pegs, gathered the balls and mallets in their arms. They walked down the dusty driveway to the wagon shed carrying the set, and stopped at the milk house for a long cold drink from the pump.
They were too quiet, too delightfully tired and calm to wish to talk. Their struggle was forgotten, and there was no upsetting emotion of love or hate to keep them from kicking in comradely fashion through the dust.
Then something altogether out of keeping with their mood shattered the evening. The horses in the barn yard whinnied in fright; there were startled hoof-beats; a cow mooed anxiously.
"Don't go," Early Ann pleaded, holding to the boy. "It might be...."
Gus and Stud came running.
"Someone after the stock, you think?" Gus asked.
They hurried in a straggling group down to the barnyard gate, saw a shadowy figure jump the far fence and disappear into the dusky brush lot, crashing through the branches.
"Tried to get in from the back road," Stud decided, "came up the lane and found himself in the barnyard. Just a tramp, I guess."
But Early Ann had her own opinion.
There are nights when men and women cannot sleep but lie awake talking until almost dawn, nights when they feel suddenly articulate after long months or even years of silence. These nights are better spent in talking than in sleep or even in love.
Stanley and Sarah Brailsford went up to their room with a lamp. A cool wind was blowing from the lake rustling the old lace curtains at the window. Stanley set the lamp with its brightly polished chimney, neatly trimmed wick, and glass base filled with kerosene (in which the lower end of the wick floated like some pale, peculiar fish) upon the jig-sawed walnut bureau with its cracked mirror, and tatted bureau runner.
The lamp light emphasized his gigantic proportions, projecting his huge shadow on the walls and ceiling, lighting one half of his strong face and leaving the other in darkness. He took off his number eleven shoes, red and white cotton socks, and coarse blue shirt stained at the arm pits. He yawned enormously.
Quickly, with little movements almost shy, Sarah Brailsford unfastened her gray-sprigged percale waist and skirt. She took off her shoesand stockings as though she were ashamed to have Stanley notice that the shoes were cracked, misshapen, and run over at the heel, the black lisle stockings one great mass of careful darns. Before she removed her undergarments she slipped her nightgown on over her head and worked beneath the gown unfastening her patched unmentionables. Sarah wished she could have pretty bloomers like the ones on the Barton line. Stud could afford a new thrashing machine that year but no new clothes for the family. She hung her garments neatly on a chair.
Unlike his careful wife, Stud Brailsford threw off his clothes and strode about the room in his long knit drawers like an early picture of John L. Sullivan if you overlooked Stud's graying hair. He stood at the window looking out at the moonlit night, enjoying the tickle of the wind in the heavy damp mat of hair on his big chest. He scratched luxuriously with big blunt fingers, then turned and rubbed his back against the window frame, yawned, blew out the light, kicked off his drawers, and threw himself naked upon the cool sheet.
The slats of the bed creaked and groaned under his weight, and Sarah, as always, held herself a little rigid so that she would not roll down intothe hollow he created. By morning she might be snugly against him, but that would come about slowly through the relaxation of sleep during the long night.
Moonlight flooded the room glinting upon the flaked mirror, the oval chromos in walnut frames on either side of the dresser, the big white and gold washbowl and pitcher on the warped wash-stand, the tin chimney-hole cover gilded and decorated with a romantic landscape, the enamelware pot underneath the bed. It came sweetly over the face of Sarah who in this light was beautiful even at the age of forty-three.
Outside there were night sounds: a hoot owl whooing from Cottonwood Hill, a farm dog howling at the moon, and far away across the lake an answering howl from some equally miserable brother in sorrow. The curtains billowed, moths brushed against the screen, a bittern croaked in desolate flight over the marshes.
For some reason they did not fall asleep. Perhaps it was the excitement of the man in the barn lot, perhaps thoughts of the morrow when they would have been wed for twenty long years.
"I've been wanting to ask you for weeks now...."
"What, Sarah?"
"About Early Ann, could she possibly be ...?"
"Be what?"
"I hate to say it, Stanley. You've always been so good to me."
"Aw, Sarah, why don't you tell me what's eating you? You ain't afraid of me, are you?"
"No, not afraid, I guess. But maybe you won't like it. Maybe it will hurt you somehow.... But I must tell you, I can't go on without. Is Early Ann your daughter?"
"My daughter!" He sat up straight in bed and turned toward her. "Well, now. It ain't altogether impossible."
"Oh, Stanley! I knew it, but I wouldn't let myself think it. Only, why did you tell me?"
"I don't know what's eating you, Sarah. I didn't say for sure she was my daughter. I only said...."
"You said it was possible...." She was crying quietly now.
"Well, a young man sometimes...."
"I know. I couldn't be so stupid or so blind as not to see young men all around the country.... But who was she, Stanley? No, don't tell me."
"I—I don't remember her name," Stud faltered. "But I did notice that Early Ann's face was like...."
"I'll treat her real nice," Sarah said, addressing the cracked ceiling above her. "I'll treat her just like a daughter. We always did want a daughter, Stanley."
"Aw, Sarah," he said. "Aw, Sarah, I'm sorry." It was almost the first time in twenty years that he had told her he was sorry for anything. It was the first time in ten that he had tried to soothe her with his big, rough hands. She could tell that he was trying not to sob, and a sudden flow of pity came out of her heart for the great, clumsy fellow beside her whom she loved.
"I can forgive you," she said. "I can forgive you real easy."
"It ain't an easy thing to forgive."
"I do forgive you now for being unfaithful, Stanley."
"Unfaithful," he said, astonished. "I don't know what you mean."
"But you just said...."
"How old is the girl?"
"Eighteen, she claims."
"But, don't you see, Sarah. Then she can't be my daughter. That would beafterwe were married."
"You mean that never after we were married, not once, not even one time...." There wassuch a note of joy and relief in her voice that the big man beside her was moved to find her mouth and kiss it.
"What a silly woman!" he said. "What a silly girl!" He laughed deeply, and suddenly hugged her until it hurt. She was laughing and crying by turns and kissing him as she had not since their honeymoon. She rubbed his beard the wrong way, thus giving him one of the most delectable sensations he could experience. And he kissed the nape of her neck as he used to years ago. A cock crowed in the moonlight and Stanley struck a match to read the time.
"Why, it's after midnight, Mother. It's the nineteenth of June, and we've been married twenty years."
BOOK TWO
On July 1, 1913, Greece delivered an ultimatum to Bulgaria. The G.A.R. turned out en masse for the bicentennial of the Battle of Gettysburg. The enfranchised women of Illinois promised a new era in politics, while deans of co-educational schools raved against the immorality of the Tango. Big panama hats were all the rage, with ankle length wrap-around skirts and frilly summer blouses. Girls ratted their hair and read Ford joke books to boys who sat beside them in the hammock holding a box of chocolate creams. Pitcher Brennan of the Phillies socked Manager McGraw of the New York Giants. The berry market was firm with a strong tone in swine. In Chicago the coroner promised he would do something about the crazy joy riders who had killed twenty people in Cook County during June.
But in the home of Temperance Crandall and her mother nothing else really mattered becausenow Temperance had a huge, careless, messy man to run after and do for.
If you had told her six months before that she would stand for a man and a cat in her best bedroom Temperance would probably have tongue-lashed you out of her front door and down the street. But there they were, sleeping all day and out all night. A scandal and a caution if you asked Temperance. She wanted to blurt it out to the whole town but for once she held her tongue.
It was a trial and a tribulation, a plague of boils which would have tried the patience of Job. The Lord could testify that Temperance Crandall had the disposition of an angel and the patience of a saint, but even she could be driven only so far and not one inch farther.
"He throws his dirty socks and underwear all over the room," she told her image in the mirror. "He misses the porcelain spittoon a foot."
She yanked the kid curlers out of her hair with a viciousness which added a tenth of an inch to the diameter of the bald spot which was starting on her crown, twisted her hair into a hard knot at the nape of her neck and punched in hairpins with fury.
The filthy man and his dirty cat in her verybest brass bed, sleeping under her nicest patchwork quilts, dirtying her monogrammed pillow cases drawn taut and smooth over her finest goose-down pillows.
"My land-a-living, why do you tolerate the brute?" she asked her scowling image. "He's the seven plagues of Egypt, and that's a fact."
Biting her upper lip touched with the lightest possible suggestion of a black mustache, she pulled upon the pink strings of her corset until the black enamel eyelets threatened to rip completely out of the fabric, hastily donned a corset-cover, thrust her legs into a luxurious pair of lisle hose, snapped on garters hanging from the corset before and aft, pulled them a bit too tight, added a pair of stiff white petticoats to her ensemble, then plunged like a swimmer into the mass of calico, which, when jerked into position over her gaunt posterior, assumed the general outlines of a dress.
For a moment a buttonhook clicked on the beady jet buttons of her high shoes; there was a snap as she pinned the chain of her pince nez to her under-developed bosom. A touch of rose water now and the effect was complete.
Down the stairs she pattered while the grandfather clock in the hall boomed five of a brightJuly morning. Beyond the hall window the bachelor buttons wore their brightest blue; the four o'clocks were just closing for the day, but the pastel trumpets of the morning glories, the sun-loving zinnias and climbing roses were at their best in a garden which had not changed its general appearance in forty years.
She banged the hall door at the foot of the stairs with a violence which shook the light-timbered house and sent down an avalanche of soot around the parlor stove-pipe, marched out the kitchen door and down the garden path to the not unromantic privy covered with grape vines and ivy.
Later as she washed in a graniteware washbowl in the kitchen sink she ruminated upon the disastrous day she had taken a man into her house. He had come up the long board walk which led back through nearly one hundred yards of trees and shrubbery to the hidden clapboard residence of the Crandall women.
"Heard you had a room to rent," he said, vaguely. "Nice and quiet back here." He looked about him with a dull but satisfied air and stroked the big black tom cat in his arms.
"It's three dollars a week, mister," Temperance had said severely. "That's just for bed andbreakfast. I don't do no laundry, and I don't like cats. Besides there hasn't ever been a man in my house, and I don't think there ever will be." She banged her feather duster against the peeling porch rail.
"That's all right," the man said, "Tommy and I ain't particular."
"Oh, so you ain't particular," she mocked. "Well listen here my good man. You'd better be particular when you crawl into my best bed."
"I don't want to sleep in your bed. I want to sleep by myself."
"Don't get sassy or I'll bat you over the head with this feather duster," Temperance warned.
"All right, Sister," the man said. "All right. Are you going to rent me the room or ain't you?"
"I'll think about it," Temperance said. "Come in and have a chair but leave that filthy cat out of doors."
"It ain't a filthy cat," the man said. "Maybe in another life this cat was your grandmother." Temperance shuddered. The man stooped to come in through the door—his cat still safely in his arms. He slouched comfortably into a red plush easy chair and put his head back against the lace doily.
"Three dollars a week in advance," Temperancesaid. "And mind you I have a sick mother who mustn't be disturbed. She's bedfast and hard of hearing, and she'd probably have a relapse if she knew you was in the downstairs bedroom."
"I get you, Sister."
Why, Temperance Crandall! Whatever are you thinking of? the good woman asked herself while showing the man to his room. Why not tell Mother? Evil woman! Nasty woman! She bustled about the parlor flicking the dust from the gilded cat-tails, ferocious crayon portraits of her ancestors, and the model of the Washington Monument made of ground-up paper money.
But if Temperance had any idea she could deceive her mother she was rudely disillusioned the next morning when she took toast and poor-man's tea to the invalid.
"Temperance," shouted the old lady. "You've got a man in the house."
"But, Mother. How did you know?"
"Smelled him," said the old lady.
"Smelled him?"
"Tobacco and shaving soap. I'm no ninny."
Luckily her mother wasn't shocked, said that what they needed around the house was a man. But Temperance on due consideration decided not to tell the neighbors.
She remembered that Brailsford Junction was one bee-hive of gossips. They would be sure to suspect the worst and add a few details of their own. How Temperance hated gossips!
Not that everything wasn't Christian and proper with her mother there every moment for a chaperon. And not that Temperance would carry on with her roomer the way Mabel Bentley had done with that railroad man. Nevertheless some women she knew had evil minds. She didn't trust them.
She patted the sofa pillows embroidered with "God Bless Our Happy Home" into an engaging fullness of ripe curves, straightened the doily on the easy chair, and singing in a lusty off-keyed falsetto the touching strains of "Blest Be the Tie That Binds," rustled off to the kitchen to fix her boarder a tray.
My how the morning had flown. Eleven o'clock already. High time he was up and eating breakfast, the lazy, filthy brute and his dirty tom cat.
Such a big strange man. Huge, simply huge. And with a ferocious appetite. She thought he would eat her out of house and home. It cost more than three dollars a week to feed the big lummox.
"Our hearts in Christian love," warbled thebusy woman as she hastened about the old wainscoted kitchen, banging the spiders and pots loudly enough to wake the dead. He certainly should be up by this time. Almost noon, imagine! And Temperance up and busy since five o'clock.
Three boiled eggs, five slices of toast, a whole pot of coffee that held at least five cups, oatmeal in a bowl, cream and sugar, and, well, she might condescend to put one of those rambler roses from over the back stoop upon his tray. Not that he would appreciate it, the filthy, lazy thing. He'd better pay his board bill today or she'd throw him out like dishwater.
There, that tray looked nice. Altogether too nice if you asked Temperance Crandall. She whisked off her apron, looked into the kitchen mirror for a second, pushed her hair this way and that, sneaked a pinch of flour out of the flour bin and dusted it on her nose with the corner of a dish towel, then assuming the air of Fox's entire conference of martyrs picked up the tray for prompt delivery.
Joe Valentine was dreaming about a cat he had for a mascot in the Spanish American War, about the time the little tabby scratched hell out of thecolonel, when the sharp rat-a-tat-tat at his bedroom door awoke him from his slumber. He pulled the covers up around his chest for the sake of modesty, thus exposing his large left foot. He buttoned the two top buttons of his summer underwear.
"Come...."
"It's just me," said Temperance Crandall. "I hope I ain't intruding upon your privacy." She hesitated a moment on the sill, then boldly entered the room.
"Just a bite and a sup," said Temperance. She crossed to the bed to set the tray upon her roomer's unaccustomed lap, then screamed in terror as the black cat rose out of the covers like a bad dream, spitting and scratching.
"Horrid thing," she cried. "Evil, nasty thing. You'll be the death of me yet, you two."
She took in the room with one scornful glance: the bedspread thrown in one corner, the big shoes on her cedar chest, his clothes in a heap on the floor, a cigar-stub in her hand-painted porcelain pin tray.
"Ain't you ashamed to be so messy?" she cried, picking up his trousers gingerly and hanging them on the closet door-knob, putting his muddy shoes on the floor and rapidly folding the bedspread,catching the fold in her teeth but never ceasing to talk.
"All right," said Joe, his mouth full of toast. He pulled a buttery and delicious central tidbit from the slice of toast and fed it to the cat.
"Cigar ashes everywhere," Temperance said. "You're just driving nails in your own coffin with that filthy weed ... nicotine ... plain poison ... look at the yellow on your fingers."
"All right," said Joe.
"Why don't you be a man?" said Temperance. "You're big enough, the Lord knows. Why don't you get a job? Gadding about all night."
"Why don't you go do your knitting?" Joe asked, wrapping his large mouth around an entire boiled egg.
"Well, I like that," said Temperance Crandall, placing her hands on her hips and glaring at the man in her best bed.
A pretty figure he cut: hair down in his eyes, a two-days' growth of beard on his face, a nose that went straight for an inch or two then detoured to the right, large loose lips, big even teeth stained with tobacco, heavy biceps that were somehow flabby, shoulders of a tired coal-heaver. The great toe of his large left foot which was protruding from beneath one of her best quiltstwitched excruciatingly against the second toe of the same foot. The bottom of the foot was covered with yellow calluses.
"You make me nervous," Joe said. He took another cup of coffee for a bracer.
"After the way I've slaved for you," said Temperance; "Done all your washing free, fixed your meals at any hour of the day or night when all you should get is breakfast. You're just a filthy brute."
"All right," Joe said.
"No appreciation. Never a thank you."
"I didn't ask you," Joe said. He ripped the center out of another slice of toast and offered it to the cat, then slowly sucked the butter from each of his fingers.
"Either you pay your board and room today or else ..." she threatened as she flaunted out of the room, slamming the door behind her. She found that for the first time in months she was dangerously near to tears, and she brushed these obvious symbols of weak, womanly emotion out of her tired eyes with angry knuckles. She just wasn't herself lately, she observed.
"I ... I'm going through the change of life," she thought, "and Lydia Pinkham ain't doing me a bit of good."
The thought suddenly came to her, as she slumped down beside the window unnoticing of the lush summer just beyond the screen, that there would never be any children for her. And for just a moment she let herself be sentimental and think of Timothy Halleck, of sleigh-rides through the frosty starlit nights, of Virginia reels, and box sociables, of poetry she had written as a girl, and again of Timothy Halleck, who never knew, and would never know to his dying day that Temperance Crandall sat by her front window morning and night to see him pass.
From upstairs she heard the demanding voice of her mother whom she had taken care of uncomplainingly since her twenty-second birthday.
"Coming," she called.
What did you want, Joe Valentine? Where were you going? Wandering through countless nights, your cat on your shoulder!
The big man slouched through the alley behind Brailsford Junction's Main Street. He passed the litter of broken boxes, barrels and piles of rotting fruit in tangled shadows behind the Dingle Brothers' general store where bats swept low between the wooden buildings. His feet knew thecinders, and his eyes, like the cat's, could see in the dark.
He skirted the cubistic mountains of empty beer cases behind the Golden Glow Saloon, the heap of manure behind the livery stable, the jumble of wrecked parts and rusting bodies piled at the back door of the Ford Garage.
A dirty stream bubbled in the ditch that paralleled the alley, and a huge black rat bloated with young leapt up the ash pile almost level with his face. The cat stiffened like some electric thing, lashed his tail and sprang. The rat went back on her hind legs waving ineffectual little feet exposing her vast soft belly. A shadowy struggle, a high-pitched squeal of terror. The man laughed shortly; slouched on.
He passed the Ritz Royal Hotel smelling of hash and strong disinfectant; the barred back windows of the First National Bank; the empty ice-cream freezers and cartons behind the Tobacco City Ice Cream Parlor.
All closed, dark and deserted, no laughter or singing, the player piano still. From the high clock tower of the old town hall the chimes spilled the half hour. Far away across the river a train whistled, rumbled over the railroad bridge, was muffled by the intervening hills, rushed dangerouslyupon the town screaming and clanging, swept westward, died away in a distant whisper of steam and clicking of wheels which lasted in the imagination long after the night was once more silent and deserted.
The air was cool now after the long hot day. A breeze from the river valley to the east of the town swept through the alley stirring little whirlpools of dust. The air was suddenly filled with the cool breath of rotting oak leaves, dank river odors, algæ, fish and flowing water.
He thought of a shack among the willows, a box-car home on the river bottom; his mother coming home early in the morning, lighting the fire as though she had not been gone for nearly a month. Her dancing slippers were covered with mud, her party dress torn. The big man who was his father turned in his bunk, swore at the woman, went out banging the sagging screen door.
"Look Mother," Joe whispered, "we got a new kitten while you was gone."
River smells, fishing catfish down at the narrows, sitting all night on the sandbar listening to the "tick, tick," far down underneath the water, the splash of muskrats, the little crying noises made by raccoons in the cornfield on thehill, the whip-poor-wills, and the hoarse cry of night birds following the river.
Oars dipping into the water, boats being pulled up on distant sandbars, the mosquitoes and the damp chill, the lordly battle with a sixteen pound catfish in the dark. Bad whiskey, later on a woman.
He breathed the night air wistfully. Never again a woman's arms about him. Lost, deprived, utterly alone. He was not aware of these thoughts as words. He did not think in words but in odors, colors, sounds, and a blind hatred which he could not understand. Cheated, haunted by some unknown thing, filled with sudden fear at a footfall, foolhardy in the face of actual danger. A man who could no longer call himself a man since that knife fight with a nigger in Rockford, Illinois.
He came at last to the one light burning in the alley, a dim green globe above a door (three steps down) between two walls of sweating brick.
The twenty-six legitimate saloons serving the eighteen hundred inhabitants of Brailsford Junction were closed at this hour. Only the blind pig offered solace to the Dago section men, the farm hands making a night of it in town, and Hannah Leary who had spent half her life looking up atceilings of empty box-cars on the siding and at stars above the Brailsford Junction Cemetery.
Joe hesitated at the top of the stairs, drinking in the aroma of the place: sweat, rot-gut whiskey, women. He ran the tip of his tongue over his full, loose lips; felt in his pocket for change.
A big man stumbled out of the door at the foot of the stairs, started forward, saw Joe blocking the way, and roared in a drunken voice—
"Getahelloutamawayou."
Joe did not move.
The man lunged forward, fell, leapt to his feet and charged up the stairs—
"Outamawaygodamnya."
Joe tipped him over with a right to the chin. At the bottom of the stairs once more the man drew a knife and waited his chance. Joe took a pair of brass knuckles out of his pocket, slipped them onto his hands, pressed the buttons with his thumbs and little knives appeared on each knuckle. He slashed at the air breathing deeply and feeling fine. He pranced on his toes.
"Come on up," he offered.
The other was more careful now, almost sober. He advanced a step at a time watching his footing, his knife drawn down and back for the uprip,the belly slash. He stank of whiskey and bad teeth.
Joe let him reach the top of the stairs before he aimed a kick at the knife arm. The man dropped the knife, howling with pain, his arm half paralyzed. He threw caution to the winds, swung with his left, and tried to close. Joyfully, methodically, Joe slashed him to ribbons with the brass knuckles.
The man went down screaming and writhing while Joe ran lightly up the alley. He met the cat who sprang up and settled himself in the crook of Joe's arm. The cat was heavier now and licking his jowls with contentment. Together they dodged through the dark streets and alleys, between houses, and through the Crandall garden to the back door.
"Time we were leaving this dump," Joe told the cat.
A moment now for throwing his clothes and other few belongings into a knapsack, another moment for mussing up his bed as though he had been sleeping there all night, back to the kitchen door again where Temperance Crandall stood in her long white nightgown, a lamp in her hands.
He reached in his pocket for three dollars and put it on the kitchen table beside the door.
"Keep it," she said.
"Ain't that what you wanted?"
"I don't want your money."
He left her standing there looking at the three dollars on the table. He swung off down the dark street with his cat and knapsack, struck out into the country along the back roads which ran among the poor hill farms to the northeast. The farmhouses were dark. The cattle slept in the pastures. Hay was cocked in the fields and the mingled smells of drying alfalfa, timothy, red clover, and sweet clover came to his nostrils.
Like that early morning he had come along the country road and stopped to pump himself a drink at the farmhouse, and the woman had come out. That was before the fight in Rockford.
He swung along the dark roads talking to his cat, watching the sky with its sprinkling of large stars. He did not feel so lost since his fight. He almost remembered what it was he was searching for.
And so he came at last to the deserted hunting lodge on Lake House Point early in the morning with the sun on the whitecaps of Lake Koshkonong and the gulls screaming greedily about the cliff.
He looked across the bay to where Stud Brailsford's barns and growing fields lay sunning under the shoulder of Cottonwood Hill.
For days now the main topic of conversation on the Brailsford farm had been the merits of the various makes of cars (a much more intriguing subject than the tramp who had been discovered half dead near Bad Pete's blind pig in Brailsford Junction). They talked Imperials, Elcars, Cuttings, Speedwells, Marions, and the swank new Garfords with the single headlight. They discussed pro and con the new-fangled gas and electric self-crankers. Some members of the family wanted Prest-O-Lites while others were eloquent for electric. Each had his own ideas concerning which of the marvelous creations had the most stylish lines.
Stud himself liked the notion of a big powerful White Steamer. He said with the price of gasoline going up every month a White would soon be a real economy. Besides you could go sixty miles an hour in a steamer.
"Sixty miles an hour!" cried Sarah, throwing up her hands in dismay.
"Shucks, that's nothing, Ma," Peter said. "I can go sixty on my motorcycle."
"Yes, and you'll break your fool neck some day," said Early Ann. "He pretty near went off the Busseyville bridge with me on behind last night."
"Peter, you must be careful," his mother said.
"Tattle-tale," said Peter. He kicked Early Ann's shins under the table, and she kicked back.
"Me for an Imperial," said Gus. "They're twenty years ahead of their time and the classiest looking buggies you ever hope to see."
But in the end, of course, they bought a Ford, and a second hand one at that, with brass braces in front and a figure that only an owner could love. It stood up in the air like a lumber wagon, and you could hear it coming for a mile. It boiled over at eighteen miles an hour, but that was all right because the worse they boiled the better they went. Stud shined the brass radiator until it glittered like the gilded roof of Solomon's Temple. Sunday was spent in tinkering with the magneto, the lighting system, and the carburettor—that was what finally wrecked the Sabbath day. You had to hold your thumb just right in cranking the thing to avoid a broken arm, and when the engine finally decided to perambulatethe whole body shook like a dish of crab-apple jelly.
Stud had the appearance of a circus giant cramped over the steering wheel. He had difficulty in manipulating the trio of pedals with his large feet, and the idiosyncrasies of the spark and gas kept him guessing, but he whooped it up and down the road like a youngster with his first bicycle, and Sarah held on beside him, game as a Red Cross nurse in the face of inevitable death. Sarah purchased a linen duster and motoring veil. Stud bought himself a pair of motor-goggles and a linen cap which he wore like Barney Oldfield with the visor in back. The entire family grew suddenly sensitive to Ford jokes.
Unfortunately, farming, even in those halcyon days, was not all driving the Ford; and so despite races between Peter and Stud,—the motorcycle versus the tin lizzy,—platonic midnight excursions by Gus in the borrowed motorcar, and thrilling family forays about the countryside, work went on as usual about the farm.
Crops were better than could have been expected. Some parts of the great Middle West suffered floods in the spring of that year and drought in the late summer, but on the Brailsford farm rains and sunny weather were neatly interspersed.The pumpkin vines opened their yellow flowers in corn which was waist-high by the fourth of July. The moisture kept the tobacco from spindling up too soon; it spread wide leaves of velvet green in rows which went as straight as arrows across the fertile north twenty.
Stud's Jersey heifers, sleek Poland China shoats, and Shropshire lambs looked like blue ribbon material down to the last little orphan. A lively pair of twin kids had the family captivated with their antics. At the age of six weeks this pair of baby billy goats were leaping about the shed roofs like veritable young chamois. Sarah discovered four beautiful new hybrids among her gladioli; and her chickens—Plymouth Rocks and Leghorns—might have stepped right out of the pages of the "Country Gentleman."
It was true that Sarah felt tired these days, and that Ulysses S. Grant, the great Poland China boar, was acting particularly vicious, but on the whole the farm was running like clock work.
Almost before the Brailsfords realized it the grain had all been cut, and the thrashing crew had descended in a hungry horde upon the farm. Some of the oats went sixty bushels to the acre, the wheat nearly forty.
What a time they had with the thrashers! The womenfolks from all over the country came to help with the baking and cooking. Country kids for miles around rode Admiral Dewey and his patient wife, took turns in carrying water to the men, slid down the hay rope, begged for cookies, played pomp-pomp-pullaway and run-sheep-run.
The teen-aged boys, after work in the fields, wrestled and boxed, not always in fun. The teen-aged girls, who helped their mothers as little as possible, watched the boys and giggled.
Out in the fields and at the thrashing machine the men labored in the hot, sticky atmosphere with barley beards in their shirts and sweat in their burning eyes. They pitched bundles of grain onto the wagons, pitched them off into the thrashing machine; they drew water for the steam engine and shoveled coal in under the boiler; they carried the great sacks of grain—which poured from the shoot, winnowed, clean, and plump,—and dumped them into the big bins in the granary.
They marveled at Stud's fine new red and silver thrashing machine with its blower which could send the golden straw into a pile at any point he wished. They looked forward to followingthis beautiful machine up and down the valley.
In Sarah's kitchen the hot and perspiring women fairly tumbled over one another in their efforts to prepare for the hungry men. They stewed chickens by the dozen, fried thick slices of ham, made brown ham gravy, boiled pecks of new potatoes, baked pies and cakes and opened cans of pickles. There was nothing fancy about the fare they served, but it was ample.
They were jovial, catty, good-natured, cross, polite, or rude as the spirit moved them. They dropped the "sistering" and "Missusing" of the church suppers and called each other plain Mary, Meg, Bert, and Cissy. They had a perfectly grand time for all their complaining.
And when the dirty men burst into the kitchen, joshing and pushing one another over chairs, pouring well water down one another's neck, splashing and crowding at the sink, and asking the women why they couldn't rustle together a little food for the real workers, the women thought of nothing but feeding and humoring the pack. If a man proved too obstreperous, however, these Amazons were thoroughly capable of forcing him to eat the extra food for which he was shouting, until at last he had to cry "enough," grinning sheepishlyat his defeat, while his fellows jeered and taunted.
Against their better judgment, and in thorough contradiction to their pre-conceived distrust of Early Ann, these women were forced to admit some merit in the Sherman girl. They noticed how hard she worked in Sarah Brailsford's kitchen, how, although she kidded with their men-folks, she showed practically no inclination to lure them into the haymow, and how, above all, she was a friendly girl and not at all stuck up about her good looks.
Good looks she undoubtedly had, the men admitted as they lay about the lawn during the hour of rest after their big dinner. They complimented Stud upon his taste in hired girls, and suggested that it was no wonder Peter took her for rides on his motorcycle.
"She'll be riding a motorcycle herself one of these days," Peter said. "She's tomboy enough. I'll bet she could lick most of you guys in a wrastle."
"Been wrastling her much, kid?" the men wanted to know. "She looks like good wrastling."
Peter flushed. He had never thought of Early Ann as a sweetheart. He had been thinking all morning about Maxine Larabee, and how hehoped she would drive in at one of the farms where he was in charge of the big thrashing outfit. Stud had told Peterhecould be thrashing boss that year and take the fine new machine all over the countryside. It would be wonderful to have Maxine hear him giving orders and directing all the men.
Maybe Bud Spillman would come up with a sneer on his face right while Maxine was there, and Peter would knock his block off. Nothing could be sweeter.
"I'd like to wrastle that girl," one of the men was saying. "I'll bet she'd make good wrastling."
During the past few weeks Sarah had tried to be particularly kind to Early Ann. She had noticed how the girl had listened to her manner of speech and tried to imitate it, how she had dropped many of her "ain'ts" and "them theres," and was taking pains to set the table nicely. One day Sarah had shown her some of her battered text books left over from distant academy days. Early Ann had taken them to her room and had painfully waded through several of them during the long summer evenings. She had even asked Sarah to show her the notes on the organ and had practiced faithfully at her scales.
In matters of personal appearance, however,Early Ann had a flair which the older woman lacked. She had a way of doing her hair, of wearing a flower or a ribbon which made her beautiful even in an apron. But in matters of tidiness and cleanliness she learned much from Sarah. She brushed her teeth more often now, and every evening, to the tantalization of the hired man, bathed in the back pantry before she went to bed.
She actually worshiped Mrs. Brailsford.
"You're ... you're wonderful, Mrs. Brailsford," the girl had told her one afternoon when they were alone in the kitchen fixing supper. "It just seems like you're the kindest thing in God's world. I wish Icouldbe your daughter like you said."
When the bins of barley, wheat and oats were full to overflowing and the thrashing crew had moved on to the Bussey farm, Stud found that work was slack for a moment, and he decided to take a little journey.
He filled the gasoline tank of his Ford from the big, red barrel mounted on sawhorses beside the milk house, poured two quarts of thick green oil into the engine, and emptied most of a sprinklingcan of water into the ever-thirsty radiator.
Four new tires were lashed to starboard and port. Pumps, jacks, kits of tools, tire shoes, and extra inner tubes were stowed beneath seats and in tool boxes. Stud had lunch enough for a two-weeks' journey, and at Sarah's insistence a sweater, raincoat, rubbers, and three changes of shirts and underwear. He felt as adventurous as Daniel Boone.
Sarah waved until he was out of sight down the road, and returned to the kitchen biting her lip to keep back the tears. While Stud, racing along at twenty miles an hour through the dewy August morning, felt as fit as a fiddle and as cocky as a bantam rooster.
He noticed the fine new circular barn Ed Underwood was building upon the very site where two previous circular barns had been struck by lightning and burned to the ground. Just flying up in the face of providence to build another of those queer-shaped cow sheds on the same spot. He craned his neck to look over the high board fence at the Foote place where all the machinery stood rusting in the front yard. He could see that Cyrus Babcock's bull wouldn't furnish much competition for his Napoleon at the county fair that year. Cy took too much stockin this scientific stuff his son was learning at the University of Wisconsin. Science was all right in its place but—
"You gotta have a feel for raising cattle same as for playing the fiddle," Stud told the passing scenery.
He was genuinely glad to see that the Widow Morrison had a fine stand of tobacco and that One Arm Bert Howe had the best corn in miles. It was pretty tough about Bert and his tubercular girl.
The creek at Busseyville, meandering through its wide valley, looked so inviting that Stud drove his car in among the willows, kicked through a meadow of deep grass and dusty milkweed bloom on which the big, brown butterflies were gathered, and came at last to the deep hole at the bend where he had often gone swimming as a boy.
There was not a farm woman in sight, so Stud stripped, took a running dive, and sported in the cool, clear water. How fine it felt! He blew and bubbled, tried to swim to the bottom of the twelve foot hole and pick up pebbles, opened his eyes under the water and grabbed for the silver minnows with his big hands. Out again with the wind and sun upon his body! Into his clothes and back to the car where he sampled a pair ofchicken sandwiches and drank noisily from the artesian well beside the road.
Another ten miles of hard driving over wagon roads which followed the ridge to the west of the lake, then into Fort Atkinson and on up the Rock River Valley. On either side spread the fertile black acres which had brought thousands of eager immigrants from across the sea. The sons and grandsons of the pioneers were thrashing grain and sweating in the fields.
Stud marveled when he thought how rapidly he was traversing these miles which would have taken days by ox-cart. Not a blowout, as yet, and not a broken spring. No trouble with the magneto, carburettor, or the engine.
Until he was twenty miles from home Stud would not let himself think what it was which had brought him on this wild goose chase. It sobered him when he remembered.
From the moment on that June night when Sarah had asked if Early Ann might be his daughter the simple mind of Stud Brailsford had been troubled and perplexed. He wanted to ask the girl outright what she knew about her mother but was embarrassed before her. He tried to recall each of the girls with whom he had had secret pleasure before he married Sarah. Suddenlyit dawned upon him that Early Ann Sherman was undoubtedly the daughter of Tess Bedermier,—Tess, the girl with whom he had once gone swimming naked in Lake Koshkonong in the days when to even speak of a girl's legs was to risk an eternity in hell. It was a Sunday evening at that. He was supposed to be driving her to the evening services at the Methodist Episcopal church in Brailsford Junction.
Tess, the lovely and lost, the foolhardy and independent, the talk of the Ladies' Aid and the scandal of the countryside. She had been Doc Crandall's stylish hired girl during the last two years of the veterinarian's life. Of an age with Temperance and Sarah, Tess had been the most run-after girl in town during the years of 1890 and '91.
Stud had not told Sarah of his discovery, nor why, when looking into Early Ann's face, he was suddenly shocked (seeing the living, breathing image of Tess).
But could she be his daughter?
Maybe she was older than she would admit. If she were twenty-one, for instance....
He tried to analyze what it was that disturbed him and decided that if a man sees his daughter growing up from babyhood, perhaps helps totend her, plays with her, teaches her to ride horseback and to swim; if he watches her sprouting up to young womanhood, sees her put up her hair and wear her first long skirts, then he can think of her as his daughter and not be troubled with her pretty ways and her fresh young body.
But if it should happen that a father did not see his daughter even once in her life before she became a young woman, then he might be disturbed by her prettiness, seeing in her, her mother of years gone by.
It was not like Stud to be worrying about anything except possibly the crops and the stock. He took the world as he found it and found it good. He lived moment by moment and day by day and rested on Sunday.
But here was a new and troubling element in his life; a worry, and a dumb, sweet misery which he carried about with him, so that sometimes Gus would have to ask him twice if he had ordered more bran, or if he intended to send for that new belt for the gas engine in the milk house, before Stud was aware Gus was speaking.
He thought of it as he went down into the woods with Shep to bring home the cows, and he thought of it while he was topping the tobacco, breaking off the budding white flowers to keepthe plants from spindling up and going to seed. He carried his troubles with him into the barns and the haymow, to the table and to bed.
Was it likely that she was eighteen and not his daughter? Or was she, perhaps, twenty-one, and the child he had got on Tess Bedermier that moonlight night they had bathed in the lake and afterwards gone back among the willows?
He did not know where Tess had gone that autumn. She had quarreled with him and moved away from Brailsford Junction. He wondered if she had ever married, and if she were living now. He thought he would never be satisfied until he found her and asked about Early Ann.
But to find her would be a job of clever sleuthing for which Stud felt too big and clumsy. He called on his friend Timothy Halleck in whom he placed utmost faith. Halleck went to Madison to look for a marriage certificate. He came back puzzled and no wiser.
He wrote to the only Bedermier he knew, a second cousin of Tess's living in Chicago, but found that this distant relative had not heard of Tess in more than twenty years.
Then he went to Old Mrs. Crandall who seemed inclined to confide a secret, but changed her mind and shut her mouth like a clam. Atlast, having had a real inspiration, he visited Mrs. Marsden, Early Ann's erstwhile landlady, and asked about the girl's mail.
"Don't you dare insinuate I look in other people's envelopes," squeaked Mrs. Marsden. "But I did notice the three letters she got were postmarked from Horicon, Wisconsin."
This was the only clew which Halleck could offer his friend, but it was sufficient.
As Stud followed the Rock River toward its source he watched the stream grow smaller and smaller. He passed through Jefferson and Watertown, neat towns in the midst of prosperous country. On every side were the white-washed milk houses and bright red barns of thrifty German farmers. The corn rustled, windmills whirred, and bob-o-links scattered their liquid notes. He passed busy creameries, a brewery, and a cross-road store, and still his chariot wheeled on.
But as he climbed a hill giving a view of the rich valley and miles of winding river, a tire expired with a long, soft sigh; and it was an hour later after a mortal struggle with tire irons, pump, jack, and obstinate valve-stems, that he was on his way again. Soon after the engine coughed and died. He was out of gas.
Courteous drivers of that all but forgotten erawhen a Ford was a fraternal emblem more binding than a Masonic button drew up with boiling radiators and shrieking brakes to shout, "Need a lift, friend?" It was one of these cheerful fellow motorists who drove him three miles and back for a gallon of gasoline.
He stopped over night at a farm where the big German farmer and his apple-dumpling wife would have been ashamed to even think of charging for their hospitality. He was impressed by the clean barns and white-washed trees, and spent several hours with the genial farmer examining his Holsteins.
The next day he drove on to Horicon.
He came at last to the desolate marshes which seem to stretch interminably across the wide valley of the upper reaches of the Rock,—endless channels and pools, acres of billowing swamp grass, millions of yellow pond lilies, red-wing blackbirds chattering in hordes upon the swaying cat-tails.
Asking for Sherman, for Bedermier, and for Sherman again and hearing this and that disturbing bit of their history until at last he knew the whole sordid tale, he made his way along one of the most desolate roads he had ever traversed. Huts among the gravel hills bordering the marshwere over-run with chickens, pigs, and dirty children. Pot-bellied women came to the door to see him pass.
He lost his way during the afternoon and had to retrace his path over ruts and ditches which threatened at every moment to break a spring. Toward sunset he arrived at the deserted Sherman place and drove in through the stumps of a once generous orchard where wheel-less wagons, overturned plows, and rusty cultivators vied with sagging fences to make the spot as uninviting as can be imagined.
There was scarcely an unbroken window left in the ramshackle farmhouse; the windmill was down. Plantain and burrs had crept into the barnyard, and the fields were giving way on every hand to brambles, sumac and willows.
So this was where Tess Bedermier had come, pregnant with his child, to live with the only man who would take her in, to bury that first child in an unmarked grave, and to bear Bung Sherman three children out of wedlock, of whom Early Ann alone had survived. Here was the desolate farm on which Early Ann—no child of Stud's—had grown and blossomed, and it was here that Bung Sherman had died in a drunken brawl with a duck hunter.
After Bung's death Tess had gone off with a man who stopped at the farm for a drink of water, a man whose name was unknown to the neighbors and whose only distinguishing characteristic was that he carried in the crook of his arm a large black cat. Two weeks later Early Ann had gone to join them.
As Stud watched the sun setting over the vast marshes he thought he felt a cold wind blow across the barn lot, and the hair stood up on the nape of his neck. The killdeers called that a storm was at hand. Clouds rolled up from the horizon and distant thunder rattled like wheels on a far bridge. Then, suddenly, the sky was black and over-cast. The lightning flashed close at hand,—jagged blue, reflected on the dark pools and the channels. The trees bowed low, the dust whirled, and rain came down over countless miles of marsh land.