Chapter III: Part 3

“Henry was reading it to Father last night, but the new mare had colic and Father said Trina was giving him the wrong bran and Father hollered like anything and Henry went on reading out loud just like Father wasn’t hollering.”

“I’ll wager Henry knows it by heart, by now.”

“I know what’s in it.”

“In what, Davey?”

“Pres-i-dent’s in-augural. We’re going to have a bigger navy. I’m going to be a sailor. Teddy wasn’t fat like Taft, was he, Bek?”

“No. Come. Winslow must read. Bek’ll take you and Leslie up to bed.”

“What if Mother forgets my little ewe lamb? Once Mother forgot to let in Sofia and Sofia froze her foot.”

“Won’t you ever forget that, Davey? I’m sure, honey, in the millions of Sofia’s ancestors, most of them born under the board walk that leads from the house to the kitchen, that not a single pussy of them ever had a frozen foot until that night Mother, for the first time, forgot.”

“But if Mother forgets again....”

“Mother won’t. Come, Leslie, and Mother will tell you for a good-night story how the moon carries honey to the bees.”

“For Heaven’s sake, Bek,” cried Winslow in the key of having said it countless times before, “get it right. The _bees_ carry honey to the _moon_.”

“Of course. Mother meant that, Leslie. Oh, Winslow, you are so much better at tales than I am. Leslie would rather be put to bed by you.”

“All right if——”

“Oh, never mind. Come, Davey. You skip on up to your room and Bek will be there in time to tuck you in.”

“Bek, I can recite the preamble of the Constitution: We, the people of the United States, in order....”

“For the love of Heaven, muzzle that child, will you Your brother Henry is going to make a gibbering encyclopedia out of him before he’s seven.”

“... in order to form a more perfect union.”

“Come, Davey.”

“The moon,” said Leslie trailing after—“honey—to—the—moon.”

“You see, Bek,” said David, clamping each small square foot on the stair as he toiled up after, “you see, he’s such a little ewe-lamb, and if such a little ewe gets thirsty and there’s no one to give him a drink....”

“Muzzle that kid,” said Winslow, hooking his pipe into the corner of his mouth and stretching out comfortably on the dining-room sofa with his _Tribune_, “s’pose a fellow ought to read the inaugural speech—dry as dust——”

“The bees don’t neither carry honey to the moon, Bek. Now the way a bee makes honey is this....”

“Muzzle that kid!” roared Winslow, ramming his right ear into a cushion and jamming another on top of his left.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] The morning of the afternoon upon which my brother was to press a button from Washington that officially put into motion the transfer that marked the formal beginnings of the Philippine Free State, I found him lying asleep in his study where he had left orders no one was to be admitted but me. He looked drawn from the rigors of his epochal Congressional address but otherwise strangely the boy. It may have been his position in sleep. One knee drawn up under his chin and the back of his hand curled against his neck—as I remembered him a hundred times in childhood. For a fleeting instant it seemed to me that all the terrific present fell away from us, and there he lay up in Stevey’s room—asleep on the balsam mattress....

[5] My brother Davey used to ride my ironing-board beating his small heels and dancing up and down as he sat astride. Flibberty-jibbeting, he called it, for some mysterious reason of childhood. Friends who saw this home-made device in my kitchen, advised me to have it patented. Later, when reverses struck us and when I saw its counterpart become a general commodity, I had reason to regret I had not capitalized the little idea before others got in ahead of me and made my device worthless.

[6] I know that there were those who thought I spoiled Winslow. Brother Phil used to twit me about it good humoredly. If I did, it was to try and repay the measure of happiness he brought me. Diametrically opposed as we were in temperament, it was that very antithesis that apparently brought us together. In all the years of our lives together, up to the very hour of his death, I can truthfully say that it was his fineness, his more delicate discernments, his dear unobtrusive co-operation that brought me the more conspicuous success of the two. As the brother-in-law of the President of the United States, and the husband of a woman whose activities were destined to be more or less conspicuous, Winslow never forfeited one of his splendid qualities to those rather spectacular and at the same time enormously difficult conditions. Neither did he ever avail himself of any largesse of favor which might have come to him because of my brother. He sought no favors. He asked precedence over no man. An artist of parts was my husband, whose work, in my opinion, never won the wide approval its gossamer beauty deserved. It was as a revered father, a beloved and respected husband, that he was to come into his own. The day of his death, the greater part of the light of the world went out for me.

[7] ... I was never able to take those differences of taste seriously which accept the antimacassar in one generation and ridicule it in the next. As I used to say to my daughter Paula, who before she became State Superintendent of Schools had a small modernistic gift-shop of her own in Cleveland, a good thought for anyone to hold, who was over-impressed by the rightness of his own time as over and above all other times, was Omar Khayyam’s salty old observation that tomorrow we may be with yesterday’s seven thousand years. I often wonder to what appalling extent my clear-eyed Paula must think me the old fogey.

[8] David never lost his childish fancy for my cookery. I recall once, the second year of his first term as Governor, his visiting the International Food Show, in the days before the general use of dehydrated vegetables. There he stood before my booth where I was demonstrating, in the name of this great food-revolution in which it was my privilege to act as pioneer, and with cameras clicking upon him, shamelessly devoured three portions of my dehydrated hominy prepared in a fireless cooking-range and served piping-hot under molasses cubes.

[9] My brother Henry, never too reverent, used solemnly to recite the rosary over my hominy. I can hear him now ... impaling with his fork, to the rhythm of “each bead a pearl, each pearl a prayer.” Dear Henry—simple spirit. Great spirit.

_Chapter Five_

It was snug up where David slept. Bek’s covers were nicer to snuggle into than the ones in the House on Sycamore Street. Chiefly because Bek used quilts that an old farmer-woman over just beyond Cottage Corner made with spud-like fingers out of the choice cotton and percale scrappage of a county of attics. Blues and reds and grays and oyster whites. There was one, Davey’s favorite, with a border that looked like rows of intently listening rabbits’ ears. In Bek’s attic, it smelled like calico as you tear it. Clean lint of the loom. There was a window set in a slant of ceiling and sometimes it was entirely filled with moon that made everything white except the shadows and the school pennants that Steve had nailed up against the slopes of wall.

There was a moon tonight. He had a toothache. He often did when he came up almost full, one of his cheeks bulging and making him lopsided. It was nice to be tucked in bed at Bek’s under quilts that did not scratch like the gray blankets in the House on Sycamore Street.

When blankets got old, sick ewes liked them. If a ewe-lamb got sick, a very baby one, and you didn’t give it warm milk out of a nursing-bottle, it died.

“Poor e-w-e. E-w-e. Y-o-u. Funny. How could you always know which of the two meant? If you said, ‘You go downstairs,’ it couldn’t mean e-w-e. But if you said, ‘poor e-w-e,’ then which you? E-w-e or y-o-u? Henry would know even that.”

Haw, Leslie thought the bees carry honey up to the moon to make it clear. Haw!

“Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord, my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. God bless Mother ’n’ Father ’n’ Henry ’n’ Bek ’n’ Leslie ’n’ Winslow ’n’ Phil ’n’ Emma ’n’ Clara ’n’ Jacob ’n’ Hallie ’n’ ewes ’n’ Pete McNall ’n’ the in-laws ’n’ nieces ’n’ nephews ’n’ Teddy and let me go to see him march when he comes back from Africa ’n’ make Mother remember to feed the ewe ’n’ God bless me for not swiping Henry’s coon-skin cap for my tommyhawk and bless we, the people of the United States in order to form a more perfect union——we——the——people——of the United States, in——order——”

* * * * *

Down in Leslie’s room it was moonlight, too. It was not really a room, but a sort of alcove that adjoined Bek’s and Winslow’s so that the moonlight flowed in from their room.

That was exactly the reason of the alcove. Because it had no windows. Sometimes Leslie walked in his sleep. There were bars across the window in the big room.

The moonlight lay in a long patch. To Leslie, in bed it was like a river. Of light. It fascinated him as things that gleamed always did. He sat up in bed to feel the sway of its bright tide.

Leslie had a song. It went something like “Evoe! Evoe! Evoe!” His mother had attempted to teach him ballads, tried and true, but this one was Leslie’s own. A little chant that he always sang with his long, white eye lids closed. Henry, who knew his self-taught Greek, was wont to observe with mock manner of pious rebuke, that there was something Bacchanalian about Leslie’s choice of lyric outburst. “Evoe! Evoe!” The call of Greek youth....

That last was enough for Bek. “Sing your song, Leslie. The song of the Greek youths.”

Leslie, with the droop of his long, pale lids: “Evoe! Evoe! Evoe!”

“Go to it, Leslie! Vine leaves in your hair.”

“Don’t tease Leslie, Henry. It’s the perpetual call of youth in Leslie.”

Later, after she had come upon Stevey that first time behind the Cider Mill, Bek had cause to feel her flesh crawl at that song of Leslie’s. “Evoe, Mother!” he had shouted to her.

“Evoe! Evoe!” sang Leslie in bed, to the swinging tide of the moonlight. The bright tide down which he could feel himself riding in a skiff made out of a bed. “Evoe! Evoe!” The humming of voices from the big room was disturbing. One of them a harsh, man’s voice, that split.

* * * * *

The humming of the voices was Rebekka’s and Winslow’s. Winslow was lying rigid in bed, with the flanges of his nose quite green, and Rebekka had the light on and was throwing an extra blanket, which she had to stand on a chair to drag down from a closet shelf, on top of him, and finally against his continued shudderings, his corduroy jacket, with the strings of his tobacco-pouch dangling out of the pocket.

“Making yourself sick isn’t going to help matters. I suppose I shouldn’t have told you, but there are some things I haven’t the right to carry alone. Besides, he will be home tomorrow.”

“I won’t have it!” said Winslow, through teeth that shuddered. “Damn him!”

“Scarcely the most helpful way to set about getting Steve out of this—mess.”

“I won’t have it!” said Winslow, and began to cry quite weakly against the pillow; and along his brow and the backs of his hands, the tallow-colored, moist pallor sprang out, and beads of moisture, in the weakening fashion that Bek dreaded.

“It’s no wonder,” said Bek, standing surveying him and wanting to keep her voice cold through her rising concern for him—“it’s no wonder I carry everything alone sooner than go through this sort of thing with you.”

“Young pup, he’ll not drag his family name into the dirt.”

“He will, unless you treat this matter like a problem instead of a calamity.”

“I won’t have it!” cried Winslow, and beat with his hands into the pillows and sobbed like a baby.

“It’s not a matter of what you’ll have. It’s a matter of what you’ve got to face.”

“There’s something you’re holding back. There’s something more to it than just withdrawing him from college at the dean’s suggestion because he’s loafing. Boys don’t get fired for such small-fry offenses. There’s been something more behind it right along.”

Rigid at his bedside, Bek bit her lips with the truth of this. But to tell Winslow all the facts of his homecoming, she realized now, was as impossible as it had been to tell him the truth of the hurried decision to send him away.

This must apparently remain her fight and Steve’s. She had meant to tell Winslow the why; the whole miserable why of the going and the coming of Steve; of the wretched reason of her sudden determination to send him to State Agricultural; of that first time behind the mill—that second—third, fourth time. The deceits. The deceptions. She had meant to tell him all, now that Steve was coming home, his secret pledges to her shattered.... Winslow must fight the fight with her and Steve now.... Winslow must be taught a quality of mercy and wisdom toward his boy ... who needed him.

“I’m cold.”

Winslow must—must meet this with her——

“I’m getting a chill.... Damn young pup—he’ll not drag our name in dirt.”

“Winslow, you mustn’t get yourself into a state. Are you really cold? Or just nervous? You don’t want the hot-water bottle?”

“Young puppy!” sobbed Winslow. “Over indulged. Gentleman farmer. Never quite understood it all, anyhow. No son of mine comes home suspended from college for loafing ... young puppy ... won’t have it. I’m getting a chill.”

“Hot-water bottle, Winslow?”

He was sure not to want it or to endure it, once it was there, but his silence meant acquiescence to her going for it. That meant padding down through the dark, cold hallways, and the slow performance of waiting for the water to boil in the black iron kettle.

“If it will make you feel better, Winslow, I’ll go down and heat water.”

“Amos Milliken,” said Winslow, from his pillow of misery.

That was a localism that needed no interpretation to a Schuyler. Emma Schuyler’s father-in-law, Amos Milliken, had long since placed the flavor of his hospitality in local ill-repute, by his habit of asking a guest, “Have a cigar if I go upstairs and get you one?” instead of passing around the box of his own excellent brand that always reposed in the top sideboard-drawer.

It was just as well, though, not to act on Winslow’s jab of a reply. It was only his nervous ague. She had first beheld him in the grip of it in the days of their engagement, during a quarrel that had to do with some trivial misunderstanding over the time and place of an appointment.

High-strung! To Bek, whose nerves seemed to run through her body with serenity of veins through marble; there was a preciousness to Winslow. Standing there in her plain, white-muslin nightgown, vigorous, deep-fleshed; her strong, brown hair, that even her own children seldom saw down, hung in two plaits that were almost too enormous for beauty.

There _was_ something Christ-like to Winslow’s face as it pressed into the pillow that way, with the profile ground against it in pain.

A picture of her father on the night he had screamed and raved about the house when she announced her engagement, rose before Bek.

“You’ll get nothing out of a Renchler! It’s not in them to give. They’re takers. His father before him would take a favor from you like it was coming to him; And the dam’-fool part of it is he got the whole town to thinking it was coming to him. Once a Renchler always a Renchler. The whole tribe of them. Pretty folks. But not in them to earn a penny or keep it, except when they marry money and catering wives. I know the Renchlers. Mark my word, Winslow Renchler will ride a girl like you to death. He’s a taker.”

Was Winslow riding her to death? Not while the rich flow of her sympathies could well out to him, as he lay there, shivering of the ague of nervousness. Theoretically perhaps, Bek was the giver. Actually, though, she would have clawed for him; fought for the qualities in him that were weaker than she was. There was pain in loving like that. And fierceness and a certain glory. And, strangely enough, reward.

“Damned young puppy!” sobbed Winslow again and again and again.... “I won’t have it!”

“I’ll go down and heat you the water, Winslow,” said Bek in a lusterless tone. “You _are_ chilled.”

Downstairs, in her enormous kitchen, spick, span, clean and cold, putting match to the gas-stove to which she could never become quite accustomed, playing its knobs as you would the stops of an organ, and then standing by to watch the water come to a reluctant boil, a lump of misery lodged itself in Bek’s throat.

Here she was, confronted with what must surely be one of the grim climaxes of her life. Surely, surely, none grimmer could await her. Leslie up there swinging himself softly to sleep on “Evoe! Evoe!” while to that rather unearthly rhythm, downstairs in the chilled kitchen, needing Winslow if she was ever to need him, she stood alone, faced with the homecoming of a seventeen-year-old inebriate son. Here she stood, as usual, administering solace to the husband who should have been administering solace to her!

How unreal! Steve, who had grown, like a streak, from his adolescence into a young-manhood that delighted her. A curious combination of his Grandfather Schuyler and of Winslow. There was a threat of fine fettle to Steve, which made his profile dance like a blooded horse about to leave his post. A poet, or a peasant, or both. And now this.

Stevey must be helped. Cured. Men were. There was George Birkaway. Carrie Birkaway used to drop something into his coffee. For five years before his death, George had not touched a drop. Backs of magazines were full of remedies. Stevey must be helped. There was yet time. He must be made to have the power to resist. And without Winslow’s knowing. Winslow was too high-strung. Without anyone’s knowing.

They must again fight it out alone. The Old Gentleman—why, the Old Gentleman might have a stroke if he knew. Stevey must promise—Stevey must promise—on Davey’s life! For Davey’s sake!

How good, how strangely comforting, the consciousness of the little nub of him up there asleep in Stevey’s room. How good....

* * * * *

After a while, the shining tide began to slow—drowsily—“Evoe! Evoe” sang Leslie to himself, and singing it, dropped off to sleep.

* * * * *

The hot-water bag, sure enough, lay unapplied on the floor when Winslow finally dropped off to sleep with his head resting on the upper part of Bek’s firm arm as she lay beside him, his hair damp and smoothed backward in long strokes of Bek’s fingers, even after he slept.

What to be done? Repeated drunkenness, the letter had said. Solitary-drinking vice, that, unless he left college at once, must soon leak out among his colleagues. Solitary drunkard. It spread black wings over all the things that mattered. And suddenly they were not mattering at all. And they must! There was so much to be done. Tomorrow’s workaday was spinning toward. Everything must matter as usual, if one was to carry on. That broken plowshare-blade to be shipped back to the factory for repair. Rock salt for pasture. Father to be broached at the bank tomorrow for a loan.

Old Jessup’s eyes. They had turned at her like the reproachful eyes of a dog that had served her well. Poor Jessup!

Emma’s Claire needed a talking-to. She had worrisome ways with her mother. Sometimes a vagrant thought flashed through Bek’s mind. Claire and Stevey. The eyes of those two cousins when they were together. Nobody in the world had noticed except Bek. A disturbing thought that never got more than half-born before she banished it.

Father must be got at before ten in the morning at the bank. If only Phil weren’t needing that loan. Why couldn’t he have borrowed directly from the bank, instead of crippling her this way? Three heifers due Thursday by shipment from Tom Groady’s place. Groady must wait, now that Phil had horned in for this loan. Foolish of her to have mentioned Phil’s loan to Winslow. Winslow hated the perpetual financial cross currents. And tomorrow Stevey. Oh, Stevey, how could you? All these weeks of reassurance about him, and now the secret terror lifting its head again. Oh, Stevey! She wanted to cry. She wanted Winslow to hold out his arms that she might creep into them. Instead, her arms were held out to him as he lay there asleep with his head on the pillow of her shoulder.

But good, at least, to feel up there in the room under the rafters the somehow reliable little old nub of Davey.

His being there, absurdly enough, gave a stability to the large white night that was spinning tomorrow relentlessly toward.

The room was so bright. It’s shininess finally hypnotized her to sleep.

* * * * *

How bright! Davey waking into it, leaped up with a sense of broad daylight. It was still only moonlight, except that the old fellow, with his slightly swollen cheek, had moved entirely out of the window. Davey, in his flannelette night-drawers that fastened about the waist with large bone buttons, sitting up in bed, gouged his eyes with his fists. Sense of awakening to something not right. What if Mother had forgotten! What if they had let the fire in the range go out. The ewe with the blue eyes and a black slit down their middle.

By day and to the routine doings of people about, there had even been a wrench about it. But now, in the still white drown of a moonlit three-o’clock-of-a-morning, what had seemed fairly all right by day, was dreadfully all wrong.

The little old thing in its blanket beside the stove had pulled at his finger as if it had been the teat of a mother lamb. That little old thing had looked up so and trusted Davey, sitting up there in his cotton-flannel night-drawers, with the moonlight flooding over him, and Davey had not gone back. But Bek had wanted him. That made it hard. Being wanted by two people not in the same place. Ewe-lamb wasn’t really a person, but the ewe wanted, just the same. And Bek was so big. In a world full of big things, Bek was almost the biggest. Only Davey and the ewe were small. And the ewe was smaller than Davey, and the ewe trusted David.

Up through the window there was only a slant of sky, the color of a grape. Cold. Terribly clear. If one could run home and back. Bek needn’t know. The ewe-lamb had pulled at your finger so!

How cold it was! The cutting cold of a March that comes raw. It made David shiver as he drew on his pants and almost with the same gesture snapped down the little suspenders over his flesh. There was no time for shoes and stockings, besides, shoes squeaked. In the _Book of General Information_ on his mother’s kitchen shelf, from which Trina could laboriously read, you took the squeak out of shoes by standing them in a half inch of water overnight. “I know how to take the squeak out of shoe-es. I know how to take the squeak out of my shoes.” It helped to chant foolishly, against a rising tide of fear. One leg over the sill. Two.

Many a time he had slid the galvanized rain spout that led from Bek’s second-story room down into a black-mouthed barrel beside the porch. From the third story, it was another and steeper matter. Ouch! His body made a soft rush going down and the snag of tin that he struck took a bit of the flesh too. Almost the only sounds, that tiny rush and tiny tear, in this great white night that slept with one eye blazing open. It was almost like a sun, that lopsided moon. It made the shadows short and grotesque and a little frightening.

Something made a neighing sound that caused Davey to crouch for a moment beside the rain-barrel. He knew that neigh. It was Flora, the right gray mare of Bek’s huge plow-team. Except that in the white night, the curious inverted noonday, it smote him with the strange terror of unreality. The sound that by day made the world seem small and friendly, was by night a thin cry of the mystery of all beasts.

Out across the pasture, toward the creek, there were almost no shadows. Just the greenish grayness and the light-drenched silence. It made Davey’s heart shy back so that he plunged his hands into his pockets, and once out of earshot of the house, set up whistling. A pretentious kind of whistling, mostly breath.

How good it was, even with scare at the pit of you, to be going to the ewe-lamb, and then back to Bek, too. All that you had to do if you had to choose between doing two things, was to do both of them.

It wasn’t fair to quit the ewe. It wasn’t fair to quit Bek. Now you weren’t quitting either of them.

Sometimes something crackled and made him scurry.

There was a song Jessup was always singing as he mended harness in the barn.

Ole Black Joe. Ole Black Joe.

There was something out there! Out there where the ghostly pale meadows ran into the grape-colored sky. There was something. A cow?

“I’m coming, I’m coming,
For my head is bending low;
I hear their gentle voices calling,
‘Old Black Joe!’”

Bek’s cows slept in rows of long, clean stalls. Jessup’s cow? But Jessup had no cow. Tarkington’s stray cow? Nobody’s cow was that tall! It was hard to continue going toward it, with the tongue a stiff thing in one’s mouth, and the throat so dry it would not swallow.

“Ole Black Joe.” You couldn’t sing with a throat that was parched with terror. You only squeaked like something rusty, “Ole Black Joe....”

Here, now, was the creek to be crossed. At night, somehow, it became a terrifying, bottomless divide, that by day trilled with water that showed the stones it ran over and slid past the brilliant flanks of minnows.

It was hard not to cry, and most difficult of all not to run back. That something on the horizon, that object too tall to be a cow, was coming toward him! Splash! The water came running up about the legs, greedily. Sucking in a way it never did during the day. Pulling downward in a way that terrified. Plunge, plunge went David’s knees, so that he came out drenched to the waist, this time, shivering. And there was the thing now almost upon him.

“Bek! Henry! Mother! Go way, you. Big Thing!” sobbed Davey, and began to cry, and back toward the creek. “Go way,” screamed Davey and because to really turn back was unthinkable, threw up his arm across his eyes. Henry would not be afraid. Nor Bek. Mother might. If Mother might be afraid, it was not wrong to be afraid. Sur-ren-der, in the histories Henry read from, meant something like afraid. No. Lee surrendered. There was a colored picture of his surrendering in Henry’s book, called _General Lee_. Lee surrendered. But that wasn’t that kind of being afraid. Of just a thing. A thing in the moonlight. One didn’t surrender to things in the moonlight.

“Go way, you!” screamed Dave, and batted his eyes and plunged forward, so that suddenly the thing swung into outline. An outline that suddenly sent him limp as a bag, of relief.

The thing was a threshing-machine. Many a time his bare legs had kicked its flanks. He gave it a punch as he passed. Corn runts began in rows now, brittle against his feet, and then a bit of fallow land with the turned earth in frozen little peaks that bit against his soles. Jessup’s place came up over a ridge, huddling for all the world like an old hen in her shoulders. That must be Jessup’s old rooster Cheetie, who would never sleep under roof, perched on top of the hen-house like a wart against the sky.

Dave’s six-year-old world, moonlit, flowing there under the feel of his toes. Its reassuring familiarity warmed him clear into his being, like a toddy going down when he had a cold. Lickity-split! He ran and spun the fields back from under him. The gnarled old veteran fields lashed by March that seemed to be resting from their day-by-day burden of the toiling of the men who tilled their faces.

They smelled deeply. Known smells that you could rub between your fingers in a nub of dirt. That was part of the warmth. The great sleeping world that milled and tilled so by day, asleep and docile, with its great bosom swept with moonlight.

When you were no longer frightened, and sick with the impulse of surrender, it was good to be spinning through their March starkness on that mission, between the ewe-lamb who needed you, and Bek who wanted you.

The kitchen window opened from the outside, so that just by shinnying up a tin water-spout, balancing tiptoe on the sill, and shoving down the upper pane by the ends of your straining fingers, in you were! It was dark inside, not even a red circle showed around the stove lid. Mother _had_ forgotten! Trina had failed! No, Mother hadn’t forgotten. It was just her way of thinking that with the little iota of red coals over in the corner, there would be enough heat for the ewe. The nickel-plated lifter in the stove-lid, you could raise noiselessly and place on one end of the range. That threw the kitchen into faint glow. Just a handful of red coals, supposed to be enough for one ewe.

The kitchen in the House on Sycamore Street was the oldest room in the house. Full of sags. Sags that might almost have been scoured in. Two white-pine wood tables that sagged and smelled perpetually cool and sudsy. Mathilda ground into them with scrub-brush in grand semicircular smears. A scrubbed floor that sagged. A safe with a perforated-tin front, that sagged. Even the sheet of metal around the range, scoured tin that shone, sagged. A scrubbed, scoured, spotless kitchen, with everything turned to the wall, nights. And there, in a chip basket beside the range, in its blanket, tiny thing, the ewe-lamb. With its snout thrust up.[10]

There was milk in the pantry in a five-gallon pail. It was about the same height as David. That made it difficult to tilt. The bottom made a great clanging sound as it left the floor. What if it should awaken Mother or Father? Or Henry, whose room was over the pantry, and who, winter and summer, slept with his cot drawn up to the window and his pillow on the sill so that his head was out-of-doors.

It was easier to find a dipper, stealthily, to save clatter, scoop down into the pail and heat the bit of milk. Over the sink, so that he had to climb, was the bottle, with the rubber nipple.

Funny ewe-lamb. Without opening its eyes, it sucked it all down, in gurgles. Grateful, sleepy darling gurgles. The pulling against the rubber nipple. It was like the thing that made the creek move. And the lilac-bush to bloom. And worms to ooze up in the lower pasture after rain. Gosh. Little thing. Little old thing. In a world of big things, it was the littlest old thing.... “Getty back there. To bed. ’Nuff, I said. Getty back! ’Night, you!”

Scampering back, up hillock, down hillock, lickety-split, over the fallen tree-trunk that spanned a small ditch, up hill, down, around, splash!—the already wet trousers sopping in more water—zither—through cinder-paths. In less than twenty-five minutes, the return was accomplished.

It was deliciously good to be in bed again under the quilt that was gay with rabbits’ ears, and with the moonlight, now receding, leaving enormous dark splotches in the room. Good, except that almost before he could sigh out with the satisfaction of it, plomp! sleep was a bottomless pit into which he had walked, open eyed.

Not so Henry, who, up in his window, cold pipe lax on his lips, had seen Davey come and Davey go. Such a strangely beautiful steel-blue night as this would not let a body sleep, for pondering and pondering on a bit of everything and nothing in particular.

FOOTNOTES:

[10] I think we had the most beautiful kitchen in the world in the House on Sycamore Street. Old Trina used to tell us how the Welsh love their kitchens. Normandy is filled with quaint, curtained, shining kitchens after every woman’s heart. The kitchen plays no mean part as the social center in the entire history of civilization. To the Dutch and the Danes, it is still literally the nucleus of the home.

Our kitchen was that. Father originally built a house of one room. A kitchen-living-bedroom. It ran, of course, the width and length of the building. A long, low room, with oak rafters and an open fireplace with a spit. Later, when the original room was surrounded and surmounted by more rooms, the enormous fireplace was fashioned into a bricked-in range. And what a range! It had a hot breath that warmed through the fine thick walls. It could roar with a draught the like of which I have never seen since. In winter, even after the house had grown to proportions sufficient to comfortably house a family of five youngsters, that range attracted us like a great flame all the little moths. We toasted corn over its red caves. Baked yams and marshmallows in its fierce oven. Dried our snow-clogged clothing before its Sahara breath. Usually, there was a baby lamb or an ailing calf or a cat with a leg in a splint in a chip basket beside this astonishingly maternal stove.

It was a more beautiful kitchen than Washington Irving’s. It had mullioned windows that opened outward. In summer, they were grown over with columbine, that had to be kept clipped in order to allow opening them. There were two long white-pine tables in our kitchen, big enough to seat eight. On a bench, beside one, was a wooden bucket, with a dipper gourd, filled with the coolest cistern-water in the county. A second bucket was filled with well-water. Softer, for cooking. How well I recall the festoons of peppers. The hearth-broom made out of the left wing of a rooster. The great crocks of the various greases my mother rendered from goose and hen and parts of the hog. There was a wooden box in one of the window-sills stocked with twists of newspaper. Firelighters. A rifle, sans barrel, and with a broken cock, said to have belonged to Daniel Beinville, hung over the door.

My mother’s pleasant mania for starched ruffles asserted itself everywhere. Along the shelves of the safe. Along the muslin curtains in the sweet old mullioned windows. We used to tease her about these ruffles. Yes, there was a God Bless Our Home sampler over the cupboard door, and a small white ruffle along the shelf that bore it. And a clock, mahogany, with a nosegay painted on its glass door. This clock may be seen in the American Institute in Baltimore. Every Schuyler of us has reason to remember this kitchen with affection.

_Chapter Six_

It was one of those days like Christmas or Washington’s Birthday, or Father’s birthday, or Fourth of July, or April Fool. One of those particularly nice days with an underlying current of events to it.

First, Stevey was coming home from Agricultural. “For good,” Claire had said and kissed Davey square on the lips and hugged him until his cap came off. Then there was the something pending about Henry. Henry, it seemed, could have had celluloid buttons, with his picture on, that you wore on the visor of your cap. “Vote for Henry Schuyler.”

Phil was coming in on the four-twenty-eight, too, and Clara from St. Louis, but this time without Sam or the children.

But it meant meeting three trains practically at a scoop, because they all arrived within three hours. The Old Gentleman never missed being the first to welcome home a Schuyler.

Phil’s wife Rita always declared that her father-in-law’s basket phaeton, a dirty affair much maligned by the family, which you could see by craning your neck, as the Springfield train drew into Centralia, was as much a part of the landscape as the Capitol dome was to Washington.

The family was given to exchanging amused persiflage with one another, and suggesting to the Old Gentleman, from time to time, that he had better will over the phaeton to the State Museum as a relic of pre-Civil-War transportation.

The Old Gentleman lived under a barrage of winks and nods between his children. He moved calmly among them, oftentimes mimicking their very gestures with his sly old eyes.

David liked meeting trains with his father. They swooped in magnificent, whizzing reality from the world that lay flat and inanimate in words against the pages of Henry’s books. Trains dashed into Centralia depot that must have come from Gettysburg where Lincoln made the speech. And from the shores of the Delaware that Washington crossed. Why, there was a railroad called the Chesapeake and Ohio. Chesapeake! Captain Lawrence cried “Don’t give up the ship” on board the _Chesapeake_. There was a picture of the frigate _Chesapeake_, in colors, in one of Henry’s books.

Yes, it was fine meeting trains. And the depot, a rather grimy, small, red-brick affair, was filled with that intangible and tickling odor of travel. The smell of leather and coal-smoke and pot-bellied stove, red-hot. The baggage and shipping rooms, stacked with crates and bales, trunks and milk-cans and egg-cartons and plow-shares and dynamos and pumps and bicycles boarded up for travel along with shipments of Centralia’s not inconsiderable exportations of hardware from the Tools Works, were jammed with the further interest of reading labels. And addresses. Braunson Hardware Company, Terre Haute, Indiana. Mr. Silas Dikey, Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Firbers Mill, Trenton, New Jersey. United States Shipping Company, West Street, New York. It made one tingle with a sense of the outside world. Alton, Missouri. Vesey Street, New York.

Bob Fenton, the baggage-master, who had one eye and a black-cloth flap for the other, gave David gummed labels, which could be spat upon and pasted against all sorts of surfaces. Fragile. Hold. Live Stock. Eggs. Baltimore and Ohio. Farmers Shipping Union. Glass. This Side Up.

There was sure to be talk as easy as the jangle of change in a pocket, around the depot. Talk that ran like this:

“Hi, Schuyler! Got them two red heifers up at Seely’s place if you’n’ Miss Bek want to drive over tomorrow ’n’ have a look. Hi, Schuyler, who’s coming home today? Hi, trade you that youngster o’ yourn for a red calf. Hi, Schuyler, see that new breed of hogs Lederman is showing up t’fair? White belly-bands. Look good. Wal, sir, see where they’re mentioning Henry hereabouts for District Attorney. He’s got my vote.”

A vote was something you couldn’t see. People kept talking about them and offering to give them, but nothing ever seemed to change hands. A vote was something that was not something in your hand. Just the same, if Henry wanted them, he could have them. Henry, who had a head that was almost the shape of the bottom of a foot and a bald, shiny spot where hair should have been, but hair that grew down the sides of his temples into two oblongs on the sides of his cheeks, where hair should not have been, and the very nicest eyes in the world that smiled and did things that most people did with their mouths; it was highly desirable that Henry should have all the votes in the world.

Even on the way to the depot, rumbling along in the Old Gentleman’s phaeton, the way was strewn, from the sidewalk and from passing vehicles.

“Hi, Mr. Schuyler. See to it that boy of yourn runs this time. The state needs his kind. Hi. Howdy. Hi. Somebody acomin’ home, I take it?”

The Schuylers were rallying for conclave all right. It was fun rumbling up to the depot with the Old Gentleman. It was in the days before his self-importance had shrunk to a kernel. Was in the days when the dirty old phaeton was only a badge of his unassailable well-being like a rich man’s shabby hat.

Down Second Street toward the depot was the most familiar ride in the world. When Davey was five, and the Old Gentleman dozed at the reins, not infrequent with him, the small boy held them importantly. Not but what every mare that the Old Gentleman ever drove knew its somnolent, unguarded way through the streets of Centralia. Even when the automobile had practically nosed out horse traffic, the Old Gentleman’s mare and phaeton had a sort of right of way.

There was a flat building going up on Second Street. The first in town. A square, two-story, two-family affair of concrete. A “St. Louis flat.” The Old Gentleman could never pass it without clucking his disgust.

Further along, though, the street relapsed. The Blue Bird Lunch Room. The Red Trunk Dry Goods Company. Binswanger’s Hardware. Hot Lunch. The White Kitchen. Gents’ Furnishings. Buddy’s Cut-Rate Drug Store. Co-Operative Mill Supply Company.

Beulah Kohn, who wore her left leg in a brace from meningitis, leaned as usual across the picket fence of the dirt-colored frame house where Mrs. Kohn kept a rooming house for mill workers.

“Hi, Mr. Schuyler!”

“Howdy, Beulah! Come out here and shake hands.”

“Now, Mr. Schuyler! ... you’ll hurt!” But out she came limping, while the mare drew up, just as if this event did not take place every time the Old Gentleman passed Beulah Kohn’s home. The Old Gentleman reserved his trick, handshake for the very old, the very young, and the ailing.

You extended your hand. He took it gingerly by the tips of the fore and little fingers, and then, with his free hand, came down whack across the wrist of his victim, causing the bones to make a cracking sound. The Old Gentleman’s delight in this was unfailing. Sometimes children cried. Then he plied them with licorice. Beulah knew his licorice-pocket, into which she dove immediately following this habitual chastisement.

Rattly old phaeton. You could jump in and out while it was moving, which David did all the way along.

Second Avenue, as it approached the depot, was myriad with interest.

“What does ‘Katy Flier’ mean, Father?”

“Katy flies, I reckon.”

“B and O,” began Davey, bursting for no apparent reason, as another sign presented itself to his amiable gaze, into loud cacophony, and beginning to direct an imaginary orchestra from standing position in the phaeton, as he faced Jenny’s unexcited tail, “Bawleymore and O-high-O! B and O. Yip! Yip!”

The Old Gentleman never minded. Sometimes David climbed up his flank as he drove, balancing on his shoulders and shouting aloud as the little panorama of his thoughts came tumbling.

The Old Gentleman never flecked an eye, or for that matter, heeded.

The train tracks cut through Centralia like a diagonal, bisecting a rhomboid. Their grime kept the chestnut trees along Sycamore Street gray. They grazed the red flank of the Five and Ten on High Street by one foot. They skirted the edge of the Old Gentleman’s South Pasture just remotely enough to have netted him not a penny when the railroad was out franchise-buying.

It rushed into town like the proverbial lion.

It tore out of town like a howling hyena. Never was the somnolistic tendency of a community more ruthlessly split to smithereens by the bangs, the bleats, the bells, the puffings, and the backings of steam-engines, than Centralia with the railroad trains across its very face, as it were.

Siren-shrieks and plumes of smoke lay on its dead of night. Fee, fie, foe, fum, snorted and rampaged one engine after another at the red flank of the Five and Ten. Freight engines backed-and-forthed up and down the center of Maple Street, baa-ing, moo-ing, and grunting with cattle and freight cars. Fee, fie, foe, fum, I’ll blow and I’ll blow ’til I blow your house down. Where Maple Street intersected Second Street, the railway’s gates were almost always down, Buick and Ford delivery-wagons, farm-teams, buggies, roadsters and family-cars waiting, and often, to save time, backing down and making détour around the viaduct-way.

“Stop, Look and Listen” signs criss-crossed the streets of Centralia. The local Democratic and Republican factions both had a Grade Crossing Abolition plank. Nothing happened.

Centralia smelled with the railroad tracks that entered and intersected her, and erected white crosses upon the scene of every grade-crossing casualty.

Driving along Second Street, not only the Old Gentleman could detect the first remote halloo of the incoming passenger train, but up went old mare Jenny’s uncurried ears that were the shape of the perpetual corner tied into the Old Gentleman’s handkerchief, and jerk went the basket phaeton that was as full of creaks as of years.

Centralia met its incoming trains with a line of short-snouted family-sedans and open Fords; occasionally the Milliken seven-passenger Cadillac that belonged to Emma’s father-in-law, or the Howey Pierce-Arrow, mixed in. They stood in motley line-up before a row of what had once been hitching-posts.

The Old Gentleman’s phaeton and the yellow lorry from Dr. Spaeth’s Sanatorium were usually the only relics of a horse-age. They waited side by side in a little brick clearing opposite, where there were no hitching-posts, and their horses wound necks.

Jenny knew her place all right, even when the Old Gentleman dozed, edging herself and phaeton in beside the lorry, or where the lorry usually stood. When David was along, even when he was so small that a shake of Jenny’s neck jerked him forward by the reins, he drove her quite grandly into the station, clucking at a great rate.

The Old Gentleman was not dozing today as he drove in. There was a constant screwing noise he made with his tongue, spurring old Jenny to uneven lopes; and above his square, white beard that hung like a curtain, the humorous blue eyes, twenty-five years too young for their setting, kept radiating. Phil’s wife was right. He was as indubitably a part of the landscape as the rick-rack outline of the depot against the stubble of corn-fields. In his hip-high reefer, jouncing along in the old phaeton which creaked around him like a rusty ocean, he was an institution for you! He was a silhouette unto himself, in reefer, round cap bound in astrakhan, slightly mangy, in puttees, string-wound where the tapes gave out.

“Old Gentleman’s quite a character,” someone or other was forever saying.

“Hi! Howdy! Hi!” called the Old Gentleman, driving up.

“Hi! Hi! Ho! Howdy!” said the loiterers.

Almost simultaneously, Emma Milliken drove up in her father-in-law’s car, a slick, night-blue affair of shine and snout, with a nickle-plated Discobolus doing a lunge off the hood. Her mother-in-law, Annie Milliken, occupied the rear seat, a sparse, iron-gray woman, with a palsy-affliction that kept her head like a flower on a stalk in a stiff breeze. Beside her, quite a beauty after her blonde fashion, sat Claire, in a brown beaver toque and brown beaver on her broad-cloth coat. Lalite and Kenneth Chipman, children of Donald Chipman, barrister, next-door neighbors of the Milliken seniors, were tucked into the collapsible chairs for the ride down to the depot. They made a carful.

“Mother Milliken, there’s Gramp and Davey.”

Mrs. Milliken leaned her palsied head forward. “So it is. Your father hadn’t ought to come down looking like that, Emma. ’Tain’t right. I don’t see Mathilda.”

Emma wound down the glass window-pane of the car.

“Oh, dear! Your Gramp _does_ look a sight, Claire. How could he come down to meet Phil and Stevey looking like that! Gramaw didn’t see him leave the house looking like that, I’ll wager. Fath-er!”

The Old Gentleman shambled over, Davey off to the baggage-room, and Jenny standing without so much as the reins wound around her whip stock.

“Father, come here. You do look a sight, dear.”

The Old Gentleman had never ceased to regard Emma, his sixth-born, as a feast for even his sly old parental eyes. As a child, he had carted her among the farmers and had even been known to stand her on the counter of Fred Firpo’s bar and appraise her yellow, little-girl loveliness.

“She’s a good one, boys. My little Emma she’s a beauty! I’m right? Give her a pretzel, Joe.”

Although it was Emma’s daughter Claire who was now considered the family beauty, Emma herself still possessed a certain cabbage-rose prettiness; and despite the fact that it had always been said that Emma Schuyler did not know how to wear clothes, and was a natural-born “slop,” she had realized enough to all her life affect velvet toques to match her eyes, and when she remembered even now, she used a gayly-painted rolling pin which hung in her bathroom, to ward off the pads of fragrant, cream-colored flesh that threatened her shoulders and upper arms.

“Father, Mother Milliken’s right. You _are_ a spectacle!”

It was rather futile of her to lean out of the car, tilt back his head, and yank at his reefer-collar, particularly since little Lalite Chipman was already at his reefer-pocket.

“Licorice, Gramp!”

“Please, Father, don’t give her any. She gets her teeth all full of the horrid stuff.”

As if Emma herself, Emma’s Claire, and virtually every youngster of the last four decades in Centralia had not, at one time or another, had their milk-teeth blacked from the yield of those pockets.

“Gramp,” shouted Kenneth, who was nine and had the straight bangs of a medieval saint, “give me a pretzel.”

“Guess which pocket,” cried the old man and struck his flanks.

“Both,” shouted the boy, and made a dive.

That tickled the Old Gentleman, who dove into a third pocket for more lunch-counter loot.

“Please, Father, Mrs. Chipman won’t like it. There’s always tobacco in that pocket. You’ll make Kenneth sick. Isn’t Mother coming down to meet Phil?”

“Yes, Bek is driving her down.”

At just that moment, Bek drove around from the shipping-platform in a Ford, with a hooded front and a delivery-body, onto which was loaded a crate of Chester White hogs that she had just picked up from the freight room. Seated beside her, in a little bonnet with a jet spray and a cape with fitted shoulders, was Mathilda, her hands clasped nervously over an empty shopping-bag of shiny black oilcloth.

David leaped the running-board before she brought the car to a short stop beside the Milliken Cadillac.

“Bek, I c’n bound Ohio. Ohio is bounded on the west——”

“Davey, don’t hop a going car!”

“—by Indiana on the——”

“Look at Puppa!” cried Mathilda weakly and threw up both mittened hands in a faint gesture, “And I laid out his brown pants on the bed.”

Emma and Claire had climbed out of their car.

“It’s a shame, Mother!” cried Emma. “I declare, Father, I wouldn’t come down to meet a load of heifers looking like that. How do you think Phil will feel stepping down off the express, with you looking this way to meet him. There’s always plenty of Springfield and even Chicago business-men on that train. And Stevey coming too. I declare, Mother, I’d burn that phaeton, if I were you.”

“Puppa,” said Mathilda, a little tiredly, and a little helplessly, “I laid everything out ... your cuffs with the buttons in——”

“Poppycock!” said Rebekka. “He looks all right. Let him be.”

The Old Gentleman made one of his sly, screwing noises with his tongue and poked an elbow into his wife’s hip bone, where the cape neatly covered it.

“I’ll dress up, ’Tilda, when we have an Attorney General in the family. I’m right?”

“Does Henry know, Father,” said Rebekka, “that you sounded the ram’s-horn for conclave about his candidacy? He’ll be a mad hatter.”

“What he don’t know don’t hurt him until he sits himself down to supper,” said the Old Gentleman, and went off chuckling, with David anchored to his pocket, burrowing for a pretzel, which had looked good to him as he saw Kenneth nibble bites out of his.