Chapter VII

When they came into the farmyard night was falling. In the west the sky still showed bright and warm; and against this brilliant sky the hills were purple and deeper purple in the distance. In the valleys mists were rising and black pools of night were forming beneath these mists; and while Evered bore his wife’s body into the house and laid it on the bed in the spare room, these pools rose and rose until they topped the hills and overflowed the world with darkness. The air was still hot and heavy, as it had been all day; and the sultry sky which had intensified the heat of the sun served now to hide the stars. When it grew dark it was as dark as pitch. The blackness seemed tangible, as though a man might catch it in his hand.

Ruth stayed beside her sister; but John built a fire in the stove while Evered sat by in stony calm, and he made coffee and fried salt pork and boiled potatoes. There were cold biscuits which Mary Evered had made that morning, and doughnuts from the crock in the cellar. When the supper was ready he called Ruth; and she came. The most tragic thing about death is that it accomplishes so little. The dropping of man or woman into the pool of the infinite is no more than the dropping of a pebble into a brook. The surface of the pool is as calm, a little after, as it was before. Thus, now, save that Mary was not at the table, their supping together was as it had always been.

And after they had eaten they must go with the familiarity of long habit about their evening chores. Ruth washed the dishes; John and his father fed the beasts and milked the cows; and when they came in John turned the separator while Ruth attended to the milk and put away, afterward, the skim milk and the cream.

By that time two or three neighbors had come in, having heard of that which had come to pass. There was genuine sorrow in them, for Mary Evered had been a woman to be loved; but there was also the ugly curiosity native to the human mind; and there was speculation in each eye as they watched Evered and John and Ruth. They would discuss, for days to come, the bearing of each one of the three on that black night.

For Evered, the man was starkly silent, saying no word. He sat by the table, eyes before him, puffing his pipe. Ruth stayed by her sister as though some instinct of protection kept her there. John talked with those who came, told them a little. He did not mention Semler’s part in the tragedy. He said simply that the bull had broken loose; that Mary Evered was by the spring, where she liked to go; that the bull came upon her there.

They asked morbidly whether she was trampled and torn; and they seemed disappointed when he told them that she was not, that even the terrible red bull had seemed appalled at the thing which he had done. And through the evening others came and went, so that he had to say the same things over and over; and always Evered sat silently by the table, giving no heed when any man spoke to him; and Ruth, in the other room, kept guard above the body. The women went in there, some of them; but no men went in.

John had telephoned to Isaac Gorfinkle, whose business it was to prepare poor human clay for its return to earth again; and Gorfinkle came about midnight and put all save Ruth out of the room where the dead woman lay. Gorfinkle was a little, fussy man; a man who knew his doleful trade. Before day he and Ruth had done what needed doing; and Mary Evered lay in the varnished coffin he had brought. Her white hair and the sweet nobility of her countenance, serenely lying there, made those who looked forget the ugly splendor of Gorfinkle’s wares.

It was decided that she should be buried on the second day. On the day after her death many people came to the farm; and some came from curiosity, and some from sympathy, and some with an uncertain purpose in their minds.

These were the selectmen of the town--Lee Motley, chairman; and Enoch Thomas, of North Fraternity; and Old Man Varney. Motley, a sober man and a man of wisdom, was of Evered’s own generation; Enoch Thomas and Varney were years older. Old Varney had a son past thirty, whom to this day he thrashed with an ax stave when the spirit moved him, his big son good-naturedly accepting the outrage.

Thomas and Varney came to demand that Evered kill his red bull; and Motley put the case for them.

“We’ve talked it over,” he said. “Seem’s like the bull’s dangerous; like he ought to be killed. That’s what we’ve--what we’ve voted.”

Evered turned his heavy eyes from man to man; and Old Varney brandished his cane and called the bull a murdering beast, and bade Evered take his rifle and do the thing before their eyes. Evered’s countenance changed no whit; he looked from Varney to Thomas, who was silent, and from Thomas to Lee Motley.

“I’ll not kill the bull,” he said.

Before Motley could speak, Varney burst into abuse and insistent demand; and Evered let him talk. When the old man simmered to silence they waited for Evered to answer, but Evered held his tongue till Lee Motley asked, “Come, Evered, what do you say?”

“What I have said,” Evered told them.

“The town’ll see,” Old Varney shrilled, and shook his fist in Evered’s face. “The town’ll see whether a murdering brute like that is to range abroad. If you’ve not shame enough--your own wife, man--your own----” he wagged his head. “The town’ll see.”

Said Evered: “I’ll not take rifle to the bull; but if any man comes here to kill the beast, I’ll have use for that rifle of mine.”

Which fanned Varney to a fresh outbreak, till Evered flung abruptly toward him, and abruptly said, “Be still.”

So were they still; and Evered looked them in the eye, man by man, till he came to Motley; and then he said, “Motley, I thought there was more wisdom in you.”

“Aye,” cried Varney. “He’s as big a fool as you.”

And Motley said, “I voted against this, Evered. The bull’s yours, if you’re a mind to kill him. I’m not for making you. It’s your own affair, you mind. And--the ways of a bull are the ways of a bull. The brute’s not overmuch to be blamed.”

Evered nodded and turned his back on them; and after a time they went away. But when Evered went into the house he met Ruth, and the girl stopped him and asked him huskily, “You’re not going to kill that red beast?”

Evered hesitated; then he said, with something like apology in his tones, “No, Ruth.”

She began to tremble, and he saw that words were hot on her lips; and he lifted one hand in a placating gesture. She turned into the other room, and the door shut harshly at her back. Evered’s eyes rested on the door for a space, a curious questioning in them, a wistful light that was strange to see.

All that day Ruth was still, saying little. No word passed between her and Evered, and few words between her and John. But that night, when they were alone, John spoke to her in awkward comfort and endearment.

“Please, Ruthie,” he begged. “You’re breaking yourself. You’ll be sick. You must not be so hard.”

He put an arm about her, as though he would have kissed her; but the girl’s hands came up against his chest, and the girl’s eyes met his in a fury of horror and loathing, and she flung him away.

“Don’t! Don’t!” she cried in a voice that was like a scream. “Don’t ever! You--his son!”

John, inexpressibly hurt, yet understanding, left her alone; he told himself she was not to be blamed, with the agony of grief still scourging her.

One of the neighbor women came in that night to sit with Ruth; and Ruth slept a little through the night. John was early abed; he had had no sleep the night before, and he was tired. He sank fathoms deep in slumber; a slumber broken by fitful, unhappy dreams. His own grief for the woman who had been mother to him had been stifled, given no chance for expression, because he had fought to comfort Ruth and to ease his father. The reaction swept over him while he slept; he rested little.

Evered, about nine o’clock, went to the room he and his wife had shared for so many years. He had not, before this, been in the room since she was killed. Some reluctance had held him; he had shunned the spot. But now he was glad to be alone, and when he had shut the door he stood for a moment, looking all about, studying each familiar object, his nerves reacting to faint flicks of pain at the memories that were evoked.

He began to think of what the selectmen had said, of their urgency that he should kill the bull. And he sat down on the edge of the bed and remained there, not moving, for a long time. Once his eye fell on his belt hanging against the wall, with the heavy knife that he used in his butchering in its sheath. He reached out and took down the belt and drew the knife forth and held it in his hands, the same knife that had killed drunken Dave Riggs long ago. A powerful weapon, it would strike a blow like an ax; the handle of bone, the blade heavy and keen and strong. He balanced it between his fingers, and thought of how he had struck it into the neck of Zeke Pitkin’s bull, and how the bull had dropped in midlife and never stirred more. The knife fascinated him; he could not for a long time take his eyes away from it. At the last he reached out and thrust it into its sheath with something like a shudder, strange to see in so strong a man.

Then he undressed and got into bed, the bed he had shared with Mary Evered. He had blown out the lamp; the room was dark. There was a little current of air from the open window. And after a little Evered began to be as lonely as a boy for the first time away from home.

There is in every man, no matter how stern his exterior, a softer side. Sometimes he hides it from all the world; more often his wife gets now and then a glimpse of it. There was a side of Evered which only Mary Evered had known. And she had loved it. When they had come to bed together it always seemed to her that Evered was somehow gentler, kinder. He put away his harshness, as though it were a part he had felt called upon to play before men. The child in him, strong in most men, came to the surface. He was never a man overgiven to caresses, but when they were alone at night together, and he was weary, he would sometimes draw her arm beneath his head as a pillow or take her hand and lift it to rest upon his forehead, while she twined her fingers gently through his hair.

They used to talk together, sometimes far into the night; and though he might have used her bitterly through the day, with caustic tongue and hard, condemning eye, he was never unkind in these moments before they slept. A man the world outside had never seen. It was these nights together which had made life bearable for Mary Evered; and they had been dear to Evered too. How dreadful and appalling, then, was this, his first night alone.

Her shoulder was not there to cradle his sick and weary head; her gentle hand was not there to cool his brow. When he flung an arm across her pillow, where she used to lie, it embraced a gulf of emptiness that seemed immeasurably deep and terrible. After a little, faint perspiration came out upon the man’s forehead. He turned on his right side, in the posture that invited sleep; but at first sleep would not come. His limbs jerked and twitched; his eyelids would not close. He stared sightlessly into the dark. Outside in the night there were faint stirrings and scratchings and movings to and fro; and each one brought him more wide awake than the last. He got up and closed the window to shut them out, and it seemed to him the closed room was filled with her presence. When he lay down again he half fancied he felt her hand upon his hair, and he reached his own hand up to clasp and hold hers, as he had sometimes used to do; but his groping fingers found nothing, and came sickly away again.

How long he lay awake he could not know. When at last he dropped asleep the very act of surrender to sleep seemed to fetch him wide awake again. Waking thus he thought that he held his wife in his arms; he had often wakened in the past to find her there. But as his senses cleared he found that the thing which he held so tenderly against his side was only the pillow on which her head was used to lie.

The man’s nerves jangled and clashed; and he threw the pillow desperately away from him as though he were afraid of it. He sat up in bed; and his pulses pounded and beat till they hurt him like the blows of a hammer. There was no sleep in Evered.

He was still sitting thus, bolt upright, sick and torn and weary, when the gray dawn crept in at last through the window panes.