Dust Part 6

"Just this--your mother had her ideas and I have mine. I am going to raise Billy in my own way." But, for weeks thereafter she managed with an almost miraculous adroitness to have him asleep at meal times.

At seven months, Billy was the most adorable, smiling, cuddly baby imaginable, with dimples, four teeth and a tantalizing hint of curl in his soft, surprisingly thick, fawn-colored hair. Already, it was quite evident that he had his mother's sensitive, affectionate nature. If only his father had picked him up, occasionally, had talked to him now and then, he scarcely could have resisted the little fellow's crowing, sweet-tempered, responsive charm, but resentment at the annoyance of his presence was now excessive. For the present, Martin's only concern in his son consisted in seeing to it that his effacement was as nearly complete as possible.

The long-impending clash came one evening after a sultry, dusty day when Rose, occupied with a large washing in the morning and heavy work in the dairy in the afternoon, realized with compunction that never had she come so near to neglecting her boy. Tired and hot from fretting, he had been slow about going to sleep, and was just dozing off, when Martin came in, worn out and hungry.

"Isn't supper ready yet?"

"All but frying the sausage," Rose answered, achieving a pleasant tone in spite of her jadedness. "He's almost turning the corner--hear his little sleepy song? Sit down and cool off. I'll have it ready by the time you and the boys are washed."

Under its thick coat of tan, Martin's face went white. "I've had enough of this," he announced levelly. "You'll put him down and fry that meat."

"Wait just a minute," she coaxed; "he'll be off for the night and if you wake him, he'll cry and get all worked up."

"You heard what I said." His tone was vibrant with determination. "How am I going to keep hired men if you treat them like this? When they come in to eat, they want to find their food on the table."

"This doesn't often happen any more and they know, good and well, I make it up to them in other ways," returned Rose truthfully.

For answer, he crossed over to her quickly, reached down and took the baby from her.

"What are you going to do with him?" she demanded, a-tremble with rage and a sense of impotent helplessness, as, avoiding her quick movement, Martin went into the bedroom.

"Let him go to sleep as other children do, while you finish getting supper. Do you want to make a sissy of him?"

"A lot you care what he becomes!" she flashed, conflicting impulses contending for mastery, as Billy, now thoroughly awake and seeing his mother, began to cry, pleading to her with big blue eyes and out-stretched arms to take him. She started forward, but Martin stepped between herself and the crib.

"Martin Wade, let me pa.s.s. He's mine."

"It isn't going to hurt him to cry. He does it often enough."

"If you had a really cross baby around you'd know how good and reasonable Billy is," she flamed, torn by the little sobs.

"You get out to that kitchen," he ordered, more openly angry than Rose had ever seen him. "I've had enough of this talk, do you hear, and enough of this way of doing. Don't you set foot in here again till supper's over. I've had quite enough, too, of jumping up and down to wait on myself."

Confusedly, Rose thought of her countless hours of lost sleep, her even yet unrecovered strength, the enormous readjustment of her own life in her sincere efforts to do her best by the whole household, her joyous acceptance of all the perpetual self-denial her new duties to Billy necessitated. In comparison, the inconveniences to which Martin had been put seemed trifling. The occasional delays, and the unusual bother of stepping to the stove, now and then, to pour himself and the men a hot cup of coffee--this was their sum total. And how injured he really felt!

The injustice of it left her speechless. Nails biting into her hands in her struggle for self-control, she left the room. With a slam of the door behind him, Martin followed her.

Blindly she strove for reason. Billy would simply cry himself to sleep--it was bad for his whole nervous system, but it would not actually make him sick. What a chaos must be in that little heart! His mother had failed him for the first time in his life. It was cruel, the way Martin had forced her to this, and as she listened, for the next half hour, to the m.u.f.fled sound of Billy's crying and saw how impervious to it Martin was, she knew that never again could things be the same between her husband and herself.

But when, supper over, she found the corners of the rosebud mouth still pathetically down and Billy's breath still quivering in long gasps, she gathered the snuggly body to her and vowed in little broken love-words that from now on his father should have no further opportunities for discipline. Knowing him as she did, she should have trained the baby in the first place to go to sleep alone, should have denied herself those added sweet moments. After this she would be on her guard, forestall Martin, do tenderly what he would do harshly. Never again should her boy be made to suffer through any such mistaken selfishness of hers.

And though, after a while, the importance of this episode shrank to its true proportions, she never forgot or broke this promise. It would have been literally impossible for her to touch Billy, even when he was naughtiest and most exasperating, with other than infinite love, but she had an even firmness of her own. As sensitive as herself, adoring her to the point of worship, he was easily punished by her displeasure or five minutes of enforced quiet on a chair. The note of dread in her voice as she pleaded: "Hush, oh, hush, Billy, be good; quick, darling, papa's coming," was always effective. By ceaseless vigilance and indefatigable patience, she evaded further open rupture until the boy was three years old.

His shrieks had brought both his father and herself flying to the hog barn to find him dancing up and down as, frightened and aghast, he vainly attempted to beat off old Dorcas, a mammoth sow, from one of her day-old litter on which, having crushed it by accident, she was now quite deliberately feasting.

"G.o.d Almighty!" stormed Martin, hastily putting the little pigs back into the next pen. "Who let them in to her? That's her old trick."

"I opened the door," confessed Billy, troubled, frank eyes looking straight into his father's. "They were hungry; that one wanted her most." And, at the thought of the tragedy he had witnessed, he flung himself heartbroken into his mother's comforting arms.

"I'll whip you for this," said Martin sternly.

"Oh, please!" protested Rose, gathering the child closer. "Can't you see he's had a bitter enough lesson? His little heart is full."

"He's got to learn, once and for all, not to meddle with the stock. Come here."

"No! I won't have it. I'll see to it that he never does a thing like this again. He's too young to understand. He's never been struck in his life. You shan't."

Martin's cold blue eyes looked icily into his wife's blazing gray ones.

"Don't act like a fool. Suppose he had gotten in there himself, and had fallen down--do you think she'd have waited to kill him? Where'd he be now--like that?" and he pointed to the half-eaten carca.s.s.

Rose shuddered. There it was again--the same, familiar, disarming plausibility of Martin's, the old trick of making her seem to be the one in the wrong.

"I wish I had an acre for every good thrashing I got when I was a boy,"

he commented drily. "But in those days a father who demanded obedience wasn't considered a monster."

"If you only loved him, I wouldn't care," sobbed Rose. "I could stand it better to have you hit him in anger, but you're so hard, so cruel. You plan it all out so--how can you?"

Nevertheless, with a last convulsive hug and a broken "Mother can't help it, darling," she put Billy on his feet, her tormented heart wrung with bitterness as Martin took the clinging child from her and carried him away, hysterical and resisting.

"What else could I do?" she asked herself miserably, stabbed by the added fear that Billy might not forgive her. Could he understand how powerless she had been?

When once more the child was cuddled against her, she realized that in some mystical way there was a new bond between them, and as the days pa.s.sed, she discovered it was not so much the whipping, but the unnatural perfidy of Dorcas that had scarred his mind. With his own eyes he had seen a mother devour her baby. He woke from dreams of it at night. Even the sight of her in the pasture contentedly suckling the remaining nine did not rea.s.sure him. The modern methods of psychology were then, to such women as Rose, a sealed book, but love and intuition taught her to apply them.

"You see, Billy," she explained, "hogs are meant to eat meat like dogs or bears or tigers. But they can live on just grain and gra.s.s, and that is what most farmers make them do because there is so much more of it and it costs so much less. Some of them feed what is called tankage. If old Dorcas could have had some of that she probably would not have eaten the little pig. You mustn't blame her too much, for she was just famishing for flesh, the way you are, sometimes, for a drink of water, when you've been playing hard." Thus rationalized, the old sow's conduct lost some of its grewsomeness, and in time, of course, the shock of the whole experience was submerged under other and newer impressions, but always the remembrance of it floated near the surface of his consciousness, his first outstanding memory of his father and the farm.

Inheriting a splendid physique from both parents, at six little Bill was as tall as the average child of eight, well set up and st.u.r.dy, afraid of nothing on the place except Martin, who, resenting his att.i.tude, not unreasonably put the blame for it on his wife. "It's not what I do to him," he told her, "it's what you teach him to think I might do that makes him dislike me." To which Rose looked volumes, but made no reply.

Whatever the reason for the child's distrust, and honestly as he tried not to let it affect his feeling for his son, Martin found himself as much repelled by it as he had once been drawn to little Rose by her sweet faith and affection. Yet, in spite of the only too slightly veiled enmity between them, he was rather proud of the handsome lad and determined to give him a thorough stockman's and agriculturist's training. Some day he would run this farm, and Martin had put too much of his very blood into it not to make sure that the hands into which it would fall became competent. With almost impersonal approval he noticed the perfect co-ordination of the boy's muscles, his insatiable curiosity about machinery and his fondness for animals; all of which only made his p.r.o.nounced distaste for work just that much more aggravating. He was, his father decided contemptuously, a dreamer.

Martin reached this conclusion early in his son's life--Bill was nine--and he determined to grind the objectionable tendency out of him.

The youngster had a way of stopping for no reason whatever and just standing there. For all his iron self-control, it nearly drove the energetic man to violence. He would leave Bill in the barn to shovel the manure into the litter-carrier--a good fifteen-minute job; he would return in half an hour to find him sitting in the alleyway, staring down into his idle scoop.

"G.o.d Almighty!" Martin would explode. "How many times must I tell you to do a thing?"

The boy would look up slowly, like a frightened colt, expecting a blow, his non-resistance as angering as his indolence. Gazing at the enormous, imposing person who was his father, he would simply wait with wide open eyes--eyes that reminded Martin of a calf begging for a bucket of milk.

"I'm asking you! Answer when I speak. Have you lost the use of your tongue? What are you, anyway--a lump of jelly? Didn't I tell you to clean this barn? It's fly time and no wonder the cows suffer and slack up on their milk when there is a lazy bones like you around who won't even help haul away the manure."

"I was just a-goin' to."

"You should have been through long ago. What are you good for, is what I'd like to find out. You eat a big bellyful and what do you give in return? Do you expect to go through the world like this--having other people do your work for you? If this job isn't finished in fifteen minutes, I'll whip you."

Bill would work swiftly and painfully, for the carrier was high and hard for him to manipulate. But he would do his best, desperate over the threat, his whole nature rebelling, not so much at the task, as at the interruption of the pleasant stream of pictures which had been flowing so excitingly through his mind. Always it was like this--just when he was most blissfully happy, he was jerked back to some mean, dirty job by the stern, driving demands of his tireless father.

Without regard to the fact that harness is heavy, and a horse's back high, Martin would order him to hitch up. He was perfectly aware that it was too much for the child, but lack of affection, and a vague, extenuating belief that especially trying jobs developed one, made him merciless. The boy frequently boiled with rage, but he was so weaponless, so completely in his father's power--there was no escape from this tyranny. He knew he could not live without him; even his mother could not do that. His mother! What a sense of rest would come over him when he sat in her capacious lap, his head on her soft shoulder. With her cheek against his and her kind hand gently patting the back of his still chubby one, something hard in him always melted away.

"Why do I love you so, mama," he asked once, "and hate papa so?"

Mrs. Wade realized what was in his sore heart and hers ached for him, but she answered quietly: "You mustn't hate anybody, dear. You shouldn't."