Old Crow Part 47

So, Raven thought, she didn't want to see either of them. She was tired of them, of him with his stiff withdrawals and d.i.c.k's young puppyhood.

He ran upstairs, s.n.a.t.c.hed some old riding breeches out of a closet, put them on and, without a word to Charlotte, went to the barn. But her eye was on him and she called out of the shed door:

"You took your saddle with you. Don't you know you did? There's nothin'

but your father's hangin' there, old as the hills."

Raven did not answer, or even turn his head. He went into the harness room, found the old saddle hanging in its place, led out Nellie, surprised at being expected to leave her oats, saddled her and rode away. He was angry, with Nan, with all the childish trouble of the business, and--as two neighbors agreed, seeing him gallop past--rode like the devil, yet not coming upon Nan and Jerry until they were at the station platform. Nan saw him first. She was gloriously glad, waving her hand and laughing out. Jerry stood with mouth open, silent but incurious, and Raven dismounted and threw him the reins.

"Hitch her behind," he said. "I'll go back with you. Got something extra to blanket her?"

He came up to Nan, and they took hands and went into the waiting room together. It was steaming hot from the monster stove and they retreated again to the platform.

"Come out and walk," said Raven, "up to Pine Grove. You've got an hour, you little simpleton. What did you run away for?"

The station is in a cl.u.s.ter of houses, awake early every morning when the milk goes away. But the road across the track leads up a little rise into Pine Grove, where church and sociables have picnics, the merrier for the neighborliness of the few trains. Raven and Nan climbed the rise almost at a run, and when they reached the shadowing pines, looked in at the pure s.p.a.ces, remembering, for the first time, the snow would bar them out. They must keep to the road.

"Forty-eight minutes," said Raven. "We'll walk twenty and then cut back.

Come on."

They walked a little, raced a little, talked--not much--and laughed a great deal. Raven was in the highest spirits, sure he was sending her off happy, since she would go. Never afterward could they remember what they talked about: only it seemed a fortunate moment stolen from the penury of years. Again he took out his watch.

"Time's up!" he said, and they went back.

The station was alive with its small activities. Jerry was walking Nellie up and down. The train came in and when Nan left him Raven remembered they had not said good-by. There was a kind of permanence in it; the moment had cemented something into bonds. When she had gone he and Jerry got into the pung and drove away leading Nellie, and then Raven remembered he had not breakfasted. They talked horse all the way home, and when d.i.c.k, appearing on the porch, called to them:

"What you got Nellie for?"

Raven answered cheerfully:

"I took a notion."

Then he and d.i.c.k went in to breakfast, and Nan's name was not mentioned.

Charlotte, Raven concluded, had told the boy she was gone. He seemed to detect in d.i.c.k some watchful kindness toward himself, the responsible care attendants manifest toward the incapable. d.i.c.k was, he concluded, bent on therapeutic measures.

x.x.x

Tira, from the forenoon of Tenney's accident, entered on uneventful days. He lowered over his helplessness; he was angry with it. But the anger was not against her, and she could bear it. For the first time she saw his activities fettered, and the mother in her answered. She ventured no outspoken sympathy, but he was dependent on her and in that, much as it chafed him, she found solace. He was chained to his chair, his wounded foot on a rest, and he had no diversions. Tira sometimes wondered what he was thinking when he sat looking out at the road, smooth with the grinding of sleds and slipping of sleighs. Once she brought the Bible and laid it before him on a stand. If its exposition was so precious to him at evening meeting, there would be comfort in it now. But he glanced at her in what looked like a quick suspicion--did it mean he thought she meant to taunt him with the unreality of his faith?--and, after it had lain there a forenoon untouched, he said to her uneasily:

"You put that away."

She took it back to its place on the parlor stand under Grandsir Tenney's hatchet-faced photograph, wondering in her heart why it was not what she had heard them read of G.o.d: "A very present help in time of trouble." If you knew it was so, Tira reasoned, you never had to fret yourself any more. And if that place was waiting for you--the good place they talked about--even a long lifetime was not too much to face before you got to it. After she had laid the book down and turned away from it to cross the ordered stillness of the room, she stopped, with a sudden hungry impulse, and opened it at random. "Let not your heart be troubled," she read, and closed it again, quickly lest the next words qualify so rich a message. It might say further on that you were not to be troubled if you fulfilled the law and gospel, and that, she knew, was only fair. But in her dearth she wanted no sacerdotal bargaining. She needed the heavens to rain down plenty while she held out her hands to take. When she entered the kitchen again Tenney, glancing round at her, saw the change in her look. She was flushed, her mouth was tremulous, and her eyes humid. He wondered, out of his ready suspicion, whether she had seen anyone going by.

"What's the matter?" he asked sharply.

"Nothin's the matter," she answered. But her hands were trembling. She was like Mary when she had seen her Lord.

"Who's gone by?" he persisted. "I didn't hear no bells."

"No," said Tira. "I don't believe anybody's gone by, except the choppers. It's a proper nice day for them."

The child woke and cried from the bedroom and she brought him out in the pink sweetness of his sleep, got the little tub and began to give him his bath by the fire. As she bent over him and dried his smooth soft flesh, the pa.s.sion of motherhood rose in her and she forgot he was "not right," and sang a low, formless song. When he was bathed she stood him naked on her knee, and it was then she found Tenney including them both in the livid look she knew. And she saw what he saw. The child's hair was more like shining copper every day, his small nose had the tiniest curve. By whatever trick of nature, which is implacable, he was not like her, he was not like Tenney. He was a message from her bitter, ignorant past. Her strong shoulders began to shake and her hands that steadied the child shook, too, so that he gave a little whimper at finding himself insecure.

"Isr'el," she broke out, "before G.o.d!"

"Well," said he, in the snarl she had heard from him at those times when his devil quite got the better of him, "what? What you got to tell?"

"It ain't so," she said, her voice broken by her chattering lips.

"Before G.o.d, it ain't so."

"So ye know what I mean," he jeered, and even at the moment she had compa.s.sion for him, reading his unhappy mind and knowing he hurt himself unspeakably. "Ye know, or ye wouldn't say 'tain't so."

Words of his own sprang up in her memory like witnesses against him, half phrases embodying his suspicion of her, wild accusations when, like a drunken man, he had let himself go. But this he did not remember. She knew that. Shut up in his cell of impeccable righteousness, he believed he had dealt justly with her and no more. She would not taunt him with his words. She had a compa.s.sion for him that reached into his future of possible remorse. Tira saw, and had seen for a long time, a catastrophe, a "wind-up" before them both. Sometimes it looked like a wall that brought them up short, sometimes a height they were both destined to fall from and a gulf ready to receive them, and she meant, if she could, to save him from the recognition of the wall as something he had built or the gulf as something he had dug. As she sat looking at him now, wide-eyed, imploring, and the child trod her knee impatiently, a man went past the window to the barn. It was Jerry, gone to fodder the cattle, and Jerry brought Raven to her mind who, if he was obeying her by absence, was none the less protecting her. The trouble of her face vanished and she drew a quick breath Tenney was quick to note.

"Who's that?" he asked her sharply, turning in his chair to command the other window.

"Jerry," she said. Her heart stilled, and she began to dress the child, with her mother's deftness. "He comes a little early to fodder, 'fore he does his own."

"I dunno," said Tenney, irritably because he had to wear out his spleen, "why you can't fodder the cows when anybody's laid up. There's women that do it all the time if their folks are called away."

"Why, I could," said Tira, with a clear glance at him, "only he won't let me."

"What's he got to do with it," said Tenney, in surprise. "Won't let ye?

Jerry Slate won't let ye? Jerry ain't one to meddle nor make. I guess if you told him 'twas your place to do it an' you'd ruther stan' up to it, he'd have no more to say."

The blood came again to her face. She had almost, she felt, spoken Raven's name, and a swift intuition told her she must bury even the thought of it.

"There ain't," she said, "two nicer folks in this township than Charlotte an' Jerry, nor two that's readier to turn a hand."

Tenney was silent, and Jerry did the ch.o.r.es and went home. Sometimes he came to the house to ask how Tenney was getting on, but to-day he had to get back to his own work.

This was perhaps a week after Tenney's accident, when he was getting impatient over inaction, and next day the doctor came and p.r.o.nounced the wound healing well. If Tenney had a crutch, he might try it carefully, and Tenney remembered Grandsir had used a crutch when he broke his hip at eighty-two, and healed miraculously though tradition p.r.o.nounced him done for. It had come to the house among a load of outlawed relics, too identified with the meager family life to be thrown away, and Tira found it "up attic" and brought it down to him. She waited, in a sympathetic interest, to see him try it, and when he did and swung across the kitchen with an angry capability, she caught her breath, in a new fear of him. The crutch looked less a prop to his insufficiency than like a weapon. He could reach her with it. He could reach the child. And then she began to see how his helplessness had built up in her a false security. He was on the way to strength again, and the security was gone.

The first use he made of the crutch was to swing to the door and tell Jerry he need not come again. Tira was glad to hear him add:

"Much obleeged. I'll do the same for you."

Afterward she went to the barn with him and fed and watered while he supplemented her and winced when he hurt himself, making strange sounds under his breath that might have been oaths from a less religious man.

And Tira was the more patient because the doctor had told her the foot would always trouble him.

It was two days after he had begun to use his crutches, that Tira, after doing the noon ch.o.r.es in the barn and house, sat by the front window in her afternoon dress, a tidy housewife. The baby was having his nap and Tenney, at the other window, his crutch against the chair beside him, was opening the weekly paper that morning come. Tira looked up from her mending to glance about her sitting-room, and, for an instant, she felt to the full the pride of a clean hearth, a shining floor, the sun lying in pale wintry kindliness across the yellow paint and braided rugs. If she had led a gypsy life, it was not because her starved heart yearned the less tumultuously for order and the seemliness of walls. For the moment, she felt safe. The child was not in evidence, innocently calling the eye to his mysterious golden beauty. Tenney had been less irascible all the forenoon because he had acquired a fortunate control over his foot, and (she thought it shyly, yet believingly) the Lord Jesus Christ was with them. Disregarded or not, in these moments of wild disordered living, He was there.

She heard sleigh-bells, and looked out. Tenney glanced up over his gla.s.ses, an unwonted look, curiously like benevolence. She liked that look. It always gave her a thrill of faith that sometime, by a miracle, it might linger for more than the one instant of a changed visual focus.

She caught it now, with that responsive hope of its continuance, and knew, for the first time, what it recalled to her: the old minister beyond Mountain Brook looked over his gla.s.ses in precisely that way, kindly, gentle, and forgiving. But mingled with the remembrance, came the nearing of the bells and the shock to her heart in the man they heralded: Eugene Martin, driving fast, and staring at the house. The horse was moving with a fine jaunty action when Martin pulled him up, held him a quieting minute, and got out. He paused an instant, his hand on the robe, as if uncertain how long he should stay, seemed to decide against covering the horse and ran up the path. He must have seen Tira and Tenney, each at a window, but his eyes were on the woman only. Half way along the path, he took off his hat and waved it at her in exaggerated salute, as if bidding her rejoice that he had come. In the same instant he seemed, for the first time, to see Tenney. His eyes rested on him with a surprise excellently feigned. He replaced his hat, turned about like a man blankly disconcerted and went back down the path, with the decisive tread of one who cannot take himself off too soon. He stepped into the sleigh and, drawing the robe about him, drove off, the horse answering buoyantly. Tira sat, the stillest thing out of a wood where stalking danger lurks, her eyes on her sewing. Tenney was staring at her; she knew it, and could not raise her lids. Often she failed to meet his glance because she so shrank, not from his conviction of her guilt, but the fear of seeing what she must remember in blank night watches, to shudder over. For things were different at night, things you could bear quite well by day. Now he spoke, with a restrained certainty she trembled at. He had drawn his conclusions; nothing she could possibly say would alter them.

"Comin' in, wa'n't he?" the a.s.sured voice asked her. "See me, didn't he, an' give it up?"