Over Paradise Ridge Part 5

"Oh, Eph, are they really Grandmother Nelson's?" I exclaimed, with such radiance that it reflected from Eph's polished black face.

"Yes'm, and they is too good to be throwed away on playing gyarden or sich," he answered, with feeling.

"Eph," I answered, with almost a choke in my voice, "they'll be--be sacred to me. Oh, thank you for telling me."

"Go on, child! you sh.o.r.e is ole mistis herself, with your pretty words to push along your high-haided ways," he answered me while he gave Redwheels an affectionate shove as I started down the street.

I didn't spend much time down-town, but I stopped at the post-office and got my mail to read while I waited at the drug-store for Mr. Simmons to put up some of every kind of flower and vegetable grandmother mentioned--if it was still in stock. He offered me a book of instructions, which I declined. I meant to garden by ancestral tendencies. And while I waited I looked over my letters. The volume from Peter I put aside to enjoy in a leisure hour, as I felt sure that I knew what was in it; but I opened another thin one that looked as if it might be from him, if he had written it in an unpoetic mood. It was from Judge Vandyne, and I then understood Peter's sudden determination to come down and live with Sam for a time, though I don't believe Peter knew the real reason of it himself. The judge is a great diplomat, and knows just when and to whom to be frank. We have always understood each other from the first vacation I spent with Mabel, and I value his confidence highly.

He wrote:

No man can get a hold on the complex problems of this day and especially the next, who doesn't go at them with at least some sunburn on his neck and a few h.o.r.n.y spots on his hands. Put Pete at it, you and Sam. Your description of Sam's habitation and vocation in letter to Mabel made me feel twenty-five again. I never had the real thing; but Peter shall. Ease him along. If he kicks over the traces let me know. When are you coming North again? Soon, I hope,

Your aged admirer, PETER VANDYNE, Sr.

_P.S._--Thought I'd better say that Dr. Herbrick doesn't like Peter's weight--one sixteen. You understand.

I wonder what the paternal Keats was like. I don't remember, and I must look him up to see. It's funny how st.u.r.dy-oak fathers can have ferny-mimosa sons. Mothers can stand producing poets, but it is hard on fathers. I felt that I must help out Judge Vandyne, and with that resolve I headed Redwheels out along Providence Road.

As I had told mother, the sobs and tears of the April day had been wilfully misleading demonstrations, for by ten o'clock the whole face of nature wore a sun-sweetened smile that was positively entrancing. The young April world seemed to spring dripping from a bath that glistened all over with crystal water gems. Winter is staid and dignified and grand with its stark trees and mantle of brown earth, and summer is glowing and glorious; but very young spring is so sappy and curly and yellow and green and lavender that you take it to heart and let it nestle there to suck its pink apple-blow thumb, and curl up its young sprout toes sheltered away from the cold that sets it back and the sun that forces it to break bud. Sometimes it stays with you a day and sometimes a week and a day, but you can't hold it back. You can just be thankful that you had it. I was.

But if the five miles of Providence Road had been a delight, as Redwheels and I ran along it, the dirt lane that led to The Briers was an intoxicating joy. The wet earth, the drenched cedars, the oak buds, the spongy moss, the reddening blackberry-bushes, and the sprouting grain, all mingled in a queer creation odor that went right through the pores of my skin into my vitals and made me feel as strong as an ox, or rather, as Sam's new mule. I caught a glimpse of that mule through a vista before I came out of the lane, plodding along before Sam and the plow with a great splendid lurch of a gait that threw the black dirt as high as Sam's knees as he plunged along at the plow-handles. I stopped the car at the cedar-pole gate of Eden and stood up and shouted at the top of my lungs, but Sam plowed on heroically, with never a glance in my direction, and I just stood and looked at him and the mule. Seeing a man plow cuts right down to the bottom of a woman's nature, because I suppose it looks so--so fundamental. At least that is about the way I felt though it was much more so until I remembered the blistered heel and shouted again, this time in alarm. At my cry of distress Sam suddenly looked up and jerked the mule's head so that he, too, stopped and regarded me. They looked like wary jungle things that had been belled from the thicket, but for just a second; then Sam threw his line around the plow-handle, thus. .h.i.tching the mule to himself, and came running across the field to me, as lightly as the blue jay skimmed from over my head into the branches of another cedar in answer to the same twit I had heard the day I first came out into the habitation of the birds. The pleasure of seeing Sam run to me was almost as keen as the pain of seeing him run away from me, but it was mitigated by my alarm over the poor sore foot.

"Gracious sakes, Betty! is that a mud-scow you came out in?" he asked, as he started to take my hand in his, which was brown with mud, and ended by rubbing his cheek in my palm. That seemed to be about the only member he had kept clean enough for the greeting.

"Aren't you hurting your heel plowing like that, Sam?" I asked, anxiously.

"Heel--what heel? Oh, that's all right. I haven't heard from it since you tucked it away in the cream Tuesday night. I have cold-bucketed myself every morning, standing on one leg with it up on the wash-bench so as not to wake it up. Come on up to the house. I'll walk, because I'm too muddy to get in with you in your sedan-chair."

"No; you go back to the plowing and I'll go and unload and begin my work," I answered, with positive heroism. I wanted to get out and go and be introduced to the mule, but I came to Sam to be not a clinging vine, but a competent garden-hoe to him.

"All right," said Sam, in the nice way he has of acquiescing in all my serious moods until they pa.s.s. "I'll be through after about three more rounds and then I'll come and help you. Say, Bettykin, what do you think of that for good land?" And as he looked back at the great square of black earth he had upturned, Sam's eyes flecked with the blue sky and snapped with enthusiasm.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE BYRD WAS ATTIRED IN MINIATURES OF SAM'S OVERALLS]

"It looks good enough to eat," I answered, with a queer dirt enthusiasm rising in me that I had never even heard of one's having before.

"Yes, and you will eat it in about four months' time in the form of roasting ears," answered Sam, smacking his lips, which had a streak of the mud delicacy across them at right angles. "But go on up and tell Mammy to put your name in her dinner-pot and buy the Byrd to get you anything you need or want to the half of our kingdom. I'll be there in ten shakes of the mule's tail."

The road that leads from the cedar-pole gate through Sam's wilderness up to the farm-house curves in and out and around the hill past as many lovely spots as my enthusiasm could endure. Halfway up, there is a glimpse past a gray old tree with crimson thorns, of the valley with Old Harpeth looming opposite. Further on a rocky old road leads down around a clump of age-distorted cedar-trees to the moss-greened stone spring-house, from which the water gurgles and pours past Sam's huge earthern crocks of milk. Over it all broods the low white house on the plateau, from under whose wings I found one small blue chicken running and cheeping wildly for a ride up the hill.

The Byrd was, as usual, attired in miniatures of Sam's overalls, and his red mop stood on ends all over his head, while his freckles shone forth resplendently from the excitement of my arrival.

"Say, Betty, what you think? Old b.u.t.tercup found a calf out in the woods and it has got a white nose and two spots. Sam wanted to name it Chubb for the doctor that saved its life 'fore it got borned, but I said ladies first, and I calls it Betty. You can let it lick your fingers if Sam milks on 'em first. And Dominick have hatched 'fore the white hen--eleven, and one what Sam calls a half chicken, because he don't see how it is black when the eggs was bought thoroughbreds; but Mammy says because they is Yankee eggs. Come see all everything."

Sam's barn is an old tumble-down collection of sheds and the most lovely place I ever got into. It is running over with new-born life, and you can get an armful of first one variety and then another. I liked the collie puppies best, but the Byrd was crazy about the little fawn calf which old b.u.t.tercup is so proud of that she switches her tail in the greatest complacency. He was just showing me how to tempt her little white nose with a wisp of hay that she was learning to eat, and I was luxuriating with one new-born wriggler in my arms and two yellow-down puff-b.a.l.l.s in my hand, when Sam and the mule came up from the field.

"My, it's great to have a nice family party like this to plow for!" he said, as he led the mule into his stall and poured down his oats out of a bucket the Byrd ran to bring him. "Any news from Petie, Bettykin?"

"I've got a letter from Peter that I haven't read, but one from Judge Vandyne that I have. Here it is--read it," and I held the letter open for Sam to read over my shoulder.

"Read it to me, Betty; I'm too dirty to come that near you," he said, as he took the cob pipe out of his pocket and prepared to light up while the Byrd scampered to the house to hurry Mammy's dinner.

"You're not exactly dirty, Sam," I answered, surveying him with a satisfiedly critical eye. "You only look and smell like the earth and the sky and the barn and--and--"

"Just call it cosmic, Betty, and let it go at that," he answered, as he reached out and roughed my hair over my eyes with the long hickory switch with which he had been merely threatening the mule all day. "Go on, read me the judge's doc.u.ment on the subject of Peter while we wait for Mammy's dinner cluck."

As he had asked me to do, I read it all, slowly, while my heart, that had been climbing like a squirrel to the tops of the trees, began to burrow down in the reverse manner of a chipmunk. I could see Sam's spirits doing likewise.

"The judge gets under Pete's skin and peels the fat off him," said Sam, slowly, with sadness in his deep, strong voice. "I've just got to build some sort of a poet's corner to put him in, so he can come on down from Philadelphia from the opening of the spring Academy. He will have burned himself out by then, and he'll be so weak we can feed him out of a bottle."

"And it's his play, too, Sam," I answered, despondently. "He's beginning on the third act, and just reading it all and suggesting in spots is making me thin. It is all the terrible heroic struggle of the poor hero now and he doesn't seem to let the heroine help him a bit. Oh, Sam, if Peter were to fail with this play after Farrington has encouraged him I don't know what might happen! I'm sorry you ever mentioned Keats to me.

I dream about him at night. I adored him when I was at The Manor, and so did Mabel," and my lips quivered so I had to turn against the harness hanging on the wall against which I drooped.

"Keats or Peter?" asked Sam as he pressed his whip across my shoulders in comforting little licks because his hand was too muddy to pat me.

"Both," I sniffed.

"Don't," said Sam, with cheering command in his voice. "We are too late to help Keats, and plenty early to pull Pete out of his divine fire.

Let's go get some good grub from Mammy so we can plant the garden before sundown, and stake out the poet's corner, too. I didn't have the money to hire the plowing done, but I am almost through for the present; and I can whirl in now and get in shape for Petie's rescue in no time."

"It's popped its skin with stuffing, and Mammy says come on while the 'taters stands up stiff," announced the Byrd, half-way up the path from the house to the barn.

"He's talking about a duckling, but let's hope Peter can be mentioned in the same terms in the near future," said Sam, as he drove the fleet Byrd and me before him with the switch, in a scamper to Mammy and food.

"Yes," said Sam, as he stood an hour later in the middle of the plot under the south window, which spread out in the sun like a great black lake, smooth from his repeated plowing and harrowing, "that is the richest bit of land at The Briers or in Benton County. It will bring some posies for you, Bettykin."

"I'm not going to plant just flowers in it, Sam," I answered in a tone that admitted of no discussion, "Do you remember the part of grandmother's book that told what she made off of the southern half-acre of hers the year everything failed? I've got it right here, and I'm going to follow it," and as I spoke I hugged the ancestral garden to my breast with one arm, while I held the old gra.s.s basket I had made for Sam in my infancy in the other hand, with all my town seeds in it.

"Oh, there's plenty of garden-land all over the place, Betty. Come on and sow the posies."

"There's not plenty of onion and beet and lettuce and okra and tomato and celery land right at the well, Sam, that Byrd and I can carry water from," I answered, positively. "Is this land mine or yours?"

"Yours."

"Wait. I forgot!" I exclaimed in sudden, embarra.s.sed consternation. "Are you renting this land to me, Sam?"

"Renting it to you, Betty?" For a second Sam's eyes blazed in a way I hadn't seen since the time I didn't want to take all of the one fish we caught after a hot day's fishing out at Little Harpeth at our tenth and fourteenth years. Then, suddenly, a queer expression came up and drowned the anger in his eyes and twitched at the comers of his mouth until I recognized it as humor.

"I believe it would be better for us both to crop it on shares, as you are going to put in foodstuffs, too. I am cropping on onions with old Charlie Wade, down the road, and with sugar-beets with Hen Bates. In this case it would be about fair for you to furnish the seeds and I the land, all labor that each of us puts in to be charged against the gross receipts. I'll just enter you in my time-book now. Let's see--it is one-fifteen," and as he spoke Sam took out, first his watch, and then a muddy little book that had time-tables and all sorts of almanac things in it.

For a second I was as mad as I was when he handed me the two-inch fish and ordered me to take it in for the cook to have for my supper; but in a second I saw just what he had done to me and I didn't dare remonstrate.

"How much do I get an hour?" I asked, with the greatest dignity, as I threw the seed-basket and my hat on the ground and picked up my rusty old hoe, ready for business.

"I charge myself at twelve and a half cents. Are you worth about--about fifteen?" he asked in a business-like tone of voice, but I saw a twitch at the corners of his mouth that made me boil with rage.

"Put me down at six and a quarter for the present," I answered, haughtily.

"Down she goes," he answered, as he thus minimized me with his pencil and put the book back in his pocket. "Now, where do you want me to heave in the lilacs so as to get the two corners of the garden to guide the rows by? Shall they run north and south or east and west? It really doesn't make much difference."