Vandemark's Folly Part 33

"You ain't married, yet, be you?" Rowena asked.

"I should say not! Me married!"

We sat then for quite a while without saying anything. Rowena sat smoothing out a calico ap.r.o.n she had on. Finally she said: "Am I wearin'

anything you ever seen before, Jake?"

Looking her over carefully I saw nothing I could remember. I told her so at last, and said she was dressed awful nice now and looked lots better than I had ever seen her looking. My own rags were sorely on my mind just then.

"This apern," said she, spreading it out for me to see, "is the back breadth of that dress you give me back along the road. I'm goin' to keep it always. I hain't goin' to wear it ever only when you come to see me!"

This was getting embarra.s.sing; but her next remarks made it even more so.

"How old be you, Jake?" she asked.

"I'll be twenty," said I, "the twenty-seventh day of next July."

"We're jest of an age," she ventured--and after a long pause, "I should think it would be awful hard work to keep the house and do your work ou'-doors."

I told her that it was, and spread the grief on very thick, thinking all the time of the very precious way in which I hoped sometime to end my loneliness, and give myself a house companion: in the very back of my head even going over the plans I had made for an "upright" to the house, with a bedroom, a spare room, a dining-room and a sitting-room in it.

"Well," said she, "for a smart, nice-lookin' young man, like you, it's your own fault--"

5

And then there was a tap on the door. Rowena started, turned toward the door, made as if to get up to open it, and then sat down again, her face first flushed and then pale. Her mother opened the door, and there stood Buckner Gowdy. He came in, with his easy politeness and sat down among us like an old friend.

"I didn't know you had company," said he; "but I now remember that Mr.

Vandemark is an old friend."

He always called me Mr. Vandemark, because, I guess, I owned seven hundred and twenty acres of land, and was not all mortgaged up. Virginia told me afterward, that where they came from people who owned so much land were the quality, and were treated more respectfully than the poor whites.

"Yes, sir," said Old Man Fewkes, "Jake is the onliest real old friend we got hereabouts."

Gowdy took me into the conversation, but he sat where he could look at Rowena. He seemed to be carrying on a silent conversation with her with his eyes, while he talked to me, looking into my eyes a good deal too, and stooping toward me in that intimate, confidential way of his. When I told him that I thought he was not getting as much done as he ought to with all the hands he had, he said n.o.body knew it better than he; but could I suggest any remedy? Now on the ca.n.a.l, we had to organize our work, and I had seen a lot of public labor done between Albany and Buffalo; so I had my ideas as to people's getting in one another's way.

I told him that his men were working in too large gangs, as I looked at it. Where he had twenty breaking-teams following one another, if one broke his plow, or ran on a boulder and had to file it, the whole gang had to stop for him, or run around him and make a balk in the work. I thought it would be better to have not more than two or three breaking on the same "land," and then they would not be so much in one another's way, and wouldn't have so good an excuse for stopping and having jumping matches and boxing bouts and story-tellings. Then their work could be compared, they could be made to work against one another in a kind of compet.i.tion, and the bad ones could be weeded out. It would be the same with corn-plowing, and some other work.

"There's sense in that, sir," he said, after thinking it over. "You see, Mr. Vandemark, my days of honest industry are of very recent date. Thank you for the suggestion, sir."

I got up to leave. Rowena's father was pulling off his boots, which with us then, was the signal that he was going to bed. If I stayed after that alone with Rowena, it was a sign that we were to "sit up"--and that was courtship. I was slowly getting it through my wool that it looked as if Buckner Gowdy and Rowena were going to sit up, when I heard her giving me back my good evening, and at the same time, behind his back, motioning me to my chair, and shaking her head. And while I was backing and filling, the door' opened and a woman appeared on the step.

"Ah, Mrs. Mobley," said Buck, "anything for me?"

She was very nicely dressed for a woman busy about her own home, but the thing that I remembered was her pallor. Her hair was light brown and curled about her forehead, and her eyes were very blue, like china. And there was a quiver in her like that which you see in the little quaking-asps in the slews--something pitiful, and sort of forsaken. Her face was not so fresh as it had been a few years before, and on her cheeks were little red spots, like those you see in the cheeks of people with consumption--or a pot of face-paint. She was tall and strong-looking, and somewhat portly, and quite masterful in her ways as a general rule; but that night she seemed to be in a sort of pleading mood, not a bit like herself when dealing with ordinary people. She was not ordinary, as could be sensed by even an ignorant b.u.mpkin like me.

She had more education than most, and had been taught better manners and brought up with more style.

"Mr. Mobley requested me to say," she said, her voice low and quivery, bowing to all of us in a very polite and elegant way, "that he has something of importance to say to you, Mr. Buckner."

"I'm greatly obliged to you, Miss Flora," said he. "Let me go to him with you. Good evening, Rowena. Good evening, Mr. Vandemark. I shall certainly think over what you have been so kind as to suggest."

He bowed to Rowena, nodded to me, and we all three left together. As we separated I heard him talking to her in what in any other man I should have called a loving tone; but there was a sort of warm note in the way he spoke to me, too; and still more of that vital vibration I have mentioned before, when he spoke to Rowena. But he did not take my arm, as he did that of the imposing "Miss Flora" as he called Mrs. Mobley, to whom he was "Mr. Buckner." I could see them walking very, very close together, even in the darkness.

6

When I found that Mr. Mobley was over at the barracks, and had been there playing euchre with the boys since supper, I wondered. I wondered why Mrs. Mobley had come with an excuse to get Mr. Gowdy away from me--or after a couple of weeks' thinking, was it from Rowena? Yet Mr.

Gowdy did see Mr. Mobley that evening; for the next morning Mobley put me over a gang of eight breaking-teams, "To handle the way you told Mr.

Gowdy last night," he said.

He was a tall, limber-jointed, whipped-looking man with a red nose and a long stringy mustache, and always wore his vest open clear down to the lower b.u.t.ton which was fastened, and thus his whole waistcoat was thrown open so as to show a tobacco-stained shirt bosom. The Missourian whom I had noticed at table said that this was done so that the wearer of the vest could reach his dirk handily. But Mobley was the last man I should have suspected of carrying a dirk, or if he did packing the gumption to use it.

I made good with my gang, and did a third more than any other eight teams on the place. Before I went away, Gowdy talked around as if he wanted me for overseer; but I couldn't decide without studying a long time, to take a step so far from what I had been thinking of, and he dropped the subject. I did not like the way things were going there. The men were out of control. They despised Mobley, and said sly things about his using his wife to keep him in a job. One day I told Magnus Thorkelson about Mrs. Mobley's coming and taking Gowdy away from the little cabin of the Fewkes family.

"She do dat," said he, "a dozen times ven Ay bane dar. She alvays bane chasing Buck Gowdy."

"Well," I said, "who be you chasing, coming over here a dozen times when I didn't know it? That's why you bought that mustang pony, eh?"

"I yust go over," said he, squirming, "to help Surajah fix up his machines--his inwentions. Sometimes I take over de wyolin to play for Rowena. Dat bane all, Yake."

When we went home, I with money enough for some new clothes, with what I had by me, we caught a ride with one of Judge Stone's teams to a point two-thirds of the way to Monterey Centre, and came into our own places from the south. We were both glad to see long black streaks of new breaking in the section of which my eighty was a part, and two new shanties belonging to new neighbors. This would bring cultivated land up to my south line, and I afterward found out, take the whole half of the section into the new farms. The Zenas Smith family had moved on to the southwest quarter, and the J.P. Roebuck family on the southeast.

The Smiths and Roebucks still live in the township--as good neighbors as a man need ask for; except that I never could agree with Zenas Smith about line fences, when the time came for them. Once we almost came to the spite-fence stage; but our children were such friends that they kept us from that disgrace. But Mrs. Smith was as good a woman in sickness as I ever saw.

George Story was working for the Smiths, and was almost one of the family. He finally took the northeast quarter of the section, and lives there yet. David Roebuck, J.P.'s son, when he came of age acquired the eighty next to me, and thus completed the settlement of the section.

Most of the Roebuck girls and boys became school-teachers, and they had the biggest mail of anybody in the neighborhood. I never saw Dave Roebuck spelled down but once, and that was by his sister Theodosia, called "Dose" for short.

We went to both houses and called as we went home so as to begin neighboring with them. Magnus stopped at his own place, and I went on, wondering if the Frost boy I had engaged to look out for my stock while I was gone had been true to his trust. I saw that there had been a lot of redding up done; and as I came around the corner of the house I heard sounds within as of some one at the housework. The door was open, and as I peeped in, there, of all people, was Grandma Thornd.y.k.e, putting the last touches to a general house-cleaning.

The floor was newly scrubbed, the dishes set away in order, and all clean. The churn was always clean inwardly, but she had scoured it on the outside. There was a geranium in bloom in the window, which was as clear as gla.s.s could be made. The bed was made up on a different plan from mine, and the place where I hung my clothes had a flowered cotton curtain in front of it, run on cords. It looked very beautiful to me; and my pride in it rose as I gazed upon it. Grandma Thornd.y.k.e had not heard me coming, and gave way to her feelings as she looked at her handiwork in her manner of talking to herself.

"That's more like a human habitation!" she e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, standing with her hands on her hips. "I snum! It looked like a hooraw's nest!"

"It looks a lot better," I agreed. She was startled at seeing me, for she expected to get away, with Henderson L. Burns as he came back from his shooting of golden plover, all unknown to me. But we had quite a visit all by ourselves. She said quite pointedly, that somebody had been keeping her family in milk and b.u.t.ter and vegetables and chickens and eggs all winter, and she was doing a mighty little in repayment. Her eyes were full of tears as she said this.

"He who gives to the poor," said she, "lends to the Lord; and I don't know any place where the Lord's credit has been lower than in Monterey Centre for the past winter. Now le'me show you where things are, Jacob."

I got all the news of the town from her. Several people had moved in; but others had gone back east to live with their own or their wives'

folks. Elder Thornd.y.k.e, encouraged by the favor of "their two rich men,"

had laid plans for building a church, and she believed their fellowship would be blessed with greater growth if they had a consecrated building instead of the hall where the secret societies met. On asking who their two richest men were she mentioned Governor Wade, of course, and Mr. Gowdy.

"Mr. Gowdy," she ventured, "is in a very hopeful, frame of mind. He is, I fervently hope and believe, under conviction of sin. We pray for him without ceasing. He would be a tower of strength, with his ability and his wealth, if he should, under G.o.d, turn to the right and seek salvation. If you and he could both come into the fold, Jacob, it would be a wonderful thing for the elder and me."

"I guess I'd ruther come in alone!" I said.

"You mustn't be uncharitable," said she. "Mr. Gowdy is still hopeful of getting that property for Virginia Royall. He is working on that all the time. He came to get her signature to a paper this week. He is a changed man, Jacob--a changed man."

I can't tell how thunderstruck I was by this bit of news. Somehow, I could not see Buck Gowdy as a member of the congregation of the saints--I had seen too much of him lately: and yet, I could not now remember any of the old hardness he had shown in every action back along the Ridge Road in 1855. But Virginia must have changed toward him, or she would not have allowed him to approach her with any kind of paper, not even a patent of n.o.bility.

But I rallied from my daze and took Grandma Thornd.y.k.e to see my live stock--birds and beasts. I discovered that she had been a farmer's daughter in New England, and I began to suspect that it relieved her to drop into New England farm talk, like "I snum!" and "Hooraw's nest." I never saw a hooraw's nest, but she seemed to think it a very disorderly place.