Chapter Twelve

The summer that Dave was seven was one of a drought; added climax of a late frost, and an absolutely unprecedented scourge of caterpillars had done for several acres of the Old Gentleman’s cabbages.

It was a crop that the old man by unusual arrangement had sold two weeks before the first seed of it was sown, on a several-hundred-dollar advance, to a commission company to whom his word was his bond.

It meant not only the loss of the crop, but the doling back, with interest, of the advance payment. In the end it was Bek who managed two hundred of the three hundred refund, Mark Milliken’s failure to meet a certain large note squeezing the Old Gentleman pretty terribly on cash. Then the forfeiture of the additional six hundred expectancy on that same crop put a crimp, so to speak, in the entire summer, so far as ready cash was concerned. Not that there was any crisis, it simply meant the old land-anomaly of all outgo and no income. Acres of potential values, but for one reason or another, without yield enough to pay their taxes.

It meant, with Mark Milliken’s and the Old Gentleman’s reciprocal habit of calling upon each other for loans of cash and land-collateral, that cash was pretty usually at low ebb. Often, indeed, for the Schuylers, at least, it meant an old story of fending off the little crisis of having to sell a parcel of land. The land-acquisitive Schuylers! They came by it honestly. In the Austrian Tyrol, generations of Schuylers had somehow managed to own an acre, even if the only other property-holding was a sow. Mathilda’s great-grandfather had owned an acre which was so meticulously tilled that it resembled a colored geometric drawing. That acre had passed immaculately from father to son. Mathilda Schuyler’s hands were still horny with her girlhood part in coaxing and tilling it.

The Old Gentleman’s battered safe, in one corner of the dining-room, and the drawers of his still-more-battered old desk beside it, and the stacks of deeds and notes, current and canceled, bore documentary evidence of the years and vitality that had been dedicated to trying to make real estate real, in terms of yield.

Bek’s love of land was ingrained. So was Phil’s. Twice in five years the family’s cash resources, scant beyond credulity, had been rallied around Phil’s love-of-land ventures, which ultimately were to make local history.[21]

This summer of fright, threat of hoof-and-mouth disease, and general money-tightness, Davey, to save an extra hand’s wage, was put to tending the South Pasture flocks during school vacation.

Long, slow, sun-drenched days, that vacation after his first year in public school, with the earth rippling under him as he lay flat against it until he could seem to feel it pushing softly, like a breathing flank. Days that moved so slowly from the east where they arrived pinkly, to the west where they departed redly, that they seemed to stand stock-still for hours during their middle, pouring into him their warmth, their hot lush smells. They had a taste, too, all their own, these motionless days.

Sometimes, when he rolled over on his stomach away from the light, as it became unendurably strong, and all of him seemed gathering the heat like a disk, the taste of the earth came crawling into his mouth.

The taste of the land rolling, billowing, and riding him along like a petal upon its current. The toes bit in. The nostrils breathed in. The body of the boy wiggled down—wiggled in—close to turf and earth.

At twelve o’clock, Trina, who wore a sunbonnet with a starched visor that buttoned on, came down to South Meadow with a tin pail of lunch. Good, square chunks of his mother’s bread, smeared with apple-butter. Strips of bacon and sometimes strips of the rind itself, tough enough to be chewed the afternoon through for the last squeeze of flavor.

The tussle with Teddy, as he bounded up from keeping tidy the edges of the flock, to fasten his teeth into that remnant of chewed-out rind, forelegs squatted, tail high, white-fanged, eyeballs bulging, ears laid! Then for the grand jerk! Gorgeously futile jerk. Teddy with his teeth sunk into the leathery morsel and snarls mixed up with his breathing, beginning to spin!

The boy and the dog. Teddy out on the horizontal. Sustained momentum. Terrific momentum. Spinning boy. Spinning dog. Riot of sunlit afternoon, with the dirty sheep grinding their teeth in a low thunder and nibbling their strange-eyed heads off.

They had no sense. Teddy was better at making them herd neatly than Grime, the eleven-year-old sheep-dog. All you had to do was to circle the flock once every hour or so to close them in a little tighter, Grime or Teddy yapping at the narrow ankles of any straggler, or Davey flecking at his flock with a peeled switch off a plane tree.

Otherwise, just hours and hours of his flesh close to flesh of earth. Lying face-up or on a slope against which the sun banged. When it rained, and the smells that had been baked into grass and tree-bole and leafage came out in cool breath, there was the hay-rick to burrow into, the sheep gathered pat as a mat beneath the spread of two maple trees that sort of linked arms.

There were books, too, which he concealed evenings in a little spring house down by the Tarkington hedge. Books off of Henry’s shelves. Sometimes, if a down-pour came along, or a quick, thick thunder shower, there was a scurrying of dogs and sheep and boy to cover of the hay-rick and interleafing maple trees, and the books remained out, usually face-up, and were drenched, and then, as they dried in a quick, repentant sun, warped.

There were books on Henry’s shelves twice their normal size. Volumes that bulged from the damp of the spring house or from hasty showers. Around the World in Eighty Days was as bedraggled-looking as something the cat might have dragged in. The Voyage of Magellan had a great blister on its cover; and the most exciting book in the world, that meant everything when Henry intoned it in his slow, careful voice, but meant so little when Dave tried to pick it out for himself, The Life of the Bee, had a great rent down its cloth binding. A combination of damp and Teddy’s teeth.

Henry never remonstrated as his shelves of books began to wave and careen and warp.

He used to plant himself before them first thing when he came home evenings, regard the new vacancies and inundations with a wide, slow smile lowering half of his face, so that his jaw hung over his cravat.

Curious relationship, when Davey was seven and Henry was four times that seven, and more.

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