Chapter Nineteen

No, it was not the same at Bek’s any more.

The family was only visiting itself, so to speak.

For instance, Davey never returned home from the Model Farm any more, bearing big, yellow-toothed ears of corn, or pats of Bek’s inimitable sweet butter, or an occasional squab, all picked and plucked and wrapped in cheese-cloth for the Old Gentleman’s supper.

The squabs on the farm now belonged to Ex-Governor Howey, and so did the sweet butter that came out of Bek’s churns just a little sweeter and creamier than any butter Davey was ever to know.

In some respects, Bek’s scruples seemed a bit beside the point. According to her interpretation of what was actually a rather loose arrangement with the Howeys, board and lodging had been allotted to herself, Winslow, Steve, and Leslie. Therefore Paula, on those few of her vacations that she spent at home instead of doing summer work at normal school, slept on a sofa in the dining-room at her aunt Emma’s in Centralia.

Davey never slept at Bek’s any more, either. His old room at the top of the house was once more occupied by Stevey; and besides, the old, easy generosities of being permitted to straddle bareback the pick of Bek’s stables, or of scuttling into the cool, dark cellar for dill-pickles stewing under juices and vine leaves, were of the past.

They were Howey property now. Even the pail of huge dills that had gone annually to Clara in St. Louis was a thing of the past, although Bek still did put up one private crock of the dark-green beauties. And a dozen for old Senator Allen, a gentleman farmer forty miles to the north, who admired Bek and always referred to her as the finest woman in the state.

Howey property! The very side rails of porch upon which Winslow loved to prop his feet and tilt back for hours with his eyes closed and his pipe drooping, were Howey property now. Feet off. Hands off. The old, easy household, with the enormous bounty of Bek, her largess, her come-hard but go-easy, were of yesteryear. Even Leslie, who liked to dig holes and bury such inconsequential addenda as bits of wall paper, empty spools, playing-cards, was now confined to a fenced-off little bit of dirt that Bek nightly spaded back into place. Howey dirt.

The overseer of the new Howey holdings, up with the first streak of dawn, stalking the barns of prize-cattle, riding on the running-board of trucks, as they rumbled out to field where the threshing-machines loomed, superintending the installation of new Howey machinery, inspecting feed-troughs, cattle-hoofs, water-drains and chickens for pip, had the hard precision of one of the new machines themselves. Ephraim Howey could have rented out the main house at good profit, and installed an overseer in the flat over the garage. Bek knew that. It kept her mouth straight and a little bitter with her scrupulous sense of obligation.

Anybody’s foot on the rung of a Howey chair, even though that rung were hidden from sight under the dining-table, grated a message to her alert nerves. Winslow, who used to paint on a Windsor chair which he toted about with him from one to the other of his five or six landscapes, tried and true, had to lug a stool instead now, which Bek herself built him out of pine-wood and a strip of canvas.

It was a tight, constrained household of conscientious economies.

It is doubtful if the Howey family ever came into much realization of this fanatical conservation of their interests.

It was ground into Winslow, all right, whose meek inefficiency under the rigors of the régime seemed to blow him out, like a candle. Bek no more realized this! On the contrary, she tried with every ounce of her grim energy to conserve him against the impact of their reverses.

Largely through her insistence that his work be served first, Winslow still painted throughout the long mornings of Bek’s drudgery, puttered at picket-fences or lawn-mowing as his share of the farm chores, trembled and got ague at the mounting problems that had to do with Steve, and started to execute Bek’s occasional request for further assistance in a low-geared fashion that almost invariably caused her to brush him aside and accomplish the task herself, with a power which never failed to amaze and further reduce him to impotency.

They never ceased, these two, to hypnotize each other by these temperamental divergencies. They made him precious to her, in the way that her children, in the first years of their life, had been precious. As Davey was still precious to her.

She liked to hurl the bulwark of her body between Winslow and the workaday things that would somehow have made him less dear to her, had he been able to cope with them.

She lifted from his shoulders, or rather never permitted to descend there, the burden of so much as the responsibility of choosing the color of his suits or the weight of his underwear, never realizing that she doused him with every breath she breathed, as she had done from the first day she met him and wooed him and married him.

She kept from him as much of the truth about Stevey as she dared. Not even Bek knew all of that truth. Davey did.

In the crammed routine of his workadays, he used to be sent twice and even thrice a day, scurrying over from the Igrotte place with a batch of his mother’s muffins or a fowl for broth, that winter that Stevey was half-sick most of the time, with pains throughout his body that made even the light work outlined for him by Bek more than he could drag himself about to do.

Davey knew the furtive thing about Stevey. He had known it since the day that Teddy had lain before his eyes with a kicked-in side.

To Davey, in the fretful, pulled, nervous face of his grown nephew Steve, there was no longer mystery. Only a certain horror that not improbably played its part in what was to be a life-long aversion to the taste or smell of spirituous liquors.[31]

Not that anything in David’s experience had prepared him for realization of anything that had to do with Stevey’s plight. To be sure, he had seen old Jessup drink, and the Tarkingtons had once had a gardener who used to come staggering home from periodic Saturday-night trips to Middleton, to sit under the spring-house and crazily play a mouth-harp.

But the slaked throat and the burning eye of a member of the family, that was another matter. Davey knew that, with his intuition.

One dusk, coming across from the Igrotte house with a pan of his mother’s clabber for Winslow, who yearned for it, now that Bek meticulously either fed it to the Howey hogs or sent pails of it over to the Howey farm, Davey came across the strange spectacle of Stevey standing in some knee-high grass beyond South Meadow, with the figure of a girl in his arms, one of her hands hanging limply into the grasses and her head dangling back and showing a great arch of white neck.

“It’s Claire,” said Stevey almost with relief at seeing David, whom he was given to avoiding since the incident with Teddy. “She’s fainted. Can’t seem to revive her. Help me home with her, there’s a fellow.”

Davey had known of these meetings. Two or three times, on that short-cut across the lower rim of South Meadow, he had heard their voices and skirted a rock-ledge to avoid being seen or heard.

One somehow did not run tattling to elders about knowing this—and yet—more than once, waking into the quiet of his room underneath the eaves, something that was not entirely right about his remaining silent smote Davey with the kind of depression that can overtake in the small hours of night.

It was quite a job getting Claire to the house. She was in the dead weight of a swoon from which she did not seem to want to emerge.

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