Chapter Five

It was snug up where David slept. Bek’s covers were nicer to snuggle into than the ones in the House on Sycamore Street. Chiefly because Bek used quilts that an old farmer-woman over just beyond Cottage Corner made with spud-like fingers out of the choice cotton and percale scrappage of a county of attics. Blues and reds and grays and oyster whites. There was one, Davey’s favorite, with a border that looked like rows of intently listening rabbits’ ears. In Bek’s attic, it smelled like calico as you tear it. Clean lint of the loom. There was a window set in a slant of ceiling and sometimes it was entirely filled with moon that made everything white except the shadows and the school pennants that Steve had nailed up against the slopes of wall.

There was a moon tonight. He had a toothache. He often did when he came up almost full, one of his cheeks bulging and making him lopsided. It was nice to be tucked in bed at Bek’s under quilts that did not scratch like the gray blankets in the House on Sycamore Street.

When blankets got old, sick ewes liked them. If a ewe-lamb got sick, a very baby one, and you didn’t give it warm milk out of a nursing-bottle, it died.

“Poor e-w-e. E-w-e. Y-o-u. Funny. How could you always know which of the two meant? If you said, ‘You go downstairs,’ it couldn’t mean e-w-e. But if you said, ‘poor e-w-e,’ then which you? E-w-e or y-o-u? Henry would know even that.”

Haw, Leslie thought the bees carry honey up to the moon to make it clear. Haw!

“Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord, my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. God bless Mother ’n’ Father ’n’ Henry ’n’ Bek ’n’ Leslie ’n’ Winslow ’n’ Phil ’n’ Emma ’n’ Clara ’n’ Jacob ’n’ Hallie ’n’ ewes ’n’ Pete McNall ’n’ the in-laws ’n’ nieces ’n’ nephews ’n’ Teddy and let me go to see him march when he comes back from Africa ’n’ make Mother remember to feed the ewe ’n’ God bless me for not swiping Henry’s coon-skin cap for my tommyhawk and bless we, the people of the United States in order to form a more perfect union——we——the——people——of the United States, in——order——”

Down in Leslie’s room it was moonlight, too. It was not really a room, but a sort of alcove that adjoined Bek’s and Winslow’s so that the moonlight flowed in from their room.

That was exactly the reason of the alcove. Because it had no windows. Sometimes Leslie walked in his sleep. There were bars across the window in the big room.

The moonlight lay in a long patch. To Leslie, in bed it was like a river. Of light. It fascinated him as things that gleamed always did. He sat up in bed to feel the sway of its bright tide.

Leslie had a song. It went something like “Evoe! Evoe! Evoe!” His mother had attempted to teach him ballads, tried and true, but this one was Leslie’s own. A little chant that he always sang with his long, white eye lids closed. Henry, who knew his self-taught Greek, was wont to observe with mock manner of pious rebuke, that there was something Bacchanalian about Leslie’s choice of lyric outburst. “Evoe! Evoe!” The call of Greek youth....

That last was enough for Bek. “Sing your song, Leslie. The song of the Greek youths.”

Leslie, with the droop of his long, pale lids: “Evoe! Evoe! Evoe!”

“Go to it, Leslie! Vine leaves in your hair.”

“Don’t tease Leslie, Henry. It’s the perpetual call of youth in Leslie.”

Later, after she had come upon Stevey that first time behind the Cider Mill, Bek had cause to feel her flesh crawl at that song of Leslie’s. “Evoe, Mother!” he had shouted to her.

“Evoe! Evoe!” sang Leslie in bed, to the swinging tide of the moonlight. The bright tide down which he could feel himself riding in a skiff made out of a bed. “Evoe! Evoe!” The humming of voices from the big room was disturbing. One of them a harsh, man’s voice, that split.

The humming of the voices was Rebekka’s and Winslow’s. Winslow was lying rigid in bed, with the flanges of his nose quite green, and Rebekka had the light on and was throwing an extra blanket, which she had to stand on a chair to drag down from a closet shelf, on top of him, and finally against his continued shudderings, his corduroy jacket, with the strings of his tobacco-pouch dangling out of the pocket.

“Making yourself sick isn’t going to help matters. I suppose I shouldn’t have told you, but there are some things I haven’t the right to carry alone. Besides, he will be home tomorrow.”

“I won’t have it!” said Winslow, through teeth that shuddered. “Damn him!”

“Scarcely the most helpful way to set about getting Steve out of this—mess.”

“I won’t have it!” said Winslow, and began to cry quite weakly against the pillow; and along his brow and the backs of his hands, the tallow-colored, moist pallor sprang out, and beads of moisture, in the weakening fashion that Bek dreaded.

“It’s no wonder,” said Bek, standing surveying him and wanting to keep her voice cold through her rising concern for him—“it’s no wonder I carry everything alone sooner than go through this sort of thing with you.”

“Young pup, he’ll not drag his family name into the dirt.”

“He will, unless you treat this matter like a problem instead of a calamity.”

“I won’t have it!” cried Winslow, and beat with his hands into the pillows and sobbed like a baby.

“It’s not a matter of what you’ll have. It’s a matter of what you’ve got to face.”

“There’s something you’re holding back. There’s something more to it than just withdrawing him from college at the dean’s suggestion because he’s loafing. Boys don’t get fired for such small-fry offenses. There’s been something more behind it right along.”

Rigid at his bedside, Bek bit her lips with the truth of this. But to tell Winslow all the facts of his homecoming, she realized now, was as impossible as it had been to tell him the truth of the hurried decision to send him away.

This must apparently remain her fight and Steve’s. She had meant to tell Winslow the why; the whole miserable why of the going and the coming of Steve; of the wretched reason of her sudden determination to send him to State Agricultural; of that first time behind the mill—that second—third, fourth time. The deceits. The deceptions. She had meant to tell him all, now that Steve was coming home, his secret pledges to her shattered.... Winslow must fight the fight with her and Steve now.... Winslow must be taught a quality of mercy and wisdom toward his boy ... who needed him.

“I’m cold.”

Winslow must—must meet this with her——

“I’m getting a chill.... Damn young pup—he’ll not drag our name in dirt.”

“Winslow, you mustn’t get yourself into a state. Are you really cold? Or just nervous? You don’t want the hot-water bottle?”

“Young puppy!” sobbed Winslow. “Over indulged. Gentleman farmer. Never quite understood it all, anyhow. No son of mine comes home suspended from college for loafing ... young puppy ... won’t have it. I’m getting a chill.”

“Hot-water bottle, Winslow?”

He was sure not to want it or to endure it, once it was there, but his silence meant acquiescence to her going for it. That meant padding down through the dark, cold hallways, and the slow performance of waiting for the water to boil in the black iron kettle.

“If it will make you feel better, Winslow, I’ll go down and heat water.”

“Amos Milliken,” said Winslow, from his pillow of misery.

That was a localism that needed no interpretation to a Schuyler. Emma Schuyler’s father-in-law, Amos Milliken, had long since placed the flavor of his hospitality in local ill-repute, by his habit of asking a guest, “Have a cigar if I go upstairs and get you one?” instead of passing around the box of his own excellent brand that always reposed in the top sideboard-drawer.

It was just as well, though, not to act on Winslow’s jab of a reply. It was only his nervous ague. She had first beheld him in the grip of it in the days of their engagement, during a quarrel that had to do with some trivial misunderstanding over the time and place of an appointment.

High-strung! To Bek, whose nerves seemed to run through her body with serenity of veins through marble; there was a preciousness to Winslow. Standing there in her plain, white-muslin nightgown, vigorous, deep-fleshed; her strong, brown hair, that even her own children seldom saw down, hung in two plaits that were almost too enormous for beauty.

There was something Christ-like to Winslow’s face as it pressed into the pillow that way, with the profile ground against it in pain.

A picture of her father on the night he had screamed and raved about the house when she announced her engagement, rose before Bek.

“You’ll get nothing out of a Renchler! It’s not in them to give. They’re takers. His father before him would take a favor from you like it was coming to him; And the dam’-fool part of it is he got the whole town to thinking it was coming to him. Once a Renchler always a Renchler. The whole tribe of them. Pretty folks. But not in them to earn a penny or keep it, except when they marry money and catering wives. I know the Renchlers. Mark my word, Winslow Renchler will ride a girl like you to death. He’s a taker.”

Was Winslow riding her to death? Not while the rich flow of her sympathies could well out to him, as he lay there, shivering of the ague of nervousness. Theoretically perhaps, Bek was the giver. Actually, though, she would have clawed for him; fought for the qualities in him that were weaker than she was. There was pain in loving like that. And fierceness and a certain glory. And, strangely enough, reward.

“Damned young puppy!” sobbed Winslow again and again and again.... “I won’t have it!”

“I’ll go down and heat you the water, Winslow,” said Bek in a lusterless tone. “You are chilled.”

Downstairs, in her enormous kitchen, spick, span, clean and cold, putting match to the gas-stove to which she could never become quite accustomed, playing its knobs as you would the stops of an organ, and then standing by to watch the water come to a reluctant boil, a lump of misery lodged itself in Bek’s throat.

Here she was, confronted with what must surely be one of the grim climaxes of her life. Surely, surely, none grimmer could await her. Leslie up there swinging himself softly to sleep on “Evoe! Evoe!” while to that rather unearthly rhythm, downstairs in the chilled kitchen, needing Winslow if she was ever to need him, she stood alone, faced with the homecoming of a seventeen-year-old inebriate son. Here she stood, as usual, administering solace to the husband who should have been administering solace to her!

How unreal! Steve, who had grown, like a streak, from his adolescence into a young-manhood that delighted her. A curious combination of his Grandfather Schuyler and of Winslow. There was a threat of fine fettle to Steve, which made his profile dance like a blooded horse about to leave his post. A poet, or a peasant, or both. And now this.

Stevey must be helped. Cured. Men were. There was George Birkaway. Carrie Birkaway used to drop something into his coffee. For five years before his death, George had not touched a drop. Backs of magazines were full of remedies. Stevey must be helped. There was yet time. He must be made to have the power to resist. And without Winslow’s knowing. Winslow was too high-strung. Without anyone’s knowing.

They must again fight it out alone. The Old Gentleman—why, the Old Gentleman might have a stroke if he knew. Stevey must promise—Stevey must promise—on Davey’s life! For Davey’s sake!

How good, how strangely comforting, the consciousness of the little nub of him up there asleep in Stevey’s room. How good....

After a while, the shining tide began to slow—drowsily—“Evoe! Evoe” sang Leslie to himself, and singing it, dropped off to sleep.

The hot-water bag, sure enough, lay unapplied on the floor when Winslow finally dropped off to sleep with his head resting on the upper part of Bek’s firm arm as she lay beside him, his hair damp and smoothed backward in long strokes of Bek’s fingers, even after he slept.

What to be done? Repeated drunkenness, the letter had said. Solitary-drinking vice, that, unless he left college at once, must soon leak out among his colleagues. Solitary drunkard. It spread black wings over all the things that mattered. And suddenly they were not mattering at all. And they must! There was so much to be done. Tomorrow’s workaday was spinning toward. Everything must matter as usual, if one was to carry on. That broken plowshare-blade to be shipped back to the factory for repair. Rock salt for pasture. Father to be broached at the bank tomorrow for a loan.

Old Jessup’s eyes. They had turned at her like the reproachful eyes of a dog that had served her well. Poor Jessup!

Emma’s Claire needed a talking-to. She had worrisome ways with her mother. Sometimes a vagrant thought flashed through Bek’s mind. Claire and Stevey. The eyes of those two cousins when they were together. Nobody in the world had noticed except Bek. A disturbing thought that never got more than half-born before she banished it.

Father must be got at before ten in the morning at the bank. If only Phil weren’t needing that loan. Why couldn’t he have borrowed directly from the bank, instead of crippling her this way? Three heifers due Thursday by shipment from Tom Groady’s place. Groady must wait, now that Phil had horned in for this loan. Foolish of her to have mentioned Phil’s loan to Winslow. Winslow hated the perpetual financial cross currents. And tomorrow Stevey. Oh, Stevey, how could you? All these weeks of reassurance about him, and now the secret terror lifting its head again. Oh, Stevey! She wanted to cry. She wanted Winslow to hold out his arms that she might creep into them. Instead, her arms were held out to him as he lay there asleep with his head on the pillow of her shoulder.

But good, at least, to feel up there in the room under the rafters the somehow reliable little old nub of Davey.

His being there, absurdly enough, gave a stability to the large white night that was spinning tomorrow relentlessly toward.

The room was so bright. It’s shininess finally hypnotized her to sleep.

How bright! Davey waking into it, leaped up with a sense of broad daylight. It was still only moonlight, except that the old fellow, with his slightly swollen cheek, had moved entirely out of the window. Davey, in his flannelette night-drawers that fastened about the waist with large bone buttons, sitting up in bed, gouged his eyes with his fists. Sense of awakening to something not right. What if Mother had forgotten! What if they had let the fire in the range go out. The ewe with the blue eyes and a black slit down their middle.

By day and to the routine doings of people about, there had even been a wrench about it. But now, in the still white drown of a moonlit three-o’clock-of-a-morning, what had seemed fairly all right by day, was dreadfully all wrong.

The little old thing in its blanket beside the stove had pulled at his finger as if it had been the teat of a mother lamb. That little old thing had looked up so and trusted Davey, sitting up there in his cotton-flannel night-drawers, with the moonlight flooding over him, and Davey had not gone back. But Bek had wanted him. That made it hard. Being wanted by two people not in the same place. Ewe-lamb wasn’t really a person, but the ewe wanted, just the same. And Bek was so big. In a world full of big things, Bek was almost the biggest. Only Davey and the ewe were small. And the ewe was smaller than Davey, and the ewe trusted David.

Up through the window there was only a slant of sky, the color of a grape. Cold. Terribly clear. If one could run home and back. Bek needn’t know. The ewe-lamb had pulled at your finger so!

How cold it was! The cutting cold of a March that comes raw. It made David shiver as he drew on his pants and almost with the same gesture snapped down the little suspenders over his flesh. There was no time for shoes and stockings, besides, shoes squeaked. In the Book of General Information on his mother’s kitchen shelf, from which Trina could laboriously read, you took the squeak out of shoes by standing them in a half inch of water overnight. “I know how to take the squeak out of shoe-es. I know how to take the squeak out of my shoes.” It helped to chant foolishly, against a rising tide of fear. One leg over the sill. Two.

Many a time he had slid the galvanized rain spout that led from Bek’s second-story room down into a black-mouthed barrel beside the porch. From the third story, it was another and steeper matter. Ouch! His body made a soft rush going down and the snag of tin that he struck took a bit of the flesh too. Almost the only sounds, that tiny rush and tiny tear, in this great white night that slept with one eye blazing open. It was almost like a sun, that lopsided moon. It made the shadows short and grotesque and a little frightening.

Something made a neighing sound that caused Davey to crouch for a moment beside the rain-barrel. He knew that neigh. It was Flora, the right gray mare of Bek’s huge plow-team. Except that in the white night, the curious inverted noonday, it smote him with the strange terror of unreality. The sound that by day made the world seem small and friendly, was by night a thin cry of the mystery of all beasts.

Out across the pasture, toward the creek, there were almost no shadows. Just the greenish grayness and the light-drenched silence. It made Davey’s heart shy back so that he plunged his hands into his pockets, and once out of earshot of the house, set up whistling. A pretentious kind of whistling, mostly breath.

How good it was, even with scare at the pit of you, to be going to the ewe-lamb, and then back to Bek, too. All that you had to do if you had to choose between doing two things, was to do both of them.

It wasn’t fair to quit the ewe. It wasn’t fair to quit Bek. Now you weren’t quitting either of them.

Sometimes something crackled and made him scurry.

There was a song Jessup was always singing as he mended harness in the barn.

Ole Black Joe. Ole Black Joe.

There was something out there! Out there where the ghostly pale meadows ran into the grape-colored sky. There was something. A cow?

Bek’s cows slept in rows of long, clean stalls. Jessup’s cow? But Jessup had no cow. Tarkington’s stray cow? Nobody’s cow was that tall! It was hard to continue going toward it, with the tongue a stiff thing in one’s mouth, and the throat so dry it would not swallow.

“Ole Black Joe.” You couldn’t sing with a throat that was parched with terror. You only squeaked like something rusty, “Ole Black Joe....”

Here, now, was the creek to be crossed. At night, somehow, it became a terrifying, bottomless divide, that by day trilled with water that showed the stones it ran over and slid past the brilliant flanks of minnows.

It was hard not to cry, and most difficult of all not to run back. That something on the horizon, that object too tall to be a cow, was coming toward him! Splash! The water came running up about the legs, greedily. Sucking in a way it never did during the day. Pulling downward in a way that terrified. Plunge, plunge went David’s knees, so that he came out drenched to the waist, this time, shivering. And there was the thing now almost upon him.

“Bek! Henry! Mother! Go way, you. Big Thing!” sobbed Davey, and began to cry, and back toward the creek. “Go way,” screamed Davey and because to really turn back was unthinkable, threw up his arm across his eyes. Henry would not be afraid. Nor Bek. Mother might. If Mother might be afraid, it was not wrong to be afraid. Sur-ren-der, in the histories Henry read from, meant something like afraid. No. Lee surrendered. There was a colored picture of his surrendering in Henry’s book, called General Lee. Lee surrendered. But that wasn’t that kind of being afraid. Of just a thing. A thing in the moonlight. One didn’t surrender to things in the moonlight.

“Go way, you!” screamed Dave, and batted his eyes and plunged forward, so that suddenly the thing swung into outline. An outline that suddenly sent him limp as a bag, of relief.

The thing was a threshing-machine. Many a time his bare legs had kicked its flanks. He gave it a punch as he passed. Corn runts began in rows now, brittle against his feet, and then a bit of fallow land with the turned earth in frozen little peaks that bit against his soles. Jessup’s place came up over a ridge, huddling for all the world like an old hen in her shoulders. That must be Jessup’s old rooster Cheetie, who would never sleep under roof, perched on top of the hen-house like a wart against the sky.

Dave’s six-year-old world, moonlit, flowing there under the feel of his toes. Its reassuring familiarity warmed him clear into his being, like a toddy going down when he had a cold. Lickity-split! He ran and spun the fields back from under him. The gnarled old veteran fields lashed by March that seemed to be resting from their day-by-day burden of the toiling of the men who tilled their faces.

They smelled deeply. Known smells that you could rub between your fingers in a nub of dirt. That was part of the warmth. The great sleeping world that milled and tilled so by day, asleep and docile, with its great bosom swept with moonlight.

When you were no longer frightened, and sick with the impulse of surrender, it was good to be spinning through their March starkness on that mission, between the ewe-lamb who needed you, and Bek who wanted you.

The kitchen window opened from the outside, so that just by shinnying up a tin water-spout, balancing tiptoe on the sill, and shoving down the upper pane by the ends of your straining fingers, in you were! It was dark inside, not even a red circle showed around the stove lid. Mother had forgotten! Trina had failed! No, Mother hadn’t forgotten. It was just her way of thinking that with the little iota of red coals over in the corner, there would be enough heat for the ewe. The nickel-plated lifter in the stove-lid, you could raise noiselessly and place on one end of the range. That threw the kitchen into faint glow. Just a handful of red coals, supposed to be enough for one ewe.

The kitchen in the House on Sycamore Street was the oldest room in the house. Full of sags. Sags that might almost have been scoured in. Two white-pine wood tables that sagged and smelled perpetually cool and sudsy. Mathilda ground into them with scrub-brush in grand semicircular smears. A scrubbed floor that sagged. A safe with a perforated-tin front, that sagged. Even the sheet of metal around the range, scoured tin that shone, sagged. A scrubbed, scoured, spotless kitchen, with everything turned to the wall, nights. And there, in a chip basket beside the range, in its blanket, tiny thing, the ewe-lamb. With its snout thrust up.[10]

There was milk in the pantry in a five-gallon pail. It was about the same height as David. That made it difficult to tilt. The bottom made a great clanging sound as it left the floor. What if it should awaken Mother or Father? Or Henry, whose room was over the pantry, and who, winter and summer, slept with his cot drawn up to the window and his pillow on the sill so that his head was out-of-doors.

It was easier to find a dipper, stealthily, to save clatter, scoop down into the pail and heat the bit of milk. Over the sink, so that he had to climb, was the bottle, with the rubber nipple.

Funny ewe-lamb. Without opening its eyes, it sucked it all down, in gurgles. Grateful, sleepy darling gurgles. The pulling against the rubber nipple. It was like the thing that made the creek move. And the lilac-bush to bloom. And worms to ooze up in the lower pasture after rain. Gosh. Little thing. Little old thing. In a world of big things, it was the littlest old thing.... “Getty back there. To bed. ’Nuff, I said. Getty back! ’Night, you!”

Scampering back, up hillock, down hillock, lickety-split, over the fallen tree-trunk that spanned a small ditch, up hill, down, around, splash!—the already wet trousers sopping in more water—zither—through cinder-paths. In less than twenty-five minutes, the return was accomplished.

It was deliciously good to be in bed again under the quilt that was gay with rabbits’ ears, and with the moonlight, now receding, leaving enormous dark splotches in the room. Good, except that almost before he could sigh out with the satisfaction of it, plomp! sleep was a bottomless pit into which he had walked, open eyed.

Not so Henry, who, up in his window, cold pipe lax on his lips, had seen Davey come and Davey go. Such a strangely beautiful steel-blue night as this would not let a body sleep, for pondering and pondering on a bit of everything and nothing in particular.

FOOTNOTES: