Stubble Part 13

"Don't know, Zeke. Perhaps."

As though satisfied by this mutual exchange of confidence, Zeke lapsed again into silence, and for a time nothing was heard save the voice of the car and occasional sighing bursts of wind high up in the tree-tops. Then there came a black line of shadow stretching across their way, on up ahead, and above it a yellowish, greenish streak of light where the clouds were breaking. Faint wisps of vapour went curling slowly across the streak and there was a patch of blue, very deep, and the momentary gleam of a star, and then they plunged into the shadow.

The air grew cooler, almost cold. The woods had swept down upon the road and engulfed it. Even the noise of the motor seemed quieter, and above it could be heard whisperings and occasional crackings.

Something started up from a thicket by the side of the road and they could hear it scurrying through the underbrush. Zeke moved up the throttle and they began to move faster. And on either side of them came down the darkness, sweeping past them, pressing close, and before them wavered the faltering light, and the cool damp air came fingering and touched their faces.

Zeke stopped the car. The rus.h.i.+ng darkness stopped. The breeze was still.

"Heah's de place," he said, and his voice was lower; Joe could barely hear him.

"I thought it was Fillmore. This isn't Fillmore."

"I know," said Zeke. "I doesn' go to Fillmo'. Dis is de place whuh I gets it. Up de paff a piece."

Joe was on the point of telling him to go on--on to Fillmore, where proper inquiry might be made, when a sense of curiosity prompted him to stop. He would see where the illegal traffic was being carried on.

Zeke was trustingly letting him in on his business and he might not understand. After all, it was getting down in a way to the heart of the business--in a way getting closer to Uncle Buzz. He had never bothered much before. He climbed out of the car and Zeke shut off the motor.

The silence, as he followed Zeke down the narrow path, was oppressive.

There would come a vast sighing like a wave of sound, and a settling, a few crackings far off, and then silence. The ground was soft with a matting of fallen leaves, damp and mouldy, and once as Zeke turned his pocket flashlight from the path there came a gleam of water. Briars flicked his face and scratched his hands, and once a low-hanging branch struck him across the eyes and he stumbled from the path and stepped into slime. He kept close behind his guide, for the darkness was intense and the path was tortuous. Directly Zeke stopped. The pocket light made a small circle on the ground.

"Heah 'tis," Zeke whispered, and pointed with the light.

A thicket of blackberry bushes crowded into a corner of an old snake-rail fence and two old boards were all that was visible in the narrow compa.s.s of the light--that, and a pool of dark water over to one side. Up above, there was a break in the trees and a suggestion, beyond, of open fields. He stood for a minute. Nothing else was visible, nothing from the hand of man, as Zeke moved the light back and forth in slow-sweeping arcs. It had been a waste of time; there was nothing to see, nothing but the crude a.s.signation place of a troop of spectral whiskey jugs, and the seat of a profitable industry. He turned to go, his mind s.h.i.+fting to other things. He heard Zeke fumbling in the bushes, saw the light switch into the fence corner, then across the pool; and then he heard a cry, a low cry of terror, and caught a glimpse of something white--on the ground, near a big tree. And then Zeke's voice, "Fo' Gawd!" and the light switched off and someone came hurrying toward him in the darkness.

"Come on, Mist' Joe. Le's git away fum heah!"

Zeke brushed past him in an agony of haste. He heard his footsteps on the leaf carpet, saw the crazy flickerings of the light through the trees, and had a sudden intense desire to follow. But he paused, curious, mastering his fear. And then the outline of the clearing came slowly to his eyes, and looking up he saw that the clouds were breaking and that the tip of the moon was showing through. Slowly the place was bathed in a silvery flood. Back slipped the shadows. Shapes that had been pressing, close at hand, receded and took the form of trees, of bushes, lurking there on the edge of the darkness. He saw the fence corner. He saw the two boards propped up against it, forming a cache. He saw the pool, a tiny little woodland pool. And then he caught again that glimmer of white by the foot of a huge beech tree.

Slowly he made his way toward it with beating heart. Slowly it took shape, a huddled shadow, right on the edge of the light. He touched it with his foot, careful lest he step beyond. He stooped. He touched it with his hand. He turned it over. And the moonlight, slipping through the trees as though to help him, sent a feeble, flickering shaft down--upon the upturned face of Uncle Buzz. For a moment it rested there, as if to rea.s.sure him, bringing out in misty detail all that was necessary. The thing was hideously befouled, besmirched, lying there in that black swamp water, mute, helpless, utterly broken. But it was unmistakeable. He stretched out his arms and dragged it from the water, and the clouds, closing in again, obscured the moon, leaving all in darkness.

CHAPTER VIII

Two days later they buried Mr. Mosby.

Joe had kept his promise. At least he had kept it as well as it was possible to keep it. It was decided that Mr. Mosby had met his death by drowning. That is what "One Half of Rome" believed. The "Other Half of Rome" perhaps had various ideas. It could not be surmised from the set conventional expressions on the faces of those gathered together in the back parlour that hot Sat.u.r.day afternoon just what the consensus was. There had been at first a surrept.i.tious buzz of conversation and then deep silence as the Episcopal priest in his long white vestments came slowly in. Joe felt peculiarly outside of it all.

He was in a sense neither spectator nor mourner. For Mrs. Mosby depended on the palsied arm of her brother for support. And then there were a few old ladies, friends of Mrs. Mosby's, and himself bringing up the rear--merely appended to the family, the last survivor of the discredited branch. He was conscious of a heavy scent of flowers banked about the close, dark room, a scent in which the cloying sweetness of jasmine prevailed. For a moment there was not a sound, and then the minister lifted his head and began the burial service.

He, too, was feeling the heavy hand of time, and his voice, so long charged with the burden of emotion, emotion that had had to be summoned on short notice, seemed on the point of breaking. He was old and broken himself, wearied with futility, with his head raised, half-closed eyes lifted ceiling-ward, his fluttering draperies now billowy, now closely enwrapping his gaunt frame in the little breeze that came in from the hall. There was not much of comfort to be gained, not much of hope. Looking out of the corner of his eyes, Joe could get a glimpse of a wall of white, blank, expressionless faces and the silent waving of countless palm-leaf fans. Directly in front of him was the long, narrow back of Mr. Fawcette, and beside the latter, Aunt Loraine, sitting very straight and very stiff, her new black veil opaquely s.h.i.+elding from curious eyes the delicacy of her grief. The ruching was there, but the bangles had been laid aside. On went that quavering, faltering voice:

"All flesh is not the same flesh: but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds."

Of just what kind had been Uncle Buzz, he found himself wondering. A weaker kind, or at least, a kind ill suited to the world it had been thrown in.

"Now I say, brethren," the voice went on, "that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of G.o.d; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption."

What, thought Joe, were the chances of all those white, fleshy faces staring there, immovable? The crowd in the back parlour--a single, silent, pasty-faced, fan-waving convention, over which the fat, pasty white hand of death was significantly hovering, and about which the odour of jasmine was pressing. He felt suddenly stifled, suffocated.

He wanted to get up and run away, out of doors, anywhere. The only thing that seemed to escape the stifling was his Uncle Buzz, lying there quietly, in acceptance. And then he knew that another link had been broken, a link that held him to the past. There was a little less friendliness, a little less cheer, a little less understandableness--he was conscious of it--a little less need of him.

The service came to an end and a small fraction of the a.s.sembly filed out to the family burying ground on the hill behind the house. Here came a repet.i.tion of what had been enacted in the back parlour, only there was the distraction of the wind which would be playful and of a robin, perched on a near-by fence post, who would not be depressed but sang away its liquid, throaty warble as though the whole ceremony had been arranged for its own entertainment. It came quickly to an end.

Mr. Mosby was sent on his way with all due convention and dispatch with a little of sentimentality thrown in for good measure. A few moments of grace after the last clods of earth were tossed on and patted down, and then everyone was hurrying away, back to his respective niche, cloaking haste with a thin layer of dignity. Mr.

Burrus openly ran after a departing "Ford." It was Mr. Martin's, and the handy reserve carry-all of the "Golden Rule," and Mr. Burrus preferred a moment's haste to a long, hot walk at greater leisure. Joe remembered his face, there in the third row at the end, in the back parlour. Inscrutable it had seemed--a weazened, yellowing blank mask, slowly souring in the heat. What had he been thinking on? On the waste of some lost accounts, perhaps--or even on the amount of credit he might allow the widow. It might be that he contemplated the remote results of his own handiwork lying there in the black cloth-covered box. But if this latter, his face showed no sign. And "Neither Half of Rome," though it point an accusing finger, would pause for a moment as it pa.s.sed him by.

Joe did not go back to the house with the rest of the family. Instead, he struck out across the fields away from them. He climbed the back boundary fence and was soon walking up to his knees in gra.s.s and weeds. The air was hot and sticky and heavily charged with a s.h.i.+mmering white water vapour. There were a few sluggish clouds with sombre centres hanging about the valley to the southwest, and there was a drone and zip of flying creatures in swarms above the drying weeds and stubble. Coming to a large oak tree standing solitary in that wasting field, he threw himself face downward on the ground in its shadow, careless that the gra.s.s was scant, and that his bed was scratchy. For a moment he lay in utter relaxation, caring for and observing nothing. And then, the sharp edge of his fatigue being broken, he slowly turned on his side and leaned his head on his palm, his elbow resting on the ground. It was a barren prospect that stretched out before him: lazy, s.h.i.+ftless land clear over the brow of the hill that sloped away to the house. The Fawcette place had not been worked to capacity for years, and there it lay, the waste of Mr.

Mosby's opportunity. Tiny creatures swarmed in the gra.s.s. Joe could see them scurrying up and down the withered and drying stalks. A little crowd of gnats was hovering about his head and occasionally one would light upon his face and stick there dejectedly. Above the gra.s.s, against the blue of the sky beyond, he could see the s.h.i.+mmering waves hang tremulous like the air above a hot wood-stove in winter, and there came to his ears the sudden whirring zip of a gra.s.shopper in mid-flight. Directly there came another, and another, till the air seemed full of them. Summer had come. And about him lay the field in listless idleness.

It was common talk that it should be worked, that it was a shame not to work it. But there had not been money enough. Money was needed for everything, everything that man wanted to do, money and something else. About him buzzed the gnats; all around him poured the suns.h.i.+ne; and in his ears was the drone of countless insects. This was Sat.u.r.day.

Another full day and would come Monday. Monday! He had not thought of it until now. He suddenly felt the uselessness of his bonds. And yet he could feel the stretching of his tether. Was everybody fastened to a tether? Was there no such thing as freedom? Singularly enough, this field in all its idleness, with all its heat, with its droning and buzzing, suggested freedom. In fact, the feel of the entire country, this country that he had known, about which his memories cl.u.s.tered thick, suggested freedom. And yet it was not above reproach. People spoke of it condescendingly. "Poor land--unproducing--a century behind the times." What was it? The land? The people? The times? There was Uncle Buzz, with his foothold on two hundred acres, and they had buried him in his one good suit. Buried beneath the force of circ.u.mstances, he had never once lifted his head--had died with it in a shallow pool of water. And _he_ was no better. He could feel the shackles close about him, binding him hand and foot. What was one to do? His head dropped down upon the crook of his arm and he fell asleep.

An hour later he awoke. He felt hot and uncomfortable. He stretched himself and rolled over on his back. He gazed upward through the tangle of branches and tried to relax again. But the heat had become unbearable. He struggled to his feet and brushed the litter from his clothes. Away in each direction stretched the field. It was dry and dusty and covered with a short, cutting stubble beneath the upper surface of waving gra.s.s and weeds. It no longer held any allurement for him and yet he did not want to go back to the house. He looked at his watch. It was five o'clock. Some of the old ladies would still be there. They would be sitting about on the horsehair chairs making lugubrious conversation. Back toward the left stretched the pike, white and dusty enough. But there were trees along the edge of it, and he remembered the gra.s.s in the fence corners to be long and fresh and succulent as a rule, even in midsummer. Slowly he started in that direction. When he reached the boundary fence he was dripping with perspiration and his shoes and trouser hems were covered with the yellow dust. He climbed the fence, and as he stepped out into the road he saw an automobile approaching in the distance, dipping down a hill to the creek that broke the stretch toward Guests. It was not often that motors of any distinction saw fit to travel into Bloomfield; the pike was not good enough. But this approaching car seemed to be one of some distinction--was long and rather rakish, had a deep sound to the exhaust as it started up the hill toward him. Idly he watched it.

There were two pa.s.sengers, a man and a woman, slouched well down in the seats. What could they be doing in the heat of the afternoon with the top down and in all that blazing sunlight? He stepped over to the side of the road and dragged his feet, first one and then the other, in the gra.s.s to wipe off some of the dust. He knew that he was hot and dirty and dishevelled, but he did not care much. On came the car. As it came nearer it lost its interest to him and he sat down in the gra.s.s and plucked a blade to chew, paying it no further attention.

Suddenly, to his surprise, he realized it was stopping and then the woman called to him.

At first he did not recognize her. Her face was quite red from the sun and she had on a fetching little close-fitting motor-bonnet with fluttering lavender strings. A long lemon-coloured duster enveloped the rest of her. She was quite pretty, with the contrast of colour, with her hair all snugly tucked away. It did not look like Mary Louise, but it was. He felt very conscious of his dusty old suit and his wilting collar and his flushed and perspiring face, as he came and stood by the car.

"This is Mr. Claybrook, Joe," she said, looking at him gravely.

He remembered then the big, confident man that had joined them that unhappy night.

"I just heard, Joe. It was terrible. I was awfully distressed."

He looked into her eyes--she spoke so earnestly--and wondered if she were feeling all she might feel. Uncle Buzz had not received very charitable treatment at her hands. The picture of it all came before his mind and he said nothing.

"When is--when is the funeral?"

"It's all over," he replied shortly. "This afternoon."

"Oh."

She turned and had a word with her companion. And then he leaned over, partly across her, smiling quietly.

"We're going right back in an hour or so. Be glad to have you go with us. There's plenty of room." His voice was big and rather pleasant and he had an air of careless a.s.sumption that everything would be all right.

"Yes, do, Joe," Mary Louise put in. "I had John drive me up this afternoon. I wanted to get here in time for----Aunt Susie wanted some things."

It was quite natural the way she said, "I had John----"

"It will be better than going back on that morning train--to-morrow?

And I suppose you'll have to be back at the office Monday?" He had never known her voice to be so solicitously sweet.

"No," he said, and he surprised himself, "I'm not going back." He had come to no such decision. But the idea was suddenly so utterly distasteful that it seemed impossible. And _she_ having _him_, Claybrook, take him, Joe, back to work. The smart of it was intolerable. "No," he repeated firmly, "I'm not going back." And then he gazed off across the hood of the motor into the vacant field beyond.

"I see," she replied, rather softly, and he could feel that she was watching him and that Claybrook was, in a way, standing by in a condescending att.i.tude, ready to do her bidding.

He was anxious to be off, anxious to be alone. "Thank you very much, however," he said, and bowed to Claybrook. He avoided Mary Louise's eyes. He backed away from the car and lifted his hat. "Good-bye."

Turning away, he set off down the road, away from Bloomfield, and shortly he heard the motor start and the grind of wheels. He looked back. He saw her lean over as though to speak to Claybrook. And then he saw Claybrook turn his face toward hers. They were probably talking about him.