Stubble Part 8

The driver pondered this in his heart for a moment, came to a sudden decision, sniffed again, and turned his back on them both and proceeded to stretch himself out as far as the narrow confines of the seat would permit. Business was apparently over for the day.

Uncle Buzz led Joe across the street to the busy side. The contrast of their figures was striking, for Joe was over a head taller, and loose where Uncle Buzz was stiff.

Mr. Mosby turned at the curbing and with a confidential air: "We'll just get a bite to eat in here," indicating a tiny little lunch room crammed in between two ramshackle old frame buildings. "Your Aunt Loraine was a bit indisposed this morning."

This established one conclusion. He was at least not expected at home.

More than that, he could not decide without further premises.

They occupied stools at a high counter covered with oilcloth. Uncle Buzz ordered rolls and coffee. Joe took rolls and coffee. There was a period of silence as they waited.

Directly Mr. Mosby began talking in a low tone: "It's a rather fortunate thing you came up this week-end, Joseph. I was rather afraid you mightn't." He paused and Joe, while he felt reasonably sure of just what would come next, listened with polite interest.

"I've been troubled with frightful headaches this past week," he continued, "so severe that I could scarcely see the open page before me."

Joe murmured his regret over the cup's brim.

The old man paused and seemed to consider. Then hesitantly continuing: "If you could spare an hour or two this afternoon----?"

"Surely I can, Uncle Buzz. Easiest thing you know."

The old man breathed deep and long and set down his coffee cup. "It is a trifling matter of some forty-six dollars. Would you like to go out to Montgomery's this afternoon? He has a couple of two-year-olds that he will be s.h.i.+pping down for the Derby now pretty soon."

"I'd be very pleased to, Uncle Buzz."

And thus was the matter broached, and the matter accepted, without any bald reference to necessity, without the slightest violation to the tenets of hospitality. No reference was made to a previous understanding. Joe's visit was established on a purely social basis, and as such it would be presented to Mrs. Mosby, whose penchant for alarm might thus escape stimulus.

They finished their lunch hurriedly and made their way across to the "Golden Rule," where Uncle Buzz led his charge with swift, silent steps back to the little private office in the rear of the store. Once inside, the door was closed and the books quickly opened upon the table. "They are always a bit impatient for the balance this time of the year," Mr. Mosby offered in explanation.

An hour's work sufficed to find the trouble. It was in the carrying forward of a single account. Once found, the rest was very simple, and at three o'clock Uncle Buzz slammed the ledger shut with an air of complete satisfaction, walked confidently through the door into the adjoining office with his little sheaf of papers, and returning reached for his hat. "Burrus is out," he said crisply. "We won't wait."

Joe likewise reached for his hat.

At the door the old man turned, and with a reminiscent smile and in a confidential tone, "There is a lot of personal jealousy in this firm."

Joe expressed no surprise.

"He's just been elected deacon in the church." His old eyes began to twinkle. "Great changes can take place in a man's habits once you hitch him up with ap.r.o.n strings. His wife has never thought so much of Loraine. And now he doesn't think so much of me." He chuckled. "We were raised together, and I have a good memory." He opened the door and walked slowly toward the front of the store. It was empty of customers. A clerk stood leaning idly across a gla.s.s counter of notions looking into the street. Uncle Buzz proceeded calmly on, giving the clerk a pleasant nod. "She came from a farm back in the county. They say she had never seen a railroad until she was twenty-one years old."

The clerk inspected Joe thoroughly and critically and made no sign of having heard anything. And still Joe felt a bit dubious; indiscretion is like other normal weapons: it kills when one doesn't know it is loaded.

But Mr. Mosby was in rising spirits. They emerged to the street and turned the corner into the less populous thoroughfare, known commonly throughout Bloomfield as Pearl Street, and there they came upon Uncle Buzz's horse and buggy, standing as if carved from one and the same block of immutable immobility. Even the flies found little of excitement in lighting about the front section of the combination, and only one or two were buzzing about in the general neighbourhood in a dispirited manner.

The horse opened his eyes and lifted one ear as Uncle Buzz climbed in the buggy and took up the lines. But being complacent and particularly indisposed to anything as much like effort as resistance, the starting was quite without ceremony.

Eventually, and not too much so, they left the city streets, and soon were jogging down a winding little lane of the softest, yellowest earth imaginable. On either side, between the edge of the roadside and the snake rail fence, was a little bank all a-tangle with blackberry bushes, and here and there, with its roots protruding out into s.p.a.ce, a gaunt and bare thorn tree or an occasional walnut thrusting its branches over the road. Beyond, the fields lay in cool, serrated rows, deep brown and freshly fragrant. The woodland which hung about in the background beyond the fields would occasionally sweep down and cross the road, and then would come a stretch of checkered shade on the yellow earth, and the lifting, expectant sound of high wind in top branches. And sometimes, in the heart of such an arm of woodland, the old horse's hoofs would echo hollow on the warped and mellowing boards of a tiny bridge, and there would be a momentary slip and gurgle of water underneath, on down through the ferns. Joe felt steeped in calm.

Mr. Montgomery was not at home. Nor were the horses. They found they were a week late. An old Negro whom they encountered just within the paddock gate so informed them: "Yessuh. They done took 'em down t'

Louisville, las' Monday."

They left him scratching his kinky gray pate in meditation.

Uncle Buzz was disappointed. The little excursion was thus deprived of its sparkle. There was a something about going out to see racehorses----Well, at any rate, Uncle Buzz was disappointed. He showed it on the way home. Perhaps the fading sunlight, the lengthening shadows, had something to do with it. And the wind, too, that had come with the morning and kept up its bl.u.s.ter all day, had died to a whisper, so that a cl.u.s.ter of last year's corn-stalks standing in a fence corner were merely indifferently waggling. It may have been just a reflection of mood, but as they were rounding the brow of the hill above Bloomfield and could see the dip of the meadows to the creek and the white fences and outbuildings of the Fair Grounds away off to the right, the old horse stopped and gently switched his tail. And Uncle Buzz let him stop.

"Do you know," he said, and his voice was reminiscent and uncertain, "I've been thinking lately we ought to sell the place and move to town."

Joe looked up at him curiously. "Why do you think that, Uncle Buzz?"

Mr. Mosby pondered, as the horse, feeling perhaps the slight p.r.i.c.ks of conscience, resumed his way at an imperceptible walk. "Well," he said, "this country is not what it used to be. All the other towns, Guests, Fillmore--all the rest of them--are on the railroad or interurban.

They have the advantage of us."

Joe was watching him unperceived. The old man's face had lost its aggressive jauntiness. There was an odd pucker about the brows. His mouth, above the well-trimmed goatee, seemed small and indecisive. Joe could see the clear blue veins on the back of the hand as it listlessly held the lines.

"Business has been a bit slack this past year. Seems like it never got over the war. And prices are high, too. Can't get a n.i.g.g.e.r to do a day's work for you for less than three dollars now," he added fiercely. And then lapsing into his former vein again, "I wonder----"

Joe waited. "Wonder what, Uncle Buzz?"

The sun made one of its perceptible drops, just as though its setting was a matter of notches. A little cool breeze came up to meet them from the creek bottom as they moved slowly downward.

"Why couldn't you get me something to do in Louisville? How about the Plow Company? They must employ a great many men." He laughed a bit shrilly. "I've always thought I would like to live in Louisville."

Joe was aghast. He felt as if it might be some old lady demanding of him pink tights and a place in the front row of the ballet. However, he checked the exclamation that rose to his lips. But for a moment he did not know what to say. Uncle Buzz--wanting to go to work at Bromley's!--An ancient and decrepit Whittington!

"But you've been here so long, Uncle Buzz!" he managed at length.

"So I have. All the more reason. I'm getting in a rut. Besides, I'm getting tired of Burrus. Narrow-minded scoundrel! He throws out hints about Zeke bringing me my whiskey over from Fillmore. As if it were any of his business!" He subsided and silently contemplated the depths of Burrus' degradation.

Joe laughed softly and at the same time felt the sharp little warning edge of an intuition. Uncle Buzz was slipping, and he knew it.

"I wouldn't be in a hurry," he suggested at length, "Bromley's is full up. All those men coming back from the army, you know--I'll keep an eye open for you if you want me." It was most incongruous, the patronizing air that had crept into his voice, the tone that invariably greets the unemployed, wherever or whoever he be.

Uncle Buzz brightened. "Do," he said.

They drove through the gate and up to the house. Aunt Loraine profusely reproached her husband for not advising her of Joseph's arrival. "It's a shame. Here at the last minute. You might have at least sent me word, Bushrod."

"We had to go out in the country," Uncle Buzz replied with decision.

And so they supped meagrely on fried chicken and rice and gravy and hot biscuits and coffee. And afterward they sat in the high-ceilinged back parlour, in candlelight, and watched the glow die from the western sky. And Aunt Loraine asked him about the "season" in Louisville, and once she asked him about Mary Louise. And bye-and-bye Uncle Buzz began to nod just like a sleepy little boy, and with the prospect of a long, well-filled to-morrow, Joe suggested that they go to bed. And then there was a moment's pausing upon the threshold of a yawning black door beyond which things smelled mustily sweet, with dusty shadows that crept across the matting from a s.h.i.+elded lamp; and later a most delicious yielding of one's self to the cool envelope of soft white sheets, and a moment's wide-eyed staring at the ceiling; and then forgetfulness.

Sometime later--it seemed hours--Joe was awakened by the clatter of an automobile somewhere beneath his window. For a moment he lay still and wondered and then, the bustle continuing, only in a much subdued and m.u.f.fled manner, he got up and in his bare feet walked over to the window across the matting and looked out. He saw an oil lantern sitting on the edge of the side steps, and he saw the open screen door. And then from a black shadow a short distance away, behind the old lilac bush he remembered so well, he saw a figure emerge, carrying a gla.s.s jug. The figure was Zeke's, stooped over and shuffling, in the same old peaked cap he had always worn. And in the jug was the apotheosis of Mr. Mosby's contempt for Mr. Burrus, and as it pa.s.sed the light it gleamed and sparkled with a deep golden malevolence. And hearing steps on the porch, and voices, and fearing lest he might be seen spying at the window, Joe crept back to bed. And directly he heard the familiar roaring clatter of a car starting up somewhere down below there in the darkness, and after a while--silence. He fell into a deep and satisfying sleep.

CHAPTER VI

Mary Louise had the power of concentration over her determinations as well as over her desires. Once having decided on a course she could keep herself driving at it without ceasing. If she made a digression, it was with eyes set on the goal, and for the reason that to so digress was to find a more facile path and save time in the end. Her past attainments had been gained apparently without effort, for in the little world she had known at Bloomfield all had been hers to do with as she desired. And then had come the eighteen months in Louisville, with its awakenings, its gradual undermining of her old standards and conceptions, and its whetting of the keen edge of her desire.