The Best Short Stories of 1917 Part 75

It was just that Nat's quarters were too small for him, chiefly. Even he realized this presently. Luke would never forget the sloppy March morning when Nat went away. He was wakened by a flare of candle in the room he shared with his brothers. Tom, the twelve-year-old, lay sound asleep; but Nat, the big man of fifteen, was up, dressed, bending over something he was writing on a paper at the bureau. There was a fat little bundle beside him, done up in a blue-and-white bandanna.

Day was still far off. The window showed black; there was the sound of a thaw running off the eaves; the white-washed wall was painted with grotesque leaping shadows by the candle flame. At the first murmur, Nat had come and put his arms about him.

"Don't ye holler, little un; don't ye do it! 'Tain't nothin'--on'y Natty's goin' away a spell; quite a spell, little un. Now kiss Natty....

That's right!... An' you lay still there an' don't holler. An' listen here, too: Natty's goin' to bring ye somethin'--a grand red ball, mebbe--if you're good. You wait an' see!"

But Natty hadn't brought the ball. Two years had pa.s.sed without a sc.r.a.p of news of him; and then--he was back. Slipped into the village on a freighter at dusk one evening. A forlorn scarecrow Nat was; so tattered of garment, so smeared of coal dust, you scarcely knew him. So full of strange sophistications, too, and new trails of thought--so oddly rich of experience. He gave them his story. The tale of an exigent life in a great city; a piecework life made of such flotsam labors as he could pick up, of spells of loafing, of odd incredible a.s.sociates, of months tagging a circus, picking up a task here and there, of long journeyings through the country, "riding the b.u.mpers"--even of alms asked at back doors!

"Oh, not a tramp, Nat!"

The hurt had quivered all through Maw.

But Nat only laughed.

"Jiminy Christmas, it was great!"

He had thrown back his head, laughing. That was Nat all through--sipping of life generously, no matter in what form.

He had stayed just three weeks. He had spent them chiefly defeating Maw's plans to keep him. Wanderl.u.s.t kept him longer the next time. That was eight years ago. Since then he had been back home three times. Never so poor and shabby as at first--indeed, Nat's wanderings had prospered more or less--but still remote, somewhat mysterious, touched by new habits of life, new ways of speech.

The countryside, remembering the manner of his first return, shook its head darkly. A tramp--a burglar, even. G.o.d knew what! When, on his third visit home, he brought an air of extreme opulence, plenty of money, and a sartorial perfection undreamed of locally, the heads wagged even harder. A gambler probably; a ne'er-do-well certainly; and one to break his mother's heart in the end.

But none of this was true, as Luke knew. It was just that Nat hated farming; that he liked to rove and take a floater's fortune. He had a taste for the mechanical and followed incomprehensible quests. San Francisco had known him; the big races at Cincinnati; the hangars of Mineola. He was restless--Nat; but he was respectable. No one could look into his merry blue eyes and not know it. If his labors were uncertain and sporadic, and his address that of a nomad, it all sufficed, at least for himself.

If at times Luke felt a stirring doubt that Nat was not acquitting himself of his family duty, he quenched it fiercely. Nat was different.

He was born free; you could tell it in his talk, in his way of thinking.

He was like an eagle and hated to be bound by earthly ties. He cared for them all in his own way. Times when he was back he helped Maw all he could. If he brought money he gave of it freely; if he had none, just the look of his eye or the ready jest on his lip helped.

Upstairs in a drawer of the old pine bureau lay some of Nat's discarded clothing--incredible garments to Luke. The lame boy, going to them sometimes, fingered them, pondering, reconstructing for himself the fabric of Nat's adventures, his life. The ice-cream pants of a bygone day; the pointed, shriveled yellow Oxfords! the silk-front s.h.i.+rt; the odd cuff link or stud--they were like a genie-in-a-bottle, these poor clothes! You rubbed them and a whole Arabian Night's dream unfurled from them.

And Nat lived it all! But people--dull stodgy people like Uncle Clem and Aunt Mollie, and old Beckonridge down at the store, and a dozen others--these criticized him for not "workin' reg'lar" and giving a full account of himself.

Luke, thinking of all this, would flush with impotent anger.

"Oh, let 'em talk, though! He'll show 'em some day! They dunno Nat.

He'll do somethin' big fur us all some day."

III

Midsummer came to trim the old farm with her wreaths. It was the time Luke loved best of all--the long, sweet, loam-scented evenings with Maw and Tom on the old porch; and sometimes--when there was no fog--Paw's cot, wheeled out in the stillness. But Maw was not herself this summer.

Something had fretted and eaten into her heart like an acid ever since Aunt Mollie's visit and the news of Matty Bisbee's funeral.

When, one by one, the early summer festivities of the neighborhood had slipped by, with no inclusion of the Hayneses, she had fallen to brooding deeply,--to feeling more bitterly than ever the ignominy and wretchedness of their position.

Luke tried to comfort her; to point out that this summer was like any other; that they "never had mattered much to folks." But Maw continued to brood; to allude vaguely and insistently to "the straw that broke the camel's back." It was bitter hard to have Maw like that--home was bad enough, anyway. Sometimes on clear, soft nights, when the moon came out all splendid and the "peepers" sang so plaintively in the Hollow, the boy's heart would fill and grow enormous in his chest with the intolerable sadness he felt.

Then Maw's mood lifted--pierced by a ray of heavenly sunlight--for Nat came home!

Luke saw him first--heard him, rather; for Nat came up the lane--oh, miraculous!--driving a motor car. It was not a car like Uncle Clem's--not even a stepbrother to it. It was low and almost noiseless, and shaped like one of those queer torpedoes they were fighting with across the water. It was colored a soft dust-gray and trimmed with nickel; and, huge and powerful though it was, it swung to a mere touch of Nat's hand.

Nat stood before them, clad in black leather Norfolk and visored cap and leggings.

"Look like a fancy brand of chauffeur, don't I?" he laughed, with the easy resumption of a long-broken relation that was so characteristically Nat.

But Nat was not a chauffeur. Something much bigger and grander. The news he brought them on top of it all took their breaths away. Nat was a special demonstrator, out on a brand-new high-cla.s.s job for a house handling a special line of high-priced goods. And he was to go to Europe in another week--did they get it straight? Europe! Jiminy! He and another fellow were taking cars over to France and England.

No; they didn't quite get it. They could not grasp its significance, but clung humbly, instead, to the mere glorious fact of his presence.

He stayed two days and a night; and summer was never lovelier. Maw was like a girl, and there was such a killing of pullets and extravagance with new-laid eggs as they had never known before. At the last he gave them all presents.

"Tell the truth," he laughed, "I'm stony broke. 'Tisn't mine, all this stuff you see. I got some kale in advance--not much, but enough to swing me; but of course, the outfit's the company's. But I'll tell you one thing: I'm going to bring some long green home with me, you can bet! And when I do"--Nat had given Maw a prodigious nudge in the ribs--"when I do--I ain't goin' to stay an old bachelor forever! Do you get that?"

Maw's smile had faded for a moment. But the presents were fine--a new knife for Tom, a book for Luke, and twenty whole round dollars for Maw, enough to pay that old grocery bill down at Beckonridge's and Paw's new invoice of patent medicine.

They all stood on the porch and watched him as far they could see; and Maw's black mood didn't return for a whole week.

Evenings now they had something different to talk about--journeys in seagoing craft; foreign countries and the progress of the "Ee-ropean"

war, and Nat's likelihood--he had laughed at this--of touching even its fringe. They worked it all up from the boiler-plate war news in the _Bi-weekly_ and Luke's school geography. Yes; for a little s.p.a.ce the blackness was lifted.

Then came the August morning when Paw died. This was an unexpected and unsettling contingency. One doesn't look for a "chronic's" doing anything so unscheduled and foreign to routine; but Paw spoiled all precedent. They found him that morning with his heart quite still, and Luke knew they stood in the presence of imminent tragedy.

It's all very well to peck along, hand-to-mouth fas.h.i.+on. You can manage a living of sorts; and farm produce, even scanty, unskillfully contrived, and the charity of relatives, and the patience of tradesmen, will see you through. But a funeral--that's different! Undertaker--that means money. Was it possible that the sordid epic of their lives must be capped by the crowning insult, the Poormaster and the Pauper's Field? If only poor Paw could have waited a little before he claimed the spotlight--until prices fell a little or Nat got back with that "long green"!

Maw swallowed her bitter pill.

She went to see Uncle Clem and ask! And Uncle Clem was kind.

"He'll buy a casket--he's willin' fur that--an' send a wreath and pay fur notices, an' even half on a buryin' lot; but he said he couldn't do no more. The high cost has. .h.i.t him too.... An' where are we to git the rest? He said--at the last--it might be better all round fur us to take what Ellick Flick would gimme outen the Poor Fund--" Maw hadn't been able to go on for a spell.

A pauper's burial for Paw! Surely Maw would manage better than that! She tried to find a better way that very night.

"This farm's mortgaged to the neck; but I calculate Ben Travis won't care if I'm a mind to put Paw in the south field. It hain't no mortal good fur anything else, anyhow; an' he can lay there if we want. It's a real pleasant place. An' I can git the preacher myself--I'll give him the rest o' the broilers; an' they's seasoned hickory plankin' in the lean-to. Tom, you come along with me."

All night Luke had lain and listened to the sound of big Tom's saw and hammer. Tom was real handy if you told him how--and Maw would be showing him just how to shape it all out. Each hammer blow struck deep on the boy's heart.

Maw lined the home-made box herself with soft old quilts, and washed and dressed her dead herself in his faded outlawed wedding clothes. And on a morning soft and sweet, with a hint of rain in the air, they rode down in the farm wagon to the south field together--Paw and Maw and Luke--with big Tom walking beside the aged k.n.o.bby horse's head.

Abel Gazzam, a neighbor, had seen to the grave; and in due course the little cavalcade reached the appointed spot inside the snake fence--a quiet place in a corner, under a graybeard elm. As Maw had said, it was "a pleasant place for Paw to lay in."

There were some old neighbors out in their own rigs, and Uncle Clem had brought his family up in his car, with a proper wreath; and Reverend Kearns came up and--declining all lien on the broilers--read the burial service, and spoke a little about poor Paw. But it wasn't a funeral, no how. No supper; no condolence; no viewing "the remains"--not even a handshake! Maw didn't even look at her old friends, riding back home between Tom and Luke, with her head fiercely high in the air.

A dull depression settled on Luke's heart. It was all up with the Hayneses now. They had saved Paw from charity with their home-made burial; but what had it availed? They might as well have gone the whole figure. Everybody knew! There wasn't any comeback for a thing like this.

They were just n.o.bodies--the social pariahs of the district.

IV