Chapter II: Part 2

Sometimes, in his small, hiccoughy voice: “Yes.” Sometimes there were orders for a prompt return.

When he was six, there was already that kind of reliability about him. One October afternoon, when the apricot haze lay in its inimitable taste and smell along the child’s senses as he crossed the fields, Rebekka met him down by the cow-shed, where she had been watching him approach.

“Did Mother say you could stay the night, Davey?”

“There’s a little sick ewe-lamb in a basket in the kitchen, Bek. I’ve got to get back. You see—you see, the liddle thing—the liddle thing he’s got the shivers terrible. The liddle thing, Bek. Jake’s giving him hot milk out of a bottle. I got to get back and hold the bottle. He’s got the shivers terrible, the liddle thing.”

He had the heaving mannerism, not uncommon with children, of drawing in his breath between words as if he were hauling up a supply for the next one.

Rebekka loved the childishness of it. She used to regard him, while he spoke, with her teeth gritted as if she wanted to pinch. She had been that way with her own children, full of the impulse to kiss and maul at them when they were babies, for what was adorable to her.

On this gray afternoon, there was a letter stuck up in the top of her boot so that it stung against her knee. It was from the dean of an agricultural college. A sympathetic letter, written to a woman known by hearsay through three counties, informing her that a certain aspect of her son’s deportment was making it impossible for him to remain as a student. It was a simple, typewritten page, couched in kindness. And yet Rebekka was seared with it. The letter burned against her knee like a hot-pack. It was as if she had rubbed flame over her body, and then in, as you would oil.

She strode down a cinder path that led from the cow-sheds toward the barns and shouted some orders that had to do with the backing in of a team of magnificent dray-horses, with light-brown braided manes and shaggy forelocks. With that letter searing against her body and her consciousness, she wanted to cry through a throat that was strong and tried from holding back tears. A great, powerful dam of a throat that had never failed her.

And through sickness of soul, she wanted David to sleep at the farm. Up in Stevey’s room. It was foolish, of course. But somehow the consciousness of the small, warm nub of him up there on the balsam mattress in the attitude he was to lie all his life, with his knees up under his chin and the back of his hand curled against his neck, could lie to her like a plaster of solace.[4]

It was his funny sturdiness. The sturdiness of him marching there alongside her, the basket of eggs, about as much as he could manage, always intact. The sturdy kicking of his bare feet into the gravel, making it fly. He lugged with a will and there was a spangling of sweat on his upper lip.

“David, let’s go in now and telephone to Mother that you’ll stay the night. It’s getting along toward dark, anyway.”

“But Bek, the sick ewe, he’s got the shivers something terrible. I’ve got to hold the bottle.”

“Stay all night, honey. There’s hominy for supper.” There was not going to be at all until that moment. David loved it with sorghum wound into it.

“He’s a poor little, sick little ewe, Bek,” began David all over again in heaving intonations, with his voice full of draughts. “Jacob is driving some heifers to Middleton tonight and I’ve got to be home to feed him his milk in a bottle. He drinks out of a bottle, Bek. Oughtta see. With a rubber nipple like a baby. Ought to see, Bek, he’s got the shivers terrible.”

“Trina will tend him, Dave. There’s nothing much to do for a sick ewe but keep it warm. Dave, Bek wants you to stay! There’s some peppermint taffies Winslow’s brought.”

There was a pucker to David’s mouth when it watered. A nibbling little motion that set the flanges of his nose dancing.

“C’n I ride Dodo?”

“He’s been plowing heavy all day, Dave.”

To ride Dodo, whose back was as broad as a moor, was to sit astride the universe.

“Well then, if I stay, can I flibber-jibber?”

To “flibber-jibber” was to ride the unanchored end of the big ironing-board that unhinged from the wall and then shut up against it.[5]

“It’s Tuesday, Davey, and Tillie is ironing.”

“You see, Bek, it’s a little sick ewe....”

“Little scamp, you. All right, have your way. Go tell Tillie I said you could ride the board.”

There was a telephone in the back hall under a slant of low ceiling formed by the stairway, a wall-affair with a handle that you ground around as you lifted the receiver.

The House on Sycamore Street was on a party line. A long ring and two shorts was the Schuyler signal. It was a standing family joke that Mathilda Schuyler unhooked her receiver for all rings. This she denied with great flurry.

But the fact remained that in the little pantry where the telephone hung beside the refrigerator, Mathilda spent long periods a-tiptoe, an eager-listening side of her face glued against the faint crackle of the receiver.

“Well, Mother,” was Henry’s habit of greeting, as he entered the house evenings, “what’s the inside news on the party line today? Any startling revelations? What’s the low-down? Is Mrs. Wiley making soft soap this week? Who killed cock robin?”

“Hennery!” She said “Hennery” in a little bleat. She said “Puppa” in a little bleat. She unhooked the receiver, to Rebekka’s call, with a little bleat.

“Hello?”

“Mother? Bek.”

“Yes, Bek.”

“I’ll keep Dave all night, Mother, and send him home with the team. Tell Father I’m sending over that load of dirt for filling in the old pig wallow.”

“But, Bek, Puppa wanted Dave to stop in at Igrotte’s on his way back this afternoon for a pat of sweet butter.”

“I’ll send you a pat in the morning. And Mother, Davey’s having a fit about that sick ewe in the kitchen. Wants you to see to it that the range is kept banked all night, and he says to be sure to see that Trina or Jake feeds him from the bottle.”

“Puppa wanted him to stop at Igrotte’s for a pat of——”

“I’ll see to everything, Mother.”

“And, Bek! Hello! And Bek——”

“Yes.”

“Emma telephoned that Claire has a little temperature again and a sore throat, and insists upon going to the movies with her Uncle Hennery.”

“White spots?”

“I don’t know. Emma seemed right worried. Claire insists upon going out. Thought I’d ask you to call up right away.”

“Surely. Father there?”

“He hasn’t come in yet from Cottage Corner. He drove out there with Mark to see some steers.”

“Tell him I bought those two Holsteins we saw out at Seven Mile last week, at my price.”

“Yes, Bek.”

“M-m-m-m,” said Bek, hung up, and began to grind at the telephone again.

Emma answered, unhooking the receiver of a desk instrument and seating herself at a small kidney-shaped table in a reception hall of highly-colored rugs, small oil-studies in large gilt Florentine frames and shadow-boxes of sheep huddling before a storm; a study of an old man with very many wrinkles and sunken cheeks, and one of the fat monks with the look of pouring mugs of ale down inside their cassocks. A winding stairway rose out of this reception-hall, with a stained window at its first landing and a rubber-plant in a brown-pottery jardinière with warts.

Emma’s home had been built at the height of the McKinley indoor period. Her reception-hall boasted an upright pianola, a piano-bench (the stool was over in front of one of the windows, with a rubber-plant on a china plate standing on it). There were lace curtains, sill-high, and, leading into the dining-room, portières of soft chenille ropes that clung to your shoulders as you walked through. On the center mission-table, with its mission-lamp, were such addenda as Owen Meredith in padded leather and, by rather amusing propinquity, obvious to no one in that household, a cloth copy of _The Egotist_ that had found its way there by one of those circuitous and anonymous routes peculiar to books. There were visiting-cards on a bronze tray shaped like the Indian head on a penny. Claire’s library ticket. A round globe of goldfish threading through a castle. A _Saturday Evening Post_. Morton Milliken’s pipe in a white-china dish. A book of family snapshots. A cut-glass pickle-dish filled with salted peanuts.

Emma wore a dressing-sacque made of strips of narrow blue-satin ribbon and Valenciennes lace, and a cream-sateen petticoat with a machine-scalloped edge.

“Oh Bek,” she cried to her sister, who stood at the other end of the telephone connection in her knee-high boots and homespun skirt crowded into them. “I’m so glad you called!”

“What’s this I hear about Claire?”

“She’s got fever again and her throat’s sore. She’s been so stubborn about my telephoning you. Wouldn’t let me.”

“White spots?”

“A little one, but she denies it. She’s got her heart set on going to the picture-show with her Uncle Henry and Henriette tonight.”

“Where is she?”

“Upstairs, lying down.”

“Tell her I want to talk to her.”

“Don’t let on Bek, that I have said anything, or she will immediately suspect that her father or I appealed to you to. She’s right stubborn.”

“Call her.”

Claire Milliken, who had a thick, creamy _mädchen_ beauty that might have flowed right off her mother’s, was lying under a pink blanket on one end of her curlicue brass bed up in a square room of stripe-and-bud wall-paper, bird’s-eye maple dresser with dotted-swiss cover over pink sateen, a window-seat of dotted Swiss cushions over pink sateen and a ukelele snugged in.

“Oh, Claire—telephone!”

With a lovely sort of languor that was a piece of her mother’s, Claire flung off of the bed, and with the pink blanket huddled shawl-wise over her plump and fair shoulders, pattered out into the hall in pink-felt slippers edged in white eiderdown, and leaned over the balustrade.

“Who is it, Dee Dee?”

For some reason, with its beginnings imbedded in the lispings of childhood, Claire was always to address her mother as “Dee Dee.”

“It’s Aunt Bek, Claire.”

Instantly there raced over Claire a tiny rigidity, as her nails whitened at the hold of the balustrade. There was a letter burning against her body, too, that bore the same postmark as Bek’s. Only hers lay warmly to the soft white flesh over her heartbeat; it rang there as if it were a little electric bell. It was from Steve, announcing a little too nonchalantly, and binding her to secrecy, the exciting tiding that he was coming home.

Her secret.

“Then you must have called her up, Dee Dee. Oh, I know!”

“Claire, that is positively not so. I was paraffining those Mason jars of damsons when the telephone rang.”

“Well, it’s _mighty_ funny. Aunt Bek isn’t going to run my life the way she runs yours and everybody else’s in this family—and out of it.”

“I can’t help how funny it is, and I hope you won’t ever have anyone less efficient to run people’s lives than your Aunt Bek.”

“Well!” said Claire with ambiguity. “Well! I’m not so sure about that by a long shot.” And she dashed down the stairs.

There was something about Claire in her teens, her prettiness brightened now with fever, of a petulant child.

“It’s mighty funny, Dee Dee! That’s all I have to say,” taking up the receiver from her mother’s hand and seating herself before the kidney-shaped table. “Hello!” Her aunt was not one to parry words.

“I suppose you know what a sore throat with temperature means if you expose yourself unnecessarily?”

“There’s nothing the matter with me, dear! Dee Dee or Father put you up to this. Or Gramaw or Gramp. I won’t be treated like a simp.”

“Like a what?”

“—elton.”

“It is entirely up to you how you are to be treated.”

“I tell you I am feeling all right, Aunt Bek.”

“Then why are you lying around the house with temperature when it is your afternoon to sew at the Betsy Ross Club?”

“Just because my throat is a little eeny sore and I am taking care of it.”

“Yes, that is precisely the way you took care of it when you insisted upon going to the State Agricultural Prom last month and came down abed afterward for two weeks.”

“But, Aunt Bek....”

“Your mother had your Grandfather Milliken’s broken leg to contend with this summer and your father’s sciatica. If you feel that you have the moral right to pile more worries upon her, that is a matter for your own judgment. Tell your mother I want to talk to her.”

“But, Aunt Bek....”

“There’s nothing more to be said about it, Claire. If consideration for yourself or your mother does not prompt you, I cannot hope to.”

“But, Aunt Bek, I tell you I....”

“I’d rather not hear it all over again, Claire. Your mother, please!”

“Oh, very well—of course, if you don’t want to listen! Here, Dee Dee, Aunt Bek wants you back again.”

“Hello, Bek.”

“Yes. Don’t answer to what I am saying. But you needn’t worry. She’s not going. And while it’s on my mind, Emma, I wish you would tell Morton to tell his father that I have reason to know that Second Street property is for sale after all.”

“Bek, Father Milliken is buying awfully heavy on that Second Street deal. I was telling Morton last night I just don’t want him bothering Father again to go his collateral.”

“Least said over the telephone about that the better, but if he insists upon being interested, Grandfather Milliken had better let me do the talking, because I handled that same group pretty well the time Phil went in on that Springfield development.”

“Yes, Bek. But I’m quite sure Morton wouldn’t proceed without conferring with you anyhow.”

“Tell Aunt Bek I want to talk to her when you’re finished, Dee Dee.”

“Sh-h! I can’t hear a word you’re saying, Bek, with Claire at my elbow. Here, she wants to talk to you again.”

“Hello, I’m not going, so there, if it makes you feel any better.”

“It does, Claire. Thank you! Good night.”

“’Night.”

“Heigh-ho! So much for that!” said Bek’s manner as she hung up. Then there was the matter of old Jessup, whose wife Mattie was demanding that his pay be turned over directly to her. Winslow was really the one who should take that up with old Jessup. But no, better do it herself. And those clapboards at the rear of the lower barn needed whitewashing. Winslow could really do that; but no, better to have Jessup do it after the bran was mixed.

There was Davey playing at her heels again, hopping along on one leg after her in a fashion that spun the gravel against her boots.

“Don’t, Davey.”

But just the same, how curiously pleasant the shot of the pebbles that he kicked up against her boots! He was so snug, David was. So solidly there! A little snug-bug-in-a-little-snug-rug of a brother. And the letter was searing into Rebekka, as she strode down the cinder path toward the lower stables.

Horrible, horrible, horrible, on David’s account if no other, that a nephew should stand disgraced in college for drinking. Not but what there were other considerations, more immediate, graver far, than David.

Only you were not always logical about David, as you had been in practically every other aspect of life, even your own children. Except perhaps—your marriage. More than for any other member of the family, Mother, Father, even Winslow, it was most intolerable of all that Stevey should have dared—for Davey’s sake—to bring this upon them!

David coming along as he had, in his ridiculous little anticlimax fashion, was an emotion. His diminutive kind of isolation made him somehow—well, special. Born so almost into a forest of grown-up brothers and sisters; knee-high to his universe.

These early years of his were spent among the knees. The knees of his parents, his brothers and sisters, and of even his nieces and nephews. Grotesque world of knees.

It was hard to treat David as anything except an emotion, even if you were Rebekka. His smallness, his squareness, his unnamable kind of solidity. Squat little toadstool in the curiously overshadowing forest of the grown-ups.

Everything, somehow, some way, must be kept right for David. Stevey represented part of that responsibility of keeping the forest of the grown-ups fine for David to grow into.

All the family must have that sense of responsibility to David. To Bek, striding there, it made Stevey’s defection seem more than ever a heartburning shame before square, little, stodgy David.

If only he wouldn’t stay stocky. The Schuylers were all tall, except Mathilda and Phil. Henry, even with his stoop, stood six-feet-two. Bek herself only slightly under. Funny little old runt of David, kicking the gravel against her boots.

“David, stop that, I said!”

“Bek, will Winslow make me a pea-shooter?”

“Yes.”

Winslow must be stirred to set about wrapping those mulberry bushes along the walk in straw against another frost. No, better get Jessup to do it, Winslow’s finger-tips split so easily. Besides, must tell Winslow tonight after supper that Stevey would be home tomorrow. Poor Winslow, having to know at last. Terrible! Terrible! Terrible!

“Bek, is there two kinds of crows’ nests?”

“No, only one.”

“There is so.”

“All right.” (If Father wants to trade me in those two red calves for the spotted heifer, I take them over. How to tell Winslow!)

“There is, Bek.”

“All right.” (One must stop the habit of listening to children’s queries with only half an ear. Her own children, growing up, had resented it. And now here was David with the most insatiable of curiosities, getting only half an ear.)

“You say there is more than one kind, Davey? Not that I know of.”

“There is so. One for crows and one for a ship.”

“Of course! How stupid of me! You’re right. Bek just wasn’t thinking.”

“There’s a picture of one on a ship in a book up in Henry’s room, called ‘Our—our—Pac-if-ic Poss-ess-ions.’ What’s ‘Our Pac-if-ic Poss-ess-ions,’ Bek?”

(Oh Stevey, Stevey—how could you? Where to turn? How? How to tell Winslow?)

“What are they, Bek?”

“What, Dave?”

“Our Pacif-ic Poss-ess-ions.”

“Why—er—islands in the Pacific, Dave. The Philippines.”

“There’s a picture of a crow’s nest in that book. It’s got a sailor-boy in it with a hunk of ice hanging on his beard. It’s as cold as the devil in a crow’s nest on a ship.”

“Don’t say ‘devil’.”

“Henry and Father do. How can it be cold on ship in the Pacific, Bek?”

“You must ask Henry that, Davey.”

“Bek, I can spell ‘Appomattox’.”

“Yes.”

“Ap-po-mat-tox. That’s where Lee surrendered to Grant, April 9th, 1865.”

“Good.”

“Henry read it to me out of a book full of pictures of flags. Ever see a flag with a skull and cross-bones?”

“Um.”

“Why can’t you say April 1th like you say April 9th?”

“Because.”

“That’s no reason. It’s a word.”

“Well you just can’t.”

“Tramp. Tramp. Tramp-tramp-tramp. I’m a Confederate Union soldier.”

“You can’t be both.”

“Why? Oh, I know!”

(Poor Winslow, having to be told tonight.)

“Tramp. Tramp. Seventeen hundred and seventy-five, scarcely a man is now alive who remembers that famous day and year. Do you remember that famous day and year, Bek?”

“No.” (Lime phosphate for the verbena borders.)

“George Washington would remember.”

“Yes, George Washington would.”

“Tramp. Tramp. Tramp-tramp-tramp. There’s a picture in Henry’s office of Washington crossing the Delaware. Where’s the Delaware, Bek?”

“In Delaware, Davey.”

“It’s in Pennsylvania, too. How can the Delaware be out of Delaware?”

(M-m-m. What to do about Stevey! All the horror of those secret months before he had been packed off to college. The need for more and more secrecy. This thing that had Stevey in its clutch. A Schuyler. Inconceivable. There was something known as Keely Cure. Keely Cure—a Schuyler. Oh God——Oh God—let me wake up and find I’m dreaming....)

“Tramp. Tramp.”

(What to do? Poor Winslow, he was sure to turn that green pallor and quiver at the flanges of his nose with the kind of nervous anger that made the backs of his hands sweat and invariably brought on one of his colds. Shame, Stevey! Oh my boy! And David growing up.)

“There’s Winslow. What’s he painting?”

“Don’t holler, Davey, while Winslow is painting that lovely corner of the orchard where all that sumach grows.”

“If I was a painter, know what I’d paint?”

(If only Winslow needn’t be told! How peaceful he seemed....)

“Know what?”

“Sh-h, Davey, Winslow wants it quiet when he’s working.”

Winslow was seated in a grassy cove behind a silo on a folding-chair that occupied two levels at a time, and from that tilt kept squinting at a distance of apple trees and fold of meadow-land that were still faintly lit with the most backward spring of many a year. Along a bit of crest ran sumach, red as fire.

He had a pale goatee which shot up with the directness of a pointing finger when he threw back his head to squint.

Rebekka had her own private opinion about Winslow’s head, particularly seen thus in perspective against sky-line while he painted. White, high brow, with a blue vein that quivered. Baby-fine hair, a shade darker than beard, lying back from it in a thin, curling roll. Long, delicate eyelids. Almost a womanish neck, the same white as his chest.

To Rebekka, particularly the countless times she had seen Winslow thus at his painting, there was something that suggested the Christ head in the northeast window of the Second Avenue Rock Church where the Old Gentleman owned a pew. Strange that no one had ever remarked it.

There was another blue little vein in the side of Winslow’s neck that jumped when he was tired or nervous. His exquisite capacity for pain symbolized to her right there in that bit of neck above the old corduroy jacket. Rebekka was never to realize to what extent her vitality was dedicated to keeping that vein at the side of Winslow’s neck from jumping.[6]

“Don’t disturb Winslow, Davey.”

Winslow had already been disturbed. But affably. He came toward them smiling, one long, white hand plunged into corduroy, leather-bound pocket, and his pipe hooked loosely into the corner o£ his mouth.

How handsome he was and how slim and straight, with that curve at his waist which was almost military. It made Bek, who had not kept her figure, fear that she looked her several years his senior. Except that her skin had the pat, dewy clarity of butter. Winslow’s had gutters, and there were long brackets about his mouth. A nervous, dredged face. A face that might have had the same pear-shaped clarity of his son Leslie’s, until he had looked into that son’s eyes and, beholding their vacancy, his own had become turgid with pain for his offspring.

It was horrible to have to tell Winslow, who sometimes cried to himself over Leslie, at night, as he lay on the pillow beside her, about the letter from Stevey flaming against her knee.

“Hi, there!” said Winslow, and caught David up by the armpits and swung him.

“Quit!” cried David, to whom the gesture seemed infantile, and began dancing on his toes and spitting on his square palms. “C’m on, spar!”

“Shrimp,” said Winslow, and placed his long, white hand against David’s face in a soft sort of mash that pinned him back against the silo, “where did you come from?”

“Your brother-in-law is going to sleep here, Winslow.”

The family never tired of its sense of the humor of David’s disparity among them.

“Well, brother-in-law,” said Winslow, and tossed him high a second time, “we’ll have the Cherokee snake dance on the Victrola after supper.”

“Yoo-hoo,” yodeled David, and beat his palm against his wide, open mouth.

Winslow, who before marriage had lived in New Mexico over a six-month recuperation from a lung condition, knew some Cherokee lore and had a great silver tribal belt that wrapped twice around David.

“Indian Territory is bounded on the north by South Dakota, and Henry says if you draw a straight line——”

“Henry says! Henry says! Henry says the moon is green cheese!”

“Now, Winslow, don’t go teasing that child.”

How peaceful, in the westering light that was lovely across closely-nibbled pasture, to saunter with these two. Externally as peaceful as if a letter were not flaming....

“Henry says——”

“Henry says!”

“Winslow!”

“Henry says when I’m big there will be a Panama Canal and then he is going to take me to see it. Panama is an isthmus——”

“Henry says!”

“Panama is an isthmus, Henry says, connecting North and South America. Know what an isthmus is?”

“Good Lord, no. Neither would you if you didn’t have a human encyclopedia for a brother.”

“Winslow!”

“An isthmus is—is——”

“Doesn’t know what an isthmus is. Henry for a brother, and doesn’t know what an isthmus is.”

“I do so. I’ve just forgot. I do so.”

“Winslow, stop teasing that boy.”

“I did know what an isthmus was.”

The sweet, the westering light. It was like a bath to Rebekka, flowing along her flesh. Her pastures. Her lands. Her husband in his lithe, easy way that suggested a remoteness from the soil she wrestled with, ambling along at her side. And her brother David, for whom the family must be kept perfect with integrity. And against the love in her for the peace of the land she was wresting her success from, there burned that consciousness of Stevey, about to be suspended from college for what to her was an unnamable vice. A vice that she had secretly wrestled with in this boy-child of hers for five years; ever since the November dusk she had first stumbled over him below Casey’s Cider Mill, lying huddled on his way home from High School, as if an old sack had been lying there.

And now, after she had fought it with him to the finish of packing him off to college, apparently cured, here it was again, the old terror, lifting its head.

The struggle to keep the thing that had happened, and then happened again and again, secret. Just her fight and Steve’s. And now that it seemed won—poor Stevey! And there was Jessup. Oh—poor Jessup! Jessup and Stevey were so terribly akin.

“Winslow, you and Davey go on up to the house. I’ll be along in a minute and dish up supper. I want to stop and talk to Jessup. Winslow—would you speak to him for me? Never mind.” (If only Winslow would! It would be easier somehow for a man to reach a man.)

“What about Jessup, Bek?”

“Never mind. Go ’long. I’ll be up to the house in a minute.”

Jessup was forking fertilizer from a horseless cart that was backed up against a barn door. A few brown wyandottes stalked about without scarcely the ado of fluttering before her, as Rebekka strode across the clean wood flooring.

“Jessup,” said Rebekka, and hit herself on the thigh as she drew up before him, “there won’t be any need coming up to the house for pay tonight. I’ll be sending it to your wife by Hallie when she comes down for milk.”

The watery old face of Jessup swam toward her, milky-eyed, cranberry-nosed. The head of Jessup, long and hairy, was like an old cocoanut, nicknamed “Emmy Sue,” that had dangled from the ceiling of the barn of the House on Sycamore Street ever since Bek could remember.

Jessup’s was just such an old hairy ellipse of a head, with eyes with red rims that were constantly about to brim over.

She had taken him off her father’s hands, for whom he had worked thirty-five years, because the Old Gentleman, as Jessup took more and more to bad moonshine whiskey that filtered over so cheaply from Kentucky, used to fly into his terrific apoplectic tempers and berate and shout at him and scream and curse him in round, sound terms that mortified Mathilda terribly.

And now here was Jessup at sixty-eight, who had never fallen this low, beginning to lay hands on his wife, until pretty Hallie, their orphaned granddaughter who made her home with them in a little old wooden house behind Casey’s Mill, had to run out dead of night, calling help for her grandmother, whom Jessup was flaying with an old broom.

“Now, Miss Bekkie,” said Jessup, shifting quid, “you wouldn’t be humiliating an old fellow like me in that fashion, now, Miss Bek?”

“Oh, Jessup, Jessup,” cried Rebekka, looking into the watering old eyes that were so kindly when sober, “don’t try to bamboozle me.”

“But, Miss Bekkie—an old man——”

“It’s what you deserve. Shame! And Hallie growing up in your house. Shame! Have you no decency left? No pride, Jessup?”

“I have, Miss Bekkie. Pride for working for the Schuyler family all these years. There’s things, Miss Bekkie,” said Jessup in a sudden, cautious whisper, and advanced a step, after the manner of one about to reveal something secret and sinister, “there’s things can take hold of a man without his knowing it. Devils. Drink-devils that get hold of him and make him what he ain’t. Mattie hadn’t ought to be told on her old husband. Twenty years of poultices I’ve laid to her old back, Miss Bekkie. It’s a bit of a swig makes a devil of me.”

“That’s the common defense of the common drunkard, Jessup,” said Bek; and as the words came, the memory cut her like a knife that Jessup’s words were practically the words Stevey had used to her one dreadful evening when she had found him in bed stupefied. “Something gets a fellow, Mother, like a burning devil over which he has no control.” (Oh, Jessup—poor, poor Jessup!)

“It’s in every man’s power, Jessup, to be stronger than those devils.”

“Now, that’s because you’re so strong, Miss Bekkie, that you say that. The weak has more pity for the weak than the strong for the weak. They know.”

How often Stevey had defended Jessup!

“The weak ones are the most sympathizingest, Miss Bekkie.”

Was that true? Rebekka, who could scarcely bear to look into the watering old eyes of Jessup cringing there before her, knew the capacity of her strength better than she knew the gauge of her pity.

“Don’t take down my pride, Miss Bekkie. That’s all I’ve got left to keep my old woman from kicking me into the corner like the dirty old sack I am. Don’t deal out my pay to my wimmin, Miss Bekkie, that’s the low-downest a man can fall.”

Jessup, who could be so pitiable in his sobriety and a lashing kind of demon in his cups. It made it so difficult. Who was she, with that letter flaming against her flesh, to judge that watery-eyed old face, horny with its years of service to her family? Besides, this was a man’s job, by rights. Winslow should be chastising Jessup! Sometimes, a kind of slow anger smote Rebekka at the brand of her own efficiency, which made it appear there was nothing she need be spared.

“Miss Bekkie, I’m going to turn over a new leaf. Watch me!” Stevey had used just those words the night they had so secretly decided on college. “Mother, watch me. You won’t be sorry we’ve fought this thing out secretly. I’m going to turn over a new leaf.”

“I got a little crazy last week. Fust time this winter. Don’t take down my pride, Miss Bekkie.”

“I’m sorry, Jessup. Your wife and your grandchild cannot continue to live in terror every Saturday night for fear you are not going to get back from Seven Mile with your pay.”

“Miss Bekkie, I’m going to turn over a new——”

“Don’t—don’t—keep saying that!”

“Why, Miss Bekkie?”

“Because. Because. Because. Too many years of that speech, Jessup!”

“Miss Bekkie—please—I’m an old man....”

If only he wouldn’t bleat and roll his eyes like something wounded. Great Scott, a drunk and a wife-beater was nothing to snivel over.

“Sorry, Jessup.”

“Miss Bekkie!”

Why didn’t he rise up? Or threaten to quit? Or kick over the traces? Gnarled old servitor, with thirty-odd years of Schuyler soil and toil ground into his pores. The terrible meek. That was what hurt most.

“Sorry, Jessup,” said Bek and went out with her firm tread full of emphasis along the wooden floor, and the heart inside of her sick.

* * * * *

Winslow and David were already at table, building wigwams out of toothpicks and waiting for Bek to come in and dish up. When Paula, who taught kindergarten in Cleveland, was home, the little pressed-glass holder for toothpicks was not in evidence, nor the four-caster cruet nor the mother-of-pearl napkin ring with “Niagara Falls” and “Daddy” written across it.

To Bek these things mattered little.[7] Even as her house became more modernized and furnace supplanted base-burner, and the coal-range, that had made fiery Hades of the kitchen summer after summer, had been replaced with a nickel-trimmed gas one, and the old walnut dining-room set with golden oak, selected by catalogue, Bek’s table, except where Paula intervened, remained broadly a farmhouse board. Rich flour gravies to be sopped into with hot biscuit. Fried foods soaked through with flavor. Every home-made conserve and preserve, pickled, brandied, and sweet. Home-killed meats and fowl. Home-corned beef; salt pork; smoked hams.

Even then, Bek had been about considerably. Stumping the state for Ephraim Howey’s second-term candidacy; and once a year Bek went as far as East St. Louis to the stockyards and put up across Eads Bridge, in St. Louis proper, at the Planters Hotel instead of at Clara’s, who lived in the “West End” of the city and a good hour’s trip from the scenes of Bek’s activities. Bek had also attended a convention at Louisville as delegate from her state of the Home Growers Association, stopping at the Seelbach Hotel for a week. Every few years she and her father spent a few days in Chicago at the stockyards. The Schuylers, seven strong, had attended the Chicago World’s Fair, and Bek and Winslow had honeymooned via Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Niagara Falls and Washington, to New York. And once, Bek and Winslow and Leslie had journeyed to Rochester, Minnesota, to consult a pair of famous physicians there on the matter of brain surgery. Then, of course, too casual for mention, were the trips to “The City”—twenty-five miles distant.

Bek had been about, but she still set her table in red-checked cloths, punctuated with large pressed-glass dishes of preserved and pickled stuffs, and two great white ironstone pitchers of milk with the foam still on. She did the work of an eleven-room house unaided, except for Jessup’s wife Mattie, who came down on Tuesdays to help with the rough-dry ironing. The “hands,” now that the children were grown, no longer sat at table, but in quarters of their own, rigged up over the summer kitchen, but Bek still did the cooking for them, and at harvest-time, fed as many as twenty from the great copper pots that hung in rows, unused from season to season.

Winslow, whose habit it was to sit down before the meal was served and, proclaiming his hunger, eat in frugal fashion once the food was before him, had pushed back his plate in the game with David, so that knife, fork, and tumbler cluttered up the center of the table.

“Winslow,” cried Rebekka, tying on her apron over the heavy cloth skirts, boots and all, “that’s no way to clutter up the supper table,” and began shoving back objects into place and jerking David into a semi-high chair that she had used for her children, and then hanging his napkin about his neck by a home-made contrivance fashioned out of a discarded pair of suspenders.

“Food! Food!” intoned Winslow, and beat with his fork, which set Davey beating after him.

“Food! Food!”

“Babies!” said Bek, flouncing out into the kitchen, smiling because she loved their being babyish.

Her children and nieces and nephews and in-laws said of her that she could stand in the center of her vast kitchen and reach with her long, sure arms for anything she wanted. That accounted for her amazing kitchen efficiency. This was scarcely true, of course, but fact was, Bek could prepare and dish up and serve a meal in the kind of jiffy that appalled, rather than merely amazed. No one ever saw her “in dough,” yet her pantry could steam with pies on a half-hour’s notice. Her doughnuts were a matter of community pride and sold at bazaar as “Bek Schuyler Beauties.”

Bek could cook! With the kind of tastiness that poured itself into the palate and quickened the gastric juices.[8]

In later life, David was to recall these sleight-of-hand meals of his sister’s preparation with astonishment. Her fowls that seemed to run the succulent kind of juices that only Bek could coax out. Bek’s bread! She baked twice a week, mixing after the family was abed, and covering the pans of swelling dough with flour-sacks which she cut open and hemmed herself. And hominy! Either you were a hominy person or you weren’t. David was. The isolated, taste-packed pearls. Strange, David was to have cause to comment later in life, how few people knew how to cook hominy. Usually, they slopped it together in a mush. Bek’s pearls stood each and every one alone. White, perfect globules, inviting the teeth to grind out their corniness. And then, when Bek poured sorghum over it in a great, slow, amber rope from a glass pitcher with a mouth that opened back like a new sparrow’s, your own mouth began to water in two expectant grooves.[9]

There was barley soup tonight, full of the taste of bay leaves and cylinders of ox-tail that you fished out with your fork and then flecked with mustard. Sliced cucumbers called “hasty pickles,” that Bek peeled first and sliced longwise and then set to boil in vinegar, cloves, and sugar. Pickled beets, grape jelly, pear-and-quince preserves, piccalilli and chow-chow, in the pressed-glass dishes. Hashed brown potatoes with a crust on. Ox-tail stew with circles of green pepper swimming in a rich brown gravy that the very biscuits seemed to sop up hungrily as you dipped. Hominy and sorghum. Milk with a half inch of cream on top. And then Bek’s fruit pie with the fork-prints on the cover and the lurid juices making it soggy. Cherry pie tonight, out of Bek’s closet of hundreds of Mason jars of preserved fruits. How the ruby flavors spurted as the fork dug in. Usually, though, David took up his slice and bit, so that there were two gashes of smear beyond his mouth, into the middle of his cheeks.

There was never anyone, for all her bigness, more lithe than Bek. Presto, change-o, with scarcely more than a rattle of pans, a dart or two through the kitchen door, and there steamed the meal on the table! Winslow’s dish of soda-crackers, that he liked to break up into his soup, and Leslie’s special soup-plate that had a legend from “Peter Pan” on the rim.

At eighteen, Leslie, who was tall to gangling, pale, and with the identical heart-shaped face of pallor and a certain beauty that had been his, six, eight, ten years before, was not, to members of his family, the mental delinquent that all of Bek’s journeys with him to specialists had so irrefutably determined.

Leslie was Peter Pan detained by the lure of perpetual youth. There was the fine hand of Bek for you! Subtly, surely, if gradually, out into the community at large, Leslie became one visited with the strange wisdom of knowing how to stay a child. There was something sly and subtle in the way Bek dressed this borderland boy of hers. Great, slender gawk of a youth with the frail look of a girl, startled by the sound of the fall of a leaf in a forest. There was always an adventurous-looking feather in the soft green-felt hat that he wore, and his jacket was of bottle-green, too, cut Eton, with an open collar and short trousers of the kind of brown stuffs that blend with tree-boles and reveal bare nut-brown knees. Peter Pan.

Bek always led Leslie to table herself, with her arm about his waist, as if they had just strolled in from a somewhere that was as lovely as it was mysterious. Without Bek at his side, food might sometimes have tumbled off his fork and down the white-linen front of Leslie’s blouse. That never happened.

It is doubtful if in those first years of his life Leslie was a whit more peculiar to David than any other member of the world of grown-ups into which he had been born. Except that it was so much easier to play pretend with Leslie. For instance, when you told Leslie that the carpet sofa in the dining-room of the House on Sycamore Street was a sea-serpent, Leslie didn’t fall creakily to all-fours and begin making pretentious, insincere noises like his brother Phil or Grandfather Milliken when he came over to play chess with the Old Gentleman of a Sunday afternoon.

Leslie really saw the sea-serpent there and tackled it. Except when he got what Davey called the sillies, and just sat and stared or insisted upon draping everything, even the sea-serpent, with a bit of white net from an old curtain that he was forever dragging everywhere with him.

Angel-veil he called it. Of all the silliness! Trina confided a curious reason to Davey why Leslie always carried about with him a bit of net. Because he was born with a caul over his face. Leslie was half angel. Of all the silliness! Angels never came on earth. Leslie had just shoulder-blades. Not wings. Besides, it was said of David himself, that he had been born with a caul over his face. But only a little one, that tore.

Oh, but there was a good one about the bit of net! David could make a naughty little roly-poly of himself and slap his thighs with laughter at the mere recollection.

Once Leslie had pinned the bit of net against Bek’s great, thick, cloth skirt, and out she went into the pasture to look over some heifers, with the bit of veiling flapping backward in the wind.

Leslie had been known to deck out pretty nearly everything about the place as his angel. But oh, Bek! Somehow doing it to Bek was funniest of all. In bed, at night, to Davey, who had a habit of coming up out of sleep along past midnight for a wakeful little period of five or ten minutes, that picture of Bek with veil flying off her boots would often set him to rollicking with laughter up and down against the bed springs.

At the Renchler table, Leslie was always served first. Great, tender helpings that he never half consumed. David came second. It had always been Bek’s theory that the growing child was the first responsibility at table. David loved to eat there. He ate abundantly. Had a short way of masticating, caught up his food on quick fork-stabs and, unless watched, cracked bones between his ragged, saw-edged teeth.

The barley soup let him in for rebuke, too. He let it wash around his mouth noisily, for that moment when the cunning flavor was most tickling. Tonight there was hot corn-bread, to be pried open like an oyster-shell, and a knifeful of pale, sweet butter slid in.

With Paula off teaching in Cleveland and Stevey at College, her table seemed immeasurably reduced to Bek. Just her three boys to serve. Winslow, who always ate languidly. Leslie, and then Davey, when she could borrow him from the House on Sycamore Street.

Bek, eating quickly, but heartily, herself, up and down, in and out. Replenishing. Carting out plates. In with fresh ones for pie. Granite pot of steaming coffee, replaced, when Paula was home, with a Wedgwood one, with a tricky snout. Leslie had to have his pie cut up for him, so that he dished it up with a spoon. Often his hand trembled. Then Bek steadied it from the elbow.

Sometimes David wondered why Leslie’s hand trembled.

“What makes you shake that way? Huh? What?” David had once asked with the directness of childhood.

Leslie, who had a strange vocabulary of nouns joined together by shakes of his head, was bewildered at this, and only quivered his head the more. Bek, with a sixth sense where Leslie’s dilemmas were concerned, had called from another room where she had been rushing muslin window curtains onto their rods:

“Leslie’s all full of secrets, Davey. He’s like a leaf on a tree that rustles with laughter each time the wind tells it a new one. You and I can’t hear the wind like Leslie can.”

Winslow, who had been painting in his attic-studio, overheard, and took his pipe ruminatingly from where it hung cold, as usual, on the edge of his lips.

Strange woman, that Bek of his.

Davey ruminated, too. Aw—the wind don’t talk. That was on a par with dressing up a lead soldier and calling it an angel. A soldier was a soldier. Oh—oh, the time Leslie had pinned the angel’s veil to Bek’s skirt! No siree, wind don’t talk. And yet—come to think about it—if you ran when you crossed a meadow and it zipped through your hair, there was something quick and rushing in what it seemed to say. Swift, almost uncapturable things. That must be why Leslie trembled. They were not too swift for him to capture. Anyway, Bek knew more than anybody. Except Henry.

“Yum-yum, the cherry pie was good!” Davey made a pyramid of the pits and it tipped over onto the cloth, and he got spanked softly across the back of the hand by Bek.

“Davey, fruit-stains don’t come out!”

“Let the youngster alone, Bek,” said Winslow, sitting back in a slim, relaxed fashion he had, that made him a restful note in any room, and feeling down into his side pocket that Bek kept replenished with a brand of tobacco she ordered by catalogue. “Gad, but it’s good to be tired and fed and warm all at the same time.”

Poor Winslow. Logically, now was the time to tell him about Steve. After dinner, with the warmth of inner well-being to sustain him, would be time enough to tell him. Poor dear....

“Davey, run upstairs, honey, in Bek’s room. There’s an express package from Sears Roebuck on the table. Open it carefully. There’s two new phonograph records in it. ‘Sweet Adeline’ and ‘Viennese Melodies.’”

“Bek, hand me my specs while you’re at the sideboard. They’re in the silver pitcher.”

It was so hard to tell him now, with his _Chicago Tribune_, which came on the afternoon mail, ready to be slid out of its folder, snapped open, read. Well—later—upstairs in bed—perhaps.

“Winslow, hadn’t you better run upstairs and lay a fire in the alcove? It gets chilly for Leslie.”

“Can’t Davey put a match to it while he’s up?”

“That child, handle fire!”

“Nonsense, he has the steadiest hand I’ve ever seen.”

“Never mind, I’ll run up. Have to go anyhow.”

“I’d have gone, if you’d have given me the chance.”

It was usually like that. Bek already up the stairs and down again, drawing shades, turning on the dome of many-colored glass over the dining-table (Paula’s installation), clearing the table, folding the “silence cloth,” spreading a fringed red-and-green rep cover, and placing a red-glass bowl of russet apples in the center.

There was Saturday’s pay roll to make out, what with two extra hands at work on fencing in the Algahr addition. There was a note to be met, that eked out exactly the last dollar of her bank balance, on a seven-per-cent loan from a shark of a fellow named Joe Quirk, in Middleton, who had advanced her five hundred toward the Algahr buy. Such further addenda as bill-of-sale for two heifers to be drawn up. Trade Hiram Igrotte load of small winter apples for two hauls of cinders. Hog medicine. Mail blue sweater to Paula.

Heigh-ho! Davey and Leslie playing at lead soldiers in the corner. The phonograph turning out the new ones, “Sweet Adeline” and “Viennese Melodies.” How debonair, the last melody, in a stately Old World fashion that suggested some of the Old Gentleman’s tales of the Vienna he had glimpsed once as a boy. And then Winslow’s favorite, Alma Gluck’s “In the Land of the Sky-Blue Water.” Bek, lower and lower over her accounts at the roll-top desk in between the windows.

The light was bad. For fifteen years, Winslow had been warning her she would ruin her eyes in that corner. Steve, when he was fourteen, had once given her a student-lamp with a green shade for a Christmas present. But that was up in Winslow’s studio in case he might need it to browse around his dim store-closet among old canvases.

The unwieldiness of her pay roll, especially during harvest and periods of extra labor, was pretty constantly worrisome. She hated to have to borrow from her father, as she almost invariably did on those quarterly months when notes of one sort or another were falling due. “Land poor,” was the bugaboo phrase with which Bek had constantly to flagellate herself, when her acquisitiveness for more and more acres laid hold of her. Yet everyone, even Stevey, with his agricultural phraseology acquired at college, had approved the Algahr buy.

“Looks like I’ll have to ask Father to meet me at the bank, after all, Winslow. I was counting on Heffernan’s cash for those three calves, and now he wants to trade in that last year’s Ford truck body. Of course, we need it for light hauling, but that three hundred Phil borrowed last week, and now that wire fencing, have put me in a hole.”

“Pity Phil couldn’t have gone to the Old Gentleman for his loan.”

“He must have had good reason, Winslow.”

“The very good reason, I suppose, of too high frequency.”

“Phil knows how he can get on Father’s nerves.”

“Well,” said Winslow and snapped his newspaper and slumped down more deeply into his Morris chair, “see where Taft isn’t going to give in an inch on the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. The Roosevelt Big Stick is still waving from behind the throne. Can’t you see those Roosevelt teeth grin?”

“What’s a throne, Winslow?”

“A throne, my young brother-in-law, is the chair at present occupied by a King called Edward who rules the greatest democracy in the world.”

“Winslow, don’t confuse the boy!”

“Teddy’s teeth! I know. I know. When I get big I’m going to be a rough-rider and have the biggest—the biggest teeth in the world.”

“Fee, fie, foe, fum, with which to dig your grave.”

“Lookie, Leslie, my two front teeth are out in the middle for bigger ones to come in. Let’s see yours!”

Leslie opened his mouth obediently. His long, narrow pointed teeth hung almost like a young terrier’s and as beautifully white. When he showed them, Bek, through the adding of accounts, turned her head.

Leslie’s mouth, when he opened it, constantly reminded Rebekka, with a stab, of a girl named Lotta Hensel, who used to carry her father, who was a house painter, his tin pail of hot lunch from the Hensel shanty in South Centralia. Lotta had been a pretty thing. Sixteen. And under Bek’s very eyes, had run screaming one day into the kitchen of the High Ridge Farm, in flames. Some burning leaves had caught at the hem of her skirt as she was passing along the road on her way to the Algahr house which her father was painting. Bek beat at the flames, but Lotta, in her terrible plight, only milled around faster, fanning them. Later there was an emergency operation and skin-grafting in the dining room. Bek stood by. There was no anesthetic, only a linen cloth laid across the upper half of pretty Lotta’s face, as she lay stretched on the table. At the first incision into her already boiling agony, Lotta’s hand tightened on Bek’s. But her mouth, where it showed beneath the linen mask, a pretty bud of a mouth, opened as sweetly as a child’s. “It doesn’t hurt,” she said. And died.

There was something about Leslie’s mouth that reminded Bek perpetually of Lotta when her lips below the mask had lifted into a little smile to say that.

“Leslie has beautiful teeth, David. You see, his baby ones have never come out. He still has his angel-teeth.”

“Angel-teeth,” repeated Leslie, who usually picked the noun out of a phrase to repeat.

“I can spit through mine.”

“That’s horrid, Dave.”

“Father does.”

“Winslow, I’ve work to do here at the desk. Go along and take Davey and Leslie up to bed.”

“I was just starting to read the Taft inaugural address, Bek. Fellow ought to....”