Once, in the duck-season, as I lay hidden among the marsh-reeds with an older boy, a crow passed over us, flying low. Looking up at him, I realized for the first time how beautiful a creature was this common black thief of ours—how splendid his strength and the sheen of his coat, how proudly graceful the sweep and curves of his great slow wings. The boy beside me fired, and in a flash what I had been admiring changed—even as it stopped headlong in mid-air—into a hideous thing, an evil confusion of jumbled feathers. The awful swiftness of that transition from beauty and power to hateful carrion haunted me for a long time.
I half expected that Abner Beech would crumple up in some such distressing way, all of a sudden, when I told him that his son Jeff was in open rebellion, and intended to go off and enlist. It was incredible to the senses that any member of the household should set at defiance the patriarchal will of its head. But that the offence should come from placid, slow-witted, good-natured Jeff, and that it should involve the appearance of a Beech in a blue uniform—these things staggered the imagination. It was clear that something prodigious must happen.
As it turned out, nothing happened at all. The farmer and his wife sat out on the veranda, as was their wont of a summer evening, rarely exchanging a word, but getting a restful sort of satisfaction in together surveying their barns and haystacks and the yellow-brown stretch of fields beyond.
“Jeff says he’s goin’ to-night to Tecumseh, an’ he’s goin’ to enlist, an’ if you want him to run over to say good-by you’re to let him know there.”
I leant upon my newly-acquired fish-pole for support, as I unburdened myself of these sinister tidings. The old pair looked at me in calm-eyed silence, as if I had related the most trivial of village occurrences. Neither moved a muscle nor uttered a sound, but just gazed, till it felt as if their eyes were burning holes into me.
“That’s what he said,” I repeated, after a pause, to mitigate the embarrassment of that dumb steadfast stare.
The mother it was who spoke at last. “You’d better go round and get your supper,” she said, quietly.
The table was spread, as usual, in the big, low-ceilinged room which during the winter was used as a kitchen. What was unusual was to discover a strange man seated alone in his shirt-sleeves at this table, eating his supper. As I took my chair, however, I saw that he was not altogether a stranger. I recognized in him the little old Irishman who had farmed at Ezra Tracy’s beaver-meadow the previous year on shares, and done badly, and had since been hiring out for odd jobs at hoeing and haying. He had lately lost his wife, I recalled now, and lived alone in a tumble-down old shanty beyond Parker’s saw-mill. He had come to us in the spring, I remembered, when the brindled calf was born, to beg a pail of what he called “basteings,” and I speculated in my mind whether it was this repellent mess that had killed his wife. Above all these thoughts rose the impression that Abner must have decided to do a heap of ditching and wall-building, to have hired a new hand in this otherwise slack season—and at this my back began to ache prophetically.
“How are yeh!” the new-comer remarked, affably, as I sat down and reached for the bread. “An’ did yeh see the boys march away? An’ had they a drum wid ’em?”
“What boys?” I asked, in blank ignorance as to what he was at.
“I’m told there’s a baker’s dozen of’em gone, more or less,” he replied. “Well, glory be to the Lord, ’tis an ill wind blows nobody good. Here am I aitin’ butter on my bread, an’ cheese on top o’ that.”
I should still have been in the dark, had not one of the hired girls, Janey Wilcox, come in from the butter-room, to ask me in turn much the same thing, and to add the explanation that a whole lot of the young men of the neighborhood had privately arranged among themselves to enlist together as soon as the harvesting was over, and had this day gone off in a body. Among them, I learned now, were our two hired men, Warner Pitts and Ray Watkins. This, then, accounted for the presence of the Irishman.
As a matter of fact, there had been no secrecy about the thing save with the contingent which our household furnished, and that was only because of the fear which Abner Beech inspired. His son and his servants alike preferred to hook it, rather than explain their patriotic impulses to him. But naturally enough, our farm-girls took it for granted that all the others had gone in the same surreptitious fashion, and this threw an air of fascinating mystery about the whole occurrence. They were deeply surprised that I should have been down past the Corners, and even beyond the cheese-factory, and seen nothing of these extraordinary martial preparations; and I myself was ashamed of it.
Opinions differed, I remember, as to the behavior of our two hired men. “Till” Babcock and the Underwood girl defended them, but Janey took the other side, not without various unpleasant personal insinuations, and the Irishman and I were outspoken in their condemnation. But nobody said a word about Jeff, though it was plain enough that every one knew.
Dusk fell while we still talked of these astounding events—my thoughts meantime dividing themselves between efforts to realize these neighbors of ours as soldiers on the tented field, and uneasy speculation as to whether I should at last get a bed to myself or be expected to sleep with the Irishman.
Janey Wilcox had taken the lamp into the living-room. She returned now, with an uplifted hand and a face covered over with lines of surprise.
“You’re to all of you come in,” she whispered, impressively. “Abner’s got the Bible down. We’re goin’ to have fam’ly prayers, or somethin’.”
With one accord we looked at the Irishman. The question had never before arisen on our farm, but we all knew about other cases, in which Catholic hands held aloof from the household’s devotions. There were even stories of their refusal to eat meat on some one day of the week, but this we hardly brought ourselves to credit. Our surprise at the fact that domestic religious observances were to be resumed under the Beech roof-tree—where they had completely lapsed ever since the trouble at the church—was as nothing compared with our curiosity to see what the new-comer would do.
What he did was to get up and come along with the rest of us, quite as a matter of course. I felt sure that he could not have understood what was going on.
We filed into the living-room. The Beeches had come in and shut the veranda door, and “M’rye” was seated in her rocking-chair, in the darkness beyond the bookcase. Her husband had the big book open before him on the table; the lamp-light threw the shadow of his long nose down into the gray of his beard with a strange effect of fierceness. His lips were tight-set and his shaggy brows drawn into a commanding frown, as he bent over the pages.
Abner did not look up till we had taken our seats. Then he raised his eyes toward the Irishman.
“I don’t know, Hurley,” he said, in a grave, deep-booming voice, “whether you feel it right for you to join us—we bein’ Protestants—”
“Ah, it’s all right, sir,” replied Hurley, reassuringly, “I’ll take no harm by it.”
A minute’s silence followed upon this magnanimous declaration. Then Abner, clearing his throat, began solemnly to read the story of Absalom’s revolt. He had the knack, not uncommon in those primitive class-meeting days, of making his strong, low-pitched voice quaver and wail in the most tear-compelling fashion when he read from the Old Testament. You could hardly listen to him going through even the genealogical tables of Chronicles dry-eyed. His Jeremiah and Ezekiel were equal to the funeral of a well-beloved relation.
This night he read as I had never heard him read before. The whole grim story of the son’s treason and final misadventure, of the ferocious battle in the wood of Ephraim, of Joab’s savagery, and of the rival runners, made the air vibrate about us, and took possession of our minds and kneaded them like dough, as we sat in the mute circle in the old living-room. From my chair I could see Hurley without turning my head, and the spectacle of excitement he presented—bending forward with dropped jaw and wild, glistening gray eyes, a hand behind his ear to miss no syllable of this strange new tale—only added to the effect it produced on me.