Part 10

It did. ’Miah had no love for his brother; there was no basis for any such love, since Jed had gouged him as hungrily as he had gouged other men. Nevertheless, there was in Jed’s money a powerful conciliatory factor, and ’Miah, though weaker, was as avaricious as the older man. He asked:

“What are you heading at, anyway?”

“This here, ’Miah,” Jed replied. “You come on over here and fix to live with me and look out for me. You’re younger than I be, and I ain’t a well man, anyway. You do for me long as I live, and I’ll fix it so you heir my prop’ty. Ain’t that a right fair thing?”

’Miah did not consider over-long. The duties proposed to him were burdensome, but the rewards were proportionately great. He did insist on a formal will, which Jed drew and signed and delivered into ’Miah’s custody. Thereafter the younger brother moved from the home farm, leaving the sisters to dwell there alone with a hired man for help, and came to live with the old miser.

Jed began almost at once to prosper on this care. He contributed to the support of the household nothing whatever.

“’Tain’t in the bargain,” he insisted when ’Miah complained. “And, besides,” he added, “all I got is a-going to come to you.” He contributed nothing, yet demanded everything: victuals of his choice and plenty of them, the daily paper to read, and a regular allowance of gin. He demanded these things, and got them. Passers used to see him sitting in the sun before the house door, as slothful as a serpent, his little black eyes twisting this way and that in a beady fashion that completed the likeness. He had been spare and thin; he began to put on flesh. But as the angles of his frame became more rounded, the edges of his tongue became keener, and he cut ’Miah with sharp words day by day.

’Miah was a spineless man; nevertheless the hour came when he rebelled. It is impossible to say how this ultimate dissension was begun; the sources of such quarrels are often lost in the flood of recriminations which arise from them. ’Miah, in a futile, shrill-voiced manner, lost his temper, but Jed did not. The older man goaded the other with edged words, observing with malign amusement his brother’s rising anger, till ’Miah suddenly became silent, turned away, and without word began to gather his few belongings. Jed, having watched him for a time, asked:

“What you a-doing, ’Miah?”

“I got enough of you,” ’Miah told him, sullenly. “I’m going back home.”

Persisting in a stubborn silence, he continued his preparations all that morning; and Jed, at first jeering and incredulous, was forced to accept the other’s intentions. It was in this crisis that he conceived the artifice that was to become a part of his life. ’Miah, in the bedroom, heard Jed groan; he paid no heed, and his brother groaned again. This time the younger man came to the door and looked at Jed, suspiciously. The miser was bent forward in his chair, hugging himself and groaning more and more. ’Miah asked petulantly:

“What’s the matter with you?” And Jed gasped, as though in agony:

“Git Doctor Crapo, ’Miah. I’m a-dying. I got a turrible pain in my stummick.”

’Miah studied him; he said incredulously:

“It’s belly-ache.”

Jed wagged his wicked old head and groaned again.

“All right, ’Miah; but git the doctor, anyhow. I’m a-dying, sure.”

There was always a chance that this might be true. ’Miah sent for the doctor, and Doctor Crapo, a young man then and not so wise as he would later be, questioned Jed, and took pulse and temperature, and said with some solemnity:

“I don’t know. You’ve got no fever, but your heart is jumpy. I guess--Well, you’re getting along, you know. If this pain is what you say, it’s just the beginning of one of those ailments that come on old men sometimes. Nothing I can do for it at your age.”

“It’s a-killing me,” Jed pleaded weakly, and the doctor said:

“Well, I can physic you, of course; but if it’s just a stomach-ache, it will stop anyway, and if it’s something worse, physic won’t do a bit of good.”

“This ain’t no stummick-ache,” said Jed and groaned again.

The doctor nodded, and he and ’Miah went out of the room together. ’Miah took this chance to ask:

“How about it, Doc?”

“May be bad,” the doctor told him. “Looks like the beginning of one of those torturing deaths that some men die. Months, maybe years, of that pain, getting worse all the time. And--his heart is bad.”

“He’ll maybe die?”

“Might go any time,” said Doctor Crapo, and drove away.

Now, this was in 1883. Chet McAusland had recorded the first appearance of that pain in the old note-book that I still held in my hand. The effect of Jed’s artifice was that ’Miah did not, after all, desert his brother. Actuated by the avaricious thought that since he had endured three years of servitude for no return, he might as well endure another period, now that the reward was in sight, he stayed on at the little hillside farm. The next spring he died and was laid away. Old Jed had read his brother well; he grinned to himself because he had been able to buy ’Miah’s services with empty promises and nothing more, and the incident gave him confidence. He lived for a few months alone.

III

But in 1885 Jed’s native sloth rebelled at the necessity for tending his own bodily needs, and he sent for his sister Abigail, who lived with Deborah on their father’s farm--sent for Abbie, and showed her, as he had showed ’Miah, that tin box of ugly treasure-trove.

“I’m a-getting feeble, Abbie,” he told her, plaintively. “I’m too old to do for myself.” With some inward appreciation of the satiric drama of the situation, he parroted the phrases he had used to ’Miah four years before. “I could hire somebody, but that don’t look right. What I got ought to stay in the family. You come and take care of me.”

This spinster sister was a humble little woman without strength or assertiveness; she yielded not from greed, but from lack of strength to resist his insistence, and so came to the farm upon the hill. Chet, telling the story, struck his fist upon his knee at the recollection.

“There’s nobody knows what he put her through, and Deborah after her,” he told me. “That old heathen had to have his own way or he’d raise holy Ned; and he got it. Abbie stood it longer than ’Miah; she never did kick up and threaten to leave him. But after two years she took sick and discouraged-like, and wanted to quit and go home. Then Jed he begun to say again how sick he was; made her fetch the doctor again.”

This time, it appeared, Doctor Crapo had been wholly convinced of the miser’s honesty.

“A pain like that,” he told Jed, “is always a sure sign. I’ve seen them go. Specially men that eat heavy, like you do, and that get fat as they go along. You’re going to have that pain the rest of your life, and worse all the time.”

Abbie was in the room, and Jed asked plaintively:

“Hev I got to suffer like this here for days and days, Doc?”

“Months, maybe years,” said the doctor, implacably.

Jed shook his head, turned wearily toward the wall.

“It ain’t a-going to be that long,” he assured them. “I can’t stand it so long as you say.”

Before this pitiable resignation, Abbie had neither the courage nor the selfishness to leave her brother alone; so she struggled on, tending the dying man. But five years later he was still alive, as venomous and as slothful as he had ever been, when Abigail at last gave way. She suffered what would have passed as a nervous breakdown in a woman of more sheltered life, and needed Jed’s care far more than he needed hers. When she would have taken to her bed, however, Jed kept stubbornly to his, so that she drove herself meekly to her round of tasks, and wept with the agony of tight-wrung nerves. It was release when, in the following spring, she died. Jed grinned at the fact that her years of service had brought her no reward at all, and the day after the funeral he sent for Deborah.

IV

“By that time,” Chet assured me, “everybody in town knowed about Uncle Jed and this pain of his, and from now on he talked about it more. You stop to see him any day, and he’d groan and take on in a way that ’u’d surprise you. He stayed in bed all the time, in a room all shut up tight, reading his papers and drinking his gin and eating all the time. Deborah took good care of him; she was that kind of a woman. She had backbone, but she was built to take care of folks, and half the town had had her in when folks was sick. There was times when she threatened to leave him, but she never did, him always saying he was about to die.”

There were skeptics, it appeared. Doctor Crapo himself was at last beginning to suspect the old miser’s play-acting.

“If he’d had that pain all this time,” he told Deborah, “he’d be howling with it night and day or dead long ago. He’s a lazy hound; that’s all, Miss Grant.”

But Deborah would not altogether be convinced, and when Jed heard the doctor’s words, he wagged his head and said pathetically:

“That’s what I git for bearing it so brave’. If I’d yell and take on, you’d believe me; but because I keep my mouth shut and stand these torments, you think I’m lying.”

So Deborah stayed with him. There was no avarice in her, but there was the instinct for service, and some trace of blood affection for this worthless brother, last of her kin alive. She gave him pitying and tender care, and the old man, in his slothful bed, fattened enormously, till it was scarcely possible for him to move at all. Yet in May, 1900, he was, as Chet had recorded, still alive and kicking; and in June of that year Deborah suddenly died.

V

This woman was loved in Fraternity, and with reason. To the funeral services in the little farmhouse came more men and women than could be crowded within doors. Jed, abed in the next room, listened to the minister’s slow and reverent words with a derisive grin. One or two people came in to speak to him, charitably, as people do at such hours. There was an element of martyrdom about the woman’s death that awed them, glorifying even the ugly ceremonies of the funeral.

Jed did not feel this at all. He was amusing himself with his own reflections, and as the service drew toward its end he became so absorbed in his own thoughts that he was not aware when the stirring of feet marked the departure of the little cortège. The last man and the last woman left the house to follow what was left of Deborah to her grave, and five minutes after they were gone Jed realized that he was alone.

Not at first sure of this, he called out; but no one answered. When he knew that he would not be overheard, the fat man began to chuckle and shake with mirth at thought of how he had tricked his brother and sisters; how, trading upon their avarice and their faint love for him, he had bought their lives with empty promises, never to be fulfilled.

But after a little this amusement passed; it gave way to a desire to talk to some one, share this jest with them. He called out once more, but no answer came to his call.

The realization that he was in fact utterly alone, the abrupt possibility that hereafter he would always be alone, with no tender hands to serve him, startled the old man, and somewhat affrighted him. He was aware of a tremor of fear at the prospect of the loneliness that lay ahead, and because he wished to reassure himself, give evidence that power still dwelt in him, he decided to get out of bed.

With some effort he pushed away the heavy coverlets with which he was accustomed to swaddle his vast body, and tried to swing his feet to the floor, lift his bulk from the bed. He struggled for an instant, then fell back with white face and staring eyes, and the sweat of fear upon his forehead.

For the first time in his life he had suddenly been stricken with a terrific pain in his bowels. He had never suffered this agony before, yet knew it for what it was; knew it for one of those shafts of anguish that presage months or years of torment, with no relief save a torturous death at the end.

He whispered, with stiff and horror-stricken lips, “I’m a-dying.” This time he spoke truth. He had, in fact, at last begun to die.

EPITOME

I

I might begin with a recital of the conversation that led up to his remark; but Chet has taught me the value of selection, the importance of elimination, by the way he has of setting before me just such a curt and poignant drama as this one was. “The last time I had a fight,” said Chet, “was with a boy that was my best friend.”

We had been in the alder swamps and across the birch knolls all that day after woodcock and partridge, tramping the countryside in a flood of autumn sunshine that was more stimulating than any of man’s concoctions; had brought home a partridge or two, and our fair allotment of woodcock; and had dined thereafter on other birds, killed three days before, which had been hanging since then in the cool of the deep cellar. Now our dogs were asleep upon the rugs at our feet; our pipes were going; and the best hour of the day was come.

“What did you fight about?” I asked.

“Fishing,” Chet told me. “We used to always fish Marsh Brook, where you and I went last summer. Where you caught the big trout in that hole in the woods. Remember?”

I nodded. The memory was very sweetly clear.

“That brook starts way in behind the mountain,” Chet reminded me. “It swings down through the old meadow and into the woods, and through the lower meadow there, and finally it runs into Marsh River. There weren’t the trout in it then that there are now. It’s been stocked right along, the last few years.... But there were trout there, even then. If I told you the fish I’ve seen my father take out of some of those holes, it would surprise you.”

“It’s a beautiful brook,” I agreed.

“Jim and I always used to fish it,” Chet went on. “When we started in, we’d draw lots to see who’d take the first hole, and then take turns after that. He took a pebble in one hand, this day; and I picked the hand that had the pebble in it, so I had the choice. And we started up the brook, me fishing the hole under that log above the bridge, and him fishing the next bend where the bank has all fell in and spoiled the hole, years ago. And I fished under the big rock below the fence; and so on.

“Jim was a fellow that loved fishing,” Chet continued; and I interrupted long enough to ask:

“Jim who?”

“Jim Snow,” said Chet. “He loved fishing, and he liked getting into the woods. He was a boy that always played a lot of games with himself, in his imagination. We were only about ten years old. And this day he was an Indian. You could see it in the way he walked, and the way he crawled around, except when he got excited and forgot. There was always a change in him when we climbed up out of the lower meadow into the real woods. He’d begin to whisper, and his eyes to shine. And he’d talk to the trout in the pools; and he was always seeing wildcat, or moose, or bear, in the deeps of the woods.

“I never knew any one it was more fun to go around the country with than Jim.”

He was still for a moment, tasting the sweets of memory; and he chuckled to himself before he spoke again.

“Well,” he said, “we come up out of the meadow into the woods. You’ve fished there. It’s the best part of the brook now, and it was then. My winning when we drew lots in the beginning made it my turn to fish when we came to the big hole. And Jim knew it as well as me.” He chuckled again. “You know the hole I mean. Where that old gray birch leans out over.”

I did know. The brook ran through the heart of a grove of old first growth pine; and the big hole itself was dark and shadowed. The water dropped into it over a ledge a few inches high; spread wide and deep upon a clear and sandy bottom, and spilled out at the foot of the hole over the gravel bar. There was an old pine on one bank, at the upper end, leaning somewhat over the water; and on the opposite side of the brook, a huge gray birch leaned to meet the pine. Except on sunny days, the spot was gloomy. More than once I heard great owls hooting in muffled tones among those pines; and the number and ferocity of the mosquitoes which dwell thereabouts is unbelievable.

“It hasn’t changed much, all this time,” Chet went on. “That slough on the west bank, in that spring hole, was there then, the same as it is now. Maybe you’ve noticed an old stub, rotting away, right beside that slough. That was a blasted hemlock; and it’s been dead a long time. Wind, or lightning, or something knocked it down.

“When we came up to that hole that day, I was on the side toward the pine; and I crept in behind the big tree that leaned out over, and swung my line in, and I had a bite right away. But I jerked too soon; didn’t set the hook. And the line whished up and snarled in the branches over my head.”

He laughed to himself at the recollection, his head back, his chin down upon his neck, deep-set eyes twinkling beneath his bushy eyebrows in the fashion I like to see. “Well, sir,” he chuckled, “while I was untangling my line, I heard a regular Indian hoot, and I turned around and see Jim had caught a fish out of my pool. Quicker than a minute, I was mad as a hat.

“Yes, sir. I didn’t stop for a thing. He was on the other side, by that old hemlock; and I went after him. I waded right across the ledge, running, and when he saw me coming, he jumped to meet me. Because he knew I was mad. We come together right in the black mire of that spring hole; and let me tell you, for a minute the fur flew. I guess we fought there in them woods, nobody within a mile of us, for as much as five minutes, maybe. Both of us grunting and cussing with every lick. Knee deep in that stiff, black mud. And first I’d get him down in it, and then he’d down me; and finally, when we kind of stopped for breath, he yells:

“‘I was only catching the fish for you, anyway, Chet.’

“And I says: ‘I’ll catch my own trout!’ And I managed to roll him under, and by that time we were both too tired to do any more.”

II

He tilted back in his chair, and we laughed together at the picture he had drawn of two wet, mad, and muddy boys. “Rolled in that mud, till we were smeared with it,” he said. And: “Didn’t speak to each other till it come time to eat lunch and we remembered we’d left it at the big hole.” He had laughed till there were tears in his eyes. Now the mirth passed; and by and by he sighed aloud, said wistfully:

“Ah, well. Poor old Jim. He drank himself to death. Died of the D T’s.”

The words were like a shock of cold water; I shivered as though the winds of tragedy had blown upon me. In my thoughts I had been seeing this Jim Snow; freckled, and covered with mud, and fighting so long as he had breath to fight; and protesting in hurt at the end: “I was only catching the fish for you.” A likeable boy, Jim Snow.... And in an instant the picture was shattered; there stood in its place the apparition of a dreadful, sodden, wrecked and ruined man.... The thing was horribly abrupt.

“For God’s sake, Chet,” I protested.

“Yes,” he said soberly. “Yes.”

I tried by a callous tone to insulate myself against the impinging tragedy. “Went to the devil?” I hazarded.

“I guess his father drove him to it, ruined him,” Chet explained. “There wasn’t any harm in Jim. Just a mischievous boy, full of high spirits and fun, like a colt. His father was a churchly man; a religious man. A sober man. And he used to beat Jim, for his pranks, awfully.” He shook his head, seemed faintly to shudder at the recollection. “I’ve seen him take Jim out into the barn; and I’ve heard Jim yell. Yell and screech. ‘Oh, father! Father!’”

My tongue seemed sticking in my mouth. I made a brave show of refilling my pipe; the cheery flame of the match seemed to lighten the dark shadows that oppressed us both. Chet laughed again, mindful of a new incident. One of these practical jokes boys have played since there were boys to play them. But as Chet told it, tragedy overhung the tale.

“His father was a cobbler,” he explained. “A good one, too. He used to make a good living out of his shop. Had a big family, and they did well. Time Jim begun to be able to work, he used to work in the shop, helping.”

He warmed to his tale. “There was a bench, by the counter,” he continued. “Folks used to sit down there when they had to wait. Jim was always up to something; and one day when his father was at home, Jim took a gimlet and bored a little hole in that bench. Then he fixed a brad under that hole, with a spring, and a string on it. And he took this string under the counter and back to the seat where he used to be when he was working. He fixed it with a piece of wood, like a trigger, there.”

Chet, spreading his arms wide, illustrated the motion which a cobbler makes in drawing his thread through the leather. “When his arm went out like that,” he said, “he could just reach this piece of wood. And when someone was sitting on the bench, some times he’d just give it a rap; and the brad would come up through and stick into them, and they’d get up in a hurry, I want to tell you.”

“He couldn’t do that when his father was around,” I suggested.

“He never did but once,” Chet agreed. “One day a boy came in that Jim didn’t like. I was there that day; and I knew about this thing Jim had fixed up; and when the other boy sat down on the bench, I kind of tipped my head to Jim. I was sorry about that, after; because Jim was never one to be dared. His father was there; but Jim winked back at me, and then he gave that wooden trigger a good hard poke, and he must have rammed that brad into the boy pretty hard, because he come right up into the air, holding on to himself and yowling.”

He slapped his knee at the memory. “Well, sir, he danced around there like a crazy man. I remember his name was Elnathan Hodge. He danced around and he yelled; and Jim’s father stood there looking at him and frowning awfully, so that I was scared, and I edged over toward the door. Jim’s father just stood, waiting for the boy to quiet down. He was a stern, solemn man; and his voice used to be enough to make us boys tremble.

“By and by he said, slow and steady: ‘What’s the matter with you, Elnathan?’

“And Elnathan says: ‘Jim stuck a needle into me.’

“The old man looked from him to Jim, and Jim was mighty busy, sewing on a sole.

“‘How did he stick a needle into you, Elnathan?’ says the old man. And Elnathan pointed to the bench. He was a big boy, bigger than us; but he was always kind of a sissy. That’s why we never liked him.

“‘Right up through that hole, it come,’ he told Jim’s father.”

“A nice boy, Elnathan!” I commented.

“Jim and me licked him for it afterwards,” Chet explained. “But that didn’t do a bit of good then. The old man went and looked under the bench and saw where the string went through under the counter; and then he followed it out through the shop to the back. He took his time about it, never looking toward Jim, pretending not to know he was there, like a cat with a hurt bird. Traced the string all back till he come to where Jim was sitting. And he didn’t say a word then, but just reached down and got Jim by the collar and started for the back room, dragging Jim after him; and Jim’s heels were clattering on the floor. After he’d shut the door, we heard the first whacks of the strap he kept there, and heard Jim yell; and then me and Elnathan put out the front door and ran away. And we could hear Jim yelling, begging....”

III

He broke off abruptly, shaking his head in sorrow at the recollection. “Poor old Jim!” he murmured, under his breath. For an interval we were silent; and then I suggested that Jim’s father must have done what he thought best for the boy.

Chet would not accept this suggestion. “He knew better,” he said. “Any man knows better. There ought to be friendliness between a man and his son. My father used to take me fishing with him, but Jim was afraid of his father, and kept away from him, except when he had to work in the shop.”