Part 2

Moore nodded. “I’m beginning to like it here,” he assented. “It was tough, at first. But I’m no worse in debt than I was last year, and I ought to pull out when the trees begin to bear.”

“Aye,” said Johnny Dree. “You’ve got something to build on, now. It’ll go easier, from now on.”

Moore had learned many things, in these months that had gone; and so had Lucy. And so had Johnny Dree. Lucy was teaching him a thing he had never had time to learn; she was teaching him to play. When snow came, he brought her, one day, snow-shoes; and thereafter they occasionally tramped the woods together, following the meandering trails of the small creatures of the forest, marking where a partridge had left a delicate tracery of footprints in the snow, exploring the great swamp below the hill where the cedars had been stripped of browse by the moose that wintered there. He found where deer were yarded, and took her to the place, and once they caught glimpses of the startled creatures, bounding away through the cumbering snow. There was a deepening understanding between these two; when they were together she talked almost constantly, and he scarce at all; but she could read his silences, and he understood her fountain-like loquacity. Through a keener understanding, she found matters to love in these hills and woods which were his world; she was, by slow degrees, forgetting the more obvious pleasures of her life before she came to Fraternity to dwell. They were, for the most part, as much isolated as though they lived upon an island in the sea; for, save for the nightly gatherings at Will Bissell’s store, Fraternity folk are not overly social in their inclinations. Once he took her to a grange dance, and she found him surprisingly adequate in this new rôle, found an unsuspected pleasure in the rustic merry-making she would, two years before, have scorned. Johnny did not smoke, and she asked him why; he said he didn’t want to waste the money. Yet once when he went to East Harbor, he brought her a flower, in a pot; and when she asked him if that wasn’t wasting money, he smiled a little and said he did not think it was. One day, to torment him, she cried: “I’d give a lot for a cigarette. I haven’t had one for days. Will you get me some, next time you’re at the store. I don’t dare buy them there.”

Johnny merely smiled at her and replied: “I guess if you ever did smoke them, you don’t any more.”

One day her snow-shoe caught on a broken stub and threw her forward into the snow. She said: “Oh, damn!” More in jest than in anger. Lifting her to her feet, he commented:

“I shouldn’t think a girl would swear much.”

“I like to,” she insisted. “It makes me feel good when I’m mad.”

“I never could see it helped me any,” he rejoined, mildly enough. But she thereafter guarded her tongue, until the necessity for restraint had disappeared. Self discipline was one of the things she learned from Johnny.

You could hardly say they had a romance. They grew together, as naturally as stock and scion grafted by his skilful hands. They had this great community of interest in the trees which were his work, which she had come to love. Their forward looking eyes were centered on the harvest time, now a scant year away, when the fruition of their labors could be expected; and their anticipations were tranquil and serene.

They talked, sometimes, of what he meant to make of his life. “You won’t always be a farmer, will you?” she asked.

“I guess I will,” he told her.

“Slaving away here!”

He smiled a little. “There’s a man up in Winterport,” he said. “He planted some apple trees twenty years ago, and more and more since, and he’s got ten thousand trees, now. I went up there two years ago on the orchard tour the Farm Bureau runs. He cleared over twenty thousand dollars, that year, on his apples. Ten thousand trees. I’ve only got four hundred; but I’m putting in two hundred more next spring, and more when I can, and my land is better than his, and there’s more around me I can buy. It’s clean work. You can learn a lot from an apple tree, and eating apples never did anybody much harm. And you’ve time for thinking, while you work on the trees....”

She slipped her hand through his arm in understanding, as they tramped along.

In December his mother, who had suffered for half a dozen years from a mysterious weakness of the heart, was taken sick with what at first seemed a slight cold. In early January, she died. Walter Moore and his wife and Lucy were among those who followed the little cortege to the receiving tomb where--because the frost had fortified the earth against the digging of a grave--his mother’s body would lie till spring. Lucy was mysteriously moved by the pity of this; that a woman should die, and yet be kept waiting for her final sweet repose in the bosom of earth. After supper that evening, she drew on coat and heavy overshoes and muffled her head against the bitter wind that blew. “I’m going down to cheer up Johnny, mama,” she said.

Moore and his wife, when the door had closed behind her, looked at each other with deep understanding. “Well,” he said, “I guess Lucy’s gone.”

But his wife smiled through misty eyes. “She’s come back to us these last two years,” she said. “No matter what happens, she can’t really go away again.”

V

Down at Johnny’s house, Lucy knocked at the kitchen door and Johnny let her in. He was washing dishes and putting them away. “I’ve finished supper, just finished supper,” he said awkwardly.

“I wanted to comfort you, Johnny,” Lucy told him.

He looked at her, rubbing his plate in his hands with the cloth. “That’s--mighty nice,” he said.

“You mustn’t be unhappy. I don’t want you to be unhappy,” she explained, still standing just within the door. She was plucking away her wraps, laid her coat aside.

“You’re a mighty sweet girl,” Johnny told her, rubbing his plate as though the motion of his hands had hypnotized him.

“I want to take care of you,” said Lucy.

Johnny considered, and saw that she had come a little nearer where he stood. “I guess it would be nice if we got married,” he suggested. “Wouldn’t it?”

Lucy suddenly smiled, tenderly amused at him. Her eyes, full of tears, were dancing. “I think it would be nice, Johnny,” she agreed. And moved a little nearer still. She did not have to go all the way.

The plate, unbroken by its fall, rolled across the floor toward the stove, and tilted over there, and whirled to rest like a dying top, oscillating to and fro on its rim with a sound faintly like the sound of bells.

VI

They were married in March; and as though upon a signal, winter drew back from the land, taking with it the snow; and in due time the grass burst up through the sod, and the buds swelled more swiftly, it seemed to these two, than they had ever swelled before. Yet it was not too warm; the blossoms in the orchards came in their season, and not before. And the air was full of the hum of the bees as they went to and fro upon their mysterious mating of the trees. The color of the blossoms, faintly glowing, was in Lucy’s cheeks; the wonder of the springtime in her eyes while she walked here and there with Johnny about his tasks. When the petals fluttered down, it became at once apparent that the apples had set in great profusion; and through the summer they watched the fruit swell and take form and color, and now and then they pared the skin away from an apple to see the white, sweet meat inside.

Johnny began to pick Wolf Rivers early, choosing the largest and reddest fruit; yet it seemed he had no sooner picked one apple than another swelled to take the place of two. Toward the summer’s end, they knew that the crop would be enormous. And this was one of those years when elsewhere the orchards had failed, so that prices were enhanced and buyers were eager.

One day in early October, one Sunday afternoon, when Johnny and Lucy had gone up the hill to have dinner with the older folk, Johnny and Walter Moore walked into the orchard and surveyed the trees.

“A big year,” Johnny said. “The biggest I ever saw. Your apples will bring you close to seven hundred dollars.”

Moore nodded. “It makes me--kind of humble,” he said. “It doesn’t seem possible. And--it’s so different from what my life has been. So great a change, these last two years....”

Johnny looked up at him. “You’ve told me,” he assented. And he smiled a little. “You know, I’ve said to Lucy some times, you can learn a lot from an apple tree. If it’s got grass and weeds around its roots, they starve it for water; and the scale and the aphis and the borer hurt it; and the suckers waste its strength. You were kind of like that, when you came up here. You’d been crowded in with a lot of other folks--grass and weeds around you, cutting off the air and the good things you needed. And the way you lived, there were all sorts of things hurting you; no exercise, and no time to yourself, and Lucy’s dancing all night, and smoking, and your inside work and all, the way the bugs hurt a tree.” He smiled apologetically. “And things like that automobile stock of yours, sucking your money the way suckers drain a tree....”

“That’s right,” Moore agreed. “I couldn’t see it then; but I felt it, even then. And I couldn’t believe these trees would come back, any more than I expected to be so different, myself, up here. I feel new, and strong, now. Like the trees. The suckers and the bugs and all the wasteful things trimmed out of our lives. Mrs. Moore was never so well. And Lucy ... I have to thank you for Lucy, Dree. She used to worry me. She doesn’t, now.”

Johnny, looking off across the orchard, saw his wife and her mother coming toward them. Mrs. Moore erect where she had drooped, laughing where she had been sad; and Lucy, full with the promise of the greatest fruition of all. “Aye,” he said, with the reverent honesty of a man who sees beauty in all the growth of life. “Aye, Lucy’s like the trees. She’s come to bearing now.”

THEY GRIND EXCEEDING SMALL

I

I telephoned down the hill to Hazen Kinch. “Hazen,” I asked, “are you going to town today?”

“Yes, yes,” he said abruptly in his quick, harsh fashion. “Of course I’m going to town.”

“I’ve a matter of business,” I suggested.

“Come along,” he invited brusquely. “Come along.”

There was not another man within forty miles to whom he would have given that invitation.

“I’ll be down in ten minutes,” I promised him; and I went to pull on my Pontiacs and heavy half boots over them and started downhill through the sandy snow. It was bitterly cold; it had been a cold winter. The bay--I could see it from my window--was frozen over for a dozen miles east and west and thirty north and south; and that had not happened in close to a score of years. Men were freighting across to the islands with heavy teams. Automobiles had beaten a rough road along the course the steamers took in summer. A man who had ventured to stock one of the lower islands with foxes for the sake of their fur, counting on the water to hold them prisoners, had gone bankrupt when his stock in trade escaped across the ice. Bitterly cold and steadily cold, and deep snow lay upon the hills, blue-white in the distance. The evergreens were blue-black blotches on this whiteness. The birches, almost indistinguishable, were like trees in camouflage. To me the hills about Fraternity are never so grand as in this winter coat they wear. It is easy to believe that a brooding God dwells upon them. I wondered as I plowed my way down to Hazen Kinch’s farm whether God did indeed dwell among these hills; and I wondered what He thought of Hazen Kinch.

This was no new matter of thought with me. I had given some thought to Hazen in the past. I was interested in the man and in that which should come to him. He was, it seemed to me, a problem in fundamental ethics; he was, as matters stood, a demonstration of the essential uprightness of things as they are. The biologist would have called him a sport, a deviation from type, a violation of all the proper laws of life. That such a man should live and grow great and prosper was not fitting; in a well-regulated world it could not be. Yet Hazen Kinch did live; he had grown--in his small way--great; and by our lights he had prospered. Therefore I watched him. There was about the man the fascination which clothes a tight-rope walker above Niagara, an aeronaut in the midst of the nose dive. The spectator stares with half-caught breath, afraid to see and afraid to miss seeing the ultimate catastrophe. Sometimes I wondered whether Hazen Kinch suspected this attitude on my part. It was not impossible. There was a cynical courage in the man; it might have amused him. Certainly I was the only man who had in any degree his confidence. I have said there was not another within forty miles whom he would have given a lift to town; I doubt if there was another man anywhere for whom he would have done this small favor. He seemed to find a mocking sort of pleasure in my company.

When I came to his house he was in the barn harnessing his mare to the sleigh. The mare was a good animal, fast and strong. She feared and she hated Hazen. I could see her roll her eyes backward at him as he adjusted the traces. He called to me without turning:

“Shut the door! Shut the door! Damn the cold!”

I slid the door shut behind me. There was within the barn the curious chill warmth which housed animals generate to protect themselves against our winters.

“It will snow,” I told Hazen. “I was not sure you would go.”

He laughed crookedly, jerking at the trace.

“Snow!” he exclaimed. “A man would think you were personal manager of the weather. Why do you say it will snow?”

“The drift of the clouds--and it’s warmer,” I told him.

“I’ll not have it snowing,” he said, and looked at me and cackled. He was a little, thin, old man with meager whiskers and a curious precision of speech; and I think he got some enjoyment out of watching my expression at such remarks as this. He elaborated his assumption that the universe was conducted for his benefit, in order to see my silent revolt at the suggestion. “I’ll not have it snowing,” he said. “Open the door.”

He led the mare out and stopped by the kitchen door.

“Come in,” he said. “A hot drink.”

I went with him into the kitchen. His wife was there, and their child. The woman was lean and frail; and she was afraid of him. The countryside said he had taken her in payment of a bad debt. Her father had owed him money which he could not pay.

“I decided it was time I had a wife,” Hazen used to say to me.

The child was on the floor. The woman had a drink of milk and egg and rum, hot and ready for us. We drank, and Hazen knelt beside the child. A boy baby, not yet two years old. It is an ugly thing to say, but I hated this child. There was an evil malevolence in his baby eyes. I have sometimes thought the gray devils must have left just such hate-bred babes as this in France. Also, he was deformed--a twisted leg. The women of the neighborhood sometimes said he would be better dead. But Hazen Kinch loved him. He lifted him in his arms now with a curious passion in his movement, and the child stared at him sullenly. When the mother came near, the baby squalled at her, and Hazen said roughly:

“Stand away! Leave him alone!”

She moved back furtively; and Hazen asked me, displaying the child: “A fine boy, eh?”

I said nothing, and in his cracked old voice he mumbled endearments to the baby. I had often wondered whether his love for the child redeemed the man; or merely made him vulnerable. Certainly any harm that might come to the baby would be a crushing blow to Hazen.

He put the baby down on the floor again and said to the woman curtly: “Tend him well.” She nodded. There was a dumb submission in her eyes; but through this blank veil I had seen now and then a blaze of pain.

Hazen went out of the door without further word to her, and I followed him. We got into the sleigh, bundling ourselves into the robes for the six-mile drive along the drifted road to East Harbor. There was a feeling of storm in the air. I looked at the sky and so did Hazen Kinch. He guessed what I would have said and he answered me before I could speak.

“I’ll not have it snowing,” he said, and leered at me.

Nevertheless, I knew the storm would come. The mare turned out of the barnyard and plowed through a drift and struck hard-packed road. Her hoofs beat a swift tattoo; our runners sang beneath us. We dropped to the little bridge and across and began the mile-long climb to the top of Rayborn Hill. The road from Hazen’s house to town is compounded of such ups and downs.

At the top of the hill we paused for a moment to breathe the mare; paused just in front of the big old Rayborn house, that has stood there for more years than most of us remember. It was closed and shuttered and deserted; and Hazen dipped his whip toward it and said meanly:

“An ugly, improvident lot, the Rayborns were.”

I had known only one of them--the eldest son. A fine man, I had thought him. Picking apples in his orchard, he fell one October and broke his neck. His widow tried to make a go of the place, but she borrowed of Hazen and he had evicted her this three months back. It was one of the lesser evils he had done. I looked at the house and at him, and he clucked to the mare and we dipped down into the steep valley below the hill.

The wind had a sweep in that valley and there was a drift of snow across it and across the road. This drift was well packed by the wind, but when we drove over its top our left-hand runner broke through the coaming and we tumbled into the snow, Hazen and I. We were well entangled in the rugs. The mare gave a frightened start, but Hazen had held the reins and the whip so that she could not break away. We got up together, he and I, and we righted the sleigh and set it upon the road again. I remember that it was becoming bitter cold and the sun was no longer shining. There was a steel-grey veil drawn across the bay.

When the sleigh was upright Hazen went forward and stood beside the mare. Some men, blaming the beast without reason, would have beaten her. They would have cursed, cried out upon her. That was not the cut of Hazen Kinch, But I could see that he was angry and I was not surprised when he reached up and gripped the horse’s ear. He pulled the mare’s head down and twisted the ear viciously. All in a silence that was deadly.

The mare snorted and tried to rear back and Hazen clapped the butt of his whip across her knees. She stood still, quivering, and he wrenched at her ear again.

“Now,” he said softly, “keep the road.”

And he returned and climbed to his place beside me in the sleigh. I said nothing. I might have interfered, but something had always impelled me to keep back my hand from Hazen Kinch.

We drove on and the mare was lame. Though Hazen pushed her, we were slow in coming to town and before we reached Hazen’s office the snow was whirling down--a pressure of driving, swirling flakes like a heavy white hand.

I left Hazen at the stair that led to his office and I went about my business of the day. He said as I turned away:

“Be here at three.”

I nodded. But I did not think we should drive home that afternoon. I had some knowledge of storms.

II

That which had brought me to town was not engrossing. I found time to go to the stable and see Hazen’s mare. There was an ugly welt across her knees and some blood had flowed. The stablemen had tended the welt, and cursed Hazen in my hearing. It was still snowing, and the stable boss, looking out at the driving flakes, spat upon the ground and said to me:

“Them legs’ll go stiff. That mare won’t go home to-night.”

“I think you are right,” I agreed.

“The white-whiskered skunk!” he said, and I knew he spoke of Hazen.

At a quarter of three I took myself to Hazen Kinch’s office. It was not much of an office; not that Hazen could not have afforded a better. But it was up two flights--an attic room ill lighted. A small air-tight stove kept the room stifling hot. The room was also air-tight. Hazen had a table and two chairs, and an iron safe in the corner. He put a pathetic trust in that safe. I believe I could have opened it with a screwdriver. I met him as I climbed the stairs. He said harshly:

“I’m going to telephone. They say the road’s impassable.”

He had no telephone in his office; he used one in the store below. A small economy fairly typical of Hazen.

“I’ll wait in the office,” I told him.

“Go ahead,” he agreed, halfway down the stairs.

I went up to his office and closed the drafts of the stove--it was red-hot--and tried to open the one window, but it was nailed fast. Then Hazen came back up the stairs grumbling.

“Damn the snow!” he said. “The wire is down.”

“Where to?” I asked.

“My house, man! To my house!”

“You wanted to telephone home that you--”

“I can’t get home to-night. You’ll have to go to the hotel.”

I nodded good-naturedly.

“All right. You, too, I suppose.”

“I’ll sleep here,” he said.

I looked round. There was no bed, no cot, nothing but the two stiff chairs. He saw my glance and said angrily: “I’ve slept on the floor before.”

I was always interested in the man’s mental processes.

“You wanted to telephone Mrs. Kinch not to worry?” I suggested.

“Pshaw, let her fret!” said Hazen. “I wanted to ask after my boy.” His eyes expanded, he rubbed his hands a little, cackling. “A fine boy, sir! A fine boy!”

It was then we heard Doan Marshey coming up the stairs. We heard his stumbling steps as he began the last flight and Hazen seemed to cock his ears as he listened. Then he sat still and watched the door. The steps climbed nearer; they stopped in the dim little hall outside the door and someone fumbled with the knob. When the door opened we saw who it was. I knew Marshey. He lived a little beyond Hazen on the same road. Lived in a two-room cabin--it was little more--with his wife and his five children; lived meanly and pitiably, groveling in the soil for daily bread, sweating life out of the earth--life and no more. A thin man, racking thin; a forward-thrusting neck and a bony face and a sad and drooping mustache about his mouth. His eyes were meek and weary.

He stood in the doorway blinking at us; and with his gloved hands--they were stiff and awkward with the cold--he unwound the ragged muffler that was about his neck and brushed weakly at the snow upon his head and his shoulders. Hazen said angrily:

“Come in! Do you want my stove to heat the town?”

Doan shuffled in and he shut the door behind him. He said: “Howdy, Mr. Kinch.” And he smiled in a humble and placating way.

Hazen said: “What’s your business? Your interest is due.”

Doan nodded.

“Yeah. I know, Mr. Kinch. I cain’t pay it all.”

Kinch exclaimed impatiently: “An old story! How much can you pay?”

“Eleven dollars and fifty cents,” said Doan.

“You owe twenty.”

“I aim to pay it when the hens begin to lay.”

Hazen laughed scornfully.

“You aim to pay! Damn you, Marshey, if your old farm was worth taking I’d have you out in this snow, you old scamp!”

Doan pleaded dully: “Don’t you do that, Mr. Kinch! I aim to pay.”

Hazen clapped his hand on the table.

“Rats! Come! Give me what you’ve got! And Marshey, you’ll have to get the rest. I’m sick of waiting on you.”

Marshey came shuffling toward the table. Hazen was sitting with the table between him and the man, and I was a little behind Hazen at one side. Marshey blinked as he came nearer, and his weak nearsighted eyes turned from Hazen to me. I could see that the man was stiff with the cold.