THE two grubby small boys with tow-colored hair who were digging among the ragweed in the front yard sat back on their heels and said, “Hello,” when the tall bony man with straw-colored hair turned in at their gate. He did not pause at the gate; it had swung back, conveniently half open, long ago, and was now sunk so firmly on its broken hinges no one thought of trying to close it. He did not even glance at the small boys, much less give them good-day. He just clumped down his big square dusty shoes one after the other steadily, like a man following a plow, as if he knew the place well and knew where he was going and what he would find there. Rounding the right-hand corner of the house under the row of chinaberry trees, he walked up to the side porch where Mr. Thompson was pushing a big swing churn back and forth.
Mr. Thompson was a tough weather-beaten man with stiff black hair and a week’s growth of black whiskers. He was a noisy proud man who held his neck so straight his whole face stood level with his Adam’s apple, and the whiskers continued down his neck and disappeared into a black thatch under his open collar. The churn rumbled and swished like the belly of a trotting horse, and Mr. Thompson seemed somehow to be driving a horse with one hand, reining it in and urging it forward; and every now and then he turned halfway around and squirted a tremendous spit of tobacco juice out over the steps. The door stones were brown and gleaming with fresh tobacco juice. Mr. Thompson had been churning quite a while and he was tired of it. He was just fetching a mouthful of juice to squirt again when the stranger came around the corner and stopped. Mr. Thompson saw a narrow-chested man with blue eyes so pale they were almost white, looking and not looking at him from a long gaunt face, under white eyebrows. Mr. Thompson judged him to be another of these Irishmen, by his long upper lip.
“Howdy do, sir,” said Mr. Thompson politely, swinging his churn.
“I need work,” said the man, clearly enough but with some kind of foreign accent Mr. Thompson couldn’t place. It wasn’t Cajun and it wasn’t Nigger and it wasn’t Dutch, so it had him stumped. “You need a man here?”
Mr. Thompson gave the churn a great shove and it swung back and forth several times on its own momentum. He sat on the steps, shot his quid into the grass, and said, “Set down. Maybe we can make a deal. I been kinda lookin’ round for somebody. I had two niggers but they got into a cutting scrape up the creek last week, one of ’em dead now and the other in the hoosegow at Cold Springs. Neither one of ’em worth killing, come right down to it. So it looks like I’d better get somebody. Where’d you work last?”
“North Dakota,” said the man, folding himself down on the other end of the steps, but not as if he were tired. He folded up and settled down as if it would be a long time before he got up again. He never had looked at Mr. Thompson, but there wasn’t anything sneaking in his eye, either. He didn’t seem to be looking anywhere else. His eyes sat in his head and let things pass by them. They didn’t seem to be expecting to see anything worth looking at. Mr. Thompson waited a long time for the man to say something more, but he had gone into a brown study.
“North Dakota,” said Mr. Thompson, trying to remember where that was. “That’s a right smart distance off, seems to me.”
“I can do everything on farm,” said the man; “cheap. I need work.”
Mr. Thompson settled himself to get down to business. “My name’s Thompson, Mr. Royal Earle Thompson,” he said.
“I’m Mr. Helton,” said the man, “Mr. Olaf Helton.” He did not move.
“Well, now,” said Mr. Thompson in his most carrying voice, “I guess we’d better talk turkey.”
When Mr. Thompson expected to drive a bargain he always grew very hearty and jovial. There was nothing wrong with him except that he hated like the devil to pay wages. He said so himself. “You furnish grub and a shack,” he said, “and then you got to pay ’em besides. It ain’t right. Besides the wear and tear on your implements,” he said, “they just let everything go to rack and ruin.” So he began to laugh and shout his way through the deal.
“Now, what I want to know is, how much you fixing to gouge outa me?” he brayed, slapping his knee. After he had kept it up as long as he could, he quieted down, feeling a little sheepish, and cut himself a chew. Mr. Helton was staring out somewhere between the barn and the orchard, and seemed to be sleeping with his eyes open.
“I’m good worker,” said Mr. Helton as from the tomb. “I get dollar a day.”
Mr. Thompson was so shocked he forgot to start laughing again at the top of his voice until it was nearly too late to do any good. “Haw, haw,” he bawled. “Why, for a dollar a day I’d hire out myself. What kinda work is it where they pay you a dollar a day?”
“Wheatfields, North Dakota,” said Mr. Helton, not even smiling.
Mr. Thompson stopped laughing. “Well, this ain’t any wheatfield by a long shot. This is more of a dairy farm,” he said, feeling apologetic. “My wife, she was set on a dairy, she seemed to like working around with cows and calves, so I humored her. But it was a mistake,” he said. “I got nearly everything to do, anyhow. My wife ain’t very strong. She’s sick today, that’s a fact. She’s been porely for the last few days. We plant a little feed, and a corn patch, and there’s the orchard, and a few pigs and chickens, but our main hold is the cows. Now just speakin’ as one man to another, there ain’t any money in it. Now I can’t give you no dollar a day because ackshally I don’t make that much out of it. No, sir, we get along on a lot less than a dollar a day, I’d say, if we figger up everything in the long run. Now, I paid seven dollars a month to the two niggers, three-fifty each, and grub, but what I say is, one middlin’-good white man ekals a whole passel of niggers any day in the week, so I’ll give you seven dollars and you eat at the table with us, and you’ll be treated like a white man, as the feller says—”
“That’s all right,” said Mr. Helton. “I take it.”
“Well, now I guess we’ll call it a deal, hey?” Mr. Thompson jumped up as if he had remembered important business. “Now, you just take hold of that churn and give it a few swings, will you, while I ride to town on a coupla little errands. I ain’t been able to leave the place all week. I guess you know what to do with butter after you get it, don’t you?”
“I know,” said Mr. Helton without turning his head. “I know butter business.” He had a strange drawling voice, and even when he spoke only two words his voice waved slowly up and down and the emphasis was in the wrong place. Mr. Thompson wondered what kind of foreigner Mr. Helton could be.
“Now just where did you say you worked last?” he asked, as if he expected Mr. Helton to contradict himself.
“North Dakota,” said Mr. Helton.
“Well, one place is good as another once you get used to it,” said Mr. Thompson, amply. “You’re a forriner, ain’t you?”
“I’m a Swede,” said Mr. Helton, beginning to swing the churn.
Mr. Thompson let forth a booming laugh, as if this was the best joke on somebody he’d ever heard. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said at the top of his voice. “A Swede: well, now, I’m afraid you’ll get pretty lonesome around here. I never seen any Swedes in this neck of the woods.”
“That’s all right,” said Mr. Helton. He went on swinging the churn as if he had been working on the place for years.
“In fact, I might as well tell you, you’re practically the first Swede I ever laid eyes on.”
“That’s all right,” said Mr. Helton.
Mr. Thompson went into the front room where Mrs. Thompson was lying down, with the green shades drawn. She had a bowl of water by her on the table and a wet cloth over her eyes. She took the cloth off at the sound of Mr. Thompson’s boots and said, “What’s all the noise out there? Who is it?”
“Got a feller out there says he’s a Swede, Ellie,” said Mr. Thompson; “says he knows how to make butter.”
“I hope it turns out to be the truth,” said Mrs. Thompson. “Looks like my head never will get any better.”
“Don’t you worry,” said Mr. Thompson. “You fret too much. Now I’m gointa ride into town and get a little order of groceries.”
“Don’t you linger, now, Mr. Thompson,” said Mrs. Thompson. “Don’t go to the hotel.” She meant the saloon; the proprietor also had rooms for rent upstairs.
“Just a coupla little toddies,” said Mr. Thompson, laughing loudly, “never hurt anybody.”
“I never took a dram in my life,” said Mrs. Thompson, “and what’s more I never will.”
“I wasn’t talking about the womenfolks,” said Mr. Thompson.
The sound of the swinging churn rocked Mrs. Thompson first into a gentle doze, then a deep drowse from which she waked suddenly knowing that the swinging had stopped a good while ago. She sat up shading her weak eyes from the flat strips of late summer sunlight between the sill and the lowered shades. There she was, thank God, still alive, with supper to cook but no churning on hand, and her head still bewildered, but easy. Slowly she realized she had been hearing a new sound even in her sleep. Somebody was playing a tune on the harmonica, not merely shrilling up and down making a sickening noise, but really playing a pretty tune, merry and sad.
She went out through the kitchen, stepped off the porch, and stood facing the east, shading her eyes. When her vision cleared and settled, she saw a long, pale-haired man in blue jeans sitting in the doorway of the hired man’s shack, tilted back in a kitchen chair, blowing away at the harmonica with his eyes shut. Mrs. Thompson’s heart fluttered and sank. Heavens, he looked lazy and worthless, he did, now. First a lot of no-count fiddling darkies and then a no-count white man. It was just like Mr. Thompson to take on that kind. She did wish he would be more considerate, and take a little trouble with his business. She wanted to believe in her husband, and there were too many times when she couldn’t. She wanted to believe that tomorrow, or at least the day after, life, such a battle at best, was going to be better.
She walked past the shack without glancing aside, stepping carefully, bent at the waist because of the nagging pain in her side, and went to the springhouse, trying to harden her mind to speak very plainly to that new hired man if he had not done his work.
The milk house was only another shack of weather-beaten boards nailed together hastily years before because they needed a milk house; it was meant to be temporary, and it was; already shapeless, leaning this way and that over a perpetual cool trickle of water that fell from a little grot, almost choked with pallid ferns. No one else in the whole countryside had such a spring on his land. Mr. and Mrs. Thompson felt they had a fortune in that spring, if ever they get around to doing anything with it.
Rickety wooden shelves clung at hazard in the square around the small pool where the larger pails of milk and butter stood, fresh and sweet in the cold water. One hand supporting her flat, pained side, the other shading her eyes, Mrs. Thompson leaned over and peered into the pails. The cream had been skimmed and set aside, there was a rich roll of butter, the wooden molds and shallow pans had been scrubbed and scalded for the first time in who knows when, the barrel was full of buttermilk ready for the pigs and the weanling calves, the hard packed-dirt floor had been swept smooth. Mrs. Thompson straightened up again, smiling tenderly. She had been ready to scold him, a poor man who needed a job, who had just come there and who might not have been expected to do things properly at first. There was nothing she could do to make up for the injustice she had done him in her thoughts but to tell him how she appreciated his good clean work, finished already, in no time at all. She ventured near the door of the shack with her careful steps; Mr. Helton opened his eyes, stopped playing, and brought his chair down straight, but did not look at her, or get up. She was a little frail woman with long thick brown hair in a braid, a suffering patient mouth and diseased eyes which cried easily. She wove her fingers into an eyeshade, thumbs on temples, and, winking her tearful lids, said with a polite little manner, “Howdy do, sir. I’m Miz Thompson, and I wanted to tell you I think you did real well in the milk house. It’s always been a hard place to keep.”
He said, “That’s all right,” in a slow voice, without moving.
Mrs. Thompson waited a moment. “That’s a pretty tune you’re playing. Most folks don’t seem to get much music out of a harmonica.”
Mr. Helton sat humped over, long legs sprawling, his spine in a bow, running his thumb over the square mouth-stops; except for his moving hand he might have been asleep. The harmonica was a big shiny new one, and Mrs. Thompson, her gaze wandering about, counted five others, all good and expensive, standing in a row on the shelf beside his cot. “He must carry them around in his jumper pocket,” she thought, and noted there was not a sign of any other possession lying about. “I see you’re mighty fond of music,” she said. “We used to have an old accordion, and Mr. Thompson could play it right smart, but the little boys broke it up.”
Mr. Helton stood up rather suddenly, the chair clattered under him, his knees straightened though his shoulders did not, and he looked at the floor as if he were listening carefully. “You know how little boys are,” said Mrs. Thompson. “You’d better set them harmonicas on a high shelf or they’ll be after them. They’re great hands for getting into things. I try to learn ’em, but it don’t do much good.”
Mr. Helton, in one wide gesture of his long arms, swept his harmonicas up against his chest, and from there transferred them in a row to the ledge where the roof joined to the wall. He pushed them back almost out of sight.
“That’ll do, maybe,” said Mrs. Thompson. “Now I wonder,” she said, turning and closing her eyes helplessly against the stronger western light, “I wonder what became of them little tads. I can’t keep up with them.” She had a way of speaking about her children as if they were rather troublesome nephews on a prolonged visit.
“Down by the creek,” said Mr. Helton, in his hollow voice. Mrs. Thompson, pausing confusedly, decided he had answered her question. He stood in silent patience, not exactly waiting for her to go, perhaps, but pretty plainly not waiting for anything else. Mrs. Thompson was perfectly accustomed to all kinds of men full of all kinds of cranky ways. The point was, to find out just how Mr. Helton’s crankiness was different from any other man’s, and then get used to it, and let him feel at home. Her father had been cranky, her brothers and uncles had all been set in their ways and none of them alike; and every hired man she’d ever seen had quirks and crotchets of his own. Now here was Mr. Helton, who was a Swede, who wouldn’t talk, and who played the harmonica besides.
“They’ll be needing something to eat,” said Mrs. Thompson in a vague friendly way, “pretty soon. Now I wonder what I ought to be thinking about for supper? Now what do you like to eat, Mr. Helton? We always have plenty of good butter and milk and cream, that’s a blessing. Mr. Thompson says we ought to sell all of it, but I say my family comes first.” Her little face went all out of shape in a pained blind smile.
“I eat anything,” said Mr. Helton, his words wandering up and down.
He can’t talk, for one thing, thought Mrs. Thompson; it’s a shame to keep at him when he don’t know the language good. She took a slow step away from the shack, looking back over her shoulder. “We usually have cornbread except on Sundays,” she told him. “I suppose in your part of the country you don’t get much good cornbread.”
Not a word from Mr. Helton. She saw from her eye-corner that he had sat down again, looking at his harmonica, chair tilted. She hoped he would remember it was getting near milking time. As she moved away, he started playing again, the same tune.
Milking time came and went. Mrs. Thompson saw Mr. Helton going back and forth between the cow barn and the milk house. He swung along in an easy lope, shoulders bent, head hanging, the big buckets balancing like a pair of scales at the ends of his bony arms. Mr. Thompson rode in from town sitting straighter than usual, chin in, a towsack full of supplies swung behind the saddle. After a trip to the barn, he came into the kitchen full of good will, and gave Mrs. Thompson a hearty smack on the cheek after dusting her face off with his tough whiskers. He had been to the hotel, that was plain. “Took a look around the premises, Ellie,” he shouted. “That Swede sure is grinding out the labor. But he is the closest mouthed feller I ever met up with in all my days. Looks like he’s scared he’ll crack his jaw if he opens his front teeth.”
Mrs. Thompson was stirring up a big bowl of buttermilk cornbread. “You smell like a toper, Mr. Thompson,” she said with perfect dignity. “I wish you’d get one of the little boys to bring me in an extra load of firewood. I’m thinking about baking a batch of cookies tomorrow.”
Mr. Thompson, all at once smelling the liquor on his own breath, sneaked out, justly rebuked, and brought in the firewood himself. Arthur and Herbert, grubby from thatched head to toes, from skin to shirt, came stamping in yelling for supper. “Go wash your faces and comb your hair,” said Mrs. Thompson, automatically. They retired to the porch. Each one put his hand under the pump and wet his forelock, combed it down with his fingers, and returned at once to the kitchen, where all the fair prospects of life were centered. Mrs. Thompson set an extra plate and commanded Arthur, the eldest, eight years old, to call Mr. Helton for supper.
Arthur, without moving from the spot, bawled like a bull calf, “Saaaaaay, Hellllllton, suuuuuupper’s ready!” and added in a lower voice, “You big Swede!”
“Listen to me,” said Mrs. Thompson, “that’s no way to act. Now you go out there and ask him decent, or I’ll get your daddy to give you a good licking.”
Mr. Helton loomed, long and gloomy, in the doorway. “Sit right there,” boomed Mr. Thompson, waving his arm. Mr. Helton swung his square shoes across the kitchen in two steps, slumped onto the bench and sat. Mr. Thompson occupied his chair at the head of the table, the two boys scrambled into place opposite Mr. Helton, and Mrs. Thompson sat at the end nearest the stove. Mrs. Thompson clasped her hands, bowed her head and said aloud hastily, “Lord, for all these and Thy other blessings we thank Thee in Jesus’ name, amen,” trying to finish before Herbert’s rusty little paw reached the nearest dish. Otherwise she would be duty-bound to send him way from the table, and growing children need their meals. Mr. Thompson and Arthur always waited, but Herbert, aged six, was too young to take training yet.
Mr. and Mrs. Thompson tried to engage Mr. Helton in conversation, but it was a failure. They tried first the weather, and then the crops, and then the cows, but Mr. Helton simply did not reply. Mr. Thompson then told something funny he had seen in town. It was about some of the other old grangers at the hotel, friends of his, giving beer to a goat, and the goat’s subsequent behavior. Mr. Helton did not seem to hear. Mrs. Thompson laughed dutifully, but she didn’t think it was very funny. She had heard it often before, though Mr. Thompson, each time he told it, pretended it had happened that self-same day. It must have happened years ago if it ever happened at all, and it had never been a story that Mrs. Thompson thought suitable for mixed company. The whole thing came of Mr. Thompson’s weakness for a dram too much now and then, though he voted for local option at every election. She passed the food to Mr. Helton, who took a helping of everything, but not much, not enough to keep him up to his full powers if he expected to go on working the way he had started.
At last, he took a fair-sized piece of cornbread, wiped his plate up as clean as if it had been licked by a hound dog, stuffed his mouth full, and, still chewing, slid off the bench and started for the door.
“Good night, Mr. Helton,” said Mrs. Thompson, and the other Thompsons took it up in a scattered chorus. “Good night, Mr. Helton!”
“Good night,” said Mr. Helton’s wavering voice grudgingly from the darkness.
“Gude not,” said Arthur, imitating Mr. Helton.
“Gude not,” said Herbert, the copy-cat.
“You don’t do it right,” said Arthur. “Now listen to me. Guuuuuude naht,” and he ran a hollow scale in a luxury of successful impersonation. Herbert almost went into a fit with joy.
“Now you stop that,” said Mrs. Thompson. “He can’t help the way he talks. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves, both of you, making fun of a poor stranger like that. How’d you like to be a stranger in a strange land?”
“I’d like it,” said Arthur. “I think it would be fun.”
“They’re both regular heathens, Ellie,” said Mr. Thompson. “Just plain ignoramuses.” He turned the face of awful fatherhood upon his young. “You’re both going to get sent to school next year, and that’ll knock some sense into you.”
“I’m going to git sent to the ’formatory when I’m old enough,” piped up Herbert. “That’s where I’m goin’.”
“Oh, you are, are you?” asked Mr. Thompson. “Who says so?”
“The Sunday School Supintendant,” said Herbert, a bright boy showing off.
“You see?” said Mr. Thompson, staring at his wife. “What did I tell you?” He became a hurricane of wrath. “Get to bed, you two,” he roared until his Adam’s apple shuddered. “Get now before I take the hide off you!” They got, and shortly from their attic bedroom the sounds of scuffling and snorting and giggling and growling filled the house and shook the kitchen ceiling.
Mrs. Thompson held her head and said in a small uncertain voice, “It’s no use picking on them when they’re so young and tender. I can’t stand it.”
“My goodness, Ellie,” said Mr. Thompson, “we’ve got to raise ’em. We can’t just let ’em grow up hog wild.”
She went on in another tone. “That Mr. Helton seems all right, even if he can’t be made to talk. Wonder how he comes to be so far from home.”
“Like I said, he isn’t no whamper-jaw,” said Mr. Thompson, “but he sure knows how to lay out the work. I guess that’s the main thing around here. Country’s full of fellers trampin’ round looking for work.”
Mrs. Thompson was gathering up the dishes. She now gathered up Mr. Thompson’s plate from under his chin. “To tell you the honest truth,” she remarked, “I think it’s a mighty good change to have a man round the place who knows how to work and keep his mouth shut. Means he’ll keep out of our business. Not that we’ve got anything to hide, but it’s convenient.”
“That’s a fact,” said Mr. Thompson. “Haw, haw,” he shouted suddenly. “Means you can do all the talking, huh?”
“The only thing,” went on Mrs. Thompson, “is this: he don’t eat hearty enough to suit me. I like to see a man set down and relish a good meal. My granma used to say it was no use putting dependence on a man who won’t set down and make out his dinner. I hope it won’t be that way this time.”
“Tell you the truth, Ellie,” said Mr. Thompson, picking his teeth with a fork and leaning back in the best of good humors, “I always thought your granma was a ter’ble ole fool. She’d just say the first thing that popped into her head and call it God’s wisdom.”
“My granma wasn’t anybody’s fool. Nine times out of ten she knew what she was talking about. I always say, the first thing you think is the best thing you can say.”
“Well,” said Mr. Thompson, going into another shout, “you’re so reefined about that goat story, you just try speaking out in mixed comp’ny sometime! You just try it. S’pose you happened to be thinking about a hen and a rooster, hey? I reckon you’d shock the Babtist preacher!” He gave her a good pinch on her thin little rump. “No more meat on you than a rabbit,” he said, fondly. “Now I like ’em cornfed.”
Mrs. Thompson looked at him open-eyed and blushed. She could see better by lamplight. “Why, Mr. Thompson, sometimes I think you’re the evilest-minded man that ever lived.” She took a handful of hair on the crown of his head and gave it a good, slow pull. “That’s to show you how it feels, pinching so hard when you’re supposed to be playing,” she said, gently.
In spite of his situation in life, Mr. Thompson had never been able to outgrow his deep conviction that running a dairy and chasing after chickens was woman’s work. He was fond of saying that he could plow a furrow, cut sorghum, shuck corn, handle a team, build a corn crib, as well as any man. Buying and selling, too, were man’s work. Twice a week he drove the spring wagon to market with the fresh butter, a few eggs, fruits in their proper season, sold them, pocketed the change, and spent it as seemed best, being careful not to dig into Mrs. Thompson’s pin money.
But from the first the cows worried him, coming up regularly twice a day to be milked, standing there reproaching him with their smug female faces. Calves worried him, fighting the rope and strangling themselves until their eyes bulged, trying to get at the teat. Wrestling with a calf unmanned him, like having to change a baby’s diaper. Milk worried him, coming bitter sometimes, drying up, turning sour. Hens worried him, cackling, clucking, hatching out when you least expected it and leading their broods into the barnyard where the horses could step on them; dying of roup and wryneck and getting plagues of chicken lice; laying eggs all over God’s creation so that half of them were spoiled before a man could find them, in spite of a rack of nests Mrs. Thompson had set out for them in the feed room. Hens were a blasted nuisance.
Slopping hogs was hired man’s work, in Mr. Thompson’s opinion. Killing hogs was a job for the boss, but scraping them and cutting them up was for the hired man again; and again woman’s proper work was dressing meat, smoking, pickling, and making lard and sausage. All his carefully limited fields of activity were related somehow to Mr. Thompson’s feeling for the appearance of things, his own appearance in the sight of God and man. “It don’t look right,” was his final reason for not doing anything he did not wish to do.
It was his dignity and his reputation that he cared about, and there were only a few kinds of work manly enough for Mr. Thompson to undertake with his own hands. Mrs. Thompson, to whom so many forms of work would have been becoming, had simply gone down on him early. He saw, after a while, how short-sighted it had been of him to expect much from Mrs. Thompson; he had fallen in love with her delicate waist and lace-trimmed petticoats and big blue eyes, and, though all those charms had disappeared, she had in the meantime become Ellie to him, not at all the same person as Miss Ellen Bridges, popular Sunday School teacher in the Mountain City First Baptist Church, but his dear wife, Ellie, who was not strong. Deprived as he was, however, of the main support in life which a man might expect in marriage, he had almost without knowing it resigned himself to failure. Head erect, a prompt payer of taxes, yearly subscriber to the preacher’s salary, land owner and father of a family, employer, a hearty good fellow among men, Mr. Thompson knew, without putting it into words, that he had been going steadily down hill. God amighty, it did look like somebody around the place might take a rake in hand now and then and clear up the clutter around the barn and the kitchen steps. The wagon shed was so full of broken-down machinery and ragged harness and old wagon wheels and battered milk pails and rotting lumber you could hardly drive in there any more. Not a soul on the place would raise a hand to it, and as for him, he had all he could do with his regular work. He would sometimes in the slack season sit for hours worrying about it, squirting tobacco on the ragweeds growing in a thicket against the wood pile, wondering what a fellow could do, handicapped as he was. He looked forward to the boys growing up soon; he was going to put them through the mill just as his own father had done with him when he was a boy; they were going to learn how to take hold and run the place right. He wasn’t going to overdo it, but those two boys were going to earn their salt, or he’d know why. Great big lubbers sitting around whittling! Mr. Thompson sometimes grew quite enraged with them, when imagining their possible future, big lubbers sitting around whittling or thinking about fishing trips. Well, he’d put a stop to that, mighty damn quick.
As the seasons passed, and Mr. Helton took hold more and more, Mr. Thompson began to relax in his mind a little. There seemed to be nothing the fellow couldn’t do, all in the day’s work and as a matter of course. He got up at five o’clock in the morning, boiled his own coffee and fried his own bacon and was out in the cow lot before Mr. Thompson had even begun to yawn, stretch, groan, roar and thump around looking for his jeans. He milked the cows, kept the milk house, and churned the butter; rounded the hens up and somehow persuaded them to lay in the nests, not under the house and behind the haystacks; he fed them regularly and they hatched out until you couldn’t set a foot down for them. Little by little the piles of trash around the barns and house disappeared. He carried buttermilk and corn to the hogs, and curried cockleburs out of the horses’ manes. He was gentle with the calves, if a little grim with the cows and hens; judging by his conduct, Mr. Helton had never heard of the difference between man’s and woman’s work on a farm.
In the second year, he showed Mr. Thompson the picture of a cheese press in a mail order catalogue, and said, “This is a good thing. You buy this, I make cheese.” The press was bought and Mr. Helton did make cheese, and it was sold, along with the increased butter and the crates of eggs. Sometimes Mr. Thompson felt a little contemptuous of Mr. Helton’s ways. It did seem kind of picayune for a man to go around picking up half a dozen ears of corn that had fallen off the wagon on the way from the field, gathering up fallen fruit to feed to the pigs, storing up old nails and stray parts of machinery, spending good time stamping a fancy pattern on the butter before it went to market. Mr. Thompson, sitting up high on the spring-wagon seat, with the decorated butter in a five-gallon lard can wrapped in wet towsack, driving to town, chirruping to the horses and snapping the reins over their backs, sometimes thought that Mr. Helton was a pretty meeching sort of fellow; but he never gave way to these feelings, he knew a good thing when he had it. It was a fact the hogs were in better shape and sold for more money. It was a fact that Mr. Thompson stopped buying feed, Mr. Helton managed the crops so well. When beef- and hog-slaughtering time came, Mr. Helton knew how to save the scraps that Mr. Thompson had thrown away, and wasn’t above scraping guts and filling them with sausages that he made by his own methods. In all, Mr. Thompson had no grounds for complaint. In the third year, he raised Mr. Helton’s wages, though Mr. Helton had not asked for a raise. The fourth year, when Mr. Thompson was not only out of debt but had a little cash in the bank, he raised Mr. Helton’s wages again, two dollars and a half a month each time.
“The man’s worth it, Ellie,” said Mr. Thompson, in a glow of self-justification for his extravagance. “He’s made this place pay, and I want him to know I appreciate it.”
Mr. Helton’s silence, the pallor of his eyebrows and hair, his long, glum jaw and eyes that refused to see anything, even the work under his hands, had grown perfectly familiar to the Thompsons. At first, Mrs. Thompson complained a little. “It’s like sitting down at the table with a disembodied spirit,” she said. “You’d think he’d find something to say, sooner or later.”
“Let him alone,” said Mr. Thompson. “When he gets ready to talk, he’ll talk.”
The years passed, and Mr. Helton never got ready to talk. After his work was finished for the day, he would come up from the barn or the milk house or the chicken house, swinging his lantern, his big shoes clumping like pony hoofs on the hard path. They, sitting in the kitchen in the winter, or on the back porch in summer, would hear him drag out his wooden chair, hear the creak of it tilted back, and then for a little while he would play his single tune on one or another of his harmonicas. The harmonicas were in different keys, some lower and sweeter than the others, but the same changeless tune went on, a strange tune, with sudden turns in it, night after night, and sometimes even in the afternoons when Mr. Helton sat down to catch his breath. At first the Thompsons liked it very much, and always stopped to listen. Later there came a time when they were fairly sick of it, and began to wish to each other that he would learn a new one. At last they did not hear it any more, it was as natural as the sound of the wind rising in the evenings, or the cows lowing, or their own voices.
Mrs. Thompson pondered now and then over Mr. Helton’s soul. He didn’t seem to be a church-goer, and worked straight through Sunday as if it were any common day of the week. “I think we ought to invite him to go to hear Dr. Martin,” she told Mr. Thompson. “It isn’t very Christian of us not to ask him. He’s not a forward kind of man. He’d wait to be asked.”
“Let him alone,” said Mr. Thompson. “The way I look at it, his religion is every man’s own business. Besides, he ain’t got any Sunday clothes. He wouldn’t want to go to church in them jeans and jumpers of his. I don’t know what he does with his money. He certainly don’t spend it foolishly.”
Still, once the notion got into her head, Mrs. Thompson could not rest until she invited Mr. Helton to go to church with the family next Sunday. He was pitching hay into neat little piles in the field back of the orchard. Mrs. Thompson put on smoked glasses and a sunbonnet and walked all the way down there to speak to him. He stopped and leaned on his pitchfork, listening, and for a moment Mrs. Thompson was almost frightened at his face. The pale eyes seemed to glare past her, the eyebrows frowned, the long jaw hardened. “I got work,” he said bluntly, and lifting his pitchfork he turned from her and began to toss the hay. Mrs. Thompson, her feelings hurt, walked back thinking that by now she should be used to Mr. Helton’s ways, but it did seem like a man, even a foreigner, could be just a little polite when you gave him a Christian invitation. “He’s not polite, that’s the only thing I’ve got against him,” she said to Mr. Thompson. “He just can’t seem to behave like other people. You’d think he had a grudge against the world,” she said, “I sometimes don’t know what to make of it.”
In the second year something had happened that made Mrs. Thompson uneasy, the kind of thing she could not put into words, hardly into thoughts, and if she had tried to explain to Mr. Thompson it would have sounded worse than it was, or not bad enough. It was that kind of queer thing that seems to be giving a warning, and yet, nearly always nothing comes of it. It was on a hot, still spring day, and Mrs. Thompson had been down to the garden patch to pull some new carrots and green onions and string beans for dinner. As she worked, sunbonnet low over her eyes, putting each kind of vegetable in a pile by itself in her basket, she noticed how neatly Mr. Helton weeded, and how rich the soil was. He had spread it all over with manure from the barns, and worked it in, in the fall, and the vegetables were coming up fine and full. She walked back under the nubbly little fig trees where the unpruned branches leaned almost to the ground, and the thick leaves made a cool screen. Mrs. Thompson was always looking for shade to save her eyes. So she, looking idly about, saw through the screen a sight that struck her as very strange. If it had been a noisy spectacle, it would have been quite natural. It was the silence that struck her. Mr. Helton was shaking Arthur by the shoulders, ferociously, his face most terribly fixed and pale. Arthur’s head snapped back and forth and he had not stiffened in resistance, as he did when Mrs. Thompson tried to shake him. His eyes were rather frightened, but surprised, too, probably more surprised than anything else. Herbert stood by meekly, watching. Mr. Helton dropped Arthur, and seized Herbert, and shook him with the same methodical ferocity, the same face of hatred. Herbert’s mouth crumpled as if he would cry, but he made no sound. Mr. Helton let him go, turned and strode into the shack, and the little boys ran, as if for their lives, without a word. They disappeared around the corner to the front of the house.
Mrs. Thompson took time to set her basket on the kitchen table, to push her sunbonnet back on her head and draw it forward again, to look in the stove and make certain the fire was going, before she followed the boys. They were sitting huddled together under a clump of chinaberry trees in plain sight of her bedroom window, as if it were a safe place they had discovered.
“What are you doing?” asked Mrs. Thompson.
They looked hang-dog from under their foreheads and Arthur mumbled, “Nothin’.”
“Nothing now, you mean,” said Mrs. Thompson, severely. “Well, I have plenty for you to do. Come right in here this minute and help me fix vegetables. This minute.”
They scrambled up very eagerly and followed her close. Mrs. Thompson tried to imagine what they had been up to; she did not like the notion of Mr. Helton taking it on himself to correct her little boys, but she was afraid to ask them for reasons. They might tell her a lie, and she would have to overtake them in it, and whip them. Or she would have to pretend to believe them, and they would get in the habit of lying. Or they might tell her the truth, and it would be something she would have to whip them for. The very thought of it gave her a headache. She supposed she might ask Mr. Helton, but it was not her place to ask. She would wait and tell Mr. Thompson, and let him get at the bottom of it. While her mind ran on, she kept the little boys hopping. “Cut those carrot tops closer, Herbert, you’re just being careless. Arthur, stop breaking up the beans so little. They’re little enough already. Herbert, you go get an armload of wood. Arthur, you take these onions and wash them under the pump. Herbert, as soon as you’re done here, you get a broom and sweep out this kitchen. Arthur, you get a shovel and take up the ashes. Stop picking your nose, Herbert. How often must I tell you? Arthur, you go look in the top drawer of my bureau, left-hand side, and bring me the vaseline for Herbert’s nose. Herbert, come here to me. . . .”
They galloped through their chores, their animal spirits rose with activity, and shortly they were out in the front yard again, engaged in a wrestling match. They sprawled and fought, scrambled, clutched, rose and fell shouting, as aimlessly, noisily, monotonously as two puppies. They imitated various animals, not a human sound from them, and their dirty faces were streaked with sweat. Mrs. Thompson, sitting at her window, watched them with baffled pride and tenderness, they were so sturdy and healthy and growing so fast; but uneasily, too, with her pained little smile and the tears rolling from her eyelids that clinched themselves against the sunlight. They were so idle and careless, as if they had no future in this world, and no immortal souls to save, and oh, what had they been up to that Mr. Helton had shaken them, with his face positively dangerous?
In the evening before supper, without a word to Mr. Thompson of the curious fear the sight had caused her, she told him that Mr. Helton had shaken the little boys for some reason. He stepped out to the shack and spoke to Mr. Helton. In five minutes he was back, glaring at his young. “He says them brats been fooling with his harmonicas, Ellie, blowing in them and getting them all dirty and full of spit and they don’t play good.”
“Did he say all that?” asked Mrs. Thompson. “It doesn’t seem possible.”
“Well, that’s what he meant, anyhow,” said Mr. Thompson. “He didn’t say it just that way. But he acted pretty worked up about it.”
“That’s a shame,” said Mrs. Thompson, “a perfect shame. Now we’ve got to do something so they’ll remember they mustn’t go into Mr. Helton’s things.”
“I’ll tan their hides for them,” said Mr. Thompson. “I’ll take a calf rope to them if they don’t look out.”
“Maybe you’d better leave the whipping to me,” said Mrs. Thompson. “You haven’t got a light enough hand for children.”
“That’s just what’s the matter with them now,” shouted Mr. Thompson, “rotten spoiled and they’ll wind up in the penitentiary. You don’t half whip ’em. Just little love taps. My pa used to knock me down with a stick of stove wood or anything else that came handy.”
“Well, that’s not saying it’s right,” said Mrs. Thompson. “I don’t hold with that way of raising children. It makes them run away from home. I’ve seen too much of it.”
“I’ll break every bone in ’em,” said Mr. Thompson, simmering down, “if they don’t mind you better and stop being so bullheaded.”
“Leave the table and wash your face and hands,” Mrs. Thompson commanded the boys, suddenly. They slunk out and dabbled at the pump and slunk in again, trying to make themselves small. They had learned long ago that their mother always made them wash when there was trouble ahead. They looked at their plates. Mr. Thompson opened up on them.
“Well, now, what you got to say for yourselves about going into Mr. Helton’s shack and ruining his harmonicas?”
The two little boys wilted, their faces drooped into the grieved hopeless lines of children’s faces when they are brought to the terrible bar of blind adult justice; their eyes telegraphed each other in panic, “Now we’re really going to catch a licking”; in despair, they dropped their buttered cornbread on their plates, their hands lagged on the edge of the table.
“I ought to break your ribs,” said Mr. Thompson, “and I’m a good mind to do it.”
“Yes, sir,” whispered Arthur, faintly.
“Yes, sir,” said Herbert, his lip trembling.
“Now, papa,” said Mrs. Thompson in a warning tone. The children did not glance at her. They had no faith in her good will. She had betrayed them in the first place. There was no trusting her. Now she might save them and she might not. No use depending on her.
“Well, you ought to get a good thrashing. You deserve it, don’t you, Arthur?”
Arthur hung his head. “Yes, sir.”
“And the next time I catch either of you hanging around Mr. Helton’s shack, I’m going to take the hide off both of you, you hear me, Herbert?”
Herbert mumbled and choked, scattering his cornbread. “Yes, sir.”
“Well, now sit up and eat your supper and not another word out of you,” said Mr. Thompson, beginning on his own food. The little boys perked up somewhat and started chewing, but every time they looked around they met their parents’ eyes, regarding them steadily. There was no telling when they would think of something new. The boys ate warily, trying not to be seen or heard, the cornbread sticking, the buttermilk gurgling, as it went down their gullets.
“And something else, Mr. Thompson,” said Mrs. Thompson after a pause. “Tell Mr. Helton he’s to come straight to us when they bother him, and not to trouble shaking them himself. Tell him we’ll look after that.”
“They’re so mean,” answered Mr. Thompson, staring at them. “It’s a wonder he don’t just kill ’em off and be done with it.” But there was something in the tone that told Arthur and Herbert that nothing more worth worrying about was going to happen this time. Heaving deep sighs, they sat up, reaching for the food nearest them.
“Listen,” said Mrs. Thompson, suddenly. The little boys stopped eating. “Mr. Helton hasn’t come for his supper. Arthur, go and tell Mr. Helton he’s late for supper. Tell him nice, now.”
Arthur, miserably depressed, slid out of his place and made for the door, without a word.
There were no miracles of fortune to be brought to pass on a small dairy farm. The Thompsons did not grow rich, but they kept out of the poor house, as Mr. Thompson was fond of saying, meaning he had got a little foothold in spite of Ellie’s poor health, and unexpected weather, and strange declines in market prices, and his own mysterious handicaps which weighed him down. Mr. Helton was the hope and the prop of the family, and all the Thompsons became fond of him, or at any rate they ceased to regard him as in any way peculiar, and looked upon him, from a distance they did not know how to bridge, as a good man and a good friend. Mr. Helton went his way, worked, played his tune. Nine years passed. The boys grew up and learned to work. They could not remember the time when Ole Helton hadn’t been there: a grouchy cuss, Brother Bones; Mr. Helton, the dairymaid; that Big Swede. If he had heard them, he might have been annoyed at some of the names they called him. But he did not hear them, and besides they meant no harm—or at least such harm as existed was all there, in the names; the boys referred to their father as the Old Man, or the Old Geezer, but not to his face. They lived through by main strength all the grimy, secret, oblique phases of growing up and got past the crisis safely if anyone does. Their parents could see they were good solid boys with hearts of gold in spite of their rough ways. Mr. Thompson was relieved to find that, without knowing how he had done it, he had succeeded in raising a set of boys who were not trifling whittlers. They were such good boys Mr. Thompson began to believe they were born that way, and that he had never spoken a harsh word to them in their lives, much less thrashed them. Herbert and Arthur never disputed his word.
*
Mr. Helton, his hair wet with sweat, plastered to his dripping forehead, his jumper streaked dark and light blue and clinging to his ribs, was chopping a little firewood. He chopped slowly, struck the ax into the end of the chopping log, and piled the wood up neatly. He then disappeared round the house into his shack, which shared with the wood pile a good shade from a row of mulberry trees. Mr. Thompson was lolling in a swing chair on the front porch, a place he had never liked. The chair was new, and Mrs. Thompson had wanted it on the front porch, though the side porch was the place for it, being cooler; and Mr. Thompson wanted to sit in the chair, so there he was. As soon as the new wore off of it, and Ellie’s pride in it was exhausted, he would move it round to the side porch. Meantime the August heat was almost unbearable, the air so thick you could poke a hole in it. The dust was inches thick on everything, though Mr. Helton sprinkled the whole yard regularly every night. He even shot the hose upward and washed the tree tops and the roof of the house. They had laid waterpipes to the kitchen and an outside faucet. Mr. Thompson must have dozed, for he opened his eyes and shut his mouth just in time to save his face before a stranger who had driven up to the front gate. Mr. Thompson stood up, put on his hat, pulled up his jeans, and watched while the stranger tied his team, attached to a light spring wagon, to the hitching post. Mr. Thompson recognized the team and wagon. They were from a livery stable in Buda. While the stranger was opening the gate, a strong gate that Mr. Helton had built and set firmly on its hinges several years back, Mr. Thompson strolled down the path to greet him and find out what in God’s world a man’s business might be that would bring him out at this time of day, in all this dust and welter.
He wasn’t exactly a fat man. He was more like a man who had been fat recently. His skin was baggy and his clothes were too big for him, and he somehow looked like a man who should be fat, ordinarily, but who might have just got over a spell of sickness. Mr. Thompson didn’t take to his looks at all, he couldn’t say why.
The stranger took off his hat. He said in a loud hearty voice, “Is this Mr. Thompson, Mr. Royal Earle Thompson?”
“That’s my name,” said Mr. Thompson, almost quietly, he was so taken aback by the free manner of the stranger.
“My name is Hatch,” said the stranger, “Mr. Homer T. Hatch, and I’ve come to see you about buying a horse.”
“I expect you’ve been misdirected,” said Mr. Thompson. “I haven’t got a horse for sale. Usually if I’ve got anything like that to sell,” he said, “I tell the neighbors and tack up a little sign on the gate.”
The fat man opened his mouth and roared with joy, showing rabbit teeth brown as shoeleather. Mr. Thompson saw nothing to laugh at, for once. The stranger shouted, “That’s just an old joke of mine.” He caught one of his hands in the other and shook hands with himself heartily. “I always say something like that when I’m calling on a stranger, because I’ve noticed that when a feller says he’s come to buy something nobody takes him for a suspicious character. You see? Haw, haw, haw.”
His joviality made Mr. Thompson nervous, because the expression in the man’s eyes didn’t match the sounds he was making. “Haw, haw,” laughed Mr. Thompson obligingly, still not seeing the joke. “Well, that’s all wasted on me because I never take any man for a suspicious character ’til he shows hisself to be one. Says or does something,” he explained. “Until that happens, one man’s as good as another, so far’s I’m concerned.”
“Well,” said the stranger, suddenly very sober and sensible, “I ain’t come neither to buy nor sell. Fact is, I want to see you about something that’s of interest to us both. Yes, sir, I’d like to have a little talk with you, and it won’t cost you a cent.”
“I guess that’s fair enough,” said Mr. Thompson, reluctantly. “Come on around the house where there’s a little shade.”
They went round and seated themselves on two stumps under a chinaberry tree.
“Yes, sir, Homer T. Hatch is my name and America is my nation,” said the stranger. “I reckon you must know the name? I used to have a cousin named Jameson Hatch lived up the country a ways.”
“Don’t think I know the name,” said Mr. Thompson. “There’s some Hatchers settled somewhere around Mountain City.”
“Don’t know the old Hatch family,” cried the man in deep concern. He seemed to be pitying Mr. Thompson’s ignorance. “Why, we came over from Georgia fifty years ago. Been here long yourself?”
“Just all my whole life,” said Mr. Thompson, beginning to feel peevish. “And my pa and my grampap before me. Yes, sir, we’ve been right here all along. Anybody wants to find a Thompson knows where to look for him. My grampap immigrated in 1836.”
“From Ireland, I reckon?” said the stranger.
“From Pennsylvania,” said Mr. Thompson. “Now what makes you think we came from Ireland?”
The stranger opened his mouth and began to shout with merriment, and he shook hands with himself as if he hadn’t met himself for a long time. “Well, what I always says is, a feller’s got to come from somewhere, ain’t he?”
While they were talking, Mr. Thompson kept glancing at the face near him. He certainly did remind Mr. Thompson of somebody, or maybe he really had seen the man himself somewhere. He couldn’t just place the features. Mr. Thompson finally decided it was just that all rabbit-teethed men looked alike.
“That’s right,” acknowledged Mr. Thompson, rather sourly, “but what I always say is, Thompsons have been settled here for so long it don’t make much difference any more where they come from. Now a course, this is the slack season, and we’re all just laying round a little, but nevertheless we’ve all got our chores to do, and I don’t want to hurry you, and so if you’ve come to see me on business maybe we’d better get down to it.”
“As I said, it’s not in a way, and again in a way it is,” said the fat man. “Now I’m looking for a man named Helton, Mr. Olaf Eric Helton, from North Dakota, and I was told up around the country a ways that I might find him here, and I wouldn’t mind having a little talk with him. No, siree, I sure wouldn’t mind, if it’s all the same to you.”
“I never knew his middle name,” said Mr. Thompson, “but Mr. Helton is right here, and been here now for going on nine years. He’s a mighty steady man, and you can tell anybody I said so.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” said Mr. Homer T. Hatch. “I like to hear of a feller mending his ways and settling down. Now when I knew Mr. Helton he was pretty wild, yes, sir, wild is what he was, he didn’t know his own mind atall. Well, now, it’s going to be a great pleasure to me to meet up with an old friend and find him all settled down and doing well by hisself.”
“We’ve all got to be young once,” said Mr. Thompson. “It’s like the measles, it breaks out all over you, and you’re a nuisance to yourself and everybody else, but it don’t last, and it usually don’t leave no ill effects.” He was so pleased with this notion he forgot and broke into a guffaw. The stranger folded his arms over his stomach and went into a kind of fit, roaring until he had tears in his eyes. Mr. Thompson stopped shouting and eyed the stranger uneasily. Now he liked a good laugh as well as any man, but there ought to be a little moderation. Now this feller laughed like a perfect lunatic, that was a fact. And he wasn’t laughing because he really thought things were funny, either. He was laughing for reasons of his own. Mr. Thompson fell into a moody silence, and waited until Mr. Hatch settled down a little.
Mr. Hatch got out a very dirty blue cotton bandanna and wiped his eyes. “That joke just about caught me where I live,” he said, almost apologetically. “Now I wish I could think up things as funny as that to say. It’s a gift. It’s. . .”
“If you want to speak to Mr. Helton, I’ll go and round him up,” said Mr. Thompson, making motions as if he might get up. “He may be in the milk house and he may be setting in his shack this time of day.” It was drawing towards five o’clock. “It’s right around the corner,” he said.
“Oh, well, there ain’t no special hurry,” said Mr. Hatch. “I’ve been wanting to speak to him for a good long spell now and I guess a few minutes more won’t make no difference. I just more wanted to locate him, like. That’s all.”
Mr. Thompson stopped beginning to stand up, and unbuttoned one more button of his shirt, and said, “Well, he’s here, and he’s this kind of man, that if he had any business with you he’d like to get it over. He don’t dawdle, that’s one thing you can say for him.”
Mr. Hatch appeared to sulk a little at these words. He wiped his face with the bandanna and opened his mouth to speak, when round the house there came the music of Mr. Helton’s harmonica. Mr. Thompson raised a finger. “There he is,” said Mr. Thompson. “Now’s your time.”
Mr. Hatch cocked an ear towards the east side of the house and listened for a few seconds, a very strange expression on his face.
“I know that tune like I know the palm of my own hand,” said Mr. Thompson, “but I never heard Mr. Helton say what it was.”
“That’s a kind of Scandahoovian song,” said Mr. Hatch. “Where I come from they sing it a lot. In North Dakota, they sing it. It says something about starting out in the morning feeling so good you can’t hardly stand it, so you drink up all your likker before noon. All the likker, y’ understand, that you was saving for the noon lay-off. The words ain’t much, but it’s a pretty tune. It’s a kind of drinking song.” He sat there drooping a little, and Mr. Thompson didn’t like his expression. It was a satisfied expression, but it was more like the cat that et the canary.
“So far as I know,” said Mr. Thompson, “he ain’t touched a drop since he’s been on the place, and that’s nine years this coming September. Yes, sir, nine years, so far as I know, he ain’t wetted his whistle once. And that’s more than I can say for myself,” he said, meekly proud.
“Yes, that’s a drinking song,” said Mr. Hatch. “I used to play ‘Little Brown Jug’ on the fiddle when I was younger than I am now,” he went on, “but this Helton, he just keeps it up. He just sits and plays it by himself.”
“He’s been playing it off and on for nine years right here on the place,” said Mr. Thompson, feeling a little proprietary.
“And he was certainly singing it as well, fifteen years before that, in North Dakota,” said Mr. Hatch. “He used to sit up in a straitjacket, practically, when he was in the asylum—”
“What’s that you say?” said Mr. Thompson. “What’s that?”
“Shucks, I didn’t mean to tell you,” said Mr. Hatch, a faint leer of regret in his drooping eyelids. “Shucks, that just slipped out. Funny, now I’d made up my mind I wouldn’ say a word, because it would just make a lot of excitement, and what I say is, if a man has lived harmless and quiet for nine years it don’t matter if he is loony, does it? So long’s he keeps quiet and don’t do nobody harm.”
“You mean they had him in a straitjacket?” asked Mr. Thompson, uneasily. “In a lunatic asylum?”
“They sure did,” said Mr. Hatch. “That’s right where they had him, from time to time.”
“They put my Aunt Ida in one of them things in the State asylum,” said Mr. Thompson. “She got vi’lent, and they put her in one of these jackets with long sleeves and tied her to an iron ring in the wall and Aunt Ida got so wild she broke a blood vessel and when they went to look after her she was dead. I’d think one of them things was dangerous.”
“Mr. Helton used to sing his drinking song when he was in a straitjacket,” said Mr. Hatch. “Nothing ever bothered him, except if you tried to make him talk. That bothered him, and he’d get vi’lent, like your Aunt Ida. He’d get vi’lent and then they’d put him in the jacket and go off and leave him, and he’d lay there perfickly contented, so fars you could see, singing his song. Then one night he just disappeared. Left, you might say, just went, and nobody ever saw hide or hair of him again. And then I come along and find him here,” said Mr. Hatch, “all settled down and playing the same song.”
“He never acted crazy to me,” said Mr. Thompson. “He always acted like a sensible man, to me. He never got married, for one thing, and he works like a horse, and I bet he’s got the first cent I paid him when he landed here, and he don’t drink, and he never says a word, much less swear, and he don’t waste time runnin’ around Saturday nights, and if he’s crazy,” said Mr. Thompson, “why, I think I’ll go crazy myself for a change.”
“Haw, ha,” said Mr. Hatch, “heh, he, that’s good! Ha, ha, ha, I hadn’t thought of it jes like that. Yeah, that’s right! Let’s all go crazy and get rid of our wives and save our money, hey?” He smiled unpleasantly, showing his little rabbit teeth.
Mr. Thompson felt he was being misunderstood. He turned around and motioned toward the open window back of the honeysuckle trellis. “Let’s move off down here a little,” he said. “I oughta thought of that before.” His visitor bothered Mr. Thompson. He had a way of taking the words out of Mr. Thompson’s mouth, turning them around and mixing them up until Mr. Thompson didn’t know himself what he had said. “My wife’s not very strong,” said Mr. Thompson. “She’s been kind of invalid now goin’ on fourteen years. It’s mighty tough on a poor man, havin’ sickness in the family. She had four operations,” he said proudly, “one right after the other, but they didn’t do any good. For five years hand-runnin’, I just turned every nickel I made over to the doctors. Upshot is, she’s a mighty delicate woman.”
“My old woman,” said Mr. Homer T. Hatch, “had a back like a mule, yes, sir. That woman could have moved the barn with her bare hands if she’d ever took the notion. I used to say, it was a good thing she didn’t know her own stren’th. She’s dead now, though. That kind wear out quicker than the puny ones. I never had much use for a woman always complainin’. I’d get rid of her mighty quick, yes, sir, mighty quick. It’s just as you say: a dead loss, keepin’ one of ’em up.”
This was not at all what Mr. Thompson had heard himself say; he had been trying to explain that a wife as expensive as his was a credit to a man. “She’s a mighty reasonable woman,” said Mr. Thompson, feeling baffled, “but I wouldn’t answer for what she’d say or do if she found out we’d had a lunatic on the place all this time.” They had moved away from the window; Mr. Thompson took Mr. Hatch the front way, because if he went the back way they would have to pass Mr. Helton’s shack. For some reason he didn’t want the stranger to see or talk to Mr. Helton. It was strange, but that was the way Mr. Thompson felt.
Mr. Thompson sat down again, on the chopping log, offering his guest another tree stump. “Now, I mighta got upset myself at such a thing, once,” said Mr. Thompson, “but now I deefy anything to get me lathered up.” He cut himself an enormous plug of tobacco with his horn-handled pocket-knife, and offered it to Mr. Hatch, who then produced his own plug and, opening a huge bowie knife with a long blade sharply whetted, cut off a large wad and put it in his mouth. They then compared plugs and both of them were astonished to see how different men’s ideas of good chewing tobacco were.
“Now, for instance,” said Mr. Hatch, “mine is lighter colored. That’s because, for one thing, there ain’t any sweetenin’ in this plug. I like it dry, natural leaf, medium strong.”
“A little sweetenin’ don’t do no harm so far as I’m concerned,” said Mr. Thompson, “but it’s got to be mighty little. But with me, now, I want a strong leaf, I want it heavy-cured, as the feller says. There’s a man near here, named Williams, Mr. John Morgan Williams, who chews a plug—well, sir, it’s black as your hat and soft as melted tar. It fairly drips with molasses, jus’ plain molasses, and it chews like licorice. Now, I don’t call that a good chew.”
“One man’s meat,” said Mr. Hatch, “is another man’s poison. Now, such a chew would simply gag me. I couldn’t begin to put it in my mouth.”
“Well,” said Mr. Thompson, a tinge of apology in his voice, “I jus’ barely tasted it myself, you might say. Just took a little piece in my mouth and spit it out again.”
“I’m dead sure I couldn’t even get that far,” said Mr. Hatch. “I like a dry natural chew without any artificial flavorin’ of any kind.”
Mr. Thompson began to feel that Mr. Hatch was trying to make out he had the best judgment in tobacco, and was going to keep up the argument until he proved it. He began to feel seriously annoyed with the fat man. After all, who was he and where did he come from? Who was he to go around telling other people what kind of tobacco to chew?
“Artificial flavorin’,” Mr. Hatch went on, doggedly, “is jes put in to cover up a cheap leaf and make a man think he’s gettin’ somethin’ more than he is gettin’. Even a little sweetenin’ is a sign of a cheap leaf, you can mark my words.”
“I’ve always paid a fair price for my plug,” said Mr. Thompson, stiffly. “I’m not a rich man and I don’t go round settin’ myself up for one, but I’ll say this, when it comes to such things as tobacco, I buy the best on the market.”
“Sweetenin’, even a little,” began Mr. Hatch, shifting his plug and squirting tobacco juice at a dry-looking little rose bush that was having a hard enough time as it was, standing all day in the blazing sun, its roots clenched in the baked earth, “is the sign of—”
“About this Mr. Helton, now,” said Mr. Thompson, determinedly, “I don’t see no reason to hold it against a man because he went loony once or twice in his lifetime and so I don’t expect to take no steps about it. Not a step. I’ve got nothin’ against the man, he’s always treated me fair. They’s things and people,” he went on, “’nough to drive any man loony. The wonder to me is, more men don’t wind up in straitjackets, the way things are going these days and times.”
“That’s right,” said Mr. Hatch, promptly, entirely too promptly, as if he were turning Mr. Thompson’s meaning back on him. “You took the words right out of my mouth. There ain’t every man in a straitjacket that ought to be there. Ha, ha, you’re right all right. You got the idea.”
Mr. Thompson sat silent and chewed steadily and stared at a spot on the ground about six feet away and felt a slow muffled resentment climbing from somewhere deep down in him, climbing and spreading all through him. What was this fellow driving at? What was he trying to say? It wasn’t so much his words, but his looks and his way of talking: that droopy look in the eye, that tone of voice, as if he was trying to mortify Mr. Thompson about something. Mr. Thompson didn’t like it, but he couldn’t get hold of it either. He wanted to turn around and shove the fellow off the stump, but it wouldn’t look reasonable. Suppose something happened to the fellow when he fell off the stump, just for instance, if he fell on the ax and cut himself, and then someone should ask Mr. Thompson why he shoved him, and what could a man say? It would look mighty funny, it would sound mighty strange to say, Well him and me fell out over a plug of tobacco. He might just shove him anyhow and then tell people he was a fat man not used to the heat and while he was talking he got dizzy and fell off by himself, or something like that, and it wouldn’t be the truth either, because it wasn’t the heat and it wasn’t the tobacco. Mr. Thompson made up his mind to get the fellow off the place pretty quick, without seeming to be anxious, and watch him sharp till he was out of sight. It doesn’t pay to be friendly with strangers from another part of the country. They’re always up to something, or they’d stay at home where they belong.
“And they’s some people,” said Mr. Hatch, “would jus’ as soon have a loonatic around their house as not, they can’t see no difference between them and anybody else. I always say, if that’s the way a man feels, don’t care who he associates with, why, why, that’s his business, not mine. I don’t wanta have a thing to do with it. Now back home in North Dakota, we don’t feel that way. I’d like to a seen anybody hiring a loonatic there, aspecially after what he done.”
“I didn’t understand your home was North Dakota,” said Mr. Thompson. “I thought you said Georgia.”
“I’ve got a married sister in North Dakota,” said Mr. Hatch, “married a Swede, but a white man if ever I saw one. So I say we because we got into a little business together out that way. And it seems like home, kind of.”
“What did he do?” asked Mr. Thompson, feeling very uneasy again.
“Oh, nothin’ to speak of,” said Mr. Hatch, jovially, “jus’ went loony one day in the hayfield and shoved a pitchfork right square through his brother, when they was makin’ hay. They was goin’ to execute him, but they found out he had went crazy with the heat, as the feller says, and so they put him in the asylum. That’s all he done. Nothin’ to get lathered up about, ha, ha, ha!” he said, and taking out his sharp knife he began to slice off a chew as carefully as if he were cutting cake.
“Well,” said Mr. Thompson, “I don’t deny that’s news. Yes, sir, news. But I still say somethin’ must have drove him to it. Some men make you feel like giving ’em a good killing just by lookin’ at you. His brother may a been a mean ornery cuss.”
“Brother was going to get married,” said Mr. Hatch; “used to go courtin’ his girl nights. Borrowed Mr. Helton’s harmonica to give her a serenade one evenin’, and lost it. Brand new harmonica.”
“He thinks a heap of his harmonicas,” said Mr. Thompson. “Only money he ever spends, now and then he buys hisself a new one. Must have a dozen in that shack, all kinds and sizes.”
“Brother wouldn’t buy him a new one,” said Mr. Hatch, “so Mr. Helton just ups, as I says, and runs his pitchfork through his brother. Now you know he musta been crazy to get all worked up over a little thing like that.”
“Sounds like it,” said Mr. Thompson, reluctant to agree in anything with this intrusive and disagreeable fellow. He kept thinking he couldn’t remember when he had taken such a dislike to a man on first sight.
“Seems to me you’d get pretty sick of hearin’ the same tune year in, year out,” said Mr. Hatch.
“Well, sometimes I think it wouldn’t do no harm if he learned a new one,” said Mr. Thompson, “but he don’t, so there’s nothin’ to be done about it. It’s a pretty good tune, though.”
“One of the Scandahoovians told me what it meant, that’s how I come to know,” said Mr. Hatch. “Especially that part about getting so gay you jus’ go ahead and drink up all the likker you got on hand before noon. It seems like up in them Swede countries a man carries a bottle of wine around with him as a matter of course, at least that’s the way I understood it. Those fellers will tell you anything, though—” He broke off and spat.
The idea of drinking any kind of liquor in this heat made Mr. Thompson dizzy. The idea of anybody feeling good on a day like this, for instance, made him tired. He felt he was really suffering from the heat. The fat man looked as if he had grown to the stump; he slumped there in his damp, dark clothes too big for him, his belly slack in his pants, his wide black felt hat pushed off his narrow forehead red with prickly heat. A bottle of good cold beer, now, would be a help, thought Mr. Thompson, remembering the four bottles sitting deep in the pool at the springhouse, and his dry tongue squirmed in his mouth. He wasn’t going to offer this man anything, though, not even a drop of water. He wasn’t even going to chew any more tobacco with him. He shot out his quid suddenly, and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, and studied the head near him attentively. The man was no good, and he was there for no good, but what was he up to? Mr. Thompson made up his mind he’d give him a little more time to get his business, whatever it was, with Mr. Helton over, and then if he didn’t get off the place he’d kick him off.
Mr. Hatch, as if he suspected Mr. Thompson’s thoughts, turned his eyes, wicked and pig-like, on Mr. Thompson. “Fact is,” he said, as if he had made up his mind about something, “I might need your help in the little matter I’ve got on hand, but it won’t cost you any trouble. Now, this Mr. Helton here, like I tell you, he’s a dangerous escaped loonatic, you might say. Now fact is, in the last twelve years or so I musta rounded up twenty-odd escaped loonatics, besides a couple of escaped convicts that I just run into by accident, like. I don’t make a business of it, but if there’s a reward, and there usually is a reward, of course, I get it. It amounts to a tidy little sum in the long run, but that ain’t the main question. Fact is, I’m for law and order, I don’t like to see lawbreakers and loonatics at large. It ain’t the place for them. Now I reckon you’re bound to agree with me on that, aren’t you?”
Mr. Thompson said, “Well, circumstances alters cases, as the feller says. Now, what I know of Mr. Helton, he ain’t dangerous, as I told you.” Something serious was going to happen, Mr. Thompson could see that. He stopped thinking about it. He’d just let this fellow shoot off his head and then see what could be done about it. Without thinking he got out his knife and plug and started to cut a chew, then remembered himself and put them back in his pocket.
“The law,” said Mr. Hatch, “is solidly behind me. Now this Mr. Helton, he’s been one of my toughest cases. He’s kept my record from being practically one hundred per cent. I knew him before he went loony, and I know the fam’ly, so I undertook to help out rounding him up. Well, sir, he was gone slick as a whistle, for all we knew the man was as good as dead long while ago. Now we never might have caught up with him, but do you know what he did? Well, sir, about two weeks ago his old mother gets a letter from him, and in that letter, what do you reckon she found? Well, it was a check on that little bank in town for eight hundred and fifty dollars, just like that; the letter wasn’t nothing much, just said he was sending her a few little savings, she might need something, but there it was, name, postmark, date, everything. The old woman practically lost her mind with joy. She’s gettin’ childish, and it looked like she kinda forgot that her only living son killed his brother and went loony. Mr. Helton said he was getting along all right, and for her not to tell nobody. Well, natchally, she couldn’t keep it to herself, with that check to cash and everything. So that’s how I come to know.” His feelings got the better of him. “You coulda knocked me down with a feather.” He shook hands with himself and rocked, wagging his head, going “Heh, heh,” in his throat. Mr. Thompson felt the corners of his mouth turning down. Why, the dirty low-down hound, sneaking around spying into other people’s business like that. Collecting blood money, that’s what it was! Let him talk!
“Yea, well, that musta been a surprise all right,” he said, trying to hold his voice even. “I’d say a surprise.”
“Well, siree,” said Mr. Hatch, “the more I got to thinking about it, the more I just come to the conclusion that I’d better look into the matter a little, and so I talked to the old woman. She’s pretty decrepid, now, half blind and all, but she was all for taking the first train out and going to see her son. I put it up to her square—how she was too feeble for the trip, and all. So, just as a favor to her, I told her for my expenses I’d come down and see Mr. Helton and bring her back all the news about him. She gave me a new shirt she made herself by hand, and a big Swedish kind of cake to bring to him, but I musta mislaid them along the road somewhere. It don’t reely matter, though, he prob’ly ain’t in any state of mind to appreciate ’em.”
Mr. Thompson sat up and turning round on the log looked at Mr. Hatch and asked as quietly as be could, “And now what are you aiming to do? That’s the question.”
Mr. Hatch slouched up to his feet and shook himself. “Well, I come all prepared for a little scuffle,” he said. “I got the handcuffs,” he said, “but I don’t want no violence if I can help it. I didn’t want to say nothing around the countryside, making an uproar. I figured the two of us could overpower him.” He reached into his big inside pocket and pulled them out. Handcuffs, for God’s sake, thought Mr. Thompson. Coming round on a peaceable afternoon worrying a man, and making trouble, and fishing handcuffs out of his pocket on a decent family homestead, as if it was all in the day’s work.
Mr. Thompson, his head buzzing, got up too. “Well,” he said, roundly, “I want to tell you I think you’ve got a mighty sorry job on hand, you sure must be hard up for something to do, and now I want to give you a good piece of advice. You just drop the idea that you’re going to come here and make trouble for Mr. Helton, and the quicker you drive that hired rig away from my front gate the better I’ll be satisfied.”
Mr. Hatch put one handcuff in his outside pocket, the other dangling down. He pulled his hat down over his eyes, and reminded Mr. Thompson of a sheriff, somehow. He didn’t seem in the least nervous, and didn’t take up Mr. Thompson’s words. He said, “Now listen just a minute, it ain’t reasonable to suppose that a man like yourself is going to stand in the way of getting an escaped loonatic back to the asylum where he belongs. Now I know it’s enough to throw you off, coming sudden like this, but fact is I counted on your being a respectable man and helping me out to see that justice is done. Now a course, if you won’t help, I’ll have to look around for help somewheres else. It won’t look very good to your neighbors that you was harbring an escaped loonatic who killed his own brother, and then you refused to give him up. It will look mighty funny.”
Mr. Thompson knew almost before he heard the words that it would look funny. It would put him in a mighty awkward position. He said, “But I’ve been trying to tell you all along that the man ain’t loony now. He’s been perfectly harmless for nine years. He’s—he’s—”
Mr. Thompson couldn’t think how to describe how it was with Mr. Helton. “Why, he’s been like one of the family,” he said, “the best standby a man ever had.” Mr. Thompson tried to see his way out. It was a fact Mr. Helton might go loony again any minute, and now this fellow talking around the country would put Mr. Thompson in a fix. It was a terrible position. He couldn’t think of any way out. “You’re crazy,” Mr. Thompson roared suddenly, “you’re the crazy one around here, you’re crazier than he ever was! You get off this place or I’ll handcuff you and turn you over to the law. You’re trespassing,” shouted Mr. Thompson. “Get out of here before I knock you down!”
He took a step towards the fat man, who backed off, shrinking, “Try it, try it, go ahead!” and then something happened that Mr. Thompson tried hard afterwards to piece together in his mind, and in fact it never did come straight. He saw the fat man with his long bowie knife in his hand, he saw Mr. Helton come round the corner on the run, his long jaw dropped, his arms swinging, his eyes wild. Mr. Helton came in between them, fists doubled up, then stopped short, glaring at the fat man, his big frame seemed to collapse, he trembled like a shied horse; and then the fat man drove at him, knife in one hand, handcuffs in the other. Mr. Thompson saw it coming, he saw the blade going into Mr. Helton’s stomach, he knew he had the ax out of the log in his own hands, felt his arms go up over his head and bring the ax down on Mr. Hatch’s head as if he were stunning a beef.
Mrs. Thompson had been listening uneasily for some time to the voices going on, one of them strange to her, but she was too tired at first to get up and come out to see what was going on. The confused shouting that rose so suddenly brought her up to her feet and out across the front porch without her slippers, hair half-braided. Shading her eyes, she saw first Mr. Helton, running all stooped over through the orchard, running like a man with dogs after him; and Mr. Thompson supporting himself on the ax handle was leaning over shaking by the shoulder a man Mrs. Thompson had never seen, who lay doubled up with the top of his head smashed and the blood running away in a greasy-looking puddle. Mr. Thompson without taking his hand from the man’s shoulder, said in a thick voice, “He killed Mr. Helton, he killed him, I saw him do it. I had to knock him out,” he called loudly, “but he won’t come to.”
Mrs. Thompson said in a faint scream, “Why, yonder goes Mr. Helton,” and she pointed. Mr. Thompson pulled himself up and looked where she pointed. Mrs. Thompson sat down slowly against the side of the house and began to slide forward on her face; she felt as if she were drowning, she couldn’t rise to the top somehow, and her only thought was she was glad the boys were not there, they were out, fishing at Halifax, oh, God, she was glad the boys were not there.
Mr. and Mrs. Thompson drove up to their barn about sunset. Mr. Thompson handed the reins to his wife, got out to open the big door, and Mrs. Thompson guided old Jim in under the roof. The buggy was gray with dust and age, Mrs. Thompson’s face was gray with dust and weariness, and Mr. Thompson’s face, as he stood at the horse’s head and began unhitching, was gray except for the dark blue of his freshly shaven jaws and chin, gray and blue and caved in, but patient, like a dead man’s face.
Mrs. Thompson stepped down to the hard packed manure of the barn floor, and shook out her light flower-sprigged dress. She wore her smoked glasses, and her wide shady leghorn hat with the wreath of exhausted pink and blue forget-me-nots hid her forehead, fixed in a knot of distress.
The horse hung his head, raised a huge sigh and flexed his stiffened legs. Mr. Thompson’s words came up muffled and hollow. “Poor ole Jim,” he said, clearing his throat, “he looks pretty sunk in the ribs. I guess he’s had a hard week.” He lifted the harness up in one piece, slid it off and Jim walked out of the shafts halting a little. “Well, this is the last time,” Mr. Thompson said, still talking to Jim. “Now you can get a good rest.”
Mrs. Thompson closed her eyes behind her smoked glasses. The last time, and high time, and they should never have gone at all. She did not need her glasses any more, now the good darkness was coming down again, but her eyes ran full of tears steadily, though she was not crying, and she felt better with the glasses, safer, hidden away behind them. She took out her handkerchief with her hands shaking as they had been shaking ever since that day, and blew her nose. She said, “I see the boys have lighted the lamps. I hope they’ve started the stove going.”
She stepped along the rough path holding her thin dress and starched petticoats around her, feeling her way between the sharp small stones, leaving the barn because she could hardly bear to be near Mr. Thompson, advancing slowly towards the house because she dreaded going there. Life was all one dread, the faces of her neighbors, of her boys, of her husband, the face of the whole world, the shape of her own house in the darkness, the very smell of the grass and the trees were horrible to her. There was no place to go, only one thing to do, bear it somehow—but how? She asked herself that question often. How was she going to keep on living now? Why had she lived at all? She wished now she had died one of those times when she had been so sick, instead of living on for this.
The boys were in the kitchen; Herbert was looking at the funny pictures from last Sunday’s newspapers, the Katzenjammer Kids and Happy Hooligan. His chin was in his hands and his elbows on the table, and he was really reading and looking at the pictures, but his face was unhappy. Arthur was building the fire, adding kindling a stick at a time, watching it catch and blaze. His face was heavier and darker than Herbert’s, but he was a little sullen by nature; Mrs. Thompson thought, he takes things harder, too. Arthur said, “Hello, Momma,” and went on with his work. Herbert swept the papers together and moved over on the bench. They were big boys—fifteen and seventeen, and Arthur as tall as his father. Mrs. Thompson sat down beside Herbert, taking off her hat. She said, “I guess you’re hungry. We were late today. We went the Log Hollow road, it’s rougher than ever.” Her pale mouth drooped with a sad fold on either side.
“I guess you saw the Mannings, then,” said Herbert.
“Yes, and the Fergusons, and the Allbrights, and that new family McClellan.”
“Anybody say anything?” asked Herbert.
“Nothing much, you know how it’s been all along, some of them keeps saying, yes, they know it was a clear case and a fair trial and they say how glad they are your papa came out so well, and all that, some of ’em do, anyhow, but it looks like they don’t really take sides with him. I’m about wore out,” she said, the tears rolling again from under her dark glasses. “I don’t know what good it does, but your papa can’t seem to rest unless he’s telling how it happened. I don’t know.”
“I don’t think it does any good, not a speck,” said Arthur, moving away from the stove. “It just keeps the whole question stirred up in people’s minds. Everybody will go round telling what he heard, and the whole thing is going to get worse mixed up than ever. It just makes matters worse. I wish you could get Papa to stop driving round the country talking like that.”
“Your papa knows best,” said Mrs. Thompson. “You oughtn’t to criticize him. He’s got enough to put up with without that.”
Arthur said nothing, his jaw stubborn. Mr. Thompson came in, his eyes hollowed out and dead-looking, his thick hands gray white and seamed from washing them clean every day before he started out to see the neighbors to tell them his side of the story. He was wearing his Sunday clothes, a thick pepper-and-salt-colored suit with a black string tie.
Mrs. Thompson stood up, her head swimming. “Now you-all get out of the kitchen, it’s too hot in here and I need room. I’ll get us a little bite of supper, if you’ll just get out and give me some room.”
They went as if they were glad to go, the boys outside, Mr. Thompson into his bedroom. She heard him groaning to himself as he took off his shoes, and heard the bed creak as he lay down. Mrs. Thompson opened the icebox and felt the sweet coldness flow out of it; she had never expected to have an icebox, much less did she hope to afford to keep it filled with ice. It still seemed like a miracle, after two or three years. There was the food, cold and clean, all ready to be warmed over. She would never have had that icebox if Mr. Helton hadn’t happened along one day, just by the strangest luck; so saving, and so managing, so good, thought Mrs. Thompson, her heart swelling until she feared she would faint again, standing there with the door open and leaning her head upon it. She simply could not bear to remember Mr. Helton, with his long sad face and silent ways, who had always been so quiet and harmless, who had worked so hard and helped Mr. Thompson so much, running through the hot fields and woods, being hunted like a mad dog, everybody turning out with ropes and guns and sticks to catch and tie him. Oh, God, said Mrs. Thompson in a long dry moan, kneeling before the icebox and fumbling inside for the dishes, even if they did pile mattresses all over the jail floor and against the walls, and five men there to hold him to keep him from hurting himself any more, he was already hurt too badly, he couldn’t have lived anyway. Mr. Barbee, the sheriff, told her about it. He said, well, they didn’t aim to harm him but they had to catch him, he was crazy as a loon; he picked up rocks and tried to brain every man that got near him. He had two harmonicas in his jumper pocket, said the sheriff, but they fell out in the scuffle, and Mr. Helton tried to pick ’em up again, and that’s when they finally got him. “They had to be rough, Miz Thompson, he fought like a wildcat.” Yes, thought Mrs. Thompson again with the same bitterness, of course, they had to be rough. They always have to be rough. Mr. Thompson can’t argue with a man and get him off the place peaceably; no, she thought, standing up and shutting the icebox, he has to kill somebody, he has to be a murderer and ruin his boys’ lives and cause Mr. Helton to be killed like a mad dog.
Her thoughts stopped with a little soundless explosion, cleared and began again. The rest of Mr. Helton’s harmonicas were still in the shack, his tune ran in Mrs. Thompson’s head at certain times of the day. She missed it in the evenings. It seemed so strange she had never known the name of that song, nor what it meant, until after Mr. Helton was gone. Mrs. Thompson, trembling in the knees, took a drink of water at the sink and poured the red beans into the baking dish, and began to roll the pieces of chicken in flour to fry them. There was a time, she said to herself, when I thought I had neighbors and friends, there was a time when we could hold up our heads, there was a time when my husband hadn’t killed a man and I could tell the truth to anybody about anything.
Mr. Thompson, turning on his bed, figured that he had done all he could, he’d just try to let the matter rest from now on. His lawyer, Mr. Burleigh, had told him right at the beginning, “Now you keep calm and collected. You’ve got a fine case, even if you haven’t got witnesses. Your wife must sit in court, she’ll be a powerful argument with the jury. You just plead not guilty and I’ll do the rest. The trial is going to be a mere formality, you haven’t got a thing to worry about. You’ll be clean out of this before you know it.” And to make talk Mr. Burleigh had got to telling about all the men he knew around the country who for one reason or another had been forced to kill somebody, always in self-defense, and there just wasn’t anything to it at all. He even told about how his own father in the old days had shot and killed a man just for setting foot inside his gate when he told him not to. “Sure, I shot the scoundrel,” said Mr. Burleigh’s father, “in self-defense; I told him I’d shoot him if he set his foot in my yard, and he did, and I did.” There had been bad blood between them for years, Mr. Burleigh said, and his father had waited a long time to catch the other fellow in the wrong, and when he did he certainly made the most of his opportunity.
“But Mr. Hatch, as I told you,” Mr. Thompson had said, “made a pass at Mr. Helton with his bowie knife. That’s why I took a hand.”
“All the better,” said Mr. Burleigh. “That stranger hadn’t any right coming to your house on such an errand. Why, hell,” said Mr. Burleigh, “that wasn’t even manslaughter you committed. So now you just hold your horses and keep your shirt on. And don’t say one word without I tell you.”
Wasn’t even manslaughter. Mr. Thompson had to cover Mr. Hatch with a piece of wagon canvas and ride to town to tell the sheriff. It had been hard on Ellie. When they got back, the sheriff and the coroner and two deputies, they found her sitting beside the road, on a low bridge over a gulley, about half a mile from the place. He had taken her up behind his saddle and got her back to the house. He had already told the sheriff that his wife had witnessed the whole business, and now he had time, getting her to her room and in bed, to tell her what to say if they asked anything. He had left out the part about Mr. Helton being crazy all along, but it came out at the trial. By Mr. Burleigh’s advice Mr. Thompson had pretended to be perfectly ignorant; Mr. Hatch hadn’t said a word about that. Mr. Thompson pretended to believe that Mr. Hatch had just come looking for Mr. Helton to settle old scores, and the two members of Mr. Hatch’s family who had come down to try to get Mr. Thompson convicted didn’t get anywhere at all. It hadn’t been much of a trial, Mr. Burleigh saw to that. He had charged a reasonable fee, and Mr. Thompson had paid him and felt grateful, but after it was over Mr. Burleigh didn’t seem pleased to see him when he got to dropping into the office to talk it over, telling him things that had slipped his mind at first: trying to explain what an ornery low hound Mr. Hatch had been, anyhow. Mr. Burleigh seemed to have lost his interest; he looked sour and upset when he saw Mr. Thompson at the door. Mr. Thompson kept saying to himself that he’d got off, all right, just as Mr. Burleigh had predicted, but, but—and it was right there that Mr. Thompson’s mind stuck, squirming like an angleworm on a fishhook: he had killed Mr. Hatch, and he was a murderer. That was the truth about himself that Mr. Thompson couldn’t grasp, even when he said the word to himself. Why, he had not even once thought of killing anybody, much less Mr. Hatch, and if Mr. Helton hadn’t come out so unexpectedly, hearing the row, why, then—but then, Mr. Helton had come on the run that way to help him. What he couldn’t understand was what happened next. He had seen Mr. Hatch go after Mr. Helton with the knife, he had seen the point, blade up, go into Mr. Helton’s stomach and slice up like you slice a hog, but when they finally caught Mr. Helton there wasn’t a knife scratch on him. Mr. Thompson knew he had the ax in his own hands and felt himself lifting it, but he couldn’t remember hitting Mr. Hatch. He couldn’t remember it. He couldn’t. He remembered only that he had been determined to stop Mr. Hatch from cutting Mr. Helton. If he was given a chance he could explain the whole matter. At the trial they hadn’t let him talk. They just asked questions and he answered yes or no, and they never did get to the core of the matter. Since the trial, now, every day for a week he had washed and shaved and put on his best clothes and had taken Ellie with him to tell every neighbor he had that he never killed Mr. Hatch on purpose, and what good did it do? Nobody believed him. Even when he turned to Ellie and said, “You was there, you saw it, didn’t you?” and Ellie spoke up, saying, “Yes, that’s the truth. Mr. Thompson was trying to save Mr. Helton’s life,” and he added, “If you don’t believe me, you can believe my wife. She won’t lie,” Mr. Thompson saw something in all their faces that disheartened him, made him feel empty and tired out. They didn’t believe he was not a murderer.
Even Ellie never said anything to comfort him. He hoped she would say finally, “I remember now, Mr. Thompson, I really did come round the corner in time to see everything. It’s not a lie, Mr. Thompson. Don’t you worry.” But as they drove together in silence, with the days still hot and dry, shortening for fall, day after day, the buggy jolting in the ruts, she said nothing; they grew to dread the sight of another house, and the people in it: all houses looked alike now, and the people—old neighbors or new—had the same expression when Mr. Thompson told them why he had come and began his story. Their eyes looked as if someone had pinched the eyeball at the back; they shriveled and the light went out of them. Some of them sat with fixed tight smiles trying to be friendly. “Yes, Mr. Thompson, we know how you must feel. It must be terrible for you, Mrs. Thompson. Yes, you know, I’ve about come to the point where I believe in such a thing as killing in self-defense. Why, certainly, we believe you, Mr. Thompson, why shouldn’t we believe you? Didn’t you have a perfectly fair and aboveboard trial? Well, now, natchally, Mr. Thompson, we think you done right.”
Mr. Thompson was satisfied they didn’t think so. Sometimes the air around him was so thick with their blame he fought and pushed with his fists, and the sweat broke out all over him, he shouted his story in a dust-choked voice, he would fairly bellow at last: “My wife, here, you know her, she was there, she saw and heard it all, if you don’t believe me, ask her, she won’t lie!” and Mrs. Thompson, with her hands knotted together, aching, her chin trembling, would never fail to say: “Yes, that’s right, that’s the truth—”
The last straw had been laid on today, Mr. Thompson decided. Tom Allbright, an old beau of Ellie’s, why, he had squired Ellie around a whole summer, had come out to meet them when they drove up, and standing there bareheaded had stopped them from getting out. He had looked past them with an embarrassed frown on his face, telling them his wife’s sister was there with a raft of young ones, and the house was pretty full and everything upset, or he’d ask them to come in. “We’ve been thinking of trying to get up to your place one of these days,” said Mr. Allbright, moving away trying to look busy, “we’ve been mighty occupied up here of late.” So they had to say, “Well, we just happened to be driving this way,” and go on. “The Allbrights,” said Mrs. Thompson, “always was fair-weather friends.” “They look out for number one, that’s a fact,” said Mr. Thompson. But it was cold comfort to them both.
Finally Mrs. Thompson had given up. “Let’s go home,” she said. “Old Jim’s tired and thirsty, and we’ve gone far enough.”
Mr. Thompson said, “Well, while we’re out this way, we might as well stop at the McClellans’.” They drove in, and asked a little cotton-haired boy if his mamma and papa were at home. Mr. Thompson wanted to see them. The little boy stood gazing with his mouth open, then galloped into the house shouting, “Mommer, Popper, come out hyah. That man that kilt Mr. Hatch has come ter see yer!”
The man came out in his sock feet, with one gallus up, the other broken and dangling, and said, “Light down, Mr. Thompson, and come in. The ole woman’s washing, but she’ll git here.” Mrs. Thompson, feeling her way, stepped down and sat in a broken rocking-chair on the porch that sagged under her feet. The woman of the house, barefooted, in a calico wrapper, sat on the edge of the porch, her fat sallow face full of curiosity. Mr. Thompson began, “Well, as I reckon you happen to know, I’ve had some strange troubles lately, and, as the feller says, it’s not the kind of trouble that happens to a man every day in the year, and there’s some things I don’t want no misunderstanding about in the neighbors’ minds, so—” He halted and stumbled forward, and the two listening faces took on a mean look, a greedy, despising look, a look that said plain as day, “My, you must be a purty sorry feller to come round worrying about what we think, we know you wouldn’t be here if you had anybody else to turn to—my, I wouldn’t lower myself that much, myself.” Mr. Thompson was ashamed of himself, he was suddenly in a rage, he’d like to knock their dirty skunk heads together, the low-down white trash—but he held himself down and went on to the end. “My wife will tell you,” he said, and this was the hardest place, because Ellie always without moving a muscle seemed to stiffen as if somebody had threatened to hit her; “ask my wife, she won’t lie.”
“It’s true, I saw it—”
“Well, now,” said the man, drily, scratching his ribs inside his shirt, “that sholy is too bad. Well, now, I kaint see what we’ve got to do with all this here, however. I kaint see no good reason for us to git mixed up in these murder matters, I shore kaint. Whichever way you look at it, it ain’t none of my business. However, it’s mighty nice of you-all to come around and give us the straight of it, fur we’ve heerd some mighty queer yarns about it, mighty queer, I golly you couldn’t hardly make head ner tail of it.”
“Evvybody goin’ round shootin’ they heads off,” said the woman. “Now we don’t hold with killin’; the Bible says—”
“Shet yer trap,” said the man, “and keep it shet ’r I’ll shet it fer yer. Now it shore looks like to me—”
“We mustn’t linger,” said Mrs. Thompson, unclasping her hands. “We’ve lingered too long now. It’s getting late, and we’ve far to go.” Mr. Thompson took the hint and followed her. The man and the woman lolled against their rickety porch poles and watched them go.
Now lying on his bed, Mr. Thompson knew the end had come. Now, this minute, lying in the bed where he had slept with Ellie for eighteen years; under this roof where he had laid the shingles when he was waiting to get married; there as he was with his whiskers already sprouting since his shave that morning; with his fingers feeling his bony chin, Mr. Thompson felt he was a dead man. He was dead to his other life, he had got to the end of something without knowing why, and he had to make a fresh start, he did not know how. Something different was going to begin, he didn’t know what. It was in some way not his business. He didn’t feel he was going to have much to do with it. He got up, aching, hollow, and went out to the kitchen where Mrs. Thompson was just taking up the supper.
“Call the boys,” said Mrs. Thompson. They had been down to the barn, and Arthur put out the lantern before hanging it on a nail near the door. Mr. Thompson didn’t like their silence. They had hardly said a word about anything to him since that day. They seemed to avoid him, they ran the place together as if he wasn’t there, and attended to everything without asking him for any advice. “What you boys been up to?” he asked, trying to be hearty. “Finishing your chores?”
“No, sir,” said Arthur, “there ain’t much to do. Just greasing some axles.” Herbert said nothing. Mrs. Thompson bowed her head: “For these and all Thy blessings. . . . Amen,” she whispered weakly, and the Thompsons sat there with their eyes down and their faces sorrowful, as if they were at a funeral.
Every time he shut his eyes, trying to sleep, Mr. Thompson’s mind started up and began to run like a rabbit, it jumped from one thing to another, trying to pick up a trail here or there that would straighten out what had happened that day he killed Mr. Hatch. Try as he might, Mr. Thompson’s mind would not go anywhere that it had not already been, he could not see anything but what he had seen once, and he knew that was not right. If he had not seen straight that first time, then everything about his killing Mr. Hatch was wrong from start to finish, and there was nothing more to be done about it, he might just as well give up. It still seemed to him that he had done, maybe not the right thing, but the only thing he could do, that day, but had he? Did he have to kill Mr. Hatch? He had never seen a man he hated more, the minute he laid eyes on him. He knew in his bones the fellow was there for trouble. What seemed so funny now was this: Why hadn’t he just told Mr. Hatch to get out before he ever even got in?
Mrs. Thompson, her arms crossed on her breast, was lying beside him, perfectly still, but she seemed awake, somehow. “Asleep, Ellie?”
After all, he might have got rid of him peaceably, or maybe he might have had to overpower him and put those handcuffs on him and turn him over to the sheriff for disturbing the peace. The most they could have done was to lock Mr. Hatch up while he cooled off for a few days, or fine him a little something. He would try to think of things he might have said to Mr. Hatch. Why, let’s see, I could just have said, Now look here, Mr. Hatch, I want to talk to you as man to man. But his brain would go empty. What could he have said or done? But if he could have done anything else almost except kill Mr. Hatch, then nothing would have happened to Mr. Helton. Mr. Thompson hardly ever thought of Mr. Helton. His mind just skipped over him and went on. If he stopped to think about Mr. Helton he’d never in God’s world get anywhere. He tried to imagine how it might all have been, this very night even, if Mr. Helton were still safe and sound out in his shack playing his tune about feeling so good in the morning, drinking up all the wine so you’d feel even better; and Mr. Hatch safe in jail somewhere, mad as hops, maybe, but out of harm’s way and ready to listen to reason and to repent of his meanness, the dirty, yellow-livered hound coming around persecuting an innocent man and ruining a whole family that never harmed him! Mr. Thompson felt the veins of his forehead start up, his fists clutched as if they seized an ax handle, the sweat broke out on him, he bounded up from the bed with a yell smothered in his throat, and Ellie started up after him, crying out, “Oh, oh, don’t! Don’t! Don’t!” as if she were having a nightmare. He stood shaking until his bones rattled in him, crying hoarsely, “Light the lamp, light the lamp, Ellie.”
Instead, Mrs. Thompson gave a shrill weak scream, almost the same scream he had heard on that day she came around the house when he was standing there with the ax in his hand. He could not see her in the dark, but she was on the bed, rolling violently. He felt for her in horror, and his groping hands found her arms, up, and her own hands pulling her hair straight out from her head, her neck strained back, and the tight screams strangling her. He shouted out for Arthur, for Herbert. “Your mother!” he bawled, his voice cracking. As he held Mrs. Thompson’s arms, the boys came tumbling in, Arthur with the lamp above his head. By this light Mr. Thompson saw Mrs. Thompson’s eyes, wide open, staring dreadfully at him, the tears pouring. She sat up at sight of the boys, and held out one arm towards them, the hand wagging in a crazy circle, then dropped on her back again, and suddenly went limp. Arthur set the lamp on the table and turned on Mr. Thompson. “She’s scared,” he said, “she’s scared to death.” His face was in a knot of rage, his fists were doubled up, he faced his father as if he meant to strike him. Mr. Thompson’s jaw fell, he was so surprised he stepped back from the bed. Herbert went to the other side. They stood on each side of Mrs. Thompson and watched Mr. Thompson as if he were a dangerous wild beast. “What did you do to her?” shouted Arthur, in a grown man’s voice. “You touch her again and I’ll blow your heart out!” Herbert was pale and his cheek twitched, but he was on Arthur’s side; he would do what he could to help Arthur.
Mr. Thompson had no fight left in him. His knees bent as he stood, his chest collapsed. “Why, Arthur,” he said, his words crumbling and his breath coming short. “She’s fainted again. Get the ammonia.” Arthur did not move. Herbert brought the bottle, and handed it, shrinking, to his father.
Mr. Thompson held it under Mrs. Thompson’s nose. He poured a little in the palm of his hand and rubbed it on her forehead. She gasped and opened her eyes and turned her head away from him. Herbert began a doleful hopeless sniffling. “Mamma,” he kept saying, “Mamma, don’t die.”
“I’m all right,” Mrs. Thompson said. “Now don’t you worry around. Now Herbert, you mustn’t do that. I’m all right.” She closed her eyes. Mr. Thompson began pulling on his best pants; he put on his socks and shoes. The boys sat on each side of the bed, watching Mrs. Thompson’s face. Mr. Thompson put on his shirt and coat. He said, “I reckon I’ll ride over and get the doctor. Don’t look like all this fainting is a good sign. Now you just keep watch until I get back.” They listened, but said nothing. He said, “Don’t you get any notions in your head. I never did your mother any harm in my life, on purpose.” He went out, and, looking back, saw Herbert staring at him from under his brows, like a stranger. “You’ll know how to look after her,” said Mr. Thompson.
Mr. Thompson went through the kitchen. There he lighted the lantern, took a thin pad of scratch paper and a stub pencil from the shelf where the boys kept their schoolbooks. He swung the lantern on his arm and reached into the cupboard where he kept the guns. The shotgun was there to his hand, primed and ready, a man never knows when he may need a shotgun. He went out of the house without looking around, or looking back when he had left it, passed his barn without seeing it, and struck out to the farthest end of his fields, which ran for half a mile to the east. So many blows had been struck at Mr. Thompson and from so many directions he couldn’t stop any more to find out where he was hit. He walked on, over plowed ground and over meadow, going through barbed wire fences cautiously, putting his gun through first; he could almost see in the dark, now his eyes were used to it. Finally he came to the last fence; here he sat down, back against a post, lantern at his side, and, with the pad on his knee, moistened the stub pencil and began to write:
“Before Almighty God, the great judge of all before who I am about to appear, I do hereby solemnly swear that I did not take the life of Mr. Homer T. Hatch on purpose. It was done in defense of Mr. Helton. I did not aim to hit him with the ax but only to keep him off Mr. Helton. He aimed a blow at Mr. Helton who was not looking for it. It was my belief at the time that Mr. Hatch would of taken the life of Mr. Helton if I did not interfere. I have told all this to the judge and the jury and they let me off but nobody believes it. This is the only way I can prove I am not a cold blooded murderer like everybody seems to think. If I had been in Mr. Helton’s place he would of done the same for me. I still think I done the only thing there was to do. My wife—”
Mr. Thompson stopped here to think a while. He wet the pencil point with the tip of his tongue and marked out the last two words. He sat a while blacking out the words until he had made a neat oblong patch where they had been, and started again:
“It was Mr. Homer T. Hatch who came to do wrong to a harmless man. He caused all this trouble and he deserved to die but I am sorry it was me who had to kill him.”
He licked the point of his pencil again, and signed his full name carefully, folded the paper and put it in his outside pocket. Taking off his right shoe and sock, he set the butt of the shotgun along the ground with the twin barrels pointed towards his head. It was very awkward. He thought about this a little, leaning his head against the gun mouth. He was trembling and his head was drumming until he was deaf and blind, but he lay down flat on the earth on his side, drew the barrel under his chin and fumbled for the trigger with his great toe. That way he could work it.