He did not seem to have slept at all before strange noises, shoutings, silences, came and went in what he knew was dreaming. Strangely, actual seconds only made a dream of the reality from which, tossing, he had tried through the night to find surcease. They merged with dozing unbelief in his return – so ineffectual – and his presence in a place alienated which should have welcomed him. … Richard Milne rose, bumping his head upon the gable ceiling, and stepped to the open window.
Dawn had come, lifting sharp colour from the fields. In a haze of level yellow sunshine on the dusty lane below, Carson Hymerson and his son manoeuvred and spoke, the voices ringing back from the shady, cliff-like barns at the far side of the yard. The skeleton of a hayrake stood between them, and they were fitting teeth into a long horizontal bar. Richard Milne had an impulse to laugh at the oblivious and loud-voiced preoccupation. Carson bent, showing patches on the back of faded clothes, clawed the air at one side of him without turning his head, and spoke with injured tones of imperial dudgeon.
“There! You’ve let loose and they’re slipped out again. Give me that piece of wire! … Show ’em!”
Arvin, a tall, bowed young man with prominent, aquiline features, went to the wire fence of the lane and lifted from it the piece which providentially hung there. His father viciously twisted the wire about the wooden bar and the rod on which the teeth were strung. It was evident that it would be impossible to insert the teeth between them.
“Now! What you gawpin’ at me for? You’ve let the others loose, and now they’ve jumped out of the holes. If ever I see –”
Arvin, who had been contemplating his father’s mistake, said nothing, but hastily jumped to the other end of the bar and held it against the teeth. His father continued to whine, until he said abruptly:
“Well! You told me to get the wire, and now see what you’ve done.”
“You’re too smart!” shouted his father without rancour. “It’s all your fault. You just think we shouldn’t be doing it ourselves, that’s all, and you won’t help.”
The son digested this a moment, seeming about to speak, and then to think better of it.
“It’s all right for you to talk,” went on the older man, turning the teeth of the rake on the steel rod delicately until they hung loosely in a perfect row. “Yes, eh, send it to the blacksmith; don’t do anything yourself for fear of getting your hands dirty. No, I’m not farming that way just yet. … I don’t say but what if I was gone, stowed away safe enough under ground, there’ll be enough of that goes on, but not just to-day, thank you, too rich for my blood. That ain’t how the old pioneers got along. If your grandfather could see the slouchy way you do things, he’d turn over in his grave. Reach me that chisel….”
“Don’t you leave go!” yelled Hymerson. “People are getting more shiftless all the time. For a certainty.”
Richard Milne stared half-awake from his window, and the argumentative, swift whine, with outbursts of shouting, the quiet, occasional remonstrance of the younger man ascended to him as though he were watching a play; until with a start he straightened and returned to bed. They even pursued him there. So he was back amid the oblivion of the farmer’s cares! It was a rousing reality. The possibility of sleep was gone for that night, and, seeing that it was nearly six o’clock according to the thin watch under his pillow, he dressed. In the kitchen he greeted Mrs. Hymerson, who was holding a slice of bread on a fork over the lidless hole of the wood stove.
“I’ve been going to get me a regular toaster,” she remarked offhandedly, “but I haven’t got around to it yet.” Richard wondered what formalities connected with the man of the house would be necessary before this could be accomplished. Meanwhile it seemed likely that smoke would contribute as much as heat to the texture of the toast. “I didn’t put your hat in the front hall,” she added, as instinctively the young man reached to the nail behind the door. “Doesn’t seem right to treat you like ordinary company so much –”
Outside the shade was chill and the air quiet, as though the trees had forgotten the struggle with the wind of the night before. The dust of the lane appeared to have been swept by it, smoothed from so much as a leaf upon the surface. The spirit of those gusty hours had belatedly entered Carson Hymerson.
“If he does stay it’ll be all right for us. He won’t know anything about it and people won’t –”
The farmer was still ejaculating and gesturing, unaware of his guest’s approach. Arvin tried to warn him of it by smiling and leaving the rake with outstretched hand to greet his early friend. “Here! What’s the idea –” Then the other saw too.
Arvin Hymerson was perhaps an inch taller than Richard Milne when he straightened, and his rather bashful smile was not belied by the freshet of reminiscent inquiry with which such meetings are accompanied. Still the interest was there, real, and Richard Milne found himself feeling that he had been away perhaps two weeks. For the first time he fully realized his return. When the weather had been canvassed Arvin said:
“We’re fixing up the old side-delivery rake. Kind of late getting around to it, but we thought we’d better do it ourselves instead of sending it to the blacksmith.”
The older man looked up from the teeth of the rake and grinned mockingly.
“Arvin here’s been buying a cow. I was just telling him he’d ought to have been making a regular study of the market before he went out. Then he’d been sure not to get beat.”
Richard smiled. “Oh, I should think that Arvin must know a good deal about cattle, Mr. Hymerson. I don’t think I’d care to have a trade with him myself.” He was not accusing Arvin of dishonesty. He found himself sympathetically taking on the attitude and locutions of a former time.
“Not ’less you wanted to get beat, eh?” The man was somewhat mollified. “Well, go and look at his cow. Just go and look at it, and see what you think of the bargain. I’ll tell you how much he gave afterwards.” A challenging malice spoke here, as though his son were not present.
The latter, Richard Milne reflected after looking at the cow, a goodly and not noteworthy Shorthorn, deserved consideration for his patience; for his industry also, since the floors of the cow stable were as spotless as its whitewashed cement walls. As though conscious of his friend’s attitude, Arvin remarked:
“Litter-carriers. Farming’s not so bad as it used to be. Things are getting a little handier.”
They stood talking a few minutes at the doorway of the stable, which framed a green and grey landscape, and then went to breakfast. Richard Milne found himself in good spirits and inclined to play the part of the well-entertained guest. This would not hurt his cause with Mrs. Hymerson, he knew. He had decided not to go back to the city, and to let it rest with her whether he was to stay, “spend his vacation,” in that house. From Carson Hymerson, he divined, anything, or nothing, might be expected.
The farmer had changed considerably with the years, from the young man’s memory of him – a surreptitiously waggish, brisk fellow taking chop to mill, striding about the muddy streets in a yellow raincoat and rubber boots, laughing and joking with other farmers on the steps of the store. This present swiftness of speech, innuendo, and attitude of not being taken in by anybody, was perhaps the result of forces in the man which the years could not but have brought out. Richard Milne had never ceased to admire the peripety of life, its myriad fugacious shadings like lake tints which become more intricate to the sight with care in scrutinizing them.
As they came out of the house after breakfast a team of horses emerged from alders around the bend of the road, with a two-wheeled implement surmounted by a barrel. On this a boy sat as though precariously, for it was perched horizontally, and looked ready to roll off. Two low, chair-like seats under and behind the barrel almost dragged the ground between the wheels.
“Tobacco-planter,” Arvin told him.
“Yes, that’s a tobacco-planter!” added Hymerson, as though it were a grim joke.
“Dad don’t like the tobacco. Won’t grow it. I keep telling him we’re going to lose out, with tobacco the price it is….”
“I guess, eh! I wouldn’t have the dirty stuff on my place, let alone smoke it, put the dirty stuff in my mouth. Agh! They can have it, them fellows.” He went, with swinging steps and one arm held out, toward the pig-pen, a swill-pail brushing his bulky, stiffened overalls at every step. Arvin grinned, looking from him to Richard Milne.
He, too, went to the stable, and hitched a team to the rake. When he had gone creaking down the lane Richard followed the older man about while he did the chores, tended to the needs of the stock, and prepared another meal for them. Then they walked over the rolling, wooded farm together. Carson said, as they crossed a hollow along a haphazard rail fence:
“That’s how he looks after things, that old man. Won’t even keep up the line fence between neighbours. I’ve had about enough of it, never keeping the fences fixed, letting the cattle run – even hogs.”
Pausing to light a cigar, Milne asked thoughtfully, “Why don’t you make some settlement, say, have it that – if this is Lethen’s end of the line – that the fence should be fixed by him, or, if not, that you will do so at his expense? I should think that some arrangement could be made.” He was tired of the man’s complaints, and still more of his rancorous air of compunction.
“Oh, that wouldn’t hardly do. Might get to be bad friends with him, that way.” Carson glanced at him in alarm and joggled the two forks on his shoulder.
“I don’t see the point,” murmured Richard. He knew that Hymerson would talk about his injuries to any listener, and generally comport himself as though in fact a breach existed between the neighbours. At the hayfield which Arvin was raking Carson began to bunch a windrow, but Richard did not accept the hint of the extra fork – let him stand it in the ground and went away.
He walked across the fields and woods in the general direction of the village. It was a day of the perfected tranquillity which only June can match, and which even in June one feels unmatchable. The clouds in their quietude only gave surcease from warmth and brilliance to the surfeited vegetation and trees, only varied that intense blue which had not yet lost its softness of spring, and which, it seemed, could never take on the greenish bitterness of first snow, the darkness of autumn storm.
The young man wandered for a time with the sense of well-being and careless optimism tempering more individual feeling, even curious recognition of old landmarks. And the fields were remarkably little changed. Toward the river the banks, the dredged ditches leading into it, the hedges of underbrush, preserved the old contours, and new fencing was in evidence more usually in the fields nearer the fronts of the farms and along the road. The lanes were the same as those down which he had wandered in earliest times to the bush for wild-flowers in spring and nuts in autumn. Richard Milne sat curiously aimless on a weathered, grey rail fence, looking at a rusty disc harrow with a homemade log tongue, to which bark still adhered. A huge, battered, old leather shoe had been nailed to the tongue for a tool-box.
He was impressed anew with the true reasonableness of farm practice. There was that about it which might appear elsewhere inertia and shiftlessness. If an appliance served its appointed purpose it was allowed to do so. There was no fever for the spick and span, and even glittering new-painted machinery soon took on protective colouring and comfortable, crude patchings. This was part of the nature of farming, and when it was overruled it was at the sacrifice of practical utility. He recalled visiting the farm of two graduates of an agricultural college, and how his expectations of a stricter formalization had been disappointed. Luckily farming did not lend itself to the simplifications of hospital wards, scientific laboratories, prisons. His experience with other departments of the modernized world led him to thank God for it.
At the end of a field of oats, so sparse and short that he skirted the patch as though in fear of injuring it, he came on a long, grey, fine-clodded field divided into narrow rows formed by the packed pattern of broad wheels. They belonged to a tobacco-planter, he guessed, because the tiny plants were in evidence, withered almost to nothing. And there was a man not far from the other end of the field, stooping over a row. Picking his way, Richard Milne advanced toward the figure. It strode to meet him, carrying a basket and a pail a few steps, then stooping, piercing a hole in the dry earth with a blunt stick, pouring water into the hole from the pail, and taking a plant from the basket, planted it. By the time he could follow this procedure he could see the man distinctly, his gaunt angular movements of stooping, planting, his swift strides forward, while the eyes were busy with the ground before him, seeking unplanted spaces and withered plants which must be replaced. In the gait and these gestures there was something familiar, and he lingered, trying to remember before he should have passed. He was on the old home place, on Bill Burnstile’s farm. That was it!
But Bill was not going to let him pass. Lit by the sun under a drooping straw hat as tanned as itself, his face was leanly smiling.
“Well, here’s the Stranger!” he exclaimed, stretching forth his hand. “My boys told me you were here yesterday. I couldn’t hardly believe it.”
Their hands held. “Fine family, Bill. I was certainly surprised too. When did you come back from the West?”
“Oh, we came back about a year ago. Well, a year last winter. Time certainly flies. You’re looking well, though I can’t say I’d have known you in a crowd. Pretty pale,” he chuckled, “like a city fellow. Oh, well, the sun out here, the open air, you’ll soon get brightened up.” He looked at Richard Milne with jovial compunction, as though he were semi-invalid. That was the way, Richard knew, in which he regarded all city men, categorically.
“Yes. Healthful weather just now. How are your crops, Bill? Clover seems to have a pretty good stand around here. What happened to everybody’s oats?”
Bill Burnstile’s lantern jaws opened in a vast “Haw, haw!” and he bent back. “You certainly ain’t forgot all about farming, I can tell you that much.”
Richard Milne could not imagine anyone else of the locality making such distinctions. Of course, impervious stolidity might have its compensations. … In rural people it was often a part of instinctive caution.
It had been impossible, Bill was explaining, to put in the oats at the proper time. The ground was too wet, and even so lots of men had had to dub them in, any way to get them in, hopeless of good weather, and determined to have a few for their horses at least. Altogether it had not been a very good season. Now there was this drought. The bad weather was not ended yet, or he was mistaken. Still, there couldn’t be a failure in everything – like in the West, where grain constituted the main asset. There a crop failure meant something.
“It was our West, of course,” mused Richard. “When a Canadian ‘goes West,’ it usually means the Canadian West.”
“Yes. … Have you been out yet?” The loose-jointed fellow seemed to take root in the ground, as though to stay there indefinitely talking.
“No. I’m sorry to say it, but I’ve never been there yet, not explored much of the world at all.”
“Oh, I understood you had become a regular Yankee by this time. I was wondering whether we’d ever have you back with us at all or not. That’s how it turns out, you know, when they get away once.”
“On the contrary, this place has scarcely been out of my mind. Naturally, when one’s been raised. … Do you find it changed at all since your return?”
“Well, no, can’t say I do. Of course, they grow more tobacco than they ever did. That began in the War, of course. Then there were a couple of years there they had to give away what they had. Over-production, I guess, or some warfare between the companies. That was just about the time I got back, and it looked kind of silly to me. But some way I got around to thinking it may be all right to put a few acres in. I see the other fellows doing it, anyway. Of course, I got enough of putting all my eggs in the one basket out West. When there’s rust, frost, or anything, hail, you just naturally lose your year’s work.”
The lank, brown, musing face was wrinkled. Richard saw a spear or two of white in his yellow temples. The man was changed and unchanged. The West, its gambling hazards, even a roving life had seemed more fitting to him than his present situation. He had been the dare-devil hail-fellow to innumerable scrapes in his youth in this circumscribed place. But then, he had met a woman, acquired a wife, the Waterloo of that character.
It was a fate, Richard Milne thought he saw, which had completely humanized the harum-scarum; or, if not completely, so well that he was now to be counted upon for half-conscious, humorous understanding: in effect, since a descent to the practical was inevitable, for support. Having seen the world and touched the commonplace of romance, he would rightly estimate the commonplace, and see its quartz-glitter in the dust of his hands.
No, he would not be suspecting these things in himself, and that would make half his value in a self-conscious world such as Richard Milne had come to know. A true man, which is something different from a nice fellow, his tough, lean body, his brown, lean face told something about him; he was as old now as he had looked ten years ago, as he would be in ten years’ time. For his hearer the remarkable thing, so frequently invoked in print, was that here was a gentleman who had never read a book.
Meanwhile he, too, was stirred by the meeting, while the talk went on of crops. Only when such matters had been dealt with very thoroughly was it that Richard, about to leave, spoke again of the family.
“Yes, you’ve got to see the wife and our boys and girls while you’re here. We’re a regular tribe now. When I look at you, only a couple of years, ain’t it, younger, it seems hard to believe.”
“Well, we’ve both been away a long time. Time enough to have acquired a wife, you know.” His tone was somewhat grim, though he tried to veil it with a smile.
“Well,” declared the other in his turn, “my luck changed just as soon as we got married. And now, with a family, I’ve got to keep pegging away, so it doesn’t seem to have a chance to change.” He laughed.
“That’s good. Why, here they come now!”
A sound echoing from the trees at the end of the field made them turn. A boy and a girl were running toward them, halfway across, while two little boys were climbing the fence. As they ran barefoot over the soft, even, warm ground, with cries back and forward to each other, light-hearted, breathless, light-footed, Richard Milne stood transfixed for a second, permeated with a sense of his own childhood. Intently looking at the stranger, and their father, expecting who knew what cryptic spoken index of the mysterious world of which they guessed only that it was wonderful, they came forward.
“Well, you’re puffing, Bill.” The older Bill put his hand on the boy’s bristling yellow head, half shoving playfully. “This is Alice,” he added of the girl, whom Richard had seen on the road the day before. “This gentleman used to live here when he was as little as you.”
“This farm, this very farm?” Bill wanted to know.
“Right here,” the man assented, smiling. “But I used to be everywhere, when I could get away.”
“A great rover you used to be, Dick. Remember when we used to go for hickory nuts to old Broadus’s place? Nobody else’s was as good, because he didn’t want us.”
“Now, here come Johnnie and Tom,” laughed Alice. “They couldn’t stay away.”
The two raced up in silence, even more nearly breathless than the others. “He’s going to let me plant ’em,” gasped a seven-year-old chubby, dark boy, not stopping to pant, but seizing the basket in his father’s hand. He looked up, his long, silky lashes glistening, his dark skin shining. He was like a sleek baby animal, and somehow different from the others. They eyed his manoeuvre with misgiving, and knew better than to try to take the basket from him. The third boy, who had run with him, was evidently the oldest, thin, tall, stooped, with open mouth and light eyes.
“Now we’ve lots of help,” mused Bill Burnstile. “I’m kind of juberous about letting you go at it; but maybe, if your sister looked after you, you could do a good job. Suppose Bill carries the basket, and Tom takes the plant out of it, while Johnnie here punches the hole with the stick. Alice can walk along behind and see that you keep straight in line with the row. And don’t waste the plants, and don’t miss any out. Give Bill the basket now, Johnnie.” The dark eyes were hurt, but Johnnie took his assigned part.
“This drought makes it bad,” Burnstile explained, once more turning to his visitor. “I kept working the ground up to keep the moisture in, and waiting for a rain. Got her in finally, day before yesterday, but no rain yet to help much.”
“It makes a lot of work, when you’ve got to go over the whole field this way and transplant.” Richard laughed, looking at the group of children hurrying down the row, stopping in a bunch, then running on. “Seems funny to see these infants planting tobacco. One thinks of nobody but men having been near that. Carson Hymerson was telling me this morning he doesn’t approve of growing it.”
“Carson’s funny. Of course, it’s hard on the land. But that isn’t why he doesn’t grow it.”
“A more personal objection?” Richard raised his eyebrows.
“Seems like it. Arvin, he’s grown to be quite a sensible fellow, though. And that’s a wonder. He’s sure working under disadvantages. Why, the boy can’t open his mouth, can’t say it’s a fine day, but what the old man wants to argue. He’ll argue black’s white just to make out the boy’s a liar. Doesn’t matter to Carson that he’s got to seem one himself. Perhaps he wants to provoke the boy to calling him one. What he does want I don’t know, nor I guess he don’t neither. It’s a wonder Arvin doesn’t give him such a back-hander! With me he wouldn’t live long, or I wouldn’t. Oh, he’s a tartar.”
“I seemed to see some change in the man. Something’s wrong. Something seems to be troubling him.”
“Well,” said Bill Burnstile consideringly, “I’ve been among gangs of men, and I know just about how long he’d keep a whole skin if he acted that way….”
“He seems,” Milne insisted on the word, “to have worries about the line fence between himself and Lethen. He was telling me a good deal about that.”
“He would. You’ll find out what an awful man poor old man Lethen is. Haw, haw! Carson, he hasn’t bothered me much yet, and I suppose he’s got to size me up. I don’t think he will, either.”
“Does Mr. Lethen farm all of his own land himself?” Richard cared little that he was exaggerating the casual tone of his query.
“No; this tobacco’s been a good thing for him. He fits up a few acres, and lets it on shares, and makes a little money that way. The rest of the farm he pastures, and grows some stuff on. Of course, he can’t keep a hired man,” said Bill Burnstile, looking him in the eyes. “Never has for years and years, they tell me. You’d know all about that, of course, as well as me. A fellow’s got to feel sorry for him.”
“It seems that nothing has changed….” Richard’s voice was tinged by a fleeting memory of those very words between himself and Ada Lethen.
“Naw.” The gaunt man spat. “Of course, there’s something there you and me can’t make out. I guess old lady Lethen is all right, from what I’ve always gathered. It just seems funny these days. I’ve heard my father talk about people who never spoke to each other, but I never come across but those two. … Makes it hard for the girl. Now she’s smart, right sensible. If they would let her alone she’d fix things up, run the farm – there must be a mortgage – in no time, just like nothing; good head on her. But them – why they don’t seem livin’.”
“Strange existence,” mused the young man, wondering at the interest generated, and impelling the man’s words.
“You understand me, they don’t seem alive,” continued Bill argumentatively. “Now when I’d go over there to borrow a tool or something, and get to the door, the old lady would be so polite, just as nice as pie, ask about the family, tell me where she thought I might find the old man, and all that. But if he wasn’t home, no use leaving any message with her. Might as well save your breath. She’d never tell him anything if it was going to save you from the grave. Makes it unhandy that way for the neighbours.”
Richard Milne roused himself from the reverie which he knew might divert the interest of his companion, and, without replying to the reference to Ada Lethen, took leave, after promising to visit the family some day soon.