3stalwarts (129 page)

She expelled a gusty breath, as if her stout being had been eased; and for the first time since she had started speaking she turned her eyes to see how Jerry might consider her proposition.

She could see that he was pleased— Mary, too. And suddenly a kind of giggle forced itself out of her mouth.

“Think of me!” she cried. “Getting halfway westward afore I ever considered my farm help!”

Jerry said softly, “Thank you, Ma. But you’ve got Joey.”

“That roosterish brat-boy! He ain’t no more reliable than hen’s peckings. Like as not, the first spring, he’ll take a notion for a girl and sashay out to prairie country. No, there’s no dependence in Joey.”

Jerry said nothing. He was looking out ahead of the horses’ ears.

“It would be a good thing for you, and for Mary,” continued Ma, warming to her own idea. “You don’t know a single body out this westward. It’ll be hard getting started. And you could come out with us, and if it didn’t suit you in a year, why, you could move off.”

Jerry dropped his eyes to his hands, that were folding themselves carefully.

“If it’s the boys you’re thinking about, or Angy and Esther, you can put it right out of your mind. They’re well fixed. They’ll be all the gladder not to have to work for me. I’ve talked with them about it, Jerry.”

Jerry said, “It’s nice. It’s a nice idea. I was figuring, though, on stopping off in Utica a spell.”

Ma Halleck turned to Mary, to persuade her over Jerry; but she changed her mind. Mary was looking at her husband, and her face was utterly tranquil. Ma Halleck twitched her shoulders. It wasn’t right a boy his age should have a complete say.

“You don’t need to answer right this minute,” she said.

“It’s tempting to me,” Jerry said. “And I’m real grateful, Ma.”

“You don’t need to feel that way. It’s business to me. Come on, now. Say you’re going to close.” She hesitated, seeing his face making up to answer; and then she added diffidently, “You know, Jerry, we all feel fine to you. And you’re hard put against it, having used your money.”

Jerry looked up swiftly.

“I’ve got plenty, Ma.”

But his eyes swung from her to Mary and back. His jaw set, and for the first time Ma Halleck noticed the bones in his face.

“I’ve thought, Ma.” His voice was slow. “Me and Mary are real grateful to you, but we’re stopping off in Utica.” And suddenly, as her fat face fell, he added, “I don’t know how we would have got along if you hadn’t been so good to us. I don’t, really.”

Ma turned and grinned at him, but her glance was for the girl. There was no readable expression in her face. She was slightly flushed and her eyes were downcast as though she had read some disapproval in Jerry’s face.

“Well, I’m sorry, Jerry. I’ve got a hankering for you two.”

She spoke to the horses again, sharply, and eyed the roadside.

“Wouldn’t that look like a likely spot for unhitching?”

Jerry looked.

“It appears a good place. Them trees would break a south wind rain. And there’s room this side the fence.”

Ma lifted her voice.

“We’re camping, George.”

The sun was going down sullenly, its fire damped in the clouds. The cattle were taken in and tethered to the fence and the men used the wagons and lengths of rope to make a kind of yard for the sheep.

Ma worked industriously at the supper. She made no comment on Jerry’s decision, even while she and Mary were alone; but she talked of her house back in Vermont. “Halleck was the youngest son,” she said. “We had a hillside farm and it was giving out. But I liked the house. I had an oven there could golden a loaf like none you ever seen.” And she talked about homey things her mother had taught her.

It was twilight when they had finished eating, and the rain was a visible shadow across the river. They could see the pucker coming into the quiet surface, the first drops, and the wind, and then the rain itself. A drop struck Ma’s stout cheek. She said, as she wiped the last dish, “I feel real lonesome, sort of. Tomorrow night we won’t have these new-wedded folks along.”

George looked at her understandingly.

He said, “I’m sorry, too.”

Jerry— who had been silent all through the evening— looked down.

“You’ve been real good to us.”

“Shucks,” said George, as he shooed Prue to her wagon. His lean face offered no comment. And before the heavy rain had reached them, the people were in their beds.

Jerry listened to it, drumming on the wagon hood above their heads. Outside a horse was crunching the grass. He could hear the small sharp sound of tearing roots.

“Mary.”

“Yes, Jerry.”

“Did you tell Ma about us?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Why did you tell her that?”

There was a long silence.

“Why?” he said again.

She spoke brokenly, as if the words wrenched her.

“I couldn’t help it. Seems as if I had to tell somebody about you and me.”

He lay a long while, stiff on his back. He had an idea that she was crying; but she was so quiet in all the things she did, he did not know.

“I don’t blame you. Only, I wouldn’t like for you to tell anyone else.”

“I won’t again.”

Her voice was very low.

“Of course, with Ma and them it doesn’t matter so. In Utica nobody will know about it.”

She said nothing more, but he could hear her making her breath even. Far away, thunder rolled into the valley… .

The movers went silently about their morning chores. Rain still was falling; and the sunrise was no more than a dim spot behind them in the notch of hills. It was cold, with the wind veering to the northwest. Through the drizzle, harder showers spat slantingly. Sight of the country was shut off. Other wagons, starting their morning’s haulage, appeared inexplicably in the murk and passed with a sludge of horse-hoofs. The surface of the road became a kind of paste that opened under the tires and closed its lips behind them, leaving no trace.

Jerry walked with Abijah Judson. The man’s pale moustaches dripped rain against his chin; he had turned up the collar of his shirt to protect his throat, round which Angy had tied a strip of black silk half an inch wide to guard against the quinsy. Vermonters, he informed Jerry, were inclined to get the quinsy when they traveled out of their valleys, and for a strong man he himself had always been extraordinarily partial to disease.

Jerry did not answer. His hat brim sagged with wet. His close-buttoned coat was stained with seeping rain; and he could feel sorry for the sheep whose thick fleeces dragged them down like sopping mops. The dogs splashed in the ruts, their tempers savage. It was a dreary day for a man who was arriving westward.

He now felt doubtful of his wisdom in refusing Ma Halleck’s proposition. Last night she had conveyed an impression of hurt feelings. With George it didn’t matter; he could take yes or no and let it go at that. But women were queer in their business; and he wondered if Mary had been crying in the night.

She looked fresh and bright as she sat beside Ma Halleck on the high seat. She had a gift for keeping her clothes from looking draggled. Be-side her every morning, Angy and Esther were frowzy creatures; and even Prue was wan. Travel didn’t agree with George’s wife; she kept turning eastward, Jerry noticed. At each halt she looked backward even if George was with her on her wagon; and at nights, as they sat at supper, she always seated herself to face the road they had traveled during the day. She seemed to fear the westward prospect. She was a frail little woman, with small hands, lost in her own transplanted being.

At eight o’clock they came to Sterling’s gate; and there they had to draw up while two teamsters hauled through. The bells over the wheelers rang with a choked note; and as soon as they were past, a gust of wind swallowed the sound of their going. Up ahead, George paid out the toll, and Sterling, in unlaced boots, a little man with a crooked back and twisted face, threw back his wet black hair with one hand while he ran over the silver in the other palm. Banging crazily over his head, the signboard of his bar shed sprays of wet. On the eastward side it had a picture of a teamster walking on a snowy road, with his team at his shoulder; and underneath were the words,—

Teamster’s Travel

And on the other side the same teamster was depicted before a red-hot stove. A couple danced behind him on one side, and on the other a black man fiddled, and the teamster held on his right knee a tankard of blue earthenware, and on the left a bouncing hussy in a yellow dress with bright green ribbons in her hair. And underneath this picture the artist had painted,—

Teamster’s Rest

The wind grew in power as the first wagon rolled hollowly under the uplifted palings. Its top was shuddered with rain. And Jerry and Abijah herded the sheep closer for Sterling to check his count.

While they stood there the rain barrel at the corner filled suddenly, and the sound of rain from the pouring eaves’ troughs was choked off and then a new gush of the overflow began to spatter into the stone gutterway beside the road. “Nasty weather,” said the little man, as he backed into the shelter of his open door.

Neither Jerry nor Abijah answered him. They had a glimpse inside of a woman bending down in front of a stove and a girl with a blank, sleepy face coming in with spring water in a pail. A smell of stale liquor floating out unsettled Jerry’s stomach. Behind him Sterling let the gate thud into the mud and reentered his house. The door slammed dully.

Then the road was curving southward over flat land and the full blast of the wind came sidewise at them. The old lead cow shook her white ears and bellowed. She would have balked but for the dog snapping her heels.

“I don’t blame you wanting to stay in a town,” shouted Abijah.

“Hey?”

“I don’t blame you wanting to stay in Utica. This eternal travel.”

“I can’t hear.” Jerry moved across the road.

“To hell with it!” said Abijah, and he drew some water from one side of his moustache.

The land was level, but the fields were lost in rain. Once they passed pastured cows, tails turned to the wind; and once they saw a farmer in his barn door staring helplessly at the sky… .

Up on the leading wagon Ma Halleck was valiantly recovering her spirits.

“Rain afore seven,” she quoted to Mary. “And a northwest wind means clearing, though I calculate on colder weather. Brisk for traveling.”

Mary was eyeing across the flat land under wetted lashes.

“How far do you think Utica is, Ma?”

“Too near by half. I reckon on its being only four miles more. I’m going to miss you, dearie, after all these days.”

Mary smiled.

“We’ve come a long way. How far have we come, Ma?”

“From Albany?”

“Yes.”

“Ninety miles or so.”

“It seems far.”

“It seems far to usn, coming from Rutland County. It can’t seem but a piece to you, all the way you’ve traveled.”

“I expected the ocean travel to seem long. But this seems such a big land we’ve been across.”

Ma patted her with a damp hand.

“Do you feel lonesome for your own land, dearie?”

“In a way. There’s so much happened to me, Ma.”

She became quiet, and Ma went on aimlessly patting her.

“There’s just one thing, dearie. After all this suddenness. If you ever need a place to come, just you recollect of your friend Betsey Halleck. I’ll always have place for you.”

She seemed to consider.

“You’ll find me out westward in the Purchase. There ain’t no town name to it yet, but you can get to Rochester. That’s a post village. And then you can inquire. Range two and town fifteen. If I ain’t knowed about that close to home, it’ll be because I’m dead, I guess.”

Mary was looking forward.

“As a matter of fact,” said Ma, “maybe you’d better write it down.”

“I can’t write.”

“Can’t write? Didn’t you go to school?”

Mary shook her head.

“Well, I never!” exclaimed Ma. “I wasn’t no real scholar, as maybe you could tell. But I learned writing, and reading to get along with print. Maybe I’d better write it for you.”

“I won’t forget it.”

“Sure?”

“I’m long at remembering things.”

“Maybe it’s best. Jerry might not like it. I feel somehow Jerry don’t like me now.”

“Yes, he does.”

“No, he feels different. What done it? Was it my speaking about how you and him got connected?”

Mary made no answer and Ma nodded to herself. Suddenly she lifted her shoulders and blew out a blast through her nose… .

With the mysterious swiftness of northwest weather, the clouds were cut apart. Suddenly the movers felt a warmth upon their backs, and the horses raised their heads and shook rain from their ears. They saw the road, with long thin puddles of shining water, the meadows green again, and cattle here and there, and ploughed land, and fences every way a person looked. Farm buildings on their right and left and a windmill just opposite them spinning its vanes; the river a winding, leaden-colored sheet with blue flashes gaining distance. And beyond the river, rising to a gentle slope, the brown roofs of houses.

Smoke was whipping from the chimneys; weather vanes made glittering spots on the higher roofs; and over all a steeple rose, sharp, clean, and white, with the sunlight full upon it and the blue sky beyond racing with clouds.

Each member of the Halleck train, whether man or beast, walked with uplifted face; for, though the wind was cold, the sun brought a scent of spring from the soaking land. The horses put themselves willingly into the collars, the cattle gazed right or left upon the pastured herds, the sheep made sporadic attempts at breaking away and jiggled their tails as the dogs brought them back, and the dogs, all four in turn, left cards upon a milestone.

George and Joe, walking in the van, began a story that called for laughter; Ma scrimped up her shawl round her fat throat and spruced her skirts and roved the land with her black eyes, calling Mary’s attention to those curtains, or this spring house, or the early spinach dock or rhubarb knub-bles; Mary rested chin on hands and stared with a shine in her eyes at the city roofs, while her ear caught up the noise of their travel, the sudden clear squeak of the kingbolt over a stone, the sound of feet in mud, and Angy’s shrill voice reminding Esther of Mrs. Percy Pennel back in Wallingford, who always claimed she best enjoyed the rainy weather; Prue sat silent and alone, holding the reins in her small hands, and letting the sunlight fall upon her back as her body gave sluggishly to the jolts of the road; and Abel Marcy called a cow “old lady” as he caught hold of her tail and marched along, as it were, holding hands. Abijah pointed to him, laughing, and said he was as foolish as the rooster who claimed the egg; and Jerry grinned. But alone of all of them his face was seriously set; and like Mary he kept eyeing the town and marveling at the size of its buildings, the big hotel at the river edge, the church, the new houses visible along a westward street.