Stories of Erskine Caldwell (50 page)

Ned and Betty looked at each other, but neither of them made any motion of the head.

“Balm of Gilead is a tree,” Ned said. “My Balm of Gilead was set out by my father, seventy-seven years ago, and it stands in my door-yard.”

“What about it?” Mr. Harmsworth asked, wild-eyed.

“It’s a lightning rod,” Ned said. “It’s the finest lightning rod on earth. After a Balm of Gilead —”

“You want us to give you a discount because you have a tree —” Mr. Harmsworth began, sitting forward in his chair.

“— passes its fiftieth year, it turns into a lightning rod,” Ned continued doggedly. “Lightning won’t strike any other thing within fifty yards of it. Lightning strikes the Balm of Gilead every time.”

“I don’t know what you’re driving at exactly,” Mr. Harmsworth said, “but I wouldn’t suppose you expect to get any discount on your fire insurance for having a tree like that.”

Betty stiffened her backbone.

“I don’t know why not,” Ned said. “Why shouldn’t I get a discount when I’ve got a Balm of Gilead located almost halfway between my two buildings, and the farthest is twenty-two feet from it. A tree like that is two or three times more protection than rods on the buildings. Why, it even makes the buildings proof against lightning! I figure I’m due five or six dollars discount for having that tree where it is.”

Mr. Harmsworth scratched his head and took a swift look at Mrs. Jones. He had time to see that her mouth was drawn in a tight line across her face. He did not look at her again.

“If you insist upon it,” he said, “I’ll take it up with the home office in New Hampshire. I won’t be able to do a thing until I hear from them. But I shouldn’t think they would allow anybody a discount on fire insurance for having a Balm of Gilead tree.”

“If they wasn’t those New Hampshire people,” Ned said, “they’d know how much protection a tree like that is.”

“I’ll write you a letter and let you know what the home office has to say just as soon as I get their answer,” he said, standing up.

Ned and Betty got up and went out into the hall, Mr. Harmsworth followed them trying to shake hands with at least one of them. Betty kept her hands clasped tightly across her waist. Ned outwalked the agent to the street.

“Ignorant young cuss,” Ned said. “Associates with New Hampshire people.”

Betty nodded her head.

They bought a few things in a store, and then got into their car and drove home. Neither of them mentioned the insurance during the rest of the day.

During the remainder of the week, and through the first three days of the following one, both Ned and his wife watched the mail for the letter from the agent in Bangor. On the third day the letter came.

They went into the kitchen and sat down in the chairs by the window before opening it. Ned first took out his glasses and carefully polished the lenses. Betty put her handkerchief to her nose, and then put it away. Ned read the letter aloud.

Dear Mr. Jones:

I have taken up the matter of the Balm of Gilead tree in your dooryard with the home office in New Hampshire, and I am herewith advising you of their decision. It seems that the company thought it was all a joke or something because, in their own words, they wished to know if your Balm of Gilead tree would “catch mice, scare crows away, and cure painter’s colic.” Further along in their letter they state most emphatically that under no circumstances would a discount on fire-insurance premiums be allowed for possession of a Balm of Gilead tree. . . .

The letter did not end there, but Ned read no farther. He handed the letter to his wife, and she laid it aside on the table, drawing her mouth into a thin straight line across her face.

“I never did waste any feelings for the people of New Hampshire,” Ned said, putting away his glasses, getting his hat, and standing up.

His wife did not say a word when he left the kitchen and went out into the dooryard.

When she saw him come out of the woodshed with the ax and the crosscut saw, she put on her jacket and went out to help him.

First he cut a notch in the Balm of Gilead on the side in order to fell it in the direction where he wanted it to fall. When that was done, he picked up one end of the crosscut, and Betty picked up the other end. They began sawing silently, their faces bright but drawn in tight lines, and both hoping that an electrical storm would come early in the spring, and each of them praying silently that lightning would strike the house and burn it to a heap of ashes on the ground.

(First published in
Story
)

M
ARY
J
ANE KNEW
Dave was up to some kind of mischief, but to save her soul she could not find out what it was. Dave had been acting queerly for more than a month. He was nervous and restless when he came in the house and she had a hard time making him finish his meals. Dave said he was just not hungry, but Mary Jane knew that was not the real reason. He was up to some kind of mischief.

Dave blamed it all on the weather. Here it was the last of April and almost the first of May, he said, and it was still winter. There should have been a thaw three or four weeks ago, but instead there were nineteen inches of snow and ice on the ground and the thermometer never went above the twenties. And it looked like more snow right then.

Mary Jane reminded him of the winter three years before when the spring thaw did not come until the first week in May. She said she was certain the lake ice would go out almost any day now.

Mary Jane could not see how the weather had anything to do with the way he was acting.

Instead of getting over his restlessness, Dave got worse. When he came home at night, after working all day in the lumber mill, he wanted to go out again before he finished eating his supper. There was a dance at the Grange hall every Tuesday night, and the moving pictures every Friday night, but there was no place to go during the rest of the week. Mary Jane went to the pictures on Friday nights and to the dance whenever there was one, and the other evenings she was in the habit of staying at home and doing her lacework. Dave wanted to go somewhere every night now.

“Why can’t you sit by the fire and read the newspapers like you used to do, Dave?” she asked, with her worried frown that he had once liked so much.

“I want to go somewhere,” was his answer. It was the same answer each time she asked him.

She placed supper on the table and Dave sat down in his chair. “You act like a twelve-year-old boy, Dave,” she stated accusingly. “You used to want to stay at home when I wanted to go to the dance or the pictures at the Grange hall. Now you want to go off and leave me by myself every night. What makes you so restless lately?”

“Maybe the winters are getting worse,” he mumbled to himself. “I wish I lived out in California or down in Florida, where they don’t have to put up with snow and ice half the whole year.”

Mary Jane gave up trying to talk to Dave. Every time she asked him what made him so restless at night he always cursed the winters and said he was going where there were none. It did no good to try to talk to him. Dave did not pay any attention to her. He was always thinking about something else.

Two days later there was a four-inch snowfall. It began to snow at about eight o’clock in the morning just after Dave went to the lumberyard. By six o’clock that night it had almost stopped, but there were four inches of it on the ground — on top of the nineteen inches already there.

Mary Jane waited all day for night to come. Not because she wanted it to come, but because she dreaded it more than anything in the world. She knew Dave would come home cursing the winters and the snow. And then before he was halfway through supper he would get up and want to go somewhere. She knew exactly what he would say about it.

Just as she knew he would do, that evening Dave stopped eating in the middle of his meal and got up from the table. She watched him go to the next room for his hat and mackinaw. Then he went to the hall and put on his heavy shoes. When he did that, she could stand it no longer. She ran to him.

“Where are you going, Dave?”

“I’m going out to walk around awhile,” he said nervously. “I’m going out. I’ll be back after a while.”

Dave went out the door and closed it behind him. She could hear the crunch of the snow under his feet while he walked down the path to the road. When he got there, the sound stopped. She knew he was walking in the deep snow and cursing about the winters.

After the dishes had been washed and the kitchen put in order, Mary Jane went to the next room and sat down in front of the fire. She had been doing a lot of thinking for the past two weeks or more, and the more she thought, the more uneasy she became. There was something that disturbed her. She could not help thinking about it because every time Dave got restless and went out it made her think about it all the more.

She had been doing a lot of thinking lately about the schoolteacher the Maxwells were boarding. The teacher had been living there all winter, but Mary Jane had not seen her until about the middle of January. The girl was too young to teach school and she was too pretty to live in the village. Her name was Flora Dunn. She remembered when Dave told her. He said she was not much more than seventeen or nineteen years old. That was all he said about her, but ever since then Mary Jane had been thinking a lot. The teacher who was there the year before had been asked not to come back because she put too much coloring on her face. The Dunn girl was not like that. She was so young she was pretty without coloring.

Mary Jane suddenly sprang up and put on all her heavy clothes and went to the barn and hitched the horse to the sleigh. When that was done, she carefully took off all the harness bells. She had enough to distract her without hearing a lot of tinkling little bells on the horse. And besides, she did not want the bells on tonight, anyway. She took the bells off and laid them on the carriage seat.

She drove down the road past the Maxwells’ house. Then she drove up and down in front of the house six or seven times. She stopped by a tree the last time and hitched the horse to it. After that she walked up and down the road to keep warm.

After waiting twenty minutes in the road Mary Jane saw Flora go upstairs to bed and turn out the light. In two minutes a figure came from the house and through the snow to the road. Mary Jane knew it was Flora. She was certain of that.

While she waited beside the horse and sleigh, Flora crossed the road and went down the hillside toward the cannery at the lake. Mary Jane followed her across the snow. There was no moon visible, but the clouds were so thin the moon gave enough light to enable her to follow Flora. When Flora reached the cannery, she opened the unlocked door and went inside for a few minutes. Then she came back and stood in the doorway, looking out over the lake as though she expected somebody to come across the ice.

Mary Jane waited beside a tree. Presently she could hear a low whistle out on the lake somewhere, and almost instantly followed an answering whistle from Flora. Mary Jane waited. She knew it was Dave walking across the ice on the lake. And she knew he was coming to the cannery.

Dave came across the ice and went up the steps to the cannery door. Flora stepped back inside just as he came up, and Mary Jane could not see what they were doing. She lost no time in getting to the cannery. Then cautiously she went up the steps. The door had been closed but not locked. She opened it easily without a sound. Dave and the girl had lighted a candle and put it on the peeling-table. The light it gave was not strong enough to see everywhere inside, but she could easily distinguish Dave and the girl. They were whispering together in the corner behind the boiling-tubs.

Mary Jane slammed the door and reached for a piece of rope she saw hanging on the wall.

“Who is that?” she heard Dave’s anxious voice.

Flora screamed.

Mary Jane ran across the cannery floor to the corner. She slashed Dave’s face with the rope and struck Flora around her legs.

“For God’s sake, Mary Jane,” Dave pleaded, when he recognized her face in the candlelight. “Mary Jane, please don’t do that!”

“So you got tired of waiting for the winter to pass, didn’t you?” she shouted at him. “The winter made you restless, didn’t it?”

She stung him again and again with the rope across his face and shoulders. She did not hit Flora again.

Flora clung to Dave’s arm and would not leave him. Mary Jane got more angry when she saw Flora hanging to Dave. She drew back to strike the girl, but Dave jerked the rope from her hand.

“What’s the matter with you, Mary Jane?” he shouted. “You stop trying to hurt her!”

“You shut your mouth, Dave! I’m going to teach her a lesson so she’ll never bother a married man again as long as she lives!”

Dave caught her arms and held her. As soon as he touched Mary Jane she relaxed and almost fell to the floor.

“If you’ll promise not to see Dave again I won’t tell on you,” she said to Flora. “But if you don’t promise, I’ll take both of you up to the house and tell the Maxwells exactly where you were and what you were doing. If I did that, you’d have to leave your school tomorrow — and anyway, you’ll have better sense than to apply for this same school again next year, won’t you?”

“I promise,” Flora begged. “I promise I won’t see him again! Please don’t tell Mr. Maxwell, or anybody!”

“Well, we’re going home now,” Mary Jane said. “Come on.”

They walked up the hill to the road. Dave walked in front, Mary Jane behind him, and Flora last. When they reached the road, Flora ran to the house without looking back.

“Come on home, Dave,” Mary Jane said.

She led him to the horse and sleigh.

Neither said a word while they rode through the village. At the barn Dave unharnessed the horse while Mary Jane went into the house.

When Dave came into the room, Mary Jane was looking at something in the almanac. Dave pretended not to be interested in what she was doing.

“Dave,” Mary Jane said, handing him the almanac opened at the month of April, “Dave, the almanac says there’s going to be a big spring thaw in northern New England beginning the 20th — and tomorrow’s the 20th. Did you know that?”