A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      The Sojourner (1953)
Author:     Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
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Language:   English
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Title:      The Sojourner (1953)
Author:     Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings






For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our
fathers: our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none
abiding.

1 chronicles 29:15




THE SOJOURNER


Three crows flew low over the fresh mound in the Linden burying-
ground, dark as the thoughts of the three unmourning mourners.
These were the widow, Amelia Linden, and the two tall sons,
Benjamin and Asahel.  The funeral assembly had gone.  The clomp of
horses' feet and the rattle of wheels were faint down the frozen
lane.  There was a pure instant of silence.  Then a wind keened far
off in the west, nosed across the hills and leaped into the
clearing, snapping its fangs at the limbs of the oak trees.  The
last leaves shivered to earth and scurried like thin brown rats
across the grave.

Amelia turned the black veil back from her face, and walked to the
carriage.  She settled herself in the front seat.

"Benjamin, take the reins."

Asahel moved to the heads of the span of horses to unhitch them
from a cedar post.  He stroked the velvet muzzles and the horses
nickered.  He slid off the blankets, and placing them in the rear
of the carriage, found his elder brother sitting stiffly with
folded arms in the back of the seat.  His mother's face was gray.
He waited for her to move into the driver's seat.  The untethered
horses sidled restlessly.  When young Dan lunged and Amelia did not
stir, Asahel jumped clumsily into the carriage and jerked the
reins.  The team broke into an unseemly trot for home.

The bereavement of life rather than grief for death chilled
Asahel's bones.  There was no sorrow among the three in the
carriage for the harsh, snarling man left behind under the wings of
crows, except the sorrow all men feel face to face with death, even
that of a stranger dead on the turn-pike, which is an unassuageable
anguish for themselves, the evidence of their own destinies.  Yet
this was a moment, surely, when mother and sons should draw close
together, pile high the barricade, build up the fire, against the
outer darkness.  Instead, his mother and Benjamin were still
separated by the violent quarrel he had heard late last night from
his bedroom.  He had not heard the words, he could not guess what
they might quarrel about, but it was the first time his mother had
not found her elder pleasing in her sight.  Asahel had hovered for
his twenty years outside her adoration, like a shy and hungry dog
that skirts a lighted house, longing to be called in for a plate of
food and a few caresses.  Because he loved Benjamin too, he had no
sense of loss for himself, was warmed when his mother's eyes
lighted for his brother, and asked only to be present.  Now with
his father's death something had come between these two, life was
hurt more cruelly.  There was no longer Benjamin's bright sun with
its two satellites, Amelia powerful and near, he far and futile,
but three cold stones pendulous in space.

The November gale caught them full at the turn into the Linden
place.  The time was late afternoon, but sky and landscape were as
gray as though there had never been a sun and so there was no sun
for setting.  The house loomed large and bleak on its rise above
the road.  Its windowed eyes were blank.  The low scudding clouds
seemed to catch and tatter on the two tall brick chimneys.  Asahel
drove the carriage up the drive to the side and stopped.  Amelia
waited for Benjamin to help her down.  He did not move.  She
stepped out then and took the graveled path to the door, her
billowing black skirts flattened against her thighs.

Asahel turned the horses around and drove across the road to the
lower-lying barns.  Here Benjamin got out and rolled open a wide
sliding door.  Asahel drove up the earth ramp and over the rattling
board floor into the dusk.  The brothers took down overalls from
nails on a wall and pulled them over their good clothes.  They
unharnessed the horses together.  Asahel led young Dan to the stock
stalls on a lower level and the mare followed.  Benjamin pitched
down hay while Asahel measured out oats.  Only one cow was fresh at
the moment and Asahel milked her, stripping her carefully.
Benjamin scattered fodder in the lot for the assorted cows and
calves.  The sheep had not yet been brought in from the hill
pasture for the winter.

Nothing remained to be fed but the hogs and poultry.  The chickens,
guinea hens, geese, ducks and turkeys, always ravenous, assumed
from the color of the sky that it was evening and made a raucous
crying.  Benjamin brought them grain while Asahel took the foaming
bucket of milk to the house and returned with skimmed milk and
slops for the hogs.  The brothers worked together smoothly,
Benjamin quickly and impatiently, Asahel with deliberation.
Benjamin was finished first.  He leaned on the rail of the pig-pen,
waiting, Asahel hoped, to speak with him, to tell him of the
quarrel.  Benjamin had nothing to offer.  He was perhaps avoiding
facing his mother alone, or there might be nothing, after all, to
say.

The two young men shared as few similar genes as was possible,
still to be blood brothers.  The differences in physique made folk
say, "Ben favors the Linden's," and "Ase isn't like any of the
family, either side."  Benjamin was hard-muscled, six feet tall,
quick-fighting, quick-dancing, moving lightly like fighter or
dancer, rocking on the balls of his feet, with panther-colored hair
and green eyes, so that all his effect was of one of the great
cats.  Asahel, twenty years to his twenty-three, reared, six-feet-
four, like a gaunt sapling, over his brother, and as though in
apology for his assumption of the greater height, carried himself
stooped and gangling.  His hair was black, with an Indian
straightness, his face was high-cheek-boned, his deep-set eyes were
gray with black striations.  He was all slowness and awkwardness,
his big feet a nuisance rather than a help.  His hands, of terrific
strength, hung like gnarled pine stumps at the ends of long bony
arms.

The disparities of the brothers' minds and spirits were profound.

Benjamin had had four years at the Academy, while Asahel, after the
simple schooling of the one-room stone schoolhouse two miles down
the road, had been kept at home to work.  Yet it was Benjamin who
remembered nothing from his textbooks, scarcely read the weekly
county paper, and Asahel who knew those books secretly by heart,
and read, as laboriously as he did everything else, any scrap of
paper with printing on it, poring hungrily over the magic of words.
It seemed to him, who was all but inarticulate, that if he could
read enough of them he would know the answers to the questions that
tormented him.  He had no way of knowing that wiser men had asked
those questions, which never had been, perhaps never would be,
answered.  It was Benjamin who was wild, who ran away periodically,
who returned with empty pockets and not even a tale to tell.  It
was Asahel, who had been no more than twenty miles from home, who
traveled in his mind so far that those who thought they knew him
would have been terrified by his consorting with the stars.

Benjamin hesitated at the kitchen door.

He turned abruptly to his younger brother.

"Listen, Ase.  You've got to back me up.  I'm leaving for good."

This, then, had been the quarrel.

Asahel's first sickness was for his mother.  In the barren ground
of her life, of her own character, Benjamin had been the bright
tropical bloom that satisfied and startled, making the desert not
impossible.  Only Benjamin had brightened those hard black eyes,
only Benjamin had brought music to that low, cold voice.  He had
seen his mother stiffen in her chair on a winter night, thinking
she heard the loved one's step on the icy road, sit back trembling
because it was not he.  He had seen her lift her arms, like a bird
taking happy wing, when at last he came, Benjamin, he came.  Then
he was sick for himself.  His heart, too, had beat so fast that he
was dizzy, when Benjamin came home.  And this was not for any
meagreness of life and thought without his brother, but because of
his own gift for love and for devotion.  It did not seem to him
this bond could be one-sided.

He washed out the empty swill buckets at the rear pump.  Now was
the moment to call on words, to find the proper ones to hold his
brother home.  The place would be desolate without him.  He could
not let him go, to roam the world in trouble.  He turned the
buckets upside down to dry.  He followed Benjamin, wordless, into
the kitchen.

Part of the ample funeral foods brought by relatives and neighbors
sat on the white-clothed table in the dining-room beyond.  Coffee
simmered on the back of the kitchen range.  A pitcher of buttermilk
was cool and fresh from the stone cellar.  The brothers washed
their hands at the cistern pump and dried them on the roller towel.
Their mother poured coffee and led the way to the table.  Benjamin
picked and chose from his favorite dishes, but ate little, his mind
and body restless.  Asahel heaped his plate at random and plodded
away, as at a job of haying.  One food was almost the same to him
as another.  He was seldom conscious of hunger, and he ate
prodigiously, filling his stomach slowly, steadily, like an ox,
until the moment came when he realized, with a mild surprise, that
he could literally hold no more.  He was the delight of fine cooks,
who took his absent-minded capacity for appreciation.

Amelia said, "Asahel, if you can bring yourself to finish eating, I
need your help.  Benjamin has something stupid to say."

"I've told him, Mother.  Ase understands.  He agrees.  Don't take
it out on him, when it's settled."

"Oh.  Settled.  He's perfectly contented, I suppose, to farm it
alone.  There isn't enough money, you know, to hire a man to
replace you.  This is a three-man farm, at the least.  Now it's to
be down to one boy.  Or am I expected to work in the fields?"

The last mouthful of pie stuck in Asahel's throat.  His mother
shocked him.  How could she bring herself to put Benjamin's leaving
on such a basis, when he knew her heart, as his, was crying, "Son
and brother, we cannot face life without you, because of love,
never because of a living!"

She said, "Asahel, do you care to speak for yourself, or will you
have another piece of pie?"

They were both looking at him, each asking in their ways, one
bitter, the other eager, for his support.

Benjamin said, "Ase, you know I've always hated farming.  I
wouldn't even be any help to you.  I'd be leaving when you needed
me most.  I can't change it.  I'll admit it now, I was afraid of
Father.  I kept coming back because I was more afraid of him away,
than here.  Ase, you're a man to plow and sow and reap.  You'll
manage without me.  I'll give you my share in the farm.  Just let
me go."

Amelia smoothed the black funereal satin over her thin breast.

"You forget that the place is mine.  Neither of you can give away a
share he doesn't own.  Your father was a difficult man, but he saw
his duty, and the farm is mine, all mine, until I say otherwise.  I
shall not release you, Benjamin, from your share.  It will be yours
as long as I live.  You can't run away from that.  Well, Asahel?"

Still, he could not speak.  Benjamin pushed away from the table and
went up to his room.  He returned to the silence with his valise,
his coat over his arm.

He said, "How much money do we have?"

Amelia went to her downstairs bedroom and came again to the table
with a tin box, and opened it.  She counted out the paper bills and
the silver.  She set aside a portion.

"This should cover the funeral expenses and a tombstone."

The remainder amounted to little over six hundred dollars.
Benjamin pocketed a third of it.  On a scrap of paper he scrawled:

"Rec. of Amelia and Asahel Linden payment in full for share in
Linden farm.  Signed, Benjamin Linden."

Amelia stared at the paper, then threw it in the door of the red
pot-bellied stove.

She turned away into her room and closed the door behind her.
Benjamin shrugged his shoulders.

"She thinks I'll be coming back again.  Maybe some day, Ase, when
I'm rich."

He took from his pocket their father's gold hunter's watch, given
him by Amelia before the funeral.

"Keep this.  No, take it."

He turned to go.

"Don't hitch up.  I'd rather walk.  I'll catch the night train west
from the village.  I'm a dog to leave you, Ase."

Asahel followed him out of the front door, across the porch, down
the steps, over the lawn, to the road.  The road ran level for a
way, rose a little, dipped down to the valley where the stream ran
under a wooden bridge, wound its way four miles to the village of
Peytonville, to the train, to the West, to the unknown and far
away.

He wanted to say, "Don't leave me.  Take me with you."

Benjamin said, "Don't come any farther."

He held out his strong arms and drew him tight.  Asahel trembled.

"Better marry Nellie Wilson in the spring, boy.  Then you won't
miss me so much."

Asahel said at last, "I'll never be done missing you."

Sunset had come, yet there was still no sun, only livid and evil
streaks in the west, where Benjamin was going.  The bond was a
stout cord that tore him and would not release him, and he was
drawn by it to the little rise.  Benjamin was a small figure on the
wooden bridge far below.  Asahel lifted his arm and waved, but his
brother did not look back.  He turned back toward home.  There was
now no color in the sky.  The world was fast darkening.  Everything
was retreating, going away into distant places, and he was left
behind, to plow, to sow, to reap.



II


On a cold December morning Ase Linden paced slowly, studying them,
the acres whose crops must soon be planned for.  A dusting of
granular snow whirled across the frozen ground ahead of a biting
wind.  His father's old buffalo greatcoat hung long and loose on
his gaunt frame.  His hands were paws in fur-backed leather
mittens.  A muskrat cap with earmuffs sat low on his head.  His
deep-set eyes searched the landscape, his long nose sniffed the
scent of coming snow, his shaggy-furred shoulders were stooped.  He
looked a winter-poor bear come wandering from his den.  He crossed
the road to the south and took shelter for a moment in the lee of
the log cabin.

The Linden land was fertile for the most part.  Its three hundred
acres divided themselves naturally into woods, pastures, and fields
suitable for varying crops.  A country road bisected the farm.  The
house sat back from it to the north, the barns to the south.  The
richest soil lay south and west of the barns.  Here the money crops
were grown, the beans, the wheat, the potatoes.  The land dipped to
a willow-bordered stream that ran from east to west, and the cow
pasture began beyond the stream.  The hill that lifted again, still
to the south, was stony and was given over to the sheep.  The high
extreme southeastern corner of the land consisted of forty acres of
wood-lot, from which trees were cut selectively for fuel and for
building.  The woods ended suddenly and blackly with a hemlock-
rimmed bog, from which springs seeped down to join the brook, and
so dangerous that a cow breaking loose and wandering there would
perish within a few minutes if unnoticed and unrescued.  A crystal
lake, believed to be bottomless, fed the stream from the east, and
the western border became marsh, infested with small rattlers.

The land on the house side of the road ended to the northwest with
a smaller wood-lot and with a sugar-bush adequate to supply a
family with maple syrup and sugar.  Wheat was grown west of the
house as well, alternating in years with the southerly field.  Rye,
oats and barley, corn and buckwheat, were staple crops for home
consumption.  A small fruit and vegetable garden was near the house
to the east, where it received full sun all day.  The house itself
was large and square, white painted, eared with red chimneys, with
a fine fan-lighted doorway carved in a Greek design.  It was
distinguished, but bleak, uncompromising, needing, Ase recognized,
the softening of trees and shrubbery.  Across from the house, a few
hundred yards west down the road, still stood the original Linden
home, a log cabin chinked with white marl, and beside it an icy
spring, stone-enclosed.

The wind veered and caught Asahel full and the cabin no longer
sheltered him.  He moved on slowly, across the level field.  There
was no living thing in sight.  The stock was snug in barn and cote.
No sheep nibbled among the granite, no cows drifted across pasture,
no horses rolled in clover, no poultry pecked and clattered.  The
farm was only bare land, frozen clay and loam waiting for new
moulding at his hands.

He halted to the south where the field dipped gently to the stream.
He heard the muffled rushing of the current under the ice.  The
willows along the borders tossed scraggled branches like the
sparse, whipping hair of hags who had once been beautiful, and by
miracle would again be young and garlanded and fair.  He turned and
looked back toward the cabin, small and huddled at the distance.
This level field, he estimated, would run close to twenty acres.
In the six weeks since Benjamin's leaving he had given it special
thought.  Knowing that Ben was done with the farm, it had seemed to
him important that some sections of the Linden land be given over
to crops which, once established, would be both profitable and
requiring little care.  Sizeable fruit orchards were plainly the
answer.  He visualized here an apple orchard.  In spring a pink and
white cloud would draw the bees to hum among the blossoms.  Birds
would nest and sing in the summer greenery.  The waxen globes would
shine like lamps in autumn, yellow and green and red, windfalls
would thud to earth, to lie deep in buckwheat sown broadcast
between the rows, to be crushed, wine-scented, in dripping jowls of
swine and cattle, to be stung by wasps.  The black boughs of apple
trees in winter made, he thought, patterns like no other tree.

His father had never planted an orchard.  No growing thing was
graceless, but that scowling, snarling man, Hiram Linden, had
seemed purposely to avoid all crops that flowered in beauty.  All
were utilitarian, sown with surliness and harvested with oaths.
Ase was the first Linden of three generations to consider the earth
and its bounty with reverence and affection, to long to adorn it as
best he might during his tenure.  To the Linden men ahead of him,
it had been only a means of subsistence.  His father, his brother,
had been not even grateful that the rich loam made the tilling so
little arduous, the lush harvests so rewarding.

The apples here, then, he decided, if his mother would allow it.
He moved down the slope to the brook, crossed carefully on the icy
stepping stones, trudged up the farther slope to the sheep pasture
and halted again.  Because of the granite out-croppings, no other
use could be made of the high expanse.  Sheep were profitable in
any case and the flock might well be enlarged.  In that case, his
mother would have to permit him a dog, a sheep dog.  He had never
had one, where every farm lad had his own.  Amelia, through
distaste an indifferent housekeeper, had always forbidden it on the
excuse that she would have no dirty animal following to the kitchen
door and tracking up the woodshed.  He had accepted the verdict, as
he must, puzzled and unsatisfied.  The truth unguessed, or
unacknowledgable, was that she would admit no living thing save one
to her affection, to her tolerance or compassion.  The fire within
her was a hoarded thing, nurtured jealously, an iron box of hot
embers for the warming of the hands of one.  That one was Benjamin.
Ase had gone his boy's way in loneliness, tagging hopefully after
his brother, longing to be tagged in turn by some soft-eyed
mongrel, equally faithful and adoring.

He opened a gate into the stock lane.  Well, he thought, perhaps
soon he would have his dog.  It was not so important, now he was a
man.  The wind whipped under the buffalo coat and chilled his long
scant-fleshed legs.  There was no need to go to the end of the lane
to the hemlocks and the bog.  He had known for a year or more that
it was time to begin cutting from the wood-lot adjoining the
hemlocks, to give a rest for growth to the lot to the northwest of
the house.  There was no need, either, to pace the southeast acres
above Pip Lake.  They would be required for some time for wheat and
corn.  Eventually, he would like to try there a small peach
orchard, increasing it from year to year if it thrived.  The
rounded summit was probably too exposed to the cold, but it seemed
to him that the slope rolling toward the brook and the barns, and
the eastern, dipping to the lake, offered protection for such
delicate fruit and trees.  This soil was pebbly, with a high
admixture of clay.

He turned down the lane to the barns.  He would have a look at the
stock in passing.  The wind at his back ruffled the curls of the
buffalo pelt, it pushed him downhill, so that his big feet stumbled
over rocks, his gait more awkward even than usual.  Opening the
gate to the sheep-shed he heard familiar horse's hooves on the
road, the scrape of the runners of the light cutter on the
inadequate snow.  His mother had returned sooner than he expected
from her drive to the post office at Peytonville.  She had insisted
on making the trip with a superstition, he felt, that if she went
alone a letter from Benjamin would be waiting for her.  He joined
her at the side driveway beside the house.  She handed him the
reins.  He looked at the newspapers in her gloved hands.

"No," she said.  "Nothing from him.  Nothing at all."

He put the cutter in the light carriage shed by the driveway,
unhitched the mare, led her to the barn, stalled, fed, watered, and
curried her.  Because of his slowness, he was occupied more than
half an hour.  He went to the house and hung his coat and cap in
the woodshed attached to the kitchen.  He found his mother warming
her hands by the living-room stove, still dressed in her velvet
pelisse, bonnet and fur capelet.  She was a slight woman past
fifty, long of neck, with smooth black hair, small black eyes and a
tight, thin mouth.  She carried herself stiffly erect in well made
clothes of good material.  She was not unattractive until she
focussed her eyes on a human being, when their unblinking coldness
gave the effect of the stare of an adder.

She lifted her head and turned the jet-like glitter on her younger
son.

She said, "I have been expecting Benjamin to return every day.
This is most unusual.  He has never been away so long without
writing me.  I begin to feel something different about this
absence.  He went with a reason and for a purpose.  It comes clear
now to my mind.  He is ambitious, if you can understand that.  He
wishes to make a much needed backlog of money to bring home.  It
will take him a little time.  He naturally prefers to have good
news before writing me.  It will come.  Meantime--"

She studied him, frowning.

"Are you listening to me?  Your expression is completely blank."

Behind the mask of his face Ase was suffering.  It seemed to him
that he must awaken her to the truth, as one shakes a sleeper in a
nightmare.  Yet for her it was not nightmare, but a sweet dream
from which she would be cruelly aroused.  It was necessary, he
thought.  How else might life begin again for her?

He said desperately, "Mother, Ben is gone."

"That's exactly what I am talking about.  It may be as late as
summer before he comes home.  Meantime, you must make plans for the
spring planting.  I have come to a decision.  I am putting
everything here in your hands.  Get advice if you need, but not
from me.  I know nothing of these things.  And care less.  It is a
hateful life.  But the farm is all we have and I expect you to make
the most of it.  Everything is up to you until Benjamin's return."

He did not speak.

She said sharply, "Do you understand?  Are you prepared to take
this responsibility?"

He nodded.  She went to her room and closed the door.

He was ready.  He had been ready a long time.  He was old in farm
lore.  He had learned it with fascination from childhood, as the
child of a musician absorbs the patterns of sound, and may astonish
its elders by climbing to the piano stool and playing accurately a
little tune at the age of five.  Benjamin had vanished for three
months the summer when Ase was sixteen, their father had been out
of his mind with fever, and the stripling, with the help of a
stupid ox of a hired hand, had brought through the crops to a
prosperous harvesting.  Because he loved the earth, its ways, its
seasons, its flowering and its fruiting, he accepted the charge of
these acres not as a burden, but as though an unrequited passion
had been suddenly returned.  His heavy spirits lifted.  Whether his
mother's gift of authority came of her necessity or of her
acknowlegment at last of his manhood, he could not tell, nor did it
matter.

He was surprised that she had given him complete freedom of
decision.  He was somehow not surprised at her refusal to admit
that Benjamin was gone perhaps forever.  He had best leave her
unmolested in her dream.

The fire in the round-bellied stove had died down.  He built it up
until the isinglass front glowed red.  He sat close, leaning
forward in his mother's Boston rocker, and was still cold.  A
bleakness lay over the room, over the house, that was of an icier
substance than the winter temperature.  The large sitting-room was
well proportioned, with bay windows on two sides to let in the sun
and the sight of trees and flying birds, the barns, the rolling
contour of the farm.  Its cherry, pine and walnut furnishings were
solid and good, as were the furnishings of all the other rooms, yet
none had sat here in content or ease.  The warmth and vitality of
the land were strong past harming.  The dwelling house was chill
with human misery and always had been.

He wondered how far back the Lindens went in time, as Lindens, and
which was the first to start the strange, interlocked, unhappy and
often violent chain.  He knew nothing of them past the first one in
America, a Hollander, whose name of Lindh'oeven, or something of
the sort, (there was an old deed in the attic with such a name) had
become simplified with pioneer usage and spelling to "Linden."
This was in the middle 1600's, and the Hollander had married a
Frenchwoman.  An English strain came in somewhere later.  Amelia
was second generation Scotch-Irish, with all the Scot dourness and
none of the Irish lilt.  He had heard that the Irish were supposed
to be a light-hearted people, but the only signs of it, certainly,
had been in Benjamin.

Perhaps the trouble had begun with his immediate grandfather, Arent
Linden.  He had moved inland from the Hudson River valley, had
taken up a large tract of land, and had two sons, Joshua the elder
and Ase's own father, Hiram.  It seemed to him that it was a
repetition of the Biblical story of Jacob and Esau, one son
beloved, the other despised, for Arent Linden and his Joshua had
made a pact with Hiram, that if he would help them clear six
hundred acres of land in this virgin place, would help them build
two houses, they in turn would help him clear three hundred for
himself, would build him a house, too, and a prosperous family
would establish itself in the wilderness.  The betrayal had been
complete.

Hiram had worked for his father and brother, unpaid, merely fed and
clothed and sheltered, until he was in his early thirties.  The
time came at last to turn to his land, to the building of his home,
and they had laughed at him.  That could make a man snarl at life.
That could make Amelia, a bride no longer young, in a log cabin,
nurse her spite, like some half-mad woman watering a poisonous weed
in a flower pot.  Yet it seemed to young Ase that the greater the
injustice that came to one, the deeper would be the desire to give
justice and warmth to one's children.

His father had fought through, after all, had cleared his land,
which proved richer than that of the other two, had sold his timber
on a high market, had built at last his house, larger if not so
fine of line and contour as the earlier, more gracious ones, and
now was dead and unlamented.  And Benjamin, who had provided,
carelessly, all this house knew of light and laughter, was gone,
taking the brightness with him.  Ase considered the spell cast by
his brother on all who knew him, for spell it was.  It was
conceivable that Ben would conquer the world, for he moved like a
whirlwind, catching up men and women breathless in the brief
gusts of his enthusiasm.  It was also unlikely.  Ase knew and
acknowledged his brother's instability.  Ben's restless impatience
took always the apparently easy way, he raced light-footed and
light-hearted, his tawny hair, his cloak of charm, streaming in the
wind he created, until the swift feet met the smallest rock, the
shallowest ravine, the slightest thickening of the forest, when he
stopped confused in his tracks, then was off again in search of a
smoother path through a more open glade.

For this, Ase felt no criticism, but only concern.  His love was so
vast a thing that he longed to clear away the rock, to bridge the
ravine, to fell the forest, ahead of Benjamin.  If he had received
in return only the most casual affection, all the more room was
left in him for the longing, some day, to be truly as one with his
brother and so end his aching loneliness.  He could not take
offense at his mother's blindness nor surely at her own adoration
of her elder.  He had a timid hope that in her loss she might turn
a little toward him.  He loved her, too, with tenderness, and
wished he might be other than he was, to please her.  He supposed
he was difficult to care for, inarticulate and brooding,
unbeautiful and awkward.

Amelia had not come from her room.  It was nearly noon.  For all
her bravado, he knew that she was in torment.  He went to the
kitchen and made a fire in the range.  He prepared a meal as best
he was able.  He went to the cellar for a bottle of elderberry
wine.  He poured a glass of it and took it to her room.

She sipped the wine and nodded her thanks.

"Come, Mother.  Dinner's ready."

His cooking was no worse than her own.  She had done no baking for
a week and the bread was hard and stale.  She was especially fond
of sweets and took a great deal of jelly with her bread and tea.
The wine and strong tea set her to talking with animation.  She
told anecdotes of early hardships.  Suddenly she frowned.

"Asahel, I want you to tear down the log cabin.  It reminds me of
too many dreadful things.  Anyway, it's an eye-sore."

To him the cabin was significant and beautiful.  When the apple
trees were grown sheltering around it, the stone chimney, the brown
walls with white marl chinking, would seem those of a little house
in a fairy tale.  For an instant he pictured himself living there
with Nellie Wilson, of whom Ben had said, "Better marry Nellie in
the spring."  But Nellie was Ben's girl.  She could not be taken
over as he had inherited Ben's discarded clothing; could not be
given away as Ben had given him their father's watch.  He set the
thought aside and wondered how he might dissuade his mother from
the cabin's destruction.  He had neither power nor words to
influence her.  She had many irrational impulses, and if he paid no
attention to this one perhaps she would forget it.  Ben of course
could have had her decking the cabin with banners if the notion
struck him.

His mind groped toward a question that had lain dormant and
festering in him all his life.  There was something more in his
mother's passion for Ben and her coldness for him than was called
for by Ben's grace and charm and his lack of it.  He had been a
toddler when she had struck him smartly because he made mild
protest that his older brother had run off with his new birthday
toy.  Blinking through tears he refused to let fall, he cried out,
"Why?" and even then the question had held the larger implication.
From his mother's expansive mood he might now draw his answer.  His
throat tightened, the words were hopeless captives.

Amelia said, "At first I was happy in the cabin."

Her face was one he had never seen.  Her eyes were half-closed, the
thin mouth was relaxed and soft, lifted at the corners in a smile.
The sallow skin glowed luminous, like an apricot in sun-light.

"Very happy.  I had waited so long.  I was past thirty.  Still
handsome, I believe."

She closed her eyes entirely.

She went on dreamily, "I could hear the spring bubbling in the
night.  There was a red rambler rose outside the window and once he
reached his hand out in the moonlight and broke a spray and laid it
on my pillow.  The thorns scratched my cheek and we laughed
together."

She opened her eyes and leaned toward him.

"I have had two husbands, you know," she said.

He stared at her.

"Oh, they were both named Hiram Linden."

She touched her handkerchief to her lips.

"Everything else was different.  The minds, the bodies--two
different men.  I loved the first one, oh yes, I loved him.  I
lived with him a year.  He died.  He was killed, of course.  Your
grandfather and your uncle killed him.  For a year, he thought they
meant to keep their promise.  Oh, the fine house, the cleared
acres, when they came to pay back his years of servitude!  When he
knew the truth, it killed him.  And why?  Because he was a coward.
He died because he was a coward, and I told him so."

She wiped her wet forehead.

"The first man gave me my only truly begotten son, my Benjamin,
conceived in love.  The second gave me you."

She looked at Ase and the adder's eyes did not flicker.  He was
cold to his marrow.  The answer was coming, it was sharp and
fanged, he would now avoid it if he could.

"I never lived with the second Hiram Linden as a wife.  I loathed
the sight of him, I loathed his touch.  He didn't give me you, he
forced me.  He forced you on me.  Not in love, not even lust.  No,
in anger.  I hated him to the last inch of his guts.  And I hated
you."

She sat back in her chair.  Her voice broke.

She said, "I can't help it.  I'm sorry."

His first impulse was to take himself from the house of horror at
once, free her from the very sight of him, free himself from her
eyes and the ice of her voice.  He went to the log cabin and built
a fire on the hearth and crouched before it.  He thought
desperately of fetching his friend Tim McCarthy for comfort and for
council, then knew the matter was private and shameful and he must
look it in the face alone.  He was stricken, a tangible knife in
his heart would be less painful, a kinder thing, than this sharp-
bladed knowledge.  The fire died to embers and he sweat in the cold
cabin, then felt the chill and brought in broken boughs to feed the
fire again.  The sun dropped toward its setting and the pale gold
filtered through the dusty windows.  Well, then, what had happened,
after all?  Only that where he had lived under lowering clouds the
storm had broken over him.  What had been a puzzling uncertainty,
without meaning, was become a fact.  He had guessed and wondered,
and now he knew.

He watched the fire until it was safely ashes.  He stood up and
stretched his cramped legs.  He drew a long breath in what seemed a
clearer air.  The truth was a liberation.  He could go on.  The
earth was still solid under him.  He felt a surge of pity for his
mother.  Even as she rejected him, she needed him.  Trapped in the
ruins of her life, he thought, she was also brave.  He returned to
the house to find her staring from a front window at the empty
road.  He stoked automatically the sitting-room stove.  He could
find no words of comfort, but he laid his big hand on her shoulder.

She said, not turning, "Why do you waste the wood?"



III


Ase Linden had three friends and a flute.  The oldest friend was an
Indian, Mink Fisher.  Their natures, their gravity, had spoken each
to each when Ase had been four years old.  The Indian had come to
trade.  He had stood in the woodshed doorway tall and straight,
blanket-wrapped, black braids of hair over his shoulders, an eagle
feather in the band across his bronze forehead.  The little boy had
thought, "It is the king of the hawks."  They had studied each
other and then Mink had held out his hand and Ase had walked to him
and laid his hand in his with a child's deep sigh of content.  They
had become as father and son.  From Mink he had learned all he knew
of the lore of nature.  Through his boyhood and early adolescence
the Indian had come to him several times a year, often from many
miles out of his way.  Now Mink had not come in five years.  Ase
grieved and longed for him.

His second oldest friend was the gypsies.  He thought of them
collectively, as he did not single out one grape from a cluster or
one marsh marigold from a field of marigolds.  The gypsies had been
coming since he was six.  They came every summer, camping by the
willow stream or near the cold flowing spring by the log cabin.
For the few days of their camp he was one of them.  He came then as
close as was possible, for him, to neglecting his chores.  As a
boy, he ran with the gypsy boys.  As a young man, he sat with the
elders, danced and sang and ate and drank at their summer nights'
festivities.  Of late, he had been closest to the matriarch of the
tribe, the Old One, the queen; to her husband and to their daughter
Elissa.  Elissa stirred his blood so that when he touched her in
the dance he trembled like a colt.  She was an unlit bonfire ready
for the spurt of his match.  The Old One looked on with approval,
and he did not understand why or how he had abruptly turned back
with Elissa from the hemlock shadows toward which he had been
leading her on a soft June evening.  The gypsies had not appeared
the summer before.  Ase was fearful that he had offended the pride
of the girl, even more, perhaps, that of her mother, the queen.

His third friend was Tim McCarthy.  No king had sired McCarthy, no
queen had borne him.  He was a drunken little old Irishman from the
bogs of Aran, a hired farm hand by necessity, a fiddler by the
grace of God and to the glory of man.  Ten years ago he had drifted
into the neighborhood with his fiddle under his arm, a bottle in
his pocket, a dirty white she dog at his heels.  He had hired out
first with Hiram Linden.  He had lasted until his first spree, when
he reeled into the house, singing and fiddling the bawdiest of
Irish ballads.  Amelia had had him off the premises before the sun
went down.  Meantime, he and the lad of eleven had become fast
cronies.  The little man, full of fables, his music and his dog
fascinated the boy in equal measure.  The Wilsons, the Lindens'
nearest neighbors, two miles to the east, had taken Tim on for a
while.  He was now reasonably settled yet another mile east, to be
near his young friend Ase, with a farm family who put up with his
instability in satisfaction over the lower wages he was willing to
work for.  The little dog was dead, replaced by a male of her
progeny as white and dirty and devoted.  When sober, there was no
better hired hand than Tim McCarthy.  At all times he was kind and
gentle, and wise, save for the drink, which had him.  He had the
Gaelic gayety and melancholy, like the streaks of fat and lean in
Irish bacon.

McCarthy had given Ase the flute, which he counted also as a
friend.  Tim's fiddle had stirred the hearts of many a man and
woman in two lands and on the sea between them, but he had never
induced so rapt an absorption as in the thin, solemn boy who had
such trouble speaking.  It seemed to McCarthy that Ase found the
music another and a richer language, one that spoke familiarly and
in which he might find tongue.  He tried to teach him the violin,
but the boy's hands, already huge, were fatally clumsy, and while
he managed the bow well enough, his already gnarled fingers could
not touch one of the delicate strings without impinging on another.

McCarthy said finally, "Me boy-o, 'tis hopeless.  'Tis like a pair
of drunken woodchucks stompin' on me fiddle."

Watching Ase piping one day on a willow whistle, McCarthy lifted a
finger and said, "Whoosh now.  I've an idea born to me."

He prowled the marsh for the proper hollow reed, and carefully, his
blue eyes intent, his cheeks rosy with excitement, ruffling his
white hair now and then in exasperation, he made with his pocket
knife a serviceable flute with half a dozen stops.  The day was
Sunday and he worked from noon to sunset.

"There now," he said.  "If it works, I'll be fitting a better
mouthpiece and trying to call back where the other stops should go.
Give a blast."

The boy had learned the crude, sweet instrument as though a young
bird learned to sing.  McCarthy deprived himself of his drink for
several months, disappeared for five days, and having walked the
twenty miles each way to and from the city of Trent, appeared again
still sober and triumphant, with the gift for Ase of as fine a
flute, ebony and silver, as money could buy.  On his next month's
wages he became magnificently drunk.  Before he collapsed, to be
driven by Ase to his place of employment and put to bed in his
loft, the old man and the boy had played fiddle and flute together
in the hemlock woods until the birds flew close to listen, and they
looked up to see the Linden sheep flocked in a semicircle before
them.  Tim had been so taken by laughter that it made an end to the
playing and he gave himself to finishing his jug.  Now Ase was
twenty-one and McCarthy was in his late sixties, and Ase was master
of his flute.  The pair was called on for their music at all the
country gatherings and dances.  It was Tim who did the trotting
back and forth between the two farms, to visit.  Two evenings
seldom passed without Ase's finding the little man and his dog
waiting for him at the barns when chores and supper were done with.

From the coldness of the Linden house Ase had walked with these
friends into strange worlds, warm and golden.  The world of Mink
Fisher had most nearly fed and satisfied him.  It was primal,
enriched by Indian myth and legend of bird and beast, of cloud and
wind and spaceless sky.  It was an amplification of the earth he
knew and there was nourishment in the stars.

The Romany world dazzled him with its freedom and its brightness.
It was spangled and embroidered, Oriental, exotic, the open road
its lamp and its god.  Its songs around the camp fire came from far
away and long ago, songs of feuds and castles, of roving minstrels,
of dark deaths and gypsy passions.  McCarthy's Celtic world was
fey, peopled with leprechauns and fairies, with red-bearded kings
and gold-haired queens who never had been and never could be.
There were fierce battles here, and a deal of bitter injustice and
the righting of it, and from behind the mist that shrouded the
green and silver landscape there came the sound of a mysterious
laughter.

These glimpses into distance, these few steps into magic places,
left Ase still the onlooker, still hungering to share more deeply,
to become a part of even farther realms and stranger people.  He
had no friend of his own age.  His longing for closeness to his
brother absorbed him.  It did not occur to him to seek a brother
among his schoolmates or the neighbor lads.  Benjamin was the
spring from which he must quench his thirst if it was to be
assuaged at all.  He was stirred and touched by the generosity of
his three friends, taking their affection as a gift past his
deserving.  He did not guess that they recognized in him
imagination and spirit like their own, a bigness of mind, a rare
understanding and tenderness that warmed them, too, made them feel
valued, as they valued him.  He knew only that he was a stranger
and they took him in.  They spoke to him and he was a little able
to speak with them.  He found voice fully in his flute alone.

Of the friends and the flute Amelia disapproved with all the sting
of her acid tongue.  Mink Fisher was a slinking savage, likely to
murder them in their beds.  The gypsies were roisterers and
thieves.  McCarthy was a common Irish drunk.  It was further proof
of the stupidity of her younger son, his unfitness, that he made
bosom companions of the scum of the earth, foreigners to boot.  She
succeeded in imposing on him a certain sense of guilt when he
slipped away, as he must, to meet them.  Otherwise he was unshaken.
He cleaved to his friends with quiet stubbornness.  They were of a
noble goodness, he knew, and the core of his integrity was
impregnable to his mother's malice.

Her outright forbiddal of the flute puzzled him.  She was not a
religious woman, save in a hard, perfunctory fashion.  It seemed
only that in the dark place in which she chose to live, she was
determined no color, no warmth, no rhythm, should ever enter.  It
was impossible to yield to her on this, either, for the release of
music was too great.  To spare her, he took care to play with
McCarthy out of her hearing, in winter in the barn, warmed by the
body heat of the stock, in summer under the hemlocks by the
wintergreen bog.  When the need came on him alone, he rambled over
the hills, piping as he went.  He kept the flute hidden in a linen
handkerchief on a shelf in the haymow.



IV


The Wilsons were plain people.  There was a large houseful of them,
good natured, hard working, earthy.  From much of the country stock
the sons went on to become lawyers, physicians, business men,
teachers, but the Wilson boys and men were unthinkable as anything
but farmers, and the girls would always marry men of the soil.
They were a solid, continuing breed.  Their red barns were
impressive, the house nondescript, but bright with white paint and
masses of old-fashioned flower beds.  The interior was divided into
many small rooms, inartistically and comfortably furnished,
cluttered with Wilsons and the paraphernalia of the men's boots and
mackinaws, the women's sewing and canning and preserving.  Their
table was famous even in a land of plenty, laden three times a day
with half a dozen meats, fruits, vegetables swimming in cream and
butter, pickles and jellies and preserves, endless pastries, heaped
together for handy self-helping like a mediaeval hunting feast.
For all the food they stowed away with such cheer and relish, the
Wilsons were runty.  Pa and Ma Wilson were a pair of wrinkled
hickory nuts, the boys were small and wiry, only the girls profited
by the family physique.  They were merry little things with dozens
of beaux, fresh and appealing until age and child bearing should
turn them gaunt and withered as locust shells.  Nellie at twenty
was the prettiest of the lot.  She was diminutive and dainty, with
plump little breasts, apple round, apple firm, an impudent short
nose, firm, pointed chin and dimpled mouth, eyes the blue of wild
chicory, and gold-chestnut hair that rippled to her shoulders in
round finger curls.  She was an incorrigible minx and a mischief.

Amelia Linden condescended to the Wilsons.  They were decent
enough, she admitted, if too much given to hilarity, undeniably
prosperous, but the men were not "gentlemen," the women were not
"ladies."  She called them "common," and so they were.  Nellie had
been Benjamin's girl since she was sixteen.  It had approached not
quite a scandal that they had not married.  Amelia had handled the
situation with a rare caution.  Her early sarcasm failing to keep
Benjamin away from the girl, she had looked uneasily to the future.
She would detest any woman who claimed him, yet she was terrified
lest by her disapproval she alienate him.  She encouraged him in
his prowlings elsewhere, slipping him money for trips to
Peytonville and Trent, yet when he returned, he would be smoothing
his hair with a wet brush like a pleased tom cat washing his fur,
and always off down the road two miles again to Nellie.  She had
decided shrewdly that if it was Nellie he must bring home as bride,
she was safer with such a little snippet than with a wife more
worthy of him.  His infatuation with the pretty face and tiny round
figure would pass, and she herself, offering no criticism save an
occasional significant lifted eyebrow, would be entrenched and
waiting, a constant contrast, so that he should inevitably turn
more and more to the superior woman, in appreciation and relief.

Ase found himself increasingly haunted by thoughts of Nellie.  He
had not seen her since his father's funeral two months ago.  He
drove his mother to Peytonville to church on Sundays, but the
Wilsons attended church in another direction.  There had been no
meeting of the Grange, and the Wilsons and Lindens, as families,
had never exchanged casual visits.  Tim McCarthy had reported that
the sweet Nellie had been moping, but the lads were crowding in
again, like yearlings trying the fence, he said, now the big bull
was gone to other pastures.

Ase had tried to put out of his mind Ben's words, "Better marry
Nellie in the spring."  He was uncertain how to take them.  Ben had
often teased him about his mute admiration of Nellie.  The words
might have been only another jest.  Again, they might have been
intended as a seal on the finality of his leaving.  Since Ben was
without subtlety, Ase came slowly over the weeks to the belief that
his brother had meant them literally, meant as well that the
miracle was possible.

The thought of Nellie Wilson began to creep in on him as
irresistibly as the sun reaching into dark crannies.  If he might
have Nellie for his wife, he would be cold no longer, no more
alone.  He dreamed of her by night and awakened with his heart
pounding.  He acknowledged now what he had ignored through loyalty
to Ben, that Nellie was his true love and always had been.  Because
of Nellie, hidden away, smothered, in his heart, he had turned back
from the hemlocks with the gypsy girl.

The time was February.  Something was supposed to happen then, what
was it?  He remembered.  Ben was to have taken Nellie to the
midwinter dance of the Grange.  He frowned at his stupidity.  He
should have asked weeks ago if he might replace his brother as her
escort.  She would have accepted another by now.  He could not
picture Nellie as waiting.  Not even waiting for Ben.  If she
refused his invitation face to face, laughed at him, he knew that
he would stumble away from her, damned and lost.  After his mother
had gone to bed he wrote laboriously by lamp light, and sent the
formal note by Tim McCarthy.

"Asahel Linden requests the pleasure of the company of Miss Nellie
Wilson at the Grange dance, if not too late in asking."

McCarthy brought the answer in her round childish writing.

"Miss Nellie Wilson thinks it's high time Mr. Asahel Linden was
asking."



V


Amelia said, "It is most disrespectful to your father to attend a
dance so soon after his death."

Ase finished tying his black tie before the kitchen mirror.  She
had always had some unreasonable reason against his occasional
excursions into the country festivities.  Having had no respect at
all for her husband, fiercely satisfied to be rid of him, and
having no interest in the opinions of others, her attempt now to
deter him on such grounds struck him as ridiculous.  In his new
understanding of her he decided that denying herself warmth and
communion and gaiety, she wished even more to deny it to him.  Any
excuse served her, and he thought it would be simpler if she made
none, since she could not or would not speak the truth about it.

She persisted, "You must cut a pretty figure at a dance, even
without the bad taste of dancing on your father's fresh grave.
You've outgrown that suit.  Look at your wrists and ankles,
sticking out from the cuffs and trousers."

He had looked at them in his bedroom.  The good black broadcloth
suit was three years old, and between eighteen and twenty-one he
had finished the last few inches of his gangling growth.  He
supposed he must look like a scarecrow.  Yet no one had laughed at
him, no one indeed had seemed even to notice.  He carried a dignity
past harming by the chance of ill-fitting clothes.  He had always
gone to the social gatherings, as he went to Mink Fisher and the
gypsies, under a slight cloud of depression imposed by his mother.
Now his deepset gray eyes were without embarrassment or guilt.  He
was as he was, he and his flute would be welcome.  His mother's
whip flicked over him without the old pain.

She said, "You must feel out of it when you go to these affairs.
You don't even have a girl."

He would prefer not to speak, for something would be resolved this
evening, but he said, "I'm taking Nellie tonight."

She studied him, drawing her heavy black eyebrows together.  He was
prepared for a storm of rage, or one of her familiar stalking
withdrawals to her room, as violent in their way as her words.  She
surprised him by nodding after a moment.

"Very good.  Very proper.  You are a better brother than I thought.
You must keep the others away from her until Benjamin returns."

He was not prepared for this.  The Seth Thomas clock on the lamp
shelf whirred and struck the hour.  He was due at the Wilson farm
this moment.  Nellie would be sputtering.  He had hitched Dan to
the light cutter before bathing and dressing.  He wrapped in
carpeting the brick heated red hot on the range.  He said "Good
night, Mother," and went to the carriage barn, placing the brick
under the straw for Nellie's feet.  He untethered Dan, and on the
road touched the whip to him lightly.  The young stallion's shod
hooves struck fire on the glazed snow.  He was only fifteen minutes
late but all the Wilsons save Nellie had gone on.  The front door
flew open.  He had a glimpse of her against the low-turned
lamplight, bundled in a red cape and red fur-trimmed bonnet, her
curls escaping, her party bag swinging from her mittened hand.  The
door slammed and she ran across the snow and was in the seat before
he could move to help her.  He drew the buffalo robe around her and
her small gaitered feet found the hot brick.

She said, "I almost went on with the folks.  Be just like you to
forget to come for me at all."

He wanted to say that he was as likely to forget to breathe, but
although he cleared his throat to speak, no words came.  He was
dizzy at having her close beside him, her shoulder against his arm.
He could not see her face in the dark night but he was conscious of
the round little shape of her, her warmth, a vitality so electric
that it seemed to him sparks would fly as from Dan's shoes if he
should touch her.  The sleigh bells jingled sweetly.  Nellie
chattered lightly, of neighbors, of other dances, her voice, he
thought, as silver as the bells.  There was no opening for graver
matters.  He was content in any case to absorb her nearness.

At the door of the lighted Grange, she said, "I suppose you brought
your flute.  Will you have to leave me much tonight to play?"

He read her tone as wistful and he felt light-headed.

"They expect me to play, but I won't have to.  I'd rather--"

"You'll have to play some.  I just wanted to know, how often.  I
promised Sam Turner the dances when you're busy."

He helped her out of the sleigh and to the door, then turned Dan
into the stables, to tie his halter to a hay-filled stall, to cover
him with a blanket.  He returned soberly to the hall.  He was on a
fool's errand tonight.  Or any other night.  He had allowed himself
to be tangled in a weblike dream of his own making.  He had
presumed on a meaningless remark of Ben's to build a cloud castle
where he did not belong and could never enter.

He saw Nellie at the far end of the long room, laughing with half a
dozen young people.  She had a gift for women as well as for men.
The girls of her age accepted her with little envy, were faithful
friends.  Older women respected her matter-of-factness, her common
sense in spite of her pranks, beyond all, her known domestic
talents.  Ase watched her, yearning.  She wore a flounced dress of
silk organza, the blue of her eyes, with a satin ribbon the same
color tied around her curls.  The pert bow at the top was a
butterfly on golden wheat.

Tim McCarthy joined him, brushed and combed and in his Sunday best.

He said, "You do be looking as forlorn as a rooster in the rain.
Pay no attention tonight to the Nellie's flirting.  I'll not call
on you yet for the flute.  Do you be dancing."

Ase made his way to Nellie.  She gave no greeting, but still
laughing, tucked her arm in his by way of acknowledgment and claim.

He said, "I'm not playing for the first dance, Nellie."

McCarthy went to the raised platform.  He had kept away from the
liquor, so that he might be at the disposal of the company.  He was
ready to play as long as they cared to dance.  The little man
seemed a full head taller.  He came into his own as head fiddler
and caller.  He tuned his violin with authority.  There were a
second fiddle, a guitar, a harmonica and an accordion.  Tim sensed
that the dancers were eager and yet shy.

He called out, "A good evening to all.  Now we'll be having a bit
of a warm-up."

He gestured to his orchestra, and set off on an Irish jig.  The
Mahoneys and the Shehys tittered, looked at one another, and the
two middle-aged couples took the floor for the jig.  The wild dance
shook the solid new boards.  Everyone clapped in tune, other feet
thumped and shuffled to the irresistible lilt.  The ice was broken.
When the Irish couples ended, red-faced and sweating, bowing to the
applause, all were ready for the square dance.  Old, half-forgotten
men and women took their places, standing straight as possible.
Children who knew the figures paired off without self-
consciousness, practised swinging and sashaying earnestly.  Ase
bowed before Nellie and led her out.  He was proud of her, his
heart was too big for his chest.  She was almost as pretty as he
thought her.  Aunt Jess the midwife swam onto the floor like a ship
in full sail, leading Grandpa Wilson, twice her age and half her
size.

McCarthy lifted his bow, called, "Face your pardners!", the music
of "Turkey in the Straw" burst out, and the square dance was on.
Tim was as fine a caller as a fiddler.  He had imagination, so that
he varied the figures between the simple and the intricate, the
restful and the exhausting.  The old folks thought they felt young
again but found themselves saving their strength, those of courting
age injected a subtle lure and passion into the formal figures, the
children danced frowning and with concentration.  Aunt Jess had
been at the hard cider and was dancing with abandon, a mistake for
a woman of her bulk.  Yet Grandpa Wilson was plainly having quite
as good a time.  The big woman and the little man were sashaying
with the best of them.  Nellie was a blue-and-gold feather, and Ase
came as close to grace as he would ever come, his long legs moving
like pistons, huge gnarled hands lifting Nellie clear from the
floor when he swung her.  The rhythm of the dance was joy, its
community was release.

The ancient ones swore they had never been less tired, the lovers
wandered away to corners, the children slid and swooped and jostled
one another.  The music was insistent, the dance almost too
intense, and it ended sharply.  All the dancers were relieved to
collapse on the chairs and benches around the walls of the hall.
McCarthy mopped his forehead.

"Come now, Asahel my friend," he called.  "Let us play only a
little quiet song while the dancers rest."

Ase went to him and picked up his flute.

"That gypsy love song," Tim whispered.  "While not truly restful,
'twill give the folks back their breath."

In the beginning there was a chatter of talk, the children
scrambling, and then the gypsy song took over, and spoke to each
man, each woman.  The tremulous violin made the young uneasy.  Was
love to prove so sad as this?  The flute cried to the elders.  One
wrinkled hand groped to find another.  Had love been after all so
sweet?  So sad, so sweet, the ancient song assured them.  The last
note faded away, to be a ghost again.  The hall was hushed.  In the
silence a child wailed loud and suddenly, being frightened by the
magic.  McCarthy laid down his fiddle and Ase his flute.

McCarthy whispered, "May be we've done too good a job of it.
'Twill take us a mort of thumpety music to liven them up again."

When he judged the dancers ready and rested, he gave the lead in
"Little Brown Jug" to the guitar and encouraged the squeaking
second fiddle and the harmonica.

"Do be twanging it up, boys," he called out, "fast and lively.
Some of the gentlemen need to be working off the hard cider."

The laughter overlay the brisk tune, small boys whooped, the dance
resumed.

There was a pause at midnight.  A light supper was served.  The
drinking men were sobered by the food.  The full, sleepy children
were deposited on benches, on quilts on the floor, the older women
volunteering to watch over them.  The younger women changed their
dresses, as was the custom, for the strenuous dancing had them
perspiring and disheveled.  The prettiest dresses were saved for
the last hours of the dance.  The atmosphere of courting was as
positive as lightning.  Girls arranged their flounces, tightened
their corset strings, pulled their bodices lower, slapped their
cheeks and bit their lips to redden them, used a trace of rice
powder surreptitiously, a drop of scent at their breasts.  The
dancing was less boisterous.  Waltzes and the Virginia reel
replaced the square dances.

McCarthy led off in "Good-Night, Ladies," and called out, "'Twas a
fine evening and I'm hoping you are appreciating my sacrifice,
staying sober.  Another time, I'll not be finding meself so noble."

The girls changed their slippers, bundled into warm cloaks and
bonnets and mittens, the mothers gathered the sleeping children,
the men went to the stables to hitch the sleighs.  The pre-dawn was
clear and cold.  The snowy road was a silver carpet-runner under
the stars.  Nellie snuggled under the buffalo robe close against
Ase.

She said, "You'd be warmer if you weren't all bones."

They drove in silence.  It was unlike her not to chatter.  This was
the moment, if he was to speak at all.  He had taken too much for
granted, he was certain.  Surely Nellie would be waiting, like his
mother, for Ben's return.  If not, if the field was open, how could
she consider having him?  And if the impossible were possible, what
of Amelia?  He had not been prepared to have her consider him a
watchdog for Nellie, a eunuch guarding the gate against the
prince's coming.

Nellie said, "Ase--."

He turned his head.  Her face was graver than he had ever seen it.

"Ase, Ben's not coming back."

She pushed back a curl from her forehead.

He said, "I didn't think you knew."

"He told me.  Ben played fair, in his way.  Did he tell you, too?"

"Yes."

The horse was pacing and the sleigh bells were noisy.  Ase drew on
the reins.  Dan snorted and slowed to a walk.

Ase said, "I thought you might be waiting for him."

She shook her head.  "I was a fool to wait as long as I did."

The way was clear for his question and he could not phrase it.  She
put her arm through his.

"Well, Ase?  Ben say anything about you and me?"

His heart thumped painfully.  Ben's words seemed unfeeling,
unsuitable.

"Did he?"

He nodded.

"Tell me."

"He said to marry you in the spring, Nellie."

"Now, Ase, you don't have to ask just because Ben said so."

Her eyes twinkled in the starlight.  He had had no words of his
own, he had used his brother's and he was trapped in them.  Surely
she must know how he had adored her, Ben's girl, from a distance.
The cords were tight in his throat.

"I want you--"

"Oh.  That's different."

He wanted to cry out, "I want you with my spirit and my loins, with
every bone and nerve of me, I want you for warmth in my house, in
my heart and my bed."

His love was suddenly stronger than his awkwardness.  He dropped
the slack reins and took her in his long arms.  His lips found the
warm hollow under her firm chin.  He felt her stir against him.
She took his face in her mittened hands and pressed her mouth to
his.  Her kiss was long and hungry.  She pushed him away, breathing
pantingly, like a cat.  His blood raced like the water over the
mill-dam, so that he thought it must spill from him as violently.

Nellie said primly, "I haven't said I'd have you."

His pulse slowed.  How could she have him?  He wanted to say, "I am
a poor stumbling thing after the glory of my brother, my feet bound
to the earth, my head lost in the clouds, but I have my love and my
faithfulness to offer."

He said, "I know.  How can you?"

She was grave again.  She laid her hand on his arm.

"You're a good man, Ase Linden.  That's how.  Ben and I--never
mind--that's over and done with.  Ben wasn't for any one woman.  I
always liked you next best.  I shouldn't have teased you.  I knew
how you felt about me."

The east was streaked with red and gold.  Light glinted on the
sleigh bells, on Nellie's curls.  Ase seemed to see her for the
first time, fair as the mythical woman all men dream of.  Her eyes
were honest, somehow anxious, somehow sad.

She said, "I'll make you a good wife, Ase."

The road turned into the Wilson farm.  Lamps were lit in house and
barn, for the men would do their chores before breakfast and then
have a few hours of sleeping.  Ase held her again, but tenderly,
with humility and gratitude.

"Nice to get it settled," she said.



VI


The sun rose behind Ase as he drove home.  The faint warmth touched
the nape of his neck, reminding him of the feeling there of
Nellie's mittens.  The snow-piled roofs of the red barns were rosy.
The large white Linden house was snow-capped, too, the drifts were
piled to the windows.  It would be not much longer aloof and bare,
unwelcoming.

He changed his clothes to do the morning chores.  He moved quietly,
not to disturb his mother.  Since Benjamin had gone, she slept
late, making no pretense at preparing breakfast.  He built a fire
in the kitchen range and put on the coffee pot and the double
boiler of oatmeal.  The handling of the milk and cream and butter
had devolved on him.

He went to the dusky cellar and lit a lamp there.  The Jersey cream
was nearly an inch thick in the wide shallow milk pans.  He skimmed
most of it into an earthen crock, saving out a pint pitcherful for
table use.  He poured the skimmed milk into a bucket for the hogs.
In the kitchen he rinsed the pans in the zinc sink fed by a rain-
water cistern pump.  He pushed the bubbling coffee pot to the back
of the range.  He took the pig slops in one hand and the clean milk
bucket in the other and went to the barn for the milking.  He fed
the stock and returned to the house, to strain the foaming milk
into yesterday's clean pans, and carried them carefully down to the
cellar shelves.  The hanging shelves were planned for family
quantities of canned fruits and pickles and jellies, but they were
almost empty.  A jar of preserved quinces would have been palatable
for a winter morning's breakfast.

The sun poured through the east window between range and sink.  He
laid a red and white checkered cloth on the kitchen table and set
two places.  He hoped Nellie would continue to have breakfast in
the kitchen in cold weather.  The warmth of the range, the
crackling of the burning wood, were pleasant.  Amelia was still
sleeping.  He ate a dish of oatmeal with crumbled maple sugar and
spoonfuls of the thick yellow cream while the bacon fried in an
iron skillet.  He set one plate of bacon in the warmer for his
mother.  To his own he added eggs poached in the fat.  He made
himself toast.  The butter dish in the pantry was empty and he went
down-cellar again for a fresh crock.  Something was the matter with
his coffee.  Even the golden cream failed to turn it to a pleasing
color, it was gray and unsavory.

He washed his dishes and the morning's milk pans and bucket,
scalding them with boiling water from the kettle, and set the milk
things on a shelf in the woodshed.  He brushed his crumbs from the
table and left the wire toast grill handy for his mother, with eggs
ready for soft-boiling in a small saucepan.  The barn needed
cleaning, the sheep were nearly out of fodder, but these chores
could be done later.  He went upstairs to his icy bedroom,
undressed to his underwear, and got into his cold bed.  His head
was thick but he could not sleep after all.  There was too much joy
to be savored, and with it, too many plans to be made, the problem
of Amelia to be mulled over.  He had hoped she would join him for
breakfast, so that in leisure over their coffee he might give her
his news and try to answer whatever might be her inevitable
objections.  She had disparaged Nellie to him and to his father,
well out of Ben's hearing, but she had accepted her for Ben's sake.
If Nellie would do for Ben, she would be not only suitable for him,
but likely to be considered too good for him, as was his own
opinion.  Yet Amelia had approved his taking Nellie to the dance as
a means of keeping her safe for his brother.  He decided there was
nothing for it but to convince his mother that Ben would not be
claiming Nellie, ever, because he would not be coming home at all.
He drowsed, imagining Nellie close beside him, and went sound
asleep at last.

When he awakened it was two o'clock in the afternoon.  He pulled on
his clothing and went downstairs.  He found a note on the kitchen
table from Amelia.  It was her sewing circle day and one of the
members had stopped in, driving by, fortunately, as her son had
failed to appear to hitch the horse and sleigh for her.  He
wondered at her faithfulness to the circle, which sewed for foreign
missions, for she was neither sociable nor friendly with neighbors
or fellow church-goers, nor a good seamstress, nor interested in
the heathen poor.  Actually, she had joined a group composed of the
simplest of farm women, for to them she was both queen and oracle.
She returned from the luncheon meetings richly fed of belly and of
ego.

Ase made himself a light meal and ate absently.  He washed up and
swept the kitchen floor.  He brought the accumulated cream from the
cellar and turned it into the wooden butter-churn.  The faint
sourness had a clean, fresh smell.  He set the churn a few feet
from the range to warm a little.  The clock struck three.  He was
restless.  The barn work was not too pressing.  There would be time
to walk the two miles east to see Nellie before the evening chores.
He wanted to set a wedding date, he wanted to prepare her for his
mother.  He hesitated.  Half at least of the large Wilson family
would be sitting about the house on a cold winter afternoon.  There
would be jesting and no privacy at all.

He heard footsteps on the gravel path, lighter than his mother's,
and then Nellie's voice, calling to her dog.  It seemed for a
moment that he heard these sounds only in his daydream.  If not,
perhaps she was not coming here, but was passing on her way to some
other place and person.

She called, "Ase!  Wake up!" and beat with her little fists on the
paneled door.

Shep was barking with excitement, as though his mistress were
calling to a man in danger in a house on fire.  Ase was too slow to
open the door to her.  She was in the room, the dog delighted
behind her.  She wore her red hooded cape and had a basket on her
arm.  It occurred to him that she was Little Red Riding Hood, with
the wolf transposed, because of her, into this amiable sheep-dog.

He said, "Nellie.  I've been thinking about you."

She took off her cape and shook imaginary dust or snow from it and
laid it over a chair in a curiously domestic manner, as though the
chair, the room, the house, were already hers.

"You always just sit and think."

She lifted the lid from her basket and handed him a plate covered
with a napkin.

"I saw your mother go by with Mrs. Barnes, so I made you a pie."

He was deeply touched.  He took the plate, staring at it.

"Well, open it up, Ase.  Maybe you don't like pumpkin."

He removed the napkin.  The plate held only a mound of flour.

"Oh, Ase, look what I've done.  Brought you the wrong plate.  Now I
remember, I just sat and thought about making you a pie and then
forgot all about doing it.  Well.  But I guess your mother has all
kinds of good pies and you wouldn't want mine, anyway."

This was surely malice, for Amelia Linden was famous for her
distaste for cooking, for the execrable products that resulted when
she did finally turn to stove and oven.  Nellie laughed.  She
swooped into her basket and brought out the true pie, golden-brown
and redolent.

"You should see your face, Ase.  Oh my--."

Her laughter was that of a child, high-keyed and delirious.

He smiled sheepishly.  He should have known this was another of her
jokes.  Yet he wanted to turn her over his knee and spank her.  She
had raised his spirits so high, then dropped them down again.  But
after all, she had indeed brought him a pie.  He could not tell
which was honest, the jest or the gift.  Since she was Nellie,
perhaps both.

He said, "I'll eat it for supper."

She looked critically around the room.  She had not been in the
house since the home funeral service for Ase's father.  A small
couch stood near the bay window.  She sat down and patted the seat
beside her, for him to join her.  He put his arms around her.  She
gave him a quick cool kiss and pushed him away.

"Never mind that now.  I saw a chance to be alone with you to make
our plans."

He said, "I'd have come to you, but your family--"

She laughed.

"I know.  Well, don't you think the sooner the better?"

He was stirred that she was as anxious as he.

"Oh, Nellie, I do."

"I can be ready in a couple of weeks.  I'd like to be married at
home and then come straight here.  All right with you?"

He reached for her in answer but she stood up impatiently and
walked around the room, studying it.  She frowned.

"I've got to do something with this awful house.  I'd like to get
it fixed up and feel settled by April.  I want to spend most of my
time outdoors at planting time.  I want a big garden.  That little
thing you've had is a disgrace, not enough stuff for the table, let
alone canning for winter.  I want to start flowerbeds and get
things growing at the front of the house, anyway.  It looks like a
barn without any plants or shrubbery."

She sat beside him again and chuckled.

"Think I'm going to have to fight your mother to do things my way?"

He took her small capable hands in his big ones.

He said gravely, "She won't mind anything about the house or
garden.  But Nellie--."

She looked at him sharply.

"What's the matter?  You don't think she'll make a fuss about our
marrying, do you?"

He nodded in misery.

"Because of Ben, I suppose."  She was thoughtful.  "Why?  Ben
walked out on me."

"She won't believe he isn't coming back."

"Oh.  I'm supposed to turn into an old woman waiting for him, just
in case her precious takes the notion to show up and claim his
property.  Well, he won't, and I won't.  She can go to the devil."

She was adorable, he thought, in her flushed anger.  It was part of
her vitality, a warm, sputtering, healthy explosion unlike the cold
venom of his mother's rages.  He stroked her hands.

He longed to tell her of his mother, to enlist her understanding
and her pity, yet would not betray one woman to the other.  He
thought again with pain of the hurt they must inflict on her, if
she were to accept their union.

He said, "You'd better tell her what Ben told you about his going."

"I'll tell her, all right.  He said one reason he was clearing out
was to get away from her.  Said she drove him crazy."

"Nellie, no."

"It wouldn't kill her.  The old dame's tough as hickory."

"Please, Nellie."

She laughed suddenly and patted his arm.

"Don't worry.  I'll behave.  She won't raise half the hell as if it
had been Ben.  I'm getting a good farm and a good husband and I'm
going to make a good job of it."

Her matter-of-factness made love-making impossible.  She relaxed
against him with the bland ease of a kitten that has had its supper
and is ready for a warm lap, but chooses not to be caressed.  She
allowed him to hold her, but slapped away his hand when his fingers
strayed to the fascination of her curls.  She had enough of
snuggling shortly, and left the couch to prowl through the dining-
room to the kitchen.  He followed at her heels, and Shep the dog
followed, both of them watching her in anxious adoration.  She gave
her verdict on the kitchen.  A good scrubbing, fresh varnish,
ruffled red and white gingham curtains at the window, some bright
braided rag rugs on the bare floor, would make it passable.  She
touched the churn.

"Your mother's let the cream get too warm.  Her butter'll be soft."

"I did it."

She looked at him, moved the churn in front of a chair and began
plunging the wooden dasher up and down.  The butter came, too
quickly, she said, and soft, as she had predicted.  She asked for
cold well water from the outside pump, worked the butter in a bowl,
asked for a mould, but there was none.  She packed the butter in a
crock and sent him down-cellar with it.  She washed and scalded the
churn, speaking with disapproval of the kitchen furnishings.  She
poured glasses of the fresh butter-flecked buttermilk and lifted
her eyebrows when no doughnuts or cookies were to be found to serve
with it.

"No wonder you're all bones.  You don't get enough to eat."

He was enchanted with her bustling domesticity, her air of kitchen
command.  She belonged here already.  She glanced at the clock.

"I ought to be going, but I want to have it out with your mother
and get it over with."

Amelia came near sunset.  She walked through the front rooms,
removing bonnet and gloves, and stopped short in the kitchen
doorway.  Ase rose to greet her.

Nellie said, "Good evening, Mother Linden."

Amelia stared.

"What are you doing here?"

"Visiting."

"So I see.  Since when does a young woman call on a young man?"

"When they're engaged."

Amelia said, "Asahel, suppose you give me a reasonable explanation
of all this.  I'm not in a mood for this girl's flippancy."

His throat was dry.  He swallowed.  He looked imploringly at his
mother and then at Nellie.  The most gracious and soothing of
words, even if he could find them, would not be adequate.

Nellie said, "Speak up, Ase."

He said, "Nellie and I are going to be married, Mother."

He saw the storm move in on her.  She would kill him with a shaft
of lightning if she could.  He braced himself against her eyes, her
voice.

"You traitor.  You miserable skulking oaf.  You trip over your own
feet and then plot to fill your brother's shoes.  Behind his back,
you wait until his back is turned, you sneak in and steal what's
his, like a weasel."

Nellie said mildly, "I'm hardly a chicken on a roost, Mother
Linden."

Amelia turned.  Ase wished Nellie had not spoken.  He had long
borne the fury, could bear it now, he had hoped to spare her.

"Perhaps this treachery was your idea, Miss?"

"Actually, it was Ben's."

"What are you talking about?  He'll expect you to be waiting for
him when he comes home.  Don't think I want you for him, you aren't
fit to wash his feet, but he chose you, I was ready to accept you
because it's what he wanted."

Nellie's eyes were blue fire.  She walked close to the dark woman.
A small fierce hawk faced a coiled snake in deadly battle.  "Now
listen to me.  I'm going to marry Ase and you're going to accept
that, too.  Ben's gone for good.  He told me so.  He told Ase so.
The last thing he said to each of us was for us to marry.  Ben
didn't want me for keeps.  Ase does.  I'm Ben's nice little present
to Ase.  It just happens it suits me.  It suits me fine.  Ben won't
be back.  Do you understand?"

Amelia gripped the back of a chair.  Her knuckles were white.  Her
hands went limp and she sat down slowly.  "No," she said.

Nellie reached for her red cape and threw it around her shoulders.
She snatched her empty basket.  The dog Shep came from behind the
range where he had slunk uneasily.

She said to Amelia, "I don't intend to quarrel with you, either.
We're going to live pleasantly.  I'm going to have things
comfortable and nice."

Amelia said hoarsely, "You can't come here."

"Oh yes, I can."

"You can't live in my house.  If you do this thing, this betrayal
of my Benjamin, you can't live in my house.  You'll have to go to
the cabin."

"I will not."

Nellie set down the basket and spoke more patiently.

"Look here, Mother Linden, I know you're upset, but you've got to
face facts.  Now you hate to keep house and I like it.  You like
good food and you don't lift a finger to cook.  I'm going to set
the best table in the township.  It makes sense for me to take over
and run things."

Amelia dabbed with her handkerchief at dry lips.

"I'll move to the cabin myself."

"All right, move there.  A good idea.  You can eat with us and not
have any responsibility at all.  You'll find you'll like it."

She laid her hand on Shep's head.

"Come on, boy.  Be dark before we get home."

Ase said, "Wait, Nellie, I'll hitch up."

"No, thanks.  I'll walk off the rest of my mad."

She stood on tiptoe and kissed him lightly on the cheek.  She
touched Amelia's cold hand.

"It won't be so bad, Mother Linden, once you get used to it."

"When is this happy event to take place?"

"I told Ase, the sooner the better.  Two weeks.  Good night."

She was out of the house in a swirl of cape and curls.  He heard
her swift feet over the crunched snow and the joyful bark of her
dog.  He wanted to hurry after her.  He started for the door.

Amelia said, "Asahel!"

Her voice was hysterical.

"She said the sooner the better.  Don't you see?  She's carrying
Benjamin's child."

He felt a sick numbing.  He was mired in a nightmare and could not
move nor escape.  She twisted her hands together.  Her words came
in a rush.

"She tried to trap him.  He doesn't know, of course.  He wouldn't
have gone if he'd known.  She disgusted him and he went away.  She
found she'd sprung the trap, but then he was gone.  So now she's
trapped you."

He shook his head like a tortured bear.

He recognized in anguish that it was possible.

"It isn't true, Mother.  But if it was--I'd want her."

More than ever, he thought, more than ever, to protect her, to
protect his brother, even, the child.

"You'd take his leftovers?  You'd take up where he left off?"

"Yes, Mother."

The clock ticked in the silence.  The range had not been lit, nor
the sitting-room stove, and the house was chill.  He waited.

Amelia said in a low voice, "If I ever needed proof you were born a
fool, this is it.  Very well.  I wash my hands of it.  You may make
your accounting to Benjamin.  He would prefer to give his own name
to his child, even by that hussy.  You'll have a pretty time
explaining your presumption when he returns."

She gathered her wraps and went to her room.

He sat thinking.  The picture was clear and without offense.
Nellie and Benjamin, volatile alike of nature, had struck a
spontaneous fire, and Ben had certainly possessed her.  She was not
with child, Ase knew.  She was honest enough to have told him.  He
knew, too, with horror, that his mother had committed herself,
almost insanely, to the conviction of her eldest's return, and
would twist facts ruthlessly to fit that conviction.  He wished he
might have had Nellie to wife free of the dark sucking bog through
which his slow feet must move, across which his wordless thoughts
must find their way.

He was late getting to his chores.  He milked and fed the stock by
lantern light.  He strained the milk in the kitchen and put it
away.  He washed his hands and face, and then his hands again, as
though something more unclean than the good animal smell might be
washed away.  He was not hungry, but he looked about for materials
for a supper.  In his absence at the barn, Amelia had been in the
kitchen.  She had made herself a pot of tea and had eaten a large
wedge of Nellie's pumpkin pie.



VII


The Linden house on their wedding day was as ready for Nellie as
Ase could make it.  It was at least immaculately clean.  He had
engaged a girl, Hulda Svenson, of a new-come Swedish family, for
the past two weeks.  She had given the first week to cleaning and
preparing the log cabin.  Amelia, trapped in her own angry
decision, had moved there, taking the best pieces of furniture from
the house.  She had settled down in self-imposed martyrdom, slyly
pleased with what she considered her new weapon.  Her treacherous
younger son and his scheming bride had put her out of her own home.
Benjamin would be outraged by their treatment of her when he
returned.

Ase brushed his black felt hat and looked about.  The wood-boxes
were freshly filled.  Hulda had cooked and baked generously, had
laid the dining-room table with a white linen cloth and the best
china and silver, for two.  She had brought a table bouquet of fern
and geraniums from her mother's house plants.  The windows shone,
the cleanliness emphasized the bleakness.  The sitting-room was
bare without the cherry secretary and the walnut center table.  He
dared not leave strong fires, but the dampered stove and range
would hold considerable heat for an hour or two.  He put on the
broadcloth greatcoat that had once been Ben's and was too short of
sleeve for him.  The March day was raw and he would be more
comfortable in the old buffalo coat, but its shabbiness seemed
unsuitable.  He walked to the cabin and knocked on the door.
Amelia opened it a crack.

She said, "You're wasting your time.  I haven't changed my mind.
I'm not going.  I want everyone to know exactly where I stand.  Go
on."

She closed the door.  He turned away.  He drove in the light buggy
against a blustering wind toward his marriage.  There were no more
than half a dozen carriages hitched at the Wilson place.  The
guests were Nellie's relatives and closest friends.  Tim McCarthy
waited for him at the door.  His presence was comforting.  Ase was
unable to shake off the feeling that he was an outsider.  The
Wilsons wore an unwonted solemnity.  Nellie was their treasure and
the wrong bridegroom had come for her.  He had an instant of panic
when it seemed that he was indeed taking what did not belong to
him.  Ben should be here in his place.  He should have been the one
to go and Ben to stay.

He saw Nellie with her father by the fireplace banked with house
plants.  He had expected to see her in bridal gown and veil.  She
wore a dove-gray silk suit, the only bridal touch her flowered
toque with a wisp of veiling.  She was matronly and collected.  The
costume, he supposed, was tactful.  The preacher motioned.  The
ritual drew him into its formal pattern.

"Do you, Asahel, take this woman--"

His blood hummed in his ears.  Her hand was warm in his.

"I do."

With all his heart, oh, with all his heart.  McCarthy handed him
the ring.

"With this ring I thee wed."

It was a gift from Tim.  It had been his mother's and generations
before her had shone on the hand of an Irish chieftain's bride.  It
was wide, of hand-beaten reddish gold, massive with some mystic,
forgotten design.  Nellie eyed it with delight.  She gave him a
quick look of surprise and pleasure.  She lifted her face for the
nuptial kiss.  In the rear of the room Tim broke into a soft tune
on his fiddle.  The Wilsons crowded around.

The noon wedding breakfast was hearty.  There was hard cider for
the men and elderberry-blossom wine for the ladies.  The house was
like a bee hive with chatter, metallic with the clatter of silver
and dishes.  Nellie moved here and there, exhibiting her ring,
accepting the guarded congratulations.  The marriage had astonished
them all.  Ase ate and drank patiently, shook hands, watching for a
sign from Nellie to be away from the confusion.  She left the room
to give instructions to her brothers for her vast pile of
belongings.  They would bring these to her the following morning by
wagon.  There were chests of china and linens, trunks of clothing,
trays of ferns and flowering winter plants, boxes of preserves and
jellies and vegetables and fruits of her own canning.  The family
had given her a cherry highboy and table to replace those Amelia
had taken to the cabin.  Her dog Shep was to be brought, and her
mother cat with the last litter of kittens.  Shep leaped against
her, aware of impending change.  She beckoned to Ase.

"This crazy dog will just follow me anyway, Ase.  We might as well
take him with us."

He nodded.

She said, "Come on, let's get away."

They ran from the shower of rice and old shoes.  McCarthy stood
with the buggy at the door, holding the stallion's head.  Ase
handed Nellie in and turned to shake hands with his friend.

"You can come to the house now, Tim."

"Praise be.  The barn's no place for fiddling.  I'll wait a decent
time of days before rapping on your door."

He leaned close and drew Ase down to whisper in his ear.

"I'd not be telling the Nellie about the ring.  'Twould spoil it
for her to know it came from the McCarthys."

He winked and waved them off.  Dan reared and set out at a fast
trot for his home stable, threatening to bolt for it.  Ase needed
both hands to control him.  The March slush flew from the wheels.
Bare tree limbs lashed against a gray sky.  Nellie was silent.  He
lifted her down at the Linden door.  He was obliged to let her
enter the house alone, for Dan was plunging.  When he came through
the woodshed into the kitchen, carrying her valise, she was putting
wood in the range.  Shep had found a proper dog's corner behind the
wood box.  He beat his feathered tail on the floor in contented
acceptance.  Wherever Nellie was, Ase thought, was home for both of
them.  He took the wood from her, filled the range and opened the
damper.  He put his arms around her and laid his cheek against
hers.  The moment was too profound for passion.  She patted his arm
and drew away.

"Let me change my clothes, Ase.  I've already got some smut on this
silk."

He and Hulda had prepared Amelia's front downstairs bedroom but
Nellie would have none of it.

"I can play her game, too.  We keep her room just as it is, all
ready for her, for everybody to see.  She'll draw in her claws
after a while."

She chose the large bedroom above it that had been Ase's father's.
It had a matching open fireplace and was well furnished with hand-
made black walnut and cherry pieces, including a large four-poster
bed with a hard horsehair mattress.  Her own feather bed would
supplement.  She would need another dresser for her own belongings.
She sent him downstairs.  He built up the fire in the sitting-room
stove.  Nellie appeared shortly, pert and pretty in fresh blue and
white ruffled gingham.  Her hair was still pinned on top of her
head in the matronly fashion that had so dismayed him.  He felt for
the pins with clumsy fingers and the loosened curls fell around her
face to her shoulders.  She laughed.

"I was trying my best to be Mrs. Linden and you've spoiled it."

He wanted to explain that she was little Nellie Wilson still to
him, and ever would be.  He could only stand and drink in the sight
of her.  The clock struck five of the afternoon.

She said, "You'll have to change your clothes to do the chores."

He was unwilling to sit at their bridal supper in common shirt and
jeans.  He kept a pair of overalls at the barn and he would be
careful.  It was dangerous to leave her for a moment, he might well
only have dreamed her presence, might return to find her gone.

He said, "Wait for me."

He took the milk bucket and went to the barn.

Nellie had the milk pans ready for his return.  She had set a few
of Hulda's foods on the dining-room table.  She was frowning.

"Who set the table, Ase?  It's laid for two.  What do we do about
your mother?  Take a tray to her?"

"Hulda took her everything this morning."

"Good for Hulda.  Ready in a minute then."

She held her finger to the light, the red-gold of her ring showing
burnished.

She said, "Never thought you'd have anything so handsome for me.
Where'd you find it?"

He spoke the truth proudly.

"It was a gift from Tim McCarthy.  It belonged to his mother."

"Oh."

As he watched, the gold seemed to turn to brass.

Nellie said, "A pity.  I thought maybe it was valuable."

She took warmed foods from the oven.  The hanging lamp shed soft
light and shadow over the white napery.  He kissed her gravely
before they sat down.  He said a silent grace of thanks for her,
presiding over their table.  The wind blew in gusts down the
chimney, a pleasant intruder, like the dog, who waited politely
from the kitchen threshold for his own plate.  Ase helped Nellie
with the supper dishes and put them away in the cupboard.  She
would need a day or so, she said, to find where things belonged,
not that she was likely to keep them as they were.  She went
upstairs ahead of him.  He turned Shep out of doors for a few
minutes, brought a piece of old carpet from the woodshed for a bed
for him by the range, filled the wood box, wound the clock, and
went with a lighted candle to the bedroom.  Nellie had put a match
to the fire laid on the hearth.  It was blazing and when he had
undressed he blew out the candle.

She drew back the bed covers for him.  There were lace and blue
ribbons at the throat of her night-dress.  Her eyes were bright in
the firelight.  Her breathing was fast.  He was trembling but there
was no uncertainty in his strong arms and limbs.  She met him
avidly.  The miracle mounted on pulsing wings, soared over
spaceless peaks and throbbed away into the distance with silver
feathers fluttering.  A hard beating recalled him, like a drum.  It
was his heart.  She was limp, her heart pounding, too, and he held
her tight, never to let her go, Nellie, his love, his own.

She said, "Well!"

The word had an odd note, as though she were agreeably surprised.
He stroked her soft hair.  Her skin was silky as her wedding suit.
Her throat under his lips was like the down of milkweed.  His power
surged again, he drew the night-dress from her shoulder and kissed
its roundness.  She did not respond.  The firelight flickered high
and he saw that her eyes were closed.  She was sound asleep.  For
an instant he felt abandoned in a lonely valley.  But she was such
a little thing--.  She looked more child than woman, her cheeks
flushed, her curls tousled on the pillow.  She was tired, he
thought, as a child is tired.  He held her carefully, his arm
cramping under her.

She roused toward midnight and came to him again.  The great wings
bore him higher than before.  Her response was that of some
famished creature finding food.  When he released her, she was
panting.

He said, "Oh Nellie--."

Her breathing slowed.  He reached for her, to draw her close.  She
moved his hand from her breast.

"I can't sleep that way."

She turned on her side, away from him.  She reached behind her and
touched his hand in reassurance.

"'Night, now."

He lay stiffly.  She was not asleep.  She gave a little sigh that
was neither of repletion nor of drowsiness.  It struck ice to him,
as though a window had blown wide in a bitter gale.  He had fed her
hunger.  He would always be able to feed it.  He knew with a sense
of desolation that the bread he offered, though it nourish her, was
without salt or leavening.



VIII


The early morning mist filled the valley.  The willow trees along
the stream lifted through it like cloaked and long-armed travelers
rising from a night of sleep beside the water.  The mist was milky,
holding a subtle nourishment for the young leaves of maples and the
pale timid buds of wild apples.  Oak and beech and elm still
brooded, leafless.  The earth in late April was expectant.  The
winter wheat pushed up green spears anxiously, long confined by
snow.  A lone phoebe spoke from the woods, not quite singing.

The team of horses snorted the damp air from their nostrils.  Ase's
feet behind the plow sank deep into the moist loam.  He was
reverent before the first spring plowing.  It was better than
anything except the harvesting.  The growing period was too
disturbing, with its threats of undue rains or untimely drought, of
unseasonable frost, sometimes of summer hail.  No, it was the
sowing time was best.  Who knew then, scattering the seed, what
fabulous crops, what strange magnificent ear or head of grain,
might not follow?  He felt so, too, about his unborn children.

The sun brushed the last of the mist from the willows.  The thin
pendulous arms showed a pale green covering.  A flight of red-
winged blackbirds circled over the marsh, late this year, Ase
thought, in their homecoming.  Turning at the end of a furrow, he
looked up at the house.  He saw Nellie come into the side yard and
begin hanging out the washing.  At this distance, she was a little
girl pinning up doll clothes.  He saw Shep race around the corner
and make off with a blue shirt from the basket, the wet arms
trailing.  He reined in the horses to watch Nellie give chase,
around and around, her curls flying, until Shep allowed her to
catch him.  Then she was bending over him, and when she released
him, the dog was wearing the blue shirt, his front legs through the
sleeves, the collar buttoned around his shaggy neck.  He heard
Shep's barking and Nellie's impish laugh.

He clucked reluctantly to the team.  His grave young face was as
softened with its smile as the square house with the morning
brightness.  The shirt would need to be washed over again anyway,
and Nellie must have her fun.  She was a constant and incredible
delight.  She had plunged into her home-making with gayety and
zest.  She was a lamp in a dark house, a fire on a cold hearth,
food on a bare table, and she had brought him in from the outerness
to light, to warm, to nourish him.  Ase was a little eased of his
fears for her content.  Yet his knowledge of their shared loss kept
his brother always in his mind.  He plowed abstractedly all the
morning until he heard the ringing of the great bell calling him to
dinner.  The massive iron bell was hung above the loft of the
carriage barn beside the house, and he smiled again, thinking how
Nellie made a game, too, of ringing it, falling clownishly flat as
she pulled each time on the heavy rope.

The noon meal was on the table when he had finished his slow
stabling, watering and feeding of the team and had washed up at the
outside pump.  Nellie was pouring coffee.  He took the pot from her
and set it back on the wood range.  He tousled her curls with his
big hands.  He kissed the back of her plump moist neck.  She was
not for the moment amorous and she squirmed away.  She pushed the
two big cups of coffee into his hands and he took them to the
dining-room.  She followed with hot biscuits.  She would indeed
seem a little girl playing house, except for her efficiency and
talent.  She moved with the quickness of a wren and had the house
immaculate within an hour each morning, except on the strenuous
weekly cleaning day.  Even his abstraction about food recognized
her genius as a cook.  The winter supplies were going fast, but she
worked miracles with ham and bacon and poultry, with puddings and
pies and tarts from her wild berry jams.  The windows had come to
life with her curtains, with ferns and potted geraniums and
fuchsias.  She pointed to the table bouquet of wilting spring
violets.

"Bring me back something fresh this evening.  Trillium's nice, the
red ones."

He had smelled arbutus under the leaf-mold in the hemlock wood by
the bog, but by the time he had finished the slow chewing of his
mouthful of food, to tell her, she was chatting about her garden
plans.

She said, "Listen!"

It was seconds before he heard the wheels on the road, the "Whoa!"
and a wagon stopping.  Nellie looked the table over quickly,
estimating the amount of food, and was at the back door at the
moment of the unmistakable peddler's rap.  It was to be hoped it
was the familiar tinker, for the Linden house pots and pans were
too meager for her needs, but it was a stranger.  He was a little
man with red cheeks and nut-brown eyes.  Shep greeted him amiably,
recognizing the good earth smell of clothes and body.  The peddler
cradled a bundle of twigs in his arms.

Ase, behind Nellie, said, "Good day, sir."

The little man bobbed his head politely.  Nellie poked his bundle.
He lifted one finger, warning of a mystery and a revelation.

"Guess!  You'll never!"

She said, "Fiddle.  It's kindling.  I want pie pans."

"They just look like kindling, child.  Oh, but the life's in them.
They're full of sap."

He nodded and pulled the sacking aside, as though he showed the
face of an infant.

"Apple trees!  And peach in the wagon, and pear and plum and
cherry.  Imagine!"

His zest was contagious.  He was as full of sap as he claimed for
his twigs.  Ase felt an excitement.  He had been inquiring where he
might buy fruit trees, and now they arrived at his door, an orchard
come to him of its own accord.  The clock struck half after noon.
Nellie bustled to china cupboard and kitchen, laid a place for the
visitor, brought coffee and poured buttermilk and water.

"Sit down and have your dinner, and talk your business with Mr.
Linden.  I've an errand," and she busied herself with a wicker
basket and was gone.

The peddler heaped his plate and sighed.  He bowed his head an
instant, more in gratitude to Nellie than to God.  Few tables this
time of year were so bountiful.

"You are kind to a traveler, Mr. Linden."

Ase cleared his throat.

"The name is--?"

"McCarthy, sir.  McCarthy."

He held a chicken leg sidewise, like a fiddle-bow, and Ase knew now
what the man would say as he was saying it.

"I have a brother in these parts somewhere.  What delicious
chicken, juicy inside as my saplings.  Heard in Ohio he was around
here."

He lifted the drumstick.  "And who do you think told me?  If I'm
not mistaken, your brother, Ben Linden.  Unless there's other
Lindens, 'twas your brother.  But no mention of the little lady--
your sister, your wife?  This gentleman said his brother might be
interested in fruit trees.  Excuse me," and he reached for a wing,
"and my own brother Tim resided in this township."

He dispatched the wing and buttered a biscuit.

"If Tim can be said to reside."

Ase said, "Tim McCarthy works at the farm east of my wife's people,
the Wilsons.  He comes here often, when his chores are done."

"Well, now.  I thirst for the sight of him.  So my brother's here
and yours is out there.  Ohio.  Where I raise my beautiful fruit
trees.  They call me 'Apple McCarthy'."

The strawberry preserves drew one hand, the biscuits the other.

"Your brother Ben, now, he was planning to leave Ohio soon.  My,
these are wild strawberries, ain't they.  Nothing like the wild
small fruits for flavor.  But my trees are cultivated, grafted, no
runts amongst 'em.  Biggest apples you ever see, and the peaches,
my."

Ase struggled to ask the impossible question.

"Ben--.  My brother."

"Oh yes, Ben Linden.  Didn't do as good as he expected, he said.
Had him something lined up farther out.  Heading on west, he said.
Years too late for the California gold, he said, but silver was
promising.  Fine young man.  Make his pile some day, sure.
Couldn't decide should he take his Ohio girl with him.  Don't do
that, I said, they get prettier farther on you go.  How he laughed
at that.  Right you are, he said.  Would that be gooseberry jam?
Thank you.  Now, the fruit trees.  How many can you use?  Don't let
me hurry you."

Not as well in Ohio as he expected--.

What had Ben expected?  The Ohio farm lands were said to be so rich
that by the time a man finished dropping the seed corn, the first
kernel had sprouted.  But Ben would never look to land to make his
fortune, unless to buy and sell it.  That too would seem dull to
him.  He was forced on, to the west, toward gold and silver, toward
some fabulous cave of diamonds.  Ase wondered if the Pacific Ocean
would halt his brother.  Perhaps when he reached that far watery
line, he would turn and retrace his steps.  But years from now.
Years from now.  Ben would make the continent last him a long time.

McCarthy said, "I especially recommend my Albemarle pippins."

Ase said, "I've been wanting a sizeable apple orchard across the
road.  I want mixed fruit trees for the house.  But isn't fall a
better time for setting?"

Speech was not so difficult when he talked of things he knew, of
crops and trees and stock.

"I see you know your business, young man.  Fall's much better.  But
if we get plenty of rain, you'll have a year's start.  And a young
fellow with as strong a back as yours wouldn't kill himself if he
had to water a few acres of saplings.  Come on out to the wagon."

Ase realized that he had forgotten his mother's dinner and that
Nellie had taken it to her at the cabin.

He said, "I'd like my mother and my wife to have a say.  I'll get
them."

He turned back.

"When you give my mother news of Ben--."

The little man nodded.

"Oh, you can trust me.  I carry messages for families clear across
the country.  Every mother's son is half Midas and half saint."

He winked.

"Helps business to bring good news.  But you now, you're a man that
draws the truth."

Because Amelia was not ready to let him go, for fear that he would
carry away with him some undelivered word of Benjamin, or from him,
Mr. McCarthy was persuaded to stay the night.  The evening was the
first pleasant one with his mother since Ben had gone.  Nellie had
been bland in the face of her animus, but the air was constantly
tense.  Amelia drew from the peddler long and loving messages
direct from her son, along with Ohio incidents in which he played a
splendid part.  She swallowed them whole in her hunger.  Amelia
turned once sharply, to catch the girl unaware at the talk of
Benjamin.  Nellie's pretty face seemed as unconcerned as that of a
puss meeting last year's Tom.  When the supper table was cleared,
Nellie covered it with a red baize cloth and washed the dishes
while the men began their figuring.

Amelia said, "Mr. McCarthy, this farm is mine, but I consider that
my elder son holds a third interest.  With my third, I must express
my choices as representing two people, where I do not agree with my
younger son."

McCarthy asked politely, "Would the land where the orchard's to go
be representing any special third?"

"No, the farm has not been actually divided."

"Then would you be taking the word of a man wise in orchards, if
nothing else in the world?  This assortment I have written down
here will give the finest fruit for family uses and a large market
crop besides, to put money in the bank for all of you."

Amelia nodded.  The list was Ase's own.  Nellie smiled, putting
away the extra raspberry tarts in the cupboard.  She lifted a
finger and McCarthy half-lifted one in return.  The little lady
would have her snow-apple tree, and the old termagant none the
wiser.  The list would include Grimes Goldens, Greenings, pippins,
russets, Maiden Blush and Northern spies.  A crab apple tree would
go either side of the smokehouse, and along one line of the
enlarged fruit and vegetable garden, a row of pear trees, Bartlett
and Seckel, two peaches, a freestone and a cling, a sweet cherry
and a sour, a Green Gage plum and a Damson.  McCarthy had six grape
vines left, Concord, Niagara and Delaware, and an arbor was planned
north of the wicket gate.  He had a dozen poplar saplings.  The
Linden house had long needed tall trees before it, for softening.
Nellie's heart was set on maples, but the poplars were almost
providentially at hand.  The poplar was a sad tree, but it grew
sturdily and fast.  Ase had always liked the tapering spire, the
rustling together, like restless hands, of the leaves.  Nellie
agreed to the purchase and planting.

McCarthy said, "'Tis strange now, this place has been waiting all
these years for McCarthy to bring you the fruits of the earth.
What a sight 'twill be, all the colors in harvest time of a
patchwork quilt.  There's the total figure--."

Ase studied the column gravely.  It would take almost all his
reserve cash.  He had hoped to hire an extra hand this summer.
That would have to wait, and he would have to put in longer hours
of his own.  But all his seed was paid for, he would soon have
lambs and calves to sell.  He could spare the coming colt.  Nellie
had already brought the hens into higher egg production and had
half a dozen brood hens setting early.

McCarthy said, "Ten per cent replacement for any dead in the fall.
Ten per cent off for cash.  'Tis a good deal for me, for you'll be
taking all my stock before it dries on me."

Ase brought out the tin cash box.  Apple McCarthy looked away
tactfully while he counted out the money.  Amelia leaned forward
and swept it into three rough piles.

"There.  We'll say the orchard's owned three ways.  You can put the
three names on your receipt, Mr. McCarthy."

Ase stared at the divided cash.  The slips of engraved paper, the
disks of metal, had been last year's wheat and corn, to be
exchanged in turn for other rich and living things, if only the
willing labor of a strong man's back and hands.  The money seemed
now not the gift of fruiting vines, but an unclean medium for human
division.

Nellie said, "That's right, Mother Linden."

She winked at McCarthy.  Their quick little minds met like the
juncture of two bright brooks.  He picked it up.

"Right indeed.  You'll be marking off the unborn orchard, so's if
it has to be watered in a dryness, it's every man for himself, and
God, I suppose, to take care of the watering of Benjamin's
portion."

Amelia's spite retreated, like a snake crawling away.

She said, "Why--I didn't mean it that way.  Only to make things
clear."

"And clear they are, to McCarthy surely.  The receipts, Ma'am, here
you be."

She said, "I'll go back to the cabin, Asahel.  No, don't come with
me.  Just light my lantern.  Good night."

McCarthy sighed after her.

"Ah, but families do be a mixed up business.  'Tis that has kept me
a bachelor man.  There's more peace amongst the apples."

The soft spring night was suddenly violated by a dog fight, a mild
one, only the token bravery of Nellie's Shep against an intruder.
The intruder proved after all a friend, for it was Tim McCarthy's
little white dog.  Tim stopped the argument and came through the
door, the two dogs wagging themselves behind him.  He looked around
timidly.

"I've been lurking about 'till the old lady should be leaving," he
said.  "Pray God 'twas not some other lanthern flickering down the
road."

He was struck by the stillness, and then he knew his brother.

"Ah--.  'Tis you--.  These many years now."

The two small men, as like as bird eggs in a nest, wrapped short
arms around each other, thumped each other's backs, and wiped away
an Irish tear or two.

Ase thought, "This is why I trusted the stranger's dry twigs
instantly.  I knew him for the same as Tim."

An almost physical pain struck him.  He longed to have himself and
Benjamin enwrapped as closely as these two other brothers.

Tim said, "To the glory of God, I brought me fiddle with me, and
Ase here would be having his flute handy, and Brother, did you not
bring along your harmonica, I'll swear I never knew you."

The music seemed to Ase the best he had ever known.  Tim's fiddle
out did itself, the harmonica filled in all the empty spaces, and
his own flute was almost as sweet as he had ever hoped for.  It was
Nellie, he thought, who made the difference, even more than the new
added instrument and the delight of the McCarthys in their meeting.
She patted her foot and laughed and tossed her curls at the lively
tunes, and when Tim twanged the first notes for a gypsy song, she
stood on tiptoe and lifted her arms like a butterfly's wings, and
danced and spun deliriously in the Linden parlor that had so long
been gloomy.

She brought cool sweet milk from the cellar, and doughnuts, and
they ate with a sleepy satisfaction.  The McCarthys separated, Tim
to call his white dog to follow him down the road, his brother to
the Lindens' downstairs company bedroom.

Nellie said, "Ase, I don't like what your mother said about owning
the farm.  Is it true?"

"Yes."

"Ben told me he was giving you his share.  I thought your father
left the property to you two boys."

"No."

"Oh.  Then she can--.  Has she made a will?"

"I don't know.  Nellie, it doesn't matter."

"It certainly does matter.  I tell you, I don't like it at all."

She cleared away the plates and went ahead of him to bed.  The
house was still.  Ase went to the cupboard and brought out Ben's
geography left from the Academy.  He turned the pages slowly.  The
United States of America.  Here they were now.  Here beyond and
south was Ohio.  On the broad splayed map it seemed quite clear.
Here was the West.  He pictured its spread and desolation.  The
West went farther.  Here was the end, the continent ended.  This,
now, was the Pacific Ocean.

Oh, Benjamin, my brother, he begged, stop there.  I shall tend the
orchard.



IX


Apple McCarthy seemed to be made unhappy by Nellie's breakfast.  He
eyed sorrowfully the pile of griddle cakes on his plate.  He poured
maple syrup over them until his plate ran with gold.  He took a
tentative forkful, laid down his fork, swallowed a mouthful of the
strong coffee lightened with heavy spooned cream, and reached for
the platter of savory sausages.  He chewed, staring at nothing,
then pushed his plate aside.

"'Tis punishment," he said, "nothing but punishment."

Nellie lifted her eyebrows.

"What's the complaint about my cooking, Mr. McCarthy?"

The little man beat his chest with his fists.

"'Complaint!' says she!  'Complaint!'  'Tis the cruelty of life I
complain of, to be in Heaven and then kicked out again.  Lucifer,
that's me, Lucifer McCarthy.  If I could leave me stummick here
behind me, mayhap I could bear the road."

Nellie laughed.

"That's one way of asking for more hot cakes," she said, and went
to the smoking griddle on the range.

McCarthy said, "Look now, Asahel Linden.  Would this be fair or
would it not be fair?  I to stay a bit to help you plant the fine
young trees, whilst Mistress Linden sets a place for me at your
table.  No charge on either side."

Ase said, "The work is worth good wages, but I'm short on ready
money."

"'Tis a deal, then."

He buttered his fresh six inch stack of griddle cakes.

"Now I can eat me fill with a clear conscience."

He sighed.

"Where on the blessed earth would I be getting better board and
company?  After all, I but part with the little trees to pass the
time and make me simple living."

It was agreed that haste must be made on the planting.  The
saplings had been long on the road.  McCarthy had kept them moist
in their burlap wrappings.  They were instinct with life, the tight
buds were aware of April, and if the stirring roots did not soon
find foothold and nourishment, an orchard would die a-borning.
With time to spare, it would have been best first to plow the
entire acreage, but the loamy soil was soft with spring, grass and
weeds yet tender, and Ase began the digging of holes to receive the
beginnings of trees.  Apple McCarthy followed behind him, expert
with the setting, the tamping down of the earth.  Working back
toward the log cabin at the end of the second row, Ase looked up to
see his mother staring from the window.  She appeared at the house
for the noon dinner, but Apple had given out of inventions
concerning her Benjamin.  She queried him closely as to whether
Benjamin was certain already to have left Ohio.  She had been
thinking, she said, that she might ride there in the apple wagon.
Something had prevented her son's return, an illness that he was
hiding, or a temporary lack of funds.  Or if he was on the way to
making his fortune, he would rejoice to have her join him, at least
for a while.

"I promise, Ma'am, he was leaving for westward close behind me, and
where you'd be finding him now, no man can tell you."

She did not appear in the house again.

The planting went fast and well.  The completed field had a strange
appearance.

Apple said to Nellie in private, "At the moment, 'tis as though the
old harridan in the cabin had raised a crop of witches' brooms."

The geometric pattern of stark black twigs was more of graveyard
than of nursery.  Fire might have swept an orchard, leaving this
stricken residue.  But the fire was in the mounting sun, the sun
unwrapped the sheathed buds with hot fingers, showers came daily,
the roots clutched and swelled, and one morning Ase saw under the
early mist a drift of palest green.  The young orchard was in leaf,
it had come through, it was alive.

Apple McCarthy was reluctant to move on.  Nellie complained of the
delay to her own kitchen garden and took him for helper there.  He
used his horse and Ase's Brinly plow to turn the ground.  She was
ambitious, and after the past Linden leanness the fenced plot she
planted seemed enormous.  There were carrots and beets, cabbages
and turnips and rutabagas, Irish potatoes and sweet, peas, tomatoes
and lettuces, onions and sweet corn, pole beans and simlins and
patty-pan squash and cucumbers.  Ase's commercial planting would
provide her with string beans, and pumpkins and Hubbard squash were
to be planted with his field corn.  She drove over the countryside
in the light buggy collecting seeds and slips of herbs from her
friends, mint and thyme, sage and dill, rose geranium, sweet
lavender and rosemary.

Ase plowed the apple orchard and sowed buckwheat broadcast.  Nellie
turned from the kitchen garden to flowers, and Apple McCarthy said
it must be his last bit of helping, for the potbelly her table had
given him was in the way of his stooping.  She was up with the
morning star, cooking breakfast by lamplight, and by the time the
birds were twittering sleepy fragments of song and the pale early
sun washed the polished floor and bright braided rugs with silver,
breakfast was over, Ase sent to Amelia with a special tray, and
Nellie was out of doors, digging as busily as the robins pulling
earthworms near her.  Ase lingered in his coming and going, to
watch her, round and plump, her curls damp over her intense,
flushed face.

Tim McCarthy came every evening.  The twilights lengthened.  The
yard grass grew thickly and Ase herded the sheep across the road to
crop it smooth.  Ase and Nellie and the brothers sat on the sweet
grass to play and sing.  Shep beat his plumed tail beside Nellie
and her mother cat, bulging again, came from the barn to sit
heavily in her lap and purr.  A lamp burned late in the cabin on
the brightest nights, and if Amelia heard and hated the sound of
music and of laughter, she gave no sign.  Ase went several times to
say good night to her, but as his footsteps approached her door,
the light went out and there was no answer to his rap.

June came in, the buckwheat made a tapestry for the embroidery of
the full-leaved apple saplings, Nellie's garden was up, with
satisfaction she picked the first greens and the first early
flower.  Apple McCarthy hitched his well-fattened horse to his
wagon and was at last on his way, woeful in parting.  The summer
passed in hard work, for Ase was single handed at heavy crops that
needed at least another hand.  Nellie was in a frenzy of canning
and preserving.  The mother cat littered behind the wood box in the
kitchen and Nellie moved in a welter of kittens until the most
ambitious climbed to the table and upset the cream, when the whole
batch was relegated again to the barn.

In August Nellie informed Ase that she was with child.  She had
suspected it a month ago but was only now certain.  The birth would
come sometime the following April.  He was profoundly stirred, but
she was as casual as though she announced a pleasant morning.  A
woman was wed, she tended her household, she bore her children.
She laughed at his gravity and tweaked his long nose.

"If you'd worked a little harder," she said, "it would have started
earlier.  I'd rather have my babies come in the winter and have it
out of the way by spring."

He supposed that the large size of the Wilson family made birth to
her more commonplace.  He asked her permission to give his mother
the good news.  She nodded.

"Sooner or later something will bring her around," she said.
"Maybe this will do it."

He found Amelia dipping water from the spring by the cabin.  He
laid his hand on her shoulder.  He could say only the few necessary
words.

"Mother, Nellie's going to have a baby."

She lifted the dipper to her thin lips, then poured the remainder
of the clear icy water over her hands.

"Of course.  I told you myself.  Very soon now, too."

She leaned over the pool and in its mirror carefully arranged her
crow-black hair.



X


Nothing was real to him except the scent of lilacs.  He had slept a
little toward morning.  Wakening, his thoughts were as nebulous as
the April dawn.  He was suspended in a gray void, and it seemed
that he and Benjamin were dead together, and some other with them,
whom he could not place for the moment.  He had not meant to sleep.
And had he slept, and was he now awake?  When a man closed his eyes
at night he did not know whether he would open them in the morning.
And was he then dead or living?  He did not, himself, know.  Only
another, observing his breathing, could say, "The man is not dead,
but sleeping."

A breath of April wind stirred the curtains and the fragrance of
the lilacs came stronger and with it that sense of danger.  He
started up from the couch and staggered a little.  Nellie's lilacs,
that was it.  Nellie had brought the lilac bushes from her father's
home, when was it, a year ago, and they were in bloom, sickening of
odor, and Nellie was in labor with his child.  Now he heard her
cry.  He went to the pump to splash cold water on his face and
hands, for it seemed only decent to be clean as he went to her.

Aunt Jess the midwife met him at the door of the downstairs
bedroom.

She whispered, "The pains are coming faster.  I think she'll make
it soon.  Come in and speak to her."

He groped to the side of the great white-sheeted bed.  Nellie was
as white, but veins stood out as blue as her eyes.  Her curls were
wet on the pillow.  She turned her head toward him.

An agony seized her and her face twisted.  She moved her head from
side to side and moaned.  The midwife gripped her hands.

"Bear down harder, Nellie dear, bear down.  Aunt Jess is holding on
to you.  Ase, you'd better get out.  Call the girl.  Get my hot
water going, lots of it."

He stumbled to the kitchen.  He had kept a low fire all night in
the range, and in minutes he had it roaring, and pots and kettles
filled with pure spring water, and boiling.  The Swedish girl,
Hulda, hired for the time being, came down the back stairs rubbing
the sleep from her eyes, then seemed to shake herself, and went
into brisk action.  She trotted back and forth with hot water and
cloths warmed in the open oven.  She took a moment out to start a
pot of coffee.

"Don't leave it boil over, Mr. Linden."

He should be doing his chores, he thought, but he could not bring
himself to leave the house.  The first ray of sun reached the
garden and pointed like a finger to a few early green sprouts.
Nellie had worked in the garden for an hour after her first pains,
her chubby little fingers scarcely reaching past her great belly to
press a plant here, scatter a row of home-saved seeds there.  It
seemed to him that all planting of seed was a man's work, but she
had driven him out when he had finished cultivating, fertilizing
and laying off the rows.  Green stuff made good milk for the cow,
she had said, and winked, and she knew the way she wanted it.  The
hired girl scurried in for another kettle of water, sweating.

She panted, "Coming fine, Mr. Linden.  Don't look so mournful."

The words were like a bone thrown to a good dog by the fire.  He
felt lost, almost an outsider.  The world had turned completely
female.  He seemed to have had nothing to do with the child,
nothing with the woman.  He was only tolerated in his own house.
The she-rites of fertility possessed it.  He heard then the wail,
the strange, anguished, angry protest against human birth.  He
stood up, shivering.  Where had the creature of his making come
from, that it was so disturbed to leave?  What would be his share
in making its life not quite as intolerable as the scream said it
feared?  When the midwife at long last called him, her voice was
triumphant, that of an Amazon blowing a trumpet made for a woman's
mouth.

He walked past her to the bed.  He had a moment's dread that Nellie
would turn her head away from him.  How could a woman forgive a man
for so much pain?  He had forgotten her own catlike pleasure.  He
looked down at her.  Aunt Jess had bathed her with sweet-smelling
soap, had dressed her in her bridal nightgown with lace ruching at
the throat, had brushed her shining curls and tied them with a blue
satin ribbon.  Nellie's eyes were twinkling.

"'Twasn't much fun," she said.

She arranged mysterious folds of cloth at her side, drew one away
to show the child, red, wrinkled, apparently blind, and wretched.
She puckered her own face in imitation.

"If 'twasn't a boy," she said, "I'd say, drown it.  Guess being
ugly won't matter."

He stared.  He had helped with the birthing of countless lambs and
calves and colts.  He had come on baby squirrels and foxes in their
nests.  This was his first sight of a new-born human.  All the
other animal young arrived complete, contented.  It was as though
they were born knowing--or not knowing--some fearful secret.

He said, "I suppose he'll change.  Nellie--how are you?"

She patted her stomach under the covers.

"Empty, thanks be.  Empty of everything.  I'm hungry."

The great bulk of Aunt Jess filled the doorway.  Her face shone
like a harvest moon.

"Fine boy there, Ase.  Never brought a better.  You'll have help on
the farm be