3stalwarts (145 page)

“Oh, but you were working, doing things. But it don’t matter, and I’m lucky now to be along and live with Dorothy. She’s been so good.”

He kept walking as if he marched, steadily, left, right, left, right, as if there were no corduroy to slip on.

“I’m happy, Jerry, I’m happy. Honest. You mustn’t mind what I said. There’s time enough. Only I do get lonesome.”

Her contrition was as breathless as her burst of discontent. She eyed him as she walked. And seeing him thinking, her eyes suddenly grew shy.

Before he turned she had stopped, but he stepped back swiftly to her, took her shoulders in his hands, and shook her gently. He was grinning.

“Tell me just what’s wrong, Mary. Don’t put it off.”

“I’m going to have a baby, Jerry.”

She opened the throat of his coat with her hands and hid her face inside. Her shoulders heaved. She felt him stiffening.

“I didn’t know,” he said. “I just knew something, but I never thought.” His hands kept fumbling with her shoulders. “How long have you known it, Mary?”

She said, her voice muffled almost to extinction, “Almost a month, now.”

“You might have told me sooner.”

“I didn’t want to tell you till you had the lock done. You was so excited.”

He patted her.

“You weren’t scared to tell me?”

She could not speak for sobbing, but he felt her face jerk up and down.

“For God’s sake, why?”

“It seems as though I’m just a drag hitched to you. Always costing money.”

“We can afford it. I guess there ain’t a better way to spend it. A doctor, I’ve heard tell, will cost you round about two dollars. We can get a woman in to help you. I wouldn’t care if it was twice as much. Why, Mary, soon I’ll be earning more. You ain’t scared for yourself?”

Her sobs were easing. She shook her head.

“Not much. A little sometimes. Way out here.”

With a bent forefinger he fished for her chin.

“Think of it.” He laughed a little. “Three of us. Right here.”

She smiled. Her eyes were wet and drops were stiffening the lashes. He bent his head and kissed her.

“It’s time we hurried. You mustn’t take a risk of cold.”

He held her close to his side.

She asked him, “Jerry, would it be all right for me to stay at Dorothy’s to have it? It seems homey, somehow.”

“Surely. Let’s see, when will it?” He counted.

“August, maybe,” said Mary.

He counted again.

“By then I will be working out in Jordan Lock. I’ll come back when your time is due. You mustn’t be scared, Mary.”

She put her hand in his. They walked silent through the silence. The twilight came in, pale green and wavery. The night rose up in the east, a steely curtain cut for stars. They heard the frost rustling the grass.

Jerry kept his glance ahead, and Mary looked up at his face. She traced his ear under the fringe of hair, the set of his jaw, until her eyes ached. He must be thinking of the lock to build in Jordan, she thought. And then she thought with pride that it would be a fine lock. She felt very proud, now, of his work. Caleb had praised it. Mr. Wright. They spoke to him as to a man of equal station. It made her humble to feel proud, and she did not mind his thinking of his work. But when she asked him what he thought about he answered promptly.

“I was just revolving names. I’d thought of Richard for a name. Or Francis. I like Francis, don’t you, Mary?”

She lifted her face.

A mischievous quirk bent her lips.

“Yes, but suppose it is a girl.”

“I never thought!”

He felt something inside his arm that made him pause. They were just on the verge of the farm. They saw the lighted window and Dorothy’s face anxiously peering forth.

“For such an unspoken girl it seems to me you’ve said a lot.”

3

‘As if they minded cold”

When the winter came at last, it settled an icy grip upon the farm. Christmas Eve began with thawing; the roofs dripped rhythmically all the morning; but as the day wore on, the dripping slowed. When Melville went out at dusk to measure the icicles hanging from the kitchen eaves, he found one four feet long.

“Four feet of snow,” he reported. “It don’t seem possible.”

“Four feet deep upon the ground?” Mary was incredulous.

The end of Melville’s long nose bent humorously.

“I guess the snow don’t fall like that in England.”

“No,” she said, and Jerry remembered a winter when the snow was six feet deep in Uniontown and the ground-floor windows had up-slanting tunnels dug down to them to bring in light. Then Melville told tall stories of the drifts. A minister had been entrapped in Pompey meetinghouse one Sunday morning by a blizzard. The congregation never could dig in to him, or he dig out. They found him frozen stiff next spring,— it was so cold,— but he had preached a sermon for them. The whole sermon was frozen stiff. They brought the words out one by one into the warm air and listened to them thawing. A fearful tale. Only the deacon was an unread man, and mixed the words.

“Shush, shush, you Robert,” Dorothy said. “Such tales before a girl!”

He looked embarrassed, with a sidelong glance at Mary. Jerry hushed. Mary smiled at her spinning. She knew that time was showing in her, but it was comforting to be so guarded.

One week later the snow began in earnest. The sun had lost itself at noon, and all the day long the wind veered slowly through the north to eastward. At sunset time, without a warning, it snapped back again to west and the snow started.

After dark she listened to it, working crisply on the shingles overhead, the wind a steady drone like hiving bees; and the cold stole into the house and the log walls shrank and groaned. When morning came, a stillness hushed the world. Melville’s stockinged feet thumped loud as guns when he got up and opened up the door.

“She’s snowed all right,” she heard him telling Dorothy. “My Lord! I’ll bet two feet has fallen.”

His voice was loud, as if he took pride in this elemental demonstration.

“Dry snow,” he said. “It’s drifting powerful.”

“You’ll have to dig us out a passage to the barn,” said Dorothy. “Mary hadn’t ought to flounder out in snowshoes. Early-morning sweats are bad at her time.”

Jerry woke up with a startling catch of breath, and sprang from bed.

“It’s surely snowed for fair.”

He looked round the loft.

“Funny,” he said, “how snow will creep in places you think chinked.”

He laughed and bent to gather a handful from the floor. His face was bright. Laughing again, he showed it to her in his fist. Suddenly he jerked his nightshirt off and rubbed himself all over till his skin was red. He kept on laughing through his chattering teeth.

Melville bawled up through the opening.

“No more carpenteering now for you, Jerry, for a spell.”

“It don’t look so.”

“Even hauling won’t be possible for a piece.”

“I’ve got my flooring ready hauled for Number Two,” said Jerry. “That’s all I care about.”

That day they did not even attempt to break the roads. They kept a trench shoveled to the barn and spent their time in splitting wood. Mary watched them through the window, red-faced, their clothes all fresh with color against the sky and snow, their axes rising and swooping, their voices talking between the stroke-sounds.

At dusk the snow began again.

That evening she started to weave her coverlet on a frame that Dorothy had stored somewhere. The two women discussed the pattern. Neither knew a design for so small a spread and so they made it up. A star set in the middle with little stars for borders, red and white. Dorothy had dyed the red. She made the tint in peach wood-brew.

From time to time the men would walk across and look on, making knowing suggestions. Mary and Dorothy would accept these silently and then go on with their own plans.

Every day, no matter how bright the morning was, it seemed to Mary that the snow began again at dusk. At first it fascinated her, the endless gentle downward drift of flakes, or the wild skirling westward winds that smothered everything with the very excess of their breath and fired icy flakes like birdshot from the racing clouds. There was a comfort in feeling herself shut in, herself and Dorothy completing the household duties early and spending their long hours inventing new flavors for their simple food or indulging in their fill of spinning, weaving, and sewing.

She milked at evening when the barn was warm and cosy, the air invigorating with ammonia. The heifer calved and made a fuss about her calf, and they had a week of fun in teaching the awkward thing to dip its muzzle in a pail.

There was excitement, too, in seeing Melville take the ox-sled out to break the roads, the white curving horns dimly shining through the flakes as the oxen bent their necks and buffeted the drift with crooked knees. He had a contract to keep the road open; for one contractor was still digging in the marsh. It had been found that in the wettest stretch the men made better progress when the muck was frozen— even though they had to shovel out the snow each morning.

Their food was brought in once a week on three horse-sleds. Each sled could carry little, for the perishables had to be wadded thick with straw.

Dorothy would look out when she heard jingling of bells along the Orville road. Her homely face worked.

“From December into March, me and Robert never saw a person but our own two selves, and now they come past close to every week.”

Strange faces had no interest for Mary. Jerry was off again, now that the crust was formed, buying and hauling timber to the other lock-sites. She liked to sit at her sewing or weaving, close to the hearth, watching the big day-log disintegrate and calling Dorothy when the time had come to pry another foot of it into the coals. She could see the flakes through the window, drifting down, and her eyes traced patterns in their fall that brought strange meanings to her.

Icicles sprouted on the eaves and broke away according to the fluctua-tions of the weather.

One still clear night it got so cold that Mary woke half numb. It seemed to her for a long time that only the child inside of her kept her alive. She thought she could feel it taking on the forms of life, breathing, turning over to rest its side from its long dormance. The cold was all in her legs and arms and face; her chest felt shriveled with it. She knew she should get up and find additional warmth, and she tried to steel herself to movement. But her muscles remained unwilled. She thought, “I’ll die, surely.” Downstairs it was as still as death. The Melvilles had each other for their warmth. She wondered where Jerry might be, where he was that minute, if he thought of her or if he slept. Her thoughts swam into one another, confusing her, and she only knew she was cold.

Outside the cabin the brittle whisper of the snow put life into the stillness. It had a sinister low note. Without looking at the window, she knew that there was moonlight.

Then a queer, sharp, living voice came to her ears. At first she thought a dog was barking, but it was querulous, half human. The sound of it frightened her, and she had a sense at once of the snow pushing against her, smothering her like a blanket so large that she could find no edge. The voice was like the voice of snow. She lay still, shivering.

Next morning, she described it to Melville.

“Foxes,” he said. “It’s been a poor season for small animals. They must be in the marshes hunting mice.”

Dorothy nodded.

“I heard them last night, too. As if they minded cold.”

“We used to hear wolves sometimes when we first came here,” said Melville, pouring cream into the churn— they planned on butter for a treat. “I knowed they couldn’t harm us, but I was always fearful when I heard them. They would come down over the lake, perhaps from Canady. A pack. You’d hear them miles away and heading for you. Then they would go by some place far off.”

“I saw one once,” said Dorothy. “A fearsome sight. It used to be easy to have children in on time for dark. They were afraid of wolves. But now the youngest ones will come in when they’re minded. Wolves don’t ‘fraid them any more.”

Mary shivered. Foxes, she said, were bad enough for her.

“You wouldn’t have minded,” Dorothy said. “Only that baby in you frightened you.”

“I was so cold. But after I had heard them he moved once. Real hard. I wasn’t feared of them then. I got up and put on socks and a shirt of Jerry’s. I was real warm after.”

But the cabin had grown smaller since that night. She began to move with a sense of care, deliberately measuring off the little spaces between the hearth and the table, the table and the dresser, the wheels and the side of the Melvilles’ bed. Outside, the barn seemed farther from the house and the snow walls to the path much higher; but, oddly, the sky had limited the land— the world looked small.

Yet in the evening Mary would listen to the singing kettle or the slow drip of the roast into its pan or the steady beat of the dasher in the churn, and the sight of Dorothy’s strong, manlike hands would comfort her. Then she would sing softly, conscious of the harmony these things made with her own feeling.

“Shining Dagger” pleased her. She would hum it at first, but gradually the words would steal into the antique melody:—

“It is no use to ask my mother; She too intends to set us free. So go, my dear, and court some other, And I no more will trouble thee.”

The walls seemed to stand more sturdily against the snow. The fire would burn more evenly. The kettle would lull its note more hollowly in its round belly.

“Oh, I can climb the tallest tree, love, And I can reach the highest nest, And I can pluck the sweetest rose, love, But not the heart that I love best.”

Jerry would seem not so far away; and the winter a shorter space. The warm air of the cabin would grow brighter with the candlelight.

Sometimes, shyly, Melville would ask her for some other tune. He liked the old tunes, and it pleased Mary to be asked. It reminded her of her girlhood, when she sang for her mother. She would smile at him and Dorothy; their homely faces became kind in her eyes. Perhaps she would sing them “Daily Growing” or “Warranty Deed,” or a newer song, like “Highland Mary,” or one of Tom Moore’s, or a little thing she had once heard and remembered for its tune: —