Across Five Aprils (3 page)

“Here chick,” she called, “here chick, chick, chick, chick, chick, chick—”

Ellen slowly reached out with her hoe and broke a clod of dirt into crumbling fragments.

“Well, we got plantin’ to do, Jeth,” she said at last, and they went on with their work.

 

When
the sun was directly above their heads, Ellen leaned her hoe against the fence, and she and the boy trudged slowly up along the fencerow toward the house. Hunger pangs twisted Jethro’s insides, and he was tired, but the prospect of dinner and an hour of cool rest under the trees in the dooryard cheered him to the point where he could whistle a little and make lazy gestures of play with the shepherd dog that came bounding down the path to greet him.

The cabin they approached was small and squat, built of logs and entirely plain, a typical pioneer’s cabin. Its basic ugliness was softened by a thick growth of vines clambering over the walls and roof and by a general air of neatness and pleasant dignity in the dooryard, the hedgerow of lilacs, and the prim, green rows of vegetables in the garden. Two rooms of the cabin faced west, both opening onto an uncovered porch where a half dozen split-bottomed chairs were ranged for the comfort of those who wished to rest and get a breath of air after meals, or to sit in the coolness of a spring night and watch the shadows move in over the prairies. Behind these rooms a kitchen extended the width of the house, with doors at either end opening onto the dooryard. Here huge silver poplars towered above the cabin, their roots extending like giant claws, making the ground rough and robbing it of grass. A low picket fence covered with a tangle of sweet honeysuckle stretched along the front of the yard; beyond this fence were the hitching posts in an area covered by sweet clover and an acrid-smelling little flower that Jethro knew as “dog fennel.”

The road in front of the house ran due north through that line where the last glacier had melted in some distant age and left its final load of drift, a line that separated the rich, black loam culture of northern Illinois from the poor, hard-packed clay culture to the south.

Jethro regretted the melting of that glacier; if it could have hung on another hundred miles, life might have been very different for him and his family. But then it hadn’t, and anyway he loved the dog fennel and the silver poplars and the hedge of lilacs on the south that separated Jenny’s well-drained kitchen garden from the dooryard. He doubted that there were such wooded hills or winding creeks in the cornbelt of the north as one could find by the dozens in the clay lands, and he could not imagine contentment in any spot other than this one, which his father had chosen thirty years before. But it was a pity about the glacier. Only another hundred miles!

Jenny had poured fresh water into a big basin so that her mother and Jethro could cool their faces and wash the dirt and grime from their hands.

“Nancy and the little tykes are here,” she called to Ellen. “We got a nice meal fixed fer you.”

Jenny had swept her shining black hair high upon her head because of the heat in the kitchen where the food was prepared over an open fireplace, and little drops of sweat stood out under her eyes and over a very firm chin. She grinned at Jethro and whacked him briskly on the seat as he came up to the kitchen well.

“I’ve got a crock of lettuce fer you, Jeth, though I’m terr‘ble wasteful in pickin’ it too young. But I know how you been dreamin’ green things as fur back as last December. Nancy and I allowed maybe yore body had need of spring eatin’.”

Green food. The hunger pangs grew even sharper at her words. His body did, indeed, have need of green food, if a continuous hunger for it meant that a need existed. He had felt many times during the long winter that he would have gladly exchanged all the pork in the smokehouse and all the gallons of sorghum, which he had helped to boil down, for one big crock of salad greens. He smiled at her, and Jenny understood his gratitude. It was as much as she expected; the Creighton males did not go into long speeches about such matters.

John’s wife looked up from her work and smiled shyly at Jethro and her mother-in-law when they entered the kitchen.

“I invited myself up fer the day, Mis’ Creighton,” she said in her thin voice. The name “Mis’ Creighton” was not a joke when Nancy used it; there was a reserve about the thin, quiet girl John had brought back from Kansas four years before that kept her almost a stranger to her husband’s family. She was amiable but aloof to the friendly Creightons, except for an occasional gesture of fondness for Jenny and for John’s favorite brother, Bill. John defended his wife earnestly to his mother.

“She was brought up by relations that treated her harsh. To draw back and say nothin’ is her way of protectin’ herself. You must be patient with her, Ma, like one of yore own—”

Ellen had had long schooling in patience. Now as she answered Nancy’s greeting her voice was very quiet.

“You never need ary invitation to John’s home, Nancy. It’s yorn, too, and you’ll hev welcome any day.”

She seated herself beside the door and took the youngest child in her lap. Nancy went on with her work, not sullenly, but so withdrawn that Ellen wearily gave up trying to talk with her and directed all her attention to the small boy.

The men came in from the fields soon. Jethro, because he was now a field worker, was allowed to eat at the first table with his parents and elder brothers. It was a coveted honor and he accepted it with dignity, looking somewhat like a solemn dwarf as he sat between his father and Bill, his eyes wide beneath the tumble of yellow curls that clung to his forehead and the back of his neck.

Across from him were the eighteen-year-olds. Tom was a mild-faced lad who, like Jethro and Bill, had inherited the blond hair and blue eyes of his father’s side of the family. Eb Carron, a nephew of Matt’s, had lived with the Creightons since he had been orphaned in childhood. Jethro admired the two big boys, but he sensed their indifference toward him and kept his distance generally. He was not especially hurt by their attitude; the youngest in the family knew his place. Besides, Jenny and Bill made up for any neglect on the part of the big boys a hundred times or more.

Bill, his favorite, was a big, silent man who was considered “peculiar” in the neighborhood. In an environment where reading was not regarded highly there was something suspect about a young man who not only cared very little for hunting or wrestling and nothing at all for drinking and rampaging about the country, but who read every book he could lay his hands upon as if he prized a printed page more than the people around him. He wasn’t quite held in contempt, for he had great physical strength and was a hard worker, two attributes admired by the people around him; but he was odd, and there was no doubt of that. Men had seen him stop his team in midfield to watch the flight of a line of birds, and a story went the rounds of Bill talking to his horse as if it were a person. “He talked to it gentle,” the story went, “like a woman talkin’ to a young ’un.” He had even attended school the previous winter when work was slack, which was surely a fool thing to do unless one was interested in “breakin’ up school.” He had listened intently to what a young man three years his junior had to say; he had studied and done the tasks set for him by Shadrach Yale as if he were no older than Jethro. It was not a behavior pattern of which the backwoods community approved; a lot of people smirked a little when they mentioned Bill Creighton.

Jethro loved Bill far and away beyond his other brothers; his mother understood why. “He’d put his hand in the fire fer you, Jeth,” she told him once, and Jethro believed her.

John, the oldest of the children left at the home place, sat at the end of the table facing his mother. He was dark like Ellen and more slender and wiry than Bill. These two brothers were very close to one another, a fact which had always been a matter of pride to Ellen, who strove to make family ties firm and secure. John was more impatient, quicker to anger than Bill, but the two of them had sought each other’s companionship from childhood; there seemed to be a bond of understanding between them that had developed with the years. John’s oldest son was named for this brother, and Nancy, whose aloofness toward Ellen and Matt never once gave way in the face of all their efforts, addressed John’s favorite as “Brother Bill.”

Jethro neither liked nor disliked John. Perhaps because of Nancy’s shyness, which he interpreted as unfriendliness, the boy extended his feeling of uneasiness with her to John and the two children. He seldom went near his brother’s cabin, which was only a half-mile away, and he made no move to attract or amuse the children.

Jenny moved quickly and a little breathlessly from fireplace to table, carrying dishes of meat and roasted potatoes, pitchers of milk, and great mounds of corn bread squares, still powdered with the wood ashes in which they had been baked. She was red-cheeked with pride over her efforts at providing a good dinner, and her eyes flashed a little in the direction of Tom and Eb, from whom she anticipated the usual teasing. Jethro smiled at her when she brought on the huge crock of lettuce, and Jenny saw to it that he received a generous serving before she passed it around the table.

Nancy poured steaming coffee into big mugs, and Jenny placed one beside the plate of each adult at the table. Children might have priority to a pudding or the last piece of cake, but coffee was an adult luxury, which Jethro enjoyed but dismissed with a passive acceptance of family custom that he never thought to question. On this day of the boy’s graduation to “first table” honors, however, Bill took a dried crust of bread—the remains of a rarely served “white loaf”—and after soaking it in his coffee cup for a few seconds, spread it with butter and placed it on his brother’s plate. Jethro nodded his thanks briefly; he did not wish to attract the attention of the others at the table to the favor.

“This meal is right good, Jenny,” John remarked pleasantly. “You air a fair cook fer yore years.”

“We might ha’ had cake and fixin’s though, if Shad had been eatin’ with us,” Tom said, grinning at his sister, who could hardly hold back the pleased smile that mention of the young schoolmaster elicited.

“Can’t help but feel a mite sorry fer pore Shad,” Eb added solemnly. “Jenny’s been feedin’ him so nice lately, he won’t be able to say ‘No’ comes a leap year.”

“Jenny is fur and away too young to be thinkin’ about Shad or ary other young man,” her father remarked quietly.

Jenny looked to the ceiling for an exasperated second as she stood behind her father’s chair. She was only fourteen, it was true, but she was as tall as Nancy and within two years as old as Ellen had been when she married Matthew Creighton. It was also true that she had her eye on Shadrach Yale, and all had been going well, too, until recently when, after a private talk with her father, the young schoolmaster had taken on a solemn and paternal attitude toward her, which Jenny found intensely annoying and unsatisfactory.

“Wonder when Shad allows to git back?” John asked after a guarded smile had been shared by the young people.

“By nine, or thereabouts, he thought,” Ellen answered. “I hope we won’t be too fur spent to wait up fer him.”

“I
won’t,” John said. “I want to see them city newspapers—” he stopped as he saw Nancy’s anxious eyes on his face. He had tried to avoid talk of war as much as possible lately; the two younger boys were too eager for it, the womenfolk too ready to cry about it. And Bill, for the first time that John could remember, had reservations about a subject and seemed unwilling to discuss it with his brother.

They ate in silence after that, but there was tension in the air. Jethro, although he was concerned mostly with the goodness of the food he ate, was vaguely aware of a troubled preoccupation all about him.

He and his mother went back to the fields after they had rested for an hour or so. The afternoon was hot, and the new freckles across Jethro’s shoulders were nearly lost by mid-afternoon beneath the red burn that spread over them. Ellen untied her apron and folded it across the back of his neck; that helped a little until the thongs of the potato pouch rubbed a blister on the sunburned skin, after which sweat and insects joined forces to torment him. The buoyancy of spirit and the beauty of early morning had long since given away to discomfort and the boredom of monotony. By sundown, both Ellen and Jethro dragged down the length of the field with weariness lining their faces and tugging at their bodies.

“Seems like a lot of ’taters, Mis’ Creighton,” Jethro said finally. He tried to smile, but the dark circles around his eyes were more convincing than his smile.

At the end of the furrow, Ellen sat down on the grass near the rail fence and reached a hand out to the boy.

“We’ll set a minute, Jeth. Sunup to sundown is a long time fer either boy or woman. The plantin’ won’t suffer overmuch if we spell ourselves a little.”

He was grateful for the rest, and, clasping his knees, he let his head fall forward, while comfort poured all through him with the relaxation of his body. He teased an ant that tried to run across a stick at his feet, blocking its way with the big toe of one foot and then the other, chuckling a little at his own mischief.

Shadows were beginning to grow long among the trees on Walnut Hill and down along the creek where the dogwood branches stood out whiter and more like ghostly clouds with the background of misty purple thickening behind them. Jethro let the ant go on its way, and sat staring at the shadows with the lonely ache that beauty sometimes brought to him. He turned once to speak to his mother, but she sat silently, her large eyes closed as she rested her head against one of the gray rails, so he said nothing, glad to prolong their rest for as long as possible.

They had sat so for ten minutes or more when the sound of wheels far down the road attracted their attention. Ellen rose stiffly and leaned against the rails; Jethro stood beside her.