To Make My Bread (20 page)

“Well,” Granpap said, “I reckon the young ones are r'aring for another set.”

After the fifth set Sam Wesley picked up his hat and took the collection. It was amazing the number of quarters that were dropped in, along with dimes. And there were two one-dollar bills!

When the dance was over and Granpap and John were walking back to Siler's Cove, Granpap spoke to John about the fine collection. “The mill brings money,” he said. “But I'd rather have my cabin and my piece of land. A cabin and land is there. You leave it and come back and there it is again. But money goes fast.”

F
OR
a month or longer the jubilation lasted like a prolonged religious revival. Then, about the first of the month, Hal Swain passed certain envelopes through the post office window. The envelopes had printing in the upper left hand corner. They were from the lumber company and the letter inside notified each man that after such and such a date he must pay a certain amount of rent to Hal Swain as the Company's representative. Hal read out line by line to each man the contents of the letter and the amount he must pay.

When they received the money for their cabins no one had thought of this possibility. Hal told them they could stay on their land rent free. They had not remembered that Hal said “as long as he owned.” Now the Company owned and it was quite a different matter. They could not blame Hal, for he had been true to what he said. Not one cent of rent had he asked them to pay so long as he owned the land. Some let it stand that way, and accepted what happened. But there were others who swore they would never pay rent for land they had owned and lived on without being beholden to any man. Granpap was one of these. The day on which he was due to pay his rent passed, and he did not appear at the store. It was Hal Swain's duty to collect from those who had failed to pay, but he could not make himself collect from his neighbors. He sent one of the Company men.

Granpap met the Company man at the door with his shotgun. It was useless for Emma to try to prevent him. He could only feel that somewhere in the transaction he had been fooled, and had a right to defend what he felt still belonged to Emma and the young ones. So Granpap drove the Company man away and he went back and reported to Hal.

So Hal had to come after all. He explained to Granpap that the Company would have a right by law to put the family out of the house. Granpap simply pointed to his shotgun. He had given up listening to Hal, listening as one does who is willing to be convinced. After that Hal went back to his store, and Granpap went about with a stern set face that dared anyone to interfere with John Kirkland. Emma was greatly disturbed. She did not know what Hal and the Company would decide to do, but she was sure of what Granpap might do in an emergency. She began to wish they were out of the country.

About this time a dapper young man appeared in the community. He wore a new store-bought suit, a white shirt, always clean, and very fine tan shoes that he must have wiped very carefully every night, for each morning when he left Hal Swain's house, where he was boarding, all the mud that had accumulated on them from the roads during the day before, was gone. Sally Swain had taken him in to board, without knowing what he came for. When she found out, Hal sent him about his business. But he had already been in the community for several days and had visited many of the cabins. Ora met him one day on the trail over Thunderhead. She almost laughed out loud to see the finely dressed little man walking so daintily on the rough trail, avoiding the muddy spots by taking short little jumps over them. She stopped and waited for him to come up the trail. She was standing in the deep shade made by the thick leaves overhead, and he did not see her at once. When he did, she told Emma later, he looked as if he had seen a ghost.

“Do—do the McClures live near by?” he asked.

Ora thought he was looking for Granpap. “Be ye their kin?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “Not exactly. That is, I have a message for them. I'm looking for the McClures who have seven children.”

Then Ora knew he meant her and turned to go back the way she had come. When she looked over her shoulder the young man was standing in the spot where she had left him. “Come on,” she said, and led the way back to the cove.

At the cabin she spoke to Young Frank who was in the yard. “Go over and get Emma and Granpap,” she told Young Frank, “and hurry.”

Since Frank was not at home it was best to have her neighbors and kin by to hear what the strange young man had to say.

He seemed eager enough to tell them, when Granpap and Emma were in the cabin. His words fell over each other in a hasty torrent. It was hard to keep up with him.

People, he said, up in that community, were being fooled. The lumber company had promised them jobs, and of course some of them would get jobs. But how long would they last? At most the company would stay five to eight years. When all the big trees had been cut down, then, naturally, the lumber company must move to a place where there were virgin forests.

On the other hand, down in Leesville, jobs, lifetime jobs, were waiting for people who would come down and work in the factories. Anybody could learn to run the machines. And those who did were given a house with a kitchen stove and electric lights.

“Hold on,” Granpap said. “They say there's going to be electric here. They're a-going to build new cabins along the creek and put in wires.”

“Suppose they do,” the young man had his answer ready. “When the Company leaves, the electric lights go with the Company. Outside there you have electricity all the time. Up here, only men can work. Down there women like you,” he pointed to Ora and Emma, “women like you can work in the mills and make money. You can send your children to a fine city school. You can buy at the city stores, and cook on a real cook stove furnished by the company.”

“And the young ones can go to school?” Emma asked him.

“Exactly.”

“They do say hit's a land flowing with milk and honey, and gold growing on trees.”

The young man smiled. “Yes,” he said. “It's the promised land, all right.”

“And they pay high?” Granpap asked.

“Yes, and all the family—father, mother and children—earn money.”

“I guess not the mother, when there's a young one like this.” Emma was looking at Minnie's baby that was lying in her lap asleep.

“You can always leave him with a neighbor.” The young man dismissed the baby with a gesture. “People down there are mighty neighborly.”

“Maybe,” Granpap said to the others, when the young man had left them to think it over, “maybe we could all make enough to buy back the land up here when the lumber company's through.”

“I'd want the young ones to have schooling,” Emma insisted.

When Frank reached the cabin he and Granpap sat for a long time over the coals of the fire, though it was a warm day. They seemed to hold their words of counsel a secret between them and the chimney.

Ora and Emma went out to sit on the door-step.

“I've felt unsettled ever since that rent-bill came,” Ora said. “You own a place and then you don't. The land you've owned, one day hit's yours, and another a stranger sends in a monthly rent-bill. Hit makes you want to git up and git.”

“We shouldn't have sold,” Emma remembered how she had given up the land so easily. It shouldn't have been done. And now it was too late.

“No,” Ora agreed with her. “Frank held out as long as he could; but the ready money was too much, I reckon. Then they told him he'd have to sell, anyway, for they was going to run the log train track right across this place where the cabin stands. They said they had a right by law. But I don't believe hit.”

“Hit's hard t' know what to believe and what not, these days. Everything's changin' so,” Emma said in her quiet still voice.

“Anyway I'm all unsettled.” Ora stood up. She looked unhappy and unsure of herself, and that was a very unusual way for Ora to look or to be. “I'll be glad to do something one way or another.”

“You'll be glad if we go outside?” Emma asked her, looking up into her friend's face.

“I'll be glad to do something, one way or another,” Ora said.

“One thing,” Emma repeated. “The young ones can get schooling.”

“Yes,” Ora said vaguely. Emma's words did not mean very much to her. She was concerned mainly with her own feelings. She felt like a tree torn up by its roots, especially since she knew another child was coming. She wanted to be planted again. If Frank and Granpap decided to stay around Swain's Crossing and move over to the valley so they could try to get work in the lumber camps, she was willing to do that. If they decided to go outside and find work in the mills, it would be the same. When her own roots were planted she could think of her young ones and what was best for them.

In Emma there was a hidden excitement at the thought of change, of seeing a city, and living there. The young man had said, “There, the streets are full of houses, mansions.” Others had told her about them, and about the engines and automobiles. The outside had come so much nearer in the last few years. It could not be ignored any longer. Her good sense told her that the picture she had might not be true, but some of the things she liked to believe. She was glad when Granpap came out and said, “Hit seems like the best thing to do is go to the outside.”

For the next day or two Bonnie and John, though they said little, ran about, Emma said, as if they were chickens with their heads cut off. With a sharp stick Bonnie practiced doing school lessons on the ground. Anyone could see they were simply marks without any meaning. But they meant something to Bonnie. She brought Minnie's baby and showed them to him, and he gurgled some to show his appreciation, and made some real sounds, which, according to Bonnie were words. But Emma knew the child was late about talking, and perhaps this was a beginning. Sometimes one that began late learned faster than others that began early. She was glad anyway to hear the sounds that were like words come out of the child's mouth, for she had thought it might turn out to be lacking.

After the first day, John was quieter than Bonnie. He was in his own way preparing himself for the adventure.

One evening while they were sitting in the cabin, before the doors were shut for bedtime, they heard someone walking on the trail outside. The steps came nearer. They were not Frank's, for his were long and light. This person walked with a quick, heavy tread. He walked on the block and stood in the dborway, looking back into their faces. It was Jim Hawkins with his scraggly beard and one eye. He hesitated in the doorway, waiting for an invitation.

“Come in, Jim,” Granpap said and motioned to John, who slid from his chair to the floor.

Jim sat in the corner and slowly lit his pipe.

“Hit's a fine evening,” he said, and looked around the room until his eye found the baby that Bonnie was holding in her lap.

The others waited for him to speak again.

“I hear you're traveling.” He looked up at Granpap who sat beside him.

“Hit looks like it.”

“To stay?”

“I'm aiming to stay from the hills no longer than need be,” Granpap told him.

Jim pointed to the baby with his pipe. “I was thinking that young one over there—hit might hamper ye some.”

“I don't know,” Granpap told him. “Emma thinks a lot of the young one, and Bonnie thinks of hit as her own by now.”

“Would hit grieve ye much to part with hit?”

There was a silence in the room. All of them were thinking, “Jim has come for Minnie's young one.”

“Hit's mine,” Bonnie called out suddenly, and hugged the baby in her arms. “I raised hit.”

“Bonnie!” Granpap called out to her.

“Is it true, Jim? Do ye want hit?” Emma asked.

“I thought, maybe you'd better let me take hit, since you're going so far.”

“Could ye care for hit?”

“I cared for Minnie, when she was no bigger.”

Emma and Granpap looked at each other, and Granpap spoke.

“I reckon hit's Jim's as much as ours, Emma.”

“Yes,” Emma had to agree. “I reckon so.”

“Shall I take hit to-night?” Jim asked.

“No,” Emma said, thinking of Bonnie. “We'll bring hit over to-morrow, hit and the cradle.”

And the next day Emma, Bonnie, and Ora took turns carrying the baby and the cradle over the mountains to Jim's cabin.

Bonnie cried all the way down the valley, until Emma promised to take her by to see the Wesleys' new baby. Emma felt the loss, too. They had worked hard to make the child thrive. But it was best for Jim to have it. He was a lonely man, and since it was a boy child he would probably raise it with more sense than he had ever used on his girl.

They visited with Sam Wesley's wife for a little while and Bonnie was allowed to hold the new baby for a moment. On the way out they passed Granma Wesley's loom. The old woman had died the winter before, but the loom was still there with the half done coverlet. Emma saw it, and a thought came into her. Down in the factories they must all know how to run a loom, like this one, only, as the young man said, out there they were run by machines. She wanted to try her hand at the loom, but she hesitated to ask Sam, for it was not good for someone outside a family to ask the use of that which has belonged altogether to a person recently dead.

She touched the loom and looked at Sam. “Could I try how it works, Sam?” she asked him and watched his face.

“Why, yes, Emma,” Sam told her.

He showed them how it worked. Ora and Emma took turns sitting on the high bench at the loom, and Bonnie crowded up to see. Sam showed them the warp beam from which the threads came down in a thick orderly stream, each one held in its place by a wire contraption. He moved the heddles so that the threads of the warp opened like the palms of two hands joined at the wrists. Through this opening he threw the shuttle, click! Then the reed pressed the shuttle thread into place and when he touched the treadles with his feet the threads of the warp passed each other and made another opening for the shuttle to pass through again.