The Bondboy Page 5

  Isom’s foot was heavy on the floor over her head, moving about as if in search of something to use in the flagellation. Ollie stood with hands to her tumultuous bosom, pity welling in her heart for the lad who was to feel the vigor of Isom’s unsparing arm.

  There was a lighter step upon the floor, moving across the room like a sudden wind. The bound boy’s voice sounded again, clear now and steady, near the top of the stairs where Isom stood.

  “Put that down! Put that down, I tell you!” he commanded. “I warned you never to lift your hand against me. If you hit me with that I’ll kill you in your tracks!”

  Ollie’s heart leaped at the words; hot blood came into her face with a surge. She clasped her hands to her breast in new fervor, and lifted her face as one speeding a thankful prayer. She had heard Isom Chase threatened and defied in his own house, and the knowledge that one lived with the courage to do what she had longed to do, lifted her heart and made it glad.

  She heard Isom growl something in his throat, muffled and low, which she could not separate into words.

  “Well, then, I’ll let it pass–this time,” said Joe. “But don’t you ever do it any more. I’m a heavy sleeper sometimes, and this is an hour or two earlier than I am used to getting up; but if you’ll call me loud enough, and talk like you were calling a man and not a dog, you’ll have no trouble with me. Now get out of here!”

  Ollie could have shouted in the triumph of that moment. She shared the bound boy’s victory and exulted in his high independence. Isom had swallowed it like a coward; now he was coming down the stairs, snarling in his beard, but his knotted fist had not enforced discipline; his coarse, distorted foot had not been lifted against his new slave. She felt that the dawn was breaking over that house, that one had come into it who would ease her of its terrors.

  Joe came along after Isom in a little while, slipping his suspenders over his lank shoulders as he went out of the kitchen door. He did not turn to Ollie with the morning’s greetings, but held his face from her and hurried on, she thought, as if ashamed.

  Ollie ran to the door on her nimble toes, the dawn of a smile on her face, now rosy with its new light, and looked after him as he hurried away in the brightening day. She stood with her hands clasped in attitude of pleasure, again lifting her face as if to speed a prayer.

  “Oh, thank God for a man!” said she.

  Isom was in a crabbed way at breakfast, sulky and silent. But his evil humor did not appear to weigh with any shadow of trouble on Joe, who ate what was set before him like a hungry horse and looked around for more.

  Ollie’s interest in Joe was acutely sharpened by the incident of rising. There must be something uncommon, indeed, in a lad of Joe’s years, she thought, to enable him to meet and pass off such a serious thing in that untroubled way. As she served the table, there being griddle-cakes of cornmeal that morning to flank the one egg and fragments of rusty bacon each, she studied the boy’s face carefully. She noted the high, clear forehead, the large nose, the fineness of the heavy, black hair which lay shaggy upon his temples. She studied the long hands, the grave line of his mouth, and caught a quick glimpse now and then of his large, serious gray eyes.

  Here was an uncommon boy, with the man in him half showing; Isom was right about that. Let it be blood or what it might, she liked him. Hope of the cheer that he surely would bring into that dark house quickened her cheek to a color which had grown strange to it in those heavy months.

  Joe’s efforts in the field must have been highly satisfactory to Isom that forenoon, for the master of the house came to the table at dinner-time in quite a lively mood. The morning’s unpleasantness seemed to have been forgotten. Ollie noticed her husband more than once during the meal measuring Joe’s capabilities for future strength with calculating, satisfied eyes. She sat at the table with them, taking minute note of Joe at closer range, studying him curiously, awed a little by the austerity of his young face, and the melancholy of his eyes, in which there seemed to lie the concentrated sorrow of many forebears who had suffered and died with burdens upon their hearts.

  “Couldn’t you manage to pick us a mess of dandelion for supper, Ollie?” asked Isom. “I notice it’s comin’ up thick in the yard.”

  “I might, if I could find the time,” said Ollie.

  “Oh, I guess you’ll have time enough,” said Isom, severely.

  Her face grew pale; she lowered her head as if to hide her fear from Joe.

  “Cook it with a jowl,” ordered Isom; “they go fine together, and it’s good for the blood.”

  Joe was beginning to yearn forward to Sunday, when he could go home to his mother for a satisfying meal, of which he was sharply feeling the need. It was a mystery to him how Isom kept up on that fare, so scant and unsatisfying, but he reasoned that it must be on account of there being so little of him but gristle and bone.

  Joe looked ahead now to the term of his bondage under Isom; the prospect gave him an uneasy concern. He was afraid that the hard fare and harder work would result in stunting his growth, like a young tree that has come to a period of drought green and promising, and stands checked and blighted, never again to regain the hardy qualities which it needs to raise it up into the beauty of maturity.

  The work gave him little concern; he knew that he could live and put on strength through that if he had the proper food. So there would have to be a change in the fare, concluded Joe, as he sat there while Isom discussed the merits of dandelion and jowl. It would have to come very early in his term of servitude, too. The law protected the bondman in that, no matter how far it disregarded his rights and human necessities in other ways. So thinking, he pushed away from the table and left the room.

  Isom drank a glass of water, smacked his dry lips over its excellencies, the greatest of them in his mind being its cheapness, and followed it by another.

  “Thank the Lord for water, anyhow!” said he.

  “Yes, there’s plenty of that,” said Ollie meaningly.

  Isom was as thick-skinned as he was sapless. Believing that his penurious code was just, and his frugality the first virtue of his life, he was not ashamed of his table, and the outcast scraps upon it. But he looked at his young wife with a sharp drawing down of his spiked brows as he lingered there a moment, his cracked brown hands on the edge of the table, which he had clutched as he pushed his chair back. He seemed about to speak a rebuke for her extravagance of desire. The frown on his face foreshadowed it, but presently it lifted, and he nodded shrewdly after Joe.

  “Give him a couple of eggs mornings after this,” said he, “they’ve fell off to next to nothing in price, anyhow. And eat one yourself once in a while, Ollie. I ain’t one of these men that believe a woman don’t need the same fare as a man, once on a while, anyhow.”

  His generous outburst did not appear to move his wife’s gratitude. She did not thank him by word or sign. Isom drank another glass of water, rubbed his mustache and beard back from his lips in quick, grinding twists of his doubled hand.

  “The pie-plant’s comin’ out fast,” said he, “and I suppose we might as well eat it–nothing else but humans will eat it–for there’s no sale for it over in town. Seems like everybody’s got a patch of it nowadays.

  “Well, it’s fillin’, as the old woman said when she swallowed her thimble, and that boy Joe he’s going to be a drain on me to feed, I can see that now. I’ll have to fill him up on something or other, and I guess pie-plant’s about as good as anything. It’s cheap.”

  “Yes, but it takes sugar,” ventured Ollie, rolling some crumbs between her fingers.

  “You can use them molasses in the blue barrel,” instructed Isom.

  “It’s about gone,” said she.

  “Well, put some water in the barrel and slosh it around–it’ll come out sweet enough for a mess or two.”

  Isom got up from the table as he gave these economic directions, and stood a moment looking down at his wife.

  “Don’t you worry over feedin’ that feller,
Ollie,” he advised. “I’ll manage that. I aim to keep him stout–I never saw a stouter feller for his age than Joe–for I’m goin’ to git a pile of work out of him the next two years. I saw you lookin’ him over this morning,” said he, approvingly, as he might have sanctioned her criticism of a new horse, “and I could see you was lightin’ on his points. Don’t you think he’s all I said he was?”

  “Yes,” she answered, a look of abstraction in her eyes, her fingers busy with the crumbs on the cloth, “all you said of him–and more!”

  * * *

  CHAPTER III

  THE SPARK IN THE CLOD

  It did not cost Isom so many pangs to minister to the gross appetite of his bound boy as the spring weeks marched into summer, for gooseberries followed rhubarb, then came green peas and potatoes from the garden that Ollie had planted and tilled under her husband’s orders.

  Along in early summer the wormy codlings which fell from the apple-trees had to be gathered up and fed to the hogs by Ollie, and it was such a season of blighted fruit that the beasts could not eat them all. So there was apple sauce, sweetened with molasses from the new barrel that Isom broached.

  If it had not been so niggardly unnecessary, the faculty that Isom had for turning the waste ends of the farm into profit would have been admirable. But the suffering attendant upon this economy fell only upon the human creatures around him. Isom’s beasts wallowed in plenty and grew fat in the liberality of his hand. For himself, it looked as if he had the ability to extract his living from the bare surface of a rock.

  All of this green truck was filling, as Isom had said, but far from satisfying to a lad in the process of building on such generous plans as Joe. Isom knew that too much skim-milk would make a pot-bellied calf, but he was too stubborn in his rule of life to admit the cause when he saw that Joe began to lag at his work, and grow surly and sour.

  Isom came in for quick and startling enlightenment in the middle of a lurid July morning, while he and Joe were at work with one-horse cultivators, “laying by” the corn. Joe threw his plow down in the furrow, cast the lines from his shoulders, and declared that he was starving. He vowed that he would not cultivate another row unless assured, then and there, that Isom would make an immediate enlargement in the bill-of-fare.

  Isom stood beside the handles of his own cultivator, there being the space of ten rows between him and Joe, and took the lines from around his shoulders, with the deliberate, stern movement of a man who is preparing for a fight.

  “What do you mean by this kind of capers?” he demanded.

  “I mean that you can’t go on starving me like you’ve been doing, and that’s all there is to it!” said Joe. “The law don’t give you the right to do that.”

  “Law! Well, I’ll law you,” said Isom, coming forward, his hard body crouched a little, his lean and guttered neck stretched as if he gathered himself for a run and jump at the fence. “I’ll feed you what comes to my hand to feed you, you onery whelp! You’re workin’ for me, you belong to me!”

  “I’m working for mother–I told you that before,” said Joe. “I don’t owe you anything, Isom, and you’ve got to feed me better, or I’ll walk away and leave you, that’s what I’ll do!”

  “Yes, I see you walkin’ away!” said Isom, plucking at his already turned-up sleeve. “I’m goin’ to give you a tannin’ right now, and one you’ll not forget to your dyin’ day!”

  At that moment Isom doubtless intended to carry out his threat. Here was a piece of his own property, as much his property as his own wedded wife, defying him, facing him with extravagant demands, threatening to stop work unless more bountifully fed! Truly, it was a state of insurrection such as no upright citizen like Isom Chase could allow to go by unreproved and unquieted by castigation of his hand.

  “You’d better stop where you are,” advised Joe.

  He reached down and righted his plow. Isom could see the straining of the leaders in his lean wrist as he stood gripping the handle, and the thought passed through him that Joe intended to wrench it off and use it as a weapon against him.

  Isom had come but a few steps from his plow. He stopped, looking down at the furrow as if struggling to hold himself within bounds. Still looking at the earth, he went back to his implement.

  “I’ll put you where the dogs won’t bite you if you ever threaten my life ag’in!” said he.

  “I didn’t threaten your life, Isom, I didn’t say a word,” said Joe.

  “A motion’s a threat,” said Isom.

  “But I’ll tell you now,” said Joe, quietly, lowering his voice and leaning forward a little, “you’d better think a long time before you ever start to lay hands on me again, Isom. This is twice. The next time––”

  Joe set his plow in the furrow with a push that sent the swingle-tree knocking against the horse’s heels. The animal started out of the doze into which it had fallen while the quarrel went on. Joe grinned, thinking how even Isom’s dumb creatures took every advantage of him that opportunity offered. But he left his warning unfinished as for words.

  There was no need to say more, for Isom was cowed. He was quaking down to the tap-root of his salt-hardened soul, but he tried to put a different face on it as he took up his plow.

  “I don’t want to cripple you, and lay you up,” he said. “If I was to begin on you once I don’t know where I’d leave off. Git back to your work, and don’t give me any more of your sass!”

  “I’ll go back to work when you give me your word that I’m to have meat and eggs, butter and milk, and plenty of it,” said Joe.

  “I orto tie you up to a tree and lash you!” said Isom, jerking angrily at his horse. “I don’t know what ever made me pity your mother and keep her out of the poorhouse by takin’ in a loafer like you!”

  “Well, if you’re sick of the bargain go and tell mother. Maybe she is, too,” Joe suggested.

  “No, you’ll not git out of it now, you’ll stick right here and put in your time, after all the trouble and expense I’ve been put to teachin’ you what little you know about farmin’,” Isom declared.

  He took up his plow and jerked his horse around into the row. Joe stood watching him, with folded arms, plainly with no intention of following. Isom looked back over his shoulder.

  “Git to work!” he yelled.

  “You didn’t promise me what I asked,” said Joe, quietly.

  “No, and that ain’t all!” returned Isom.

  The tall corn swallowed Isom and his horse as the sea swallowed Pharaoh and his host. When he returned to the end of the field where the rebellion had broken out, he found Joe sitting on the beam of his plow and the well-pleased horse asleep in the sun.

  Isom said nothing, but plunged away into the tall corn. When he came back next time Joe was unhitching his horse.

  “Now, look a-here, Joe,” Isom began, in quite a changed tone, “don’t you fly up and leave an old man in the lurch that way.”

  “You know what I said,” Joe told him.

  “I’ll give in to you, Joe; I’ll give you everything you ask for, and more,” yielded Isom, seeing that Joe intended to leave. “I’ll put it in writing if you want me to Joe–I’ll do anything to keep you, son. You’re the only man I ever had on this place I wouldn’t rather see goin’ than comin’.”

  Isom’s word was satisfactory to Joe, and he returned to work.

  That turned out a day to be remembered in the household of Isom Chase. If he had come into the kitchen at noon with all the hoarded savings of his years and thrown them down before her eyes, Ollie could not have been more surprised and mystified than she was when he appeared from the smokehouse carrying a large ham.

  After his crafty way in a tight pinch Isom turned necessity into profit by making out that the act was free and voluntary, with the pleasure and comfort of his pretty little wife underlying and prompting it all. He grinned as if he would break his beard when he put the ham down on the table and cut it in two at the middle joint as deftly as a butcher.


  “I’ve been savin’ that ham up for you, Ollie. I think it’s just about right now,” said he.

  “That was nice of you, Isom,” said she, moved out of her settled taciturnity by his little show of thought for her, “I’ve been just dying for a piece of ham!”

  “Well, fry us a big skilletful of it, and some eggs along with it, and fetch up a crock of sweet milk, and stir it up cream and all,” directed Isom.

  Poor Ollie, overwhelmed by the suddenness and freedom of this generosity, stood staring at him, her eyes round, her lips open. Isom could not have studied a more astounding surprise. If he had hung diamonds on her neck, rubies on her wrists, and garnets in her hair, she could quicker have found her tongue.

  “It’s all right, Ollie, it’s all right,” said Isom pettishly. “We’re going to have these things from now on. Might as well eat ’em, and git some of the good of what we produce, as let them city people fatten off ’em.”

  Isom went out with that, and Ollie attacked the ham with the butcher knife in a most savage and barbarous fashion.

  Isom’s old wife must have shifted in her grave at sight of the prodigal repast which Ollie soon spread on the kitchen table. Granting, of course, that people in their graves are cognizant of such things, which, according to this old standard of comparison in human amazement, they must be.

  But whether the old wife turned over or lay quiescent in the place where they put her when they folded her tired old hands upon her shrunken breast, it is indisputable that the new one eased the pangs of many a hungry day in that bountiful meal. And Joe’s face glowed from the fires of it, and his eyes sparkled in the satisfaction of his long-abused stomach.

  Next day a more startling thing happened. Twice each week there passed through the country, from farm to farm, a butcher’s wagon from Shelbyville, the county-seat, a few miles away. Isom Chase never had been a customer of the fresh meat purveyor, and the traveling merchant, knowing from the old man’s notoriety that he never could expect him to become one, did not waste time in stopping at his house. His surprise was almost apoplectic when Isom stopped him and bought a soup-bone, and it almost became fatal when the order was made a standing one. It was such a remarkable event that the meat man told about it at every stop. It went round the country like the news of a wedding or a death.