The Bondboy Read online

  Isom did not return that evening; the conclusion of his household was that he had been chosen on a jury. They discussed it at supper, Ollie nervously gay, Morgan full of raucous laughter, Joe sober and grudging of his words.

  Joe never had borne much of a hand at the table-talk since Morgan came, and before his advent there was none to speak of, so his taciturnity that evening passed without a second thought in the minds of Ollie and her guest. They had words enough for a house full of people, thought Joe, as he saw that for every word from the lips they sent two speeding from their eyes. That had become a language to which he had found the Rosetta Stone; it was as plain to him now as Roman text.

  Perhaps Morgan regarded her with an affection as sincere as his own. He did not know; but he felt that it could not be as blameless, for if Joe had desired her in the uninterpreted passion of his full young heart, he had brought himself up to sudden judgment before the tribunal of his conscience. It would go no farther. He had put his moral foot down and smothered his unholy desire, as he would have stamped out a flame.

  It seemed to Joe that there was something in Morgan’s eyes which betrayed his heart. Little gleams of his underlying purpose which his levity masked, struck Joe from time to time, setting his wits on guard. Morgan must be watched, like a cat within leaping distance of an unfledged bird. Joe set himself the task of watching, determined then and there that Morgan should not have one dangerous hour alone with Ollie again until Isom came back and lifted the responsibility of his wife’s safety from his shoulders.

  For a while after supper that night Joe sat on the bench beside the kitchen door, the grape-vine rustling over his head, watching Ollie as she went to and fro about her work of clearing away. Morgan was in the door, his back against the jamb, leisurely smoking his pipe. Once in a while a snoring beetle passed in above his head to join his fellows around the lamp. As each recruit to the blundering company arrived, Morgan slapped at him as he passed, making Ollie laugh. On the low, splotched ceiling of the kitchen the flies shifted and buzzed, changing drowsily from place to place.

  “Isom ought to put screens on the windows and doors,” said Morgan, looking up at the flies.

  “Mosquito bar, you mean?” asked Ollie, throwing him a smile over her shoulder as she passed.

  “No, I mean wire-screens, everybody’s gettin’ ’em in now; I’ve been thinkin’ of takin’ ’em on as a side-line.”

  “It’ll be a cold day in July when Isom spends any money just to keep flies out of his house!” said she.

  Morgan laughed.

  “Maybe if a person could show him that they eat up a lot of stuff he’d come around to it,” Morgan said.

  “Maybe,” said Ollie, and both of them had their laugh again.

  Joe moved on the bench, making it creak, an uneasy feeling coming over him. Close as Isom was, and hard-handed and mean, Joe felt that there was a certain indelicacy in his wife’s discussion of his traits with a stranger.

  Ollie had cleared away the dishes, washed them and placed them in the cupboard, on top of which the one clock of that household stood, scar-faced, but hoarse-voiced when it struck, and strong as the challenge of an old cock. Already it had struck nine, for they had been late in coming to supper, owing to Joe’s long set-to with his conscience at the edge of the hazel-copse in the woods.

  Joe got up, stretching his arms, yawning.

  “Goin’ to bed, heh?” asked Morgan.

  “No, I don’t seem to feel sleepy tonight,” Joe replied.

  He went into the kitchen and sat at the table, his elbows on the board, his head in his hands, as if turning over some difficult problem in his mind. Presently he fell to raking his shaggy hair with his long fingers; in a moment it was as disorderly as the swaths of clover hay lying out in the moonlight in the little stone-set field.

  Morgan had filled his pipe, and was after a match at the box behind the stove, with the familiarity of a household inmate. He winked at Ollie, who was then pulling down her sleeves, her long day’s work being done.

  “Well, do you think you’ll be elected?” he asked, lounging across to Joe, his hands in his pockets.

  Morgan wore a shirt as gay-striped as a Persian tent, and he had removed his coat so the world, or such of it as was present in the kitchen, might behold it and admire. Joe withdrew his hands from his forelock and looked at Morgan curiously. The lad’s eyes were sleep-heavy and red, and he was almost as dull-looking, perhaps, as Morgan imagined him to be.

  “What did you say?” he asked.

  “I asked you if you thought you’d be elected this fall,” repeated Morgan, in mock seriousness.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” said Joe, turning from him indifferently.

  “Why, ain’t you runnin’ for President on the squash-vine ticket?” asked Morgan. “I heard you was the can’idate.”

  Joe got up from the table and moved his chair away with his foot. As he was thus occupied he saw Ollie’s shadow on the wall repeat a gesture of caution which she made to Morgan, a lifting of the hand, a shaking of the head. Even the shadow betrayed the intimate understanding between them. Joe went over and stood in the door.

  “No use for you to try to be a fool, Morgan; that’s been attended to for you already,” said he.

  There wasn’t much heart in Morgan’s laugh, but it would pass for one on account of the volume of sound.

  “Oh, let a feller have his joke, won’t you, Joe?” said he.

  “Go ahead,” granted Joe, leaning his shoulder against the jamb, facing out toward the dark.

  Morgan went over and put his hand on the great lad’s shoulder, with a show of friendly condescension.

  “What would the world be without its jokes?” he asked. And then, before anybody could answer: “It’d be like home without a mother.”

  Joe faced him, a slow grin spreading back to his ears.

  “Or a ready-reckoner,” said he.

  Morgan’s laugh that time was unfeigned.

  “Joe, you’ve missed your callin’,” said he. “You’ve got no business foolin’ away your time on a farm. With that solemn, long-hungry look of yours you ought to be sellin’ consumption cure and ringbone ointment from the end of a wagon on the square in Kansas City.”

  “Or books, maybe,” suggested Joe.

  “No-o-o,” said Morgan thoughtfully, “I wouldn’t just say you’re up to the level of books. But you might rise even to books if you’d cultivate your mind and brain. Well, I think I’ll fly up to roost. I’ve got to take an early start in the morning and clean up on this neck of the woods tomorrow. Good night, folks.”

  “I don’t suppose Isom’ll be home tonight,” Ollie ventured, as Morgan’s feet sounded on the stairs.

  “No, I guess not,” Joe agreed, staring thoughtfully at the black oblong of the door.

  “If he does come, I don’t suppose it’ll hurt him to eat something cold,” she said.

  “I’ll wait up a while longer. If he comes I can warm up the coffee for him,” Joe offered.

  “Then I’ll go to bed, too,” she yawned wearily.

  “Yes, you’d better go,” said he.

  Ollie’s room, which was Isom’s also when he was there, was in the front of the house, upstairs. Joe heard her feet along the hall, and her door close after her. Morgan was still tramping about in the room next to Joe’s, where he slept. It was the best room in the house, better than the one shared by Isom and his wife, and in the end of the house opposite to it. Joe sat quietly at the table until Morgan’s complaining bed-springs told him that the guest had retired. Then he mounted the narrow kitchen stairs to his own chamber.

  Joe sat on the edge of his bed and pulled off his boots, dropping them noisily on the floor. Then, with shirt and trousers on, he drew the quilt from his bed, took his pillow under his arm, and opened the door into the hall which divided the house from end to end.

  The moon was shining in through the double window in the end toward Ollie’s room; it lay on the white floor, almost
as bright as the sun. Within five feet of that splash of moonlight Joe spread his quilt. There he set his pillow and stretched his long body diagonally across the narrow hall, blocking it like a gate.

  Joe roused Morgan next morning at dawn, and busied himself with making a fire in the kitchen stove and bringing water from the well until the guest came down to feed his horse. Morgan was in a crusty humor. He had very little to say, and Joe did not feel that the world was any poorer for his silence.

  “This will be my last meal with you,” announced Morgan at breakfast. “I’ll not be back tonight.”

  Ollie was paler than usual, Joe noticed, and a cloud of dejection seemed to have settled over her during the night. She did not appear to be greatly interested in Morgan’s statement, although she looked up from her breakfast with a little show of friendly politeness. Joe thought that she did not seem to care for the agent; the tightness in his breast was suddenly and gratefully eased.

  “You haven’t finished out your week, there’ll be something coming to you on what you’ve paid in advance,” said she.

  “Let that go,” said Morgan, obliterating all claim with a sweep of his hand.

  “I think you’d better take back what’s coming to you,” suggested Joe.

  Morgan turned to him with stiff severity.

  “Are you the watch-dog of the old man’s treasury?” he sneered.

  “Maybe I am, for a day or two,” returned Joe, “and if you step on me I’ll bite.”

  He leveled his steady gray eyes at Morgan’s shifting orbs, and held them there as if to drive in some hidden import of his words. Morgan seemed to understand. He colored, laughed shortly, and busied himself buttering a griddle-cake.

  Ollie, pale and silent, had not looked up during this by-passage between the two men. Her manner was of one who expected something, which she dreaded and feared to face.

  Morgan took the road early. Joe saw him go with a feeling of relief. He felt like a swollen barrel which had burst its close-binding hoops, he thought, as he went back to the place where he dropped his scythe yesterday.

  As he worked through the long morning hours Joe struggled to adjust himself to the new conditions, resulting from the discovery of his own enlargement and understanding. It would be a harder matter now to go on living there with Ollie. Each day would be a trial by fire, the weeks and months a lengthening highway strewn with the embers of his own smoldering passion. Something might happen, almost any day, youth and youth together, galled by the same hand of oppression, that would overturn his peace forever. Yet, he could not leave. The bond of his mother’s making, stamped with the seal of the law, held him captive there.

  At length, after spending a harrowing morning over it, he reached the determination to stand up to it like a man, and serve Isom as long as he could do so without treason. When the day came that his spirit weakened and his continence failed, he would throw down the burden and desert. That he would do, even though his mother’s hopes must fall and his own dreams of redeeming the place of his birth, to which he was attached by a sentiment almost poetic, must dissolve like vapor in the sun.

  It was mid-afternoon when Joe finished his mowing and stood casting his eyes up to the sky for signs of rain. There being none, he concluded that it would be safe to allow yesterday’s cutting to lie another night in the field while he put in the remainder of the day with his scythe in the lower orchard plot, where the clover grew rank among the trees.

  Satisfied that he had made a showing thus far with which Isom could find no fault, Joe tucked the snath of his scythe under his arm and set out for that part of the orchard which lay beyond the hill, out of sight of the barn and house, and from that reason called the “lower orchard” by Isom, who had planted it with his own hand more than thirty years ago.

  There noble wine-sap stretched out mighty arms to fondle willow-twig across the shady aisles, and maidenblush rubbed cheeks with Spitzenberg, all reddening in the sun. Under many of the trees the ground was as bare as if fire had devastated it, for the sun never fell through those close-woven branches from May to October, and there no clover grew. But in the open spaces between the rows it sprang rank and tall, troublesome to cut with a mower because of the low-swinging, fruit-weighted limbs.

  Joe waded into this paradise of fruit and clover bloom, dark leaf and straining bough, stooping now and then to pick up a fallen apple and try its mellowness with his thumb. They were all hard, and fit only for cider yet, but their rich colors beguiled the eye into betrayal of the palate. Joe fixed his choice upon a golden willow-twig. As he stood rubbing the apple on his sleeve, his eye running over the task ahead of him in a rough estimate of the time it would require to clean up the clover, he started at sight of a white object dangling from a bough a few rods ahead of him. His attention curiously held, he went forward to investigate, when a little start of wind swung the object out from the limb and he saw that it was a woman’s sun-bonnet, hanging basket-wise by its broad strings. There was no question whose it was; he had seen the same bonnet hanging in the kitchen not three hours before, fresh from the ironing board.

  Joe dropped his apple unbitten, and strode forward, puzzled a bit over the circumstance. He wondered what had brought Ollie down there, and where she was then. She never came to that part of the orchard to gather wind-falls for the pigs–she was not gathering them at all during Isom’s absence, he had relieved her of that–and there was nothing else to call her away from the house at that time of the day.

  The lush clover struck him mid-thigh, progress through it was difficult. Joe lifted his feet like an Indian, toes turned in a bit, and this method of walking made it appear as if he stalked something, for he moved without noise.

  He had dropped his scythe with the apple, his eyes held Ollie’s swinging bonnet as he approached it as if it were some rare bird which he hoped to steal upon and take. Thus coming on, with high-lifted feet, his breath short from excitement, Joe was within ten yards of the bonnet when a voice sounded behind the intervening screen of clover and boughs.

  Joe dropped in his tracks, as if ham-strung, crouched in the clover, pressed his hands to his mouth to stifle the groan that rose to his lips. It was Morgan’s voice. He had come sneaking back while the watch-dog was off guard, secure in the belief that he had gone away. As Joe crouched there hidden in the clover, trembling and cold with anger, Morgan’s voice rose in a laugh.

  “Well, I wouldn’t have given him credit for that much sense if I hadn’t seen him with my own eyes,” said he.

  “He’s smarter than he looks,” said Ollie, their voices distinct in Joe’s shamed ears, for it was as quiet in the orchard as on the first day.

  They both laughed over what she said.

  “He thinks I’m gone, he’ll go to bed early tonight,” said Morgan. “Don’t bother about bringing anything with you.”

  “Not even my diamonds?” she laughed.

  Morgan’s gruffer mirth joined her, and Joe found himself straining to hear, although he despised himself for spying and eavesdropping, even on guilt.

  “We can get on without the diamonds,” said Morgan, “and I don’t suppose you’ve got any ball dresses or sealskin cloaks?”

  “Three calico wrappers that he’s bought me, and a dress or two that I had when I came,” said Ollie, bitterly.

  “You’ll have all you want in a day or two, honey,” said Morgan, in comforting voice.

  They were silent a while; then Joe heard her ask the time. Morgan told her it was half-past four.

  “Oh, I had no idea it was that late–time goes so fast when I’m with you! I must go back to the house now, Joe might come in and find me gone.”

  “Yes, I’d like to wring his damned neck!” said Morgan.

  “He’s a good boy, Curtis,” she defended, but with lightness, “but he’s a little––”

  She held her words back coquettishly.

  “Heh?” queried Morgan.

  “Jealous, you old goose! Can’t you see it?”

 
Morgan had a great laugh over that. From the sound of his voice Joe knew that he was standing, and his whole body ached with the fear that they would discover him lying there in the clover. Not that he was afraid of Morgan, but that he dreaded the humiliation which Ollie must suffer in knowing that her guilty tryst had been discovered.

  “I’ll meet you at the gate, I’ll have the buggy on down the road a little ways,” Morgan told her. “There’s only a little while between you and liberty now, sweetheart.”

  Joe dared not look up nor move, but he needed no eyes to know that Morgan kissed her then. After that he heard her running away toward the house. Morgan stood there a little while, whistling softly. Soon Joe heard him going in the direction of the road.

  Morgan was quite a distance ahead when Joe sprang out of his concealment and followed him, for he wanted to give Ollie time to pass beyond ear-shot of the orchard. As Joe made no attempt to smother the sound of his feet, Morgan heard him while he was still several yards behind him. He turned, stopped, and waited for Joe to come up.

  Joe’s agitation was plain in his face, his shocked eyes stared out of its pallor as if they had looked upon violence and death.

  “What’s the matter, kid?” inquired Morgan carelessly.

  “I’ve got something to say to you,” answered Joe thickly. He was panting, more from rage than exertion; his hands trembled.

  Morgan looked him over from boots to bandless hat with the same evidence of curiosity as a person displays when turning some washed-up object with the foot on the sands. It was as if he had but an abstract interest in the youth, a feeling which the incident had obtruded upon him without penetrating the reserve of his private cogitations.