Read Ebook: Thrifty Stock and Other Stories by Williams Ben Ames

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Ebook has 2253 lines and 91407 words, and 46 pages

And this was the first encounter between the tender of trees and Lucia Moore.

Her father had bought the farm during the winter from Dan Howe, who moved away to Augusta. Dan, Fraternity said, made a good thing out of it. He had paid eighteen hundred, two years before, and had sold off three hundred dollars' worth of hard wood for ship timbers, carted to Camden. The price Moore paid him was thirty-three hundred dollars. Moore had thought the figure high; but there was in the man a hunger for contact with the soil. His father had been a farm boy, had harked back to his youthful days in reminiscence during his later years. His death left Moore some fifty-two hundred dollars, and made it possible for him to escape from the small store he had run for years in Somerville, at a yearly profit less than he might have earned as salary. He and his wife had perceived, by that time, that Lucia--they had christened her Lucy--was a problem in need of solving. Lucia liked moving pictures, and dancing, and boys, and she was not strong. Country life, they thought, would be good for her; and Moore did not cavil at Dan Howe's price. Save for a few hundred dollars, he put the remainder of his legacy, and his own savings, into a newly organized automobile company which seemed to him promising, and came to the hills above Fraternity.

Since then, he had been learning by experience that a horse which can be bought for seventy dollars is probably not worth it, and that pigs cannot profitably be raised with no milk to feed them, and that the directions in printed manuals of the art of farming are not so complete and so reliable as they seem. He was not a practical man. Even the automobile investment had turned out badly; the company was now quietly defunct, without even the formality of a receiver. And he owed a mounting bill at Will Bissell's store. If it had been possible, he would have escaped from the farm and returned to bondage; but no one would buy the place, and his debts anchored him.

It was Lucia--she had, it appeared, some grain of sense in her--who suggested one day that he might raise apples. "Johnny Dree does," she explained. This was in early fall, and she had seen Johnny once or twice since that first encounter--at her instance, and not at his. Also she had asked questions, surprisingly shrewd.

Her father nodded. "He's got a good orchard," he agreed.

"He's been picking Wolf Rivers right along," said Lucia wisely. "He says you can pick the big ones, and the others will grow to make up for it, and he's going to have hundreds of barrels to sell next month."

"I've looked at our trees," her father told her. "The apples aren't good for anything but cider. Full of worms and things."

"Johnny Dree says you've got to take care of a tree," she insisted impatiently. "But he says--" She hesitated, seeking to remember the word he had used. "He says your trees are good, thrifty stock."

"It takes years to make an orchard, Lucy," he said wearily. "You're talking about impossible things."

The swift temper which sometimes possessed the girl flamed up at him. "You make me sick!" she cried. "You just sit back and let the world walk over you. You've stuck yourself with this damned farm, and now you're going to sit still and let it smother you. Why don't you try to do something, anyway? Johnny says you've got good orchard land as there is. But you just look wise and think you know it all, and won't do anything."

Her mother said wearily: "Lucy, you oughtn't to swear at your father."

"Well, he makes me mad!" the girl cried, furiously defiant. "He's such a damned stubborn fool!"

Moore wiped his forehead with his handkerchief and smiled weakly. "I guess I'm a failure, all right, Lucia," he agreed. "You're right to swear at a father like me."

At his humility, her revulsion was as swift as her anger had been; tenderness swept her. She pressed against him, where he sat beside the table, and with her thin arm drew his head against her fleshless bosom. "You're not, either, papa!" she cried passionately. "You're always so patient with me. But I do wish you'd talk to Johnny Dree!"

He reached up to touch her cheek caressingly. "That's all right, honey," he said.

"But you will talk to Johnny?"

The man nodded, at last. "All right, Lucy. Yes, I'll talk to him."

Johnny Dree found a little time, even during the busy weeks of the apple picking, to go with Moore through his orchard, and to search out the trees scattered along the stone walls. He began the work of pruning and trimming them, showed Moore, and showed Lucy, how to continue it. Bade Moore plow under the thick sod around the base of each tree. "Nothing like grass to steal the water an apple tree needs," he explained. "Grass is worse than weeds." Before the snow came, much had been done. Moore said once, diffidently:

"I'd like to hire you to help me along with this, Dree!"

But Johnny shook his head. "You don't want to hire help only when you have to," he said. "I just come up when I'm not busy at home. You can help me with haying and things, some time."

The seasons marched monotonously on. The crisp sunshine of fall days, with frost tingling in the air, gave way to bleaker weather, and then to the full rigors of harsh cold, when snow lay thick across the hills, blanketing everything. The routine of little tasks laid itself upon Moore, and upon his wife. Even Lucia, in greater and greater degree, submitted to it. But revolt was always very near the surface in the girl. One day she met Johnny Dree upon the road, and he asked in a friendly way: "Well, you getting to like it here?"

She was in ill humor that morning, and she flamed at him. "Oh, I hate it! I hate it!" she cried. "I wish to God I'd never seen this damned hole. But papa's got us into it, and we can't get out, and there's nothing to do but work and work. Sometimes I wish I were dead."

He had never heard her swear before; and he looked at her in some astonishment. She was, he thought, so small, and so serenely sweet to look upon that there was something incongruous in her profanity. But he did not speak of his thought at that time; said merely:

"Why, that's too bad. I thought you were getting to like it, maybe." And so passed on, leaving her curiously chastened by his very mildness.

There was an interminable sameness in the days. To rise early, to do the morning chores, and cook, and eat, and wash dishes, and dust, and cook, and eat, and wash dishes, and sew, and cook, and eat, and wash dishes, and read the paper, and go fumingly to bed. This was Lucia's bitter life. But because it is impossible to hold indignation always at its highest pitch, there were hours when she forgot to be unhappy; there were hours when she found something like pleasure in this ordered simplicity of life. Now and then Johnny came in of an evening, and sat in the dining room with them all and talked with her father about apple trees; and Lucia liked, at first, to practice her small cajoleries upon him. He quickly began to call her Lucia, then Lucy as her father and mother did. She preferred the simpler name, upon his simple lips. When the snow thinned and disappeared, and new grass pushed greenly up through the brown that clothed the fields, she was stronger than she had ever been. Her arms were rounding, her figure assuming the proportions for which it was designed; and her color no longer required external application. When Johnny took Moore into his own orchards and showed him how to apply the dormant spray, and how to search out the borers in the base of the trees and kill them with a bit of wire, or with a plug of poisoned cotton, and all the other mysteries of orchardry, Lucy liked to go along, and learned to do these tasks as well as Johnny, and better than her father did. The trees, fed with well-rotted manure which Johnny preferred to any chemical preparation, and freed from the competition of the grass and weeds which had surrounded them and blanketed their thirsty roots, throve and put out a great burst of bloom, and all the hillside was aglow with color. Lucy began to see hope of release from this long bondage here. When the apples were sold, if the market was good, Johnny thought they might make five or six hundred dollars in a year....

Then one midnight she awoke shivering in a sharp blast from her open window, and drew fresh blankets over her; and in the morning there was white frost on the ground, and Johnny came up the hill with a philosophic smile upon his face. Moore met him at the kitchen door.

"Well," said Johnny slowly. "We won't do well this year. This frost has nipped them. I guess not bearing will give your trees a chance to get a better start."

Moore accepted the calamity with mild protest. Said blankly: "No apples. Why, I've got to have something...."

But Lucy was not so mild. From the kitchen behind her father she pushed past him and out upon the porch, her eyes ablaze. "No apples!" she cried, in a voice like a scream. "Why not?"

"This frost has killed them," said Johnny, his eyes hardening.

She almost sprang at him, beat on his broad chest with her fists, and tears streamed down her face. "You fool! You damned fool!" she cried. "There've got to be apples. There've got to be! You said there would be! You said if we worked, there would be! If we sprayed the damned trees! Oh, you make me sick, with your lies! Oh, I hate this farm! I hate the damned trees...."

Johnny surprised her. He took her by the shoulders, gripping them till she winced. "Stop it, Lucy," he commanded.

"I won't!" she cried. "Let go of me...."

"Be still your noise," he said, no more loudly than before. But the insistence in his voice constrained her, and she began to weep bitterly, and slumped against him, shaken and half fainting. "You can't talk that way," he told her. "It's no way to talk. You got to be a sport. It's a part of the business, Lucy. Now you go in the house and wash your face and help with breakfast. I want to talk to your father. Go along."

Her father watched her; and his face was white with surprise and consternation. But Lucy turned and went obediently into the house, and he looked after her, and looked at Johnny Dree; and Johnny grinned, a little sheepishly.

"You see," he said, ignoring what had happened. "Thing is, you can raise some garden stuff, and some chickens and things, and get along. We're due for a good year next year."

Walter Moore nodded. "That's all right," he assented, and looked again at the door through which Lucy had gone. "But I'd like to shake hands with you, Dree. I'd like to shake your hand."

The stoic patience of the farmer, who serves a capricious master and finds his most treasured works casually destroyed by that master's slightest whim, takes time to learn, but is a mighty armor, when it has been put on. It was Johnny Dree's heritage; it was, in remoter line, the heritage also of Walter Moore. It bore them through that summer, and through the frost-hued glory of the fall. There is a pleasure in a task well done, regardless of reward; and when Moore surveyed his trees, he found this pleasure. Johnny Dree confirmed it. "They're like money in the bank, Mr. Moore," he said. "You can't lose it, and it pays you interest right along. We're due for a good apple year, next year."

Moore nodded. "I'm beginning to like it here," he assented. "It was tough, at first. But I'm no worse in debt than I was last year, and I ought to pull out when the trees begin to bear."

"Aye," said Johnny Dree. "You've got something to build on, now. It'll go easier, from now on."

Moore had learned many things, in these months that had gone; and so had Lucy. And so had Johnny Dree. Lucy was teaching him a thing he had never had time to learn; she was teaching him to play. When snow came, he brought her, one day, snow-shoes; and thereafter they occasionally tramped the woods together, following the meandering trails of the small creatures of the forest, marking where a partridge had left a delicate tracery of footprints in the snow, exploring the great swamp below the hill where the cedars had been stripped of browse by the moose that wintered there. He found where deer were yarded, and took her to the place, and once they caught glimpses of the startled creatures, bounding away through the cumbering snow. There was a deepening understanding between these two; when they were together she talked almost constantly, and he scarce at all; but she could read his silences, and he understood her fountain-like loquacity. Through a keener understanding, she found matters to love in these hills and woods which were his world; she was, by slow degrees, forgetting the more obvious pleasures of her life before she came to Fraternity to dwell. They were, for the most part, as much isolated as though they lived upon an island in the sea; for, save for the nightly gatherings at Will Bissell's store, Fraternity folk are not overly social in their inclinations. Once he took her to a grange dance, and she found him surprisingly adequate in this new r?le, found an unsuspected pleasure in the rustic merry-making she would, two years before, have scorned. Johnny did not smoke, and she asked him why; he said he didn't want to waste the money. Yet once when he went to East Harbor, he brought her a flower, in a pot; and when she asked him if that wasn't wasting money, he smiled a little and said he did not think it was. One day, to torment him, she cried: "I'd give a lot for a cigarette. I haven't had one for days. Will you get me some, next time you're at the store. I don't dare buy them there."

Johnny merely smiled at her and replied: "I guess if you ever did smoke them, you don't any more."

One day her snow-shoe caught on a broken stub and threw her forward into the snow. She said: "Oh, damn!" More in jest than in anger. Lifting her to her feet, he commented:

"I shouldn't think a girl would swear much."

"I like to," she insisted. "It makes me feel good when I'm mad."

"I never could see it helped me any," he rejoined, mildly enough. But she thereafter guarded her tongue, until the necessity for restraint had disappeared. Self discipline was one of the things she learned from Johnny.

You could hardly say they had a romance. They grew together, as naturally as stock and scion grafted by his skilful hands. They had this great community of interest in the trees which were his work, which she had come to love. Their forward looking eyes were centered on the harvest time, now a scant year away, when the fruition of their labors could be expected; and their anticipations were tranquil and serene.

They talked, sometimes, of what he meant to make of his life. "You won't always be a farmer, will you?" she asked.

"I guess I will," he told her.

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