Читать книгу Forgive Us Our Trespasses - Lloyd C. Douglas - Страница 5

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Her entrance into the grim little dining-room was effected with much difficulty. She could have wished that her first appearance before her household, as an adult in good and regular standing, might have been somewhat more impressive.

Circumstances had decreed that Julia must bump her way crabwise through the obstinate swinging-door from the smoky kitchen with a precariously poised platter of bacon in one hand and the big battered coffee-pot in the other, while the family, glancing up from its first round of fried mush and sorghum molasses—with which munitions Martha had preceded her—wondered, not without warrantable anxiety, whether she would make port with all her cargo.

It was not to be expected that her lazy and surly brothers, much less absent-minded old Ferd—whose fork trembled in a long, slim hand that had been obviously intended for more esteemed employment than shingling barns and blowing stumps—would spring to her rescue. That would have been "a-puttin' on style," an affectation held in snarling contempt by Hiram and Elmer. Indeed, their sentiment on this subject was commonly shared by the entire male species, so far as she had been able to observe.

As for Greta, who, at twenty-two, had already well developed an impish talent for the enjoyment of other people's discomfiture; and as for Susan, whose twenty-seven virginal years and one hundred and sixty-seven pounds gave such alarming promise of unarrestable progress in both dimensions that she was frankly envious of her willowy young sister, Julia's predicament was clearly no concern of theirs.

Martha, seated with her angular back to the door, which now capitulated with a savage swish and a sullen bang, cleared a place at her elbow for the brown-stained coffee-pot, and dutifully remarked that this was Julia's eighteenth birthday.

While still in her teens, Martha had accidentally lost an upper canine. Morbidly self-conscious, her misfortune had worried her grievously; but there had been no necessity for replacing the missing tooth. By skilful practice, Martha had been able to conceal this disfigurement with the corner of her lip, a technique which had produced a meticulousness of articulation oddly inconsistent with the slovenly elisions and shockingly bad syntax demanded by her righteous passion to avoid "a-puttin' on airs."

"Yes; your little sister," reiterated Martha, her choice of a pronoun indicating the maternal relationship she sustained to the family, "is came of age."

Brief, bucolic felicitations from the boys were mumbled through the mush, to which old Ferd—so stung with remorse over having no gift for her that he did not even raise his eyes—added solemnly that Martha could always be depended on to remember the days.

Depositing her awkward burdens, Julia stiffened to a martial stance, brought her full red lips to a determined pucker, tossed her curly head airily, and swept the breakfast-table with a look of pretended challenge, as if to say that she was quite grown up now and they must all have a care how they treated her.

A moment later she was repentantly reflecting that previous experiences might have warned her against indulging in this bit of playful pantomime. Julia's sporadic efforts to dramatize some situation for the amusement of her family had been uniformly unsuccessful. It would have been very pleasant, she often thought, to belong to a household quick to interpret and enjoy a little good-natured clowning. It was not that their stodginess and lack of sparkle evoked her contempt: she was too naïve to be contemptuous. Indeed, she had never known—except in Little Women, long since read to rags and learned by heart—any such family as the rollicking, bantering, make-believe crew that constituted her ideal home.

On one's birthday, however, it might reasonably be hoped that the family would waive its habitual taciturnity, and humour a whim; so, quite recklessly overplaying her premeditated skit, Julia glared at her brothers and sisters with a mock severity signifying her newly acquired dignity. But they had already returned to their bacon and mush; and, noting that no one of them—not even her father—showed signs of sharing her mood, she doffed her archness, rubbed a damp wisp of blue-black hair from her low forehead with the back of a shapely wrist—astonishingly like old Ferd's, only daintier—and slipped into her accustomed place on the end of the pine bench beside Susan.

"Reckon you'll be too cocky to live with, now yer old enough t' be yer own boss," observed Hiram, who, on second thought, had decided not to leave Julia under the impression that he, at least, was too thick-witted to have taken note of her brief charade.

Equally unwilling to be considered incapable of clever deduction, Greta remarked to her plate that Julia would probably be leaving home, one of these days, to go on the stage.

Old Ferd hitched about in his chair, and for a moment Julia thought he was going to offer a comment.

"Julia's always been a-playin' she was somethin' else besides what she is," said Susan.

"Well—she ain't harmed no one by a-doin' that," growled Ferd. "She come by it honestly enough. When I was her age, or thereabouts—"

"More coffee, paw?" inquired Martha, loudly, as if he were deaf.

"It's sure a-goin' to be a scorcher, Gret," observed Susan,—fanning her goitre with the bib of her apron, and peering through the open doorway toward the road.

"There goes old Len Bausermann with his pick 'n' shovel," reported Elmer, following his plump sister's eyes to the highway.

"He'll be a-diggin' Granny Hartsock's grave today," explained Hiram, without turning to look.

"A saint," murmured Martha, unctuously, "if they ever was one."

"Who—Len?" chaffed Elmer. "That consarned old chicken-thief?"

Susan and Greta laughed immoderately. Martha, easily offended when her piety was ridiculed, drew down the corners of her mouth, and pouted. Elmer explored a defective wisdom-tooth with a pointed quill, and grinned.

Old Ferd knew they didn't care to hear his story—none of them but Julia. He could always be sure of an attentive listener in Julia, though sometimes she asked too many questions.

The family's rude indifference occasioned him no surprise. He had been on the defensive for so long in a home to which he contributed almost nothing, his small earnings claimed by Jake Heffel, that he had no right to be indignant over such discourtesies. He poured the thin coffee into his saucer with a shaky hand, crumbled bread into it, and sprinkled the dish with brown sugar, intent upon his occupation. Julia, toying absently with her food, studied his deep-lined, mobile face, confident that she was following his reminiscences as closely as if he had been given encouragement to recite them.

He was, she knew, skipping hurriedly over the Dresden part of it; the part that most interested her; the part that really mattered. She had never been able to construct a very clear picture of his boyhood home. The blurry impression she had of it was an accumulated synthesis of chance remarks accidentally dropped, and laconic answers to her importunate queries in the rare moments when he seemed willing to talk about his youth.

He would be out in his tiny shop under the big maple, standing at his home-made lathe, turning wooden pins for the mending of Squire Craig's harrow-teeth. The fine hickory shavings would come writhing and screaming from the point of his blue-hot chisel. He would pretend not to notice her, sitting on the old tool-chest, intently watching him.

"Let me treadle it, father. I like to."

The huge oak balance-wheel overhead would lumber to a creaking stop.

"Mind you don't get yer foot caught under it, now!"

Julia would snuggle it between his arms and stand so close, her back to his breast, pumping the broad pedal that made the patched belt go snapping and crackling on the great wooden fly-wheel, threatening to bring it down on their heads; her father's warm, hairy forearm, tense on the chisel, moist with sweat and powdered with fine sawdust, brushing her cheek, almost as if he caressed her.

Panting with exertion, she would look up over her shoulder, and smile, when he signalled her to stop.

"You're more like her every day, Julia!" he would murmur, as the machinery idled to a standstill.

"Because my hair dips down to a point here in the middle?"

"That—and the deep dimple in your chin."

"And she had the same kind of eyes that we have."

"Exactly; that's where we got 'em."

"The others don't have them, father.... Funny—isn't it?"

Thus drawn together in these brief intimacies, there would be some talk about her Grandmother Mueller—Ferd had changed his name to Miller, when coming to Indiana, because the people invariably mispronounced it; or was that the exact reason, Julia often wondered, when she had grown up—Grandmother Mueller who always seemed to be a mere slip of a girl, stooping over the flower-beds in the garden that was so—

"How big was it, father—honestly: big as our potato-patch?"

He would chuckle derisively.

"Our potato-patch! Huh! Six—eight—ten times as big!"

Then there would be some vigorous prodding of memory for more information about the house. It was a great, rambling, stone house with tall, broad chimneys and many gables. Yes—his own room had a gable, and there was a window-seat with a rose-coloured velvet cushion. Wrens nested in a little box under the eaves, and when it stormed, the branch of an elm swept the diamond-shaped panes of the mullioned window.

"And was there honestly a fountain in the middle of a big pool, father?"

"Yes—and lily-pads."

"And really goldfish, like you said?"

"Yes, daughter—but don't you think you'd better go and help Martha now?"

"And you would feed them in the mornings—and they always knew when you were coming, and swam close to the edge to meet you?"

Of late Julia was becoming painfully aware of their lost heritage. Her day-dreams were bounded by the high stone wall, made warm and friendly by the tall hollyhocks his mother loved. On summer afternoons she fancied herself sitting in the rose-arbour, hard-by the large, half-timbered workshop and studio where distinguished guests were so often entertained to tea.

"Tea!—in a shop!" she had exclaimed, the first time he had told her about it.

"But it wasn't a little shop like this here, Julia. Seems to me like it had five or six big rooms. I disremember, exactly. The people came to see the carvings; almost every afternoon, somebody. And there would be exhibitions, couple o' times a year. Lots o' people came then, from long distances, Paris and London."

"Would they talk to you, father?"

"I was just a young feller."

"Going to school?"

"No—I had a tutor.... But I was always a-hangin' around the shop, and I can't remember when I wasn't a-playin' with chisels, and a-makin' things.... Once I heard a Count—I disremember his name—a-tellin' somebody that Mueller on a rood screen made it worth more 'n' its weight in gold."

And there was a river.

Julia felt almost certain, as she sat watching her father's slow motions with his spoon, oblivious of the dull prattle of his family's table-talk, that he was dreaming of that river. You went through a thick oaken door set in the garden wall. The door had heavy wrought-iron hinges, and was always locked o' nights with a key that must have weighed all of a pound. You went through the door, and there was the river. The banks were rounded and grassy, and a long row of tall poplars grew on our side, "their leaves always a-flutterin' whether there was any wind or not." He disremembered the name of the river, but "one of the swans was called 'William Tell.'" There were boats, too; a couple o' canoes and a dory and a punt with a red and blue canopy—

"How much did Lafe Shock git fer his gol-danged shoats?" Elmer was inquiring of Hiram.

"Four cents, I heared," rumbled Hiram, puffing at his sputtering pipe. "'Bout enough to pay fer th' corn he'd chucked into 'em."

"Corn—hell!" scoffed Elmer. "Them shoats never seen a grain o' corn. All they ever et was swill!"

"Lot o' good the Shock swill woulda done' em," sneered Greta.

"They was so gol-danged poor," expatiated Elmer, "that I bet Lafe had to soak 'em afore they'd hold slop."

—and a punt with a red and blue canopy; and, sometimes, in the evening, his mother sat in the punt, with her guitar, and sang ballads to him, very sweetly. No—his father never joined them. No—he disremembered what the songs were.

Now Julia was at sea with her father, standing beside him as he stoked his way, with blistered hands, on a slow boat; she was landing with him, bewilderedly, at Castle Garden. Much had happened since the swans and the ballads in the evening; but it was quite impossible to recover intervening events. His father had whipped him savagely when he was sixteen. He wouldn't tell her why; but it had something to do with his mother. She had cried desperately, and that night he ran away. The tutor had helped him get away. The tutor had gone away, too, that same night.

Judging by the confident tightening of his lips, Julia knew he was in New York now, apprenticed to Lamb's Studios. Four years of that passed in a few seconds. Now he was hard at work on the big walnut eagle—his first important assignment—that was to be poised on a lectern for Saint John's in Philadelphia. Lamb's had taken him in on the strength of the Mueller tradition, and had given him every possible encouragement, undisguisedly rejoicing in his budding talent. Every day he was improving his skill; every night he was poring over his new books, determined to perfect his English.

Then came the war. Julia saw the clouds gathering on the seamed old face. It was all over now. He had gone back to Lamb's in a faded uniform topped by the absurd little cap with the stiff visor that he still wore, rather rakishly, on Decoration Day—a day Julia dreaded, for he always marched unsteadily, and joked a good deal, when he should have been silent and dignified.

Now he had returned to the Lamb Studios, stubbly, fuddled, and pungent, after a fortnight's spree. All was forgiven. Soldiers would be soldiers. Lamb's were disappointed, but hopeful. Why, Mr. Joseph Lamb, himself!—(Ferd had been too proud of that recognition to keep it a secret, even if its implications were not to his own credit)—Mr. Joseph Lamb, himself, had pleaded with him to straighten up, and be a man. Surely, nobody could have asked for a better friend, Ferd often remarked, than "Mr. Joseph," who, it was said, had given up his plans to enter the ministry because he thought he could do more for religion by adding something to its beauty. "Mr. Joseph Lamb was a great artist!" Ferd would say. "Yes sir!"

No—it wasn't the fault of Lamb's Studios if he had drunk himself practically into the gutter at a time when a returned soldier's dissipation was easily pardoned, but not so easily capitalized in a profession demanding the utmost steadiness of eye and hand. Ferd was so proud of his erstwhile craftsmanship and its stern exactions that he was willing to admit his own inability to meet its requirements, shamelessly confessing the cause of his failure, as if his very drunkenness, at twenty-four, was to be talked about in tones of respect, seeing it had been important enough to collide successfully with an esteemed art.

So—that chapter was finished, then, and her father had ceased being an artist. Julia recognized the exact moment when he "took to the road" en route to Pennsylvania in quest of a distant cousin who owned "a bit of a truck-farm." Oddly enough, no exigency of poverty had ever induced him to part with the books he had bought in the golden days when he was so brilliantly succeeding at Lamb's. He had stored them in New York; had kept himself sober long enough to save the money required for their transportation to his new home; for, now, he had a home. He had married the plump, shy, awkward, yellow-haired daughter of an improvident neighbour who indifferently operated a small sawmill, "mortgaged, by Golly, down to the last cleat in the old pulley-belt."

Julia knew how it always amused him to repeat that phrase. He smiled, now, and glanced up furtively to make sure the family's attention was occupied. She dodged his eyes and took no further risks with them until she was sure he was in "pardnership" with his unthrifty father-in-law, who, hearing rumours of advantages to be had by moving to Northern Indiana, "where everybody was a-makin' big money loggin' and gettin' out railroad ties," had suggested the immediate migration of his populous, penniless tribe.

Ferd grinned again, rather wryly. Julia was not quite sure where we were in the story, now. Perhaps he was thinking about something he had never told her—something not very pleasant, perhaps; something not much to our credit, she feared.

He had taken along to Indiana their simple, mostly homemade, household gear, the precious books—English classics—which were to become a veritable Godsend to Julia!—and his only military trophy, his little brown jug. Occasionally, of a late Saturday night in Heffel's Saloon in Cromwell, when Ferd and his cronies had passed from the bragging stage to the distinctly maudlin, nose-trumpeting phase of bland confessions and remorses over their respective might-have-beens, he would pull himself together long enough to make a pathetic joke of his own disaster.

"Yep"—Ferd would say, grinning drunkenly through his tears—"that was my only military trophy—that there little brown jug."

He glanced up now, out of the tail of his eye, and found Julia regarding him with rapt interest. A bit disconcerted by this intense scrutiny (sometimes Julia's penetrating knowledge of his moods and meditations annoyed him, just a little), he pushed back his chair, and muttered, partly to himself, partly to her:

"Yep—that's the way it goes."

He gnawed off a large bite of Horseshoe chewing-tobacco from the plug he had rummaged from the depth of his overall-pocket, and, without a backward glance, strolled out through the doorway toward his shop.

Perhaps he would continue his reminiscences while he worked on the Snell baby's pine coffin; but he had already covered everything in his story that had any interest for Julia. Except for such minor episodes as the births of his five children, and the death of Minnie, six years ago, his history was an unpunctuated monotony of trivial jobs—building corncribs, replacing timbers in the forebay at Austin's gristmill, planing and hanging Squire Craig's screen-doors every April, and stowing them in the loft of the woodhouse every November—a chronicle as sterile of novelty as the legendary minstrel's redundant report that now another locust came and carried away another grain of corn.

Julia wondered, sometimes, whether her father ever missed her mother. It was obvious that he did not grieve for her. Minnie's biological contribution to Julia's character was no more in evidence than the influence of a hen on a golden pheasant's egg. Julia was all Ferd's.

Minnie had been an ignorant, whining, colourless, unimaginative creature, her quite astounding bulk disproving the adage that stout people are invariably optimistic. Save for the fact that she had been an economical housekeeper (as she had plenty of reason to be), and was thought to put up the best green-tomato pickles in the Oak Grove neighbourhood, nothing important was remembered of her; not even by her own kin.

A litter of empty, overturned, glass fruit-jars on her grave in the Baptist Cemetery which, on the anniversaries of her death, the melancholy Martha stuffed with garden flowers, ironically testified to Minnie's previous relation to other natural objects in a world where she had dully foozled a chance to present society with a rehabilitated wood-carver of exceptional virtuosity, and had contented herself with the excellence of her piccalilli.