Читать книгу The Measure of a Man. A Tale of the Big Woods - Duncan Norman - Страница 4
ОглавлениеAN ENGAGEMENT WITH GOD
Swamp's End gave no impression of having taken permanent possession of the clearing in which it was situated. In suggestion it was rather a lumber-woods settlement which had not quite made up its mind about settling, being for the moment too much preoccupied with a bottle. It seemed, on second thought, merely to have squatted in a mud-puddle in the midst of the woods to rest its inebriated legs. The thirty-two shanty saloons of the high-street had certainly locked arms and gone into a drunken stupor in the cozy shelter of the pines. They leaned one against the other in singular and helpless dependence, necks limp, bodies lax and awry, hats cocked or gone; and they were quite unashamed of their scandalous condition, because, perhaps, they were in the fashion, and conducted themselves precisely as everybody expected them to behave, and after the approved model of those woods.
A push, of course—a vigorous push by John Fairmeadow—might have sent them sprawling; and Fairmeadow was even then on the trail from Elegant Corners to Big Rapids, momentarily approaching. But Pale Peter's place, the ramshackle hotel on the corner, might not have yielded so easily. It achieved an impression of sleepy sobriety, and it was at least steady on its legs. What other habitations there were—a lesser crew, compounded of logs, turf, pine-board and tar-paper, with a helpful addition of packing boxes—squatted near in various attitudes of inebriety, now lying, all beggared and listless, in a glowing summer haze and pause. No matter, however: the whole—the company of makeshift dwellings no less than the folk who went in and out—was peregrinating west by north on the heels of the slow-moving lumber camps; and what broken bodies and souls might be left with the refuse of the sojourn in the balsamic clearing concerned nobody.
The aspiring homesteaders would presently raise a city in that place and give it a new name.
It was an eventful day at Swamp's End—the still and mellow Sunday of John Fairmeadow's first professional appearance. The dog fight served importantly to gather the crowd, of course, and to enlist the hurrying Fairmeadow's attention; but the dog fight was not all. In the early hours of the morning—a warm, flushed dawn—a tote-wagon, drawn by two stolid black beasts, and gravely driven by Plain Tom Hitch, had arrived from the Bottle River camps, bearing the mortal remains of Gray Billy Batch, who had departed this life, much to the annoyance of the foreman of the drive, and doubtless to his own surprise and alarm, in the Rattle Water rapids below Big Bend of Bottle River. He had been a scurrilous dog when the breath of life was in him, a sour and unloved wastrel of his days, morose, unkempt, ill-mouthed, in a rage with all the world, save one young heart, and least kind of all to the body they presently fished from the swirl and foam of the eddy below Rattle Water, and to the misled soul that had sped to the solution of its own mystery.
It is to be regretted that a division of the Bottle River drive, employed in the neighbourhood, and thus fortunately vantaged to observe the departure of Gray Billy Batch, experienced a flush of rejoicing at the moment of inevitable farewell. When, however, the dripping corpse lay on the bank, the feet still in the wash of the water, the gray face in the shadow of the birches, the Bottle River drive stood voiceless and quiet in this Presence; and, perhaps, old terrors awoke, and the strings of memory were touched, and the depths gave tongue. At any rate, in the more charitable mood of that soft afternoon, it was informally resolved, and without Gray Billy Batch's consent or interest in the extraordinary proceeding, that the only surviving relative of the deceased should forthwith be apprized of the lamentable fatality and assured of the deep sense of personal loss under which his associates of the Bottle River camps drooped disconsolate.
The surviving relative was Patience, Gray Billy Batch's daughter, a sweet, brown mite, with a child's curious outlook upon the world of Swamp's End, though now fast and shyly approaching her eighteenth year. It was Saturday evening, at sunset, with the breeze fallen away to an odorous breath of air, when Gingerbread Jenkins, sufficiently fortified, but still agitated and heavy with his errand, came upon her, waiting in the dooryard of the shack, a listless log dwelling which Gray Billy Batch had knocked together at the edge of the clearing in which Swamp's End squatted. "Pattie, my dear," said he, with a soothing hand on the girl's shoulder, "your pop won't be comin' home t'-night."
The girl looked up in quick alarm.
"You see," Gingerbread added, "he's—delayed."
"That's funny," Pattie replied; "he most always comes home from the Bottle River on Saturday night. I—I—been waitin'."
Gingerbread Jenkins sighed. "Not t'-night," said he. "You see, he's—hindered."
"I—I—I been waitin'," pretty little Pattie Batch complained.
"He's—hindered," Gingerbread blankly repeated.
"Is he comin' t'-morrow?"
"Well, yes," Gingerbread admitted, more heartily; "you see, he'll be fetched."
"What say?"
"He'll come home, all right," Gingerbread repeated, "fetched—in a sort of a way."
"Is he drunk?"
"Drunk? Oh, my, no!" Gingerbread Jenkins protested; "he ain't drunk, my dear."
"Is he near drunk?"
Gingerbread Jenkins, hard put to it for words wherewithal in the presence of a lady, ejaculated: "Good gracious, no!"
"That's funny," said Pattie Batch. "Where's he gettin' drunk?"
"He ain't gettin' drunk nowheres."
"Not gettin' drunk?" Pattie Batch exclaimed. "That's funny."
"You see," Gingerbread gently exclaimed "your pop won't be drunk no more."
"Is he—is he—dead?"
Gingerbread Jenkins was flustered by this abrupt question. It bewildered him, too, to learn, all in a flash of revelation, that Gray Billy Batch had been loved and would be mourned. "Oh, well, now!" he replied, hurriedly, "I wouldn't go so far as t' say that. I'd say," he explained, lamely, "that he was—that he was—engaged."
"Who's his business with?"
Gingerbread Jenkins' bleared eyes were all at once flushed. "Your pop's business, my dear," he answered, softly, driven to the disclosure at last, "is with God."
"Pop's dead!" the girl gasped.
Gingerbread's eyes overflowed. Off came his old cloth cap. He nodded. "Pop's dead," said he.
"Pop's dead!" Pattie repeated, her gray eyes round with wonder, which no pain had yet disturbed. "Pop's dead!" She brooded upon this new thing; and presently, with a start, her hands fallen upon her agitated bosom, she turned to the shack, wherein, through the open door, she seemed to discover her loneliness, but not yet to be troubled by it. She looked, then, without concern, to the high, darkening sky, and to the flaring sunset clouds, above the black pines, whence her wistful glance fell to the besotted settlement, huddled in the gathering shadows beyond the confines of her familiar place. "He's dead!" she whispered. "Pop's dead!"
"Hush!" Gingerbread Jenkins besought her; "don't cry."
She was not crying; she looked up to him with the light of interest lively in her gray eyes, for which, perhaps, the monotony of her days is to be blamed. "When's the fun'l?" she inquired.
"Eh?" Gingerbread Jenkins ejaculated. "When's what?"
"When's the fun'l?"
"Whose?"
"Why, pop's!"
"Oh!" said Gingerbread, enlightened but not advised, and now taken aback. "I see."
"Goin' t' be a fun'l, isn't there?"
"Eh?"
"Isn't there goin' t' be no fun'l?"
"Well, you see," said Gingerbread, "he'll be buried."
"That all?"
"Well," Gingerbread admitted, "I haven't heard nobody say nothin' about no funeerial."
"No fun'l?" Pattie wailed. "No fun'l a-tall?"
Gingerbread deliberated. The matter of obsequies had not been included in his instructions. But something had to be done to correct this flow of tears. "Didn't hear nobody say nothin' much about no funeerial," he hedged.
Pattie whimpered.
"But I'm told," Gingerbread ventured, "that the boys had a little game like that in mind."
Pattie began to cry outright.
"You see," Gingerbread hastily proceeded, "there was a deal o' talk about consultin' the only survivin' re-lation about the percession."
The girl looked up with a wet and glistening smile.
"An' there'll be a funeerial," Gingerbread Jenkins declared, flushed with tender determination, "or there'll be hell t' pay on Bottle River!"
And when the uplifted Gingerbread Jenkins went away resolved upon his own concerns—to agitate a spectacle, in fact, worthy of easing poor Pattie Batch's grief—Pattie Batch did not go into the cabin. She did not so much as look in that ghostly direction; she turned her back, with a frightened little shudder, and strayed off to the twilit woods. She did not go far, at all: she dared not; it was darkening fast, and she was afraid as she had never before known fear. But she found at the edge of the clearing a companionable patch of wild-flowers, come to their shy and fragrant blooming in the sunny weather of that day; and she plucked them, while the soft light lasted, and adorned herself, according to her nature—God's jewels, flung broadcast in love upon the earth, inspiring no avarice, now peeping from her cloud of dark hair, and clasped around her slender wrists, and wreathing her shoulders, an acceptable garland. It was a pleasant thing to do; she was distracted by the delights of her fairy occupation and by her thronging fancies, as she had always been, on the edge of the woods at twilight. All the while she sang very softly some sad expression of her mood, in the way she had; and no brooding cadence of the wild-throated woods, no amorous serenade of the dusk, no nesting twitter, was sweeter, none more spontaneously swelling, than her clear, melancholy notes.
It was night: she must go back to her known place.
"I got t' be a man," thought she.
It was what Gray Billy Batch used to tell her—scurrilous Billy Batch who loved nothing in the world beside her. "You got t' be a little man," he used to say; and Pattie had altogether mastered the teaching.
"I got t' be a little man," she determined, again, "like pop used t' say."
So she gave her fears to the shadows of night, in a long sigh, and set out, with a resolute shake of her little head, which showered the flowers from her hair, and with a step that was not afraid. But she was not to be alone in the cabin, after all, it seemed; she came, there, into the disquieting company of her future.
"I s'pose I got t' do something," she mused, much troubled.
It was not clear what that should be.
"Can't stay here all alone no more," she determined. "I just simply can't."
By and by she busied herself upon a black gown, which had been her mother's, long ago; and she ripped, and she basted, and she tucked, and she sewed, singing a little, like a child who cannot comprehend a swiftly encompassing sorrow, and sighing a little, too, and now and again overcome by a vision of her desolate state, whereupon she cried bitterly. It was dawn—flushing mild and rosy over all the redolent, dewy, lively world—before her nimble little fingers rested. And she sighed, then, and having recited her prayers lay down to sleep, in poignant grief, and sobbed herself far away from all her trouble. Poor little Pattie Batch—lying, now, forsaken, in Gray Billy Batch's cabin at the edge of the big, black woods! Unknowing little soul, sweet and trustful—cast now by Death into the vast confusion of life! But Pattie Batch was going to be a li'l' man. Yes, sir, by ginger! Pattie Batch was going to be a li'l' man in every fortune.
