Читать книгу Oliver October - George Barr McCutcheon - Страница 4

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Oliver Baxter, junior, was born on a vile October day in 1890—at seven o’clock in the morning, to be exact. People were more concerned over the plight of a band of gypsies, camped on the edge of the swamp below the Baxter house, however, than they were over the birth of Oliver, although he was a very important child.

The gypsies, journeying southward, had been overtaken by an unexampled and unseasonable blizzard, and citizens of Rumley, in whom curiosity rather than pity had been excited by the misfortunes of the shivering nomads, neglected for the moment that civic pride which heretofore had never failed to respond to any increase in population as provided solely by nature.

First off, Rumley was a very small place at the beginning of the ’nineties. A birth or a death was a matter of profound importance. In the case of the former, all Rumley knew about it months before it happened, and rejoiced. A form of anticipatory interest, amounting almost to impatience, centered upon any expectant mother who ultimately was to add another inhabitant to the town. It was absolutely impossible for a baby to be born in Rumley without the whole town knowing about it within the hour. For that matter, it was equally impossible for any one to die with any degree of privacy unless he went about it deliberately as did Bob Cheever who stole off into the woods back in ’81 and hung himself so cunningly that twenty-four hours passed before his body was discovered.

But, on the whole, the births were what counted most, for, with a true philosophy, the people of Rumley, anticipating that every one had to die some time or other, depended on nature to do its part toward repairing all losses in population by producing a brand-new citizen for every old one who happened to drop put. With a scant five hundred inhabitants, Rumley could ill afford to have its birth rate surpassed by its death rate. The year in which Oliver Baxter, junior, was born had been a lean one; there had been thirteen deaths up to October and only seven births. The surprising mortality was due to the surrender of five old men and three old women who had hung on well beyond the age of ninety, and then, with unbecoming perversity, had combined upon an unusually barren year in which to die.

In view of the fact that no one else could possibly be born in 1890, now that October was at hand, it would seem that Oliver was entitled to a great deal more consideration than he received on his natal day. But when one considers the simultaneous arrival of a blizzard and a band of wandering gypsies at a time of the year when neither was expected, and offers in opposition the arrival of an infant that had been expected ever since the preceding February, it is only fair to say that there were extenuating circumstances and that Rumley was not entirely to blame for its default in civic pride.

Oliver’s parents were prominent in the commercial, social and spiritual life of the town. His father was the proprietor of the hardware store, a prominent member of the Presbyterian church, and a leader in the local lodge of Odd Fellows. He was well on to forty-five when his namesake, was born, and as this son and heir was the first and only child born to the Baxters it is easy to understand the interest and concern that accompanied his approach and arrival into the world—that is to say, up to the distracting intervention of the October cold snap which came apparently out of nowhere and confounded everybody.

Baxter was a hard-cased bachelor of forty when he succumbed to the charms of Mary Floyd, the daughter of the toll-gate keeper at the edge of the village, and asked her to marry him. A full three years elapsed, however, before they could be married. This was due to Mary’s stubborn and somewhat questionable fidelity; her ancient father, it appears, was irascibly certain that he could not manage the affairs of the toll-gate without her assistance: how was he to keep house for himself, or get his own meals, or do his own washing and ironing, or take care of the cow and the pigs? In fact, he was the sort of man who did not believe in trying to do anything for himself as long as there were able-bodied women about the place to do it for him. For twenty years Mary had been his right-hand woman, beginning at the tender age of ten, within fifteen or twenty minutes after the death of her mother, who, by the way, had taken care of Martin for a matter of twenty-five years without rest or recompense. Two older brothers had exercised the masculine prerogative and, having families of their own, left Mary to wither, so to speak, “on the parent stem.”

Old Martin died when Mary was thirty-two. Instead of observing the customary year of mourning, she married Oliver inside of three months after the joyous bereavement, much to the surprise and passing grief of her neighbors, who were unable, for the life of them, to understand how she could do such a thing when her father was hardly cold in the grave. Joseph Sikes, who ran a feed store in connection with and back of Baxter’s hardware establishment, and was a Godless man, set a good many people straight by sardonically observing that anybody as mean as Martin Floyd never would be cold in his grave, owing to the heat that was getting at him from below.

Now as for Oliver Baxter, the elder. He was a scrawny man with a drooping sandy mustache and a thatch of straw-colored hair that always appeared to be in need of trimming no matter how recently it had been cut by Ves Bridges, the barber. In the matter of stature he was a trifle above medium height on Sundays only, due to a studied regard for the dignity that accrued to him as deacon in the church and passer of the collection box at both services. Moreover, he wore a pair of Sabbath day shoes that were not run down at the heel. On week days, in his well-worn business suit and his comfortable old shoes, he was what you would call a trifle under medium height. He was a shy, exceedingly bashful sort of man, with a fiery complexion that cooled off only when he was asleep, and he was given to laughing nervously—and kindly—at any and all times, frequently with results that called for a confused apology on his part and sometimes led to painful misunderstandings—for example, the time he made tender and sympathetic inquiry concerning the health of young Mrs. Hoxie’s mother and cackled cheerfully when informed that the old lady was not expected to last the day out, she was that bad.

How he ever screwed up the courage to propose to Mary Floyd was always a mystery to the entire population of Rumley, including Mary herself, who in accepting him was obliged to overlook the two perfectly inane spasms of laughter with which his bewildered plea was punctuated. She took him, nevertheless, for she was a prudent spinster and had got to the age where people not only were beginning to pity her but were talking of putting her in charge of the public library as soon as old Miss Lowtower died.

Mary at thirty-two was a comely, capable young woman, fairly well educated in spite of Martin Floyd’s exactions, and was beloved by all. If it had not been for the fact that Oliver Baxter was prosperous, honest and a credit to the town, people no doubt would have said she was throwing herself away on him, for it must be said that the Floyds, despite their reduced circumstances, were of better stock than the Baxters. Martin Floyd, in his younger days, had been a schoolmaster and had studied for the law. Moreover, he had been thrice elected justice of the peace and during Grant’s last administration was postmaster at Rumley. Whereas, Oliver Baxter’s father had been a farmhand and Oliver himself an itinerant tin-peddler before really getting on his feet. But as the fortunes of the Floyds went down those of the frugal and enterprising Baxter came up, so, on the whole, Mary was not making a bad bargain when she got married—indeed, she was making a very good bargain if one pauses to consider the somewhat astonishing fact that she really loved the homely and unromantic little bachelor.

When, after two years, it became known that on or about the twentieth of October Mary Baxter was going to have a baby, the town of Rumley and the country for miles about experienced a thrill of interest that continued without abatement up to the very eve of the new Oliver’s natal day, when, as before mentioned, it was stifled by a sudden change in the weather and the belated descent of the gypsies.

It must not be assumed that the gypsies were welcome. Far from it, they were most unwelcome. Their appearance on the outskirts of Rumley was the occasion of dire apprehensions and considerable uneasiness. The word gypsy was synonymous with thievery, kidnaping, black magic and devilry. More than one instance of curses being put upon respectable people by these swarthy, black-eyed vagabonds could be mentioned, and no one felt secure after foolishly subjecting herself to the dire influence of the fortune-telling females of the tribe. Little children were kept indoors, stables and cellars were locked, and backyards zealously watched during the time the gypsies were in the neighborhood.

Small wonder then that the young and tender Oliver failed to hold his own against such overwhelming odds. Nearly twenty-four hours elapsed before the town as a whole took notice of him. By nightfall it was pretty generally known that he was a boy and that his name, provisionally selected, was to be Oliver and not Olivet, as it might have been had his sex been what everybody prophesied it was bound to be. Mr. and Mrs. Baxter, in the second year of their married life, had gone to a nearby city to see a performance of the comic opera “Olivet,” and were so delighted with it—especially the song “In the North Sea Lived a Whale”—that they decided then and there if a girl should ever be born to them they would call her Olivet, that being as near to Oliver as they could possibly come.

They yearned for an Oliver, of course, but in the event he did not materialize, it would be a rather satisfactory compromise to substitute a “t” for the “r” which they would have preferred.

So they called him Oliver and added October to that, as a tribute to the month in which he was born.

The Baxter residence, a two-story frame building, stood at the top of a tree-covered knoll on the edge of the town, overlooking an extensive swamp in the center of which lay a reed-encircled pond where at certain seasons of the year migratory wild ducks and geese disported themselves in perfect security, for so treacherous was the vast morass guarding this little body of water that even the most daring and foolhardy of hunters feared to cross it. These evil acres bore the name of Death Swamp. They belonged to Oliver Baxter. He bought the whole tract, four hundred acres or more, for twenty-five dollars, and with a droll sense of humor described it as his back yard.

The wild October gale had been blowing all day long, a bleak legacy of the blizzard that swept over the land during the night. There were high, white drifts in sheltered nooks and corners; a fine, sleety snow cut mercilessly through the air, beating against window panes like sweeps of bird shot, scuttling through reluctantly opened doors, swirling in restless fury across porches, all to the tune of a shrill wind that came whistling out of the north. In an upstairs corner room, warmed by a big, carefully tended sheet-iron stove, young Oliver first saw the light of day. No finer “young-un” had ever been born, according to Mrs. Serepta Grimes, and Serepta was an authority on babies. It was she who took command of Oliver, his mother and his father, the house itself, and all that therein was. She was there hours ahead of Dr. Robinson, and she was still there hours after his departure. Throughout the town of Rumley, Serepta was known as a “blessing and a comfort.” Her word was law. Fond mothers and frightened fathers submitted to her gentle but arbitrary regulations without a murmur of protest. Joe Sikes claimed—and no one disputed him—that you couldn’t come into or go out of the world properly without being assisted by Serepta Grimes. She was that kind of a woman.

She saw to it that all the cracks around the window frames were securely stuffed with paper to keep the wind from coming in; she kept Oliver’s beaddled father from darting into the room every time he heard the baby cry; she gave peremptory directions to neighbor-women who came in to see what they could do; she kept the fire going, the kitchen running, and, by virtue of her own vast experience and authority, she kept the doctor in his place. Perhaps a hundred times during the day she had patiently answered “Yes” to the senior Oliver’s tremulous question: “Is she going to pull through, Serepty?”

In this cozy little room and in the presence of the doctor and Serepta Grimes, young Oliver was weighed by his father. For this purpose, a brand-new, perfectly balanced meat-scales, selected from stock, was brought up from the hardware store by Mr. Sikes, who, while being denied the privilege of witnessing the ceremony, subsequently was able to collect fifty cents from another bosom friend of the family, Mr. Silas Link, undertaker and upholsterer. The infant weighed nine and a quarter pounds, Joseph winning his wager by a scant quarter of a pound. The two worthies also had made another bet as to the sex of the infant, Mr. Sikes giving odds of two to one that it would be a boy. Up to seven o’clock in the evening, fully twelve hours after the baby was born, neither Mr. Sikes nor Mr. Link had the slightest idea who had won the bet, for, try as they would, there seemed to be absolutely no way of getting any authentic information from upstairs, owing to the speechless condition of Oliver senior and the drastic reticence of Serepta Grimes.

And so, as the story of Oliver October really begins at seven o’clock in the evening, regardless of all that may have transpired in the preceding twelve hours of his life, we will open the narrative with Mr. Joseph Sikes hovering in solitary gloom over the base-burner in the sitting-room to the right of the small vestibule hall whose door opened upon the snow-covered, wind-swept front porch. For the better part of an hour he had been sitting there, listening with tense, apprehensive ears to the brisk footsteps in the room overhead. The sitting-room was cold, for Joseph had neglected to close the front door tightly on entering the house and the wind had blown it ajar, permitting quite an accumulation of snow to carpet the hall. He had purposely left the sitting-room door open in order to hear the better what was going on at the top of the stairs. His attention was called to this almost criminal act some fifteen or twenty minutes after its commission by the sound of a man’s voice in the upper hall. It was an agitated voice and it was raised considerably in the effort to make itself heard by some one on the other side of a closed, intervening door.

“Say, Serepty, I—I think the front door is open,” the voice was saying. Joseph wasn’t sure, but he thought it belonged to Oliver Baxter. At any rate, the speaker was in the upper hall. After a moment it continued. “Like as not Mary and the baby will ketch cold and die if—”

A door squeaked upstairs and then came the voice of Serepta Grimes.

“My goodness! Of course, it’s open. Haven’t you got sense enough to go down and shut it? Who left it open anyway? You?”

“I thought I heard somebody come in a little while ago. Must have been—”

“Go down and shut it this instant. And stay downstairs, you goose.”

The door closed sharply and Mr. Sikes, recovering from a temporary paralysis, clumsily got to his feet and hurried into the hall.

“Never mind, Ollie,” he whispered hoarsely to the figure descending the stairs. “I’ll shut it. Some darned fool must have forgot to close it.”

“Isn’t that snow on the floor?” demanded Mr. Baxter, pausing midway on the stairs. The light from the sitting-room door fell upon his pinched, worried face as he peered, blinking, over the banister.

“Must have blowed in,” mumbled Joseph guiltily. “You don’t suppose she’s taken cold, do you, Ollie?”

“She probably has,” groaned Mr. Baxter. “She’s—she’s dying anyhow, Joe—she hasn’t got more than half an hour to live. I—”

“Is the doctor up there?”

“No. He ain’t been here since five o’clock. Oh, the poor—”

“I guess she’s all right or he wouldn’t have gone off and left her,” said Mr. Sikes consolingly. “I guess it wouldn’t be a bad idea to sweep all this snow out. Where’ll I find a broom?”

“In the kitchen—in the kitchen, Joe. My God, what have I ever done that we should have a blizzard like this on the one day that—”

“Come on down, Ollie, and let me give you a swig at this bottle I brought along with me. I can hear your teeth chatterin’ from here.”

“I haven’t got any shoes on,” protested Mr. Baxter. “I’m trying not to make any more noise than I can help. Besides I don’t want Mary to smell liquor on me. No, I can’t come down. I’d never forgive myself if she was to die and me not up here where I could hear her calling for me. Yes, sir—she’s not going to pull through, Joe—she’s not going to get well. I—”

“What does Serepty say?”

“Serepty? Oh, she says she’s all right and as fit as a fiddle—but I know better. She’s just saying that to brace me up. She—”

The door squeaked above him and Mrs. Grimes spoke.

“Didn’t I tell you to close that door, Oliver Baxter? Who is that you’re talking to?”

“Don’t tell her,” whispered Mr. Sikes, springing nimbly to the door. “She don’t like me anyhow, and—Oh, the danged thing’s stuck! I’ll have to get the broom.”

Mr. Sikes hurried to the kitchen and returned with the broom. Baxter was still standing on the stairs, in a listening attitude.

“Sh!” he hissed. “Don’t do that? I thought I heard—” He turned and darted up the stairs, leaving Mr. Sikes to his task. Presently he came half way down again and addressed the sweeper, who had just completed his job and was closing the door against the pressing wind. “I’m up here in the spare bedroom, Joe, if you need me for anything. I’ve just been thinking that the house might catch fire with all these stoves going and the wind blowing so hard. If you smell anything burning come up and let me know.”

“Just a second, Ollie,” whispered Joseph, from the bottom of the steps. “Is it a boy or a girl?”

But Oliver failed to answer. He had disappeared, tiptoeing in his stocking feet past the closed and guarded door at the bend in the hall.

His friend went back to his place by the base-burner and sat down. In skirting the table in the center of the room he paused long enough to take a cigar from the box of “Old Jim Crows” that Oliver had purchased for distribution among congratulatory friends. He hesitated a long time before lighting it, however. He knew from past experience that Serepta Grimes objected to men smoking in the house, and, while this was not her house, nevertheless for the time being she was complete mistress of it.

To look at Joseph Sikes you would never believe that he could be afraid of anything or anybody. He was a burly, rugged, middle-aged man with broad shoulders, a battling face and a thick shock of black hair that might well have supplied you with a corporeal picture of what Samson must have looked like before he was shorn. He looked somewhat ill at ease and uncomfortable in his Sunday suit of clothes and his starched shirt and the bothersome collar that appeared to be giving him a great deal of trouble, judging by the frequency with which he ran his forefinger around the inside of it and twisted his puckered, uplifted chin from time to time as if in dire need of help. Mr. Sikes was an unmarried man. He was not used to tight collars.

The combination sitting-and dining-room was on the side of the house facing the main thoroughfare of the town. Its windows looked out across the porch and down the wooded slope to the street, a hundred yards away. Mr. Sikes on his arrival after a scant supper at his boarding-house in Shiveley’s Lane had found the entire lower part of the house in darkness except the kitchen. He took it upon himself to light the two kerosene lamps in the sitting-room and subsequently—in some dismay—to draw down the window shades. He replenished the fire from a scuttle of coal and then, on second thought, went down into the cellar and replenished the scuttle. After performing these small chores, he removed his overcoat and hat and hung them over the back of a chair alongside the stove. He forgot to remove his goloshes, and it was not until he became aware of the smell of scorching rubber that he remembered where he had put them on sitting down for the second time in front of the stove. He had put them on the bright nickel-plated railing at the bottom of the base-burner with only one thought in mind: to get his feet warm.

He was aghast. That odor of calamity was bound to ransack the house from bottom to top, with desolating consequences. Mary would think the house was afire, Oliver would lose his head completely, Serepta would—and the child? It didn’t take much to suffocate a baby. Mr. Sikes was not long in deciding what to do. He opened a window, jerked off the offending goloshes, and hurled them far out into the snowdrifts.

It was while he was in the act of disposing of the damning evidence that he heard the kitchen door slam with a bang. Somewhere back in his mind lurked an impression that some one had been knocking at the front door during the tail end of his profound cogitation. He had a faint, dim recollection of muttering something like this to himself:

“You can knock your fool head off, far as I’m concerned.”

The slamming of the kitchen door irritated Mr. Sikes. His brow grew dark. This was no time to be slamming doors. He strode over to investigate. If the offender should happen to be Maggie Smith, Baxter’s hired girl, she’d hear from him. What business had she to be away from the house for more than an hour, just at supper time, and probably catching cold or—