Читать книгу Still Jim - Honoré Morrow - Страница 6

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"The same sand that gave birth to the coyote and the eagle gave birth to the Indian and to me. I wonder why!"

Musings of the Elephant.

Little Jim and his mother were left very much alone by Big Jim's death. Little Jim was literally the last of the Mannings. Mrs. Manning's only relative, her sister, had died when Jim was a baby. There was no one to whom Mrs. Manning felt that she could turn for help.

Jim pleaded to be allowed to quit school and go to work.

"I'm fourteen, Mama, and as big as lots of men. I can take care of you."

Mrs. Manning had not cried much. Her heartbreak would not give into tears easily. But at Jim's words she broke into hysterical sobs.

"Jimmy! Jimmy! I don't see how you can ever think of such a thing after all Papa said to you. Almost his last advice to you was about getting an education. He was so proud of your school work. Why, all I've got to live for now is to carry out Papa's plans for you."

Jimmy stood beside his mother. He was taller than she. Suddenly, with boyish awkwardness, he pulled the sobbing little woman to him and leaned his young cheek on her graying hair.

"Mama, I'll make myself into a darned college professor, if you just won't cry!" he whispered.

For several days after the funeral, Jim wandered about the house and yard fighting to control his tears when he came upon some sudden reminder of his father; the broken rake his father had mended the week before; a pair of old shoes in the wood shed; one of his father's pipes on the kitchen window ledge. The nights were the worst, when the picture of his father's last moments would not let the boy sleep. It seemed to Jim that if he could learn to forget this picture a part of his grief would be lifted. It was the uselessness of Big Jim's death that made the boy unboyishly bitter. He could not believe that any other death ever had been so needless. It was only in the years to come that Jim was to learn how needlessly, how unremittingly, industry takes its toll of lives.

Somehow, Jim had a boyish feeling that his father had had many things to say to him that never had been said; that these things were very wise and would have guided him. Jim felt rudderless. He felt that it was incumbent on him to do the things that his father had not been able to do. Vaguely and childishly he determined that he must make good for the Mannings and for Exham. Poor old Exham, with its lost ideals!

It was in thinking this over that Jim conceived an idea that became a great comfort to him. He decided to write down all the advice that he could recall his father's giving him, and when his mother became less broken up, to ask her to tell him all the plans his father might have had for him.

So it was that a week or so after her husband's death, Mrs. Manning found one of Jim's scratch pads on the table in his room, with a carefully printed title on the cover: