Читать книгу Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man - Marie Conway Oemler - Страница 10

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On a cold gray morning in December two members of my flock, Poles who spoke but little English and that little very badly, were on their way to their daily toil in the canning factory. It is a long walk from the Poles' quarters to the factory, and the workpeople must start early, for one is fined half an hour's time if one is five minutes late. The short-cut is down the railroad tracks that run through the mill district—for which cause we bury a yearly toll of the children of the poor.

Just beyond the freight sheds, signal tower, and water tank, is a grade crossing where so many terrible things have happened that the colored people call that place Dead Man's Crossin' and warn you not to go by there of nights because the signal tower is haunted and Things lurk in the rank growth behind the water tank, coming out to show themselves after dark. If you must pass it then you would better turn your coat inside out, pull down your sleeves over your hands, and be very careful to keep three fingers twisted for a Sign. This is a specific against most ha'nts, though by no means able to scare away all of them. Those at Dead Man's Crossin' are peculiarly malignant and hard to scare. Maum Jinkey Delette saw one there once, coming down the track faster than an express train, bigger than a cow, and waving both his legs in his hands. Poor old Maum Jinkey was so scared that she chattered her new false teeth out of her mouth, and she never found those teeth to the day of her death, but had to mumble along as best she could without them.

Hurrying by Dead Man's Crossin', the workmen stumbled over a man lying beside the tracks; his clothing was torn to shreds, he was wet with the heavy night dew and covered with dirt, cinders, and partly congealed blood, for his right leg had been ground to pulp. Peering at this horrible object in the wan dusk of the early morning, they thought he was dead like most of the others found there.

For a moment the men hesitated, wondering whether it wouldn't be better to leave him there to be found and removed by folks with more time at their disposal. One doesn't like to lose time and be consequently fined, on account of stopping to pick up a dead tramp; particularly when Christmas is drawing near and money so much needed that every penny counts.

The thing on the ground, regaining for a fraction of a second a glint of half-consciousness, quivered, moaned feebly, and lay still again. Humanity prevailing, the Poles looked about for help, but as yet the place was quite deserted. Grumbling, they wrenched a shutter off the Agent's window, lifted the mangled tramp upon it, and made straight for the Parish House; when accidents such as this happened to men such as this, weren't the victims incontinently turned over to the Parish House people? Indeed, there wasn't any place else for them, unless one excepted the rough room at the jail; and the average small town jail—ours wasn't any exception to the rule—is a place where a decent veterinary would scruple to put a sick cur. With him the Poles brought his sole luggage, a package tied up in oilskin, which they had found lying partly under him.

We had become accustomed to these sudden inroads of misfortune, so he was carried upstairs to the front Guest Room, fortunately just then empty. The Poles turned over to me the heavy package found with him, stolidly requested a note to the Boss explaining their necessary tardiness, and hurried away. They had done what they had to do, and they had no further interest in him. Nobody had any interest in one of the unknown tramps who got themselves killed or crippled at Dead Man's Crossin'.

The fellow was shockingly injured and we had some strenuous days and nights with him, for that which had been a leg had to come off at the knee; he had lain in the cold for some hours, he had sustained a frightful shock, and he had lost considerable blood. I am sure that in the hands of any physician less skilled and determined than Westmoreland he must have gone out. But Westmoreland, with his jaw set, followed his code and fenced with death for this apparently worthless and forfeited life, using all his skill and finesse to outwit the great Enemy; in spite of which, so attenuated was the man's chance that we were astonished when he turned the corner—very, very feebly—and we didn't have to place another pine box in the potter's field, alongside other unmarked mounds whose occupants were other unknown men, grim causes of Dead Man's Crossin's sinister name.

The effects of the merciful drugs that had kept him quiet in time wore away. Our man woke up one forenoon clear-headed, if hollow-eyed and mortally weak. He looked about the unfamiliar room with wan curiosity, then his eyes came to Clélie and myself, but he did not return the greetings of either. He just stared; he asked no questions. Presently, very feebly, he tried to move—and found himself a cripple. He fell back upon his pillow, gasping. A horrible scream broke from his lips—a scream of brute rage and mortal fear, as of a trapped wild beast. He began to revile heaven and earth, the doctor, myself. Clélie, clapping her hands over her outraged ears, fled as if from fiends. Indeed, never before nor since have I heard such a frightful, inhuman power of profanity, such hideous oaths and threats. When breath failed him he lay spent and trembling, his chest rising and falling to his choking gasps.

"You had better be thankful your life is spared you, young man," I said a trifle sharply, my nerves being somewhat rasped; for I had helped Westmoreland through more than one dreadful night, and I had sat long hours by his pillow, waiting for what seemed the passing of a soul.

He glared. "Thankful?" he screamed, "Thankful, hell! I've got to have two good legs to make any sort of a getaway, haven't I? Well, have I got 'em? I'm down and out for fair, that's what! Thankful? You make me sick! Honest to God, when you gas like that I feel like bashing in your brain, if you've got any! You and your thankfulness!" He turned his quivering face and stared at the wall, winking. I wondered, heartsick, if I had ever seen a more hopelessly unprepossessing creature.

It was not so much physical, his curious ugliness; the dreadful thing was that it seemed to be his spirit which informed his flesh, an inherent unloveliness of soul upon which the body was modeled, worked out faithfully, and so made visible. Figure to yourself one with the fine shape of the welter-weight, steel-muscled, lithe, powerful, springy, slim in the hips and waist, broad in the shoulders; the arms unusually long, giving him a terrible reach, the head round, well-shaped, covered with thick reddish hair; cold, light, and intelligent eyes, full of animosity and suspicion, reminding you unpleasantly of the rattlesnake's look, wary, deadly, and ready to strike. When he thought, his forehead wrinkled. His lips shut upon each other formidably and without softness, and the jaws thrust forward with the effect as of balled fists. One ear was slightly larger than the other, having the appearance of a swelling upon the lobe. In this unlovely visage, filled with distrust and concentrated venom, only the nose retained an incongruous and unexpected niceness. It was a good straight nose, yet it had something of the pleasant tiptiltedness of a child's. It was the sort of nose which should have complemented a mouth formed for spontaneous laughter. It looked lonesome and out of place in that set and lowering countenance, to which the red straggling stubble of beard sprouting over jaws and throat lent a more sinister note.

We had had many a sad and terrible case in our Guest Rooms, but somehow this seemed the saddest, hardest and most hopeless we had yet encountered.

For three weary weeks had we struggled with him, until the doctor, sighing with physical relief, said he was out of danger and needed only such nursing as he was sure to get.

"One does one's duty as one finds it, of course," said the big doctor, looking down at the unpromising face on the pillow, and shaking his head. "Yes, yes, yes, one must do what's right, on the face of it, come what will. There's no getting around that!" He glanced at me, a shadow in his kind gray eyes. "But there are times, my friend, when I wonder! Now, this morning I had to tell a working man his wife's got to die. There's no help and no hope—she's got to die, and she a mother of young children. So I have to try desperately," said the doctor, rubbing his nose, "to cling tooth and claw to the hope that there is Something behind the scenes that knows the forward-end of things—sin and sorrow and disease and suffering and death things—and uses them always for some beneficent purpose. But in the meantime the mother dies, and here you and I have been used to save alive a poor useless devil of a one-legged tramp, probably without his consent and against his will, because it had to be and we couldn't do anything else! Now, why? I can't help but wonder!"

We looked down again, the two of us, at the face on the pillow. And I wondered also, with even greater cause than the doctor; for I had opened the oilskin package the Poles found, and it had given me occasion for fear, reflection, and prayer. I was startled and alarmed beyond words, for it contained tools of a curious and unusual type—not such tools as workmen carry abroad in the light of day.

There was no one to whom I might confide that unpleasant discovery. I simply could not terrify my mother, nor could I in common decency burden the already overburdened doctor. Nor is our sheriff one to turn to readily; he is not a man whose intelligence or heart one may admire, respect, or depend upon. My guest had come to me with empty pockets and a burglar's kit; a hint of that, and the sheriff had camped on the Parish House front porch with a Winchester across his knees and handcuffs jingling in his pockets. No, I couldn't consult the law.

I had yet a deeper and a better reason for waiting, which I find it rather hard to set down in cold words. It is this: that as I grow older I have grown more and more convinced that not fortuitously, not by chance, never without real and inner purposes, are we allowed to come vitally into each other's lives. I have walked up the steep sides of Calvary to find out that when another wayfarer pauses for a space beside us, it is because one has something to give, the other something to receive.

So, upon reflection, I took that oilskin package weighted down with the seven deadly sins over to the church, and hid it under the statue of St. Stanislaus, whom my Poles love, and before whom they come to kneel and pray for particular favors. I tilted the saint back upon his wooden stand, and thrust that package up to where his hands fold over the sheaf of lilies he carries. St. Stanislaus is a beautiful and most holy youth. No one would ever suspect him of hiding under his brown habit a burglar's kit!

When I had done this, and stopped to say three Hail Marys for guidance, I went back to the little room called my study, where my books and papers and my butterfly cabinets and collecting outfits were kept, and set myself seriously to studying my files of newspapers, beginning at a date a week preceding my man's appearance. Then: