"It"s the law," cut in Isom. "I can do it if I see fit."
"Well, don"t ever try it," said Joe, drawing a long breath. "That was the main thing I wanted to say to you, Isom--don"t ever try that!"
"I never intended to take a swingle-tree to you, Joe," said Isom, forcing his dry face into a grin. "I don"t see that there ever need be any big differences between me and you. You do what"s right by me and I"ll do the same by you."
Isom spoke with lowered voice, a turning of the eyes toward the kitchen door, as if troubled lest this defiance of his authority might have been heard within, and the seeds of insubordination sown in another bond-slave"s breast.
"I"ll carry out mother"s agreement with you to the best of my ability,"
said Joe, moving forward as if ready now to begin.
"Then come on in and eat your breakfast," said Isom.
Isom led the way into the smoky kitchen, inwardly more gratified than displeased over this display of spirit. According to the agreement between them, he had taken under bond-service the Widow Newbolt"s "minor male child," but it looked to him as if some mistake had been made in the delivery.
"He"s a man!" exulted Isom in his heart, pleased beyond measure that he had bargained better than he had known.
Joe put his lean brown hand into the bosom of his shirt and brought out a queer, fat little book, leather-bound and worn of the corners. This he placed on top of his bundle, then followed Chase into the kitchen where the table was spread for breakfast.
Mrs. Chase was busy straining milk. She did not turn her head, nor give the slightest indication of friendliness or interest in Joe as he took the place pointed out by Chase. Chase said no word of introduction. He turned his plate over with a businesslike flip, took up the platter which contained two fried eggs and a few pieces of bacon, sc.r.a.ped off his portion, and handed the rest to Joe.
In addition to the one egg each, and the fragments of bacon, there were sodden biscuits and a broken-nosed pitcher holding mola.s.ses. A cup of roiled coffee stood ready poured beside each plate, and that was the breakfast upon which Joe cast his curious eyes. It seemed absurdly inadequate to the needs of two strong men, accustomed as Joe was to four eggs at a meal, with the stays of life which went with them in proportion.
Mrs. Chase did not sit at the table with them, nor replenish the empty platter, although Joe looked expectantly and hungrily for her to do so.
She was carrying pans of milk into the cellar, and did not turn her head once in their direction during the meal.
Joe rose from the table hungry, and in that uneasy state of body began his first day"s labor on Isom Chase"s farm. He hoped that dinner might repair the shortcomings of breakfast, and went to the table eagerly when that hour came.
For dinner there was hog-jowl and beans, bitter with salt, yellow with salt, but apparently greatly to the liking of Isom, whose natural food seemed to be the very essence of salt.
"Help yourself, eat plenty," he invited Joe.
Jowls and beans were cheap; he could afford to be liberal with that meal. Generosity in regard to that five-year-old jowl cost him scarcely a pang.
"Thank you," said Joe politely. "I"m doing very well."
A place was laid for Mrs. Chase, as at breakfast, but she did not join them at the table. She was scalding milk crocks and pans, her face was red from the steam. As she bent over the sink the uprising vapor moved her hair upon her temples like a wind.
"Ain"t you goin" to eat your dinner, Ollie?" inquired Isom with considerable lightness, perhaps inspired by the hope that she was not.
"I don"t feel hungry right now," she answered, bending over her steaming pan of crocks.
Isom did not press her on the matter. He filled up his plate again with beans and jowl, whacking the grinning jawbone with his knife to free the clinging shreds of meat.
Accustomed as he had been all his life to salt fare, that meal was beyond anything in that particular of seasoning that Joe ever had tasted. The fiery demand of his stomach for liquid dilution of his saline repast made an early drain on his coffee; when he had swallowed the last bean that he was able to force down, his cup was empty. He cast his eyes about inquiringly for more.
"We only drink one cup of coffee at a meal here," explained Isom, a rebuke in his words for the extravagance of those whose loose habits carried them beyond that abstemious limit.
"All right; I guess I can make out on that," said Joe.
There was a pitcher of water at his hand, upon which he drew heavily, with the entire good-will and approbation of Isom. Then he took his hat from the floor at his feet and went out, leaving Isom hammering again at the jowl, this time with the handle of his fork, in the hope of dislodging a bit of gristle which clung to one end.
Joe"s hope leaped ahead to supper, unjustified as the flight was by the day"s developments. Human creatures could not subsist longer than a meal or two on such fare as that, he argued; there must be a change very soon, of course.
It was a heavy afternoon for Joe. He was weary from the absolute lack of nourishment when the last of the ch.o.r.es was done long after dusk, and Isom announced that they would go to the house for supper.
The supper began with soup, made from the left-over beans and the hog"s jaw of dinner. There it swam, that fleshless, long-toothed, salt-reddened bone, the most hateful piece of animal anatomy that Joe ever fixed his hungry eyes upon. And supper ended as it began; with soup. There was nothing else behind it, save some hard bread to soak in it, and its only savor was salt.
Isom seemed to be satisfied with, even cheered by, his liquid refreshment. His wife came to her place at the table when they were almost through, and sat stirring a bowl of the mixture of bread and thin soup, her eyes set in abstracted stare in the middle of the table, far beyond the work of her hands. She did not speak to Joe; he did not undertake any friendly approaches.
Joe never had seen Mrs. Chase before that day, neighbors though they had been for months. She appeared unusually handsome to Joe, with her fair skin, and hair colored like ripe oats straw. She wore a plait of it as big as his wrist coiled and wound around her head.
For a little while after finishing his unsatisfying meal, Joe sat watching her small hand turning the spoon in her soup. He noted the thinness of her young cheeks, in which there was no marvel, seeing the fare upon which she was forced to live. She seemed to be unconscious of him and Isom. She did not raise her eyes.
Joe got up in a little while and left them, going to the porch to look for his bundle and his book. They were gone. He came back, standing hesitatingly in the door.
"They"re in your room upstairs," said Mrs. Chase without turning her head to look at him, still leaning forward over her bowl.
"I"ll show you where it is," Isom offered.
He led the way up the stairs which opened from the kitchen, carrying a small lamp in his hand.
Joe"s room was over the kitchen. It was bleak and bare, its black rafters hung with spiderwebs, plastered with the nests of wasps. A dormer window jutted toward the east like a hollow eye, designed, no doubt, and built by Isom Chase himself, to catch the first gleam of morning and throw it in the eyes of the sleeping hired-hand, whose bed stood under it.
Isom came down directly, took his lantern, and went to the barn to look after a new-born calf. Where there was profit, such as he counted it, in gentleness, Isom Chase could be as tender as a mother. Kind words and caresses, according to his experience, did not result in any more work out of a wife so he spared them the young woman at the table, as he had denied them the old one in her grave.
As Isom hurried out into the soft night, with a word about the calf, Ollie made a bitter comparison between her lot and that of the animals in the barn. Less than six months before that gloomy night she had come to that house a bride, won by the prospect of ease and independence which Chase had held out to her in the brief season of his adroit courtship. The meanest men sometimes turn out to be the nimblest c.o.c.k-pheasants during that interesting period, and, like those vain birds of the jungles, they strut and dance and cut dazzling capers before the eyes of the ladies when they want to strike up a matrimonial bargain.
Isom Chase had done that. He had been a surprising lover for a dry man of his years, spurring around many a younger man in the contest for Ollie"s hand. Together with parental encouragement and her own vain dreams, she had not found it hard to say the word that made her his wife. But the gay feathers had fallen from him very shortly after their wedding day, revealing the worm which they had hidden; the bright colors of his courtship parade had faded like the fustian decorations of a carnival in the rain.
Isom was a man of bone and dry skin, whose greed and penury had starved his own soul. He had brought her there and put burdens upon her, with the a.s.surance that it would be only for a little while, until somebody could be hired to take the work off her hands. Then he had advanced the plea of hard times, when the first excuse had worn out; now he had dropped all pretenses. She was serving, as he had married her to serve, as he had brought her there in unrecompensed bondage to serve, and hope was gone from her horizon, and her tears were undried upon her cheeks.
Isom had profited by a good day"s work from Joe, and he had not been obliged to drive him to obtain it. So he was in great spirits when he came back from the barn, where he had found the calf coming on st.u.r.dily and with great promise. He put out the lantern and turned the lamp down a shade seeing that it was consuming a twentieth more oil than necessary to light Ollie about her work. Then he sat down beside the table, stretching his long legs with a sigh.
Ollie was washing the few dishes which had served for supper, moving between table and sink with quick competence, making a neat figure in the somber room. It was a time when a natural man would have filled his pipe and brought out the weekly paper, or sat and gossiped a comfortable hour with his wife. But Isom never had cheered his atrophied nerves with a whiff of tobacco, and as for the county paper, or any paper whatever except mortgages and deeds, Isom held all of them to be frauds and extravagances which a man was better off without.
"Well, what do you think of the new hand?" asked Isom, following her with his eyes.
"I didn"t pay any particular notice to him," said she, her back toward him as she stood sc.r.a.ping a pan at the sink.
"Did you hear what he said to me this morning when he was standin" there by the steps?"
"No, I didn"t hear," listlessly, indifferently.
"H"m--I thought you was listening."
"I just looked out to see who it was."
"No difference if you did hear, Ollie," he allowed generously--for Isom.
"A man"s wife ought to share his business secrets, according to my way of lookin" at it; she"s got a right to know what"s going on. Well, I tell you that chap talked up to me like a man!"