Ole Mammy's Torment Part 4

Maybe Bud leaned a little too much to one side. Maybe the pan missed the guiding legs that had held it steady before. At any rate something was amiss, for half-way down the plank it spun dizzily around to one side, and spilled the luckless Bud out on the chicken-coop. Usually he made very little fuss when he was hurt, but this time he set up such a roar that John Jay was frightened. When he saw blood trickling out of the child's mouth, he began to cry himself. He was just about to run for Aunt Susan, when Bud suddenly stopped crying, and turned toward him with a look of terror.

"Aw, I done knock a tooth out!" he exclaimed, and began crying harder than before, feeling that he had been damaged beyond repair.

John Jay laughed when he found that nothing worse had happened than the loss of a little white front tooth, and soon dried Bud's tears by promising that a new one would certainly fill the hole in time.

"Keep yoah mouf shet much as you can when Mammy comes home to-night," he cautioned; "for I sut'n'ly don't want to ketch a lickin' on my buthday.

It's mighty lucky the pan didn't get a hole knocked in her."

Mammy came home just before dark. The children were on the fence waiting for her. John Jay felt sure that if Miss Hallie knew that it was his birthday she would send him something. He wondered if Mammy had told her. The basket on the old woman's head was always interesting to these children, for it never came back from Rosehaven empty. The cook always saved the sc.r.a.ps for Sheba's hungry little charges. This evening John Jay kept his eyes fixed on it expectantly, as he followed it up the walk. He had thrown one foot up behind him, and rested the toes of it in his clasped hands as he hopped along on the other. Maybe there might be a birthday cake in that basket, with little candles on it. He didn't know, of course,--but--_maybe_.

They all crowded around, as Sheba put the basket on the table and took out some sc.r.a.ps of boiled ham, a handful of cookies, and half of an apple pie. That was all. John Jay looked at them a moment with misty eyes, and turned away with a lump in his throat. He was beginning to grow discouraged.

Mammy was so tired that she did not cook anything for supper, as she had intended, but set out the contents of the basket beside the corn bread left from dinner. Before they were through eating somebody called for sis' Sheba to come quick, that Aunt Susan was having one of her old spells.

"Like enough I won't get back for a good while," said Mammy, as she hurriedly left the table. "Put Ivy to bed as soon as you wash her face, John Jay, an' go yo'self when the propah time comes. Be a good boy now, and don't forget to close the doah tight when you go in."

When Ivy was safely tucked away among the pillows, the two boys sat down on the door-step to wait once more for the birthday Santa Claus. John Jay repeated what the thoughtless fellow had said:

"If I don't get there by noon, it'll be because something has happened; anyway, somebody'll be prancing along about sundown." In the week just pa.s.sed, Bud had come to believe in the birthday Santa Claus as firmly as John Jay.

"Wondah wot he's doin' now?" he said, after a long pause and an anxious glance down the darkening road.

Ah, well for those two trusting little hearts that they could not know!

He was sitting on the steps of the porch at Rosehaven with a guitar on his knee, and smiling tenderly into Sally Lou's blue eyes as he sang, "Oh, yes, I ever will be true!"

It grew darker and darker. The katydids began their endless quarrel in the trees. A night-owl hooted dismally over in the woods. The children stopped talking, and sat in anxious silence. Presently Bud edged up closer, and put a sympathetic arm around his brother. A moment after, he began to cry.

"What you snufflin' for?" asked John Jay savagely. "'Tain't yo'

buthday."

"But I'm afraid you ain't goin' to have any eithah," sobbed the little fellow, strangely wrought upon by this long silent waiting in the darkness.

"Aw, you go 'long to bed," said John Jay, with a careless, grown-up air.

"If anything comes I'll wake you up. No use for two of us to be settin'

heah."

Bud was sleepy, and crept away obediently; but the day was spoiled, and he went to bed sore with his brother's disappointment.

John Jay sat down again to keep his lonely tryst. He looked up at the faithless stars. They had failed to help him, but in his desperation he determined to appeal to them once more. So he picked out the seven largest ones he could see and repeated very slowly, in a voice that would tremble, the old charm:

"Star-light, star bright, Seventh star I've seen to-night; I wish I may and I wish I might Have the wish come true I wish to-night."

Then he made his wish again, with a heart felt earnestness that was almost an ache. Oh, surely the day was not going to end in this cruel silence! Just then he heard the thud of a horse's hoofs on the wooden bridge, far down the road. Nearer and louder it came. Somebody was prancing by at last. He stood up, straining his eyes in his smiling eagerness to see. Nearer and nearer the hoof-beats came in the starlight. "_Bookity book! Bookity book!_" The horseman paused a moment in front of Uncle Billy's.

John Jay hopped from one foot to the other in his impatient gladness.

Then his heart sank as the hoof-beats went on down the road, _Bookity book! Bookity book!_ growing fainter and fainter, until at last they were drowned by the voices of the noisy katydids.

He stood still a moment, so bitterly disappointed that it seemed to him he could not possibly bear it. Then he went in and shut the door,--shut the door on all his bright hopes, on all his fond dreams, on the day that was to have held such happiness, but that had brought instead the cruelest disappointment of his life.

The tears ran down his little black face as he undressed himself. He sat on the edge of the trundle-bed a moment, whispering brokenly, "They wasn't anybody livin' that cared 'bout it's bein' my buthday!" Then throwing himself face downward on his pillow, he cried softly with long choking sobs, until he fell asleep.

CHAPTER VI.

Although John Jay bore many a deep scar, both in mind and body, very little of his life had been given to sackcloth and ashes.

"Wish I could take trouble as easy as that boy," sighed Mammy. "It slides right off'n him like watah off a duck's back."

"He's like the rollin' stone that gethah's no moss," remarked Uncle Billy. "He goes rollickin' through the days, from sunup 'twel sundown, so fast that disappointment and sorrow get rubbed off befo' they kin strike root."

Despite all his troubles, if John Jay had been marking his good times with white stones, there would have been enough to build a wall all around the little cabin by the end of the summer. There were two days especially that he remembered with deepest satisfaction: one was the Sat.u.r.day when Mars' Nat took him to the circus, and the other was the Fourth of July, when all the family went to the Oak Grove barbecue.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Uncle Billy]

But now blackberry season had begun,--a season that he hated, because Mammy expected him to help her early and late in the patch. So many of the s.h.i.+ning berries slipped down his throat, so many things called his attention away from the brambly bushes, that sometimes it took hours for him to fill his battered quart cup.

Usually his reward was a juicy pie, but this year Mammy changed her plan. Berries were in demand at Rosehaven, and she had very little time to spend in going after them.

"I'll give you five cents a gallon for all you'll pick," she said to John Jay. He looked at her in amazement. As he had never had any money in his life, this seemed a princely offer. He was standing outside by the stick chimney when she made the promise. After one sidelong glance, to see if she were in earnest, he threw his feet wildly into the air and walked off on his hands; then, after two or three somersaults backward, he stood up, panting.

"Where's the buckets at?" he demanded, "I'm goin' to pick every bush in this neck o' woods as clean as you'd pick a chicken."

Now it was Mammy's turn to be surprised. She had expected that her offer would lure him on for an hour or two, maybe for a whole day. She had not supposed that it would keep him faithfully at work for a week, but it did. His nimble fingers stripped every roadside vine within a mile of the cabin. His hands and legs, and even his face, were criss-crossed with many brier scratches. The sun beat down on him unmercifully, but he stuck to his task so closely that he seemed to see berries even when his eyes were shut. Every day great pailfuls of the s.h.i.+ning black beads were sent over to Rosehaven, and every night he dropped a few more nickels into the stocking foot hidden under his pillow.

"Berries is all mighty nigh cleaned out," he said one noon, when he was about to start out again after dinner. "Uncle Billy says there's lots of 'em down in the gandah thicket, but I'se mos' afeered to go there."

"Nothin' won't tech you in daylight, honey," answered Mammy, encouragingly, "but I would n't go through there at night for love or money I'd as lief go into a lion's cage."

"Did you ever see any ghos'es down there Mammy?" asked John Jay with eager interest, yet cautiously lowering his voice and taking a step nearer.

"No," admitted Mammy, "but oldah people than I have seen 'em. All night long there's great white gandahs flappin' round through that thicket 'thout any heads on. You know they's an awful wicked man buried down there in the woods, an' the sperrits of them he's inju'ed ha'nts the thicket every night. There isn't anybody, that I know of, that 'ud go down there aftah dark for anything on this livin' yearth."

"Then who sees 'em?" asked John Jay, with a skeptical grin.

"Who sees 'em?" repeated Mammy wrathfully, angry because of the doubt implied by his question and his face. "Who sees 'em? They've been seen by generations of them as is dead and gone. Who is you, I'd like to know, standin' up there a-mockin' at me so impident and a-askin' 'Who sees 'em?'"

She turned to begin her dish was.h.i.+ng, with a scornful air that seemed to say that he was beneath any further notice. Still, no sooner had she piled the dishes up in the pan than she turned to him again, with her hands on her hips.

"Go down and ask Uncle Mose," she said, still indignant. "He can tell you tales that'll send cole chills up an' down yo' spine. He saw an awful thing in there once with his own eyes. 'Twan't a gandah, but somethin' long an slim flyin' low in the bushes--he reckoned it was twenty feet long. It had a little thin head like a snake, an' yeahs that stuck up like rabbit's. It was all white, an' had fo' little short legs an' two little short wings, an' it was moah'n flesh an' blood could stand, he say, to see that long, slim, white thing runnin' an' a-flyin'

at the same time through the bushes, low down neah the groun'. You jus'

go ask him."

John Jay swung his buckets irresolutely. "I don't believe I'll go down there aftah berries," he said. "I don't know what to do. They isn't any moah anywhere else."

Mammy wished that she had not gone to such pains to convince him.

"Nothin' evah comes around in the daytime," she insisted, "an' I reckon berries is mighty plentiful, too," she added, persuasively. "n.o.body evah saw anything down there in the daylight, honey. I'd go if I was you."