O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 Part 55

"You're enjoying it, aren't you, Hosey, h'm?"

"It's the life, mother! It's the life!"

His ruddy colour began to fade. He took to haunting department-store kitchenware sections. He would come home with a new kind of cream whipper, or a patent device for the bathroom. He would tinker happily with this, driving a nail, adjusting a screw. At such times he was even known to begin to whistle some sc.r.a.p of a doleful tune such as he used to hum. But he would change, quickly, into something lovely. The price of b.u.t.ter, eggs, milk, cream and the like horrified his Wisconsin cold-storage sensibilities. He used often to go down to Fulton Market before daylight and walk about among the stalls and shops, piled with tons of food of all kinds. He would talk to the marketmen, and the buyers and grocers, and come away feeling almost happy for a time.

Then, one day, with a sort of shock, he remembered a farmer he had known back home in Winnebago. He knew the farmers for miles around, naturally, in his business. This man had been a steady b.u.t.ter-and-egg acquaintance, one of the wealthy farmers in that prosperous farming community. For his family's sake he had moved into town, a ruddy, rufous-bearded, clumping fellow, intelligent, kindly. They had sold the farm with a fine profit and had taken a boxlike house on Franklin Street. He had nothing to do but enjoy himself. You saw him out on the porch early, very early summer mornings.

You saw him ambling about the yard, poking at a weed here, a plant there. A terrible loneliness was upon him; a loneliness for the soil he had deserted. And slowly, resistlessly, the soil pulled at him with its black strength and its green tendrils, down, down, until he ceased to struggle and lay there clasped gently to her breast, the mistress he had thought to desert and who had him again at last, and forever.

"I don't know what ailed him," his widow had said, weeping. "He just seemed to kind of pine away."

It was one morning in April--one soft, golden April morning--when this memory had struck Hosey Brewster. He had been down at Fulton Market.

Something about the place--the dewy fresh vegetables, the crates of eggs, the b.u.t.ter, the cheese--had brought such a surge of homesickness to him as to amount to an actual nausea. Riding uptown in the subway he had caught a glimpse of himself in a slot-machine mirror. His face was pale and somehow shrunken. He looked at his hands. The skin hung loose where the little pads of fat had plumped them out.

"Gos.h.!.+" he said. "Gosh, I--"

He thought, then, of the red-faced farmer who used to come clumping into the cold-storage warehouse in his big boots and his buffalo coat. A great fear swept over him and left him weak and sick.

The chill grandeur of the studio-building foyer stabbed him. The glittering lift made him dizzy, somehow, this morning. He shouldn't have gone out without some breakfast perhaps. He walked down the flagged corridor softly; turned the key ever so cautiously. She might still be sleeping. He turned the k.n.o.b, gently; tiptoed in and, turning, fell over a heavy wooden object that lay directly in his path in the dim little hall. A barked s.h.i.+n. A good round oath.

"Hosey! What's the matter? What--" She came running to him. She led him into the bright front room.

"What was that thing? A box or something, right there in front of the door. What the--"

"Oh, I'm so sorry, Hosey. You sometimes have breakfast downtown. I didn't know-"

Something in her voice--he stopped rubbing the injured s.h.i.+n to look up at her. Then he straightened slowly, his mouth ludicrously open. Her head was bound in a white towel. Her skirt was pinned back. Her sleeves were rolled up. Chairs, tables, rugs, ornaments were huddled in a promiscuous heap. Mrs. Hosea C. Brewster was cleaning house.

"Milly!" he began, sternly. "And that's just the thing you came here to get away from. If Pinky--"

"I didn't mean to, father. But when I got up this morning there was a letter--a letter from the woman who owns this apartment, you know. She asked if I'd go to the hall closet--the one she reserved for her own things, you know--and unlock it, and get out a box she told me about, and have the hall boy express it to her. And I did, and--look!"

Limping a little he followed her. She turned on the light that hung in the closet. Boxes--pasteboard boxes--each one bearing a cryptic penciling on the end that stared out at you. "Drp Stud Win," said one; "Sum Slp Cov Bedrm," another; "Toil. Set & Pic. Frms."

Mrs Brewster turned to her husband, almost shamefacedly, and yet with a little air of defiance. "It--I don't know--it made me--not homesick, Hosey. Not homesick, exactly; but--well, I guess I'm not the only woman with a walnut streak in her modern make-up. Here's the woman--she came to the door with her hat on, and yet--"

Truth--blinding, white-hot truth--burst in upon him. "Mother," he said--and he stood up, suddenly robust, virile, alert--"mother, let's go home."

Mechanically she began to unpin the looped-back skirt.

"When?"

"Now."

"But, Hosey! Pinky--this flat--until June--"

"Now! Unless you want to stay. Unless you like it here in this--this make-believe, double-barreled, duplex do-funny of a studio thing. Let's go home, mother. Let's go home--and breathe."

In Wisconsin you are likely to find snow in April--snow or slush. The Brewsters found both. Yet on their way up from the station in 'Gene Buck's flivver taxi, they beamed out at it as if it were a carpet of daisies.

At the corner of Elm and Jackson Streets Hosey Brewster stuck his head out of the window. "Stop here a minute, will you, 'Gene?"

They stopped in front of Hengel's meat market, and Hosey went in. Mrs.

Brewster leaned back without comment.

Inside the shop. "Well, I see you're back from the East," said Aug Hengel.

"Yep."

"We thought you'd given us the go-by, you stayed away so long."

"No, sir-ree! Say, Aug, give me that piece of bacon--the big piece. And send me up some corned beef to-morrow, for corned beef and cabbage. I'll take a steak along for to-night. Oh, about four pounds. That's right."

It seemed to him that nothing less than a side of beef could take out of his mouth the taste of those fiddling little lamb chops and the restaurant fare of the past six months.

All through the winter Fred had kept up a little heat in the house, with an eye to frozen water pipes. But there was a chill upon the place as they opened the door now. It was late afternoon. The house was very still, with the stillness of a dwelling that has long been uninhabited.

The two stood there a moment, peering into the darkened rooms. Then Hosea Brewster strode forward, jerked up this curtain, that curtain with a sharp snap, flap! He stamped his feet to rid them of slush. He took off his hat and threw it high in the air and opened his arms wide and emitted a whoop of sheer joy and relief.

"Welcome home! Home!"

She clung to him. "Oh, Hosey, isn't it wonderful? How big it looks!

Huge!"

"Land, yes." He strode from hall to dining-room, from kitchen to library. "I know how a jack-in-the-box feels when the lid's opened. No wonder it grins and throws out its arms."

They did little talking after that. By five o'clock he was down in the cellar. She heard him making a great sound of rattling and b.u.mping and shaking and pounding and shoveling. She smelled the acrid odour of his stubby black pipe.

"Hosey!"--from the top of the cellar stairs. "Hosey bring up a can of preserves when you come."

"What?"

"Can of preserves."

"What kind?"

"Any kind you like."

"Can I have two kinds?"

He brought up quince marmalade and her choicest damson plums. He put them down on the kitchen table and looked around, spatting his hands together briskly to rid them of dust. "She's burning pretty good now.

That Fred! Don't any more know how to handle a boiler than a baby does.

Is the house getting warmer?"

He clumped into the dining-room, through the butler's pantry, but he was back again in a wink, his eyes round. "Why, say, mother! You've got out the best dishes, and the silver, and the candles and all. And the tablecloth with the do-dads on it. Why--"

"I know it" She opened the oven door, took out a pan of biscuits and slid it deftly to one side. "It seems as if I can't spread enough. I'm going to use the biggest platter, and I've got two extra boards in the table. It's big enough to seat ten. I want everything big somehow. I've cooked enough potatoes for a regiment, and I know it's wasteful, and I don't care. I'll eat in my kitchen ap.r.o.n, if you'll keep on your overalls. Come on."

He cut into the steak--a great thick slice. He knew she could never eat it, and she knew she could never eat it. But she did eat it all, ecstatically. And in a sort of ecstatic Nirvana the quiet and vastness and peace of the big old frame house settled down upon them.