The Bondboy Part 6

Ollie fumbled around in her dark corner for kindling, and started a fire in the kitchen stove with a great rattling of lids. Perhaps there was more alarm than necessary in this primitive and homely task, sounded with the friendly intention of carrying a warning to Joe, who was making no move to obey his master's call.

Ollie went softly to the staircase and listened. Joe's snore was rumbling again, as if he traveled a heavy road in the land of dreams.

She did not feel that she could go and shake him out of his sleep and warn him of the penalty of such remission, but she called softly from where she stood:

"Joe! You must get up, Joe!"

But her voice was not loud enough to wake a bird. Joe slept on, like a heavy-headed boor, and she went back to the stove to put the kettle on to boil. The issue of his recalcitration must be left between him and Isom. If he had good blood in him, perhaps he would fight when Isom lifted his hand and beat him out of his sleep, she reflected, hoping simply that it would turn out that way.

Isom came back to the house in frothing wrath a quarter of an hour later. There was no need to ask about Joe, for the bound boy's nostrils sounded his own betrayal.

Isom did not look at Ollie as he took the steep stairs four treads at a step. In a moment she heard the sleeper's bed squeaking in its rickety old joints as her husband shook him and cut short his snore in the middle of a long flourish.

"Turn out of here!" shouted Isom in his most terrible voice--which was to Ollie's ears indeed a dreadful sound--"turn out and git into your duds!"

Ollie heard the old bed give an extra loud groan, as if the sleeper had drawn himself up in it with suddenness; following that came the quick scuffling of bare feet on the floor.

"Don't you touch me! Don't you lay hands on me!" she heard the bound boy warn, his voice still husky with sleep.

"I'll skin you alive!" threatened Isom. "You've come here to work, not to trifle your days away sleepin'. A good dose of strap-oil's what you need, and I'm the man to give it to you, too!"

Isom's foot was heavy on the floor over her head, moving about as if in search of something to use in the flagellation. Ollie stood with hands to her tumultuous bosom, pity welling in her heart for the lad who was to feel the vigor of Isom's unsparing arm.

There was a lighter step upon the floor, moving across the room like a sudden wind. The bound boy's voice sounded again, clear now and steady, near the top of the stairs where Isom stood.

"Put that down! Put that down, I tell you!" he commanded. "I warned you never to lift your hand against me. If you hit me with that I'll kill you in your tracks!"

Ollie's heart leaped at the words; hot blood came into her face with a surge. She clasped her hands to her breast in new fervor, and lifted her face as one speeding a thankful prayer. She had heard Isom Chase threatened and defied in his own house, and the knowledge that one lived with the courage to do what she had longed to do, lifted her heart and made it glad.

She heard Isom growl something in his throat, m.u.f.fled and low, which she could not separate into words.

"Well, then, I'll let it pa.s.s--this time," said Joe. "But don't you ever do it any more. I'm a heavy sleeper sometimes, and this is an hour or two earlier than I am used to getting up; but if you'll call me loud enough, and talk like you were calling a man and not a dog, you'll have no trouble with me. Now get out of here!"

Ollie could have shouted in the triumph of that moment. She shared the bound boy's victory and exulted in his high independence. Isom had swallowed it like a coward; now he was coming down the stairs, snarling in his beard, but his knotted fist had not enforced discipline; his coa.r.s.e, distorted foot had not been lifted against his new slave. She felt that the dawn was breaking over that house, that one had come into it who would ease her of its terrors.

Joe came along after Isom in a little while, slipping his suspenders over his lank shoulders as he went out of the kitchen door. He did not turn to Ollie with the morning's greetings, but held his face from her and hurried on, she thought, as if ashamed.

Ollie ran to the door on her nimble toes, the dawn of a smile on her face, now rosy with its new light, and looked after him as he hurried away in the brightening day. She stood with her hands clasped in att.i.tude of pleasure, again lifting her face as if to speed a prayer.

"Oh, thank G.o.d for a _man_!" said she.

Isom was in a crabbed way at breakfast, sulky and silent. But his evil humor did not appear to weigh with any shadow of trouble on Joe, who ate what was set before him like a hungry horse and looked around for more.

Ollie's interest in Joe was acutely sharpened by the incident of rising.

There must be something uncommon, indeed, in a lad of Joe's years, she thought, to enable him to meet and pa.s.s off such a serious thing in that untroubled way. As she served the table, there being griddle-cakes of cornmeal that morning to flank the one egg and fragments of rusty bacon each, she studied the boy's face carefully. She noted the high, clear forehead, the large nose, the fineness of the heavy, black hair which lay s.h.a.ggy upon his temples. She studied the long hands, the grave line of his mouth, and caught a quick glimpse now and then of his large, serious gray eyes.

Here was an uncommon boy, with the man in him half showing; Isom was right about that. Let it be blood or what it might, she liked him. Hope of the cheer that he surely would bring into that dark house quickened her cheek to a color which had grown strange to it in those heavy months.

Joe's efforts in the field must have been highly satisfactory to Isom that forenoon, for the master of the house came to the table at dinner-time in quite a lively mood. The morning's unpleasantness seemed to have been forgotten. Ollie noticed her husband more than once during the meal measuring Joe's capabilities for future strength with calculating, satisfied eyes. She sat at the table with them, taking minute note of Joe at closer range, studying him curiously, awed a little by the austerity of his young face, and the melancholy of his eyes, in which there seemed to lie the concentrated sorrow of many forebears who had suffered and died with burdens upon their hearts.

"Couldn't you manage to pick us a mess of dandelion for supper, Ollie?"

asked Isom. "I notice it's comin' up thick in the yard."

"I might, if I could find the time," said Ollie.

"Oh, I guess you'll have time enough," said Isom, severely.

Her face grew pale; she lowered her head as if to hide her fear from Joe.

"Cook it with a jowl," ordered Isom; "they go fine together, and it's good for the blood."

Joe was beginning to yearn forward to Sunday, when he could go home to his mother for a satisfying meal, of which he was sharply feeling the need. It was a mystery to him how Isom kept up on that fare, so scant and unsatisfying, but he reasoned that it must be on account of there being so little of him but gristle and bone.

Joe looked ahead now to the term of his bondage under Isom; the prospect gave him an uneasy concern. He was afraid that the hard fare and harder work would result in stunting his growth, like a young tree that has come to a period of drought green and promising, and stands checked and blighted, never again to regain the hardy qualities which it needs to raise it up into the beauty of maturity.

The work gave him little concern; he knew that he could live and put on strength through that if he had the proper food. So there would have to be a change in the fare, concluded Joe, as he sat there while Isom discussed the merits of dandelion and jowl. It would have to come very early in his term of servitude, too. The law protected the bondman in that, no matter how far it disregarded his rights and human necessities in other ways. So thinking, he pushed away from the table and left the room.

Isom drank a gla.s.s of water, smacked his dry lips over its excellencies, the greatest of them in his mind being its cheapness, and followed it by another.

"Thank the Lord for water, anyhow!" said he.

"Yes, there's plenty of that," said Ollie meaningly.

Isom was as thick-skinned as he was sapless. Believing that his penurious code was just, and his frugality the first virtue of his life, he was not ashamed of his table, and the outcast sc.r.a.ps upon it. But he looked at his young wife with a sharp drawing down of his spiked brows as he lingered there a moment, his cracked brown hands on the edge of the table, which he had clutched as he pushed his chair back. He seemed about to speak a rebuke for her extravagance of desire. The frown on his face foreshadowed it, but presently it lifted, and he nodded shrewdly after Joe.

"Give him a couple of eggs mornings after this," said he, "they've fell off to next to nothing in price, anyhow. And eat one yourself once in a while, Ollie. I ain't one of these men that believe a woman don't need the same fare as a man, once on a while, anyhow."

His generous outburst did not appear to move his wife's grat.i.tude. She did not thank him by word or sign. Isom drank another gla.s.s of water, rubbed his mustache and beard back from his lips in quick, grinding twists of his doubled hand.

"The pie-plant's comin' out fast," said he, "and I suppose we might as well eat it--nothing else but humans will eat it--for there's no sale for it over in town. Seems like everybody's got a patch of it nowadays.

"Well, it's fillin', as the old woman said when she swallowed her thimble, and that boy Joe he's going to be a drain on me to feed, I can see that now. I'll have to fill him up on something or other, and I guess pie-plant's about as good as anything. It's cheap."

"Yes, but it takes sugar," ventured Ollie, rolling some crumbs between her fingers.

"You can use them mola.s.ses in the blue barrel," instructed Isom.

"It's about gone," said she.

"Well, put some water in the barrel and slosh it around--it'll come out sweet enough for a mess or two."

Isom got up from the table as he gave these economic directions, and stood a moment looking down at his wife.

"Don't you worry over feedin' that feller, Ollie," he advised. "I'll manage that. I aim to keep him stout--I never saw a stouter feller for his age than Joe--for I'm goin' to git a pile of work out of him the next two years. I saw you lookin' him over this morning," said he, approvingly, as he might have sanctioned her criticism of a new horse, "and I could see you was lightin' on his points. Don't you think he's all I said he was?"

"Yes," she answered, a look of abstraction in her eyes, her fingers busy with the crumbs on the cloth, "all you said of him--_and more_!"