in here tomorrow and leave you nothing to do but oversee. You’ll have a fine easy time of it this fall, Ollie, when I turn my crops.”
Ollie drained the dishpan and wrung out the cloths. These she hung on a line to dry. Isom watched her with approval, pleased to see her so housewifely and neat.
“Ollie, you’ve come on wonderful since I married you,” said he. “When you come here–do you recollect?–you couldn’t hardly make a mess of biscuits that was fit to eat, and you knew next to nothing about milk and butter for all that you was brought up on a farm.”
“Well, I’ve learned my lesson,” said she, with a bitterness which passed over Isom’s head.
Her back was turned to him, she was reaching to hang a utensil on the wall, so high above her head that she stood on tiptoe. Isom was not insensible to the pretty lines of her back, the curve of her plump hips, the whiteness of her naked arms. He smiled.
“Well, it’s worth money to you to know all these things,” said he, “and I don’t know but it’s just as well for you to go on and do the work this summer for the benefit of what’s to be got out of it; you’ll be all the better able to oversee a nigger woman when I put one in, and all the better qualified to take things into your own hands when I’m done and in the grave. For I’ll have to go, in fifteen or twenty years more,” he sighed.
Ollie made no reply. She was standing with her back still turned toward him, stripping down her sleeves. But the sigh which she gave breath to sounded loud in Isom’s ears. 37
Perhaps he thought she was contemplating with concern the day when he must give over his strivings and hoardings, and leave her widowed and alone. That may have moved him to his next excess of generosity.
“I’m going to let Joe help you around the house a good deal, Ollie,” said he. “He’ll make it a lot easier for you this summer. He’ll carry the swill down to the hogs, and water ’em, and take care of the calves. That’ll save you a good many steps in the course of the day.”
Ollie maintained her ungrateful silence. She had heard promises before, and she had come to that point of hopelessness where she no longer seemed to care. Isom was accustomed to her silences, also; it appeared to make little difference to him whether she spoke or held her peace.
He sat there reflectively a little while; then got up, stretching his arms, yawning with a noise like a dog.
“Guess I’ll go to bed,” said he.
He looked for a splinter on a stick of stove-wood, which he lit at the stove and carried to his lamp. At the door he paused, turned, and looked at Ollie, his hand, hovering like a grub curved beside the chimney, shading the light from his eyes.
“So he brought a Bible, did he?”
“Yes.”
“Well, he’s welcome to it,” said Isom. “I don’t care what anybody that works for me reads–just so long as he works!”
Isom’s jubilation over his bondboy set his young wife’s curiosity astir. She had not noted any romantic or noble parts about the youth in the casual, uninterested view which she had given him that day. To her then he had appeared only a sprangling, long-bodied, long-legged, bony-shouldered, unformed lad whose hollow frame indicated a great capacity for food. Her only thought in connection with him had 38 been that it meant another mouth to dole Isom’s slender allowance out to, more scheming on her part to make the rations go round. It meant another one to wash for, another bed to make.
She had thought of those things wearily that morning when she heard the new voice at the kitchen door, and she had gone there for a moment to look him over; for strange faces, even those of loutish farm-hands, were refreshing in her isolated life. She had not heard what the lad was saying to Isom, for the kitchen was large and the stove far away from the door, but she had the passing thought that there was a good deal of earnestness or passion in the harangue for a farm-hand to be laying on his early morning talk.
When she found the Bible lying there on top of Joe’s hickory shirt, she had concluded that he had been talking religion. She hoped that he would not preach at his meals. The only religion that Ollie knew anything of, and not much of that, was a glum and melancholy kind, with frenzied shoutings of the preacher in it, and portentous shaking of the beard in the shudderful pictures of the anguish of unrepentant death. So she hoped that he would not preach at his meals, for the house was sad enough, and terrible and gloomily hopeless enough, without the kind of religion that made the night deeper and the day longer in its dread.
Now Isom’s talk about the lad’s blood, and his expression of high confidence in his fealty, gave her a pleasant topic of speculation. Did good blood make men different from those who came of mongrel strain, in other points than that of endurance alone? Did it give men nobility and sympathy and loftiness, or was it something prized by those who hired them, as Isom seemed to value it in Joe, because it lent strength to the arms?
Ollie sat on the kitchen steps and turned all this over in her thoughts after Isom had gone to bed. 39
Perhaps in the new bondboy, who had come there to serve with her, she would find one with whom she might talk and sometimes ease her heart. She hoped that it might be so, for she needed chatter and laughter and the common sympathies of youth, as a caged bird requires the seed of its wild life. There was hope in the new farm-hand which swept into her heart like a refreshing breeze. She would look him over and sound him when he worked, choring between kitchen and barn.
Ollie had been a poor man’s child. Isom had chosen her as he would have selected a breeding-cow, because nature, in addition to giving her a form of singular grace and beauty, had combined therein the utilitarian indications of ability to plentifully reproduce her kind. Isom wanted her because she was alert and quick of foot, and strong to bear the burdens of motherhood; for even in the shadow of his decline he still held to the hope of his youth–that he might leave a son behind him to guard his acres and bring down his name.
Ollie was no deeper than her opportunities of life had made her. She had no qualities of self-development, and while she had graduated from a high school and still had the ornate diploma among her simple treasures, learning had passed through her pretty ears like water through a funnel. It had swirled and choked there a little while, just long enough for her to make her “points” required for passing, then it had sped on and left her unencumbered and free.
Her mother had always held Ollie’s beauty a greater asset than mental graces, and this early appraisement of it at its trading value had made Ollie a bit vain and ambitious to mate above her family. Isom Chase had held out to her all the allurements of which she had dreamed, and she had married him for his money. She had as well taken a stone 40 to her soft bosom in the hope of warming it into yielding a flower.
Isom was up at four o’clock next morning. A few minutes after him Ollie stumbled down the stairs, heavy with the pain of broken sleep. Joe was snoring above-stairs; the sound penetrated to the kitchen down the doorless casement.
“Listen to that feller sawin’ gourds!” said Isom crabbedly.
The gloom of night was still in the kitchen; in the corner where the stove stood it was so dark that Ollie had to grope her way, yawning heavily, feeling that she would willingly trade the last year of her life for one more hour of sleep that moist spring morning.
Isom mounted the kitchen stairs and roused Joe, lumbering down again straightway and stringing the milk-pails on his arms without waiting to see the result of his summons.
“Send him on down to the barn when he’s ready,” directed Isom, jangling away in the pale light of early day.
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