One of Ours
Book I: On Lovely Creek
Chapter III
The circus was on Saturday. The next morning Claude was standing at his
dresser, shaving. His beard was already strong, a shade darker than his hair and
not so red as his skin. His eyebrows and long lashes were a pale
corn-colour—made his blue eyes seem lighter than they were, and, he thought,
gave a look of shyness and weakness to the upper part of his face. He was
exactly the sort of looking boy he didn't want to be. He especially hated his
head,—so big that he had trouble in buying his hats, and uncompromisingly
square in shape; a perfect block-head. His name was another source of
humiliation. Claude: it was a "chump" name, like Elmer and Roy; a hayseed name
trying to be fine. In country schools there was always a red-headed,
warty-handed, runny-nosed little boy who was called Claude. His good physique he
took for granted; smooth, muscular arms and legs, and strong shoulders, a farmer
boy might be supposed to have. Unfortunately he had none of his father's
physical repose, and his strength often asserted itself inharmoniously. The
storms that went on in his mind sometimes made him rise, or sit down, or lift
something, more violently than there was any apparent reason for his doing.
The household slept late on Sunday morning; even Mahailey did not get up
until seven. The general signal for breakfast was the smell of doughnuts frying.
This morning Ralph rolled out of bed at the last minute and callously put on his
clean underwear without taking a bath. This cost him not one regret, though he
took time to polish his new ox-blood shoes tenderly with a pocket handkerchief.
He reached the table when all the others were half through breakfast, and made
his peace by genially asking his mother if she didn't want him to drive her to
church in the car.
"I'd like to go if I can get the work done in time," she said, doubtfully
glancing at the clock.
"Can't Mahailey tend to things for you this morning?"
Mrs. Wheeler hesitated. "Everything but the separator, she can. But she can't
fit all the parts together. It's a good deal of work, you know."
"Now, Mother," said Ralph good-humouredly, as he emptied the syrup pitcher
over his cakes, "you're prejudiced. Nobody ever thinks of skimming milk
now-a-days. Every up-to-date farmer uses a separator."
Mrs. Wheeler's pale eyes twinkled. "Mahailey and I will never be quite
up-todate, Ralph. We're old-fashioned, and I don't know but you'd better let us
be. I could see the advantage of a separator if we milked half-a-dozen cows.
It's a very ingenious machine. But it's a great deal more work to scald it and
fit it together than it was to take care of the milk in the old way."
"It won't be when you get used to it," Ralph assured her. He was the chief
mechanic of the Wheeler farm, and when the farm implements and the automobiles
did not give him enough to do, he went to town and bought machines for the
house. As soon as Mahailey got used to a washing-machine or a churn, Ralph, to
keep up with the bristling march of invention, brought home a still newer one.
The mechanical dish-washer she had never been able to use, and patent flat-irons
and oil-stoves drove her wild.
Claude told his mother to go upstairs and dress; he would scald the separator
while Ralph got the car ready. He was still working at it when his brother came
in from the garage to wash his hands.
"You really oughtn't to load mother up with things like this, Ralph," he
exclaimed fretfully. "Did you ever try washing this damned thing yourself ?"
"Of course I have. If Mrs. Dawson can manage it, I should think mother
could."
"Mrs. Dawson is a younger woman. Anyhow, there's no point in trying to make
machinists of Mahailey and mother."
Ralph lifted his eyebrows to excuse Claude's bluntness. "See here," he said
persuasively, "don't you go encouraging her into thinking she can't change her
ways. Mother's entitled to all the labour-saving devices we can get her."
Claude rattled the thirty-odd graduated metal funnels which he was trying to
fit together in their proper sequence. "Well, if this is labour-saving "
The younger boy giggled and ran upstairs for his panama hat. He never
quarrelled. Mrs. Wheeler sometimes said it was wonderful, how much Ralph would
take from Claude.
After Ralph and his mother had gone off in the car, Mr. Wheeler drove to see
his German neighbour, Gus Yoeder, who had just bought a blooded bull. Dan and
Jerry were pitching horseshoes down behind the barn. Claude told Mahailey he was
going to the cellar to put up the swinging shelf she had been wanting, so that
the rats couldn't get at her vegetables.
"Thank you, Mr. Claude. I don't know what does make the rats so bad. The cats
catches one most every day, too."
"I guess they come up from the barn. I've got a nice wide board down at the
garage for your shelf." The cellar was cemented, cool and dry, with deep closets
for canned fruit and flour and groceries, bins for coal and cobs, and a
dark-room full of photographer's apparatus. Claude took his place at the
carpenter's bench under one of the square windows. Mysterious objects stood
about him in the grey twilight; electric batteries, old bicycles and
typewriters, a machine for making cement fence-posts, a vulcanizer, a
stereopticon with a broken lens. The mechanical toys Ralph could not operate
successfully, as well as those he had got tired of, were stored away here. If
they were left in the barn, Mr. Wheeler saw them too often, and sometimes, when
they happened to be in his way, he made sarcastic comments. Claude had begged
his mother to let him pile this lumber into a wagon and dump it into some
washout hole along the creek; but Mrs. Wheeler said he must not think of such a
thing; it would hurt Ralph's feelings. Nearly every time Claude went into the
cellar, he made a desperate resolve to clear the place out some day, reflecting
bitterly that the money this wreckage cost would have put a boy through college
decently.
While Claude was planing off the board he meant to suspend from the joists,
Mahailey left her work and came down to watch him. She made some pretence of
hunting for pickled onions, then seated herself upon a cracker box; close at
hand there was a plush "spring-rocker" with one arm gone, but it wouldn't have
been her idea of good manners to sit there. Her eyes had a kind of sleepy
contentment in them as she followed Claude's motions. She watched him as if he
were a baby playing. Her hands lay comfortably in her lap.
"Mr. Ernest ain't been over for a long time. He ain't mad about nothin', is
he?"
"Oh, no! He's awful busy this summer. I saw him in town yesterday. We went to
the circus together."
Mahailey smiled and nodded. "That's nice. I'm glad for you two boys to have a
good time. Mr. Ernest's a nice boy; I always liked him first rate. He's a little
feller, though. He ain't big like you, is he? I guess he ain't as tall as Mr.
Ralph, even."
"Not quite," said Claude between strokes. "He's strong, though, and gets
through a lot of work."
"Oh, I know! I know he is. I know he works hard. All them foreigners works
hard, don't they, Mr. Claude? I reckon he liked the circus. Maybe they don't
have circuses like our'n, over where he come from."
Claude began to tell her about the clown elephant and the trained dogs, and
she sat listening to him with her pleased, foolish smile; there was something
wise and far-seeing about her smile, too.
Mahailey had come to them long ago, when Claude was only a few months old.
She had been brought West by a shiftless Virginia family which went to pieces
and scattered under the rigours of pioneer farm-life. When the mother of the
family died, there was nowhere for Mahailey to go, and Mrs. Wheeler took her in.
Mahailey had no one to take care of her, and Mrs. Wheeler had no one to help her
with the work; it had turned out very well.
Mahailey had had a hard life in her young days, married to a savage
mountaineer who often abused her and never provided for her. She could remember
times when she sat in the cabin, beside an empty meal-barrel and a cold iron
pot, waiting for "him" to bring home a squirrel he had shot or a chicken he had
stolen. Too often he brought nothing but a jug of mountain whiskey and a pair of
brutal fists. She thought herself well off now, never to have to beg for food or
go off into the woods to gather firing, to be sure of a warm bed and shoes and
decent clothes. Mahailey was one of eighteen children; most of them grew up
lawless or half-witted, and two of her brothers, like her husband, ended their
lives in jail. She had never been sent to school, and could not read or write.
Claude, when he was a little boy, tried to teach her to read, but what she
learned one night she had forgotten by the next. She could count, and tell the
time of day by the clock, and she was very proud of knowing the alphabet and of
being able to spell out letters on the flour sacks and coffee packages. "That's
a big A." she would murmur, "and that there's a little a."
Mahailey was shrewd in her estimate of people, and Claude thought her
judgment sound in a good many things. He knew she sensed all the shades of
personal feeling, the accords and antipathies in the household, as keenly as he
did, and he would have hated to lose her good opinion. She consulted him in all
her little difficulties. If the leg of the kitchen table got wobbly, she knew he
would put in new screws for her. When she broke a handle off her rolling pin, he
put on another, and he fitted a haft to her favourite butcher-knife after every
one else said it must be thrown away. These objects, after they had been mended,
acquired a new value in her eyes, and she liked to work with them. When Claude
helped her lift or carry anything, he never avoided touching her, this she felt
deeply. She suspected that Ralph was a little ashamed of her, and would prefer
to have some brisk young thing about the kitchen.
On days like this, when other people were not about, Mahailey liked to talk
to Claude about the things they did together when he was little; the Sundays
when they used to wander along the creek, hunting for wild grapes and watching
the red squirrels; or trailed across the high pastures to a wildplum thicket at
the north end of the Wheeler farm. Claude could remember warm spring days when
the plum bushes were all in blossom and Mahailey used to lie down under them and
sing to herself, as if the honey-heavy sweetness made her drowsy; songs without
words, for the most part, though he recalled one mountain dirge which said over
and over, "And they laid Jesse James in his grave."