Part 8 (1/2)
THE seat was an empty starch-box on the Cross-Roads porch, its occupant a barefoot boy with a torn straw hat pulled far down over his eyes. To the casual observer one of the most ordinary of sights, but to one possessed of sympathetic powers of penetration into a boy's inner consciousness there was a suggestion of the tragic. Perkins's oldest had that afternoon in school been told to write a composition on September.
It was to be handed in next morning. It was the hopelessness of accomplis.h.i.+ng the fact even in aeons, not to mention the limited time of a dozen short hours, that had bound him, a little Prometheus, to the starch-box, with the vulture of absolute despair tearing at his vitals.
Two other boys had been a.s.signed the same subject, and the three had kicked the dust up wrathfully all the way from the schoolhouse, echoing an old cry that had gone up ages before from the sons of Jacob, under the lash of the Egyptian, ”How can we make bricks without straw?”
”Ain't nothin' to say 'bout September,” declared Riley Hines, gloomily, ”and I'll be dogged if I say it. I'm goin' to get my sister to write mine fer me. She'll do it ef I tease long enough, and give her something to boot.”
”I'll ask paw what to say,” declared Tommy Bowser. ”He won't write it for me, but he'll sort o' boost me along. Then if it ain't what she wants, _I_ won't be to blame. I'll tell her paw said 'twas all right.”
This s.h.i.+fting of responsibility to paternal shoulders restored the habitual expression of cheerfulness to Tommy's smudgy face, but there was no corresponding smile on Sammy's. There was no help to be had in the household of Perkins.
That was why he was waiting on the starch-box while Tommy was sent on an errand. It was in the vain hope that Tommy would return and apply for his ”boost” and share it with him before darkness fell. He was a practical child, not given to whimsical reflections, but as he sat there in desperate silence, he began wondering what the different customers would have to say if they were suddenly called upon, as he had been that afternoon, to write about September.
Mrs. Powers, for instance, in her big c.r.a.pe bonnet, with its long wispy veil trailing down her back. He was almost startled, when, as if in answer to his thought, she uttered the word that was at the bottom of his present trouble, the subject a.s.signed him for composition.
”Yes, Mr. Bowser, September is a month that I'm never sorry to say good-bye to. What with the onion pickle and peach preserves and the house-cleaning to tend to, I'm nearly broke down when it's over. There's so many odds and ends to see to on a farm this time of year, first in doors and then out. I tell Jane it's like piecing a crazy quilt. You can't never count on what a day's going to bring forth in September. You may get a carpet up and beat, and have your stove settin' out waiting to be put up, and your furniture in a heap in the yard, and the hired man will have to go off and leave it all while he takes the cider-mill to be mended. And you in a stew all day long for fear it'll rain before he gets things under shelter.
”Then it's a sad time to me, too,” she exclaimed with a mournful shake of the head in the black bonnet. ”It was in September I lost my first and third husbands, two of the best that ever had tombstones raised to their memory, if I do say it as oughtn't. One died on the sixteenth, and his funeral was preached on the eighteenth, and the other died fifteen years later on the twenty-third, and we kept him three days, on account of waiting till his brother could get here from Missouri. So you see that makes nearly a week altogether of mournful anniversaries for me every September.”
Another breath and she had reached the three tombstones, and talking volubly on her favourite subject, she completed her purchases and went out. But her conversation had not lightened the woes of the little Prometheus on the starch-box. Despair still gnawed on. House-cleaning worries and onion pickle, and reminiscences of two out of three departed husbands, might furnish material for Mrs. Powers's composition, should the fates compel her to write one, but there was no straw of a suggestion for Sammy Perkins, and again he cried out inwardly as bitterly as the oppressed of old had cried out against Pharaoh.
A man in a long, sagging linen duster was the next comer. He squeaked back and forth in front of the counter in new high-heeled boots, and talked incessantly while he made his purchases, with a clumsy attempt at facetiousness.
”Put in a cake of shaving-soap, too, Jim,” he called, pa.s.sing his hand over the black stubble on his chin. ”County court begins to-morrer.
Reckon the lawyers will shave everything in sight when it comes to their bills, but I want to be as slick as them. I'll be settin' on the jury all week. Did you ever think of it, Jim, that's a mighty interesting way to earn your salt? Jest set back and be entertained with the history of all the old feuds and fusses in the county, and collect your two bucks a day without ever turning your hand over. Good as a show, and dead easy.
”Only one thing, it sort o' spiles your faith in human nature. The court stenographer said last year that in the shorthand he writes, the same mark that stands for lawyer stands for liar, too. He! he! he! isn't that a good one? You can only tell which one is meant by what comes before it, and this fellow said he'd come to believe that one always fit in the sentence as good as the other. Either word was generally appropriate. You miss a lot of fun, Jim, by not getting on the jury. I always look forrard to fall on that account.”
No help for Perkins's oldest in _that_ conversation. He waited awhile longer. Presently an old gentleman in a long-tailed, quaintly cut black coat, stepped up on the porch. He had a gold-headed cane under his arm, and the eyes behind the square-bowed spectacles beamed kindly on the little fellow. He stopped beside the starch-box a moment with a friendly question about school and the health of the Perkins household. The boy's heart gave a jump up into his throat. The old minister knew everything.
The minister could even tell him what to write in his composition if he dared but ask him. He opened his mouth to form the question, but his tongue seemed glued in its place, and the head under the torn hat drooped lower in embarra.s.sed silence. His troubled face flushed to the roots of his tow hair, and he let the Angel of Opportunity pa.s.s him by unchallenged.
”Will you kindly give me one of those advertising almanacs, Mr. Bowser?”
inquired the parson, when his packages of tea and sugar had been secured. ”I've misplaced mine, and I want to ascertain at what hour to-morrow the moon changes.”
”Certainly, certainly!” responded the storekeeper with obliging alacrity, rubbing his hands together, and stepping up on a chair to reach the pile on a shelf overhead. ”Help yourself, sir. I must answer the telephone.”
The parson, slowly studying the moon's phases as he stepped out of the store, did not notice that he had taken two almanacs until one fell at his feet. The boy sprang up to return it, but he waved it aside with a courtly sweep of his hand.
”No, my son, I intended to take but one. Keep it. They are for general distribution. You will find it full of useful information. Have you ever learned anything about the signs of the Zodiac? Here is Leo. I always take an especial interest in this sign, because I happened to be born under it. I'm the seventh son of a seventh son, born in the seventh month, and I always take it as a good omen, seven being the perfect number. You know the ancients believed a man's star largely affected his destiny. You will find some interesting historical events enumerated under each month. A good almanac is almost as interesting to study as a good dictionary, my boy. I would advise you to form a habit of referring to both of them frequently.”
With one of his rare, childlike smiles the good man pa.s.sed on, and Perkins's oldest was left with the almanac in his hands. For awhile he studied the signs of the Zodiac, in puzzled awe, trying to establish a relations.h.i.+p between them and the man they surrounded, whose vital organs were obligingly laid open to public inspection, regardless of any personal inconvenience the display might cause him.
Then he turned to the historical events. There was one for each day in the month. On Sunday, the first, eighteen hundred and ninety-nine, had occurred the j.a.panese typhoon. Friday, the sixth, sixteen hundred and twenty, the _Mayflower_ had sailed. Mahomet's birth had set apart the eleventh in five hundred and seventy. The founding of Mormonism, Was.h.i.+ngton's Farewell, and the battle of Marathon were further down the list, but it was all Greek to Perkins's oldest. Any one of these items would have been straw for the parson. Out of the _Mayflower_, Mahomet, Mormonism, or Marathon, each one of them the outgrowth of some September, he could have pressed enough literary brick to build a fair sky-sc.r.a.ping structure that would have been the wonder of all who gazed upon it. This time the boy looked his Angel of Opportunity in the face and did not recognise it as such.
The gate clicked across the road and he turned his head. Miss Anastasia Dill was going up the path, her arms full of goldenrod and white and purple asters. September was a poem to Miss Anastasia, but the boy looked upon goldenrod and the starry asters simply as meadow weeds. The armful of bloom brought no suggestion to him. On the morrow Riley Hines would hand in two pages of allusions to them, beginning with a quotation from Whittier's ”Autumn Thoughts,” and ending with a couplet from Pope, carefully copied by Maria Hines from the ”Exercises for Parsing” in the back of her grammar.
Somebody's supper-horn blew in the distance, and, grown desperate by Tommy's long absence and the lateness of the hour, he took his little cracked slate from the strap of books on the floor beside him, and laid it across his knees. Then with a stubby pencil that squeaked dismally in its pa.s.sage across the slate, he began copying bodily from the almanac the list of historical events enumerated therein, just as they stood, beginning with the j.a.panese typhoon on the first, and ending ”_Volunteer_ beat _Thistle_” on the thirtieth, eighteen hundred and eighty-seven.
Then he began to copy a few agricultural notes, inserted as side remarks for those who relied on their almanacs as guide-posts to gardening.