Teeftallow/Chapter 37

ABNER TEEFTALLOW stood on the hillside brooding over the sinfulness of sex, yet mixed with this in an alternating current was the thought of the value of the timber which he could see on the old Coltrane place. As he stood thinking now of sin, now of value, a perfect epitome of all hill thought, a voice with a foreign accent asked, "Were you looking for me, Mr. Teeftallow?"

Abner turned to see the man whom Adelaide had pointed out down the road. He recognized the intense studious face of Shallburger, the labour organizer whom he had known in Irontown.

"Well, no," ejaculated Abner, surprised at seeing Shallburger on a country road. He looked out of place.

"Then it's luck," said Shallburger in his quick accents. "I sent out a call for every loyal member of the union to come and resist the heartless encroachments of the plutocrats of labour." He dropped his voice. "They're goin' to bring a bunch of scabs here."

"They are?" echoed Abner, grasping the situation with the slowness of his kind.

"Yes, a bunch of new men to take the place of the old men. I understand the sheriff's coming with 'em.—Have you got a gun?"

"Nachelly."

Shallburger squeezed his arm. "To-day you can stand up for the cause of labour. You'll be a soldier in the army of human liberation! It's a glorious opportunity, Teeftallow, to carry on the battle for social progress, the uplifting of men!"

​Abner became more and more disconcerted; he cleared his throat and wet his lips.

"Er—hadn't you heard about me?" He hesitated, although he knew that Shallburger had not heard of his good fortune. The organizer never talked of anything except the wrongs of the working men. "I inherited a lot of farms from my gran'-daddy."

The foreigner's face lighted up. "Fine! Magnificent! You can be an example; a beacon on a high hill!"

"How?" asked Abner, mystified.

"By throwing your influence on the side of labour, by fighting the battles of the working men!"

"But look here," persisted Abner, thinking the fellow must not have understood, "I tell you I ain't a workin' man any more. I'm well fixed, Mr. Shallburger."

The organizer stared at him in turn. "What difference does that make?"

Abner was more confounded. "What dif'runce! Why, my Lord, man, it's jest like quittin' one job an' workin' at another. I'm on the side of money now 'cause I got money!"

"Does your money change the human right of life?" demanded Shallburger in amazement. "Is it a reason why the children of these poor crackers around here should grow up in poverty, ignorance, and crime?"

"You're damn whistlin' it is!" cried Abner, answering the spirit and not the letter of the question. "To git a man to work fer you is jest a trade, that's all. When I work fer somebody I want the highest price, nachelly, but when I har somebody I want to pay the lowest price. That's plain common sense. If a man don't do that he'll bust hisse'f."

"Would you turn traitor to the cause of humanity for money?" shouted Shallburger. "You're not worthy the name of—"

"You damn fool!" yelled Abner. "When a man's a workin' man, then workin' is his side, but when he's got money, then money's his side. If I've got a pocket full of ​money an' flop to the workin' side, then I'd be a traitor for leavin' my side. Let the rich man stan' by the rich an' the pore by the pore! Now, by God, I'm rich an' I'm stan'in' with 'em, an' if you don't like it you can go to hell!"

An invitation to go to the place of eternal punishment is usually the end of all arguments in Lane County. Mr. Shallburger seemed not to realize this. He stood looking distressfully at Abner, and presently began again with persistent persuasiveness, "But, Mr. Teeftallow, let us look to see which side has right and justice and charity on it—"

"Well, we've got the Bible on our side," interrupted Abner. "Didn't you ever read in the Bible about the feller who lent out his money first here and then there, an' they all got to tradin' with it—I forgit jest how it went; I heard Perry Northcutt tellin' it—but anyway, the idyah was to skin 'em when you can, an' that's in the Bible, Shallburger, an' there's no gittin' around that!"

Shallburger underwent such facial contortions that Abner thought he was about to have a stroke.

"The Bible! The Bible!" he spewed. "Record of an obsolete morality of a barbarous society. What does the Bible know about the complexities and injustices of our proletarian world or the rights of labour! There was no labour in those days."

"Now, look here," interposed Abner solemnly. "When you butt yore head agin the Bible you're buttin' agin a stone wall. Moreover, I won't lissen to you, because God'lmighty might send down a streak of lightnin' to kill you an' hit me by mistake. So it's fare you well if you're goin' to talk like that."

With this the hillman climbed over the rail fence which bordered the road and walked up through a field of scrawny corn stalks toward the old Coltrane place on the hill.

Abner walked quickly, uneasy, because Shallburger by his blasphemy had exposed them both to a bolt from Heaven. The hill youth bristled at the recollection of Shallburger's stupid theories—they were so dead against common sense. ​He could not conceive how a sane man could think like that.

As Abner hurried to escape any carelessly directed lightning bolt the deity might hurl, a rabbit leaped up before him and ran across his path from right to left. The young man stopped and regarded it with a mental oath.

"Damn that rabbit," he thought; "it'll bring me bad luck. It could jest as easy have run the other way."

He stood several moments, perturbed over the course of the rabbit. The omen of its direction brought before Abner the purpose of his journey and predicted for it an unfortunate outcome.

In this grayer mood he approached the dilapidated old manor on the hill. From the side Abner could see the weather-beaten columns of the piazza which were two stories in height. A little balcony which marked the second story was stuck halfway between the floor and ceiling of the piazza. A long ell of rooms ran back from the front chambers. Here and there a piece of weather boarding had fallen down or was hanging by an end, displaying a black opening in the gray wall. Several windows needed reglazing; others had been recently mended, to judge by their yellow, unpainted sashes. The old house was in its last stages, but it still had the bleak dignity of that old South which Abner had never known.

Abner had been born in this manor. In it his mother had spent her lonely and finally unbalanced life; his grandfather, old Judge Jefferson Coltrane, had built it; and his ne'er-do-well father, Linsey Teeftallow, had lost it. Now this melancholy family history recurred to Abner's mind as he approached the house on the hill. Certain salient features reasserted themselves from the misty memories of his childhood. He recalled the little balcony thrust out above the great door of the central hall; and the epic arc of the well sweep which thrust its pole, it had seemed to his childish eyes, quite to the sky—and there it was now, surprisingly shortened by the years.

The well sweep, the little balcony, an old horse-apple tree, ​and his mother, a thin sallow woman, not quite a hillwoman, moving in settled melancholy about the gray old mansion; such were his memories.

Abner meant to walk through the Coltrane farm on his way to the railroad camp and look at the timber on the estate. So now he directed his steps toward the lower side of the garden fence which was screened with elder bushes and blackberry briars and was set at irregular intervals with candelabra of sumac burning with flames of brilliant red seed.

As he walked through the corn stalks the gauze of spiders continually tickled Abner's cheeks and eyelashes and the hairs on the back of his hands. The youth must have been walking amid a bewilderment of webs. Every step he took brushed away this enginery of destruction, gins and traps, spread by the aristocrats of the insect world with indomitable patience and endless cunning.

As Abner passed this tangled fence at the back of the house, the creaking of the old well sweep caught his attention. He looked up, saw the long wooden arm coming down, and then with that rural instinct to see and identify every person in one's vicinity, the teamster moved about, peering through the hedge until he made out a woman pulling on the sweep rope. A few paces farther on he turned into a little weed-choked gate which would open a bare foot at the bottom, but the rickety top would press back perhaps a yard. He let himself through, meaning to ask for a drink, and as he rustled the small growth, the woman at the well turned.

For perhaps thirty seconds the two stood perfectly still looking at each other; the woman with her arms extended upward to pull down the sweep. At last she whispered. framing the words with her lips with difficulty as persons do under great stress, "Abner—what you are doing here?"

The teamster nodded across the hill, "I was goin' to the railroad camp."

"To fight?"

"I—don't know—we want to finish the railroad."

​Nessie let the rope slip back up through her fingers.

"I heard you were interested in the railroad," she said in a pathetic voice.

"How d'je mean?" asked Abner uncomfortably.

"I heard you were going to marry Mr. Jones's daughter—are you?"

The youth straightened, on the defensive. "Look here, Nessie!" he cried, "you sayin' that to me, an' you already married to Belshue!"

The girl stood silent with her hand resting on the bucket which swung at the edge of the well curb. It seemed to Abner that an almost invisible film of age had settled over Nessie; her features were sharpened; her blue eyes appeared larger and sadder. Her bosom had ripened and the lines of her body were a little changed from child-bearing. The dress she wore was somewhat soiled about the bosom from suckling her baby.

"I hear you really are rich," began Nessie again: she hesitated a moment, then, colouring faintly beneath the almost imperceptible roughening of her skin, "Are you still studying to be a lawyer, Abner?"

"No, I'm not doin' nothin' now—jest collectin' on my land." Here he remembered that he had come to arrange a settlement on this very house and farm.

The girl gave a deep sigh. "I wish you could have made some great somebody, Abner . . ."

"Well—I'm goin' to be rich, Nessie."

"Ye-es . . ." Her tone was dissatisfied, freighted with the unrealized dreams of her novels. Presently she began on a new tack. "You know, Abner, this is the sort of house I always meant," nodding at the decaying manor, "only, of course, kept nice."

At this moment a thin cry, repeated in an expressionless monotone, like some little animal in pain, came to Abner's ears. Nessie stooped swiftly to a basket on the ground and out of it picked up the tiniest bundle of a baby he had ever seen. He moved toward her with a catch in his breathing.

​"Nessie," he gasped, "is that it?"

The girl glanced up at him in affirmation and then gazed tenderly at the little morsel at her bosom. Abner bent over the wry little face with a gauze of dark baby hair on its head and its staring dark slate eyes which would change later into the brown of Abner's. Its tiny face was wrinkled against the weak sunshine and its doll-like fists made aimless motions about its breast. Abner touched it and felt a tiny hand grasp the end of his thumb.

"What's its name?" he asked in a shaken voice.

"Nessie Teeftallow Belshue," whispered Nessie, still looking at the baby.

"Teeftallow!"

Nessie nodded at her baby.

"Then he—knows?"

"Certainly, Abner, I—I told him before he—married me. I—I couldn't do anything else."

The irony of the situation swept over the hillman with a sickening effect. He looked at the mother of his little daughter.

"Jest to think! Jest to think, if you had waited two hours longer. . . ."

Nessie looked at him with a paling face.

"What—what do you mean?"

"Why, I—I come to Arntown that night, lookin' for you."

"Lookin' for me, to—to—marry me?"

Abner nodded. "But you had gone."

Nessie steadied herself with a hand on the well curb.

"I—didn't know—the men, the whitecaps—I was so scared, Abner . . ."

"Yes, I know—they beat me."

The young mother gazed with horrified eyes at Abner. She sat weakly down on the curb, looking as if she might fall into the well with her baby. She began weeping silently, her tears falling on her baby's clothes.

"Oh, oh, Abner, what a terrible thing! What a cruel thing! If they had only let us alone!"

​The pity of it; the tragedy of it; the nearness with which her girlish dream had skirted her life, broke her heart. She got to her feet with her baby, picked up her basket, and moved unseeingly toward the ruinous old manor.

Abner turned and walked on amid confused and painful emotions; the sad tender change in Nessie which motherhood had brought; the tiny baby, his own baby to be reared and cared for by Belshue; and now Nessie was really living in his old ancestral home, while he was an outsider—he could still feel the tiny hand of the child, like a peach petal coiled about the end of his thumb—and all this was because of the mob; the flounderings of the great moral mob; his life and Nessie's and their child's had fallen apart in confusion. What if his little daughter's hand did curl about his thumb, and about his heart, too, the sensibilities of the mob, who had flayed him in bloody agonies, must be respected. And presently the queer fact came to him that thanks to the mob he was the father of a little girl by a woman whom it melted his heart to see or even to think of, and he was betrothed to Adelaide Jones.

The teamster walked on through the long unkempt manor yard meaning to climb the fence at the end and get into the road to the camp, when an old man, who apparently had formed out of the air, came meeting Abner. With a little qualm the young man saw that it was Mr. Belshue, the jeweller whom he had known in Irontown.

The man had gone gray and withered during his few months on the Coltrane place. Time, apparently, had taken the jeweller's own burin to engrave his face. He stopped Abner with a gesture.

"That's Teeftallow—Abner Teeftallow, isn't it?"

"Yes," said Abner, defensive in air and tone.

"What did you do to my wife to send her to the house crying?"

Abner thought quickly what he could say.

"I—was talking to her . . ." he began, trying to frame something.

​"Yes—did you insult her?" trembled the old man. "Did you do like all the folks around here—insult her by word or act?"

"Insult her! Insult Nessie!" Amazement filled Abner's voice.

Belshue stared at him. "But she was crying—I saw her—you hurt her somehow!"

Abner studied the gray, angry old man and wondered what would be the best thing to say; the best thing for Nessie. If he simply said Nessie had shown him her baby and wept, that might arouse his jealousy and make the girl's lot harder.

"I—I come up when she was drawin' watter, Mr. Belshue, an' I guess I must uh give her a start, the bucket swung aginst her hand and hurt her. I was mighty sorry. . . ." Abner’s mind always worked in concretes.

Neither the jeweller's anger nor suspicions were allayed.

"Well, I don't know what you did, but, Teeftallow, I tell you for your own safety, as well as my wife's comfort, to go away from here and stay off this place." His voice rose a trifle. "Don’t enter my lands; don’t ever set foot on this plantation again."

Abner reddened at being ordered off the farm. It was the kind of insult in the hills that has caused more homicides than any other one thing.

"All right, Mr. Belshue, I'll git off now—I was jest takin' a nigh cut to the railroad camp, I wasn't expectin' to see your wife, wasn't thinkin' anything about her—but I tell you now, I own this farm, and the time's goin' to come mighty soon when you're goin' to haff to git off yorese'f!"

"When you get possession by law, we'll leave it to you, but don't persecute me and mine till then!"

Abner nodded angrily. "You'll be leavin' soon!" he blustered. "I'll—I'll—" and then at the thought of Nessie, he hesitated, then stammered,

"N-no, Mr. Belshue, I—I won't do that. I'll stay off. I won't give you no more trouble. An', honest, I didn't ​know I'd meet Nessie. If I had, I never would have clumb over the hill."

The teamster turned and walked self-consciously down the long eminence. Past the brow of the hill there came into his sight the tents of the railroad camp, the long shanghai stables, the line of track, and the little unsheltered platform where he had stood months before waiting for the train to take him to Irontown and to his torture by the mob.