Teeftallow/Chapter 5

SQUIRE MEREDITH lived something near a mile west of Irontown in a gray frame house with two enormous stone chimneys buttressing its gables. Across the public road from the house stood the Squire's barn and stable. Abner and the old man arrived at this place late at night, fed the mules, then went in and had their own supper. Immediately after eating, the old justice sat down in the family room and began reading a volume of his beloved Molner.

The Squire's wife, a rather spectral old lady, made shift to keep up a halting conversation, or rather an intermittent monologue with the boy. She reckoned the railroad would mean a lot to Lanesburg; there was a sick man up the road a piece, that they believed was going to die; a neighbour, Mr. Ferns, had been smoking his horse that day for the blind staggers; she herself had a knee that was hurting her, and she had tied red flannel around it which she thought had done it a little good; and so in driblets, on and on and on.

The was a girl in the room, a daughter of the house, who sat as mutely as Abner in the undecided light of the oil lamp. The old Squire read of the coming of the end of time. His book told him signs and portents which market the end of this dispensation, and then there would be a new people and a new earth; the author unrolled the dramatic prelude to the second coming before the old man's eyes. Of the four persons in the sitting room only one, the old Squire, escaped the pinched and meagre present, liberated through the magic of his prophet. Presently the old woman bestirred herself and advised Abner not to wait up for her husband, as lots of nights he would set there readin' tull nine or ten o'clock, and that ever'body on the place went to bed an' left him.

​The youth was glad enough to go. He took the candle the old woman provided and was directed out of the door across a dark hall into the guest room on the other side.

The candle showed dimly the walls of the guest chamber which were plastered and whitewashed. The windows were small and high, which gave the room a certain vague resemblance to a prison. A rude crayon portrait of one of the Meredith ancestors hung on the wall. It was the work of an enlarging house in Chicago and had been sold to Mrs. Meredith by a travelling salesman. Abner’s sleeping place was a mighty four-poster in the corner which was surmounted by a feather bed of enormous depth.

Abner took off his shoes and trousers in the utmost depression; he blew out his breath and looked around the melancholy room without finding a point where his eyes could rest. He thrust his toe under the overhang of the feather bed and on top of the rail, leaned down and blew out his candle, and then made a rather desperate lunge upward and over in the darkness and fell into a mass of feathers. The smell of feathers and the mustiness of long-unused sheets filled the air. The youth straightened out and lay staring up into the blackness. The feathers cupped around his body and between his outspread legs and grew warmer and warmer in the warm night. Presently perspiration dampened his shirt and drawers, and he flung about shifting to places which were temporarily cool. He sickened with longing for the poorhouse, for Mrs. Sandage and Colonel Wybe and Beatrice Belle. He remembered the county court had made him a free man, that he was alone in the world, a being without any family connection whatever; no one would ever pay him two thoughts again; desolation seized him. He gave up trying to find a cool place in the bed and so went to sleep.

The worst of nights finally pass and are no more. At length morning came with its coolness and dew and its salvo of light saluting the day. The celebration of chanticleers far and near aroused Abner, who turned out of bed, replaced his trousers and shoes and thereby was "dressed." When ​he had washed his face in a tin pan and had dried it on a sour towel he undertook the hill guest's obligation to help feed and water the stock. Squire Meredith fed his hogs by whooping them up and throwing corn to them in the middle of the public road between his house and his barn. Just here the road was fairly covered by tramped-under cobs, and this morning he began throwing out more corn on this feeding place. Hogs came running from up and down the road and through by-lanes.

As Abner helped throw out the corn he saw coming down the road a team driven by a man walking behind it. Above the jingle of the harness Abner could hear the fellow whistling a country breakdown at a merry lilt, and occasionally he broke into his own whistling to sing a snatch of the chorus,

"Hum tiddy um tum . . . turkey in the straw, Tum tiddy um tum . . . turkey in the stra-a-aw . . . ."

When he came closer Abner could see that the troubadour presented a sorry sight. His trousers were torn so that one leg was exposed from the knee down. His shirt was frayed, his hat gone, leaving his shock of disordered greasy black hair glistening in the morning sunshine. When he came still closer Abner saw that one of his eyes was black and there was dried blood on one ear and on his shirt collar below, where the blood had dripped.

Both Squire Meredith and Abner paused in their work to regard this remarkable sight.

The Squire drew a breath and called out in the formula of the hills, "Hey-oh, stranger, air ye travellin' or goin' somewher'?"

"Goin' somewher', by God . . . um tiddy um tum, turkey in the straw. . . . How fur is it to Arntown?"

"You're right in it now," said the Squire.

The stranger glanced about the lonely landscape to verify the Squire's words.

"Lemme see," he said. "What do you call yore name?"

"I don't call it," said the Squire drily, for he had formed a ​distaste for the teamster. "I don’t haff to. I'm genully with myse'f most of the time."

The teamster was not piqued at this answer but burst into loud brief laughter. "Well, I be damned, I see you air a ole man full of ketches." He looked at the old Squire with the crude superiority of youth. "Well, you've had a lot o' time to learn 'em in. We grow wiser an' weaker, as the rabbit said when the dawg chawed him up."

"I don't know whether you air any wiser or not," said the Squire stiffly, "but you certainly look chawed up some yorese'f. Where's yore waggin, an' what happened to ye?"

"Comin' down here to work on the railroad last night an' my team run away an' kinder strung my waggin out over three or four miles of road, and fin'ly wropped what was left aroun' a black jack; I figgered we had gone fur enough fer one night, so I got my mules stopped, cut 'em some grass fer fodder, an' jess laid down an' went to sleep."

"I guess you was pretty well lit up when all that was goin' on, wasn't ye?" asked the Squire with the teetotaller's scorn of the tippler in his voice.

"Wuz when I started," agreed the teamster frankly, "but I was sober as a jedge when I got 'em stopped. I'm like that. Whisky ain't got no holt on me. I sober up the minute anything happens."

This ability to react in crises must have touched even the Squire, for he asked somewhat drily, "Have ye had any breakfust?"

"Nope. I calkerlate to git some cheese an' crackers in Arntown."

"Well, we're jest about to set down," invited the Squire without enthusiasm. "Might come on in an' jine us."

"Don't keer ef I do."

The stranger reined his mules to the side of the road and hitched them to the barn fence, and the three men went into the house. As they walked through the hall into the kitchen the old man called out, "Ma, here's a stranger I'm takin' in. He's purty bad bunged up from a runaway." The phrase ​"stranger I'm taking in," referred subconsciously to the Biblical injunction for acts of this description, and the wife accepted it in the same spirit. The teamster added, "You'll haff to excuse my looks, ma'am," but he got his bloody face clean and his hair combed before he entered the kitchen.

Squire Meredith's kitchen was dark and heated like an oven. In building the room the Squire apparently had forgotten to put in windows, for there was none; and even with the brightness of a summer morning outside, the women were forced to light an oil lamp on the table. Now this lamp dimly illuminated platters piled high with fried chicken, fried ham, a sorghum stand, plates of string beans, new potatoes, turnip greens, apple pies so old that they had turned bluish. The greater part of these dishes were cold because Mrs. Meredith put on the breakfast table all that she had left over from yesterday's dinner.

The men stood around a little awkwardly until the Squire said, "Well, set down," and they all sat. The stranger made a false move toward his plate just as the Squire bent his head to return thanks for the meal. He corrected his mistake in time to bend his own oily head while the Squire rattled off some unintelligible grace which concluded with "name of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, Amen . . ." and glided without a break into "What part of the chickun will you have, brother? . . . I fergit yore name."

"Beavers," replied the teamster solidly, "Tug Beavers—an' I fergit yo'rn."

"That's because you never knowed it," said the host.

"Fur the lan's sake, Pa!" cried both women in the back of the kitchen, scandalized. "Why, it's Meredith, Mr. Beavers. I don't know what's the matter with Pa. He simply never will tell his name. He makes me so ashamed sometimes."

"That's all right, ma'am," responded Mr. Beavers, broadly generous. "I've seed the time an' place when I didn't want to give my name myse'f, an' I didn't."

"Fuh the lan's sake!" ejaculated the girl in a repressed tone.

​Mr. Beavers, who had been doing this talking with strict attention to his eating, now looked up for the first time and attempted to peer through the darkness of the kitchen. There was something primitive in the way he halted his chewing and swallowing to stare through the glow of the lamp at the girl beyond. When he saw he could make out nothing at all he said, "Could you bring me a glass of watter, please, young lady? I'm powerful thirsty."

"I vence you air after yore drunk," said the Squire's wife sympathetically. She evidently looked upon all "drunks" as disasters which overtook young men at more or less untimely intervals. She brought the water herself in a glass tumbler tinted with green.

Mr. Beavers drank thirstily and then finished his high-piled plate. Then after two quarter sections of pie, he tipped his chair back comfortably until his body and legs were in a straight line, resting on the front edge of the seat and the top slat of the back. "Best breakfust I ever et," he said, drawing a long breath and patting his stomach. "Yes, sir, the best one I ever et. Yore gal shore does cook good chicken and make fine pies, Mr. Meredith. She shore is goin' to make some man a fine wife." He sighed with comfort, then leaned forward with a bang and said sharply, "Well, I guess I better be goin'. I signed up fer that railroad job, an' I want to start with the gang this mornin'."

The old woman came forward. "You better eat some more, Mr. Beavers; you ain't et enough to keep a bird alive."

"I think I done purty well," said Mr. Beavers politely, as he glanced over the stripped dishes.

"You must come back some time an' see us, Mr. Beavers, workin' so clost like this."

"Shore will," accepted Mr. Beavers heartily.

"Now, Ma," put in the Squire bluntly, "you know these young folks ain't goin' to have no time fer nothin' like what you've got in yore head when the whole caboodle is goin' ​to be wiped out an' started over on a diff'runt plan in fourteen months."

"What in the worl' do you mean by that?" asked the teamster in amazement.

The Squire began explaining the end of Time to Mr. Beavers. It was the one topic on which the old hillman was eloquent and convincing. Again as he talked it seemed to Abner that the hot kitchen, the house, the earth, and the very people about him took on a queer insubstantiality. All life became a mere temporary arrangement awaiting the end of Time which was due in a few months. Just what the rearrangement would be, Abner could not imagine; nor did it occur to him to try to imagine. He simply knew that it would be something infinitely better than the world he saw before him.

The teamster was astounded. "Well, I declare, jest think of that! Dividin' the goats frum the sheep . . ." He stood in the door of the kitchen, scratching his greasy head, and presently observed frankly, "Well, that bein' the case, I guess I better tell you folks good-bye, for I guess I shore am bound fer hell an' won't see you no more." He came back holding out his hand with the greatest simplicity.

The implication that the teamster, a soul bound for hell, was bidding good-bye to a family who would be caught up to a happier event held a certain drama.

"I'll pray fer ye, Brother Beavers," said the Squire. The wife promised the same thing, and when the girl put her hand in the mule driver's, she murmured a barely audible, "An' me, too."

Abner, who had no certain destination for his soul, was not told good-bye, but was entirely overlooked. He simply followed Mr. Beavers out of the house and out of the gate.

The teamster unhitched his mules and set out driving them down the road and the boy went by his side.

They had gone hardly two hundred yards when they reached the top of a hill and Irontown lay in their view. ​Involuntarily both stopped and stood looking at the goal of their pilgrimage. Mr. Beavers reached very solemnly in his hip pocket and drew out a pint bottle about a fourth full. He removed the cork and held the flask up toward Irontown, and then toward Abner.

"Here's luck," he said.

He drank, then wiped the mouth of the bottle on his dirty sleeve and handed it to the youth.

Abner never before had taken a drink. He looked at the bottle with a queer trembly sensation and asked uneasily, "Will it make me drunk, Mr. Beavers?"

"Why, it never does uffeck me none," stated the rather bunged-up mule driver simply.

Abner suddenly became ashamed of his qualms. He took the bottle and held it up toward the village.

"Here's luck," he repeated; took a mouthful of the fiery liquid, strangled, sputtered, but swallowed it, and then stood blinking at Mr. Beavers with tears in his eyes.