Satan's Bushel (10 page)

The old man turned his face—only his face. Its expression was so calamitous, so mingled of pity, pain and cruel resolve, that Dreadwind was shocked. Before he could speak again, Weaver dropped the pouch and went stumbling away through the wheat, trampling it in a heedless manner and never once looked back. His walking down the wheat in that way, as if it were nonexistent or lifeless, so contrary to the feeling of tenderness hitherto revealed, was a sight that unnerved Dreadwind. He said it was like an act of murder unconsciously committed. When he had so far recovered as to be able to act the old man was invisible.

The first thing he did was to pick up the abandoned pouch. It was still half full of some fine, brownish stuff with a sick, unpleasant odor. He put this away in his pocket and then went about the neighborhood leisurely, making no inquiries at first, expecting to come upon Weaver and Cordelia in a casual manner. He imagined that Weaver had not recognized him. There had been no sign of recognition in that extraordinary expression; and this was all the more probable from the fact that one of Weaver’s peculiarities was a morbid longsightedness. When he was in a state of feeling his eyes focused slowly and with difficulty upon near-by objects.

But not only was there no trace of either Weaver or Cordelia in the immediate vicinity; there was not a house within a radius of many miles where they had been seen. Dreadwind was disagreeably astonished. Elusiveness in this degree was adroit, not accidental. Forebodings assailed him. He began to have ugly thoughts about Weaver.

And now it occurred to him to work backward. The woman who had delivered Cordelia’s mute token might know with whom they had stopped before coming to her. If she did, then in the same way others might be able to refer him back, and so he would go from one place to another until he had discovered their source.

Thus he came again to the house where all the beginning was, and knocked—as by this time he had learned to do—at the kitchen door. The woman’s name was Purdy. She was not surprised to see him and seemed to be indulgently amused.

“I knew you wouldn’t find them,” she said before Dreadwind had spoken.

No. She had no news of them. They had not been back.

“Do you know where they were before coming here?” Dreadwind asked.

“That won’t do you any good,” she said.

She had been making bread. There was dough on her hands. She gathered it into a little ball and rolled it thoughtfully between her palms.

“Perhaps not,” said Dreadwind. “You’ve been right so far, I’m sorry to say. However, I’d like to try.”

She gave him the name of a family in the next county, together with explicit directions about the way to go, twice repeated.

“Now be sure you don’t get lost,” she called after him. He turned to thank her again. “And stop again if you are passing this way,” she added.

He found the place. The migrants had passed four days there, and to one side of the house it was a sore matter. The woman lost her temper at the mention of Weaver’s name and denounced him for a witch. She was more voluble than coherent. Presently her husband appeared, put her aside and stood himself in the whole doorway. He wished to talk of womankind for listening womankind’s benefit. Dreadwind wished only to know where the Weavers had been before this. Gradually the man admitted the probability that they might have been with a family twelve miles south. Dreadwind was departing with this information. The man followed him to the gate and there created a man-to-man atmosphere, with no annotating female in the background.

Dreadwind, he said, would know what he meant. Women were not such as had judgment into them. They put on everything a man said and wore it hard around the house whether it was intended that way or not. Weaver was all right, only sometimes he had a strong way of saying things and it wasn’t everybody knew how to take it.

Dreadwind asked what he had been saying here to jeopardize his welcome on the feminine side.

Things there wasn’t anything into really, the man said. Things nobody would notice unless they put them on like women always done. Such as one morning at breakfast the woman said she dreamed of the devil and Weaver said you dreamed of the devil when you let the dishwater stand. There was nothing into that, was there? How did he know she let her dishwater stand? But the woman got mad and let herself go. Well, things like that. If you had short fingernails you was a tale bearer. If you kicked up your dress behind you was a thief. Maybe, maybe not. You would see many things that was both so and not so. What was so of a field might not be so of a furrow. Anyhow, it wasn’t meant personal, like the woman took it, not even about the hair. He said if birds made a nest of your hair you went crazy. So ever since the woman was going about the place knocking birds’ nests out of the trees and raking the grass for bits of her hair that might have blowed out of the house, thinking the old man put a spell on her mind. But as for him being a witch, it was like them inquisitors calling everybody heretics and burning them up because they couldn’t understand what they said. Suppose he could talk with dumb animals, like he said. Wasn’t that on account of him being born Christmas? And if he could read cobwebs and tell what the rest of the winter was going to be according to how the liver and spleen was pointed in a fresh-killed hog, that was knowledge. Whatever you might say it came out that way.

“Juknow,” the man asked, eyeing Dreadwind keenly—”juknow why you never seen a blue jay on Friday and why on the first Thursday in July at two o’clock all the toads turn pink for thirty minutes?”

“Why?” said Dreadwind.

“Ask him,” the man answered.

With that he was through. He became suddenly apprehensive. To further questions he returned evasive, suspicious monosyllables. Dreadwind offered to shake hands. The man hastily popped out of the gate.

“Never shake hands over a gate,” he said.

At the next place, twelve miles south, there was a tidy woman who never let her dishwater stand and was careful of her hair. She had liked Cordelia and felt very sorry for her on the ground that in being so devoted to that old curmudgeon of a father she was throwing her life away. It seemed hardly natural, and such a lovely girl too. However, she said nothing against Weaver directly. Her husband smiled vaguely, a little uneasily, at some secret recollection of the old man, saying: “He’s a character all right.” Dreadwind said he had been told that Weaver was a kind of witch who worked upon people’s superstitions.

“Yes,” said the man. “He might do that But you’ll see there’s generally some point to it. There are people you can’t get at in any other way for their own good. There’s a man near here that never fed his stock properly. Weaver told him at twelve o’clock Christmas Eve cows kneel down and talk with the devil in the language of the Old Testament and complain if they haven’t been used right. And that was the reason he had been having bad luck. The man believed it. Weaver nailed two brooms in a cross on the barn—you can see them as you go by—and said they would keep evil spirits away as long as the cows got enough to eat. And he believed that. It was good for the cows. What’s more, the man’s having better luck.”

“Anything else?” Dreadwind asked.

“He can find water with a peach twig,” said the man. “I never took any stock in that myself until I saw him do it right here on this place.”

In that way and from place to place Dreadwind got a lot of information he was not seeking, all of it interesting, and nothing to the main point. Nobody knew who Weaver was nor how it happened that he came to be wandering over the wheat country year after year with a beautiful daughter attached. Their trail was easy to follow in this backward fashion until it jumped off the earth in Texas. It appeared to have started there, not once but several times, for people remembered their coming again and again; only here nobody knew whence they came or where they had been last. Here was their point of departure, it seemed, but not their source; and Dreadwind was more mystified than ever.

He had been three times to see a family that was said to have known the Weavers in a time long past. The last member of the family had now denied it. The clew was therefore false and Dreadwind was leaving it.

Outside the gate in the shade of an ash tree, on a little bench, sat a man who had long since ceased to observe the world or mind its vanities. He had cut it off. His hands were folded, his knees lay together, his toes turned in, and the long, wonderful beard that had absorbed his masculinity was tucked into his shirt bosom. He seemed very little, very old and wholly impenetrable. Dreadwind had noticed him before, always in that place on the bench, remote and unseeing. You could imagine that without power, authority or grandeur of any sort he lived there among his progeny, begotten of himself and a strong woman, and derived his dignity from the one phenomenon of venerable silence; also that he took a great deal of ironic pleasure in it.

“I don’t suppose you knew Absalom Weaver?” said Dreadwind, more out of curiosity to see how he would react when directly provoked than with any sort of expectation.

The patriarchal deposit did not stir. One could not believe that anything within it stirred. Dreadwind stood looking down at it for a minute, then turned away and had one foot on the running board of his car when a far-away voice at the pitch of an unoiled hinge arrested him. The bearded figure had uttered words. Dreadwind asked him what they were. After a long time he repeated them.

“Ye can suppose it,” he said.

“Well, do you?” Dreadwind asked.

“Better nor he knew himself,” was the answer when at length it came.

Dreadwind sat down on the grass, facing the motionless figure, and gave the impulse plenty of time to augment itself.

“What made him a vagabond?” he asked.

“If you ask him why he don’t own any land—if you ask him—do you know what he will say?”

“What will he say?” asked Dreadwind.

“He will say he ain’t fit to own land. And he ain’t fit.”

“Why will he say that?” asked Dreadwind.

“I told him. I told him he were not fit to own land. And he ain’t the one to forget it.”

It was an afternoon’s work, requiring much subtlety and patience, to mine that dry cavern of its treasure. Each fragment was parted with reluctantly. And it was a plain story, deserving to be briefly told.

W
EAVER, as one might have guessed, was once a farmer on his own land. He was a good farmer. No trouble there. He was industrious and far-seeing. No trouble yet. But he had a gambling mania. What he gained by farming he lost in the nearest bucket shop. He gambled in wheat. Never anything else. This went on for years. The mania grew. His betting losses in that phantom wheat on the blackboard began to be more than all the profit he could win from the soil; and the farm itself became involved in debt. Each time a new mortgage was necessary to pay up his losses and avoid a lawsuit the cruelties of the domestic scene were greater. You can see it. A woman in the rôle of martyr, taking advantage of a just grievance to balance off all petty scores, as almost any woman will. Children bewildered at first and then beginning to take sides. A proud and willful man who must storm it through to save his own ego and authority.

The woman said that he promised each time to stop. Almost for certain he never did. He wasn’t one who would, nor one who, if he had, would have defaulted on his word; and yet, of course, a woman in these circumstances, saying each time she would never sign again, could not be expected clearly to see the difference between an ultimatum and a covenant. She understood he would cease gambling. How could he go on if she meant what she said and would never sign again? But that was an understanding arrived at in her mind alone. Anyone who knows a gambler, one in whom the passion is deep, can imagine what he was thinking. It would not be necessary for her to sign another mortgage. He would beat the phantom wheat game and clear the farm of debt. What ruins the gambler is not ill luck. It is counting on the future to pay for the past.

The sequel is foreseen. This little effigy of a patriarch with his beard flowing into his bosom like a lost river was at that time an intimate friend of the family—one who understood everything, one in whom the wife confided, one who meddled when he dared and still bore the scars of Weaver’s scorn. He was there this night, hot with the news he had got in town. Weaver at last had lost the farm. There had been a sudden fall in the price of wheat. It wiped him out. What was worse, he owed the bucket shop so much that even what was left of the farm would not satisfy the debt. There would be a dead horse to pay for. Therefore, the friend argued, it would be better now for the two boys to come forward and take charge of the family’s future. They could not be sued for the father’s debt. With all his wisdom he persuaded the wife to this line of conduct and admonished her to be firm. When he ceased speaking, having said everything three times, the little clock on a bracket shelf against the wall took up his exhortation. It was a little out of plumb, with an injured tick, and kept saying:
“Be firm, be firm, be firm.”

It was a winter night. Snow was falling. They sat in the kitchen—the sympathetic friend, the wife and four children. The chores were all done. A lantern on the floor by the door had not quite gone out and was fuming. Supper was over, except Weaver’s, and his was on a plate in the oven. It had been kept warm for so long that it was already spoiled, and no one minded it any more. The wife’s arms lay limp on the red tablecloth in the round shadow of the hanging coaloil lamp. At the slightest unexpected sound she would start, take in her breath, then let it out again in a weary, reconciled sigh. The kind of a woman who secretly enjoys misery and aggrievedness because she can so easily dramatize it. A girl of sixteen was clearing up. She had to walk around two boys, almost grown, who surrounded the stove; and she did it without speaking.

A much younger girl stood alone at the window looking out. It was she who spoke and her voice was bright.

“There he is,” she said. “I see him.”