III
Lazarus's downfall was a matter of pigs
It was Lazarus, I think, who most enjoyed the open fire. Stretched full length on the hearth, flat on his stomach, his chin in his hands, baking himself, he might have been one of his own ancestors of the African forest, for he was desperately black, and true to type. A runty little spindle-legged darky of thirteen, Lazarus had come to us second-hand, so to speak, from the county home. A family in the neighborhood was breaking up, and Lazarus's temporary adoption in the household was at an end. He had come on an errand one evening, and our interview then had led to his being transferred to our account.
"I goin' away nex' week," he said.
"Where are you going, Lazarus?"
"Back to de home, where I come from."
"What do you get for your work where you are now?"
"Boa'd and clo's an' whatever dey min' to give."
"What do you do?"
"Bring wood, wash dishes, and whatever dey wants me to."
"How would you like to come up here for a while?"
He had his eye on my target-rifle as he replied, "Yassah, I'd like it—what sort o' gun yo' got?"
I explained my firearm to him and let him handle it. His willingness to come grew.
"Are you a pretty good boy, Lazarus?"
"Oh, yassah—is—is yo' goin' to le' me shoot yo' gun ef I come?"
"Very likely, but never mind that now. What happens if you're not good?"
He eyed me rather furtively. "De rule is yo cain't whip," he said. "You kin only send back to de home."
We agreed on these terms, and Lazarus arrived the day after the auction that closed out his former employers. As an aside I may mention that Old Pop laid off a day to attend the said auction, and bought a pink chenille portière and a Japanese screen.
I want to be fair to Lazarus, and I confess, before going farther, that I think we did not rate him at his worth. He had artistic value—he was good literary material. I feel certain of that now, and I think I vaguely realized it at the time. But I was not at the moment doing anything in color, and for other purposes he was not convincing. His dish-washing was far from brilliant and his sweeping was a mess. Also, his appetite for bringing wood had grown dull. There is an old saying which closely associates a colored person with a wood-pile, but our particular Senegambian was not of that variety. The only time he really cared for wood was when it was blazing in the big fireplace, and the picture he made in front of it was about all that we thought valuable. It is true that he made a good audience and would accompany me to the fuel-heap and openly admire and praise my strength in handling the big logs, but his own gifts lay elsewhere. He approved of my gun and would have spent whole days firing it into the sky or the tree-tops, or at the barn or at birds, or into an expansive random, to the general danger of the neighborhood, if I had let him. He had a taste for jewelry, especially for my scarf-pins. When he saw one loosely lying about he carefully laid it away to prevent accident, using a very private little box he had, as a proper and safe place for it. When he discussed this matter he told me quite casually that he spected something would happen to him some day, as his father and uncle, and I think he said his grandfather, were at the moment in the penitentiary. He was inclined to exaggerate and may have been boasting, but I think his ancestry was of that turn.
Lazarus's own chief treasure was a clock. I do not recall now where he said it came from, but he valued it highly. It was a round tin clock, with an alarm attachment. He kept it by his bed, and the alarm was his especial joy. He loved the sound of it, I do not know why. Perhaps it echoed some shrill, raucous cry of the jungle that had stirred his ancestors, and something hereditary in him still answered to it. He never seemed to realize that it was attached to the clock for any special purpose, such as rousing him to the affairs of the day. To him it was music, inspiration, even solace. When its strident concatenation of sounds smote the morning air Lazarus would let it rave on interminably, probably hugging himself with the fierce joy of it, lulled by its final notes to a relapse of dreams. It did not on any occasion stimulate him to rise and dress. That was a more strenuous matter—one requiring at times physical encouragement on my part. Had his bulk been in proportion to his trance, I should have needed a block and tackle and a derrick to raise this later Lazarus.
Lazarus's downfall was a matter of pigs. We did not expect to embark in pig culture when we settled at Brook Ridge, but Westbury encouraged the notion, and our faith in Westbury was strong. He said that pigs had a passion for dish-water and garbage, and that our kitchen surplus, modestly supplemented with "shorts," would maintain a side-line of two pigs, which would grow into three-hundred-pounders and fill up Uncle Joe's pork and ham barrels by the end of another season.
The idea was alluring. A neighbor had small pigs for sale, and I ordered a pair. There was an old pen near the barn, and I spent a day setting it in order for our guests. I repaired the outlets, swept it, and put in nice clean hay. I built a yard easy of access from the pen, and installed a generous and even handsome trough. Westbury said our preparations were quite complete. I could see that our pigs also approved of it. They capered about, oof-oofing, and enjoyed their trough and contents. True, their manners left something to be desired, but that is often the case with the young.
What round, cunning, funny little things they were! We named them Hans and Gretel, and were tempted to take them into the house, as pets. We might have done so, only that I remembered the story of the Arab who invited his camel to put his head in the tent. I had a dim suspicion that those two pigs would own the house presently, and that we should have no place to go but the pen. Lazarus was fascinated by them. He hung over the side of their private grounds and wanted to carry them refreshments constantly.
"Dem cert'ney make mighty fine shotes by spring," he announced to everybody that came along, "an' by killin'-time dey grow as big as dat barn. I gwine to feed 'em all day an' see how fat dey gits."
"You're elected, Lazarus," I said. "It's your job. You look after Hans and Gretel and we'll look after you."
"Yo' des watch 'em grow," said Lazarus.
For a while we did. We went out nearly every day to look at our prospective ham and bacon supply, and it did seem to be coming along. Then I had some special work which took me away for a fortnight, and concurrently a bad spell of weather set in. Elizabeth, occupied with the hundred supplementary details of getting established, and general domestic duties, could not give Hans and Gretel close personal attention, and they fell as a monopoly to Lazarus. With his passion for pigs, she thought he might overfeed them, but as she had never heard of any fatalities in that direction he was not restrained.
But it may be this idea somehow got hold of Lazarus. I came home one evening and asked about the pigs. Elizabeth was doubtful. She had been out that day to look at them and was not encouraged by their appearance. She thought they had grown somewhat—in length. When I inspected them next morning, I thought so, too. I said that Hans and Gretel were no longer pigs they were turning into ant-eaters. Their bodies appeared to have doubled in length and halved in bulk. Their pudgy noses had become beaks. I was reminded of certain wild, low-bred pigs which I had seen splitting the hazel-brush of the West, the kind that Bill Nye once pictured as outrunning the fast mail. I said I feared our kitchen by-product was not rich enough for Hans and Gretel. Possibly that was true. Still, it would, have been better than nothing, which it appeared was chiefly what those poor porkers had been living on.
Lazarus's love had waned and died. On chilly, stormy evenings it had been easier to fling the contents of his pail and pan out back of the wood-house than to carry them several times farther to the pen, while the supplementary "shorts" had been shortened unduly for Hans and Gretel. The physical evidence was all against Lazarus—the fascinations of the big open fire had won him; he had been untrue to the pigs. When he appeared, they charged him in chorus with his perfidy, and he could frame no adequate reply. Westbury came, and I persuaded him to take them at a reduction, and threw in Uncle Joe's pork and ham barrels. I said we wanted Hans and Gretel to have a good home—that we had not been worthy of them.
They found it at Westbury's. There they were in a sort of heaven. When I saw them at the end of another two weeks they were again unrecognizable—they were once more pigs.
We parted, with Lazarus about the same time. Our régime was not suited to his needs. It was a pity. With his gifts, the right people might have modeled him into a politician, or something, but we couldn't. We had neither the equipment nor the time. Nor, according to agreement, could we administer that discipline which, from our old-fashioned point of view, he sometimes seemed to require. We could only "send back to de home." Perhaps to-day he is "somewhere in France," making a good soldier. I hope so.