III
But in 1885 Jed’s native sloth rebelled at the necessity for tending his own bodily needs, and he sent for his sister Abigail, who lived with Deborah on their father’s farm—sent for Abbie, and showed her, as he had showed ’Miah, that tin box of ugly treasure-trove.
“I’m a-getting feeble, Abbie,” he told her, plaintively. “I’m too old to do for myself.” With some inward appreciation of the satiric drama of the situation, he parroted the phrases he had used to ’Miah four years before. “I could hire somebody, but that don’t look right. What I got ought to stay in the family. You come and take care of me.”
This spinster sister was a humble little woman without strength or assertiveness; she yielded not from greed, but from lack of strength to resist his insistence, and so came to the farm upon the hill. Chet, telling the story, struck his fist upon his knee at the recollection.
“There’s nobody knows what he put her through, and Deborah after her,” he told me. “That old heathen had to have his own way or he’d raise holy Ned; and he got it. Abbie stood it longer than ’Miah; she never did kick up and threaten to leave him. But after two years she took sick and discouraged-like, and wanted to quit and go home. Then Jed he begun to say again how sick he was; made her fetch the doctor again.”
This time, it appeared, Doctor Crapo had been wholly convinced of the miser’s honesty.
“A pain like that,” he told Jed, “is always a sure sign. I’ve seen them go. Specially men that eat heavy, like you do, and that get fat as they go along. You’re going to have that pain the rest of your life, and worse all the time.”
Abbie was in the room, and Jed asked plaintively:
“Hev I got to suffer like this here for days and days, Doc?”
“Months, maybe years,” said the doctor, implacably.
Jed shook his head, turned wearily toward the wall.
“It ain’t a-going to be that long,” he assured them. “I can’t stand it so long as you say.”
Before this pitiable resignation, Abbie had neither the courage nor the selfishness to leave her brother alone; so she struggled on, tending the dying man. But five years later he was still alive, as venomous and as slothful as he had ever been, when Abigail at last gave way. She suffered what would have passed as a nervous breakdown in a woman of more sheltered life, and needed Jed’s care far more than he needed hers. When she would have taken to her bed, however, Jed kept stubbornly to his, so that she drove herself meekly to her round of tasks, and wept with the agony of tight-wrung nerves. It was release when, in the following spring, she died. Jed grinned at the fact that her years of service had brought her no reward at all, and the day after the funeral he sent for Deborah.