III
Midsummer came to trim the old farm with her wreaths. It was the time Luke loved best of all—the long, sweet, loam-scented evenings with Maw and Tom on the old porch; and sometimes—when there was no fog—Paw's cot, wheeled out in the stillness. But Maw was not herself this summer. Something had fretted and eaten into her heart like an acid ever since Aunt Mollie's visit and the news of Matty Bisbee's funeral.
When, one by one, the early summer festivities of the neighborhood had slipped by, with no inclusion of the Hayneses, she had fallen to brooding deeply,—to feeling more bitterly than ever the ignominy and wretchedness of their position.
Luke tried to comfort her; to point out that this summer was like any other; that they "never had mattered much to folks." But Maw continued to brood; to allude vaguely and insistently to "the straw that broke the camel's back." It was bitter hard to have Maw like that—home was bad enough, anyway. Sometimes on clear, soft nights, when the moon came out all splendid and the "peepers" sang so plaintively in the Hollow, the boy's heart would fill and grow enormous in his chest with the intolerable sadness he felt.
Then Maw's mood lifted—pierced by a ray of heavenly sunlight—for Nat came home!
Luke saw him first—heard him, rather; for Nat came up the lane—oh, miraculous!—driving a motor car. It was not a car like Uncle Clem's—not even a stepbrother to it. It was low and almost noiseless, and shaped like one of those queer torpedoes they were fighting with across the water. It was colored a soft dust-gray and trimmed with nickel; and, huge and powerful though it was, it swung to a mere touch of Nat's hand.
Nat stood before them, clad in black leather Norfolk and visored cap and leggings.
"Look like a fancy brand of chauffeur, don't I?" he laughed, with the easy resumption of a long-broken relation that was so characteristically Nat.
But Nat was not a chauffeur. Something much bigger and grander. The news he brought them on top of it all took their breaths away. Nat was a special demonstrator, out on a brand-new high-class job for a house handling a special line of high-priced goods. And he was to go to Europe in another week—did they get it straight? Europe! Jiminy! He and another fellow were taking cars over to France and England.
No; they didn't quite get it. They could not grasp its significance, but clung humbly, instead, to the mere glorious fact of his presence.
He stayed two days and a night; and summer was never lovelier. Maw was like a girl, and there was such a killing of pullets and extravagance with new-laid eggs as they had never known before. At the last he gave them all presents.
"Tell the truth," he laughed, "I'm stony broke. 'Tisn't mine, all this stuff you see. I got some kale in advance—not much, but enough to swing me; but of course, the outfit's the company's. But I'll tell you one thing: I'm going to bring some long green home with me, you can bet! And when I do"—Nat had given Maw a prodigious nudge in the ribs—"when I do—I ain't goin' to stay an old bachelor forever! Do you get that?"
Maw's smile had faded for a moment. But the presents were fine—a new knife for Tom, a book for Luke, and twenty whole round dollars for Maw, enough to pay that old grocery bill down at Beckonridge's and Paw's new invoice of patent medicine.
They all stood on the porch and watched him as far they could see; and Maw's black mood didn't return for a whole week.
Evenings now they had something different to talk about—journeys in seagoing craft; foreign countries and the progress of the "Ee-ropean" war, and Nat's likelihood—he had laughed at this—of touching even its fringe. They worked it all up from the boiler-plate war news in the Bi-weekly and Luke's school geography. Yes; for a little space the blackness was lifted.
Then came the August morning when Paw died. This was an unexpected and unsettling contingency. One doesn't look for a "chronic's" doing anything so unscheduled and foreign to routine; but Paw spoiled all precedent. They found him that morning with his heart quite still, and Luke knew they stood in the presence of imminent tragedy.
It's all very well to peck along, hand-to-mouth fashion. You can manage a living of sorts; and farm produce, even scanty, unskillfully contrived, and the charity of relatives, and the patience of tradesmen, will see you through. But a funeral—that's different! Undertaker—that means money. Was it possible that the sordid epic of their lives must be capped by the crowning insult, the Poormaster and the Pauper's Field? If only poor Paw could have waited a little before he claimed the spotlight—until prices fell a little or Nat got back with that "long green"!
Maw swallowed her bitter pill.
She went to see Uncle Clem and ask! And Uncle Clem was kind.
"He'll buy a casket—he's willin' fur that—an' send a wreath and pay fur notices, an' even half on a buryin' lot; but he said he couldn't do no more. The high cost has hit him too.... An' where are we to git the rest? He said—at the last—it might be better all round fur us to take what Ellick Flick would gimme outen the Poor Fund—" Maw hadn't been able to go on for a spell.
A pauper's burial for Paw! Surely Maw would manage better than that! She tried to find a better way that very night.
"This farm's mortgaged to the neck; but I calculate Ben Travis won't care if I'm a mind to put Paw in the south field. It hain't no mortal good fur anything else, anyhow; an' he can lay there if we want. It's a real pleasant place. An' I can git the preacher myself—I'll give him the rest o' the broilers; an' they's seasoned hickory plankin' in the lean-to. Tom, you come along with me."
All night Luke had lain and listened to the sound of big Tom's saw and hammer. Tom was real handy if you told him how—and Maw would be showing him just how to shape it all out. Each hammer blow struck deep on the boy's heart.
Maw lined the home-made box herself with soft old quilts, and washed and dressed her dead herself in his faded outlawed wedding clothes. And on a morning soft and sweet, with a hint of rain in the air, they rode down in the farm wagon to the south field together—Paw and Maw and Luke—with big Tom walking beside the aged knobby horse's head.
Abel Gazzam, a neighbor, had seen to the grave; and in due course the little cavalcade reached the appointed spot inside the snake fence—a quiet place in a corner, under a graybeard elm. As Maw had said, it was "a pleasant place for Paw to lay in."
There were some old neighbors out in their own rigs, and Uncle Clem had brought his family up in his car, with a proper wreath; and Reverend Kearns came up and—declining all lien on the broilers—read the burial service, and spoke a little about poor Paw. But it wasn't a funeral, no how. No supper; no condolence; no viewing "the remains"—not even a handshake! Maw didn't even look at her old friends, riding back home between Tom and Luke, with her head fiercely high in the air.
A dull depression settled on Luke's heart. It was all up with the Hayneses now. They had saved Paw from charity with their home-made burial; but what had it availed? They might as well have gone the whole figure. Everybody knew! There wasn't any comeback for a thing like this. They were just nobodies—the social pariahs of the district.