Dwellers in Arcady: The Story of an Abandoned Farm

by Albert Bigelow Paine

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.