She cried furiously, “Oh, you—— John Evered, you! I hate you! I’ll always hate you. You and your father—both of you. Don’t you laugh at me!”
A little frightened at the storm he had evoked he touched her arm. She wrenched violently away, was near falling, recovered herself. “Don’t touch me!” she bade him.
He watched her run into the house.
XII
ONE day in the first week of September, a day when there was a touch of frost in the air, and a hurrying and scurrying of the clouds overhead as though they would escape the grip of coming winter, Evered took down his double-bitted ax from its place in the woodshed and went to the grindstone and worked the two blades to razor edge. John was in the orchard picking those apples which were already fit for harvesting. Ruth was helping him.
There was not much of the fruit, and Evered had said to them, “I’ll go down into the woodlot and get out some wood.”
When he was gone Ruth and John looked at each other; and John asked, “Does he know Darrin is there, I wonder? Know where he is?”
Ruth said, “I don’t know. He sees more than you think. Anyway, it won’t hurt him to know.”
Evered shaped the ax to his liking, slung it across his shoulder, and walked down the wood road till he came to a growth of birch which was ready for the ax. The trees would be felled and cut into lengths where they lay, then hauled to the farm and piled in the shed to season under cover for a full twelve months before it was time to use the wood. Evered’s purpose now was simply to cut down the trees, leaving the later processes for another day.
He had chosen the task in response to some inner uneasiness which demanded an outlet. The man’s overflowing energy had always been his master; it drove him now, drove him with a new spur—the spur of his own thoughts. He could never escape from them; he scarce wished to escape, for he was never one to dodge an issue. But if he had wished to forget, Fraternity would not have permitted it. The men of the town, he saw, were watching him with furtive eyes; the women looked upon him spitefully. He knew that most people thought he should have killed the red bull before this; but Evered would not kill the bull, partly from native stubbornness, partly from an unformed feeling that he, not the bull, was actually responsible. He was growing old through much thought upon the matter; and it is probable that only his own honest certainty of his wife’s misdoing kept him from going mad. He slept little. His nerves tortured him.