[CHAPTER VII
THE ELECTION]
Soon the fine weather was at an end. One day it was soft and warm, with a tender blue haze over the distant woods and a sun like a blood-orange in the tranquil sky, and birds twittering about among the elders and sumac along the rail fences. And the next day everything was gray and lifeless and desolate, with fierce winds sweeping over the bare fields, and driving the cold rain in sheets before them.
Some people—among them Hurley—said it was the equinoctial that was upon us. Abner Beech ridiculed this, and proved by the dictionary that the equinoctial meant September 22d, whereas it was now well-nigh the end of October. The Irishman conceded that in books this might be so, but stuck wilfully to it that in practice the equinoctial came just before winter set in. After so long a period of saddened silence brooding over our household, it was quite a relief to hear the men argue this question of the weather.
Down at the Corners old farmers had wrangled over the identity of the equinoctial ever since I could remember. It was pretty generally agreed that each year along some time during the fall, there came a storm which was properly entitled to that name, but at this point harmony ended. Some insisted that it came before Indian Summer, some that it followed that season, and this was further complicated by the fact that no one was ever quite sure when it was Indian Summer. There were all sorts of rules for recognizing this delectable time of year, rules connected, I recall, with the opening of the chestnut burrs, the movement of birds, and various other incidents in nature's great processional, but these rules rarely came right in our rough latitude, and sometimes never came at all—at least did not bring with them anything remotely resembling Indian Summer, but made our autumn one prolonged and miserable succession of storms. And then it was an especially trying trick to pick out the equinoctial from the lot—and even harder still to prove to sceptical neighbors that you were right.
Whatever this particular storm may have been it came too soon. Being so short-handed on the farm, we were much behind in the matter of drawing our produce to market. And now, after the first day or two of rain, the roads were things to shudder at. It was not so bad getting to and from the Corners, for Agrippa Hill had a gravel formation, but beyond the Corners, whichever way one went over the bottom lands of the Nedahma Valley, it was a matter of lashing the panting teams through seas of mud punctuated by abyssmal pitch-holes, into which the wheels slumped over their hubs, and quite generally stuck till they were pried out with fence-rails.
Abner Beech was exceptionally tender in his treatment of live-stock. The only occasion I ever heard of on which he was tempted into using his big fists upon a fellow-creature, was once, long before my time, when one of his hired men struck a refractory cow over its haunches with a shovel. He knocked this man clear through the stanchions. Often Jeff and I used to feel that he carried his solicitude for horse-flesh too far—particularly when we wanted to drive down to the creek for a summer evening swim, and he thought the teams were too tired.