CHAPTER VIII.—THANKSGIVING AT THE LAWTONS’.
The church-bells rang out next morning through a crisp and frosty air. A dazzling glare of reflected sunshine lay on the dry snow, but it gave no suggestion of warmth. The people who passed on their way to Thanksgiving services walked hurriedly, and looked as if their minds were concentrated on the hope that the sexton had lighted the fire in the church furnace the previous day. The milkman who stopped his sleigh just beyond the house of the Law-tons had to beat off a great rim of chalk-white ice with the dipper before he could open his can.
The younger members of the Lawton family were not dependent upon external evidences, however, for their knowledge that it was bitterly cold. It was nearly noon when they began to gather in the kitchen, and cluster about the decrepit old cooking-stove where burned the only fire in the house. A shivering and unkempt group they made, in the bright daylight, holding their red hands over the cracked stove-lids, and snarling sulkily at the weather and one another when they spoke at all.
Jessica had slept badly, and, rising early and dressing in self-defence against the cold, had found her father in the act of lighting the kitchen fire. An original impulse prompted her to kiss him when she bade him good-morning; and Ben, rising awkwardly from where he had been kneeling in front of the grate, looked both surprised and shamefacedly gratified. It seemed ages since one of his daughters had kissed him before.
“It’s a regular stinger of a morning, ain’t it?” he said, blowing his fingers. “The boards in the sidewalk jest riz up and went off under my feet like pistols last night, when I was coming home.” He added with an accent of uneasiness: “Suppose you didn’t hear me come in?”
He seemed pleased when she shook her head, and his face visibly lightened. He winked at her mysteriously, and going over to a recess in the wall, back of the woodbox, dragged out a lank and dishevelled turkey of a dingy gray color, not at all resembling the fowls that had been presented to him the previous day.
“Trouble with me was,” he said, reflectively, “I shot four turkeys. If I hadn’t been a bang-up shot, and had only killed one, why, I’d been all right. But no, I couldn’t help hitting ’em, and so I got four. Of course, I hadn’t any use for so many: so I got to raffling ’em off, and that’s where my darned luck come in.” He held the bird up, and turned it slowly around, regarding it with an amused chuckle. “You know this cuss ain’t one of them I shot, at all. You see, I got to raffling, and one time I stood to win nine turkeys and a lamp and a jag of firewood. But then the thing kind o’ turned, and went agin me, and darn me if I didn’t come out of the little end of the horn, with nothing but this here. Sh-h!—M’rye’s coming. Don’t say nothing to her. I told her I earnt it carrying in some coal.”
Mrs. Lawton entered the room as her husband was putting back the turkey. She offered no remarks beyond a scant “mornin’!” to Jessica, and directed a scowl toward Lawton, before which he promptly disappeared. She replied curtly in the negative when Jessica asked if there was anything she could do; but the novelty of the offer seemed to slowly impress her mind, for after a time she began to talk of her own accord. Ben had come home drunk the night before, she said; there wasn’t anything new in that, but it was decidedly new for him to bring something to eat with him. He said he’d been carrying in coal, which was her reason for believing he had been really shaving shingles or breaking up old barrels. He couldn’t tell the truth if he tried—it wasn’t in him not to lie. The worst of his getting drunk was he was so pesky good-natured the next day. Her father used always to have a headache under similar conditions, and make things peculiarly interesting for everybody round about, from her mother at the helm of the boat to the nigger-boy and the mule on the tow-path ahead. That was the way all other men behaved, too: that is, all who were good for anything. But Ben, he just grinned and did more chores than usual, and hung around generally, as if everybody was bound to like him because he had made a fool of himself.