The Doctor's Christmas Eve

by James Lane Allen

Of course he believed none of this legend; but suggestions live on in the mind even though they do not root themselves in faith; and memory also has its power to make us like and dislike. Presently, as he lay there stretched on the grass and near the edge of the shade, another ill-omened bird came sailing cloud-high across the blue firmament; and having taken notice of him,—a motionless form on the earth below,—it turned back and began to circle about him. That was another bird he hated. When a child he asked about it, and had been told that it removed all disagreeable things from the farms. He thought it a very kind, very self-sacrificing and industrious bird to do so. And he conceived the whole species of them as a procession of wheelbarrows operated across the sky by means of wings and tails. Afterwards, when his views grew less hazy on natural history, he lowered his opinion of the disinterested buzzard.

The third bird on which had fallen his resentment was the rain-crow: earlier in his childhood it had been told him that when the clacking wail of this songster was heard on the stillness of a summer day, a storm was coming. And he had seen storms enough on that very farm—tornadoes that cut a path through the woods as a reaper cuts his way across the wheat-field. But he saw no rain-crow to-day; you look for them in August when they haunt the cool shade-trees of lawns.

Altogether these three birds made with one another a rather formidable combination for a boy living on a farm: the one brought on storms that threatened life; the second gladly presided at your obsequies, if the opportunity were given; and the third was pleased to accompany you to the infernal regions with the necessary fuel. The arrangement seemed about perfect; apparently they had overlooked nothing of value.

Thus he had not escaped that vast romance of Nature which brooded more thickly over Kentucky country life in those days than now: a romance of superstitions and legends about bird life and animal life and tree life, that extended even to Nature's chemicals; for was there not brimstone with its story? As far back as he could remember he had been made familiar with the idea—rather terrible in its way—that there was a variety of Biblical horse which breathed brimstone. All alone one day he had made a somewhat cautious personal examination of the paddocks and stalls; and was relieved to discover that his uncle's horses breathed out only what they breathed in—Kentucky air. He felt glad that they were not of the breed of those Biblical chargers.

But then there was brimstone in reserve for a large portion of the human family; and with a perverse mocking deviltry he pushed his inquiry in this direction still farther. Without the knowledge of any one he had wasted at a drugstore in town his brightest dime for a package of the avenging substance; and at home the following day he had scraped chips together at the woodpile and started a blaze and poured the brimstone in. Actually he had a sample of hell fire in operation there behind the woodpile! There was no question that brimstone knew how to burn: it seemed well adapted for its purpose. He did not take Fred Ousley into his confidence in this experiment: the possibilities were a little too personal even for friendship!

All this reveals a trait in him which lay deeper than child's-play—a susceptibility to suggestion. Even while he amused himself as a child with the shams and superstitions about nature, these lived on in his mind as part of its furnishings. Alas, that this should be true for all of us—that we cannot forget the things we do not believe in. To the end of our lives our thoughts have to move amid the obstructions and rubbish of the useless and the laughable. The salon of our inner dwelling is largely filled with old furniture which we decline to sit in, but are obliged to look at, and are powerless to remove; and which fills the favorite recesses where we should like to arrange the new.

There they were, then, that Saturday afternoon: the uncle with his newspaper and the nephew at that moment with his group of evil birds.

There was an interruption. Around the yard with its velvet turf and blooming shrubs and vines and flowers, that filled the air with fragrance, was a plank fence newly whitewashed. All the fences of the farm had been newly whitewashed; and they ran hither and thither across the emerald of the landscape like structures of white marble. Through the gate of the yard fence which was heard to shut behind him there now advanced toward uncle and nephew a neighbor of theirs, the minister of the country church, himself a bluegrass farmer. He was one of the many who liked to seek the company of the untroubled turfman. The two were good neighbors and great friends. The minister came oftenest for a visit on Saturday afternoons, as if he wished to touch at this harbor of a quiet life while passing from the earthly fields of the week to the Sabbath's holy land.

At the sound of the latch the uncle lifted his eyes from his newspaper.

"Bring a chair, Downs, will you?" he said in a cordial undertone; and soon there was a fine group of rural humanity under the blossoming locusts: the two men talking, and the boy, now that his turn had come at last, lying on the grass absorbed in the newspaper.