It was natural that these weeks of incessant labor should tell upon the men—indeed many of them looked utterly worn out, with red rims encircling their eyes, and faces from which each drop of moisture seemed to have oozed; but Homer Wilson, during the excessive heats of that summer, looked worse than any of his neighbors. His blue jeans hung loose upon him; and when he threw aside his smock, his shoulders seemed sharp and thin under his shirt. The outline of his strong jaw was clearly defined, and by reason of the lack of superfluous flesh the contour of his head was strikingly apparent, and suggested almost unpleasantly the dominant force of his character. His eyes were sunken; and although at the end of a long day's work his face might grow ashen, his muscles twitch nervously, and his strong fingers tremble, yet the fire in his eyes remained undimmed.
He could not sleep. At night he used to go to the lake—very solitary then, when the fishing season was past—and plunging into the water swim far out in the moonlight. Sometimes he beat his arms upon the water at each stroke, striving to communicate his own excitement to the water, that shone up with such maddening placidity to the stars. Sometimes he would swim out until the shore behind him was but a dimness, seeming as unsubstantial as the clouds; then, turning on his back, he would float there, silent, his eyes searching the sky. The harvest moon—
"The loveliest moon that ever silver'd o'er
A shell for Neptune's goblet; she did soar
So passionately bright,"
floated above him. Silence was upon the face of the water, and he, in the embrace of the wave and the night, was alone indeed.
"The lidless train of planets" passed him by; the moon drew a mantle of mist about her and sailed away. A premonitory shiver crept along his limbs; he reached the shore, chilled to the bone; but the heat at his heart still parched him with thirst, for there had awakened within him a great longing for loving eyes, a great hunger for woman's touches, a great dread of his own solitariness, a great disgust of himself. He was realizing slowly, numbly, his own decadence, groping for some rope by which he might pull himself up out of the abyss into which he had fallen.
It is doubtless nobler to dispense with the rope and climb out of the pit unaided; the rockiest precipice may be hewn into painful steps, but in shifting sands who can form a stairway?
"Seems to me, Homer," said Mrs. Wilson one day, as she stood moulding her bread in the early morning, "seems to me you need something; now there's yarbs just hanging up and spilin' for the want of drinking; there ain't anything more buildin' than yarbs is—'The yarbs of the field,' it says in the Bible, which means all yarbs, and I have them mostly there." Here she glanced at the long row of paper bags which, tied round the stems of the dried plants, hung along one side of the kitchen. "Maybe it's ague workin' on you, or m'laria you're sickening for; I'll make up some boneset agin noon and——"
"Don't make any brews for me, mother," said Homer. "I don't need any; it's the heat." He was putting oatmeal into the water-pails for the men to take to the field.
"There," said his mother, "I knowed it! I'd no hope as you'd be led by me in this any more'n anything else. Well, it's to be expected, I suppose. I know who the nursin' and settin' up will fall on, but I kin stand it; I've had to bear with a good deal in my time, and the Lord 'll give me strength for this, too—but it does seem hard." She sniffed, and, wiping away an imaginary tear with her floury apron, left a smudge of white upon her rubicund countenance.
"It is hard," said Homer, very quietly, and went out, pails in hand, to where the horses stood ready harnessed for the day. The hired men were sticking branches of walnut leaves on their bridles and in the backhands, and bathing their flanks and breasts with smartweed oil, to keep off the flies.