“Nothing particular just now.”
“There are some small occupations about the parsonage—a board or so loose on the ice house, a small field of provender for the animal. Let us say a week’s employment for a ready man. I could pay but a modest stipend ... but the privilege of my home, the close communion with our Maker. You would be as my brother: what do you say?”
Gordon was well aware of the probable extent of the “small occupations,” the minister’s reputation for exacting monumental labors in return for the “modest stipend” mentioned. However, the proposal furnished Gordon with a solution for immediate difficulties; it secured him a bed and food, an opportunity for the maturing of further plans.
He rose, queried, “Shall I go right along?”
“Admirable,” the other approved. “My beloved helpmate will show you where the tools are kept, when you can begin immediately.”
Gordon made his way past Simmons’ store to the plaster bulk of the Universalist Church, its lawn shared by the four-square, shingled roof of the parsonage. Back of both structures reached a small field of heavy grass, where Gordon labored for the remainder of the day.
Late in the afternoon an aged, gaunt man drove an incongruous, two wheeled, breaking cart into the stable yard behind the parsonage. After hitching an aged, gaunt white horse, he approached the field’s edge, where Gordon was harvesting. It was the minister’s father-in-law, himself a clergyman for the half century past, a half century that stretched back into strenuous, bygone days of circuit riding. His flowing hair and a ragged goatee were white, oddly stained and dappled with lemon yellow, his skin was leather-like from years of exposure to the elements, to the bitter mountain winters, the ruthless suns of the August valleys. He was as seasoned, as tough, as choice old hickory, and had pale, blue eyes in which the flame of religious fervor, of incandescent zeal, were scarcely dimmed.
A long supper table was spread in a room where a sideboard supported a huge silver-plated pitcher swung on elaborately engraved supports, a dozen blue glasses traced with gold, and a plate that pictured in a grey, blurred fashion the Last Supper. The gathering ranged variously from the aged circuit rider to the minister’s next but one to the youngest: he had fourteen children, of which nine were ravenously present. The oldest girl at the table, a possible sixteen years, had this defiant detachment under her immediate charge, acquitting herself notably by a constant stream of sharp negations opposed to a varied clamor of proposals, attempted forages upon the heaped plates, sly reprisals, and a sustained, hysterical note which threatened at any time, and in any youthful individual, to burst into angry wails.
Opposite Gordon Makimmon sat a slight, feminine figure, whom he recognized as the teacher of the past season’s local school. She had a pallid face, which she rarely raised, compressed lips, and hands which attracted Gordon by reason of their white deftness, the precise charm of their pointed fingers. During a seemingly interminable grace, pronounced in a rapid sing-song by the circuit rider, Gordon saw her flash her gaze about the table, the room; and its somber, resentful fire, its restrained fury of impatience, of disdain, of hatred, coming from that fragile, silent shape, startled him.
The Universalist minister addressed the company in sonorous periods, which, however, did not prevent him from assimilating a prodigious amount of food. Between forkfuls of chicken baked in macaroni, “I rejoice that my ministrations are acceptable to Him,” he pronounced; “three souls Wednesday last, two adults and a child on Sunday.”