Julie’s father boasted largely of the things he meant to do in the business way, but always as the table boarders increased, the customers in the shop decreased, until finally, when Julie was ten or eleven, the shop was closed altogether, and her father had gone across the State line into West Virginia, to work in the lumber camps. There he made good money, for people said that Emmet Rose was a mighty fine hand in the woods; and he himself bragged that he could drop a tree within a foot of any spot he named. Thereafter, with the money coming regularly from the lumber camp, Mrs. Rose gave up most of the table boarders, and so had leisure to do fancy sewing, and to make pretty, sober little clothes for Julie. The stitches in them were exquisite and sincere, but she never dressed Julie in bright colors. “No, I don’t like bright colors,” she was wont to say.
“But why, mother? Why?” Julie questioned.
“They’re so gay—” her mother hesitated; “I—I don’t know, but someway I don’t think they’re respectful to the Lord.”
Thereafter Julie went in fear of a jealous surveillance from on high. God became somewhat confused in her child mind with a chicken hawk. “Grandmaw Rose,” who had a little farm on the top of Slatty Mountain, said she didn’t hold with white chickens: they was too easy a mark for the hawk. This seemed to accord with her mother’s fear of bright colors. Apparently, up there in the wide stretches of the deep sky that Julie had always liked, there lurked a terrifying Power that might pounce dreadfully at any moment. Evidently the safest way to get through life was to slip by as unnoticed as possible, clad, if one were a chicken, in speckled gray feathers that faded easily from sight in the grass; or; if one were a little girl, ordering one’s self in the same humble and unobtrusive manner.
Julie felt worried about her father, there was so little of the discreet coloration about him. His necktie, when he wore one, could be seen half a mile, an easy mark for hawk or deity. His friends described him as a great big two-fisted Jim-bruiser of a man. He was boastful and loud, and would come roaring down the river with the log drives in spring, boisterous, gay, and apparently unafraid. During the summer months, when he was in Hart’s Run, their reserved little house rocked with his Homeric laughter, accompanying great stories of “Tony Beaver” who lives up “Eel River,”—where all the impossible things of the West Virginia lumber camps happen,—who is blood brother to “Paul Bunyan” of the Northern woods and who owns a yoke of oxen so big it takes a crow a week to wing the distance between the horns of one of them. But just because of his recklessness and daring laughter, Julie adored her father. Those were good days on the whole—her mother and herself snug and well provided for in the village, building up a gentle home-life, with the lumber-jack’s big personality off in the woods to roof it over securely.
But when Julie was sixteen, this period came to an abrupt end on a day in the woods, when a tree which Emmet Rose was felling failed to drop on the spot he had named, but fell instead upon him. They brought him home, out of the woods, to Hart’s Run—a painful journey—by way of tram cars and rough frozen roads with ice and skifts of snow in the ruts, with Sam Fletcher, who drove, feeling in his own body every dreadful jolt of the wagon; for, as he confided to his intimates, if there was one thing he did naturally despise, it was haulin’ a crippled hand out of the woods.
Julie and her mother were dazed by the shock. Their scared faces fell into a mould of horror that did not lighten or relax when they spoke or even when they tried to smile. Their little hands shook, but they went on and did things efficiently and bravely. Emmet Rose watched them sadly out of his big face that was gaunt and curiously stretched with pain to a wider apprehension. Once when her mother was out of the room, he put out his uninjured hand to Julie and spoke darkly.
“It’s got me. I allus knew it would.”
Julie’s heart jumped violently. “What’s got you, pappy, honey?” she questioned, putting her hand in his.
“Life,” he answered. “It’s got me down at last. I allus knew it would. It gits every feller in the end. I stood up aginst it an’ fought it like a two-fisted man, but it’s got me, an’ now I’ll jist have to lay down on you women-folks. Don’t tell mammy—she’s scary enough anyhow.”