“You are just as good as northern folks,” he said to her once, “and I am sorry I came down to lick you; I wish I had something to give you. Where are my trousers?” Phyllis had washed and ironed the ragged greys and put back in the pocket everything she found there—a jews-harp, a ball of twine, some nails, and a pearl handled knife with three blades, two of which were broken; this with the jews-harp he gave to Fan to remember him by, he said.
“Carlyle gave me the knife one Christmas, and I gave him a lead pencil. I couldn’t get anything more, for I hadn’t any money. I’d been bad; I was always bad, and Aunt Martha wouldn’t give me any,” he said, and when Fan asked him who Carlyle was, he answered, “Oh, a boy I used to know and like. If you see him tell him so, and that I have never told that he took the cake, and wouldn’t if I lived to be a hundred. Aunt Martha whaled me for it, and my, didn’t she put it on; I was too big to be thrashed, and I ran away not long after that, and went to a grocery and then to the war, and she thinks now that I stole the cake!”
This was all we could possibly get from him, and we did not know how much reliance to put upon it, he was delirious so much of the time.
At first father thought to amputate his hand but finally gave that up. It was useless to torture him, he said, as he could not last long, and he did not. It was Monday evening when he came to us and he lingered for three days, sometimes sleeping quietly and sometimes raving about the war and Charlie and the long weary road he had traveled to reach us and Fan-an-Ann and Ann-an-Fan, clinging most to Fan, who watched him day and night as tenderly as if it had been Charlie instead of one of the race she had affected to hate. Once he seemed to be at his old home, and in fear of punishment, for he begged piteously of Aunt Martha to spare him from something, we could not tell what, and he asked us twice not to let her find him, saying he would not go back to her. Again he spoke of a little out of the way town in Maine which Fan wrote down for future reference. Everything about him was wrapped in mystery except the fact that he was there with us, the boy who had cared for our dying brother and for whom we cared to the last. When the morning of Good Friday dawned he sank into a stupor from which we thought he would never awaken, but when the church bell rang for service he started up and opening his eyes said to Fan, “What’s that? Is it Sunday and must I go to Sunday School? I hain’t my lesson.”
“It is Good Friday,” Fan replied, and he continued: “Oh, yes; Good Friday, and Easter; I know. We had ’em down in Maine, and the lilies, too, that he told me about in the woods, and I once spoke a piece. Do you want to hear it?”
Fan nodded, and raising himself in bed, he began:
Softly now the Easter sunlight
Falls on Judea’s wooded hills,
Shining redly through the tree tops,
Lighting up the running rills.