Oldfield: A Kentucky Tale of the Last Century

by Nancy Huston Banks

Mrs. Alexander looked at Lynn with a sudden dimness shadowing the brightness of her kind eyes. "You don't know the Oldfield people, Mr. Gordon, though you are really one of us. Unless you had known Tom Watson as we knew him, you can hardly understand how terrible and how strange his present condition seems to us. He used to be a great, strong, noisy, reckless, hot-tempered dare-devil, but as tender-hearted as a child and liked by everybody, black and white, big and little, in the whole country."

A sudden recollection caused her to smile at her husband, forgetting that she had just been scolding him and that he richly deserved it:—

"You remember, John, that time when Tom kept those bear cubs tied up in his back lot. One day the biggest of them got loose and caught Sidney as she was going home with a pitcher of milk which Anne had given her. Sidney was almost scared out of her wits, and screamed as loud as she could, till the bear squeezed her so tight that she couldn't make another sound. But she never let go the pitcher—never even loosed her grip—and kept on holding it out of the cub's reach, long after she couldn't scream any more. Tom went running. Can't you see him now, John? and hear him shouting at every jump: 'Let go, Sid. Good Gad—woman! are you going to let the bear hug the life out of you before you'll give him that spoonful of milk?'"

"And to think of poor Tom as he is now;" she went on presently, the smile fading. "I will speak to Sidney as you suggest, John. I will send her a basket of sweet potatoes and urge her to go as often as she can. Anne would never think of asking any one to come, but I know she would be pleased to have Sidney drop in. She's always like a fresh breeze on a hot day even to well folks. She told me, however, the other morning that Tom Watson never seemed to notice anything that she had to say. She said that, no matter how hard she tried to entertain him, he kept on staring out at the empty big road, just sitting there, not trying to speak, and looking like a dead man only for his restless, burning eyes."

"And yet he may live for years just as he is now," the doctor said. "But we must not give up trying to help him because he can never be any better. I must devise some sort of relief. It will not do to let him sit there, like that, all day, day after day—maybe for years. I tried this morning to find out what he was thinking about. I also tried to learn from Anne what his tastes were, what sort of things he had liked or was interested in before he met with the accident. His sight is much impaired, and he seems never to have been anything of a reader. I doubt whether he ever had any indoor interests, except playing cards. All that I can remember is that he used to gamble like the very devil."

"Shame on you, John, to be raking up that against the poor fellow, as he is now," protested the doctor's wife, indignantly.

"Nonsense! Who's raking anything up?" the doctor responded. "I was merely trying to think of some way of diverting his mind. I thought perhaps a game of cards—"

The doctor's wife uttered a smothered little shriek: "John Alexander! What are you thinking of to speak of card-playing in Anne Watson's house?"

The doctor grew calmly judicial, as all good husbands grow when their wives become unduly excited. "I am well aware of Anne's prejudice. I know precisely how strong—"

"Strong!" repeated his wife, interrupting him. "It's the strongest thing—the only really strong thing—in Anne—that, and her religion. Her horror of card-playing is a part of her religion. It's bred in her bone. She got it from her father, the elder. Some people thought he was actually out of his head about cards. And Anne believes as firmly as he believed it, that cards are Satan's chief weapon, and that even to touch them is to imperil the soul. She believes it as firmly as she believes in baptism for the remission of sins; as firmly as she believes that there is a heaven and a hell."