“He’s a bit touched in his head,” said his wife. “You see, when we were at Marysville the war kind o’ upset him. They wanted him to go into the rebel army, and he wasn’t minded to do it. I got him a place on a railroad, so he didn’t have to; but he was awful worried, and took to thinking about it, and his brothers that were in our army,—on the other side,—and then he got off his head. He ain’t been the same man since,—and twice he ran away. But I fetched him both times, and then the fevers took the children. He ain’t been the same man since. I’ve got to p’int him a good bit,—that’s what he calls it; but if he’s p’inted right, he goes sure. To my thinking, it is a queer world, Miss Rose. I wish I was certain there is a better.”
“But there is,” said Rose.
“Well, well. Maybe. Anyhow, I never felt no call to doubt what I was to do in this one. Old Kitchins used to pray over me. He was an awful certain man about other folks’ sins; never missed fire. At last, one day, when he was a-consoling me, and thinking he’d just only got to be a kind of centurion for a woman’s troubles, and say go and they’d go, I asked him if he’d any knowledge of the gospel of grinning,—and that ended him. Come out and see my flowers.”
Rose got up, laughing. “I want you to walk to Colkett’s with me. I told the men to go up the river, so as to bring us back. You see, I made sure you would go.”
“Go!—of course I’ll go,” said Dorothy. “No, I won’t want a bonnet. I’ve got one somewhere, under the bed, I guess,” and, so saying, they set off. It required little skill to draw from this frank and fearless nature, as they walked, the history of a wandering life, of the children dead, of the half-witted husband, of her own long-continued asthma, now gone, as she hoped. It was told with curious vivacity,—with some sense of the humorous quality of complete disaster, and when she spoke of her dead it was with brief gravity, which seemed to deny sympathy or hasten away from it. As they moved along and her companion talked, Rose glanced with curiosity at the Quaker-born woman, who had lost nearly every trace of her origin. She walked well, and there was a certain distinctiveness, if not distinction, in her erect carriage and refinement of feature, still visible after years of toil and troubles.
At last, after a pause, Rose spoke for herself.
“It seems to me wonderful that you, who have gone through so much, could have stood it as you seem to have done.” She herself was at the opening age of doubts and questions. At times the discontentment of a life without the definite aims of a man’s career distressed her. Yet she had surely all that one could ask of existence; and here was this poverty-haunted woman supremely cheerful under circumstances such as would have ruined all capacity for happiness in most of her sex. Rose went on, half surprised at her own frankness:
“I have everything in the world, and sometimes I am not happy. I ought to be ashamed.”
“Well, Miss Rose, I did use to bother, but I gave it up. As long as you’re here, you’re here. I’m like a pig Hiram used to have out West. He was a very enterprising pig, and was always a-trying to get into the pea-patch and out of his own field. One day I was watching that pig,—I used to think that pig could laugh,—well, he spied an angle of a great big, dead cottonwood-tree Hiram had set to stop the gap in a fence. You see, the two ends of it were in the field, and it was hollow right through trunk and limb, and the point of it stuck out into my pea-patch. So, Mr. Pig, in he goes, and after much scratching he got through the trunk, and then through the big branch, and then out he came, and there he was in the same field again. Well, he tried it three times and then he gave it up; looked like he’d have liked to scratch his head; and after that he was the contentedest pig you ever saw. And when sticking-time came, at Christmas, he didn’t squeal any morsel louder than the rest. I guess I’m a good deal like that pig. I’ve quit trying to get out of my field, and so I just stay here and grin, and take what comes.”
“Thank you,” said Rose, smiling. “That is a delightful parable, Mrs. Maybrook.” And with it Rose ceased awhile to hear what her companion said, and took stern measures with herself, because of the thoughts this woman’s life and words had brought to her.