The fat in the little cracked china dish is warm and soothing to burning itching hands. For an hour she has had the dish sitting at the back of the kitchen stove in the little frame house far out at the edge of the town.
The strange, silent mother! She is making love to her sons, but there are no words for her love. There are no kisses, no caresses.
The rubbing of the warm fat into the cracked hands of her sons is a caress. The light that now shines in her eyes is a caress.
* * * * *
The silent woman has left deep traces of herself in one of her sons. He is the one now lying stilly in the bed with his two noisy brothers. What has happened in the life of the mother? In herself, in her own physical life, even the two quarreling, fighting sons feel that nothing can matter too much. If her husband, the father of the boys, is a no-account and cannot bring money home—the money that would feed and clothe her children in comfort—one feels it does not matter too much. If she herself, the proud quiet one, must humiliate herself, washing—for the sake of the few dimes it may bring in—the soiled clothes of her neighbors, one knows it does not matter too much.
And yet there is no Christian forbearance in her. She speaks sometimes as she sits on the edge of the bed in the lamplight rubbing the warm fat into the cracked frost-bitten hands of her children and there is often a kind of smoldering fire in her words.
* * * * *
One of the boys in the bed has had a fight with the son of a neighbor. He, the third son of the family, has taken a hatchet out of the neighbor boy’s hands. We had been cramming ourselves with the contents of a book, “The Last of the Mohicans,” and the neighbor boy, whose father is the town shoemaker, had the hatchet given him as a Christmas present. He would not lend it, would not let it go out of his hands and so my brother, the determined one, has snatched it away.
The struggle took place in a little grove of trees half a mile from the house. “Le Renard Subtil,” cries my brother jerking the hatchet out of the neighbor boy’s hand. The neighbor boy did not want to be the villain—“Le Renard Subtil.”
And so he went crying off toward his home, on the farther side of the field. He lived in a yellow house just beyond our own and near the end of the street at the edge of the town.