The two boys arose and walked under the trees and dark shadows began to form on the ground underfoot. Tom burst into words and continually asked questions and the fat boy, who had been often to church and for whom the figure of Jesus had lost most of its reality, felt a little embarrassed. He did not think the subject should be thus freely discussed and when Tom’s mind kept playing with the notion of Jesus, pursued and tempted by a woman, he grunted his disapproval. “Do you think he really refused?” Tom asked over and over. The fat boy tried to explain. “He had twelve disciples,” he said. “It couldn’t have happened. They were always about. Well, you see, she wouldn’t ever have had no chance. Wherever he went they went with him. They were men he was teaching to preach. One of them later betrayed him to soldiers who killed him.”
Tom wondered. “How did that come about? How could a man like that be betrayed?” he asked. “By a kiss,” the fat boy replied.
On the evening of the day when Tom Edwards—for the first and last time in his life—went into a church, there was a light shower, the only one that fell upon John Bottsford’s threshing crew during the last three months the Welsh boy was with them and the shower in no way interfered with their work. The shower came up suddenly and a few minutes was gone. As it was Sunday and as there was no work the men had all gathered in the barn and were looking out through the open barn doors. Two or three men from the farm house came and sat with them on boxes and barrels on the barn floor and, as is customary with country people, very little was said. The men took knives out of their pockets and finding little sticks among the rubbish on the barn floor began to whittle, while the old thresherman went restlessly about with his hands in his trouser pockets. Tom who sat near the door, where an occasional drop of rain was blown against his cheek, alternately looked from his employer to the open country where the rain played over the fields. One of the farmers remarked that a rainy time had come on and that there would be no good threshing weather for several days and, while the thresherman did not answer, Tom saw his lips move and his grey beard bob up and down. He thought the thresherman was protesting but did not want to protest in words.
As they had gone about the country many rains had passed to the north, south and east of the threshing crew and on some days the clouds hung over them all day, but no rain fell and when they had got to a new place they were told it had rained there three days before. Sometimes when they left a farm Tom stood up on the seat of his water wagon and looked back. He looked across fields to where they had been at work and then looked up into the sky. “The rain may come now. The threshing is done and the wheat is all in the barn. The rain can now do no harm to our labor,” he thought.
On the Sunday evening when he sat with the men on the floor of the barn Tom was sure that the shower that had now come would be but a passing affair. He thought his employer must be very close to Jesus, who controlled the affairs of the heavens, and that a long rain would not come because the thresherman did not want it. He fell into a deep reverie and John Bottsford came and stood close beside him. The thresherman put his hand against the door jamb and looked out and Tom could still see the grey beard moving. The man was praying and was so close to himself that his trouser leg touched Tom’s hand. Into the boy’s mind came the remembrance of how John Bottsford had prayed at night on the barn floor. On that very morning he had prayed. It was just as daylight came and the boy was awakened because, as he crept across the hay to descend the ladder, the old man’s foot had touched his hand.
As always Tom had been excited and wanted to hear every word said in the older man’s prayers. He lay tense, listening to every sound that came up from below. A faint glow of light came into the hayloft, through a crack in the side of the barn, a rooster crowed and some pigs, housed in a pen near the barn, grunted loudly. They had heard the thresherman moving about and wanted to be fed and their grunting, and the occasional restless movement of a horse or a cow in the stable below, prevented Tom’s hearing very distinctly. He, however, made out that his employer was thanking Jesus for the fine weather that had attended them and was protesting that he did not want to be selfish in asking it to continue. “Jesus,” he said, “send, if you wish, a little shower on this day when, because of our love for you, we do not work in the fields. Let it be fine tomorrow but today, after we have come back from the house of worship, let a shower freshen the land.”
As Tom sat on a box near the door of the barn and saw how aptly the words of his employer had been answered by Jesus he knew that the rain would not last. The man for whom he worked seemed to him so close to the throne of God that he raised the hand, that had been touched by John Bottsford’s trouser leg to his lips and secretly kissed it—and when he looked again out over the fields the clouds were being blown away by a wind and the evening sun was coming out. It seemed to him that the young and beautiful god Jesus must be right at hand, within hearing of his voice. “He is,” Tom told himself, “standing behind a tree in the orchard.” The rain stopped and he went silently out of the barn, towards a small apple orchard that lay beside the farm house, but when he came to a fence and was about to climb over he stopped. “If Jesus is there he will not want me to find him,” he thought. As he turned again toward the barn he could see, across a field, a low grass-covered hill. He decided that Jesus was not after all in the orchard. The long slanting rays of the evening sun fell on the crest of the hill and touched with light the grass stalks, heavy with drops of rain and for a moment the hill was crowned as with a crown of jewels. A million tiny drops of water, reflecting the light, made the hilltop sparkle as though set with gems. “Jesus is there,” muttered the boy. “He lies on his belly in the grass. He is looking at me over the edge of the hill.”
Chapter II
JOHN BOTTSFORD went with his threshing crew to work for a large farmer named Barton near the town of Sandusky. The threshing season was drawing near an end and the days remained clear, cool and beautiful. The country into which he now came made a deep impression on Tom’s mind and he never forgot the thoughts and experiences that came to him during the last weeks of that summer on the Barton farms.