Will and Fred had got beyond Main Street now, and Will took a small pipe with a curved stem out of his overcoat pocket and lighted it. “I’ll bet I could hang a ceiling without father there at all, if only some one would give me a chance,” he said. Now that his father was no longer present to embarrass him with his lack of dignity, he felt comfortable and happy. Also, it was something to be able to smoke a pipe without discomfiture. When mother was alive she was always kissing a fellow when he came home at night, and then one had to be mighty careful about smoking. Now it was different. One had become a man and one accepted manhood with its responsibilities. “Don’t it make you sick at all?” Fred asked. “Huh, naw!” Will answered contemptuously.
The new disaster to the family came late in August, just when the fall work was all ahead, and the prospects good too. A. P. Wrigley, the jeweler, had just built a big, new house and barn on a farm he had bought the year before. It was a mile out of town on the Turner pike.
That would be a job to set the Appletons up for the winter. The house was to have three coats outside, with all the work inside, and the barn was to have two coats—and the two boys were to work with their father and were to have regular wages.
And just to think of the work to be done inside that house made Tom Appleton’s mouth water. He talked of it all the time, and in the evenings liked to sit in a chair in the Appleton’s front yard, get some neighbor over, and then go on about it. How he slung house-painter’s lingo about! The doors and cupboards were to be grained in imitation of weathered oak, the front door was to be curly maple, and there was to be black walnut, too. Well, there wasn’t another painter in the town could imitate all the various kinds of wood as Tom could. Just show him the wood, or tell him—you didn’t have to show him anything. Name what you wanted—that was enough. To be sure a man had to have the right tools, but give him the tools and then just go off and leave everything to him. What the devil! When A. P. Wrigley gave him this new house to do, he showed he was a man who knew what he was doing.
As for the practical side of the matter, everyone in the family knew that the Wrigley job meant a safe winter. There wasn’t any speculation, as when taking work on the contract plan. All work was to be paid for by the day, and the boys were to have their wages, too. It meant new suits for the boys, a new dress and maybe a hat for Kate, the house rent paid all winter, potatoes in the cellar. It meant safety—that was the truth.
In the evenings, sometimes, Tom got out his tools and looked at them. Brushes and graining tools were spread out on the kitchen table, and Kate and the boys gathered about. It was Fred’s job to see that all brushes were kept clean and, one by one, Tom ran his fingers over them, and then worked them back and forth over the palm of his hand. “This is a camel’s hair,” he said, picking a soft fine-haired brush up and handing it to Will. “I paid four dollars and eighty cents for that.” Will also worked it back and forth over the palm of his hand, just as his father had done and then Kate picked it up and did the same thing. “It’s as soft as the cat’s back,” she said. Will thought that rather silly. He looked forward to the day when he would have brushes ladders and pots of his own, and could show them off before people and through his mind went words he had picked up from his father’s talk. One spoke of the “heel” and “toe” of a brush. The way to put on varnish was to “flow” it on. Will knew all the words of his trade now and didn’t have to talk like one of the kind of muts who just does, now and then, a jack job of house painting.
On the fatal evening a surprise party was held for Mr. and Mrs. Bardshare, who lived just across the road from the Appletons on Piety Hill. That was a chance for Tom Appleton. In any such affair he liked to have a hand in the arrangements. “Come on now, we’ll make her go with a bang. They’ll be setting in the house after supper, and Bill Bardshare will be in his stocking feet, and Ma Bardshare washing the dishes. They won’t be expecting nothing, and we’ll slip up, all dressed in our Sundey clothes, and let out a whoop. I’ll bring my cornet and let out a blast on that too. ‘What in Sam Hill is that?’ Say, I can just see Bill Bardshare jumping up and beginning to swear, thinking we’re a gang of kids come to bother him, like Hallowe’en, or something like that. You just get the grub, and I’ll make the coffee over to my house and bring it over hot. I’ll get ahold of two big pots and make a whooping lot of it.”
In the Appleton house all was in a flurry. Tom, Will and Fred were painting a barn, three miles out of town, but they knocked off work at four and Tom got the farmer’s son to drive them to town. He himself had to wash up, take a bath in a tub in the woodshed, shave and everything—just like Sunday. He looked more like a boy than a man when he got all dogged up.
And then the family had to have supper, over and done with, a little after six, and Tom didn’t dare go outside the house until dark. It wouldn’t do to have the Bardshares see him so fixed up. It was their wedding anniversary, and they might suspect something. He kept trotting about the house, and occasionally looked out of the front window toward the Bardshare house. “You kid, you,” Kate said, laughing. Sometimes she talked up to him like that, and after she said it he went upstairs, and getting out his cornet blew on it, so softly, you could hardly hear him downstairs. When he did that you couldn’t tell how badly he played, as when the band was going it on Main Street and he had to carry a passage right through alone. He sat in the room upstairs thinking. When Kate laughed at him it was like having his wife back, alive. There was the same shy sarcastic gleam in her eyes.
Well, it was the first time he had been out anywhere since his wife had died, and there might be some people think it would be better if he stayed at home now—look better, that is. When he had shaved he had cut his chin, and the blood had come. After a time he went downstairs and stood before the looking-glass, hung above the kitchen sink, and dabbed at the spot with the wet end of a towel.