CHAPTER XVI
JOTHAM STORIES
Almost daily in our hottest season the east wind brings coolness and refreshment to the dwellers at the sea beach. Nor does it stop at the seacoast. Often hills a dozen miles inland feel its cool caress.
The inland, simmering beneath the sun, with the thermometer in the eighties or worse, sends heavenward great columns of heated air. To take the place of this the lower strata draws in from the sea, filled with the coolness and sparkle of the brine and informed with that mysterious tonic which seems born of wind-tossed salt water. At such times the east wind brings the breath of life to our nostrils and sets the jaded motor centres of our nerves atingle with new power.
Often we dwellers far inland get more than a cool breath of the sea. Then for a day or two a northeaster comes pelting over the seaward range of hills, murking the sky with dun clouds, whining about the eaves and roaring down the chimney, bringing deluges of rain to the heat-browned pastures and draping them in obscurity of gray mists, blotting out the roar of cities and the flurry of modern life, making us believe for a little that we are children of the farm once more. On sunny days we do not quite get this. Even in the east wind we smell the soot as well as the sea, but the genuine northeaster shuts all that out.
On such days the work of the farm ceases. What hay is out is cocked and capped, snugged down to wait for fair weather. The weeds in the garden drink and drink again and forget the hoe which idles in the tool-house corner, and Jotham putters about the barn, making pretence of indoor work but really luxuriating in idleness. The place is redolent of the rich, sweet odor of the new hay and mingled with, this comes that salt tang of the east wind bearing scent also of all the hills and pastures over which it has blown. You may if you will tell what gust touched the elders in white bloom down by the brook, which one lingered in the swamp a moment to caress the azaleas, and which stopped only long enough to snatch a kiss from the sweet fern on the pasture hill-top.
It is pleasant then to sit sheltered from the rain just within the wide barn doors, to hear the twittering of the swallows as they comfort their young on the beams, and to listen to the wind and to Jotham. The old-time New England farm hand-he who wore the smock frock as did his master while they both worked about the barn and then, the chores done, stood for half an hour in the dusk, either side of the barn door like caryatids, drinking in the pleasures of rest in the twilight has passed, but Jotham remains. He has told the tales of his grandfather's exploits as a hunter so many times that he not only believes them himself but is equally sure that everyone else believes them.
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Yet Jotham is in the main taciturn. It is only when the northeaster soughs in the eaves and brings him leisure that he drops into narrative. His tales are grotesque fancies, simple yarns withal, such as fluttered from the homely life of pasture and woodland in early days of enforced idleness to light on the threshing floor of some great old barn, or to warm themselves at the big kitchen fireplace on winter nights when the wind guffawed down the throat of the big chimney and sprinkled the hearth with an attic salt of snow for the seasoning of them for the country palate. I do not doubt Jotham's grandfather told them of his grandfather and that they belong to neither but are local folk lore, pasture sagas, changelings born of the queer union of east wind and blueberry blooms, brought up by hand-farm hand.