CHAPTER XIX

On this Saturday evening, while Rose was relating her day to Aunt Anne, Joe Colkett sat, meditatively, astride of his wood-saddle.[5] In the morning he had seen Dorothy Maybrook, and had been as cunning as he knew how to be. He had found Dory engaged in “p’inting her man,” as she said; he was to saw some wood, and to kill two chickens for Mrs. Lyndsay’s table. “Now, two p’ints, Hiram, two!” The pale, square-shouldered man considered her with dull eyes.

5. The cross-pieces on which wood is laid for sawing.

“You said two pairs.”

“Oh, you are not p’inted right yet. Don’t you kill more than two chickens. Here,” and she set two pins in his sleeve, “you can look at these.”

“There, one pin stands for each chicken,” he said. “Guess I’m p’inted,” and he went away.

“What’s wanting,Joe?” she said. “How’s Susie?”

“Oh, she’s kind of upsot. She takes on ’bout that last boy like there wasn’t a boy on airth.”

“There isn’t for her.”

“There’s no gainsayin’ that. She’s allus a-talkin’ about them Lyndsays, and how they sot a stone, a right handsome stone, up on that there boy of theirn,—and 249she ain’t got none. Women’s awful queer, Dory. I can’t buy no tombstone.”

“It doesn’t seem so queer to me. Can’t you get some kind of a thing, just to please the woman? Why, if it was only of wood, you see, it might help.”

“That’s so. I was a sort of thinkin’ ’bout that. Queer how folks thinks ’bout the same things.”

“Were you? Well, you’re a better kind of man than I took you for, Joe Colkett. Your wife’s about half off her wits with grieving. If I was you, I wouldn’t—well, I wouldn’t take her too serious. People that are troubled the way she is do have strange notions. I think the devil he’s as like as not to get a grip on us when we are—”

“What was you a-thinkin’, Dory?” he broke in, suspiciously.

“I ain’t fully minded to tell you, Joe. But Susie’s a masterful woman, and don’t you let her get you into trouble. If it’s money, my man and me we’ve got a little put by. I’d a heap rather spend a bit of it than see you tormented into some wickedness.”

“You must think I’m right bad, Dory. Can’t you talk out?”

“No; I might, but I won’t. Only you remember, Joe, I didn’t say you were bad, but I do say anybody you care for might p’int you wrong. It’s a queer thing how easy men can be p’inted.”

He was terribly scared, and, seeing that no more was to be had out of Dory, resolved to profit by her warning. How she could have guessed anything of his or his wife’s intentions he was at a loss to comprehend. But he was timid, and eager to steer clear of 250trouble. After a few moments of silent consideration, he spoke:

“It ain’t always easy to keep straight. Guess I’m p’inted now, like Hiram,” and he grinned. “I don’t drink none neither, not now.”

“Stick to that and keep your mouth shut, or it may be worse for you—and for Susie, too,” she added.

“I will. Don’t you be afraid.”

“And what fetched you, Joe?”

“I was minded to set a nice clean board over them boys. I was a-tellin’ you that. And I can’t read none nor write. But if you was to write big on a paper just what a man might want to set on a board like I was a-talkin’ of, guess I could copy it plain enough.”

Dorothy considered. “Can you wait? It’ll be quite a time.”

“Yes, I kin wait.”

She left him, and went into the house, and was gone a full hour. What the man thought of as he leaned against the rails, or sat on top, I do not know. He had the patience of an ant.

When he saw Dorothy again at the door he climbed down, and, with some excitement in his face, went toward the cabin.

“It wasn’t right easy, Joe. I was thinking I might ask Mr. Carington about it. Mr. Lyndsay he’d be best; but I guess I wouldn’t ask him.”

“No,” said Joe, promptly. He saw why this might not be well. “I don’t want nobody to know, Dory, ’cept you and Susie. It’ll kind of surprise her, and she’ll like it.” Then he added, with some cunning, 251“She hates to have folks goin’ there where them children’s buried.”

“I shall never want to,” said Dorothy. She still carried an unpleasant remembrance of the dismal burial.

“Well, I thought I’d tell you, Dory.”

“Yes, of course.” She took the hint as but another evidence of Susie’s state of mind and of Joe’s dreads and anxieties, and failed to examine it closely, not being of a suspicious turn, despite a life which had given little and taken much. Whoever asked of Dorothy a favor approached her on the side of her nature most open to capture.

“You are a good deal more patient than most men,” she said. “Come in; come in.” Joe entered after her. A Sunday quiet was in the air of the place. There was no fire, and the sun, as it looked in, disclosed no want anywhere of neatness and care. It was not lost on poor Joe as he looked around the small house. He had been here often, but there are times when we see and times when we do not. Now, perhaps because of being on guard, all his senses, and the inert mind back of them, were more alive than usual. A book lying open on the spotless table struck him most; a snow-white rolling-pin had been hastily laid on it to keep the place at the moment of Joe’s coming.

He was bent on making himself agreeable to his hostess, who now stood by an open window, well satisfied with her work, a large sheet of paper in her hand. She had put on for Sunday a white gown which had known the summers of Georgia. It was 252clean and much mended, but it set off her fair rosiness and dark hair, and made her look larger than she was.

“Sit down, Joe.”

“Guess I will,” said Joe. “Top rail of Hiram’s fence is mighty sharp.”

He sat down with caution, being heavy. In his own home the furniture was apt to go to pieces unless humored by a but gradual abandonment to it of the full weight of the human frame. Satisfied as to this, he began to use the weapon of his sex:

“You’re well fixed up here, Dory. There ain’t many women could keep a man’s house lookin’ like yourn!”

“Oh, it’s only just to not let things get ahead of you, and to keep your man p’inted right.”

“Might be the woman mostly,” he said. “Some women p’ints themselves, and some women don’t. It isn’t every woman’s got your talents.”

“I don’t know, Joe. Sometimes I think it isn’t worth while to go on and on this way, and then I let things go a while just any way they’re a-minded. That’s burying your talents, Joe; and then at last I can’t stand it, and I dig up my little talents, and dust them well, and say, ‘Get up on your legs, and attend to your business.’” Her parables were never clear to him.

“We live just like hogs at my house.”

“No, you don’t,” cried Dorothy, laughing. “I hate to hear a man taking away the characters of respectable animals. A hog has always got his nose over the trough. He wants his feed like everything. 253He’ll work for it all day—and smart! Why, he’ll be into your truck-patch and out, when he sees you, before you can turn round. He knows what he wants, and he goes for it; and he knows when he’s stealing as well as you or me. I hate to hear an animal called pig-headed because he don’t mean to be ordered here or there by a fellow that hasn’t got half his will or half his brains. There!”

“Gosh, Dory, but you’re a funny woman.”

“Am I? There is more than fun in that sermon. Look here; this might do.” And, as he came near and stood with huge square hands on the table, she spread out the sheet of paper.

“Can’t you read any of it, Joe?”

“Not no word of it. I might know the letters—the big ones.”

He looked at it as a scholar might at some papyrus in an unknown language. “You might read it,” he said.

Upon this, with a finger on each word, as she went on, and with his eyes following it with interest, she read slowly:
“HERE LIE THE BODIES
OF
SUSAN FAIRLAMB,
PETER FAIRLAMB, AND
ISAIAH FAIRLAMB,
CHILDREN OF SUSAN AND
PETER FAIRLAMB.”

“I guess I’d leave him out,” said Joe, straightening himself.

254“But children must have a father.”

“There ain’t no need to say it, though, Dory. Susie she won’t like it.”

“Well, it isn’t my tombstone,” said Dorothy. “He wasn’t much use to them when he was alive; we’ll leave him out.” Untrammeled by the usages of the world, she put a pen through the statement of parental relation.

“What about the dates—the days they died, and their ages?”

“Derned if I know, except about Isaiah. It don’t matter none.” He was reflecting that the work before him might be reasonably lessened.

“It really don’t matter,” she returned. “But, Joe, don’t you want some verse out of the Bible? They most generally do put that.”

“It makes a heap of work, and my knife ain’t none too sharp. Make it short, anyways.”

Certain grim texts came into Dorothy’s mind, but she set them aside. At last she wrote:
Of such are the kingdom of heaven!

and repeated the phrase aloud.

“That’s as short as you could make it?” he said.

“Yes. Do you come down to-morrow morning—no, on Monday. I’ll baste four big sheets together, and print it all, the size you will want it. Then you can easily copy the letters. How will that do?”

“First rate. I’m awful obliged to you, Dory.”

“Can Susan read it?”

“Well, she can manage to spell it out; and you’ll read it to me a couple of times, so I’ll be able to tell 255her if she ain’t got the meanin’ straight. I’ll come, and don’t you let no one know.”

“Well, good-by.” She made no promise. She had too clear a sense of the ridiculous to want to let this thing stand uncriticized. It was for her a novel venture. Now she saw the man go, and stood herself a moment in the sun, facing the doorway, and resting with both hands on the table. Her own children lay in nameless graves in the far South, buried in days when war and want had made record difficult. She was recalling the live-oak grove where the two small mounds were crumbling to the common level of earth. At last she smiled, and said aloud:

“I guess Christ will know where to find them.”

“What was you sayin’?” said Hiram, entering.

“I was only p’inting myself, Hiram.”

“Do you have need to do that, Dory? I’d’a’ never guessed that.”

“Oh, pretty often.” She herself would scarcely have said “p’inting” in her talk with the Lyndsays, but that her husband used the word, and she had come to regard it by habit as having a specific significance other than that of its proper, unabbreviated parent.

Meanwhile Joe Colkett walked homeward, with so much mind as he possessed at ease. The rest of the enterprise seemed small compared to the difficulty over which poor Dorothy had so innocently helped him.

At times he had been inclined to content himself with a neat wooden tomb-mark. Being clever enough with tools, this might easily have been managed; but 256now, the hard, half-distraught woman, whose worn middle age still had his love, for whom he would have dared all his nature let him dare, was ever at his elbow with hints as to the possibility of crime. He had, however, no natural tendency to grave wrong-doing, and it seemed to him that if he could propitiate this relentless temptress by gratifying her lesser desire, she might be content and cease to urge him into worse ways. He was distinctly afraid of his wife, and, once or twice, of himself, when she had set before him what they could do with money, and how pleasant it might be to get drunk when he liked.

At least now she should have her more innocent wish satisfied. Nor was it strange that he gave no thought to the people he was about to plunder. He had lived too much of late in the black shade of the possibilities of larger crime to be troubled by the smaller sin he was so eager to commit. Nor could he supply to the minds of those he meant to rob more motives than his own imagination supplied, and it taught him nothing in the way of sentiment concerning these records of the dead.