the back door he caught a glimpse of Martha Waley, the woman who helped him with the store and kept house for him. She smiled at him over her shoulder as he came in.
“Hello, Johnnie,” she said. “Have a nice day?” and, without waiting for an answer, “Sue Tolliver just came into the store. Go on and ask her what she wants. I got supper on the stove and I don’t want to spoil it.”
He put his hat and bundle of magazines on the kitchen table and went into the front room. Behind the counter stood the little Tolliver girl, her sweater buttoned high about her neck and her straight pale hair straggling down into her eyes.
Johnnie said, “Well, little lady, what can I give you?”
She consulted a small piece of crumpled paper and said, “Matches, soap, bacon.”
“What kind of soap?” said Johnnie, setting a box of matches on the counter. It was cozy in the store with all the rows of breakfast foods, oatmeal, canned goods. A shelf of jams and pickles in glass jars behind Johnnie’s back was particularly enticing. The oil lamp stood on the glass top of the candy counter. The child shook her head at the question.
“Kitchen soap,” she suggested.
“I’ll make it Lily White,” said Johnnie. “That’s the kind your ma generally gets. Here, now, don’t go putting them things in your pockets. I’m going to wrap ’em up for you.” The child put them back on the counter sheepishly.
“Lookit,” he said. He stacked them deftly on the slab of bacon, unrolled a fair sheet of brown paper, wrapped everything, mitered the corners neatly, tied the package, spinning the string out of a wire cocoon hung overhead. “There,” he said, shoving it toward her, “ain’t that an elegant package? Anything else, little lady?”
She shook her head, smiling and mute, and edged out the door. Johnnie, also smiling, entered the purchases in a charge book and went back into the kitchen.
He did a pretty fair business in the summer, supplying the summer colony with canned goods and, now and then, fresh vegetables and fruit. In the winter there were only three other households. He dined out regularly every Sunday with one or the other of them, played endless games of solitaire, and enjoyed the hermitage. He was proud of the store. It was little and bright; and built onto the kitchen in the rear he had a little glassed-in sun parlor with cretonne curtains and wicker chairs. It was so little that the kitchen stove heated it thoroughly even in the coldest weather. From the windows he could see the river, both upstream and down, for the store was on a point.
Beside the store, in a small thicket of Indian plum, stood a guesthouse, where his housekeeper lived. Johnnie himself bunked over the store. The guesthouse was hardly bigger than a sandwich wagon. It had been a Builders’ and Roofers’ float in a trade pageant at the Soo, and was such a good job that Johnnie had bought it, cheap, and set it up on a log foundation next to the store. He built a stairway of three steps leading up to the door, and there you were.
Martha Waley was in a good mood tonight. They had a pleasant supper, and after the dishes were washed he invited her to play a game of two-handed bridge with him. But she said she was tired and wanted to go to bed. She took the lamp from the store, and he saw its light moving over the leaves and low bushes. Then she entered the house, shut the door, and the light disappeared.
He read for a while and then got out the cards for a game of solitaire. The vague feeling of misfortune which he had downed successfully from the moment when he had parted from the blue lighter returned now, rather more potent than before.
“It was a damn fool thing to do,” he argued. “Ask for trouble and you’ll get it sure enough.”
The cards were firm and smooth in his hands, and the little accurate flip and shuffle consoled him somewhat. He played the game through, his uneasiness deepening momently, but when he had gathered up the cards again, he sighed in disgust and gave himself up entirely to his gloom.
He thought of the coffin, thought of it minutely, thought of himself in it, he, Johnnie Plows, in his best suit, but without a hat, of course, lying in white satin. The image depressed him terribly, and there is no knowing how long he might have remained sunk in misery had not a grain of common sense come to his help.
“Shucks,” he said, “this is all the wrong way to go about it, planning my material hereafter instead of my spiritual.” He repeated it, “My spiritual hereafter.” Then he sighed. “Yeah,” he said, “but how do you work it?”
Phrases like “the remission of sins,” “examine your conscience,” “the way of the transgressor,” “through the eye of a needle,” came into his mind. His sins, as he remembered them, were all so long ago, when he was on the road, and “only the usual sins, anyway,” he said, finding it hard to be interested in them. The face of his wife appeared to him dimly, patient and faintly lined, a face seen through a mist, one that he might encounter in his spiritual hereafter. As for Martha Waley, he’d had nothing to do with Martha Waley. People could talk if they wanted to; it didn’t concern the problem in hand.
A clergyman, now, would know better how to go about it. But the last clergyman he remembered having talked with had been the circuit preacher, and they hadn’t talked about sin or redemption either. Or death. He had stayed for a couple of weeks in the guesthouse be fore the days of Martha Waley, and they had gone fishing.
The face of the circuit preacher grew before his eyes, a long brown face with only a few wrinkles, but those deeply incised; his eyes gray and deep-set, his eyebrows gray and tufted.
“Looked like a Rail Splitter if there ever was one,” said Johnnie.
They got up one morning at four o’clock in order to catch some bass for the judge. The judge had gone down to Chicago several weeks before, but his wife had stayed at the island with their little boy, who suffered from hay fever. It was the morning she was leaving, to rejoin the judge. They were going to send them down by her.
At four o’clock it was dark, and the river was the most curious cold expanse he’d ever laid eyes on. “That was when hot coffee tasted good,” he said. As they pulled out from the dock they saw the Great Dipper stooping over Rains’s barn. “Lookit,” said Johnnie. “By golly, you could pitch hay into it.”
The preacher smiled. “You’ve got a fancy, Johnnie,” he said. “A fancy.” They got the fish all right, a fine stringerful, but they barely made it back to the dock in time for the boat. That was before the Elva was taken off the run. There she lay, as they rowed up to the store. They were taking in the gangplank as Johnnie rushed out on the dock, waving his hands. The judge’s wife looked aghast.
“But how can I travel with a stringerful of fish!”
“Oh,” said Johnnie, “you just let the porter take care of them. Think of it! Black bass for breakfast in Chicago. I bet it tickles the judge. Here today and there tomorrow. No, I ain’t quoting Scripture.”
Captain Stewart leaned over the railing on the top deck.
“What’s this I hear, Johnnie? Sending fish out of the state without a permit?”
“Just a snack for breakfast, Captain,” said Johnnie.
The preacher hurried up with the fish then, and the last Johnnie had seen of the judge’s wife that year she was standing on the lower deck of the Elva in her city clothes, wiping her eyes with one hand and holding a string of wet fish with the other.
He
