I ought to have told you, mother,” he confessed. “I wanted to. Honest, I did, but I was afraid you’d worry, though you needn’t. The man who taught me how to fire has been doing it over twenty years. A lot of it’s up to a fellow, himself. You can pretty near tell if the air is all right by the way it blows—the less the better it is. And if you’re right careful to see that the tool-boxes the boys leave are all locked—so’s no powder can catch, you know—and always start lighting against the air, so that if there’s gas and it catches the fire’ll blow away from you instead of following you up—and if you examine the fuses to see they’re long enough and the powder is tamped in just right—each miner does that before he leaves and lots of firers just give ’em a hasty once-over instead of a real look—and then shake your heels good and fast after you do fire—”
“Billy!” Rose was white. “I can’t bear it—to hear you go on so lightly, when it’s your life, your life, you’re playing with. For my sake, son, give it up.”
With an odd sinking of the heart, she observed the expression in his face which she had seen so often in his father’s—the one that said as plainly as words that nothing could shake his determination. “A fellow’s got a right to some good times in this world,” he said very low, “and I’m getting mine now. I’m not going to grind away and grind away all my life like father and you’ve done. If anything did happen I’d have had a chance to dream and think and read instead of getting to be old without ever having any fun out of it all. Maybe you won’t believe it, but some days for hours I just lie in the sun like a boy, not even thinking. Gee! it feels great! And sometimes I read all day until I have to go to the mine. There’s one thing I’m going to tell you square,” he went on, a firm ring in his voice, boyish for all its deep, bass note, “I’m never going back to the farm, never! Mother,” he cried, suddenly, coming over to take her hand in both his. “Will you leave father? We could rent a little house and you’d have hardly anything to do. I’m making more than lots of men with families. And I’d give you my envelope without opening it every pay-day.”
“Oh, Billy, you don’t know what you’re saying! I couldn’t leave your father. I couldn’t think of it.”
“What I don’t see is how you can stand it to stay with him. He’s always been a brute to you. He’s never cared a red cent for either of us.”
Rose was abashed before the harsh logic of youth. “Oh, son,” she murmured brokenly, “there are things one can’t explain. I suppose it may seem strange to you—but his life has been so empty. He has missed so much! Everything, Billy.”
“Then it’s his own fault,” judged the boy. “If ever anybody’s always had his own way and done just as he darn pleased it’s father. I wish he’d die, that’s what I wish.”
“Bill!” His mother’s tone was stern.
“There you are!” he marvelled. “You must have wished it lots of times yourself. I know you have. Yet you always talk as if you loved him.”
In Rose’s eyes, the habitual look of patience and understanding deepened. How could Bill, as yet scarcely tried by life, comprehend the purging flames through which she had passed or realize time’s power to reveal unsuspected truths.
“When you’ve been married to a man nearly twenty-two years and have built up a place together, there’s bound to be a bond between you,” she eluded. “He just lives for this farm. It’s almost as dear to him as you are to me, son, and it’s a wonderful heritage, Bill, a magnificent heritage. Just think! Two generations have labored to build it out of the dust. Your father’s whole life is in it. Your father’s and mine. And your grandmother’s. If only you could ever come to care for it!”
Bill fidgeted uneasily. “You mean you want me to go on with it?” he demanded. “You want me to come back to it, settle down to be a farmer—like father?”
The tone in which he asked this question made Rose choose her words carefully.
“What are your plans, son? What do you want to be—not just now, but finally?”
“I can’t see what difference it makes what a fellow is—except that in one business a man makes more than in another. And I can’t see either that it does a person a bit of good to have money. I’m having more fun right now than father or you ever had—more fun than anybody I know. Mother,” and his face was solemn as if with a great discovery, “I’ve figured it out that it’s silly to do as most people—just live to work. I’m going to work just enough to live comfortably. Not one scrap more, either. You can’t think how I hate the very thought of it.”
Rose sighed. Couldn’t she, indeed! She understood only too well how deeply this rebellion was rooted. The hours when he had been dragged up from the far shores of a dreamful slumber to shiver forth in the chill darkness to milk and chore, still rankled. Those tangy frosty afternoons, when he had been forced to clean barns and plow while the other boys went rabbit and possum hunting or nutting, were afternoons whose loss he still mourned. Nothing had yet atoned for the evenings when he had been torn from his reading and sent sternly to bed because he must get up so early. Always work had stolen from him these treasures—dreams, recreation and knowledge. He had been obliged to fight the farm and his father for even a modicum of them—the things that made life worth living. And the irony of it—that eventually it would be this farm and Martin’s driving methods which, if he became reconciled to his father, would make it possible for him to drink all the fullness of leisure.
It was too tragic that the very thing which should have stood for opportunity to the boy had been used to embitter him and drive him into danger. But he must not lose his birthright. An almost passionate desire welled in Rose’s heart to hold on to it for him. True, she too had been a slave to the farm. Yet not so much a slave to it, she distinguished, as to Martin’s absorption in its development. And of late years there had been for her, running through all the humdrum days, a satisfaction in perfecting it. In her mind now floated clearly the ideal toward which her husband was striving. She had not guessed how much it had become her own until she felt herself being drawn relentlessly by Bill’s quiet, but implacable determination to have her leave it all behind. If only he would try again, she felt sure all would be so different! His father had learned a lesson, of that she was positive, and though he would not promise it, would not be so hard on the boy. And with this new independence of Bill’s to strengthen her, they could resist Martin more successfully as different issues came up. She could manage to help her boy get what he wanted out of life without his having to pay such a terrible price as, the mine on one hand, and his father’s displeasure on the other, might exact, for she knew that if he persisted too long, the break with Martin could never be bridged and that in the end his father would evoke the full powers of the law to disinherit him and tie her own hands as completely as possible in that direction.
But she was far too wise to press such arguments in her son’s present mood. They would have to drift for a while, she saw that clearly, until she could gradually impress upon him how different farming would be if he were his own master. In time, he might even come to understand how much Martin needed her. “Say you will,” Bill, pleading, insistent, broke in on her train of reflections, “I’ve always dreamed of this day, when we’d go away, and now it’s come. I can take care of you.”
As he stood there, a glorious figure in his youthful self-confidence, a turn of his head reminded her a second time of Martin, recalling sharply the way her husband had looked the night he told her of his love for the other Rose. He had been bothered by no fine qualms about abandoning herself. She thought of his final surrender of love to wisdom. It was only youth that dared pursue happiness—to purchase delicious idleness by gambling with death. Billy was her boy. His dreams and hopes should be hers; her way of life, the one that gave him the most joy. She would follow him, if need
