Ralph snorted. “You might clean your fruit closet once in awhile, you know, Mahailey. You ought to see how Mrs. Dawson keeps hers. Now, let’s see.” He sorted the jars on the table. “Take back the grape jelly. If there’s anything I hate, it’s grape jelly. I know you have lots of it, but you can’t work it off on me. And when you come up, don’t forget the pickled peaches. I told you particularly, the pickled peaches!”
“We ain’t got no pickled peaches.” Mahailey stood by the cellar door, holding a corner of her apron up to her chin, with a queer, animal look of stubbornness in her face.
“No pickled peaches? What nonsense, Mahailey! I saw you making them here, only a few weeks ago.”
“I know you did, Mr. Ralph, but they ain’t none now. I didn’t have no luck with my peaches this year. I must ‘a’ let the air git at ’em. They all worked on me, an” I had to throw ’em out.”
Ralph was thoroughly annoyed. “I never heard of such a thing, Mahailey! You get more careless every year. Think of wasting all that fruit and sugar! Does mother know?”
Mahailey’s low brow clouded. “I reckon she does. I don’t wase your mudder’s sugar. I never did wase nothin’,” she muttered. Her speech became queerer than ever when she was angry.
Ralph dashed down the cellar stairs, lit a lantern, and searched the fruit closet. Sure enough, there were no pickled peaches. When he came back and began packing his fruit, Mahailey stood watching him with a furtive expression, very much like the look that is in a chained coyote’s eyes when a boy is showing him off to visitors and saying he wouldn’t run away if he could.
“Go on with your work,” Ralph snapped. “Don’t stand there watching me!”
That evening Claude was sitting on the windmill platform, down by the barn, after a hard day’s work ploughing for winter wheat. He was solacing himself with his pipe. No matter how much she loved him, or how sorry she felt for him, his mother could never bring herself to tell him he might smoke in the house. Lights were shining from the upstairs rooms on the hill, and through the open windows sounded the singing snarl of a phonograph. A figure came stealing down the path. He knew by her low, padding step that it was Mahailey, with her apron thrown over her head. She came up to him and touched him on the shoulder in a way which meant that what she had to say was confidential.
“Mr. Claude, Mr. Ralph’s done packed up a barr’l of your mudder’s jelly an’ pickles to take out there.”
“That’s all right, Mahailey. Mr. Wested was a widower, and I guess there wasn’t anything of that sort put up at his place.”
She hesitated and bent lower. “He asked me fur them pickled peaches I made fur you, but I didn’t give him none. I hid ’em all in my old cook-stove we done put down cellar when Mr. Ralph bought the new one. I didn’t give him your mudder’s new preserves, nudder. I give him the old last year’s stuff we had left over, and now you an’ your mudder’ll have plenty.” Claude laughed. “Oh, I don’t care if Ralph takes all the fruit on the place, Mahailey!”
She shrank back a little, saying confusedly, “No, I know you don’t, Mr. Claude. I know you don’t.”
“I surely ought not to take it out on her,” Claude thought, when he saw her disappointment. He rose and patted her on the back. “That’s all right, Mahailey. Thank you for saving the peaches, anyhow.”
She shook her finger at him. “Don’t you let on!”
He promised, and watched her slipping back over the zigzag path up the hill.
Chapter XIV
Ralph and his father moved to the new ranch the last of August, and Mr. Wheeler wrote back that late in the fall he meant to ship a carload of grass steers to the home farm to be fattened during the winter. This, Claude saw, would mean a need for fodder. There was a fifty-acre corn field west of the creek, – just on the sky-line when one looked out from the west windows of the house. Claude decided to put this field into winter wheat, and early in September he began to cut and bind the corn that stood upon it for fodder. As soon as the corn was gathered, he would plough up the ground, and drill in the wheat when he planted the other wheat fields.
This was Claude’s first innovation, and it did not meet with approval. When Bayliss came out to spend Sunday with his mother, he asked her what Claude thought he was doing, anyhow. If he wanted to change the crop on that field, why didn’t he plant oats in the spring, and then get into wheat next fall? Cutting fodder and preparing the ground now, would only hold him back in his work. When Mr. Wheeler came home for a short visit, he jocosely referred to that quarter as “Claude’s wheat field”.
Claude went ahead with what he had undertaken to do, but all through September he was nervous and apprehensive about the weather. Heavy rains, if they came, would make him late with his wheat-planting, and then there would certainly be criticism. In reality, nobody cared much whether the planting was late or not, but Claude thought they did, and sometimes in the morning he awoke in a state of panic because he wasn’t getting ahead faster. He had Dan and one of August Yoeder’s four sons to help him, and he worked early and late. The new field he ploughed and drilled himself. He put a great deal of young energy into it, and buried a great deal of discontent in its dark furrows. Day after day he flung himself upon the land and planted it with what was fermenting in him, glad to be so tired at night that he could not think.
Ralph came home for Leonard Dawson’s wedding, on the first of October. All the Wheelers went to the wedding, even Mahailey, and there was a great gathering of the country folk and townsmen.
After Ralph left, Claude had the place to himself again, and the work went on as usual. The stock did well, and there were no vexatious interruptions. The fine weather held, and every morning when Claude got up, another gold day stretched before him like a glittering carpet, leading…? When the question where the days were leading struck him on the edge of his bed, he hurried to dress and get downstairs in time to fetch wood and coal for Mahailey. They often reached the kitchen at the same moment, and she would shake her finger at him and say, “You come down to help me, you nice boy, you!” At least he was of some use to Mahailey. His father could hire one of the Yoeder boys to look after the place, but Mahailey wouldn’t let any one else save her old back.
Mrs. Wheeler, as well as Mahailey, enjoyed that fall. She slept late in the morning, and read and rested in the afternoon. She made herself some new house-dresses out of a grey material Claude chose. “It’s almost like being a bride, keeping house for just you, Claude,” she sometimes said.
Soon Claude had the satisfaction of seeing a blush of green come up over his brown wheat fields, visible first in the dimples and little hollows, then flickering over the knobs and levels like a fugitive smile. He watched the green blades coming every day, when he and Dan went afield with their wagons to gather corn. Claude sent Dan to shuck on the north quarter, and he worked on the south. He always brought in one more load a day than Dan did, – that was to be expected. Dan explained this very reasonably, Claude thought, one afternoon when they were hooking up their teams.
“It’s all right for you to jump at that corn like you was a-beating carpets, Claude; it’s your corn, or anyways it’s your Paw’s. Them fields will always lay betwixt you and trouble. But a hired man’s got no property but his back, and he has to save it. I figure that I’ve only got about so many jumps left in me, and I ain’t a-going to jump too hard at no man’s corn.”
“What’s the matter? I haven’t been hinting that you ought to jump any harder, have I?”
“No, you ain’t, but I just want you to know that there’s
