The Arena. Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891

One of the group, the one cuffed last, sniffled out, in rage and grief:—

“He’s in the cornfield,—where’d ye s’pose he was?”

“Good land! why don’t the man work all night? Sile, you put that dipper in that milk agin, an’ I’ll whack you till your head’ll swim! Sadie, le’ go Pet, an’ go ‘n get them turkeys out of the grass ‘fore it gits dark! Bob, you go tell y’r dad if he wants the rest o’ them cows milked, he’s got ‘o do it himself. I jest can’t, and what’s more I won’t,” she ended rebelliously.

Having strained the milk and fed the children, she took some skimmed milk from the cans and started to feed the calves bawling strenuously behind the barn. The eager and unruly brutes pushed and struggled to get into the pails all at once, and in consequence spilt nearly all of the milk on the ground. This was the last trial,—the woman fell down on the damp grass and moaned and sobbed like a crazed thing. The children stood around like little partridges, looking at her in silence, till at last the little one began to wail. Then the mother rose wearily to her feet, and walked slowly back towards the house.

She heard Burns threshing his team at the well, with the sound of oaths. He was tired, hungry, and ill-tempered, but she was too desperate to care. His poor, overworked team did not move quick enough for him, and his extra long turn in the corn had made him dangerous. His eyes gleamed from his dust-laid face.

“Supper ready?” he growled.

“Yes, two hours ago.”

“Well, I can’t help it! That devilish corn is getting too tall to plow again, and I’ve got ‘o go through it to-morrow or not at all. Cows milked?”

“Part of ‘em.”

“How many?”

“Three.”

“Hell! Which three?”

“Spot, and Brin, and Cherry.”

“Of course! kept the three worst ones. I’ll be damned if I milk ‘m to-night. I don’t see why you play out jest the nights I need ye most—” here he kicked a child out of the way. “Git out ‘o that! Haint ye got no sense? I’ll learn ye—”

“Stop that, Sim Burns!” cried the woman, snatching up the child. “You’re a reg’lar ol’ hyeny,—that’s what you are—” she added defiantly, roused at last from her lethargy.

“You’re a—beauty, that’s what you are,” he said, pitilessly. “Keep your brats out f’um under my feet;” and he strode off to the barn after his team, leaving her with a fierce hate in her heart. She heard him yelling at his team in their stalls.

The children had had their supper so she took them to bed. She was unusually tender to them for she wanted to make up in some way for her harshness. The ferocity of her husband had shown up her own petulant temper hideously, and she sat and sobbed in the darkness a long time beside the cradle where the little Pet slept.

She heard Burns come growling in and tramp about,—the supper was on the table, he could wait on himself. There was an awful feeling at her heart as she sat there and the house grew quiet. She thought of suicide in a vague way; of somehow taking her children in her arms and sinking into a lake somewhere, where she would never more be troubled, where she could sleep forever, without toil or hunger.

Then she thought of the little turkeys wandering in the grass, of the children sleeping at last, of the quiet, wonderful stars. Then she thought of the cows left unmilked, and listened to them stirring uneasily in the yard. She rose, at last, and stole forth. She could not rid herself of the thought that they would suffer. She knew what the dull ache in the full breasts of a mother was, and she could not let them stand at the bars all night moaning for relief.

The mosquitoes had gone, but the frogs and katy-dids still sang, while over in the west Venus shone. She was a long time milking the cows; her hands were so tired she had often to stop and rest them, while the tears fell unheeded into the pail. She saw and felt little of the external as she sat there. She thought of how sweet it seemed the first time Sim came to see her, of the many rides to town with him when he was an accepted lover, of the few things he had given her, a coral breastpin and a ring.

She felt no shame at her present miserable appearance, she was past that; she hardly felt as if the tall, strong girl, attractive with health and hope, could be the same soul as the woman who now sat in utter despair listening to the heavy breathing of the happy cows, grateful for the relief from their burden of milk.

She contrasted her lot with that of two or three women that she knew, not a very high standard, who “kept hired help,” and who had “fine houses of four or five rooms.” Even the neighbors were better off than she, for they didn’t have such quarrels. But she wasn’t to blame—Sim didn’t—then her mind changed to a vague resentment against “things;” everything seemed against her.

She rose at last and carried her second load of milk to the well, strained it, washed out the pails, and after bathing her tired feet in a tub that stood there, she put on a pair of horrible shoes without stockings, and crept stealthily into the house. Sim did not hear her as she slipped up the stairs to the little low, unfinished chamber beside her oldest children,—she could not bear to sleep near him that night,—she wanted a chance to sob herself to quiet.

As for Sim, he was a little disturbed but would as soon have cut off his head as acknowledge himself in the wrong, but he yelled as he went to bed, and found her still away:—

“Say, ol’ woman, aint ye comin’ to bed?” and upon receiving no answer he rolled his aching body into the creaking bed. “Do as ye damn please about it. If ye wan’ to sulk y’ can.” And in such wise the family grew quiet in sleep, while the moist, warm air pulsed with the ceaseless chime of the crickets.

II

When Sim Burns woke the next morning he felt a sharper twinge of remorse. It was not a broad or well-defined feeling, just a sense that he’d been unduly irritable, not that on the whole he was not in the right. Little Pet lay with the warm June sunshine filling his baby eyes, curiously content in striking at flies that buzzed around his little mouth.

The man thrust his dirty naked feet into his huge boots, and, without washing his face or combing his hair, went out to the barn to do his chores.

He was a type of the prairie farmer and his whole surrounding was typical. He had a quarter-section of fine level land, mortgaged, of course, but his house was a little box-like structure, costing, perhaps, five hundred dollars. It had three rooms and the ever-present “summer kitchen” attached to the back. It was unpainted and had no touch of beauty, a mere box.

His stable was built of slabs and banked and covered with straw. It looked like a den, was low and long, and had but one door in the end. The cow-yard held ten or fifteen cattle of various kinds, while a few calves were bawling from a pen near by. Behind the barn on the west and north was a fringe of willows forming a “wind-break.” A few broken and discouraged fruit trees standing here and there among the weeds formed the garden. In short, he was spoken of by his neighbors as “a hard-working cuss, and tollably well fixed.”

No grace had come or ever could come into his life. Back of him were generations of men like himself, whose main’ business had been to work hard, live miserably, and beget children to take their places after they died. He was a product.

His courtship had been delayed so long on account of poverty that it brought little of humanizing emotion into his life. He never mentioned it now, or if he did, it was only to sneer obscenely at it. He had long since ceased to kiss his wife or even speak kindly to her. There was no longer any sanctity to life or love. He chewed tobacco and toiled on from year to year without any very clearly defined idea of the future.

He was tall, dark, and strong, in a flat-chested, slouching sort of way, and had grown neglectful of even decency in his dress. He wore the American farmer’s customary outfit of rough brown pants, hickory shirt, and greasy white hat. It differed from his neighbors, mainly in being a little dirtier and more ragged. His grimy hands were broad and strong as the clutch of a bear, and he “was a turrible feller to turn off work,” as Council said. “I druther have Sim Burns work for me one day than some men three. He’s a linger.” He worked with unusual speed this morning, and ended by milking all the cows himself as a sort of savage penance for his misdeeds the previous evening, muttering in self-defence:—

“Seems ‘s if ever’ cussid thing piles on to me at once. That corn, the road-tax, and hayin’ comin’ on, and now she gits her back up—”

When he went back to the well he sloshed himself thoroughly in the horse-trough and went to the house. He found breakfast ready but his wife was not in sight. The older children were clamoring around the uninviting breakfast table, spread with cheap plates and with boiled potatoes and fried salt pork as the principal dish.

“Where’s y’r ma?” he asked, with a threatening note in his voice, as he sat down by the table.

“She’s in the bedroom.”

He rose and pushed open the door. The mother sat with the babe in her lap, looking out of the window down across the superb field of timothy, moving like a lake. She did not look round. She only grew rigid. Her thin neck throbbed with the pulsing of blood to her head.

“What’s got into you, now?” he said brutally; “don’t be a fool. Come out and eat breakfast with me, an’ take care o’ y’r young ones.”

She neither moved nor made a sound. With an oath he turned on his heel and went out to the table. Eating his breakfast in his usual wolfish fashion, he went out into the hot sun with his team and ridding plow, not a little disturbed by this new phase of his wife’s “cantankerousness.” He plowed steadily and sullenly all the forenoon, in the terrific heat and dust. The air was full of tempestuous threats, still and sultry, one of those days when work is a punishment. When he came in at noon he found things the same,—dinner on the table, but his wife out in the garden with the youngest child.

“I c’n stand it as long as she can,” he said to himself, in the hearing of the children. When he finished the field of corn it was after sundown, and he came up to the house, hot, dusty, his shirt wringing wet with sweat, and his neck aching with the work of looking down all day at the cornrows. His mood was still stern. The multitudinous lift, and stir, and sheen of the wide green field had been lost upon him.

“I wonder if she’s milked them cows,” he muttered to himself. He gave a sigh of relief to find she had. But she had done so not for his sake, but for the sake of the poor, patient, dumb brutes.

When he went to the bedroom after supper, he found that the cradle and his wife’s few little boxes and parcels—poor pathetic properties—had been removed to the garret which they called a chamber, and he knew he was to sleep alone again.

“She’ll git over it, I guess.” He was very tired but he didn’t feel quite comfortable enough to sleep. The air was oppressive. His shirt wet in places, and stiff with dust in other places, oppressed him more than usual, so he rose and removed it, getting a clean one out of a drawer. This was an unusual thing for him, for he usually slept in the same shirt which he wore in his day’s work, but it was Saturday night, and he felt justified in the extravagance.

In the meanwhile poor Lucretia was brooding over her life in a most dangerous fashion. All she had done and suffered for Simeon Burns came back to her till she wondered how she had endured it all. All day long in the midst of the glorious summer landscape she brooded.

“I hate him,” she thought with a fierce blazing up through the murk of her musing, “I hate t’ live. But they aint no hope. I’m tied down. I can’t leave the children, and I aint got no money. I couldn’t make a living out in the world. I aint never seen anything an’ don’t know anything.”

She was too simple and too unknowing to speculate on the loss of her beauty, which would have brought her competency once,—if sold in the right market. As she lay in her little attic bed, she was still sullenly thinking, wearily thinking of her life. She thought of a poor old horse which Sim had bought once, years before, and put to the plough when it was too old and weak to work. She could see her again as in a vision, that poor old mare, with sad head drooping, toiling, toiling, till at last she could no longer move, and lying down under the harness in the furrow, groaned under the whip—and died.

Then she wondered if her own numbness and despair meant death, and she held her breath to think harder upon it. She concluded at last, grimly, that she didn’t care—only for the children.

The air was frightfully close in the little attic, and she heard the low mutter of the rising storm in the west. She forgot her troubles a little, listening to the far-off gigantic footsteps of the tempest.

Boom, boom, boom, it broke nearer and nearer as if a vast cordon of cannon was being drawn around the horizon. Yet she was conscious only of pleasure. She had no fear. At last came the sweep of cool, fragrant storm-wind, a short and sudden dash of rain, and then in the cool, sweet hush which followed, the worn and weary woman fell into a deep sleep.