The Bondboy. George W. Ogden

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      He looked for a splinter on a stick of stove-wood, which he lit at the stove and carried to his lamp. At the door he paused, turned, and looked at Ollie, his hand, hovering like a grub curved beside the chimney, shading the light from his eyes.

      “So he brought a Bible, did he?”

      “Yes.”

      “Well, he’s welcome to it,” said Isom. “I don’t care what anybody that works for me reads–just so long as he works!”

      Isom’s jubilation over his bondboy set his young wife’s curiosity astir. She had not noted any romantic or noble parts about the youth in the casual, uninterested view which she had given him that day. To her then he had appeared only a sprangling, long-bodied, long-legged, bony-shouldered, unformed lad whose hollow frame indicated a great capacity for food. Her only thought in connection with him had 38 been that it meant another mouth to dole Isom’s slender allowance out to, more scheming on her part to make the rations go round. It meant another one to wash for, another bed to make.

      She had thought of those things wearily that morning when she heard the new voice at the kitchen door, and she had gone there for a moment to look him over; for strange faces, even those of loutish farm-hands, were refreshing in her isolated life. She had not heard what the lad was saying to Isom, for the kitchen was large and the stove far away from the door, but she had the passing thought that there was a good deal of earnestness or passion in the harangue for a farm-hand to be laying on his early morning talk.

      When she found the Bible lying there on top of Joe’s hickory shirt, she had concluded that he had been talking religion. She hoped that he would not preach at his meals. The only religion that Ollie knew anything of, and not much of that, was a glum and melancholy kind, with frenzied shoutings of the preacher in it, and portentous shaking of the beard in the shudderful pictures of the anguish of unrepentant death. So she hoped that he would not preach at his meals, for the house was sad enough, and terrible and gloomily hopeless enough, without the kind of religion that made the night deeper and the day longer in its dread.

      Now Isom’s talk about the lad’s blood, and his expression of high confidence in his fealty, gave her a pleasant topic of speculation. Did good blood make men different from those who came of mongrel strain, in other points than that of endurance alone? Did it give men nobility and sympathy and loftiness, or was it something prized by those who hired them, as Isom seemed to value it in Joe, because it lent strength to the arms?

      Ollie sat on the kitchen steps and turned all this over in her thoughts after Isom had gone to bed. 39

      Perhaps in the new bondboy, who had come there to serve with her, she would find one with whom she might talk and sometimes ease her heart. She hoped that it might be so, for she needed chatter and laughter and the common sympathies of youth, as a caged bird requires the seed of its wild life. There was hope in the new farm-hand which swept into her heart like a refreshing breeze. She would look him over and sound him when he worked, choring between kitchen and barn.

      Ollie had been a poor man’s child. Isom had chosen her as he would have selected a breeding-cow, because nature, in addition to giving her a form of singular grace and beauty, had combined therein the utilitarian indications of ability to plentifully reproduce her kind. Isom wanted her because she was alert and quick of foot, and strong to bear the burdens of motherhood; for even in the shadow of his decline he still held to the hope of his youth–that he might leave a son behind him to guard his acres and bring down his name.

      Ollie was no deeper than her opportunities of life had made her. She had no qualities of self-development, and while she had graduated from a high school and still had the ornate diploma among her simple treasures, learning had passed through her pretty ears like water through a funnel. It had swirled and choked there a little while, just long enough for her to make her “points” required for passing, then it had sped on and left her unencumbered and free.

      Her mother had always held Ollie’s beauty a greater asset than mental graces, and this early appraisement of it at its trading value had made Ollie a bit vain and ambitious to mate above her family. Isom Chase had held out to her all the allurements of which she had dreamed, and she had married him for his money. She had as well taken a stone 40 to her soft bosom in the hope of warming it into yielding a flower.

      Isom was up at four o’clock next morning. A few minutes after him Ollie stumbled down the stairs, heavy with the pain of broken sleep. Joe was snoring above-stairs; the sound penetrated to the kitchen down the doorless casement.

      “Listen to that feller sawin’ gourds!” said Isom crabbedly.

      The gloom of night was still in the kitchen; in the corner where the stove stood it was so dark that Ollie had to grope her way, yawning heavily, feeling that she would willingly trade the last year of her life for one more hour of sleep that moist spring morning.

      Isom mounted the kitchen stairs and roused Joe, lumbering down again straightway and stringing the milk-pails on his arms without waiting to see the result of his summons.

      “Send him on down to the barn when he’s ready,” directed Isom, jangling away in the pale light of early day.

      Ollie fumbled around in her dark corner for kindling, and started a fire in the kitchen stove with a great rattling of lids. Perhaps there was more alarm than necessary in this primitive and homely task, sounded with the friendly intention of carrying a warning to Joe, who was making no move to obey his master’s call.

      Ollie went softly to the staircase and listened. Joe’s snore was rumbling again, as if he traveled a heavy road in the land of dreams. She did not feel that she could go and shake him out of his sleep and warn him of the penalty of such remission, but she called softly from where she stood:

      “Joe! You must get up, Joe!”

      But her voice was not loud enough to wake a bird. Joe slept on, like a heavy-headed boor, and she went back to the stove to put the kettle on to boil. The issue of his recalcitration must be left between him and Isom. If he had 41 good blood in him, perhaps he would fight when Isom lifted his hand and beat him out of his sleep, she reflected, hoping simply that it would turn out that way.

      Isom came back to the house in frothing wrath a quarter of an hour later. There was no need to ask about Joe, for the bound boy’s nostrils sounded his own betrayal.

      Isom did not look at Ollie as he took the steep stairs four treads at a step. In a moment she heard the sleeper’s bed squeaking in its rickety old joints as her husband shook him and cut short his snore in the middle of a long flourish.

      “Turn out of here!” shouted Isom in his most terrible voice–which was to Ollie’s ears indeed a dreadful sound–“turn out and git into your duds!”

      Ollie heard the old bed give an extra loud groan, as if the sleeper had drawn himself up in it with suddenness; following that came the quick scuffling of bare feet on the floor.

      “Don’t you touch me! Don’t you lay hands on me!” she heard the bound boy warn, his voice still husky with sleep.

      “I’ll skin you alive!” threatened Isom. “You’ve come here to work, not to trifle your days away sleepin’. A good dose of strap-oil’s what you need, and I’m the man to give it to you, too!”

      Isom’s foot was heavy on the floor over her head, moving about as if in search of something to use in the flagellation. Ollie stood with hands to her tumultuous bosom, pity welling in her heart СКАЧАТЬ