for so good and patient a man, si hummaston bore himself rather vehemently during the milking. it was hotter in the barn than it was outside in the sun, and the stifling air swarmed with flies, which seemed to follow si perversely from stall to stall and settle on his cow. one beast put her hoof square in his pail, and another refused altogether to “give down,” while the rest kept up a tireless slapping and swishing of their tails very hard to bear, even if one had the help of profanity. marcellus and i listened carefully to hear him at last provoked to an oath, but the worst thing he uttered, even when the cow stepped in the milk, was “dum your buttons!” which marcellus said might conceivably be investigated by a church committee, but was hardly out-and-out swearing.
i remember si’s groans and objurgations, his querulous “hyst there, will ye!” his hypocritical “so-boss! so-boss!” his despondent “they never will give down for me!” because presently there was crossed upon this woof of peevish impatience the web of a curious conversation.
si had been so slow in his headway against flapping tails and restive hoofs that, before he had got up to the end of the row, aunt em had finished her side. she brought over her stool and pail, and seated herself at the next cow to hummaston’s. for a little, one heard only the resonant din of the stout streams against the tin; then, as the bottom was covered, there came the ploughing plash of milk on milk, and si could hear himself talk.
“s’pose you know s’reny’s come, ’long with your father,” he remarked, ingratiatingly.
“i saw ’em drive in,” replied em.
“whoa! hyst there! hole still, can’t ye? i didn’t know if you quite made out who she was, you was scootin’ ’long so fast. they ain’t—whoa there!—they ain’t nothin’ the matter ’twixt you and her, is they?”
“i don’t know as there is,” said em, curtly. “the world’s big enough for both of us—we ain’t no call to bunk into each other.”
“no, of course—now you stop it!—but it looked kind o’ curious to me, your pikin’ off like that, without waitin’ to say ‘how-d’-do?’ of course, i never had no relation by marriage that was stuck-up at all, or looked down on me—stiddy there now!—but i guess i can reelize pretty much how you feel about it. i’m a good deal of a hand at that. it’s what they call imagination. it’s a gift, you know, like good looks, or preachin’, or the knack o’ makin’ money. but you can’t help what you’re born with, can you? i’d been a heap better off if my gift’d be’n in some other direction; but, as i tell ’em, it ain’t my fault. and my imagination—hi, there! git over, will ye?—it’s downright cur’ous sometimes, how it works. now i could tell, you see, that you ‘n’ s’reny didn’t pull together. i s’pose she never writ a line to you, when your husband was killed?”
“why should she?” demanded em. “we never did correspond. what’d be the sense of beginning then? she minds her affairs, ’n’ i mind mine. who wanted her to write?”
“oh, of course not,” said si lightly. “prob’ly you’ll get along better together, though, now that you’ll see more of one another. i s’pose s’reny’s figurin’ on stayin’ here right along now, her ’n’ her little girl. well, it’ll be nice for the old folks to have somebody they’re fond of. they jest worshipped the ground alvy walked on—and i s’pose they won’t be anything in this wide world too good for that little girl of his. le’s see, she must be comin’ on three now, ain’t she?”
“i don’t know anything about her!” snapped aunt em with emphasis.
“of course, it’s natural the old folks should feel so—she bein’ alvy’s child. i hain’t noticed anything special, but does it—well, i swan! hyst there!—does it seem to you that they’re as good to marcellus, quite, as they used to be? i don’t hear ’em sayin’ nothin’ about his goin’ to school next winter.”
aunt em said nothing, too, but milked doggedly on. si told her about the thickness and profusion of serena’s mourning, guardedly hinting at the injustice done him by not allowing him to go to the red barn with the others, speculated on the likelihood of the wadsworths’ contributing to their daughter’s support, and generally exhibited his interest in the family through a monologue which finished only with the milking; but aunt em made no response whatever.
when the last pails had been emptied into the big cans at the door—marcellus and i had let the cows out one by one into the yard, as their individual share in the milking ended—si and em saw old arphaxed wending his way across from the house to the red barn. he appeared more bent than ever, but he walked with a slowness which seemed born of reluctance even more than of infirmity.
“well, now,” mused si, aloud, “brother turnbull an’ me’s be’n friends for a good long spell. i don’t believe he’d be mad if i cut over now to the red barn too, seein’ the milkin’s all out of the way. of course i don’t want to do what ain’t right—what d’you think now, em, honest? think it ’ud rile him?”
“i don’t know anything about it!” my aunt replied, with increased vigor of emphasis. “but for the land sake go somewhere! don’t hang around botherin’ me. i got enough else to think of besides your everlasting cackle.”
thus rebuffed, si meandered sadly into the cow-yard, shaking his head as he came. seeing us seated on an upturned plough, over by the fence, from which point we had a perfect view of the red barn, he sauntered toward us, and, halting at our side, looked to see if there was room enough for him to sit also. but marcellus, in quite a casual way, remarked, “oh! wheeled the milk over to the house, already, si?” and at this the doleful man lounged off again in new despondency, got out the wheelbarrow, and, with ostentatious groans of travail hoisted a can upon it and started off.
“he’s takin’ advantage of arphaxed’s being so worked up to play ‘ole soldier’ on him,” said mar-cellus. “all of us have to stir him up the whole time to keep him from takin’ root somewhere. i told him this afternoon ’t if there had to be any settin’ around under the bushes an’ cryin’, the fam’ly ’ud do it.”
we talked in hushed tones as we sat there watching the shut doors of the red barn, in boyish conjecture about what was going on behind them. i recall much of this talk with curious distinctness, but candidly it jars now upon my maturer nerves. the individual man looks back upon his boyhood with much the same amused amazement that the race feels in contemplating the memorials of its own cave-dwelling or bronze period. what strange savages we were! in those days marcellus and i used to find our very highest delight in getting off on thursdays, and going over to dave bushnell’s slaughter-house, to witness with stony hearts, and from as close a coign of vantage as might be, the slaying of some score of barnyard animals—the very thought of which now revolts our grown-up minds. in the same way we sat there on the plough, and criticised old arphaxed’s meanness in excluding us from the red barn, where the men-folks were coming in final contact with the “pride of the family.” some of the cows wandering toward us began to “moo” with impatience for the pasture, but mar-cellus said there was no hurry.
all at once we discovered that aunt em was standing a few yards away from us, on the other side of the fence. we could see her from where we sat by only turning a little—a motionless, stout, upright figure, with a pail in her hand, and a sternly impassive look on her face. she, too, had her gaze fixed upon the red barn, and, though the declining sun was full in her eyes, seemed incapable of blinking, but just stared coldly, straight ahead.
suddenly an unaccustomed voice fell upon our ears. turning, we saw that a black-robed woman, with a black wrap of some sort about her head, had come up to where aunt em stood, and was at her shoulder. marcellus nudged me, and whispered, “it’s s’reny. look out for squalls!” and then we listened in silence.
“won’t you speak to me at all, emmeline?” we heard this new voice say.
aunt em’s face, sharply outlined in profile against the sky, never moved. her lips were pressed into a single line, and she kept her eyes on the barn.
“if there’s anything i’ve done, tell me,” pursued the other. “in such an hour as this—when both our hearts are bleeding so, and—and every breath we draw is like a curse upon us—it doesn’t seem a fit time for us—for us to—” the voice faltered and broke, leaving the speech unfinished.
aunt em kept silence so long that we fancied this appeal, too, had failed. then abruptly, and without moving her head, she dropped a few ungracious words as it were over her shoulder. “if i had anything special to say, most likely i’d say it,” she remarked.
we could hear the sigh that serena drew. she lifted her shawled head, and for a moment seemed as if about to turn. then she changed her mind, apparently, for she took a step nearer to the other.
“see here, emmeline,” she said, in a more confident tone. “nobody in the world knows better than i do how thoroughly good a woman you are, how you have done your duty, and more than your duty, by your parents and your brothers, and your little step-son. you have never spared yourself for them, day or night. i have said often to—to him who has gone—that i didn’t believe there was anywhere on earth a worthier or more devoted woman than you, his sister. and—now that he is gone—and we are both more sisters than ever in affliction—why in heaven’s name should you behave like this to me?”
aunt em spoke more readily this time. “i don’t know as i’ve done anything to you,” she said in defence. “i’ve just let you alone, that’s all. an’ that’s doin’ as i’d like to be done by.” still she did not turn her head, or lift her steady gaze from those closed doors.
“don’t let us split words!” entreated the other, venturing a thin, white hand upon aunt em’s shoulder. “that isn’t the way we two ought to stand to each other. why, you were friendly enough when i was here before. can’t it be the same again? what has happened to change it? only to-day, on our way up here, i was speaking to your father about you, and my deep sympathy for you, and—”
aunt em wheeled like a flash. “yes, ’n’ what did he say? come, don’t make up anything! out with it! what did he say?” she shook off the hand on her shoulder as she spoke.
gesture and voice and frowning vigor of mien were all so imperative and rough that they seemed to bewilder serena. she, too, had turned now, so that i could see her wan and delicate face, framed in the laced festoons of black, like the fabulous countenance of “the lady i帽ez” in my mother’s “album of beauty.” she bent her brows in hurried thought, and began stammering, “well, he said—let’s see—he said—”
“oh, yes!” broke in aunt em, with raucous irony, “i know well enough what he said! he said i was a good worker—that they’d never had to have a hired girl since i was big enough to wag a churn dash, an’ they wouldn’t known what to do without me. i know all that; i’ve heard it on an’ off for twenty years. what i’d like to hear is, did he tell you that he went down south to bring back your husband, an’ that he never so much as give a thought to fetchin’ my husband, who was just as good a soldier and died just as bravely as yours did? i’d like to know—did he tell you that?”
what could serena do but shake her head, and bow it in silence before this bitter gale of words?
“an’ tell me this, too,” aunt em went on, lifting her harsh voice mercilessly, “when you was settin’ there in church this forenoon, with the soldiers out, an’ the bells tollin’ an’ all that—did he say, ‘this is some for alvy, an’ some for abel, who went to the war together, an’ was killed together, or within a month o’ one another?’ did he say that, or look for one solitary minute as if he thought it? i’ll bet he didn’t!”
serena’s head sank lower still, and she put up, in a blinded sort of a way, a little white handkerchief to her eyes. “but why blame me?” she asked.
aunt em heard her own voice so seldom that the sound of it now seemed to intoxicate her. “no!” she shouted. “it’s like the bible. one was taken an’ the other left. it was always alvy this, an’ alvy that, nothin’ for any one but alvy. that was all right; nobody complained: prob’ly he deserved it all; at any rate, we didn’t begrudge him any of it, while he was livin’. but there ought to be a limit somewhere. when a man’s dead, he’s pretty much about on an equality with other dead men, one would think. but it ain’t so. one man get’s hunted after when he’s shot, an’ there’s a hundred dollars for embalmin’ him an’ a journey after him, an’ bringin’ him home, an’ two big funerals, an’ crape for his widow that’d stand by itself. the other man—he can lay where he fell! them that’s lookin’ for the first one are right close by—it ain’t more’n a few miles from the wilderness to cold harbor, so hi tuckerman tells me, an’ he was all over the ground two years ago—but nobody looks for this other man! oh, no! nobody so much as remembers to think of him! they ain’t no hundred dollars, no, not so much as fifty cents, for embalmin’ him! no—he could be shovelled in anywhere, or maybe burned up when the woods got on fire that night, the night of the sixth. they ain’t no funeral for him—no bells tolled—unless it may be a cowbell up in the pasture that he hammered out himself. an’ his widow can go around, week days an’ sundays, in her old calico dresses. nobody ever mentions the word ‘mournin’ crape’ to her, or asks her if she’d like to put on black. i s’pose they thought if they gave me the money for some mournin’ i’d buy candy with it instead!”
with this climax of flaming sarcasm aunt em stopped, her eyes aglow, her thick breast heaving in a flurry of breathlessness. she had never talked so much or so fast before in her life. she swung the empty tin-pail now defiantly at her side to hide the fact that her arms were shaking with excitement. every instant it looked as if she was going to begin again.
serena had taken the handkerchief down from her eyes and held her arms stiff and straight by her side. her chin seemed to have grown longer or to be thrust forward more. when she spoke it was in a colder voice—almost mincing in the way it cut off the words.
“all this is not my doing,” she said. “i am to blame for nothing of it. as i tried to tell you, i sympathize deeply with your grief. but grief ought to make people at least fair, even if it cannot make them gentle and soften their hearts. i shall trouble you with no more offers of friendship. i—i think i will go back to the house now—to my little girl.”
even as she spoke, there came from the direction of the red barn a shrill, creaking noise which we all knew. at the sound marcellus and i stood up, and serena forgot her intention to go away. the barn doors, yelping as they moved on their dry rollers, had been pushed wide open.
