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 ............