Grant Allen - Babylon. Volume 1

‘This ain’t a knife,’ Hiram answered, still doggedly. ‘This is a tommyhawk. Injun knives ain’t made like this ‘ere. I’ve had knives, and they’re quite a different kinder pattern.’

Mr. Winthrop shook his head solemnly.

‘Seems to me,’ he said with a loud snort, ‘’taint right of any believin’ boy goin’ lookin’ up these heathenish things, mother. He’s allus bringin’ ‘em home – arrowheads, he calls ‘em, and tommyhawks, and Lord knows what rubbish – when he ought to be weedin’ in the peppermint lot, an’ earnin’ his livin’. Why wasn’t you here, eh, sonny? Why wasn’t you? Why wasn’t you? Why wasn’t you?’

As Mr. Winthrop accompanied each of these questions by a cuff, crescendo, on either ear alternately, it is not probable that he himself intended Hiram to reply to them with any particular definiteness. But Hiram, drawing his sleeve across his eyes, and wiping away the tears hastily, proceeded to answer with due deliberation: ‘’Cause I was tired planin’ planks. So I went down to the blackberry lot, to rest a bit. But you won’t let a feller rest. You want him to be workin’ like a nigger all day.‘Taint reasonable.’

‘Mother,’ Mr. Winthrop said again, more solemnly than before, ‘it’s my opinion that the old Adam is on-common powerful in this here lad, on-common powerful! Ef he had lived in Bible times, I should hev been afeard of a visible judgment on his head, like the babes that mocked at Elijah. (Or was it Elisha?’ asked Mr. Winthrop to himself, dubitatively. ‘I don’t’zackly recollect the pertickler prophet.) The eye that mocketh at its father, you know, sonny; it’s a dangerous thing, I kin tell you, to mock at your father. Go an’ weed that thar peppermint, sir; go an’ weed that thar peppermint.’ And as he spoke the deacon gave Hiram a parting dig in the side with the handle of the Dutch hoe he was lightly carrying.

Hiram dodged the hoe quickly, and set off at a run to the peppermint lot. When he got there he waited a moment, and then felt in his pocket cautiously for some other unseen object. Oh joy, it wasn’t broken! He took it out and looked at it tenderly. It was a bobolink’s egg. He held it up to the light, and saw the sunshine gleaming through it.

‘Aint it cunning?’ he said to himself, with a little hug and chuckle of triumph. ‘Ain’t it a cunning little egg, either? I thought he’d most broke it, I did, but he hadn’t, seems. It’s the first I ever found, that sort. Oh my, ain’t it cunning?’ And he put the egg back lovingly in his pocket, with great cautiousness.

For a while the boy went on pulling up the weeds that grew between the wide rows of peppermint, and then at last he came to a big milk-weed in full flower. The flowers were very pretty, and so curious, too. He looked at them and admired them. But he must pull it up: no room in the field for milk-weed (it isn’t a marketable crop, alas!), so he caught the pretty thing in his hands, and uprooted it without a murmur. Thus he went on, row after row, in the hot July sun, till nearly half the peppermint was well weeded.

Then he sat down to rest a little on the pile of boulders in the far corner. There was no tree to sit under, and no shade; but the boy could at least sit in the eye of the sun on the pile of ice-worn boulders. As he sat, he saw a wonderful and beautiful sight. In the sky above, a great bald-headed eagle came wheeling slowly toward the corner of the fall wheat lot. From the opposite quarter of the sky his partner circled on buoyant wings to meet him; and with wide curves to right and left, crossing and recrossing each other at the central point like well-bred setters, those two magnificent birds swiftly beat the sunlit fields for miles around them. At last, one of the pair detected game; for an instant he checked his flight, to steady his swoop, and then, with wings halffolded, and a rushing noise through the air, he fell plump on the ground at a vague spot in the midst of the meadow. One moment more, and he rose again, with a quivering rabbit suspended from his yellow claws. Presently he made towards the corn lot. It was fenced round, like all the others, with a snake fence, and, to Hiram’s intense joy, the eagle finally settled, just opposite him, on one of the two upright rails that stand as a crook or stake for the top rail, called the rider. Its big white head shone in the sunlight, its throat rang out a sharp, short bark, and it craned its neck this way and that, looking defiantly across the field to Hiram.

‘I reckon,’ the boy said to himself quietly, ‘I could draw that thar eagle.’

He put his hand into his trousers pocket, and pulled out from it a well-worn stump of blacklead pencil. Then from another pocket he took a small blank book, an old account book, in fact, with one side of the pages all unwritten, though the other was closely covered with rows of figures. It was a very precious possession to Hiram Winthrop, that dog-eared little volume, for it was nearly-filled with his own tentative pencil sketches of beast and birds, and all the other beautiful things that lived together in the blackberry bottom. He had never seen anything beautiful anywhere else, and that one spot and that one book were all the world to him that he loved or cared for.

He laid the book upon his knee, and proceeded carefully to sketch the grand whiteheaded eagle in his boyish fashion. ‘He’s the American eagle, I guess,’ the lad said to himself, as he looked from bird to paper with rapid glances; ‘on’y he ain’t so stiff-built as the one upon the dollars, neither. His head goes so. Aint it elegant? Oh my, not a bit, ruther. And his tail! That’s how. The feathers runs the same as if it was shingles on the roof of a residence. I’ve got his tail just as true as Genesis, you bet. I can go the head and the tail, straight an’ square, but what licks me is the wings. Seems as if you couldn’t get his wing to show right, nohow, agin the body. Think it must be that way, pretty near; but I don’t know. I wish thar was some feller here in Geauga could show me how the folks that draw the illustriations in the books ud draw that thar wing. It goes one too high for me, altogether.’

Even as Hiram thought that last thought he was dimly aware in a moment of an ominous shadow supervening behind him, and of a heavy hand lifted angrily to cuff him about the head for his pesky idleness. He knew it was his father, and with rapid instinct he managed to avoid the unseen blow. But, alas, alas, as he did so, he dropped the precious account book from his lap and let it fall upon the heap of boulders. Deacon Winthrop took the mysterious volume up, and peered at it long and cautiously. ‘Wal,’ he said slowly, turning over the pages one by one, as if they were clear evidence of original sin unregenerated – ‘wal, this do beat all, really. I’ve allus wondered what on airth you could be up to, sonny, when you was sent to weed, and didn’t get a furrer or two done, mornings, while I was hoein’ a dozen rows of corn or tomaters. Wal, this do beat all. Makin’ figgers of chipmunks, and woodchucks, and musk-rats, and – my goodness, ef that thar aint a rattlesnake! Hiram Winthrop, it’s my opinion that you was born to reprobation – that’s jest about the size of it!’

If this opinion had not been vigorously backed by a box on the ears and a violent shaking, it isn’t likely that Hiram in his own mind would have felt deeply concerned at it. Reprobation is such a very long way off (especially when you’re twelve years old), whereas a box on the ears is usually experienced in the present tense with remarkable rapidity. But Hiram was so well used to cuffing (for the deacon was a God-fearing man, who held it prime part of his parental duty to correct his child with due severity) that he didn’t cry much or make a fuss about it. To say the truth, too, he was watching so eagerly to see what his father would do with the beloved sketch-book that he had no time to indulge in unnecessary sentiment. For if only that sketch-book were taken from him – that poor, soiled, second-hand, half-covered sketch-book – Hiram felt in his dim inarticulate fashion that he would have solved the pessimistic problem forthwith in the negative, and that life for him would no longer be worth living.