savage mountaineer who often abused her and never provided for
her. She could remember times when she sat in the cabin, beside
an empty meal-barrel and a cold iron pot, waiting for “him” to
bring home a squirrel he had shot or a chicken he had stolen. Too
often he brought nothing but a jug of mountain whiskey and a pair
of brutal fists. She thought herself well off now, never to have
to beg for food or go off into the woods to gather firing, to be
sure of a warm bed and shoes and decent clothes. Mahailey was one
of eighteen children; most of them grew up lawless or
half-witted, and two of her brothers, like her husband, ended
their lives in jail. She had never been sent to school, and could
not read or write. Claude, when he was a little boy, tried to
teach her to read, but what she learned one night she had
forgotten by the next. She could count, and tell the time of day
by the clock, and she was very proud of knowing the alphabet and
of being able to spell out letters on the flour sacks and coffee
packages. “That’s a big A.” she would murmur, “and that there’s a
little a.”
Mahailey was shrewd in her estimate of people, and Claude thought
her judgment sound in a good many things. He knew she sensed all
the shades of personal feeling, the accords and antipathies in
the household, as keenly as he did, and he would have hated to
lose her good opinion. She consulted him in all her little
difficulties. If the leg of the kitchen table got wobbly, she
knew he would put in new screws for her. When she broke a handle
off her rolling pin, he put on another, and he fitted a haft to
her favourite butcher-knife after every one else said it must be
thrown away. These objects, after they had been mended, acquired
a new value in her eyes, and she liked to work with them. When
Claude helped her lift or carry anything, he never avoided
touching her, this she felt deeply. She suspected that Ralph was a
little ashamed of her, and would prefer to have some brisk young
thing about the kitchen.
On days like this, when other people were not about, Mahailey
liked to talk to Claude about the things they did together when
he was little; the Sundays when they used to wander along the
creek, hunting for wild grapes and watching the red squirrels; or
trailed across the high pastures to a wild-plum thicket at the
north end of the Wheeler farm. Claude could remember warm spring
days when the plum bushes were all in blossom and Mahailey used
to lie down under them and sing to herself, as if the honey-heavy
sweetness made her drowsy; songs without words, for the most
part, though he recalled one mountain dirge which said over and
over, “And they laid Jesse James in his grave.”
IV
The time was approaching for Claude to go back to the struggling
denominational college on the outskirts of the state capital,
where he had already spent two dreary and unprofitable winters.
“Mother,” he said one morning when he had an opportunity to speak
