late in the morning, and read and rested in the afternoon. She
made herself some new house-dresses out of a grey material Claude
chose. “It’s almost like being a bride, keeping house for just
you, Claude,” she sometimes said.
Soon Claude had the satisfaction of seeing a blush of green come
up over his brown wheat fields, visible first in the dimples and
little hollows, then flickering over the knobs and levels like a
fugitive smile. He watched the green blades coming every day,
when he and Dan went afield with their wagons to gather corn.
Claude sent Dan to shuck on the north quarter, and he worked on
the south. He always brought in one more load a day than Dan
did,—that was to be expected. Dan explained this very
reasonably, Claude thought, one afternoon when they were hooking
up their teams.
“It’s all right for you to jump at that corn like you was
a-beating carpets, Claude; it’s your corn, or anyways it’s your
Paw’s. Them fields will always lay betwixt you and trouble. But a
hired man’s got no property but his back, and he has to save it.
I figure that I’ve only got about so many jumps left in me, and I
ain’t a-going to jump too hard at no man’s corn.”
“What’s the matter? I haven’t been hinting that you ought to jump
any harder, have I?”
“No, you ain’t, but I just want you to know that there’s reason
in all things.” With this Dan got into his wagon and drove off.
He had probably been meditating upon this declaration for some
time.
That afternoon Claude suddenly stopped flinging white ears into
the wagon beside him. It was about five o’clock, the yellowest
hour of the autumn day. He stood lost in a forest of light, dry,
rustling corn leaves, quite hidden away from the world. Taking
off his husking-gloves, he wiped the sweat from his face, climbed
up to the wagon box, and lay down on the ivory-coloured corn. The
horses cautiously advanced a step or two, and munched with great
content at ears they tore from the stalks with their teeth.
Claude lay still, his arms under his head, looking up at the
hard, polished blue sky, watching the flocks of crows go over
from the fields where they fed on shattered grain, to their nests
in the trees along Lovely Creek. He was thinking about what Dan
had said while they were hitching up. There was a great deal of
truth in it, certainly. Yet, as for him, he often felt that he
would rather go out into the world and earn his bread among
strangers than sweat under this half-responsibility for acres and
crops that were not his own. He knew that his father was
sometimes called a “land hog” by the country people, and he
himself had begun to feel that it was not right they should have
so much land,—to farm, or to rent, or to leave idle, as they
chose. It was strange that in all the centuries the world had
been going, the question of property had not been better
adjusted. The people who had it were slaves to it, and the people
who didn’t have it were slaves to them.
