Short Fiction

take a drink of water tomorrow morning, as you did las’ time, and miss yo’ communion, my boy. You are a good child, Polydore, to go like that to confession without bein told.”

“No, I ain’ good,” he returned, doggedly. He began to twirl his hat on one finger. “Père Cassimelle say he always yeard I was stupid, but he never knew befo’ how bad I been.”

“Indeed!” muttered Mamzelle Adélaïde, not over well pleased with the priest’s estimate of her protégé.

“He gave me a long penance,” continued Polydore. “The ‘Litany of the Saint’ and the ‘Litany of the Blessed Virgin,’ and three ‘Our Father’ and three ‘Hail Mary’ to say ev’ry mo’ning fo’ a week. But he say’ that ain’ enough.”

“My patience! W’at does he expec’ mo’ from you, I like to know?” Polydore was now creasing and scanning his hat attentively.

“He say’ w’at I need, it’s to be wo’ out with the rawhide. He say’ he knows M’sieur José is too ole and feeble to give it to me like I deserve; and if you want, he say’ he’s willing to give me a good tas’e of the rawhide himse’f.”

Mamzelle Adélaïde found it impossible to disguise her indignation:

“Père Cassimelle sho’ly fo’gets himse’f, Polydore. Don’t repeat to me any further his inconsid’ate remarks.”

“He’s right, nénaine. Père Cassimelle is right.”

Since the night he crouched outside her door, Polydore had lived with the weight of his unconfessed fault oppressing every moment of existence. He had tried to rid himself of it in going to Father Cassimelle; but that had only helped by indicating the way. He was awkward and unaccustomed to express emotions with coherent speech. The words would not come.

Suddenly he flung his hat to the ground, and falling on his knees, began to sob, with his face pressed down in Mamzelle Adélaïde’s lap. She had never seen him cry before, and in her weak condition it made her tremble.

Then somehow he got it out; he told the whole story of his deceit. He told it simply, in a way that bared his heart to her for the first time. She said nothing; only held his hand close and stroked his hair. But she felt as if a kind of miracle had happened. Hitherto her first thought in caring for this boy had been a desire to fulfill his dead mother’s wishes.

But now he seemed to belong to herself, and to be her very own. She knew that a bond of love had been forged that would hold them together always.

“I know I can’t he’p being stupid” sighed Polydore, “but it’s no call fo’ me to be bad.”

“Neva mine, Polydore; neva mine, my boy,” and she drew him close to her and kissed him as mothers kiss.

Dead Men’s Shoes

It never occurred to any person to wonder what would befall Gilma now that “le vieux Gamiche” was dead. After the burial people went their several ways, some to talk over the old man and his eccentricities, others to forget him before nightfall, and others to wonder what would become of his very nice property, the hundred-acre farm on which he had lived for thirty years, and on which he had just died at the age of seventy.

If Gilma had been a child, more than one motherly heart would have gone out to him. This one and that one would have bethought them of carrying him home with them; to concern themselves with his present comfort, if not his future welfare. But Gilma was not a child. He was a strapping fellow of nineteen, measuring six feet in his stockings, and as strong as any healthy youth need be. For ten years he had lived there on the plantation with Monsieur Gamiche; and he seemed now to have been the only one with tears to shed at the old man’s funeral.

Gamiche’s relatives had come down from Caddo in a wagon the day after his death, and had settled themselves in his house. There was Septime, his nephew, a cripple, so horribly afflicted that it was distressing to look at him. And there was Septime’s widowed sister, Ma’me Brozé, with her two little girls. They had remained at the house during the burial, and Gilma found them still there upon his return.

The young man went at once to his room to seek a moment’s repose. He had lost much sleep during Monsieur Gamiche’s illness; yet, he was in fact more worn by the mental than the bodily strain of the past week.

But when he entered his room, there was something so changed in its aspect that it seemed no longer to belong to him. In place of his own apparel which he had left hanging on the row of pegs, there were a few shabby little garments and two battered straw hats, the property of the Brozé children. The bureau drawers were empty, there was not a vestige of anything belonging to him remaining in the room. His first impression was that Ma’me Brozé had been changing things around and had assigned him to some other room.

But Gilma understood the situation better when he discovered every scrap of his personal effects piled up on a bench outside the door, on the back or “false” gallery. His boots and shoes were under the bench, while coats, trousers and underwear were heaped in an indiscriminate mass together.

The blood mounted to his swarthy face and made him look for the moment like an Indian. He had never thought of this. He did not know what he had been thinking of; but he felt that he ought to have been prepared for anything; and it was his own fault if he was not. But it hurt. This spot was “home” to him against the rest of the world. Every tree, every shrub was a friend; he knew every patch in the fences; and the little old house, gray and weather-beaten, that had been the shelter of his youth, he loved