Her sinewy hands squeezed two swift streams of milk into her pail and the foam rose high. Inside the cabin, pots and pans and dishes clattered, water splashed, children laughed. Thank God, they were able to help themselves. She had trained Unex and Seraphine, her two oldest, and they had trained the others. Even the baby could dress himself.
She missed Unex and Seraphine more than ever now that Keepsie had only one leg. But Keepsie faced his trouble without complaining although he was only a shoulder-high boy.
People were trying to change the world, letting new ways creep in every day. Except for that newfangled hay-press, Keepsie would have his two good legs today. But the poor little fellow had so much curiosity about everything, instead of keeping his distance while the old mule pulled the long pole round and round, packing the hay into tight little bales, he went close to the machine to see how it tightened down on the wire bands before it clipped them off. Somehow, only God knows how, before Keepsie could get out of the way, it caught his leg and held it fast, and clipped it off the same as a wire around a hay bale. The people screamed and cried, but Keepsie made no sound. He knew he had done wrong. He knew Big Boy had warned him about going close to that hay-press. Big Boy told him it was a blind contraption made by white men and it would cut off a boy’s arm or leg as quickly as wire.
God must have sent that white doctor from town to go deer hunting. Maum Hannah said so.
Big Boy got him to come and fix Keepsie’s leg. Keepsie’s eyes got big and shiny, but he held himself still and did not flinch when the white doctor took scissors and trimmed his ragged meat and sewed his skin with a needle and thread the same as cloth.
Keepsie was a brave-hearted boy. He could have died, but he strove to live and now he was as well as ever. He could play around as spry as any of the other children, hopping like a sparrow, doing almost anything the others could do until he decided to go to that free school.
Mary didn’t want him to go. She had never learned to read. There were no printed words in the Quarters except in Brer Dee’s Bible and on the newspapers pasted on the house walls to hinder the wind from gushing too fast through the cracks. The same white people who made that hay-press made newspapers and books. Such things were dangerous. Keepsie ought not to tamper with them. Who could tell what book-reading might do to him?
Spoken words are safer. If Keepsie would keep his ears open he could hear plenty of good wise talk. Spoken words can cut and sting and beat down almost any enemy. They can bring tears or make people split their sides with laughter. Instead of reading all the time out of books and papers covered with printed words, he would do better to learn how to read other things: sunrises, moons, sunsets, clouds and stars, faces and eyes. Everything has its way of speaking and telling things worth knowing. Even the little grass-blades have their way of saying things as plain as words when human lips let them fall. Book-learning takes people’s minds off more important things. The faithful old superstitions, the choice bits of wisdom passed down by word of mouth ever since the first slaves were brought here to live were never written down in any books.
Big Boy and Budda Ben sided with Keepsie. They told Mary to let him learn to read and write too, for Keepsie could never farm. A one-legged boy cannot hop along and hold a plow straight to the row in soft ground. Keepsie would have to follow some other kind of business to make himself a living.
Last Monday morning Keepsie got up before day was clean and did all his tasks before breakfast, then he washed and dressed and hopped off to the schoolhouse. Mary hardly thought he could get so far, but she was mistaken. The next morning he started out just as brave as ever, hopping off gaily and laughing with happiness to be going. The children could not leave him then. He hopped too high and too fast. But he came home in the evening hopping slowly, wearily. Hopping up two long hills was a hard task for his one little leg. The hills fagged him out on the way home. He couldn’t hop high enough to make any progress up them. Poor little faithful Keepsie. Money was scarce and crutches would cost cold hard dollars, but Keepsie must have a pair. Brer Dee could make heavy crutches for grown men or for old slow-moving people, but Keepsie needed a light pair that would help push him up the hill and not weight him down, or hold him back and hamper him. Big Boy’s father, Andrew, had sharp tools and a good head. He might make Keepsie crutches that would fetch him home as joyful in the evening as he was when he started off in the morning. But she hated to ask any favor of Andrew, for he was the deacon who was hardest on her, always the main one to say she was pure scarlet and not fit ever to have been a member of the church.
XIX
Peach buds were swelling, trees were in bloom, birds chirped around them, but Mary and crippled Budda Ben sat on the woodpile talking so earnestly she completely forgot to enjoy the morning’s bright sunshine. Misery filled his dull red-rimmed eyes. His high-pitched outbursts of fury were pitiful. Mary begged him to be quiet, not to make himself sick. Ranting could do no good
