The Bondboy. George W. Ogden
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him of the penalty of such remission, but she called softly from where she stood:
“Joe! You must get up, Joe!”
But her voice was not loud enough to wake a bird. Joe slept on, like a heavy-headed boor, and she went back to the stove to put the kettle on to boil. The issue of his recalcitration must be left between him and Isom. If he had 41 good blood in him, perhaps he would fight when Isom lifted his hand and beat him out of his sleep, she reflected, hoping simply that it would turn out that way.
Isom came back to the house in frothing wrath a quarter of an hour later. There was no need to ask about Joe, for the bound boy’s nostrils sounded his own betrayal.
Isom did not look at Ollie as he took the steep stairs four treads at a step. In a moment she heard the sleeper’s bed squeaking in its rickety old joints as her husband shook him and cut short his snore in the middle of a long flourish.
“Turn out of here!” shouted Isom in his most terrible voice–which was to Ollie’s ears indeed a dreadful sound–“turn out and git into your duds!”
Ollie heard the old bed give an extra loud groan, as if the sleeper had drawn himself up in it with suddenness; following that came the quick scuffling of bare feet on the floor.
“Don’t you touch me! Don’t you lay hands on me!” she heard the bound boy warn, his voice still husky with sleep.
“I’ll skin you alive!” threatened Isom. “You’ve come here to work, not to trifle your days away sleepin’. A good dose of strap-oil’s what you need, and I’m the man to give it to you, too!”
Isom’s foot was heavy on the floor over her head, moving about as if in search of something to use in the flagellation. Ollie stood with hands to her tumultuous bosom, pity welling in her heart for the lad who was to feel the vigor of Isom’s unsparing arm.
There was a lighter step upon the floor, moving across the room like a sudden wind. The bound boy’s voice sounded again, clear now and steady, near the top of the stairs where Isom stood.
“Put that down! Put that down, I tell you!” he commanded. 42 “I warned you never to lift your hand against me. If you hit me with that I’ll kill you in your tracks!”
Ollie’s heart leaped at the words; hot blood came into her face with a surge. She clasped her hands to her breast in new fervor, and lifted her face as one speeding a thankful prayer. She had heard Isom Chase threatened and defied in his own house, and the knowledge that one lived with the courage to do what she had longed to do, lifted her heart and made it glad.
She heard Isom growl something in his throat, muffled and low, which she could not separate into words.
“Well, then, I’ll let it pass–this time,” said Joe. “But don’t you ever do it any more. I’m a heavy sleeper sometimes, and this is an hour or two earlier than I am used to getting up; but if you’ll call me loud enough, and talk like you were calling a man and not a dog, you’ll have no trouble with me. Now get out of here!”
Ollie could have shouted in the triumph of that moment. She shared the bound boy’s victory and exulted in his high independence. Isom had swallowed it like a coward; now he was coming down the stairs, snarling in his beard, but his knotted fist had not enforced discipline; his coarse, distorted foot had not been lifted against his new slave. She felt that the dawn was breaking over that house, that one had come into it who would ease her of its terrors.
Joe came along after Isom in a little while, slipping his suspenders over his lank shoulders as he went out of the kitchen door. He did not turn to Ollie with the morning’s greetings, but held his face from her and hurried on, she thought, as if ashamed.
Ollie ran to the door on her nimble toes, the dawn of a smile on her face, now rosy with its new light, and looked after him as he hurried away in the brightening day. She 43 stood with her hands clasped in attitude of pleasure, again lifting her face as if to speed a prayer.
“Oh, thank God for a man!” said she.
Isom was in a crabbed way at breakfast, sulky and silent. But his evil humor did not appear to weigh with any shadow of trouble on Joe, who ate what was set before him like a hungry horse and looked around for more.
Ollie’s interest in Joe was acutely sharpened by the incident of rising. There must be something uncommon, indeed, in a lad of Joe’s years, she thought, to enable him to meet and pass off such a serious thing in that untroubled way. As she served the table, there being griddle-cakes of cornmeal that morning to flank the one egg and fragments of rusty bacon each, she studied the boy’s face carefully. She noted the high, clear forehead, the large nose, the fineness of the heavy, black hair which lay shaggy upon his temples. She studied the long hands, the grave line of his mouth, and caught a quick glimpse now and then of his large, serious gray eyes.
Here was an uncommon boy, with the man in him half showing; Isom was right about that. Let it be blood or what it might, she liked him. Hope of the cheer that he surely would bring into that dark house quickened her cheek to a color which had grown strange to it in those heavy months.
Joe’s efforts in the field must have been highly satisfactory to Isom that forenoon, for the master of the house came to the table at dinner-time in quite a lively mood. The morning’s unpleasantness seemed to have been forgotten. Ollie noticed her husband more than once during the meal measuring Joe’s capabilities for future strength with calculating, satisfied eyes. She sat at the table with them, taking minute note of Joe at closer range, studying him curiously, awed a little by the austerity of his young face, 44 and the melancholy of his eyes, in which there seemed to lie the concentrated sorrow of many forebears who had suffered and died with burdens upon their hearts.
“Couldn’t you manage to pick us a mess of dandelion for supper, Ollie?” asked Isom. “I notice it’s comin’ up thick in the yard.”
“I might, if I could find the time,” said Ollie.
“Oh, I guess you’ll have time enough,” said Isom, severely.
Her face grew pale; she lowered her head as if to hide her fear from Joe.
“Cook it with a jowl,” ordered Isom; “they go fine together, and it’s good for the blood.”
Joe was beginning to yearn forward to Sunday, when he could go home to his mother for a satisfying meal, of which he was sharply feeling the need. It was a mystery to him how Isom kept up on that fare, so scant and unsatisfying, but he reasoned that it must be on account of there being so little of him but gristle and bone.
Joe looked ahead now to the term of his bondage under Isom; the prospect gave him an uneasy concern. He was afraid that the hard fare and harder work would result in stunting his growth, like a young tree that has come to a period of drought green and promising, and stands checked and blighted, never again to regain the hardy qualities which it needs to raise it up into the beauty of maturity.
The work gave him little concern; he knew that he could live and put on strength through that if he had the proper food. So there would have to be a change in the fare, concluded Joe, as he sat there while Isom discussed the merits of dandelion and jowl. It would have to come very early in his term of servitude, too. The law protected the bondman in that, no matter how far it disregarded his rights and human necessities in other ways. So thinking, he pushed away from the table and left the room. 45
Isom drank a glass of water, smacked his dry lips over its excellencies, the greatest of them in his mind being its cheapness, and followed it by another.
“Thank the Lord for water, anyhow!” said he.
“Yes, there’s plenty of that,” said Ollie meaningly.
Isom was as thick-skinned as he was sapless. Believing that his penurious code was just, and his frugality the first virtue of his life, he was not ashamed of his table, and the outcast scraps upon it. But he looked at his young wife with a sharp drawing down of his spiked brows as he lingered there a moment, his cracked brown hands