The 42nd Parallel (8 page)

“Come, Fenian,” he boomed, when he saw that Fainy was awake, “let us shake the dust of this inhospitable farm, latcheting our shoes with a curse like philosophers of old . . . Hitch up the horse; we’ll get breakfast down the road.”

This went on for several weeks, until one evening they found themselves driving up to a neat yellow house in a grove of feathery dark tamaracks. Fainy waited in the wagon while Doc Bingham interviewed the people in the house. After a while Doc Bingham appeared in the door, a broad smile creasing his cheeks. “We’re going to be very handsomely treated, Fenian, as befits a wearer of the cloth and all that . . . You be careful how you talk, will you? Take the horse to the barn and unhitch.”

“Say, Mr. Bingham, how about my money? It’s three weeks now.” Fainy jumped down and went to the horse’s head.

An expression of gloom passed over Doc Bingham’s face. “Oh, lucre, lucre . . .

“Examine well

His milkwhite hand, the palm is hardly clean

But here and there an ugly smutch appears
,

Foh, ’twas a bribe that left it. . . .

“I had great plans for a cooperative enterprise that you are spoiling by your youthful haste and greed . . . but if you must I’ll hand over to you this very night everything due you and more. All right, unhitch the horse and bring me that little package with
Maria Monk
, and
The Popish Plot.”

It was a warm day. There were robins singing round the barn. Everything smelt of sweetgrass and flowers. The barn was red and the yard was full of white leghorns. After he had unhitched the spring wagon and put the horse in a stall, Fainy sat on a rail of the fence looking out over the silvergreen field of oats out back, and smoked a cigarette. He wished there was a girl there he could put his arm round or a fellow to talk to.

A hand dropped onto his shoulder. Doc Bingham was standing beside him.

“Fenian, my young friend, we are in clover,” he said. “She is alone in the house, and her husband has gone to town for two days with the hired man. There’ll be nobody there but her two little children, sweet bairns. Perhaps I shall play Romeo. You’ve never seen me in love. It’s my noblest role. Ah, some day I’ll tell you about my headstrong youth. Come and meet the sweet charmer.”

When they went in the kitchen door a dimplefaced pudgy woman in a lavender housecap greeted them coyly.

“This is my young assistant, ma’am,” said Doc Bingham, with a noble gesture. “Fenian, this is Mrs. Kovach.”

“You must be hungry. We’re having supper right away.”

The last of the sun lit up a kitchen range that was crowded with saucepans and stewpots. Fragrant steam rose in little jets from round wellpolished lids. As she spoke Mrs. Kovach leaned over so that her big blue behind with starched apronstrings tied in a bow above it stood up straight in the air, opened the oven door and pulled out a great pan of cornmuffins that she dumped into a dish on the dining table already set next the window. Their warm toasted smoke filled the kitchen. Fainy felt his mouth watering. Doc Bingham was rubbing his hands and rolling his eyes. They sat down, and the two blue-eyed smearyfaced children were sat down and started gobbling silently, and Mrs. Kovach heaped their plates with stewed tomatoes, mashed potatoes, beef stew and limabeans with pork. She poured them out coffee and then said with moist eyes, as she sat down herself:

“I love to see men eat.”

Her face took on a crushed pansy look that made Fainy turn away his eyes when he found himself looking at it. After supper she sat listening with a pleased, frightened expression while Doc Bingham talked and talked, now and then stopping to lean back and blow a smoke ring at the lamp.

“While not myself a Lutheran as you might say, ma’am, I myself have always admired, nay, revered, the great figure of Martin Luther as one of the lightbringers of mankind. Were it not for him we would be still groveling under the dread domination of the Pope of Rome.”

“They’ll never get into this country; land sakes, it gives me the creeps to think of it.”

“Not while there’s a drop of red blood in the veins of freeborn Protestants . . . but the way to fight darkness, ma’am, is with light. Light comes from education, reading of books and studies . . .”

“Land sakes, it gives me a headache to read most books, an’ I don’t get much time, to tell the truth. My husband, he reads books he gets from the Department of Agriculture. He tried to make me read one once, on raisin’ poultry, but I couldn’t make much sense out of it. His folks they come from the old country . . . I guess people feels different over there.”

“It must be difficult being married to a foreigner like that.”

“Sometimes I don’t know how I stand it; course he was awful goodlookin’when I married him . . . I never could resist a goodlookin’ man.”

Doc Bingham leaned further across the table. His eyes rolled as if they were going to drop out.

“I never could resist a goodlooking lady.”

Mrs. Kovach sighed deeply.

Fainy got up and went out. He’d been trying to get in a word about getting paid, but what was the use? Outside it was chilly; the stars were bright above the roofs of the barns and outhouses. From the chickencoop came an occasional sleepy cluck or the rustle of feathers as a hen lost her balance on her perch. He walked up and down the barnyard cursing Doc Bingham and kicking at an occasional clod of manure.

Later he looked into the lamplit kitchen. Doc Bingham had his arm around Mrs. Kovach’s waist and was declaiming verses, making big gestures with his free hand:

. . .
These things to hear

Would Desdemona seriously incline

But still the house affairs would draw her hence

Which ever as she could with haste dispatch

She’d come again and with a greedy ear . . .

Fainy shook his fist at the window. “Goddam your hide, I want my money,” he said aloud. Then he went for a walk down the road. When he came back he was sleepy and chilly. The kitchen was empty and the lamp was turned down low. He didn’t know where to go to sleep, so he settled down to warm himself in a chair beside the fire. His head began to nod and he fell asleep.

A tremendous thump on the floor above and a woman’s shrieks woke him. His first thought was that Doc Bingham was robbing and murdering the woman. But immediately he heard another voice cursing and shouting in broken English. He had half gotten up from the chair, when Doc Bingham dashed past him. He had on only his flannel unionsuit. In one hand were his shoes, in the other his clothes. His trousers floated after him at the end of his suspenders like the tail of a kite.

“Hey, what are we going to do?” Fainy called after him, but got no answer. Instead he found himself face to face with a tall dark man with a scraggly black beard who was coolly fitting shells into a doublebarrelled shotgun.

“Buckshot. I shoot the sonabitch.”

“Hey, you can’t do that,” began Fainy. He got the butt of the shotgun in the chest and went crashing down into the chair again. The man strode out the door with a long elastic stride, and there followed two shots that went rattling among the farm buildings. Then the woman’s shrieks started up again, punctuating a longdrawnout hysterical tittering and sobbing.

Fainy sat in the chair by the stove as if glued to it.

He noticed a fiftycent piece on the kitchen floor that must have dropped out of Doc Bingham’s pants as he ran. He grabbed it and had just gotten it in his pocket when the tall man with the shotgun came back.

“No more shells,” he said thickly. Then he sat down on the kitchen table among the uncleared supper dishes and began to cry like a child, the tears trickling through the knobbed fingers of his big dark hands. Fainy stole out of the door and went to the barn. “Doc Bingham,” he called gently. The harness lay in a heap between the shafts of the wagon, but there was no trace of Doc Bingham or of the piebald horse. The frightened clucking of the hens disturbed in the hencoop mixed with the woman’s shrieks that still came from upstairs in the farmhouse. “What the hell shall I do?” Fainy was asking himself when he caught sight of a tall figure outlined in the bright kitchen door and pointing the shotgun at him. Just as the shotgun blazed away he ducked into the barn and out through the back door. Buckshot whined over his head. “Gosh, he found shells.” Fainy was off as fast as his legs could carry him across the oatfield. At last, without any breath in his body, he scrambled over a railfence full of briars that tore his face and hands and lay flat in a dry ditch to rest. There was nobody following him.

“IT TAKES NERVE TO LIVE IN THIS WORLD”      LAST WORDS OF GEORGE SMITH HANGED WITH HIS BROTHER BY MOB IN KANSAS      MARQUIS OF QUEENSBERRY DEAD      FLAMES WRECK SPICE PLANT COURT SETS ZOLA FREE

a few years ago the anarchists of New Jersey, wearing the McKinley button and the red badge of anarchy on their coats and supplied with beer by the republicans, plotted the death of one of the crowned heads of Europe and it is likely that the plan to assassinate the president was hatched at the same time or soon afterward

It’s moonlight fair tonight upon the Wabash

From the fields there comes the breath of newmown hay

Through the sycamores the candlelight is gleaming

On the banks of the Wabash far away

OUT FOR BULLY GOOD TIME

Six Thousand Workmen at Smolensk Parade With Placards Saying Death To Czar Assassin.

riots and streetblockades mark opening of teamster’s strike

WORLD’S GREATEST SEA BATTLE NEAR

Madrid police clash with 5000 workmen carrying black flag

spectators become dizzy while dancer eats orange breaking record that made man insane

and we played the battle of Port Arthur in the bathtub and the water leaked down through the drawingroom ceiling and it was altogether too bad but in Kew Gardens old Mr. Garnet who was still hale and hearty although so very old came to tea and we saw him first through the window with his red face and John Bull whiskers and aunty said it was a sailor’s rolling gait and he was carrying a box under his arm and Vickie and Pompom barked and here was Mr. Garnet come to tea and he took a gramophone out of a black box and put a cylinder on the gramophone and they pushed back the tea-things off the corner of the table      Be careful not to drop it now they scratch rather heasy      Why a hordinary sewin’ needle would do maam but I ave special needles

and we got to talking about Hadmiral Togo and the Banyan and how the Roosians drank so much vodka and killed all those poor fisherlads in the North Sea and he wound it up very carefully so as not to break the spring and the needle went rasp rasp      Yes I was a bluejacket miself miboy from the time I was a little shayver not much bigger’n you rose to be bosun’s mite on the first British hironclad the
Warrior
and I can dance a ornpipe yet maam      and he had a mariner’s compass in red and blue on the back of his hand and his nails looked black and thick as he fumbled with the needle and the needle went rasp rasp and far away a band played and out of a grindy noise in the little black horn came
God Save the King
and the little dogs howled

I met my love in the Alamo

    
When the moon was on the rise

Her beauty quite bedimmed its light

    
So radiant were her eyes

during the forenoon union pickets turned back a wagon loaded with 50 campchairs on its way to the fire engine house at Michigan Avenue and Washington Street. The chairs it is reported, were ordered for the convenience of policemen detailed on strike duty

FLEETS MAY MEET IN BATTLE TODAY
WEST OF LUZON

three big wolves were killed before the dinner.

A grand parade is proposed here in which President Roosevelt shall ride so that he can be seen by citizens. At the head will be a caged bear recently captured after killing a dozen dogs and injuring several men. The bear will be given an hour’s start for the hills then the packs will be set on the trail and President Roosevelt and the guides will follow in pursuit

three Columbia students start auto trip to Chicago on wager

GENERAL STRIKE NOW THREATENS

It’s moonlight fair tonight upon the Wa-abash

OIL KING’S HAPPYEST DAY

one cherub every five minutes market for all classes of real estate continues to be healthy with good demand for factory sites residence and business properties court bills break labor

BLOODY SUNDAY IN MOSCOW

lady angels are smashed troops guard oilfields America tends to become empire like in the days of the Caesars $5 poem gets rich husband eat less says Edison rich poker player falls dead when he draws royal flush charges graft in Cicero

STRIKE MAY MEAN REVOLT IN RUSSIA

lake romance of two yachts murder ends labor feud Michigan runs all over Albion red flags in St. Petersburg

CZAR YIELDS TO PEOPLE

holds dead baby forty hours families evicted by bursting watermain.

CZAR GRANTS CONSTITUTION

From the fields there comes the breath of newmown hay

Through the sycamores the candlelight is gleaming