“Billy,” he said, “I guess you’d be a good messenger. I’ll give you ten cents to deliver this letter to Isaac Willard. What do you say?”
“Sure!”
“Are you going right back?”
“Sure!”
“All right.”
He gave me the letter and the ten cents, and I started out almost at a run. It was too good to be true. I had seen at once, by the long blue stamp with a picture of a messenger boy on it, that it was a special-delivery letter—though heaven knows why old Isaac should be getting a special delivery. It came from Bennington, Vermont, and there was a name in the upper left-hand corner of it, but I can’t remember what it was. Anyway, I was tremendously excited. What would be happening when I got there? Should I hear the whip or the razor strop going, or screams? It even occurred to me, naturally, that I might have to cut and run for it myself; it might be one of the days when the old man looked like an eggplant. And had Mr. Greene sent the letter by me because he was afraid to take it himself?
That was a disquieting thought and made me slow down my steps. It was quite possible. Nobody liked to go to the Willard farm, which was one of the reasons why their milk business had fallen away to almost nothing. As Jim had told me, if it weren’t for everybody’s feeling sorry for old Mrs. Willard and Lydia, nobody would have taken their dirty milk anyway. It was Mrs. Willard and Lydia who took the orders and delivered the milk (in an old blue wagon) and collected the bills. If it hadn’t been for Mrs. Willard, Jim said, they’d all have starved to death.
The footbridge fascinated me. It consisted of two wide planks, laid over a series of rotten piles, with a handrail at either side. The water under it was very shallow and littered with every kind of débris. There were innumerable tin cans, bottles, fragments of rusted iron, quantities of broken glass—even an old muskrat trap, with a piece of rusted chain still attached, which I thought a little of salvaging. I stood there for several minutes, looking down into the water, and out of the corner of my eye glancing also at the house. There was no sign of life, not a sound. I could see the half-dozen cows up on the hill—a spur of Hateful—a half mile above me. All the windows were shuttered, except one on the ground floor, to the right of the door; and this, despite the hot weather, was closed. As I walked up the brick path I saw two humming-birds dart out of the trumpet-vine and whizz round the corner; and I caught the strong, rank smell from the cow-yard at the other end. I went up the four steps to the shabby porch and knocked at the door. Standing there, I could see into the cow-yard, which was paved with cobbles. Or rather, it had been paved at one time; now, one merely saw the cobbles here and there, amid dung and water. An old tub and pump stood at the far end, and beyond that the dilapidated shed.
I waited for several minutes without hearing anything and then, somewhat timidly, knocked again. The door withdrew itself swiftly from my knock, and a white-haired woman stood before me. She was tall, and had the blackest and fiercest eyes I have ever seen. She was rubbing one red fist against her blue-checked apron.
“Well!” she said, snappishly. And then, before I could muster speech, “What is it?”
I felt guilty, and stammered something about a letter for Mr. Willard, holding it out toward her half-heartedly.
At that, she merely said “Isaac!” in a sharp voice, and turned her back on me. As she walked away, I had a glimpse into the room. It was large, with a huge fireplace, but almost entirely bare. There were no rugs on the unpainted floor, which looked spotlessly clean, and the furniture consisted of three or four ordinary kitchen chairs and a kitchen table. Isaac I saw at once—he was sitting at the table with a book open before him. If he had heard his wife, he gave no sign of it. He continued to read as if nothing whatever had occurred. And while I waited for him to move, I saw another woman—Lydia, I supposed—at the other end of the table. Her head was down on the table, her arms outstretched, her hands clasped. I thought I saw her shoulders moving. Then Isaac rose, put his hand flat on the page for a moment, as if for a kind of emphasis, and came toward the door. He wore red rubber boots which swished as he walked, and his steps were heavy. His face—as I saw when he stood before me, or rather above me—was narrow and high and flushed, with the gray suspicious eyes set very close together. His mouth, turned downwards at the corners, was curiously arched over his big teeth, and the effect was a mixture of ferocity and weakness.
“Well?” he said.
“It’s a letter for you,” I said.
“Why didn’t Mr. Greene bring it?”
“I don’t know, sir. He asked me to bring it.”
“Well, by Ephraim!…” He closed up his eyes to slits and glared. “Give it here. And don’t you ever do his dirty work again.”
He took hold of my shoulder so firmly with thumb and forefinger that it hurt me. “You hear?”
“Yes, sir!”
“And now, git!”
And with that he shut the door so quickly that I had to do a sort of skip to avoid having any feet caught against the jamb.
When my aunts and Jim heard of this expedition, they were unfeignedly horrified. I was told never to do such a thing again—never to go to the house, nor even on the Willard land. My Aunt Julia was especially alarmed. She seemed to feel that I had done well to escape with my life! Even Jim, I could see, was concerned; he shook his head and solemnly advised me to give old Isaac a wide berth.
“If you’d a’ struck him on one of his bad days,” he said, ruminating, “you might have got a hell of a licking, and a sermon thrown in. There was a kid in Hackley Falls got beaten black and blue once.”
“Who was it?”
“Well, I don’t remember.”
“What had he done?”
“Well, I don’t remember that either. But you keep away from there, Billy, and it won’t do you no harm. That’s what I say.”
All of this not unnaturally only whetted more keenly my appetite for further adventure, and it wasn’t long before I had discovered a new and thrilling pastime. Crossing the Mill River by the covered bridge, I would then turn westward, climb up what was called the Rock Pasture, one of those delightful New England hillsides of granite and cedar and juniper, and eventually come to the wood which covered the long spur of Hateful Mountain. This spur ran westward as far as Hackley Falls itself, roughly paralleling the river. It had occurred to me that if I were to scout through the edge of the woods, I should eventually come out at the upper end of Isaac’s cow-pasture. And from there, taking cover behind the firs or birches or rocks, it would be easy to get a view of the Willard house, and from no very great distance.
What profit I expected to get from this, heaven knows! The first time I did it I took elaborate precautions—climbed high into the maple and chestnut grove, and then, when I began to approach Willard’s farm, got down and crawled forward on my hands and knees. I crept through the fringe of white birches at the edge of the pasture and then found to my delight that I could make my way down the hill toward the house by crawling from rock to rock, at last taking up a position not more than three hundred yards from the back of the house. Here I had admirable shelter—a great granite boulder, covered with silvery lichens, beside which grew a cedar tree. There was a warm hollow of grass behind it and, looking between the rock and the tree, I could see perfectly without in the least being seen. Old Isaac’s cows grazed peacefully round me, not at all disturbed; and I could look straight down into the cow-yard to which they would eventually be driven.
The house itself was shuttered, at the back, as in front. There were two doors—one leading down into the cow-yard, from the side, and another at the back, from which occasionally Mrs. Willard would come out to hang her washing on the clothesline, or she and Lydia together to work in the small vegetable garden. On such occasions they both wore old-fashioned calico bonnets. They worked grimly and in silence, hoeing and digging like men. At the end of the patch nearer to me, they were scarcely a hundred yards away, and I could hear the regular clink of their hoes on the pebbles, and once in a long while a remark—usually made by old Mrs. Willard and usually very brief and sharp. They never looked at each other when they spoke. When, now and then, they paused for a rest, they would stand with their hands on their hoes and gaze down toward the house. There seemed to me something ominous in the way they did this—they never looked anywhere else and they were always perfectly silent. It gave me the shivers. As for the old man, I wondered what he was doing. I never heard him singing, as he was supposed to do every afternoon, and very seldom saw him. Once in a long while he would come out of the house and lurch across the cow-yard to the shed—what he went for, I don’t know—perhaps cider.