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Page 20
Sad steps indeed that postponed his meeting with Brian! Did he not owe
it to his son to travel with all possible speed to the farmhouse
instead of plodding belatedly along the highway in rain and gloom and
twilight? Had he after all a right to indulge his passion for tramping
and footsore penance when already word might have come to the sister
with the ink-pool eyes? The runaway was young. His remorse would come
the quicker. For every day he, Kenny, lingered in selfish penance on
the road, he must pay in a widening of distance between Brian and
himself. Kenny quickened his sagging foot-steps. Drenched and hungry,
he felt himself better able to see the thing in sane and unpoetic light.
It came to this: Would Brian prefer the rags of romantic loitering to
the speed, train or otherwise, of eager affection? Surely not! He
must not be selfish. Foot-sore or foot-fresh, his remorse would be the
same. With Brian it would be the inner things that counted.
At twilight Kenny found a thrifty farmer who agreed to take him in. He
dried his clothes by the kitchen fire, hating the woolly smell of the
steam. Later he slept in the haymow and lay awake far into the night,
listening in doubt and despair to the drip of the rain on the roof.
Nothing ever went quite right. He must read again in Brian's letter
about the Tavern of Stars. Beldame Rain seemed bent upon a
housecleaning. Kenny, dreaming, departed from the barn in a flying
machine made of lilacs. Its planes, he regretted, seemed merely sheets
of rain, specked foolishly with pine-needles.
He awoke to a subdued noise of voices in the barn below and wondered
disapprovingly if the farmer was just getting home. It appeared that
he was getting up. Horribly depressed and sorry for him, Kenny went to
sleep again. When he awoke the sun was laughing iridescently from
meadow trails of rain. The fragrance of wet pine came in through the
barn window. The lilac in the garden was ready to flower. Kenny
longed to be off. Nevertheless he breakfasted at some length in the
farm kitchen and paid so handsomely in coin and grace that there was
talk of him for days.
Already the sun was warm. It lay in a blanket of bright gold
everywhere. Cloud shadows deepened a meadow here and there to
coolness. The air was tonic, deliriously wine-sweet and heady. Kenny
thought of honey and bees and clover and tramped and brooded.
The sun he hoped would presently abate its unromantic fervor. Meantime
he must think. Penance or the tribute of impatience? Which should it
be?
It remained for an abandoned corncrib to plunge him into his original
fever of inspiration and remorse. Brian had lived in a corncrib for
seven cents a day. Brian had ploughed and Brian had mended fences. He
had even dabbled in whitewash. No, by the powers that be! It was a
thing for penance after all. Always at the farmhouse the trail would
be waiting. What if he arrived there and the runaway had failed to
write? What would he do then?
Rags and blisters and a bit of corncrib penance for himself! It was
the only way. It would give his need of Brian invincible weight.
Kenny climbed a fence and entered the corncrib by a flight of rickety
steps. It was something of a wreck and unspeakably dusty. Sneezing
violently he sat down and ate his supper of bread and cheese with
profound discontent. Each tasted monotonously of the other. Instead
of two articles of diet he appeared to have something heterogeneously
one in flavor. The smell of cheese he hoped wouldn't attract rats and
remembered vaguely that a corncrib was architecturally immune from
rodents. Well, no rat with discrimination would select a corncrib
abode anyway. He'd fall through the floor slats.
Oppressed by the general air of slatty insecurity and the sight of a
basket of ancient cobs in one corner, Kenny wished passionately that he
hadn't always hated spiders, killed one with a shudder and pensively
watched the sunset through the corncrib bars. It made him think of
flamingoes in flight. One saw that best in India, flocks and flocks of
them in the sky like an exquisite flame of clouds. Ah, India! No, on
second thought he'd rather he in Iceland.
It sounded cooler.
When the moon etched silver bars upon the corncrib floor he went to
bed, regretting the preposterous fanlike spread of the corncrib walls.
Nothing walled should be smaller at the floor than it was at the top.
It gave one a hopeless feeling of constriction. The feeling colored
his dreams. Kenny found himself hazily adrift in an inquisitorial
corncrib made of bars of moon-plated silver. They pressed in upon him
ever tighter and tighter until with a mighty sweep of his arms he burst
them all asunder.
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