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Updated: May 26, 2025
Wheeler and Mahailey always lost weight in thrashing time, just as the horses did; this year Nat Wheeler had six hundred acres of winter wheat that would run close upon thirty bushels to the acre. Such a harvest was as hard on the women as it was on the men. Leonard Dawson's wife, Susie, came over to help Mrs. Wheeler, but she was expecting a baby in the fall, and the heat proved too much for her.
Wheeler explained to her that American soldiers didn't wear blue now, Mahailey repeated to herself that these brown clothes didn't show the dust, and that Claude would never look like the bedraggled men who used to stop to drink at her mother's spring. "Them leather leggins is to keep the briars from scratchin' you, ain't they?
At seven o'clock the Wheeler family set out in the two cars that stood waiting by the windmill. Mr. Wheeler drove the big Cadillac, and Ralph took Mahailey and Dan in the Ford. When they reached the mill house the outer yard was already black with motors, and the porch and parlours were full of people talking and moving about. Claude went directly upstairs.
I don't know what I will do with them, but I'm mighty sure I won't butcher them." "Don't bother him, Mahailey," Mrs. Wheeler cautioned her. "He's tired, and he has to fix some place for the live hogs." "I know he is, mam, but I could easy cut up one of them hawgs myself. I butchered my own little pig onct, in Virginia. I could save the hams, anyways, and the spare-ribs.
In telling stories about him, people often tried to imitate his smooth, senatorial voice, robust but never loud. Even when he was hilariously delighted by anything, as when poor Mahailey, undressing in the dark on a summer night, sat down on the sticky fly-paper, he was not boisterous. He was a jolly, easy-going father, indeed, for a boy who was not thin-skinned.
She was out of temper most of the time now, and went about muttering to herself. The only possessions Mahailey brought with her when she came to live with the Wheelers, were a feather bed and three patchwork quilts, interlined with wool off the backs of Virginia sheep, washed and carded by hand. The quilts had been made by her old mother, and given to her for a marriage portion.
Claude, you've been curryin' that old mare, and you've got white hairs all over your soldier-clothes. You're jist covered!" If his uniform stirred feeling in people of sober judgment, over Mahailey it cast a spell. She was so dazzled by it that all the time Claude was at home she never once managed to examine it in detail.
Where shall I put my cigars? They'll make everything smell, wherever I put them. All my clothes seem to smell of cooking, or starch, or something. I don't know what Mahailey does to them," he ended bitterly. Ralph looked outraged. "Well, of all ingratitude! Mahailey's been ironing your damned old shirts for a week!" "Yes, yes, I know. Don't rattle me.
Claude could remember warm spring days when the plum bushes were all in blossom and Mahailey used to lie down under them and sing to herself, as if the honey-heavy sweetness made her drowsy; songs without words, for the most part, though he recalled one mountain dirge which said over and over, "And they laid Jesse James in his grave."
She had been brought West by a shiftless Virginia family which went to pieces and scattered under the rigours of pioneer farm-life. When the mother of the family died, there was nowhere for Mahailey to go, and Mrs. Wheeler took her in. Mahailey had no one to take care of her, and Mrs. Wheeler had no one to help her with the work; it had turned out very well.
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