The American Claimant | Page 8

"Here's old Dan'l and old Jinny, that the sheriff sold south one of the
times that we got bankrupted before the war--they came wandering
back after the peace, worn out and used up on the cotton plantations,
helpless, and not another lick of work left in their old hides for the rest
of this earthly pilgrimage--and we so pinched, oh so pinched for the
very crumbs to keep life in us, and he just flung the door wide, and the
way he received them you'd have thought they had come straight down
from heaven in answer to prayer. I took him one side and said,
'Mulberry we can't have them--we've nothing for ourselves--we can't
feed them.' He looked at me kind of hurt, and said, 'Turn them
out?--and they've come to me just as confident and trusting as--as--why

Polly, I must have bought that confidence sometime or other a long
time ago, and given my note, so to speak--you don't get such things as a
gift--and how am I going to go back on a debt like that? And you see,
they're so poor, and old, and friendless, and--' But I was ashamed by
that time, and shut him off, and somehow felt a new courage in me, and
so I said, softly, 'We'll keep them--the Lord will provide.' He was glad,
and started to blurt out one of those over-confident speeches of his, but
checked himself in time, and said humbly, 'I will, anyway.' It was years
and years and years ago. Well, you see those old wrecks are here yet."
"But don't they do your housework?"
"Laws! The idea. They would if they could, poor old things, and
perhaps they think they do do some of it. But it's a superstition. Dan'l
waits on the front door, and sometimes goes on an errand; and
sometimes you'll see one or both of them letting on to dust around in
here--but that's because there's something they want to hear about and
mix their gabble into. And they're always around at meals, for the same
reason. But the fact is, we have to keep a young negro girl just to take
care of them, and a negro woman to do the housework and help take
care of them."
"Well, they ought to be tolerably happy, I should think."
"It's no name for it. They quarrel together pretty much all the time--
most always about religion, because Dan'l's a Dunker Baptist and
Jinny's a shouting Methodist, and Jinny believes in special Providences
and Dan'l don't, because he thinks he's a kind of a free-thinker--and
they play and sing plantation hymns together, and talk and chatter just
eternally and forever, and are sincerely fond of each other and think the
world of Mulberry, and he puts up patiently with all their spoiled ways
and foolishness, and so--ah, well, they're happy enough if it comes to
that. And I don't mind--I've got used to it. I can get used to anything,
with Mulberry to help; and the fact is, I don't much care what happens,
so long as he's spared to me."
"Well, here's to him, and hoping he'll make another strike soon."
"And rake in the lame, the halt and the blind, and turn the house into a
hospital again? It's what he would do. I've seen aplenty of that and
more. No, Washington, I want his strikes to be mighty moderate ones
the rest of the way down the vale."
"Well, then, big strike or little strike, or no strike at all, here's hoping

he'll never lack for friends--and I don't reckon he ever will while there's
people around who know enough to--"
"Him lack for friends!" and she tilted her head up with a frank pride--
"why, Washington, you can't name a man that's anybody that isn't fond
of him. I'll tell you privately, that I've had Satan's own time to keep
them from appointing him to some office or other. They knew he'd no
business with an office, just as well as I did, but he's the hardest man to
refuse anything to, a body ever saw. Mulberry Sellers with an office!
laws goodness, you know what that would be like. Why, they'd come
from the ends of the earth to see a circus like that. I'd just as lieves be
married to Niagara Falls, and done with it." After a reflective pause she
added--having wandered back, in the interval, to the remark that had
been her text: "Friends?--oh, indeed, no man ever had more; and such
friends: Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Johnston, Longstreet, Lee--many's
the time they've sat in that chair you're sitting in--" Hawkins was out of
it instantly, and contemplating it with a reverential surprise, and with
the awed sense of having trodden shod upon holy ground--
"They!" he said.