The Leatherwood God | Page 4

a ruffled shirt, and a tall beaver hat, the color of the
fur, and a pair of these here high boots, with his breeches strapped
down under 'em."
Braile limbered himself from his splint-bottom chair, and came forward
to the edge of the porch, as if to be sure of spitting quite under the
claybank's body. Not until he had folded himself down into his seat
again and tilted it back did he ask, "Goin' to order a suit?"
"Oh, well!" said Reverdy, with a mingling of disappointed hope, hurt
vanity, and involuntary pleasure.
If he had been deeply moved by the incident which he had tried to
make Braile see with his own sense of its impressiveness, it could not
have been wholly with the hope of impressing Braile that he had
stopped to tell it. His notion might have been that Braile would ridicule
it, and so help him throw off the lingering hold which it had upon him.
His pain and his pleasure both came from Braile's leaving the incident
alone and turning the ridicule upon him. That was cruel, and yet funny,
Reverdy had inwardly to own, as it touched the remoteness from a full
suit of black broadcloth represented by his hickory shirt and his

butternut trousers held up by a single suspender passing over his
shoulder and fastened before and behind with wooden pegs. His straw
hat, which he had braided himself, and his wife had sewed into shape
the summer before, was ragged round the brim, and a tuft of his yellow
hair escaped through a break in the crown. It was as far from a tall hat
of fur-colored beaver as his bare feet were from a pair of high boots
such as the stranger at the camp-meeting had worn, though his ankles
were richly shaded in three colors from the road, the field, and the
barnyard. He liked the joke so well that the hurt of it could hardly keep
him from laughing as he thumped his mare's ribs with his naked heels
and bade her get up.
She fetched a deep sigh, but she did not move.
"Better light," Braile said; "you wouldn't get that corn ground in time
for breakfast, now."
"I reckon," Reverdy said aloud, but to himself, rather than Braile, and
with his mind on his wife in the log cabin where he had left her in high
rebellion which she promised him nothing but a bag of cornmeal could
reduce, "she don't need to wait for me, exactly. She could grate herself
some o' the new corn, and she's got some bacon, anyway."
"Better light," Braile said again.
The sound of frying which had risen above their voices within had
ceased, and after a few quick movements of feet over the puncheon
floor, with some clicking of knives and dishes, the feet came to the
door opening on the porch and a handsome elderly woman looked out.
She was neatly dressed in a home-woven linsey-woolsey gown, with a
blue check apron reaching to its hem in front, and a white cloth passed
round her neck and crossed over her breast; she had a cap on her iron
gray hair.
Braile did not visibly note her presence in saying, "The woman will
want to hear about it."
"Hear about what?" his wife asked, and then she said to Reverdy,
"Good morning, Abel. Won't you light and have breakfast with us? It's
just ready. I reckon Sally will excuse you."
"Well, she will if you say so, Mrs. Braile." Reverdy made one action of
throwing his leg over the claybank's back to the ground, and slipping
the bridle over the smooth peg left from the limb of the young
tree-trunk which formed one of the posts of the porch. "My!" he said,

as he followed his hostess indoors, "you do have things nice. I never
come here without wantun' to have my old shanty whitewashed inside
like yourn is, and the logs plastered outside; the mud and moss of that
chinkun' and daubun' keeps fallun' out, and lettun' all the kinds of
weather there is in on us, and Sally she's at me about it, too; she's
wuss'n I am, if anything. I reckon if she had her say we'd have a
two-room cabin, too, and a loft over both parts, like you have, Mis'
Braile, or a frame house, even. But I don't believe anybody but you
could keep this floor so clean. Them knots in the puncheons just shine!
And that chimbly-piece with that plaster of Paris Samuel prayin' in it;
well, if Sally's as't me for a Samuel once I reckon she has a hundred
times; and that clock! It's a pictur'." He looked about the interior as he
took the seat offered him at the table,