The Quickening | Page 7

cayn't he'p bein' mean: looks like I was made thataway. Get up and slap me, if you want to. I won't slap back."
But Thomas Jefferson only ground his face deeper into the thick mat of cedar needles and begged to be let alone.
"Go away; I don't want you to talk to me!" he groaned. "You're always making me sin!"
"That's because you're Adam and I'm Eve, ain't it? Wasn't you tellin' me in revival time that Eve made all the 'ruction 'twixt the man and God? I reckon she was right sorry; don't you?"
Thomas Jefferson sat up.
"You're awfully wicked, Nan," he said definitively.
"'Cause I don't believe all that about the woman and the snake and the apple and the man?"
"You'll go to hell when you die, and then I guess you'll believe," said Thomas Jefferson, still more definitively.
She took a red apple from the pocket of her ragged frock and gave it to him.
"What's that for?" he asked suspiciously.
"You eat it; it's the kind you like--off 'm the tree right back of Jim Stone's barn lot," she answered.
"You stole it, Nan Bryerson!"
"Well, what if I did? You didn't."
He bit into it, and she held him in talk till it was eaten to the core.
"Have you heard tell anything more about the new railroad?" she asked.
Thomas Jefferson shook his head. "I heard Squire Bates and Major Dabney naming it one day last week."
"Well, it's shore comin'--right thoo' Paradise. I heard tell how it was goin' to cut the old Maje's grass patch plumb in two, and run right smack thoo' you-uns' peach orchard."
"Huh!" said Thomas Jefferson. "What do you reckon my father'd be doing all that time? He'd show 'em!"
A far-away cry, long-drawn and penetrating, rose on the still air of the lower slope and was blown on the breeze to the summit of the great rock.
"That's maw, hollerin' for me to get back home with that bucket o' water," said the girl; and, as she was descending the tree ladder: "You didn't s'picion why I give you that apple, did you, Tommy-Jeffy?"
"'Cause you didn't want it yourself, I reckon," said the second Adam.
"No; it was 'cause you said I was goin' to hell and I wanted comp'ny. That apple was stole and you knowed it!"
Thomas Jefferson flung the core far out over the tree-tops and shut his eyes till he could see without seeing red. Then he rose to the serenest height he had yet attained and said: "I forgive you, you wicked, wicked girl!"
Her laugh was a screaming taunt.
"But you've et the apple!" she cried; "and if you wasn't scared of goin' to hell, you'd cuss me again--you know you would! Lemme tell you, Tom-Jeff, if the preacher had dipped me in the creek like he did you, I'd be a mighty sight holier than what you are. I cert'nly would."
And now anger came to its own again.
"You don't know what you're talking about, Nan Bryerson! You're nothing but a--a miserable little heathen; my mother said you was!" he cried out after her.
But a back-flung grimace was all the answer he had.

III
OF THE FATHERS UPON THE CHILDREN
Thomas Jefferson's grandfather, Caleb the elder, was an old man before his son, Caleb the younger, went to the wars, and he figured in the recollections of those who remembered him as a grim, white-haired octogenarian who was one day carried home from the iron-furnace which he had built, and put to bed, dead in every part save his eyes. The eyes lived on for a year or more, following the movements of the sympathetic or curious visitor with a quiet, divining gaze; never sleeping, they said--though that could hardly be--until that last day of all when they fixed themselves on the wall and followed nothing more in this world.
Caleb, the son, was well past his first youth when the Civil War broke out; yet youthful ardor was not wanting, nor patriotism, as he defined it, to make him the first of the Paradise folk to write his name on the muster-roll of the South. And it was his good fortune, rather than any lack of battle hazards, that brought him through the four fighting years to the Appomattox end of that last running fight on the Petersburg and Lynchburg road in which, with his own hands, he had helped to destroy the guns of his battery.
Being alive and not dead on the memorable April Sunday when his commander-in-chief signed the articles of capitulation in Wilmer McLean's parlor in Appomattox town, this soldier Gordon was one among the haggard thousands who shared the enemy's rations to bridge over the hunger gap; and it was the sane, equable Gordon blood that enabled him to eat his portion of the bread of defeat manfully and without bitterness.
Later it was the steadfast Gordon courage that helped him