Clarkton by Howard Fast Page B

their breakfast, and very often their lunch, in a little room adjoining the dining room, which was called the gun room but which contained, in the way of firearms, only an old flintlock musket, which hung over the Dutch oven. Lois had papered the room in a small-figured, dark-green pattern, and had hung the high, small windows with white chintz curtains. The trestle board and the reed-seat, ladder-back chairs were all the furniture it contained outside of a small pine sideboard, and when a door had been cut through to the pantry, Lois found the room admirably suited to its new purpose. In the five years they had lived there, she had changed not only this room, but the whole aspect of the house, removing bit by bit, slowly, without ever giving George reason for protest, the presence of a man who had made his home there for half a century and more. The older George Lowell, her father-in-law, was not easily eliminated, but Lois was patient. Just as patiently, just as undisturbed, she had waited something less than twenty years for his death, and she saw no reason why her patience should be less durable now that he was gone.
    Patience was a quality of hers, and very often she used it the way her grandmother had used a favorite patent medicine. When her understanding of something was limited, she resigned herself to waiting for the problem to remove itself and because her knowledge of men was more limited than she and most of those who knew her supposed, she considered that the same treatment would be most advisable for what had happened the night before. The result was a calm but rather silent breakfast until Fern appeared, and said:
    â€œI’ve been having bellyaches, although I’m not pregnant, if that’s what you’re thinking, Mother, and I’ve decided to see Elliott about it. How long did he stay last night?”
    â€œI hate that kind of talk,” Lois said. “It’s not flip, it’s not clever. It’s cheap talk.”
    She kissed her father and sat down next to him, and Lowell, who was going to say something, swallowed his words.
    â€œI got home at twelve-thirty,” Fern said. “I thought Elliott would still be here.”
    â€œWhy was that so important?” Lowell asked.
    Fern, who was drinking her orange juice, put it down suddenly and looked at her father reflectively. “He’s a beautiful man,” she said. She finished her juice, and began to pour her coffee. Lois asked:
    â€œIs there any reason why we have to wait for this wretched business to be over, George? I hate a winter in Massachusetts. I always have hated it.”

3. B ut this was not really a winter’s day, in the old, time-accepted sense of the word; this was not the sort of a day that comes down out of the Berkshires, growling with suppressed anger, raising a godhead out of petulant Mount Greylock. This was a day when the morning mists cleared in the earliest dawn, and the sun flooded the hills around Clarkton, the cobbled red streets, and the long rows of red-brick tenements—that amazing New England combination of slum and countryside—that were strung the length of First and Fourth Avenues, nestling into the hills themselves. It was a windy, sunny day, full of delight for the senses—something that Mike Sawyer was highly conscious of as he walked down the main street with Danny Ryan, on their way to JÓe Santana’s barber shop.
    Sawyer was one of those men whose face hair ingrew unless he was regularly shaved and double-shaved by a barber, and when he brought this up with Ryan, the little man remarked that it was a good way to kill two birds with one stone, since he ought to meet Joe Santana in any case, and that they might as well walk over there and get him shaved, and then maybe chew the fat a little with Joe before they went up to the plant, which Mike Sawyer had not yet seen. Sawyer agreed to this; the prospect of a walk on this fine, cool morning was inviting, and