Fainy and the farmer’s boy went down the rickety ladder.
“Say, is she pretty spicy?… Gosh, if pop finds it he’ll give me a whalin’… Gosh, I bet you’ve read all them books.”
“Me?” said Fainy haughtily. “I don’t need to read books. I kin see life if I wanter. Here it is… it’s about fallen women.”
“Ain’t that pretty short for a dollar? I thought you could get a big book for a dollar.”
“This one’s pretty spicy.”
“Well, I guess I’ll take it before dad ketches me snoopin’ around… Goodnight.” Fainy went back to his bed in the hay and fell fast asleep. He was dreaming that he was going up a rickety stair in a barn with his sister Milly who kept getting all the time bigger and whiter and fatter, and had on a big hat with ostrich plumes all round it and her dress began to split from the neck and lower and lower and Doc Bingham’s voice was saying, She’s Maria Monk, the queen of the white slaves, and just as he was going to grab her, sunlight opened his eyes. Doc Bingham stood in front of him, his feet wide apart, combing his hair with a pocketcomb and reciting:
“Let us depart, the universal sun
Confines not to one land his blessed beams
Nor is man rooted like a tree…
“Come, Fenian,” he boomed, when he saw that Fainy was awake, “let us shake the dust of this inhospitable farm, latcheting our shoes with a curse like philosophers of old… Hitch up the horse; we’ll get breakfast down the road.”
This went on for several weeks, until one evening they found themselves driving up to a neat yellow house in a grove of feathery dark tamaracks. Fainy waited in the wagon while Doc Bingham interviewed the people in the house. After a while Doc Bingham appeared in the door, a broad smile creasing his cheeks. “We’re going to be very handsomely treated, Fenian, as befits a wearer of the cloth and all that… You be careful how you talk, will you? Take the horse to the barn and unhitch.”
“Say, Mr. Bingham, how about my money? It’s three weeks now.” Fainy jumped down and went to the horse’s head.
An expression of gloom passed over Doc Bingham’s face. “Oh, lucre, lucre…
“Examine well
His milkwhite hand, the palm is hardly clean
But here and there an ugly smutch appears,
Foh, ’twas a bribe that left it….
“I had great plans for a cooperative enterprise that you are spoiling by your youthful haste and greed… but if you must I’ll hand over to you this very night everything due you and more. All right, unhitch the horse and bring me that little package with Maria Monk, and The Popish Plot.”
It was a warm day. There were robins singing round the barn. Everything smelt of sweetgrass and flowers. The barn was red and the yard was full of white leghorns. After he had unhitched the spring wagon and put the horse in a stall, Fainy sat on a rail of the fence looking out over the silvergreen field of oats out back, and smoked a cigarette. He wished there was a girl there he could put his arm round or a fellow to talk to.
A hand dropped onto his shoulder. Doc Bingham was standing beside him.
“Fenian, my young friend, we are in clover,” he said. “She is alone in the house, and her husband has gone to town for two days with the hired man. There’ll be nobody there but her two little children, sweet bairns. Perhaps I shall play Romeo. You’ve never seen me in love. It’s my noblest role. Ah, some day I’ll tell you about my headstrong youth. Come and meet the sweet charmer.”
When they went in the kitchen door a dimplefaced pudgy woman in a lavender housecap greeted them coyly.
“This is my young assistant, ma’am,” said Doc Bingham, with a noble gesture. “Fenian, this is Mrs. Kovach.”
“You must be hungry. We’re having supper right away.”
The last of the sun lit up a kitchen range that was crowded with saucepans and stewpots. Fragrant steam rose in little jets from round wellpolished lids. As she spoke Mrs. Kovach leaned over so that her big blue behind with starched apronstrings tied in a bow above it stood up straight in the air, opened the oven door and pulled out a great pan of cornmuffins that she dumped into a dish on the dining table already set next the window. Their warm toasted smoke filled the kitchen. Fainy felt his mouth watering. Doc Bingham was rubbing his hands and rolling his eyes. They sat down, and the two blue-eyed smearyfaced children were sat down and started gobbling silently, and Mrs. Kovach heaped their plates with stewed tomatoes, mashed potatoes, beef stew and limabeans with pork. She poured them out coffee and then said with moist eyes, as she sat down herself:
“I love to see men eat.”
Her face took on a crushed pansy look that made Fainy turn away his eyes when he found himself looking at it. After supper she sat listening with a pleased, frightened expression while Doc Bingham talked and talked, now and then stopping to lean back and blow a smoke ring at the lamp.
“While not myself a Lutheran as you might say, ma’am, I myself have always admired, nay, revered, the great figure of Martin Luther as one of the lightbringers of mankind. Were it not for him we would be still groveling under the dread domination of the Pope of Rome.”
“They’ll never get into this country; land sakes, it gives me the creeps to think of it.”
“Not while there’s a drop of red blood in the veins of freeborn Protestants… but the way to fight darkness, ma’am, is with light. Light comes from education, reading of books and studies…”
“Land sakes, it gives me a headache to read most books, an’ I don’t get much time, to tell the truth. My husband, he reads books he gets from the Department of Agriculture. He tried to make me read one once, on raisin’ poultry, but I couldn’t make much sense out of it. His folks they come from the old country… I guess people feels different over there.”
“It must be difficult being married to a foreigner like that.”
“Sometimes I don’t know how I stand it; course he was awful goodlookin’when I married him… I never could resist a goodlookin’ man.”
Doc Bingham leaned further across the table. His eyes rolled as if they were going to drop out.
“I never could resist a goodlooking lady.”
Mrs. Kovach sighed deeply.
Fainy got up and went out. He’d been trying to get in a word about getting paid, but what was the use? Outside it was chilly; the stars were bright above the roofs of the barns and outhouses. From the chickencoop came an occasional sleepy cluck or the rustle of feathers as a hen lost her balance on her perch. He walked up and down the barnyard cursing Doc Bingham and kicking at an occasional clod of manure.
Later he looked into the lamplit kitchen. Doc Bingham had his arm around Mrs. Kovach’s waist and was declaiming verses, making big gestures with his free hand:
… These things to hear
Would Desdemona seriously incline
But still the house affairs would draw her hence
Which ever as she could with haste dispatch
She’d come again and with a greedy ear…
Fainy shook his fist at the window. “Goddam your hide, I want my money,” he said aloud. Then he went for a walk down the road. When he came back he was sleepy and chilly. The kitchen was empty and the lamp was turned down low. He didn’t know where to go to sleep, so he settled down to warm himself in a chair beside the fire. His head began to nod and he fell asleep.