He had put the glass to his lips, evidently more at home with methods of drinking than of eating, and taken a single sip before sputtering, choking and spitting. Nan was furious, equally at the waste and the manners, until she noticed his hands for the first time. They were strong-looking, perhaps longer than ordinary. On each there was a thumb and three fingers. The three fingers were widely spaced; there was no sign of deformity or amputation. He was simply eight- instead of ten-fingered.
Nan Maxill was a softhearted girl. She had never drowned a kitten or trapped a mouse in her life. She forgot her annoyance instantly. “Oh, poor man!” she exclaimed.
There was no question he must stay and her father must be cozened into allowing it. Ordinary decency—contrary to Maxill custom—demanded hospitality. And if they let him go, her unsatisfied curiosity would torment her for years. On his part he showed no inclination to leave, continuing to examine each object and person with interest. His humming wasn’t monotonous, or tiresome. Though it sounded like no music she had ever heard, it was agreeable enough for her to try to imitate it. She found if deceptively complicated and hard—almost impossible for her to reproduce.
His reaction was enthusiastic surprise. He hummed, she hummed, he hummed back joyously. Briefly the Maxill kitchen echoed a strange, unearthly duet. Then—at least so it seemed to Nan—he was demanding more, far more, than she was able to give. His tones soared away on subtle scales she couldn’t possibly follow. She fell silent; after a questioning interval, so did he.
Malcolm Maxill came home in ill-humor. He worked for his son-in-law during the winter and for a month or so in summer; his natural irritation at this undignified role was not lessened by the hardware merchant’s insinuations that this employment was in the manner of family charity: who else in Evarts County would hire an ex-bootlegger? Maxill looked to the day he could sell the farm—it was clear of mortgages since it would have been inconvenient in his former profession to have bankers scrutinizing his affairs —and work for himself again. But even good farms were hard to sell in times like these and there were no offers on the eighty acres. More to give an impression to an unlikely prospective buyer that the place had potentialities than in hope of profit, he kept the cow, some pigs and chickens, planted twenty acres or so each spring to corn it never paid to harvest, and looked with disgust on the decayed orchard which was good only for firewood—for which he couldn’t get back the cost of cutting.
He stared belligerently at the fellow. “What do you want around here?”
The stranger hummed. Nan and Josey started explaining at the same time. Jessie and Janet begged, “Oh, Daddy, please.”
“All right, all right,” growled their father. “Let him stay a couple of days if you’re all so hot about it. I suppose at least he can do the chores for his board and maybe cut down a few of those old apple trees. Can you milk?” he asked the fellow. “Huh; forgot he’s a dummy. O.K. come along; soon find out whether you can or not.”
The girls went with them, Nan carrying the milkpail and tactfully guiding the stranger. Sherry, the cow, was fenced out rather than fenced in: she had the run of the farm except for the cornfield and the scrubby kitchen garden. She was not bedded down in the barn in summer; she was milked wherever she was found. Half-Jersey, half-Guernsey, (and half anybody’s guess, Malcolm Maxill said sourly), her milk was rich with cream but it had been too long since she last freshened and the neighboring bulls had never earned their stud fee, though their owners didn’t return it when she failed to calve.
Maxill set the pail under Sherry’s udder. “Go ahead,” he urged, “let’s see you milk her.” The fellow just stood there, looking interested, humming. “Wouldn’t you know it? Can’t milk.” He squatted down disgustedly, gave a perfunctory brush of his hand against the dangling teats, and began pulling the milk, squit, squit, shish, down into the pail.
The fellow reached out his four-fingered hand and stroked the cow’s flank. City man or not, at least he wasn’t scared of animals. Of course Sherry wasn’t balky or mean; she hardly ever kicked over the pail or swished her tail real hard in the milker’s eyes. Still it took confidence (or ignorance) to walk around her left side and touch the bag from which Maxill was drawing, slish, slish, slish, the evening milk.
Nan knew her father was no fanner and that a real one would be milking Sherry only once a day by now, drying her up, since she yielded little more than three quarts. But Maxill knew you were supposed to milk a cow twice a day, just as he knew how long to let mash ferment and he was no chemist either. He went by rules.
“Be darned,” exclaimed Maxill, who seldom swore in front of his children. “That’s the most she’s given in months and I ain’t stripped her yet.”
The cow’s unexpected bounty put him in good humor; he didn’t seem to mind slopping the pigs nor the stranger’s helplessness at throwing scratch to the chickens. (The girls usually did this anyway; Maxill’s presence was a formality to impress the fellow with the scope and responsibility of the chores.) He ate what Nan had cooked with cheerful appetite, remarking jovially that the dummy would be cheap to feed since he didn’t touch meat, butter or milk, only bread, vegetables and water.
Maxill’s jollity led him to tune up his fiddle—only Josey and Nan noted the stranger’s anguish—and run through Birmingham Jail, Beautiful Doll, and Dardanella. Maxill played by ear, contemptuous of those who had to read notes. Josey whistled (after an apologetic glance), Jessie played her mouth-organ, Janet performed expertly with comb and toilet-paper. “You’d think,” grunted Maxill, “with his humming he could give us a tune himself. How about it?” And he offered the fiddle.
The fellow looked at the fiddle as though it were explosive. He put it down on the table as fast as he could and backed away. Nan grieved at this evidence of mental deficiency; Jessie and Janet giggled; Malcolm twirled his finger at his temple; even Josey smiled ruefully.
Then the fiddle began playing. Not playing really, because the bow lay unmoving beside it and the strings didn’t vibrate. But music came out of the sound holes, uncertainly at first, then with swelling assurance. It resembled the fellow’s humming except that it was infinitely more complicated and moving...
Next morning Maxill took the fellow down to the orchard, the girls tagging along. They weren’t going to miss the possibility of more miracles, though now everyone had had a chance to think things over, the Maxills weren’t so sure they’d actually heard the fiddle, or if they had, that it hadn’t been by some perfectly explicable trick or illusion. Still, if he could seem to make it play without touching it, maybe he could do similar things with the ax.
Maxill hacked at a dead limb. The ax bounded back from the wood. The tree was not diseased or rotten, just old and neglected. Most of the branches were dead but sap still ran in the trunk, as shown by a few boughs on which a handful of fruit had set, and there was new growth on the tips. Like the rest of the orchard, the tree wasn’t worth saving. The ax swung again and again; the branch broke off. Maxill nodded and handed the ax to the fellow.
The fellow hummed, looked at Maxill, the girls, the ax. He dropped the tool and walked over to the tree, fingering the rough bark of the corns, the gnarly outcrop of the roots, the leaves and twigs over his head. Nan halfway expected the tree to rearrange itself into cordwood, neatly split and stacked. Nothing happened, nothing at all.
“Yah! Dummy can’t milk, slop pigs, feed chickens or cut wood. If it cost anything to feed him he wouldn’t be worth his keep. All he can do is hum and play tricks.”
“We’ll do the chores this morning,’’ Nan offered tactfully. They did them most mornings, and evenings too, but it was a convention that their father did all the man’s work and left them free to concentrate on feminine pursuits. Thoughtful girls, they saved his face.