Luke Baldwin's Vow Read online

  Tied up at the bank was Uncle Henry’s old rowboat and as he walked toward it he called, “Come on, Dan.”

  He did not row very well; his oars dipped too deeply into the water or slipped out without cutting the water and he hoped Uncle Henry could not see him. If Uncle Henry was watching, he would be sure to notice whether Luke was feathering the oars properly; he might even call out and insist on giving him a rowing lesson. So he avoided looking in the direction of the mill; he kept looking toward the woods.

  Somewhere in the woods, in some cool grove where there was only a slant of sunlight, or maybe on a spot by the side of the river which would be secret and silent, he expected to draw close to his father. The fact that his father was dead still didn’t have much meaning for him. Each morning he half expected to see him.

  Letting the oars trail in the water he took the dog’s head in his arms and explained solemnly, “You know what I’m thinking, Dan? Maybe you have ways of knowing and seeing and hearing that I haven’t got. You know what I mean? If you can hear things I can’t hear, then I guess you can see things I can’t see. Isn’t that right, Dan?” Licking Luke’s hands, the dog expressed approval of the sound of his voice, the intimate tone, anything he might say.

  Having crossed the river and pulled the boat up on the bank they headed upstream. It was as if Luke were looking for a path into the woods, believing that if there were such a path, his father, too, would have found the path and followed it. But instead of a path they found the brush becoming more tangled, primeval. A ledge of great jagged rocks made Luke feel that the region was ancient, his footstep was alien. While he was watching and hesitating, the impatient dog darted into the woods; then Luke followed eagerly.

  Old fallen branches blocked the way, the ground was soft from rotting roots, tangled vines hung from the trees like the arms of an octopus, and the spruces and the hemlock so close together shut out the sunlight. “Keep going, Dan,” he called encouragingly. But even the crack of a twig underfoot startled him as he followed and he kept looking around, always looking around slowly with the strange, lonely longing in his heart, wondering and expectant.

  It was like going into the shadowed vaulted world of ghosts; in his imagination each stone and tree had its spirit; some of them good, some evil and determined to thwart him. When low underbrush or thorny twisting vines caught at his pant legs he slashed at them savagely with his stick, as if he suddenly believed that powerful demons could take the form of curling vines and twine around him and force him back. When he slashed at the vines the dog barked savagely.

  Still there was no path. A big brown bird swooping low scared him and he ducked, but it was only a partridge; the wings seemed to him to be ten feet wide. In a little while he felt lost in the woods, only he knew that he could not be lost while Dan was there.

  They came to a strange pool with floating gray, dead logs, and weeds gray too, and the underbrush around the pool gray and dead; a burned-out place with charred stumps and logs rotten with age. Luke’s foot crunched the logs into dust. There was one mossy pool and then low swampland, and while he was looking over the swamp and dreading its evil smell and vast stagnation he heard a rustling near his foot. A fat brown snake four feet long glided toward another log. “Dan!” he yelled, terrified. The dog, leaping toward him, stiffened, the fur on his head and neck suddenly like bristles, his back arching, his one good eye on the eyes of the snake which did not retreat but spiraled a little and watched with malevolent calmness. Though barking furiously, Dan did not attack.

  “Look out, Dan. Look out,” Luke whispered. He wanted to run, but as he watched the tan markings and the black blotches on the snake’s head he knew he should not run nor be driven back by this guardian of these dark regions. Retreating a little, his knees weak, he picked up a large flat rock and heaved it at the snake’s head. The rock crunched against the curving body a foot behind the head and the snake, lashing out in a whirling motion, glided away and disappeared behind another fallen tree.

  “Wow, was I scared, Dan!” Luke said. But Dan now did notlook scared.

  “You don’t know what that snake really might be,” Luke went on. “It was there like an evil monster, wasn’t it, Dan?”

  Circling around the swampy ground they headed for the slope where the trees thinned out, and where there was spruce and hemlock and sunlight.

  Then suddenly the whole earth shook, and because he believed he was wandering in a shadowy world he was scared, his heart started to pound; he looked up and the branches and the leaves of the trees were all interlaced in a cloud of smoke that came drifting down darkly. As the smoke drifted by, a shaft of sunlight fell upon his wondering face, and he heard the lonely whistle of a train passing on the tracks which were on a ridge running through the woods. “Oh! It was only a train, Dan,” he said with a sigh of relief.

  Still looking around expectantly and reaching out for some little sound or sign or shadow or whisper that would be like a sudden familiar consolation, he seemed like a watchful boy going slowly through the woods looking for someone. They came to a little gully where there were second-growth pines and oaks, magnificent tall trees towering in the long slanting bars of sunlight with the air sweet and cool. Suddenly this place was like a haven of dignity and peace which they had come to after a difficult journey through dark evil swampy regions.

  In this clearing was a huge rounded rock of quartz and gneiss, eight feet high and flattened at the top. At the base smaller rocks jutted from the grass. But this great rock was set there among the trees like a huge flattened ball. Circling the rock, Luke looked at it and pondered and wondered if he could climb to the top. On the mossy sloping sides were rounded holes, and little ledges. He began to haul himself up.

  When he was halfway to the top Dan began to bark, so he called, “Come on, Dan.” The dog leaped up after him, but he began to slide and Luke grabbed him by the forepaws; then Dan became like a worm, his body flattening out against the surface as he came crawling up to the top. There they sat down together.

  As Luke sat with his arms folded around his knees looking at the tops of the trees rising around him in the sunlight, he suddenly realized how lonely he had been since he had come to the sawmill. “Where am I?” he thought, and looking all around he asked, “What am I doing here?”

  But no soft voice answered and broke his loneliness. No matter how closely he listened or how long he waited, he heard no sound.

  But Dan, who had been resting with his head on his paws, his pink tongue hanging out as he breathed jerkily, rose slowly; the fur on his neck stiffened; he ears were up and he growled a little; it was like a low threatening alert rumble. Dan’s head swung around slowly.

  “What is it, Dan?” Luke asked anxiously.

  Dan now was watching quietly, offering no threat, watching instead with great but friendly curiosity. Suddenly he barked three times.

  “Dan! Dan, what is it?” Luke pleaded in a worried tone. “What are you barking at, Dan? I don’t see anything.” But now he was frightened by the mysterious presence that Dan could feel, but which he himself could not see. With his hands clenched, his head raised and his eyes fearful, he turned slowly and looked all around. The back of his neck twitched; it was as if he were being watched, only he saw now that the dog was not scared and it reassured him. The silence became friendly. The Dan slowly turned his head, the one good eye on Luke as if asking him, “Is it all right? I’m not worried if you’re not.”

  Longing as he did to believe that his father was not far away and could come close to him, Luke was awed. The dog seemed to have the strange power to see and feel an unseen presence. In Luke’s thoughts there was only one unseen presence, and so he was comforted and yet shaken. Kneeling with his arms around Dan, he whispered, “Oh Dan, I wish I could see and feel things as you do.” In acknowledgment of this tribute, the dog licked Luke’s hand.

  For a long time they sat there at peace with each other and content. All Luke’s thoughts were of his father, and half dre
aming he found himself explaining how strange he found the life around the sawmill.

  They stayed there until Dan stood up and looked down the slope of the rock and started to feel his way down as if he were implying there was no use staying there any longer.

  Before trotting off through the woods, Luke looked for a time at the rock. “We’ll come here, Dan. We’ll often come here,” he whispered. It was like the sharing of a mysterious secret and the beginning of a building up of a secret world that nobody at the sawmill could know anything about.

  They made their way downstream to the boat. And when they were in the boat, with the mill and the house there in the sunlight, he knew that he must never let Uncle Henry know what had happened in the woods, for what had happened belonged to that world of strange wonders that Uncle Henry despised, and therefore it belonged in the secret life he could share only with Dan.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Nobody Fools Uncle Henry

  Luke seemed to his Aunt Helen to be a practical useful boy to have around the house, for he put the screens on the front windows for her, mended two of them, and appreciated how important it was to her to keep flies out of the house. She offered to give him five cents for every ten flies he killed, and one afternoon he was working industriously with the fly swatter. He knew, however, that he wasn’t going to get rich killing flies so early in the season.

  When he was in the kitchen, concentrating on one stubborn fly that would not abandon its secure position on the ceiling, he heard his aunt talking to a man at the front door. When the man’s voice faded away and Aunt Helen came back to the kitchen, Luke went out to the veranda.

  Standing beside his car was a man of sixty-five in clean blue overalls, who had a leathery, lined face, a straggling moustache, and wise, steady gray eyes. When Luke got a little closer to this man the lines on his face seemed to have come from years of smiling. His name was Alex Kemp and he lived in the redbrick house along the road a piece from the sawmill. He had a herd of cows and had come to deliver milk.

  The collie, who had been asleep on the veranda, got up and waddled over to Luke, who knelt down to stroke his head as he watched Mr. Kemp.

  “Ah, you’re the boy I’ve heard about,” Mr. Kemp called. “Didn’t take long to make a friend of Dan, did it? Hiya, Dan.”

  Wagging his tail slowly and shaking his body, the old dog went down the steps to old Mr. Kemp, who rubbed the collie as if he had known him a long time. Seeing that Dan liked the old man, Luke also approached him and Mr. Kemp sat down on the running board of the car.

  Some men, old or middle-aged, have a way of being at ease with a boy at once by not trying to be too friendly with him, but simply by letting everything come easily and naturally and taking it for granted they are not separated by the difference in age.

  “Warm day, eh, son?” Mr. Kemp said, mopping his forehead. “That’s a nice dog you’ve got there. Dan and I are old friends. I can remember when Dan was a pup. Best-looking dog around here then. Say, son, why don’t you get an old comb and comb out that loose hair on him?”

  “What’ll that do with him?” Luke asked guardedly.

  “Make him look like a new dog. Smarten him up.”

  “He’s pretty smart the way he is,” Luke said quickly, but he was looking closely at Dan and observing that around the dog’s neck there was hair that looked dead and matted. The glossy sheen that ought to have been a fine old collie’s distinction was lacking. And suddenly he began to feel elated. “Maybe a little combing and fixing might make Dan look younger, would it, Mr. Kemp?”

  “Ever see a lady fresh from a beauty parlor?”

  “No, I guess I haven’t.”

  “The point is they also feel young, Luke.”

  “Yeah, that’s important, isn’t it, Mr. Kemp? I mean for a lady, and maybe for a dog too.”

  “Try it with Dan and you’ll find he’ll go right along with you.”

  “I’ll go to work on him, Mr. Kemp.”

  “Sure, and why don’t you and Dan come up some night and help me bring the cows home?”

  “Okay, Mr. Kemp.”

  “It’s a deal then, son,” Mr. Kemp said as he got into the car and waved, his eyes still gentle and twinkling with sympathetic amusement.

  And Luke stood for a moment watching the old car going down the road as if something about the old man puzzled him. Then he turned and hurried into the house and into the kitchen where his Aunt Helen was baking, her plump face pink and shining from the heat, and he asked her if she would give him an old comb and brush. She made many clucking noises mixed with tolerant sighs when he explained why he wanted the brush; but she was willing to indulge him a little and when she had taken her pies out of the oven she got a brush and a comb.

  Whistling for Dan he found a cool spot in the shade of the pile of cordwood at the back of the house, sat down and began to comb the loose hair from under the dog’s neck.

  In his mind there was a picture of the surprise which would show on Uncle Henry’s face when he saw how sprightlier and younger Dan looked, and he longed to hear him say, “Why, whatever made me think Dan was an old dog not much good for anything? He looks as good as he ever did, Luke.” The dead hair came out in little tufts. He combed and tugged at the old matted hair. Some of it was like cotton batten and he could lift it out with his fingers. No matter how vigorously he combed, Dan did not complain.

  For the collie this careful combing was like an old memory of a care and concern for his appearance he hadn’t felt in anybody for a long time; he took it as a gesture of affection. In each tug of the comb Dan felt the beginning of a restoration of a lost importance.

  It took Luke an hour and a half to comb out the loose hair, which was there in a pile big enough to stuff a sofa pillow. When he had finished the combing he began to brush Dan; he liked brushing him; each stroke of the brush brought a shine to the coat, and soon he had brushed out the little white apron which is part of a collie’s distinction.

  “I don’t do it very well, Dan,” Luke apologized, “but you certainly look like a different dog to me. Anybody could see now you’re a thoroughbred. Walk up and down there, Dan. Go on, boy.”

  The collie put his forepaws out stiffly, his head came down, he drew all his weight back as he always did when stretching, then moved around in a little circle, waiting with his good eye glowing, his tail wagging expectantly.

  The collie now wanted to prance and play a little. He swung away from Luke and scurried around the yard, his nose to the ground as if chasing a rat until he found a stick about a foot long; snapping it up, the collie returned to Luke and dropped the stick at his feet; he nodded an invitation to the play and backed away encouragingly as if giving Luke a change to grab the stick. They both grabbed at it together, Dan tugging one way, Luke the other, with Dan growling and worrying and deliberately yielding a little ground. It really wasn’t hard to get the stick away from the collie, whose grip was no longer fierce and strong because of the bad teeth. So Luke humored him a little; he let Dan tear the stick from his hand. Laughing happily he watched Dan do a little victory march which was a kind of strut as he pranced in a circle, shaking the stick in the air.

  The shadows on that side of the house had lengthened. The mill saws were suddenly still . . . voices carried from the mill. Two of the workmen with their lunch pails went down the road. From the porch came the sound of Uncle Henry’s heavy step. Then Luke called out eagerly, “Could you come here a minute, Uncle Henry?”

  Uncle Henry came around the side of the house with his brisk, busy, long stride, mopping his sunburned forehead with a big white very clean handkerchief, and he smiled when he saw Luke squatting beside the pile of dog hair, the brush still in his hand.

  “What do think of Dan now, Uncle Henry?” Luke asked eagerly.

  “Been pretty busy, eh, Luke? What are you going to do with all that hair? Stuff a mattress?” Uncle Henry asked.

  “Dan looks pretty spry. Just like a young dog . . . almost, doesn’t he, Uncl
e Henry?” Luke encouraged him. “That’s the way he should look. That’s the way he really feels.”

  “Well, there’s less chance of his getting eczema with that old hair combed out,” Uncle Henry agreed. “But he’s still blind in one eye, Luke, and he’s still got a bad leg.”

  Looming up over Luke and Dan, his arms folded across his chest, Uncle Henry eyed them quizzically. As was natural and inevitable with him, he decided to draw out of the occasion a useful moral that might be of value to a growing boy.

  “Yes,” he said, with a little chuckle, “a man who didn’t look closely and took dogs and men at their face value might be deceived a little by that primping you’ve done, Luke. But with dogs and men in this world it’s often all a big front. A man and his work will often stand up under a quick glance, but once you look closely – once you know what you’re looking for, you see to it that you get your value for your money. Take Dan there. A man should disregard all that brushing. Take his mouth, see? Come here, Dan. Look at the teeth, Luke. Look at the eyes. See what I mean? In half a minute you know Dan’s a washed-up old dog. That primping should not take anybody in. Always try and see things for what they are, my boy. Even when you’re dealing only with yourself, face the real facts if you want to get on in the world.”

  Smiling, and yet serious, he stood there, his legs wide apart, looming up over them, ready to answer questions, but the questions didn’t come from Luke, who was too distressed. Nor did Dan wag his tail. Uncle Henry could be a maddening man. “Well, come on in and get washed up for dinner, Luke,” Uncle Henry said cheerfully.

  And Luke whispered to Dan, “He’s got his mind made up, Dan. That’s all. But if he can’t see that you look like a million dollars, then he’s the one who’s blind in one eye – not you.”