Across Five Aprils: Chapters 5–6

“I know I kin do it, Pa. There’s nothin’ hard about it — jest keepin’ a level head and usin’ gumption.”

He had fifteen miles to travel; master of his team, navigator of his route, he felt proud and exhilarated by his freedom and sense of adventure.

People were moving about their morning chores in barnyards or woodlots; inevitably they stood still, watching the approach of the wagon as it rattled down the road; invariably they waved a hand in greeting and stood watching for a long time after Jethro passed, as if trying to guess whose team it was and whose boy was out on the road at such an early hour.

Jethro maintained the stoic calm of the farm-bred boy as the wagon swayed; he kept his small, hunched frame in a position of untroubled assurance, whistling a little now and then to prove to himself that his nerves were as nearly iron-like as he wanted to believe they were.

It had been a wonderful experience, and he looked at the place wistfully as he passed.

He looked directly at the man with an anger that dissipated his weakness.

He turned then to Jethro, who stood beside the counter, his body hunched together as if in an effort to make himself as inconspicuous as possible.

Jethro shrank from the great bulk beside him with fear and revulsion.

Both man and boy seemed to be in tacit agreement that the attack at the bridge was a closed incident, a thing for which they felt a solid indifference.

They noticed his pallor, and Ellen’s eyes were tender as she recognized the signs of tears, but they would not shame him by asking if the trip had been too hard for him.

Now he was to know labor from dawn till sunset; he was to learn what it meant to scan the skies for rain while corn burned in the fields, or to see a heavy rainstorm lash grain from full, strong wheat stalks, or to know that hay, desperately needed for winter feeding, lay rotting in a wet quagmire of a field.

But Jethro was to experience one attack of childish fury before the transition to his new standing was fully accomplished.

When his sister left the table and ran off to her room with the letter, Jethro was irritated, but tolerant of her rights; however, when she returned, with flaming cheeks, and began to read a few excerpts from the closely written pages, he was dismayed.

He was sound asleep before the spring night was quite dark, but excessive fatigue, like excitement, was a forerunner of the nightmares that had plagued him for the past year.

Jethro was annoyed at Shep’s gullibility, but not particularly anxious.