Windy McPherson's Son eBook

At the edge of the wood he stopped and leaning on a rail fence watched until he saw his mother come out to the pump in the back yard.  She had begun to draw water for the day’s washing.  For her also the holiday was at an end.  A flood of tears ran down the boy’s cheeks, and he shook his fist in the direction of the town.  “You may laugh at that fool Windy, but you shall never laugh at Sam McPherson,” he cried, his voice shaking with excitement.

CHAPTER III

One evening, when he had grown so that he outtopped Windy, Sam McPherson returned from his paper route to find his mother arrayed in her black, church-going dress.  An evangelist was at work in Caxton and she had decided to hear him.  Sam shuddered.  In the house it was an understood thing that when Jane McPherson went to church her son went with her.  There was nothing said.  Jane McPherson did all things without words, always there was nothing said.  Now she stood waiting in her black dress when her son came in at the door and he hurriedly put on his best clothes and went with her to the brick church.

Valmore, John Telfer, and Freedom Smith, who had taken upon themselves a kind of common guardianship of the boy and with whom he spent evening after evening at the back of Wildman’s grocery, did not go to church.  They talked of religion and seemed singularly curious and interested in what other men thought on the subject but they did not allow themselves to be coaxed into a house of worship.  To the boy, who had become a fourth member of the evening gatherings at the back of the grocery store, they would not talk of God, answering the direct questions he sometimes asked by changing the subject.  Once Telfer, the reader of poetry, answered the boy.  “Sell papers and fill your pockets with money but let your soul sleep,” he said sharply.

In the absence of the others Wildman talked more freely.  He was a spiritualist and tried to make Sam see the beauties of that faith.  On long summer afternoons the grocer and the boy spent hours driving through the streets in a rattling old delivery wagon, the man striving earnestly to make clear to the boy the shadowy ideas of God that were in his mind.

Although Windy McPherson had been the leader of a Bible class in his youth, and had been a moving spirit at revival meetings during his early days in Caxton, he no longer went to church and his wife did not ask him to go.  On Sunday mornings he lay abed.  If there was work to be done about the house or yard he complained of his wounds.  He complained of his wounds when the rent fell due, and when there was a shortage of food in the house.  Later in his life and after the death of Jane McPherson the old soldier married the widow of a farmer by whom he had four children and with whom he went to church twice on Sunday.  Kate wrote Sam one of her infrequent letters about it.  “He has met his match,” she said, and was tremendously pleased.