Beautiful Joe by Marshall Saunders (most important books of all time txt) π
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- Author: Marshall Saunders
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them neat, and groomed his horse, and cleaned the cows, and dug up the
garden, it would have taken up all his time; but he never tidied the
place at all, till his yard and stable got so littered up with things he
threw down that he could not make his way about.
His house and stable stood in the middle of a large field, and they were
at some distance from the road. Passers-by could not see how untidy the
place was. Occasionally, a man came to look at the premises, and see
that they were in good order, but Jenkins always knew when to expect
him, and had things cleaned up a little.
I used to wish that some of the people that took milk from him would
come and look at his cows. In the spring and summer he drove them out to
pasture, but during the winter they stood all the time in the dirty,
dark stable, where the chinks in the wall were so big that the snow
swept through almost in drifts. The ground was always muddy and wet;
there was only one small window on the north side, where the sun only
shone in for a short time in the afternoon.
They were very unhappy cows, but they stood patiently and never
complained, though sometimes I know they must have nearly frozen in the
bitter winds that blew through the stable on winter nights. They were
lean and poor, and were never in good health. Besides being cold they
were fed on very poor food.
Jenkins used to come home nearly every afternoon with a great tub in the
back of his cart that was full of what he called "peelings." It was
kitchen stuff that he asked the cooks at the different houses where he
delivered milk, to save for him. They threw rotten vegetables, fruit
parings, and scraps from the table into a tub, and gave them to him at
the end of a few days. A sour, nasty mess it always was, and not fit to
give any creature.
Sometimes, when he had not many "peelings," he would go to town and get
a load of decayed vegetables, that grocers were glad to have him take
off their hands.
This food, together with poor hay, made the cows give very poor milk,
and Jenkins used to put some white powder in it, to give it "body," as
he said.
Once a very sad thing happened about the milk, that no one knew about
but Jenkins and his wife. She was a poor, unhappy creature, very
frightened at her husband, and not daring to speak much to him. She was
not a clean woman, and I never saw a worse-looking house than she kept.
She used to do very queer things, that I know now no housekeeper should
I have seen her catch up the broom to pound potatoes in the pot. Shepounded with the handle, and the broom would fly up and down in the air,
dropping dust into the pot where the potatoes were. Her pan of
soft-mixed bread she often left uncovered in the kitchen, and sometimes
the hens walked in and sat in it.
The children used to play in mud puddles about the door. It was the
youngest of them that sickened with some kind of fever early in the
spring, before Jenkins began driving the cows out to pasture. The child
was very ill, and Mrs. Jenkins wanted to send for a doctor, but her
husband would not let her. They made a bed in the kitchen, close to the
stove, and Mrs. Jenkins nursed the child as best she could. She did all
her work near by, and I saw her several times wiping the child's face
with the cloth that she used for washing her milk pans.
Nobody knew outside the family that the little girl was ill. Jenkins had
such a bad name, that none of the neighbors would visit them. By-and-by
the child got well, and a week or two later Jenkins came home with quite
a frightened face, and told his wife that the husband of one of his
customers was very ill with typhoid fever.
After a time the gentleman died, and the cook told Jenkins that the
doctor wondered how he could have taken the fever, for there was not a
case in town.
There was a widow left with three orphans, and they never knew that they
had to blame a dirty, careless milkman for taking a kind husband and
father from them.
* * * * *
CHAPTER II (THE CRUEL MILKMAN)
I have said that Jenkins spent most of his days in idleness. He had to
start out very early in the morning, in order to supply his customers
with milk for breakfast. Oh, how ugly he used to be, when he came into
the stable on cold winter mornings, before the sun was up.
He would hang his lantern on a hook, and get his milking stool, and if
the cows did not step aside just to suit him, he would seize a broom or
fork, and beat them cruelly.
My mother and I slept on a heap of straw in the corner of the stable,
and when she heard his step in the morning she always roused me, so that
we could run out-doors as soon as he opened the stable door. He always
aimed a kick at us as we passed, but my mother taught me how to dodge
him.
After he finished milking, he took the pails of milk up to the house for
Mrs. Jenkins to strain and put in the cans, and he came back and
harnessed his horse to the cart. His horse was called Toby, and a poor,
miserable, broken-down creature he was. He was weak in the knees, and
weak in the back, and weak all over, and Jenkins had to beat him all the
time, to make him go. He had been a cab horse, and his mouth had been
jerked, and twisted, and sawed at, till one would think there could be
no feeling left in it; still I have seen him wince and curl up his lip
when Jenkins thrust in the frosty bit on a winter's morning.
Poor old Toby! I used to lie on my straw sometimes and wonder he did not
cry out with pain. Cold and half starved he always was in the winter
time, and often with raw sores on his body that Jenkins would try to
hide by putting bits of cloth under the harness. But Toby never
murmured, and he never tried to kick and bite, and he minded the least
word from Jenkins, and if he swore at him. Toby would start back, or
step up quickly, he was so anxious to please him.
After Jenkins put him in the cart, and took in the cans, he set out on
his rounds. My mother, whose name was Jess, always went with him. I used
to ask her why she followed such a brute of a man, and she would hang
her head, and say that sometimes she got a bone from the different
houses they stopped at. But that was not the whole reason. She liked
Jenkins so much, that she wanted to be with him.
I had not her sweet and patient disposition, and I would not go with
her. I watched her out of sight, and then ran up to the house to see if
Mrs. Jenkins had any scraps for me. I nearly always got something, for
she pitied me, and often gave me a kind word or look with the bits of
food that she threw to me.
When Jenkins come home, I often coaxed mother to run about and see some
of the neighbors' dogs with me. But she never would, and I would not
leave her. So, from morning to night we had to sneak about, keeping out
of Jenkins' way as much as we could, and yet trying to keep him in
sight. He always sauntered about with a pipe in his mouth, and his hands
in his pockets, growling first at his wife and children, and then at his
dumb creatures.
I have not told what became of my brothers and sisters. One rainy day,
when we were eight weeks old, Jenkins, followed by two or three of his
ragged, dirty children, came into the stable and looked at us. Then he
began to swear because we were so ugly, and said if we had been
good-looking, he might have sold some of us. Mother watched him
anxiously, and fearing some danger to her puppies, ran and jumped in the
middle of us, and looked pleadingly up at him.
It only made him swear the more. He took one pup after another, and
right there, before his children and my poor distracted mother, put an
end to their lives. Some of them he seized by the legs and knocked
against the stalls, till their brains were dashed out, others he killed
with a fork. It was very terrible. My mother ran up and down the stable,
screaming with pain, and I lay weak and trembling, and expecting every
instant that my turn would come next. I don't know why he spared me. I
was the only one left.
His children cried, and he sent them out of the stable and went out
himself. Mother picked up all the puppies and brought them to our nest
in the straw and licked them, and tried to bring them back to life; but
it was of no use; they were quite dead. We had them in our corner of the
stable for some days, till Jenkins discovered them, and swearing
horribly at us, he took his stable fork and threw them out in the yard,
and put some earth over them.
My mother never seemed the same after this. She was weak and miserable,
and though she was only four years old, she seemed like an old dog. This
was on account of the poor food she had been fed on. She could not run
after Jenkins, and she lay on our heap of straw, only turning over with
her nose the scraps of food I brought her to eat. One day she licked me
gently, wagged her tail, and died.
As I sat by her, feeling lonely and miserable, Jenkins came into the
stable. I could not bear to look at him. He had killed my mother. There
she lay, a little, gaunt, scarred creature, starved and worried to death
by him. Her mouth was half open, her eyes were staring. She would never
again look kindly at me, or curl up to me at night to keep me warm. Oh,
how I hated her murderer! But I sat quietly, even when he went up and
turned her over with his foot to see if she was really dead. I think he
was a little sorry, for he turned scornfully toward me and said, "She
was worth two of you; why didn't you go instead?"
Still I kept quiet till he walked up to me and kicked at me. My heart
was nearly broken, and I could stand no more. I flew at him and gave him
a savage bite on the ankle.
"Oho," he said, "so you are going to be a fighter, are you? I'll fix you
for that." His face was red and furious. He seized me by the back of the
neck and carried me out to the yard where a log lay on the ground.
"Bill," he called to one of his children, "bring me the hatchet."
He laid my head on the log and pressed one hand on my struggling body. I
was now a year old and a full-sized dog. There was a quick, dreadful
pain, and he had cut off my ear, not in the way they cut puppies' ears,
but close to my head, so close that he cut
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