Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/128

 his eyes open another moment, and lay as though he were dead for twelve or fourteen hours every night, awaking to see the country sun shining in on the slant, hewed beams over his head, and to hear the country sounds, as clear as crystal coming in through the open window; the mill-brook chanting, the wind in the big maple, the bright, brazen call of the rooster, the sociable grunting of the pigs.

The pigs were a great comfort to Neale at this time. After he had washed in the brown rain-water in his wash-bowl, and had gone down to the clean, sunny kitchen, always empty at this hour, and had eaten heartily of the fried potatoes, hash, and pan-cakes which he found waiting for him in the warming-oven of the kitchen stove, he sauntered out, a doughnut in his hand, to lean over the pig-pen and commune with the pigs. He stood there an hour at a time, occasionally scratching their backs as an excuse for staying so long with them, but for the most part gazing dreamily down, lost in the magnificent sensuality of their joy in life. They had always been fed an hour or so earlier, so there was no excitement in their profound beatitude, none of the homeric scramblings of mealtimes. Neale was not ready for that yet. What he needed, what slowly floated him up from the depths, was their rapt ecstasy of repletion, their voluptuous pleasure in sinking thoughtfully into the cool, wet filth and the glow of their peace as they stood sunning themselves, visibly penetrated to every fleshly cell of their vast bodies, by the most perfect accord with the scheme of the universe, as they saw it. Neale gazed at them as they lay sprawled in the mud, or moved about very slowly, grunting very gently, occasionally turning upon the boy a small, wise, philosophic eye; and they did his heart good, like medicine.

When he was ashamed to stand there any longer … although no one ever commented on it, and indeed no one was there to see it, except Grandmother and Jenny busy in the house, he loitered along the path which led to the seldom-used foot-bridge across the mill-brook. The sound of the water always threw him into another contemplative pause here. He often lay down on the rusty-colored pine-needles