Read Online Across Five Aprils by Irene Hunt - Free Book Online Page A

fireplace, where the flames struck at a great log and shot up in hot tongues now and then, as the fat from a roasting chicken dripped into the fire. The warmth, the smell of food and wood smoke, overpowered Jethro for a while, and he would have sat silent, drinking in content, if his obligations as a guest had not demanded more of him.
    “Going to spend the night with me, Jeth?” Shadrach asked, removing the boy’s heavy shoes and chafing his feet with cheerful vigor.
    “Ma allowed I could if you was of a mind to ask me.”
    “I think she knew pretty well that I’d be of a mind to ask you.”
    “She sent that loaf of white bread fer our supper; it’s fresh out of the ashes.”
    “Good. I’m glad now that I had the sense to start a chicken roasting. Fresh bread and chicken should make a pretty good meal for a couple of hungry bachelors like us, eh?”
    Jethro flushed with pleasure. Shad was like that. He was different. He had book learning and was almost twenty-one; still he could make a ten-year-old schoolboy feel proud as a man.
    “How’s—Jenny?” Shadrach asked after a time.
    “She was cryin’ a little. Pa’s been talkin’ to her about bein’ too young fer—”
    “Marrying me, I know.” It was the schoolmaster’s turn to flush, and he looked stern, as he did sometimes in the classroom.
    “Ma would let her git married to you, Shad. But Pa—sometimes Pa kin be so good, and then agin, he kin be awful strict.”
    Shadrach stared gloomily at Jethro’s foot, which he still held in his hands.
    “I respect him so much,” he said after a while, “and I owe him so much, but I think he’s overshooting the mark when he sets himself up as knowing exactly what is right or wrong for two other people. I think he’s being tyrannical and—” he stopped himself abruptly.
    Jethro felt a twinge of loyalty for his father in the face of Shadrach’s obvious anger.
    “Of course Jenny is real young, Shad,” he said, with the gravity of a small parson.
    Shadrach raised a black eyebrow. “Thou too, Brutus?” he asked, grinning a little sourly.
    Jethro did not understand the allusion, and Shadrach seemed to be in no mood for explanations.
    “There wouldn’t be any question about it if it weren’t for this war,” he said, after a moment with his own thoughts. “I’d be willing to wait years for Jenny, but when I think of leaving her, maybe for—a long time—I guess panic hits me a little.”
    “When do you go, Shad?”
    “Next week—John and I. He’ll go as far as Chicago with me; I’ll go back to Philadelphia.”
    “Seems like I can’t face up to yore goin’.”
    “I’m not eager for it either, Jeth, not by a long way. I’ve got a lot of plans for the next forty or fifty years of my life, and being a soldier is not a part of any single one of them.”
    “Do you hev to do it then?”
    “I guess I do. There’s been a long chain of events leading up to this time; the dreams of men in my generation are as insignificant as that—” he snapped his fingers sharply. “We were foolish enough to reach manhood just when the long fizzling turned into an explosion.”
    “Maybe—maybe it will be over soon. I know Pa don’t think so, but people in Newton was sayin’ that it would, and Jenny even read it in the paper.”
    “What is that saying of your mother’s—about hope making a fool out of reason? We finally— finally, mind you—have a victory at Forts Henry and Donelson. Then—hooray! The end of the war is in sight for the optimists. I’m afraid not, Jeth.”
    The mention of Forts Henry and Donelson made Jethro remember the letter. He hastily unpinned it from the inside of his shirt and gave it to Shadrach.
    “I fergot this—it’s from Tom. Ma wanted you to read it.”
    Shadrach took the letter eagerly and held it so that it was lighted by the fire as he read. When he had finished, he folded it slowly and looked into the flames.
    Jethro sat quietly watching his teacher’s sober face. He