Stoner

His Occupation It was a lonely household, of which he was an only child, and it was bound together by the necessity of its toil. In the evenings the three of them sat in the small kitchen, lighted by a single kerosene lamp, staring into the yellow flame. Often during the hour or so between supper and bed, the only sound that could be heard was the weary movement of a body in a straight chair, and the soft creak of a timber giving a little beneath the edge of the house. The house was built in a crude square, and the unpainted timbers sagged around the porch and doors. It had with the years taken on the colors of the dry land, gray and brown, streaked with white. On one side of the house was a long parlor, sparsely furnished with straight chairs and a few hewn tables, and a kitchen, where the family spent most of its little time together. On the other side were two bedrooms, each furnished with an iron bedstead, enameled white, a single straight chair, and a table with a lamp and a washbasin on it. The floors were of unpainted plank, unevenly spaced and cracking with age, up through which dust steadily seeped, and was swept back each day by Stoner's mother. At school he did his lessons as if they were chores only somewhat less exhausting than those around the farm. When he finished high school in the spring of 1910, he expected to take over more of the work in the fields. It seemed to him that his father grew slower and more weary with the passing months. But one evening in late spring, after the two men had spent a full day hoeing corn, his father spoke to him in the kitchen, after the supper dishes had been cleared away. "'County agent come by last week.' William looked up from the red-and-white checked oilcloth, spread smoothly over the round kitchen table. He did not speak. "'Says they have a new school at the University in Columbia. They call it a College of Agriculture. Says he thinks you ought to go. It takes four years.' "'Four years,' William said. "'Does it cost money?' "'You could work your room and board,' his father said. "'Your ma as a first cousin owns a place just outside Columbia. There would be books and things. I could send you two or three dollars a month.' William spread his hands on the tablecloth, which gleamed dully under the lamplight. He had never been farther from home than Boonville, fifteen miles away. He swallowed to steady his voice. "'Think you could manage the place all by yourself?' he asked. "'Your ma and me could manage. I'd plant the upper twenty in wheat. That would cut down the handwork.' William looked at his mother. "'Ma?' he asked. She said tonelessly, "'You do what your pa says.' "'You really want me to go?' he asked, as if he half hoped for a denial. "'You really want me to?' His father shifted his weight on the chair. He looked at his thick, calloused fingers, into the cracks of which soil had penetrated so deeply that it could not be washed away. He laced his fingers together and held them up from the table, almost in an attitude of prayer. "'I never had no schoolin' to speak of,' he said, looking at his hands. "'I started workin' a farm when I finished sixth grade. Never held with schoolin' when I was a youngin'. But now I don't know. Seems like the land gets drier and harder to work every year. It ain't rich like it was when I was a boy. County agents says they got new ideas, ways of doin' things they teach you at the university. Maybe he's right. Sometimes when I'm workin' the field I get to thinkin'.' He paused. His fingers tightened upon themselves, and his clasped hands dropped to the table. "'I get to thinkin'.' He scowled at his hands and shook his head. "'You go on to the university come fall. Your ma and me will manage.' It was the longest speech he had ever heard his father make. That fall he went to Columbia and enrolled in the university as a freshman in the College of Agriculture.