Read Northfield for Free Online Page B

blazes was going on here, but Ben Wood rode up alongside of me. There was that eighth man, he’d been hiding all along.
    “That’s Sam Wells,” Ben Wood told me, pulling the extra horse behind him. “Don’t mind him none. He’s shy is all.” He lowered his voice, tapped his temple. “Little touched in the head.”
    “What’s in the wagon?”
    “Our supplies. Long way from Tennessee, sir. Sam’s harmless, Mister Brown. I give you my word.”
    My suspicions had returned, but that Ben Wood could talk so smoothly, politely, it eased my apprehensions about them. I just didn’t know what Matilda would think.
    Well, that’s not entirely true.
    “First things first, Joe,” Matilda said, wiping her hands on the apron and blocking the front door. “There’s tobacco flakes stuck in your teeth, which is brown as molasses. Didn’t I ask you not to buy none of that devil’s chaw? Rot your mouth out, it will. Didn’t I tell you we don’t have money to squander? You don’t see me buying sassy-frass tea.”
    “Mister Wood over yonder, he offered me his own plug, Mama,” I told my wife. Which was the truth, I figured, pushing my own dirty store-bought plug deeper inside my mule-ear trousers pocket.
    “And that’s another thing. How many times before you get it through that thick skull of yours that we don’t have enough food to spare? You meet any fool on the road, you invite him over for supper, then work your jaw till midnight. Gracious, Joe, how many are there over yonder? Nine? We can’t spare no food for nine, ten men.”
    “It’s only eight, Mama, and they’re strangers, on their way north. From Tennessee. Said they wouldn’t take no food from us. Got their own.”
    Rain started to sprinkle, but she still blocked the door, staring over my shoulder at the camp Ben Wood and his friends had made in the field by the barn.
    “I don’t like it when you bring strangers home, Joe. Don’t like strangers.” She was looking at me again. “Did you order the plowshares?”
    “Yes, Mama.”
    “Get the coffee?
    “Yes’m. And sugar, and flour.”
    “How much did Ziegler give you?”
    “Same as last time.”
    She snorted. “Well, best bring in them sacks before they get ruint by the rain.” When she looked up again, her face hardened and she let out an angry bark. Knew she wasn’t snapping at me no more, so I turned around to see Mister Wood standing by the well with a bucket, him just smiling at us.
    “What do you want?” my wife hollered at him.
    “Fetching water, ma’am, to boil potatoes.”
    “Well, if it’s water you’re after, fetch it. Don’t just stand there paralyzed.” She looked back at me. “What is it them men are doing here?”
    “Heading north to the logging country,” I started to say, but only got about halfway when Matilda was barking at Ben Wood again.
    “Missus Brown….” Ben Wood swept off his gray hat. “The Good Book says in Saint Matthew, Chapter Twenty-Five, Verse Forty-One…‘Then shall he say also to them on the left hand, depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungered, and ye gave no meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink. I was a stranger, and ye took me not in naked, and ye clothed me not, sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.’”
    Setting the bucket by the well, he reached inside his coat pocket and pulled out one of them little Bibles, the kinds soldiers oftentimes carried with them off to war, and he started thumbing through the pages as he walked toward us till he was protected somewhat from the little drizzle of rain under what passed for a porch at our place, and he was telling my wife, who on most Sundays didn’t cotton to having her toes preached on, to turn with him to Chapter Seven of the same Gospel.
    “‘Judge not, that ye be not judged,’” he read. “‘For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged; and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you