That night she again quarreled with her father. He tried to scold her
for remaining out late with a man, and she shut the door in his face.
On another evening she walked boldly out of the house with the school
teacher. The two walked along a road to where a bridge went over a small
stream. John May, who was still determined that the farmer's daughter
was in love with him, had on that evening followed the school teacher to
the Butterworth house and had been waiting outside intending to frighten
his rival with his fists. On the bridge something happened that drove
the school teacher away. John May came up to the two people and began
to make threats. The bridge had just been repaired and a pile of small,
sharp-edged stones lay close at hand. Clara picked one of them up and
handed it to the school teacher. “Hit him,” she said. “Don't be afraid.
He's only a coward. Hit him on the head with the stone.”
The three people stood in silence waiting for something to happen. John
May was disconcerted by Clara's words. He had thought she wanted him to
pursue her. He stepped toward the school teacher, who dropped the stone
that had been put into his hand and ran away. Clara went back along the
road toward her own house followed by the muttering farm hand who, after
her speech at the bridge, did not dare approach. “Maybe she was making
a bluff. Maybe she didn't want that young fellow to get on to what is
between us,” he muttered, as he stumbled along in the darkness.
In the house Clara sat for a half hour at a table in the lighted living
room beside her father, pretending to read a book. She half hoped he
would say something that would permit her to attack him. When nothing
happened she went upstairs and to bed, only again to spend the night
awake and white with anger at the thought of the cruel and unexplainable
things life seemed trying to do to her.
In September Clara left the farm to attend the State University at
Columbus. She was sent there because Tom Butterworth had a sister who
was married to a manufacturer of plows and lived at the State Capital.
After the incident with the farm hand and the misunderstanding that had
sprung up between himself and his daughter, he was uncomfortable with
her in the house and was glad to have her away. He did not want to
frighten his sister by telling of what had happened, and when he wrote,
tried to be diplomatic. “Clara has been too much among the rough men who
work on my farms and had become a little rough,” he wrote. “Take her in
hand. I want her to become more of a lady. Get her acquainted with the
right kind of people.” In secret he hoped she would meet and marry some
young man while she was away. Two of his sisters had gone away to school
and it had turned out that way.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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