Joe's "Burning Heart" by Frances B. Callaway

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Oct 15, 1912

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 39, No. 40.

Joe's "Burning Heart"

By Frances B. Callaway

FROM his father, Joe Berwick inherited a blacksmith shop, his trade, and a love for drink. The smithy, a weather-beaten old brick building, with bleared, cobwebby windows and crumbling foundations, stood in an open lot near the center of the village. This lot was covered with a bed of black cinders, the accumulation of twenty years, and on top of the cinders all manner of rusty wheels, tires, plows, farm implements, and broken-down carts which had been collecting there for about the same length of time.

Joe, a great swarthy, stalwart fellow, was a splendid workman; and when the ring of his hammer made the sparks fly cheerily from the anvil, how his mother in that little cottage next to the smithy listened to the music of it! and all the neighbors could tell you how she used to sing. But the days and days when Joe was off on a drunk, and the old smithy was dark and silent — only the Lord knew how his mother used to pray!

Joe had been away to a Keeley cure for months, and when he returned he was cured, as they all hoped. But poor Joe! he no sooner entered the smithy than the old temptation, which seemed still lurking about the smoky walls and the blear-eyed windows, all leaped upon him whichever way he turned, and no man ever began a braver fight with the powers of darkness than did Joe Berwick that day.

Just a month Joe had been home, and the old thirst was on him that morning with something like madness. To resist it was like trying to stand in the way of a lightning express-train. Joe found himself trembling and giving way. He threw down his hammer and went to the open window, feeling faint and sick. The strip of doorway by his mother's cottage lay fresh and green in the April sunshine, and a robin lighting on an apple bough bursting with buds, was whistling joyously. Joe's mother in her sunbonnet, with her skirts carefully pinned back, was weeding out her bed of grass-pinks in the garden. Joe could hear her singing:

'The prince is ever in them, The daylight is serene, The pastures of the blessed Are decked in glorious sheen.'

Joe loved flowers and sunshine; he loved this peaceful little home; more than all, he loved his mother. He leaned his face heavily on his hands — O, how the battle was raging! There was a strange look in his eyes when a few moments later he put on his hat in a shamed way and walked out of the shop.

"I'm afeared Joe's goin' to give in," muttered the foreman, with a troubled look on his face.

"Goin' to give in?" laughed the customer who chanced to be waiting. "Nobody ever expected him to hold out more'n a week."

The old foreman turned back to his work with something like a groan. He had known and loved Joe since he was a little lad. Through the open window still came the mother's voice, clear, almost shrill, in its sweetness:

'The prince is ever in them, The daylight is serene, The pastures of the blessed Are decked in glorious sheen.'

The customer had paid for his work and gone away before Joe's familiar step was heard returning, and then he went straight past the shop into his mother's flower garden. He had something in a pot which he was carrying; and the foreman, glancing out of the window, heaved a sigh of relief, for he knew that Joe was all right when he heard the lad say in his hearty voice:

"I brought you a posy, mother. It's a primrose."

"Why, Joe! whatever made you do it?" cried the little mother, putting down her trowel with such a look of surprise and delight, and her hands trembled so she almost let the pot fall as Joe handed it to her.

From time to time all summer, Joe kept bringing home flowers, until the tiny garden spot was crammed full, the borders of the walks were filled, and even the porch was overflowing with them. Mrs. Berwick, no longer surprised or delighted, began to think that her son had gone out of his senses.

"Never mind," she said, soberly, as she put up the last hanging-basket; "he'll get over it when cold weather comes."

But cold weather came, and Joe still kept up his mania for buying flowers. One night when he came in with a great burly chrysanthemum, his mother lost all patience.

"Why, Joe, this house is so cluttered up with plants now I can hardly find room to set my foot down, and the windows are so filled up we can't see out of 'em — and what do you keep on buying more for?"

"Mother!" said Joe, taken aback, for she was a woman who never scolded, "I hadn't noticed the house was filled up so, and I thought you liked flowers — and the truth is, when the old cravin' came back drivin' me most mad, I just took to spendin' that money for flowers I might have spent in drink, and the Lord knows how it helped me. Do you mind now, mother?"

"Joe, my lad!" and the tears were streaming down his mother's cheeks, "you can buy flowers until we have to move out on the sidewalk if you'll only keep sober and steady. Of course I don't mind," and then Joe's mother was fast in Joe's arms, and they were crying together.

While Joe slept that night, Joe's mother was praying — praying as no mother ever prayed for a son on a battle-field before — that her son might not give in.

After this, Joe gave his mother a little purse to keep, and whenever he felt the old passion coming back, he put in it the money he would have spent for drink. The purse was filled over and over, and his mother saved it all until such a time as it could be spent for "Joe's flowers."

The garden being full, another summer the waste ground around the smithy was cleared up, soil was put there in place of cinders, and all neatly sodded, with a great heart of flowers in the center. This heart Joe kept filled with blazing red flowers; and the old foreman, who knew the story now, could not help telling the neighbors, he was so proud of Joe. The neighbors, who were all fond of Joe, could not help speaking of it to one another as they passed and repassed many times a day, and so it came that even the children knew every one of these flowers meant a battle and a victory, and they used to speak of this bed reverently as "Joe's burning heart."

The old smithy hardly knows itself any more, since its foundations have been rebuilt so square and true, its windows cleaned and brightened, and its weather-worn walls covered with shining ivies. On the south side, facing the cottage, a greenhouse has been built; and here Joe spends every spare moment, busying himself in the care of his flowers, or reading and studying about them, for it is his ambition to become not only a florist, but a botanist.

Nor does Joe forget his old comrades; and when he meets one in the street, out of work it may be, or downhearted, or bound for the saloon to have it all out in a spree, Joe will ask him into the greenhouse to see the flowers, or to offer him some odd bit of work, or just to give him some little potted plant to take home to the children. And what with Joe's kindness and friendliness, and the sweetness and the brightness of the flowers, and the encouragement of it all, the poor fellow will be tided over that hard place and saved from the spree.

"An' that's the way Joe works it," says the old foreman to a neighboring gossip. "That's the way he lends a helpin' hand. An' the boys are willin' to take a word of advice from Joe — they know what he's been through."

It was one summer morning that I first saw Joe's flower garden, and this story was told to me. Fine blush roses and tall madonna lilies were filling all the June air with fragrance; and as Joe's mother walked between them, she was singing softly but with confidence:

"The prince is ever in them, The daylight is serene." It was a busy morning, with the sound of Joe's anvil ringing out lustily and cheerily; and as I stood looking and listening, it seemed to me I had never heard such eloquent preachers of temperance as these lovely, innocent flowers opening in the sunshine — "Joe's flowers."