Chapter XII: Part 12

His grandmother began to reach for her handkerchief with a great hand which could not find its way. He gave it to her and smoothed the sheets under her chin.

At any rate, to proceed (if only toward death) on the basis of a little more experience than one had had time to acquire. Able to anticipate and control the next moment, perhaps infinitely little, by some understanding of what would make it what it would be--for was not each moment the child of those which had gone before? Able to build one’s continual bridge from the past, across a sort of abyss in the dark, to the future, with a certain knowledge of at least one side of the abyss (the side from which one came) and a certain knowledge of other bridges: what they had been made of; how they had broken, with the hearts of their builders; why they had fallen again and again into the dark. Knowledge gained by breaking the law.... Alwyn thought with rather unreasonable pride that he had become a man in as nearly as possible the way that men had become heroes or gods.

His grandmother Tower was tossing very feebly, very slowly, from side to side of her pillow. He saw that the lock of gray hair on her forehead was like a dead star, ashes of a star. It was beginning to rain.

He had loved them indeed, and tried to see them clearly and at close hand, the old mothers who lay side by side in the past as she lay in the dim lamplight, as many as there were locks of hair in Serena Cannon’s album--loved them with the fever of inquisitiveness of an adolescent about love. Now he was a man, he supposed. His heart was heavy and the innocence of his mind darkened with what he had found out, or fancied he had found out--with theories like this one about incest and knowledge of the past.

His grandmother was talking to herself, but she no longer had breath enough for those who overheard to be able to understand. Alwyn fancied that he could understand without being able to hear.

It had all been like that, his understanding. Of Wisconsin, for example, in the flower of its age, the wild flower of its age. His sweetheart among the parts of the world.... When he was born it was already a mother, even a grandmother. Actually he was innocent and ignorant of its love, its resistance, its abandon and spiteful changes of heart. He had not been in time to go out to meet it with oxen and teams of hungry, hurried horses. He had not handled a rifle, an ax, a hammer, or a plow, on its great and tedious body. Nor had he eaten in a sort of habitual starvation the turnips which according to his grandfather had tasted like “Paradise apples.” He had not feared God, nor begotten children, nor lived by the sweat of his brow. And perhaps he never would....

But it had been true love, and not altogether sterile, illusory as the relation had been. In imagination, as adolescent boys, night after night and one indoor afternoon after another, suffer the enjoyment of those whom they have never touched or never even seen--he also had exhausted his boyhood to master an abstraction, a wilderness in the abstract, and to wring from its hypocritically rich body--what? Just enough knowledge to live on.... And it was the mother of the weak, incalculable manhood which, within and protected by his immature arms, lay like a newborn child.

His grandmother had slipped down in her bed, which made it hard for her to breathe; so he lifted her up, with his arms under hers. Her shoulders, which slipped out of her nightgown, looked as if the skin had been polished. He remembered how she had used to bathe late in the afternoon, with water heated in a great copper kettle which the Towers had brought from York State, and how, when he was a small boy, she had sometimes asked him to wash her back with a red-flannel cloth. As he worked he had studied the twisted, bluish veins, and wondered dreamily why the heart took such devious paths; and she had said, “Rub hard. Get on with it, or I shall take cold!...” For the first time since she had been dying, the tears came to Alwyn’s eyes.

He sat down again in his chair amid the books lying on the floor, under the lamp, and tried to stop his futile tears by forcing himself to go on thinking. Would he, having brooded feverishly upon the past, the particular long series of energies and passions which had in the end produced himself, himself to be the part they would play together in the future--would he then be a little more capable of a good life than the others had been? The use of their common, unlucky abilities blessed at last, for him? “Bless unto our use this day our daily bread....” And his daily life well constructed like a bridge from one day to another? Would he be able to see to it that his heart did not break--not, at least, until he was ready to die? He asked for no more supernatural powers than these....

Indeed his birthright, that of the son of one of the poorest pioneer families, was wealth and power enough, of a kind. A patrimony, an unearned inheritance, of knowledge of life, of skeletons in the closet, of precepts which had led infallibly to resignation or disappointment, handed down to him in his turn. Everything that he knew about his family had been told by someone to someone else, fact by fact, and at last he had been told. So he resembled a young man whose fortune, bequeathed by numerous relatives, is so vast that he does not know what to do with it; and he thought of the usual disorder of such a life....

A disorder like that of his grandmother Duff’s unbalanced mind: memories, inverted ideas, many-voiced wandering symmetrical discords, the entire material of three-quarters of a century’s experience rewoven more briefly in a deafening fugue--out of which at last had come, like the phrase at the end of a fugue, “You know, you are my only sweetheart.” These words sounded again and again in Alwyn’s mind, the bitter end of a tune broken off, and echoing after it a special sadness, unconsoled, but satisfied. Life then was like what was in the mind of a bitter woman in her second childhood, like a fugue. But apart from the sterile passion of an old woman for her grandson, the passion of the past and present for the time to come, of adolescents for what had gone before, various kinds of madness of the imagination for various reasons uncontrolled--apart from these things, was there any final phrase?

He ought to have known, if his passion of curiosity had done its work well. He had been so proud of being able to see a certain distance into the past. Was it a false perspective of his own invention? Seemingly he had increased his knowledge of life by adding to brief memories of his own, others’ interminable recollections; but was it merely an adolescent’s poor substitute for experience, before experience has had time to begin? He could not tell, but some day he would be able to.

For his life, scarcely begun, would repeat theirs; the materials more closely and differently combined, in closer harmony or perhaps with harsher discord--a restatement nevertheless. The materials determined in advance: certain human limitations, American characteristics, family traits. All the surprises there would be would result from the combinations (one interrupting another, one melting into another), the rhythm and order of the combinations. Otherwise, in so far as he was surprised by himself, he would know that he had made a mistake in his estimate of what he had to work with. Just as by the second generation he had revised his notions of the first, errors in his judgment of their lives in general would be corrected by the particular instance of his own. And his own, if he did his work well, ought to resemble a fugue, without a break (that is, without disaster) from beginning to end, without violent emphasis, each element in perfect relief, played without loss of memory or unsteadiness in either hand: counterpoint of their appetites, their frugality, cunning, vanity, idealism, and homesickness.... And the phrase at the end?

That night, between three and four o’clock, Alwyn thought that his grandmother was sinking rapidly. He had forgotten: death, of course, was the phrase at the end. But she got better before dawn.

What then was it going to be like, his life? (His mind, as if he were a maniac, went over and over the same ground; he could not stop it.) He knew that he would perpetuate in himself the immortal disagreement, the so-called warfare, between the sexes. At worst, for example, the struggle between his great-aunt Nancy and her husband Jesse Davis; at best the mysterious balance of his parents. That damage to his simplicity was done; he had thought too much of women with sympathy, of men with wonder.

Over the house (in which everyone but himself and his grandmother slept) the long, soft lightning and thunder interlaced with clouds and being drawn away in one direction or another, made a mass of voices in too close harmony.

He knew further that he would unite in himself two races of men, the characteristics of two men: his grandfather Tower the aristocrat, painstakingly upright about a few unprofitable actions controlled by conscience, never changing his faithful and secretive mind; his grandfather Duff, a sort of Proteus, a hypocrite, a liar or rhetorician, profiting by everything. He would have to make some sort of peace between the fruitless pride of the one and the creative vanity of the other.

There would also have to be a compromise between his talent for poverty and his love of wealth; not, he hoped, the one his uncle Jim had made. He wondered at the fact that he was most deeply indebted to that one of his relatives who conformed to his standards, appealed to his imagination, the least. He felt for his uncle at once a vaguely disdainful pity and that admiration which, even against one’s better judgment, often follows gratitude. Thanks to him, to his family by marriage, to a Chicago education and the leisure of going to school, there had been opened uncertainly to Alwyn a way of life which was neither his way nor that of their common blood relatives--less desperate than theirs, possibly less futile than his. Alwyn realized that he would not have had the courage to appreciate the comfortless glory which the pioneers and (his uncle excepted) the first generation of their children, deserved, but for this personal emancipation from their destiny, this more agreeable prospect....

The morning came. His father woke, sent the dogs after the cattle, and came in to hear how the dying woman had passed the night. She was lying quietly, her head thrown back on the pillow; the breath of her nostrils alone seemed alive, like a small, rising and falling, colorless flame at one end of a burned-out log.

The next day his grandmother’s condition seemed to improve, and his uncle Jim came. He brought the news that Mrs. Fielding as well was not expected to live more than a few months, and that after her death he and his sister-in-law, Miss Anne, were to be married. His mother told him that she wanted him to preach her funeral sermon, and he seemed exceedingly proud.

Alwyn had sometimes called Mrs. Fielding his third grandmother: the least loved, least pitiable, and perhaps most tragic of the three--representatively tragic. An old, pampered heroine of a great period in the nation’s history, that of the birth and infancy of wealth; proud of herself as a proof that it had been a success. Alwyn believed that it had not been. She and her house had given him a history lesson.

Whenever he had come back from Chicago to the country he had looked about him with a half-willing, almost bitter enthusiasm. Neither Chicago nor Wisconsin had justified its existence. The city had surpassed all reasonable expectations, and no one who did not have something to gain by optimism was pleased with the result. It seemed able to do, more and more powerfully, only two things: grow rich, and complain. The country lives had been no more than self-supporting; in his mother’s words, no worthy gifts to the world had been made. What then had the heroic efforts in the country come to? Shabby and gloomy farms, unserviceable virtues, broken hearts, large family reunions, grievances of those (like Alwyn himself) with ideas above their station, other grievances and old-time religion.... Where literal wilderness had been conquered, a wilderness still, overrun by peasant immigrants, but still ineffectually governed by the early settlers’ wistful young, by their habits of poverty-stricken conquerors. There was this difference between Chicago and Wisconsin: in the country the avidity had never been assuaged. There were blank spaces between the badly cultivated fields; there were areas of craving and brute force which poverty had been too God-fearing, prosperity not eager enough, to lay hands upon. Across the Mississippi Valley the barbed-wire fences lay like the staves of music paper on which as yet there were scarcely any notes.... It had not kept its promise, so it was still the promised land.

Represented by Mrs. Fielding, in great towns like her town, the West had taken its first step toward a civilization; it had been a step in the wrong direction. Already moribund prosperity, abortive progress; men like Alwyn’s uncle kept as close to the women as drones in a beehive, little or no posterity nevertheless.... Between them and the most brutish immigrants, the future, for its purposes, whatever they were, would find little to choose. Would it not have to fall back upon the past, upon the poor God of poverty and His remnant of pioneers, unchanged though dying out? Those who are best prepared for the second lap of a race are those who did not even get a start in the first.

Avid company of failures, out of date, behind the times, perhaps timeless. Ethically, socially, above all financially, they had made little progress; in modern methods of pretending to be happy, of pretending to have satisfied on earth their hearts’ desire, they had made none at all. Pioneers because their unhappy dispositions unfitted them for everything else.... Imaginative but disillusioned; therefore talented for the sake of God, religious in hope of heaven. Amid the national opinionatedness, factitious gayety, cruelty by accident, grace and candor, ignorance, imagination, ugly opulence with or without wealth, a sense of poverty with or without actual need--theirs was the only glory, such as it was.

The Middle Ages of America (not middle age, but youth) were coming to an end, leaving behind countless denominations of Protestantism instead of cathedrals. Too soon, the holiness was going out of the land. There were modern inventions for warming the heart, and certain fires with too bitter smoke had been allowed to go out--except upon old-fashioned, unattractive hearths. And perhaps, if America was to justify its existence, to be justified for the massacre of redskins, the broken white hearts, the destruction of the city called Tenochtitlan or something of the sort--the children of those hearths, reared in, embittered and half-intoxicated by the smoke, would have to do the work. And they might well be ready for any outlawry; ready to betray, for the work’s sake, those whom they would continue to love even more than they ought; to betray the West to the East in the warfare between the two in order to gain for the former the advantages of defeat as well as victory; to betray their native land as a whole for love of some characteristically native land of their imagination. With the recklessness, the scruples, the vainglory, which characterize the sons of men who thought they had failed.... Stronger than their fathers, because they would have less fear of God; more desperate because, lacking a God of resignation and forgiveness, failure would be even more intolerable. The future of America, if it was to be worth troubling about, depended on them.

Flattering and terrifying himself by his thought, according to his family’s habit of mind, Alwyn shrank from this responsibility of being the hope of his native land. And those original beginnings which, as he had persuaded himself, were unchangeable among his relatives, perverted among his countrymen, unchanged in him--just what had they been? He would probably need to know. His thought ran superficially and not impartially over the history of the country....

Invariably at the end of these exercises of his imagination, another day beginning monotonously.... His grandmother had rested well, as well as could be expected. A little hue of life appeared in her face, which seemed made of candle drippings and stone; once more her fallen lips began to resemble, as they did during the day, one dried rosebud laid on another (the meager cinnamon roses of her youth). What were like dim recollections of bright colors began to haunt the room and the flat country around Brighton, where they had brought her to die. Her illness seemed interminable.

The following day Alwyn could not sleep because of the heat. So he began to write a historical essay, summarizing in part what he had recently been thinking with so much assurance. Three or four days later, he read it to his mother, who said she was not quite sure she understood what it meant. He hoped that when he went back to school in the fall one or another of his teachers would praise it. He himself was uneasily proud of what he had done.

Then suddenly his grandmother Duff died. Alwyn had to stay with his other grandmother the day of the funeral, because his father had to go with his mother to drive the few mourners to and from the cemetery. But he went by train to Aaronsville the day before, in order to see the little woman again. She was scarcely recognizable: in a coffin which was too large, amid the glued ruffles and pleats of tulle, lay a bit of natural elegance--that was all. Her face had lost its vigilant look, its aged vanity, indeed all resemblance to herself; it was like that of a young girl in a fairy tale who had withered overnight. Alwyn went back to Brighton. Only the spectacle of his grandmother Tower’s anguish saved him from the extreme sorrow of wishing, for a few days, to follow his grandmother Duff through that transformation, whatever it led to. Upon her return, his mother said bitterly that beside the grave the Aaronsville preacher had spoken with a sort of cold embarrassment, apparently under the impression that she had not been a good woman.

Meanwhile Alwyn’s satisfaction at having written an essay led him to try to keep a diary in the daytime of what he thought when his responsibility and his grandmother’s suffering, like a mixture of stimulating drugs, kept him wide awake all night. But the choking sound of her breathing and ceasing to breathe--which, from the room above, he could not hear but imagined he heard--made it impossible. So he slept or waited unhappily for the sleepless vigils in which duty took the place of ineffectual ambition. A watchdog’s duty, though death was a housebreaker, a robber, who would be welcomed by everyone.

The nights came and went. Now there was less theorizing with which to pass the time. He had lost his courage, the courage of his convictions, and could no longer pretend to be clever and more farsighted than others, than the rest of his family. Too long, like a sort of detective, he had spied upon them, studied to convict them--of their everlasting glory, he thought resolutely but without much enthusiasm. Futile unweaving and reweaving of the evidence, vain praise, generalizations of what was passing away before his eyes (he himself was such a generalization).... He was glad that the rapidly approaching end put a stop to it. He had a sense of having gone too far, and felt the peculiar shame of an outlaw who has not even done a dangerous thing.

Indeed, it was an instinctive law for Americans, the one he had broken. Never be infatuated with nor try to interpret as an omen the poverty, the desperation, of the past; whoever remembers it will be punished, or punish himself; never remember. Upon pain of loneliness, upon pain of a sort of expatriation though at home. At home in a land of the future where all wish to be young; a land of duties well done, irresponsibly, of evil done without immorality, and good without virtue. Maturity, responsibility, immorality, virtue are offspring of memory; try not to remember. America had as yet nothing worth remembering--no palaces, no enchanting antiquity, even the plunder of Tenochtitlan or whatever the city was called, had been taken away. The past was by nature tragic. No tragic arts ought to flourish; tragedy was treason, the betrayal of state secrets to the enemy, even the enemy in one’s self. Memory was incest....

The fact that Alwyn had thought so fanatically about the past of others during those summer months, always and only in relation to his own future, meant, he supposed, that he had lost interest in it, temporarily at least. There was a tide in such matters; now it ran the other way. And in that direction waited an insufferable event, at least one--one more death.

He felt also a sickly anxiety about his own--life or death, he scarcely knew which; and was ashamed of it. For he understood that fear is the most impious of the emotions: disdain and suspicion of God, or the gods, no matter which. He remembered that in the most frightened period of his childhood, his sixth or seventh year, there had been a pen like a cave inside the strawstack where the old sows crawled away to have their litters, with a hole through the straw a little higher than his head, to pour in their corn and swill. One day he had happened to be standing near it when he heard from somewhere inside, a soft, sickening sound. Beat by beat, deep in the pitch-black hole, like those of a fatal drum. When he held his breath, it had grown louder. Stiff with fright, half-hypnotized, he had got away; and when far enough away, had cried. Thereafter, the thought having been almost as painful as the experience, he had returned from time to time, hoping the sound would have ceased; it had never ceased. More than a year had passed before he had learned what it was: his own heart beating....

Then the days in the new home near Brighton began to resemble the night watches--both strained as one’s throat is strained by thirst, sorrow, or fright. A sort of poor, concrete poetry took the place of Alwyn’s prosaic analysis and judgments; at last even it failed. He had no longer anything to think about, and wondered why. Suddenly, sitting as usual in the doorway of his grandmother’s room, he realized that death had come. Scarcely invisible, it entered the room, and apparently in haste, approached his grandmother’s bed.

Her sickness rose off and on in a crisis lasting half an hour or an hour, so violent that it could not have been endured longer at a time, and now increasingly frequent. The doctor had prescribed certain drugs for these attacks. Speaking severely, she had asked what their effect would be; she was willing to have her sufferings lessened, but wanted no attempt made to lengthen her life. The doctor had been obliged to admit that her condition could not be improved and these medicines might even hasten the end, with which answer she had been content.

Now she never lay flat in her bed and scarcely ever slept. The heat was intense, and on her cheeks and forehead a cold sweat mingled with that of the breathless chamber and the season. Her head would fall, her heart stop, and be started again with an effort of her whole body, throughout which this rhythm of convulsion was constantly accompanied by a heavy trembling. Sometimes she could not keep her mouth closed; then Alwyn would tie a cloth under her chin and over her head, which she disliked, as if that particular weakness were moral. She seemed to suffer pain but never made a sound, except that, loud and hideous, of continuing to breathe by sheer will power, though against her will.

At other times she was at peace. She never lost consciousness in the slightest degree; and Alwyn was certain that whenever she could sit quietly with her eyes closed, her mind was clear and patiently occupied with what had gone before, or what according to her simple faith was still to come. Sometimes, usually during the day, she was able to speak with a certain ease, in her rough, still beautiful voice; then she would ask, “What are the men doing in the fields now?” or ask one of her grandchildren if he remembered something she had told him long before.

During the periods of respite, death seemed to keep watch with Alwyn, and covered him with its abstraction and ignorance, and obliterated his pretentiousness, his good memory, his hopeless ambitions. Suddenly it would turn its attention from him to the old woman on whose account it was there. Then like one of those spectators who, because of love or some other preoccupation, go to the same theater night after night, heartsick and tired, Alwyn watched the struggle, on the pillows and among the folds of bedclothes, with the invisible actor angel; the print of its rough touch pitting her cheeks and throat here and there, hollowing out her temples, twisting her great hands which lay loosely open; and he imagined he could hear its breath as well as hers, blowing back and forth upon her mouth and nostrils.

Then Alwyn’s impassibility came to an end; he suffered an agony of excitement. One night he burst into tears in front of the gasping, uncomplaining old woman. It was not heartbreak because she was soon to die--he hoped it would be soon--he was crying for futilities, futilities of affection, pleasure, talk, no matter what. Anything to relieve the useless pain, his pain, to relax his useless ardor, his miserable concentration. Useless--because she was going to die, anyway. His grandmother’s eyes were wide open, and she gazed at him attentively without a sign of disapproval or compassion.

The following afternoon his uncle John Craig arrived, a few days earlier than he had been expected. Alwyn went to the station. “Hello. If you’re not a grown man!” he said by way of greeting. “But I might have known it. My young Orfeo will soon be as old as his father.”

He himself looked worn and was turning gray, but had a younger expression than before, that of a man with plans to carry out, or perhaps only risks to run. “My boy will be here day after to-morrow. He’s coming on from that school he goes to in the East. You’ll probably get on well together. It’s a family tradition that cousins and so on should be friendly. That is, if they get a chance. I was sort of left out of it.”

He seemed to dread going into his mother’s room, following his brother’s and sister-in-law’s eyes to her door from the threshold of the house, and finally stepping forward alone with a strange, formal humility, as if he feared that his presence would remind her of tragic things and imagined, mistakenly, that she was now not strong enough to bear them all with composure.

The very news of his coming, as if it were a medicine (the last which would take effect), had given her new strength. Lying back against the mass of pillows, she had breathed easily, and looked able to wait another lifetime, though her great bones now wore a mere veil of flesh. It was as if the struggle had been altogether within herself, rather than between herself and death; her desire to live a few days more to see her son was stronger than for almost a year her desire to die had been.

That night John Craig wished to take his nephew’s place; but Alwyn stayed up with them a few hours, pretending to be uncertain whether she would need the emergency drugs before morning, and offering to give his uncle the necessary instructions.

John Craig sat closer to her bed than she had ever permitted Alwyn to sit, and she asked him to talk to her: “You know, mother,” he said, “the last time I was in Oklahoma, I looked up the place where uncle Leander was buried. I suppose I was his favorite, of your children. I sometimes think I loved him too much--I mean, on account of father.” He glanced up at her face, as if to see whether he should be embarrassed by what he had said.

But she replied, “I loved him best.”

“They buried him in a very pleasant place, not too crowded. I finally got hold of the little old fellow who took care of him, a Catholic priest. I don’t know if you ever heard.... The cemetery is Catholic. The priest seemed to think that made him die one, more or less. I don’t suppose uncle Leander paid much attention to what he said. I thought it was funny. You see, I got to be a Catholic too, when I married. He kept asking for a lot of us, uncle Hilary and Tim Davis and you. The little priest had it all written down; kind of him, I thought. Well, I put up a big monument, granite. I couldn’t remember when he was born, so I left that blank, and they promised to put it in afterward. And I thought if there was anything else you wanted written on it, a verse or something ...”

Alwyn heard his grandmother say with some difficulty, “You always were a good boy, Evan.”

John Craig’s voice broke slightly. “You never said that before, mother.”

“Well, I meant to.... I guess the war and all that--was harder on you than it was on us. Your pa minded. But you might have got killed or died. That would have been hard on me. That was what I said to myself about Leander, after the Civil War.” There was a long pause while she took breath. “Your children’ll have a better chance,” she went on. “Yours and Ralph’s. I try to think of them when it seems hard. I wasn’t able to do much for mine, I guess. Try not ever to blame me for anything, when I’m gone.”

John Craig, when not at his mother’s bedside, seemed to prefer to talk to his nephew than to his brother or sister-in-law, and to have, in doing so, a mysterious purpose which amused him. “See here,” he asked, “haven’t you had about enough of Wisconsin? Does Chicago and Jim’s house suit you? I thought it was a woman’s town, when I was there. You’d better come along with us, West. Or come soon, anyway. I spoke to your mother, and she’s willing to try to spare you for a while,” he added with a suggestion of affectionate mockery. “Mothers usually have to, whether they’re willing or not, more’s the pity.”

Alwyn’s grandmother lost ground during the day; the periodical failing of her heart began again, but much less extremely. Her body had no longer the force either to produce or to endure the former sufferings. The doctor thought that most of her suffering and nearly all of her life were over.

The following morning Orfeo Craig arrived. Alwyn was astonished and pleased. He was not like a member of the family nor even like an American; he had no appearance either of the country or the sort of city Alwyn knew. He was exceedingly dark, with strange variations of the same dark, burned rose without pinkness in his mouth and skin. His eyes were heavy-lidded, dark, and bright. He seemed never to have a sharp or clever look under any circumstances. Alwyn was glad, feeling a greater humility than he had previously known, the measure of which was his pride in his own mere intelligence, for example. If his cousin compared him with himself in that respect alone, he might find that he merited affection.... Such ideas revealed even to himself his desire for their friendship. John Craig looked as happy as if for him, who had known in his day too little either of friendship or family affection, something more important than good relations between the sons of the family were at stake.

Alwyn had never seen his grandmother’s face so radiant, even in the days of her strength, as when her unknown grandson was taken into her room. Even Alwyn’s youngest sisters had realized that something ceremonial and happy was about to take place, and slipped inside the doorway. She lifted her trembling, open hands to the level of her breast in the gesture of reverence or good tidings, and gazed a long time at the strange boy.

At last she remembered herself. She called him by his first name, Leander, and said, “You do not see me as I once was. Children, get out the photographs.”

The little girls, enchanted to have a part in the formalities, fluttered across the room to the chest of drawers and took them out--three daguerreotypes in cases, some tintypes in an album, two yellow photographs mounted on worn pieces of cardboard: a girl, a young wife, a woman aging but not less strong.... She told the girls to spread them out on her bed where she could see them as well. They looked at them together.

Then with her greatest dignity, as if a duty had been done, she said: “Now you’d better go out. I can’t have you here any longer. I am an old sick woman now.”

A few more days passed. She said that she was glad that her son and grandson who lived so far away were staying until the end. John Craig watched with her during the night. The boys sat by the door during the afternoon, often talking to each other in whispers, beckoning to the children, as they came and went, to hush.

Late one afternoon Orfeo thought that Alwyn looked pale, and sent him out in the fresh air. Alwyn wished that it were the Hope’s Corner countryside which lay about the new house, in which, however, the lives of those he loved throbbed and failed as much like a single hollow heart of joy and sorrow, as ever in the old home. And over the distant marshes, amid the harvest, under the loaded fruit trees, the dusk beginning to mingle with the sunshine was the same: that dusk peculiar to Wisconsin, tossed by hunting nighthawks, rocked by the motion of flocks coming home.... And there were ghosts there as much as anywhere, worthy of being loved, the same, in fact, as everywhere else: spirits so great, vain, and tender as to resemble gods. Ghosts of the little local history, of misunderstood friends and lovers, of members of the family; a legion of them in straggling procession. For years, Alwyn remembered, he had not been able to take his eyes off their shadowy ceremony, their disorder like that of the strong farm hands and their sweethearts under the trees on summer nights such as this which was falling. For years his mind had been troubled by their faint instruments in concert, just as in his childhood by those to which ghostly soldiers (his grandfather and his brothers and friends) had marched on the warm, blood-spattered rock in the South during the war. Distracting flutes; and little drums in the air about his birthplace, even about the new, unsympathetic house where his grandmother had been brought to die, beating a dead march; and beating like his own heart as he grew to manhood and got ready to leave these things--glad to go and leave them behind. But he felt that he would have need of them all, gods or pioneers or whatever they were, to lead an entire life; and if there were any he had not called upon, those would probably take him by surprise; certain of them, those of the passions and disasters, would spring on him when he was lonely, have their way with him, and leave him hurt for a while by the side of the road--the last one would leave him dead. Out of pride he wanted to be able to love and praise them all, even the last one....

His daydream was interrupted by Orfeo calling from the porch, calling him to come in at once, because their grandmother seemed to have stopped breathing, and perhaps it was an ordinary occurrence, and he might be mistaken, but he was not sure what it meant.

She was dead. They called their two fathers, who suddenly grew unfamiliar and pale. They were preoccupied with many things of which Alwyn had not thought in connection with the long-anticipated event, and it seemed that the young who had had an important part to play while she had been dying, had nothing to do with the burial of the dead. Alwyn and Orfeo were told merely to go to the town and send a message to their uncle Jim; but they were glad to be free.

So they set out through the garden and the melon patch, over a fence, and up a hill. Orfeo thought they should buy as many flowers as possible. Alwyn looked back at the small house, seeing another in its place, indeed several others, one of which, the earliest, had stood in a melon patch. And as they went on in the dusk, he whispered to himself good-by to them, those who were dead: his great, gaunt grandmother, and the other little one as well, who had called him her sweetheart in the madness of her old age.

_Paris, February 1925--Villefranche-sur-Mer, November 1926._