Chapter III: Part 3

So he enlisted. Hilary refused to be left at home; his mother wept, and he wept with her, but they could not change his mind. And the farewell night came upon them all, more suddenly, it seemed, than any night had ever come upon its own day. The spring stirred all about Rose and Leander when they said good-by--beckoning sprays of wet leaves, flowers he would not find in the South; Rose had no eyes to see. She was thinking that if he died down there, it would mean that death was more living than life and more rich, with a blond boy in its arms.... Then she felt the awkward softness of his kiss--the first kiss; she smiled, because that was a woman’s duty, and because his lips were sweet; and he turned away to go to war, with his little brother.

When Rose’s school closed, Serena Tower asked her to live with her. She had been received into the family; she was proud. There was little money, though Henry, who had enlisted as a musician, sent home his pay. Rose grew fond of Oliver, the slight child with languorous eyes, and came to love Serena more than anyone else in the world but Leander. Serena was never in good health. Rose did all the work, trying to make the men they hired care for Henry’s farm as well as he would have done, a difficult task for the daughter of shiftless farmers. She took a man’s responsibilities, and learned the cost of a man’s gentleness.

It was a long war, long as an illness during which one knows that at its end the time will have passed like an hour of sleep. There were letters, brief, monotonous, and precious. The draft began; Serena and Rose were glad that the inevitable had not come to them as an officer of the law. The widowed mother of five soldiers sat with them on the porch, thinking chiefly of the fifth, who had already broken her heart. They knitted socks, sewed military garments, and scraped linen to make gauze for wounds, praying that it would be placed on the wounds of strangers. Lists of casualties were published. Then Leander wrote that Hilary had disappeared. His mother fell to the floor, and refused to eat for many days. After that it was their duty to express hope tirelessly, without any hope. Serena fell desperately ill. Suddenly peace was declared. Rose had not time to feel impatience for the home-coming, caring for the sick woman, the child, and the old mother for whom alone there was to be no home-coming.

Leander was the first to return. Rose drove to the station. He stood before her, heedless and gaunt. He kissed her. They could not speak. He got into the carriage; she took up the reins. She told him that Serena was ill; they said nothing of Hilary; the sound of water had gone out of his voice. They drove to his mother’s house. Never again in her life was there to be a moment as cruel as that in which he stumbled forward, fell on his knees, and hid his face under the old woman’s hands. Rose closed her eyes; it was not enough--she could hear their sobs; and she herself was all but a stranger. So she got into the carriage and drove away, quite unnoticed.

That afternoon he came to his brother’s house. Serena, who had been lying in an apathy which no voice could penetrate, wept when she heard his voice, and cried out, “No, it is not Henry!”

They left Adelaide in the sick room and walked toward the hills. Finally Rose paused and said (for the first time to him and the only time in her life): “I love you. Are we going to get married?”

The pupils of his eyes, large and dark, were shaking. In that voice of some other man, a man who was still in the South, he answered: “I don’t.... In the war.... You don’t know-- Try to understand....”

But Rose did know and did not need to understand. That knowledge and lack of knowledge could not be endured quietly, standing up, and not alone. She gathered up her heavy skirts and ran, like the wild Hamilton girl who had ceased to exist.

She was crouching on a porch. A man was driving into the yard and getting out of a buggy. She had pressed her head between her hands so long that the gold earrings had left marks on her cheeks like scars. In that moment she knew what life was made up of; she would never forget again. As if from a great distance, by transference from someone else’s thought, she knew that Serena was delirious--it was the doctor who was walking up the path--there was work to be done.

Two days later Henry came. He was too late; Serena could not speak. After the funeral Rose went home, thinking that the rude cabin would never give her up again.

At the end of the month Leander went to California. Henry Tower was living alone with his little son, and one day asked Rose to marry him. She felt as if she had been dead, in an apparent eternity of lazy hunters, their gibes and their quarrels; and suddenly, in the widower’s melancholy voice, permission to return to the earth she loved was granted. Leander had not wanted her, but she was acceptable to the Towers.

It was her duty not to let her husband see how she grieved for his brother; he could not comfort her. She did not hope to be loved, and she realized once more how rough and homely she must appear beside the memory of Serena. She continued to grow heavier; the coarse roses did not disappear from her cheeks, but came to resemble dead rose leaves, covered with a network of tiny veins.

Life was not sad, though Henry was obstinate and sad. She never understood him. Would she have understood Leander? She often found him unreasonable; but after argument and protest, when his eyes grew abstract as if they were staring at things which did not exist, or when a rare, bitter word escaped from his tight lips, she folded her arms and gave in.

Her mother-in-law died, saying at the end, “Now I know that Hilary is dead; he will meet me on the other side.”

Little Oliver died, and a week later Polly was born. Four more children were born; their names were Ada, James Arthur, Ralph, and Evan. There were deaths in the family, but her children were spared; she gave thanks to God.

Then an epidemic of scarlet fever broke out in the community. Henry and five-year-old Ralph fell sick. An old woman named Minerva Foote came to help her. Henry was delirious and called her Serena. He and Ralph got better. The little girls fell sick. Rose cried by the hot kitchen stove, the hot sunlight pressing through the shutters.

Old Min Foote said: “Now you stay away from them. Who’s going to cook for the hungry mouths if you come down with it? I’m childless; I’ve nothing to fear. They’re not yours, anyway--they’re God’s now, till the fever is past.”

Polly and Ada died. Life was teaching her methodically; this was the second lesson; she was a strong woman and could learn. On the day of the funeral the heat was broken by a thunderstorm. The cheap little coffins were of the same length. Rose attended two other funerals that week, children’s funerals, saying, “It shall never be said that my sorrow has hardened me toward others.”

In the spring of 1884 she received a letter from Leander, which read:

Dear Sister Rose,

I want to come back to the old country. If you’d rather I didn’t,
please tell me so. I’ve made some money and would like to buy a
little house near you and Henry. After these long years, I love my
own people more than ever before. Love to Henry and your children.

Henry said nothing. Rose was glad he was coming back to Wisconsin. It was his home. He would be forty years old and greatly changed, as they all were. He would be her brother now, yet not like a brother, for she understood her brothers; and the Towers were men she could never understand, men she could only love, quite humbly.

Leander’s return marked the middle of her life. Thereafter, absorbed in maternal duties and matriarchal reminiscences, she took every disappointment for granted and wanted nothing for herself. In fact, she was more like the strong, serene grandmother, perfectly willing to be old, whom Alwyn knew, than like the girl who had loved Leander.

5. His Great-Aunt Mary Harris. Her Life and Travels

When Alwyn was ten years old there was a solemn excitement at the farmhouse. His great-aunt Mary, the most romantic member of the family, was dead, and her daughter, a woman in black veils whom no one had seen before, brought her body to be buried at Hope’s Corner, as she had requested. His grandparents and his father and mother went to the station to meet her, and they proceeded directly to the cemetery.

There Alwyn and his little sister waited on a stone pile, and stared over the fence, over the shrubs and the monuments, at the nearly soundless funeral. The tall stranger and the great blue-gray box had come a thousand miles from a place called Oklahoma City; and Alwyn breathed heavily as the coffin, covered with bouquets, disappeared in the new grave, because the heroine of an old story had come back to the place where her travels had begun.

This one of his great-aunts had undertaken many journeys in her lifetime. Later in the day her daughter, sitting on the porch between Alwyn’s grandparents, told how her house was cluttered with souvenirs of the last journey, a trip to Europe, which appeared to have hastened the old woman’s death: water in tiny bottles--water of the Rhine, the Jordan, the Nile; chips of stone from the Alps, and Vesuvian lava; shells from the Channel and the Ægean Sea, all carefully labeled; pressed flowers, a box of sand from the Sahara, and a picture frame of Italian mosaic like petrified confetti, in which she had placed a tintype of herself and her sister Eliza when they were girls. The care of these relics was a problem; no one had any use for them; they would have to be thrown away. Alwyn wanted them, but his mother said it would be too expensive to have them sent from the Far West.

Mary Tower, born Harris, had been brave, energetic, and virtuous; and Alwyn’s grandmother, who had not seen her for half a century, loved her still, and said she was “the greatest of the pioneer women.” This adventurous life embodied not all the womanly qualities of the period, but all that his grandmother admired and meant to praise. So she told the story of it whenever she was asked, and in her very old age, on important occasions such as family reunions or Thanksgiving dinners, she began it without invitation.

Thus the life of this woman was fixed in Alwyn’s memory like the plot of the first book he ever read. A life in profile, an almost incredible history, a boy’s adventure story with a single female musketeer for heroine.... Her death added nothing to the adventure, and subtracted nothing from it; Alwyn’s grandmother went on repeating the story--the same words appearing in the same order--as if she had been dead a long time, or had never actually lived, or could never die.

So, quite naturally, as Alwyn grew up, the October afternoon on which she was buried, among her relatives and his own, mingled in his memory with the afternoons of her girlhood, at the very beginning of the story. Autumn stood that day like a scarecrow at the crossroads, and the blackbirds, pigeons, and plovers fluttered overhead. Autumn had stood there before, its great sleeves flapping in the wind; and birds in October never know which way they are going. Across the road, like a large dry-goods box, stood the district school which he attended, where, before the Civil War, the dead woman’s sister Eliza had taught.

In Eliza Harris’s day it was a hard school. The pupils had to stand around the stove in winter, three or four at a time, to keep their ears from freezing. Girls with full breasts and wild boys in their teens founded friendships and flirtations on plans to shame her and make her cry before the class.

One evening, when her work was done, Eliza turned the key in the lock and started home. She shivered at the clumps of bushes so close to the road that they seemed to stagger to meet her. As she passed a willow thicket two or three girls ran out, howling, with switches; half paralyzed by fear, she stumbled away, but received a dozen cuts under her long skirts. Speechless with sobbing and incessant fits of coughing, she pushed open the door of her mother’s cabin.

Her failure as a teacher was a tragic misfortune, for her mother and sister lived on her salary. After Samuel Harris’s death his widow had sold the small farm he had cleared in the ’forties, rearing the children on the proceeds; now they were penniless.

The widow Harris resembled Eliza. All that evening she shuffled up and down the one room in which they lived--Eliza crying in one corner, sixteen-year-old Mary giggling irrepressibly in another--now raging against the young hussies of the school, now scolding her daughters in turn.

Having been too frightened to see which ones had attacked her, Eliza said nothing to her pupils next day, and left the schoolroom unswept; and the following afternoon Mary came at four to help do the work and to take her home.

Mary was small and plump; she had an olive skin and ash-blond hair; and her way of speaking quickly in a low voice reminded one of a bird. Together they put the room in order and went down the road, Eliza peering into thickets and hanging back.

“It was there they set on me before,” she said, but they passed the place unmolested. Suddenly there was a war whoop, and two girls jumped out of another bush, brandishing willow switches. Screaming feebly, Eliza left Mary to face them.

“Devils! You devils!” Mary cried. “I know you, Allie Jones! I know you, Mary Ann Murphy! You’ll catch it for this! You’ll catch it!” Eliza stumbled forward and backward, wringing her hands; Mary stood her ground. “Run! Run or I’ll stone you,” she shouted, throwing handfuls of gravel at the girls in flight.

Mary made her sister visit the parents, as a result of which one girl was thrashed, another was taken out of school, and Eliza’s authority was strengthened. Mary and the widow gave her advice, but her misfortunes excited her beyond all thought of policy; ineffectual tantrums made her ridiculous, and many parents thought her a tyrant. Matters went from bad to worse, and she coughed incessantly.

There was a harelipped boy who tormented her; he was too big to punish (she dared to whip only the little ones) and it was useless to speak to his father; both father and son were proud of being hated by her. One day in January, when the small children could not get through the drifts, this boy tipped up the bench on which he sat, so that a fat girl rolled on the floor. “Order!” shouted Eliza. The girl and the harelipped boy sat down again. “Ezra, stand in the corner,” said Eliza. Smiling, he rose; the fat girl tumbled off the end of the bench again, and the school rocked with laughter.

Eliza overturned her chair and took up a heavy ruler. The boy with the harelip lifted his elbow in front of his eyes. There was a dead silence which frightened her. She set her teeth, broke the ruler in her large hands, and threw the pieces in his face.

A growl rose from the back of the room. “It wan’t his fault,” one shouted; another, “Do what we said we would.” One ran to the door, one opened a window, and the two oldest boys jumped over the benches, lifted her roughly, and threw her out into a snowdrift.

Eliza lay in the snow, choking with anger. Then she waded around the building, went into the entry, and pushed at the door. “You shan’t get in here for a while,” the one who was holding it muttered. So she shook the snow out of her sleeves, put on a coat, and went home.

During the night, in a paroxysm of weeping, a small quantity of blood escaped from her lungs, and the next day she had a fever. The school was closed for ten days, and then a substitute was hired. “How Eliza Harris had been put out” was common talk, and the subject of two or three quarrels. The widow and her daughters were dependent on charity. All winter the neighbors brought stove wood, sacks of potatoes, and hams, tallow dips and corn meal, and eggs in hand-woven baskets. On the bed, Eliza closed her eyes while her mother complained of unruly girls and what they deserved. Mary did all the work cheerfully.

The widow Harris talked of her relatives in Missouri as if distance had cheated her of a resource to which she had a right. Some one suggested that they be sent south; ambitious men and women who begrudged the provisions, those with large families to support, and those who pitied them, welcomed the solution with equal relief. Two box parties were given in the spring, to which the girls brought supper for two in decorated boxes which were sold at auction to their sweethearts; and a purse of money was given to the helpless women.

Mrs. Harris wrote to her brother, and when he replied, preparations were made for their departure. She dreaded the trip down the great, savage valley; perhaps dreaded no less the welcome of a brother she had not seen in years and a sister-in-law whom she had never seen. Eliza was eager to escape from a State peopled in her imagination with wild girls bearing switches. Mary was glad to go, welcoming all the years of the rest of her life as if they were people about to become friends.

They went down the Mississippi on a river boat. There were whisperings of the water and a sound of kisses around the prow as it advanced through regular ripples which were like a wedding veil. Negroes on invisible boats sang in the dark, burdening it with their hearts’ burden. Spring quickened its pace, and the deck was drenched with unfamiliar odors and unusually sweet rain. Three women going south.... The tanned captain followed Mary with his warm eyes as she moved excitedly among the hampers and sacks and bales.

They disembarked and drove overland through poor cotton fields where slaves were at work; and at last they found their relatives, a gaunt, booted man and a plaintive woman. The blond South dozed by the river--it would never wake up; and over the incessant lapping of the water there was a lapping of dry wind, like the river caressing the earth scantily clad with bushes, and like the river yellow with dust.

Mrs. Harris complained, and her health failed. A sallow young man with red eyelids who had come from her home in Vermont began to feel a dolorous excitement in Mary’s presence, and finally proposed marriage. When she said No, he trembled with either anger or sadness, and turned his attentions to Eliza, dwelling on the disappointments of the West and wooing her with praise of the East. Mournfully but enthusiastically she agreed. So Eliza and he were married. The preacher had to raise his voice above the sobs which the widow muffled in her sleeve; a few boxes and carry-alls were packed, and they said good-by.

Then the widow Harris died, leaving Mary alone. She was unhappy with her relatives. Her presence reminded them that they had no children; her dependence reminded them of their poverty; all the coming and going, and the widow’s death, increased their longing to return to the East--they dreaded death in Missouri. They had nothing to say to Mary; their silence at meals made what she ate seem like the bread given to a tramp on the doorstep, to whom one never knows what to say. So she sat sadly on the porch when her work was done, watching the birds go north; there must have been one in all their number as lonely as she--but luckier, having its wings. She scarcely ever sang now; but when the tunes rose round the dusky shanties they seemed to be sung for her, more heartless tunes than any she could sing.

Her aunt was always ailing, and the doctor, a widower of fifty-nine, lean and cheerful, came to the house every three or four days. Mary knew that he liked her. One day he found her alone, drawing water from the well, and said: “You’re not happy. You ought to be happy. Before I leave, go down the road a ways. Meet me. I have something to say to you.”

When she got into his buggy he said: “I am lonely. And you’ve no home. If you will marry me, I will give you a good home.”

Mary considered it as a vague necessity--like another journey down another river; there was no likelihood of music on that stream, only years without danger or liberty. Six months later her uncle and aunt returned to the town in the East where Eliza was living; and Mary was the last of her family on that frontier.

Dr. Brandon had a small plantation, six darkies, and innumerable patients. Mary was lonely. She played with the pickaninnies, washing them in the creek and spreading them out on the grass to dry, and with the doctor’s help nursed all the sick slaves in the county. On some days she tried to learn their songs; on others she tried not to hear them. The Missouri women gossiped about the way she behaved.

There was a young mulatto named Tartar, the doctor’s most valuable slave, who had cooked for him and slept in the house while he was a widower. Mary was always aware of his presence, and never forgot that he was as young as she; and once or twice, as she lay by her husband, this boy’s ugly face rose out of her sleep; she confused him with the night because they were the same color, and feared both.

Then in far towns whose names people heard for the first time, the Civil War broke out. After a few days the State was divided, neighbor against neighbor. Private hatreds paraded in uniforms of opinions hastily put together. State rights and the souls of the negroes were taken as a pretext for murderous appetites, and many slept with shotguns at the head of the bed.

The doctor said to Mary, “Better not be seen from the road with the blacks. All the old women will talk.”

He was a Unionist. “Slavery doesn’t matter,” he said. “There’ll always be slaves, whether we buy ’em or pay ’em wages. But a pack of desperadoes can rule round a post office; they don’t get so far as Washington. So if the Union breaks up, we go to wrack and ruin.”

He expressed these opinions recklessly beside the sick beds of both factions. The fanatical Unionists could not defend him because he was a complacent slaveholder, so that of all those whom the Rebels hated, he was the weakest as well as the least discreet. An old man, thinking only of politics and the battles in the East, he paid no attention to the echoes of war in Missouri, the drunkenness of war increasing around his house.

Tired by the anger of sick Rebels whom he continued to visit, the doctor went to bed early one night. In the same room Mary tried to read _Pilgrim’s Progress_ by the light of two candles, but her attention wandered. She was a married woman now, and her marriage was like a return from childhood of the father she could scarcely remember. He too had been kind. But she was tired of Missouri, tired and terrified. She had heard of a man named Cleaver who was starting north in a few days with a team and overland wagon; if only the doctor had loved Wisconsin as she did.... But he had never been there. So she would have to stay always on the frontier between the North and the South, with a war breaking out between the two. She dreamed of the war, the lifting of row on row of mournful trumpets, far away.... Would it stay far away?

The stove stood in one corner of the room, her table in another, the door in another, and in the fourth, the bed where presently she would lie, and perhaps fail to sleep, beside the husband who was like a father. She knew by his breathing that he slept, and thought of the sighs which revealed, in the daytime, how troubled he was.

A knock at the door. There were two men, strangers, on the threshold. “We want to see the doctor.” Their mouths were so drawn--evidently someone was ill.

“My husband has gone to bed. I will wake him. Won’t you come in?”

The two men shouldered her aside and strode across the room, one of them fumbling in his pocket. Then a shot was fired. Mary fainted away.

She lay in the center of the dark, broad floor. The room was empty--frightful and empty. She stumbled to her chair under the candles; she did not need to look at the bed. She was all alone now. Why didn’t the darkies come? They must have heard; they were afraid. She could not stay there alone.

The young negro slept in a shack by the door, and she whispered into it: “Tartar. Tartar.”

More faintly still he whispered back: “What, missie?”

“Come. They’ve killed your master.”

He slipped in, looking infinitely young, younger than she now (for she was a widow). His eyes sought the bed, but he turned so they could not reach it.

The two flames fattened while the two candles decreased in stature. Silence lay in the corner with its arms outstretched on a wet pillow. Mary and the boy sat face to face, the distance between them the length of the bed; it was as if they were keeping watch at the head and foot of a bed. Mary was not thinking of the future, not even of to-morrow, nor of anything. Strange how white Tartar’s mouth was.... And why did the dark plantations betray now and then the anxiety of a dog? No feet and no wheels on the road, the road running north and south down which the war had come, without any trumpets.

A moth staggered in out of the dark and around the candles, narrowly avoiding the flame, and fell at her feet. Blunt wings, white and tan; from the middle of each wing a spot like an eye looked at them. Mary covered it with her handkerchief and let it out through the window; it was so dark that she could not see it fly away, and she began to shudder. More deaths were hiding there, deaths which had not yet happened, and perhaps crowds of nameless men waiting their turn, two by two, to knock at her door. She could scarcely find her chair in the unconsciousness which rolled up under her feet; but she did find it, or she would have fainted again.

There, sitting in the chair which faced her chair, was the black boy. She felt like a fugitive who finds the trace which he has left a moment before, which will betray him a moment after. How swiftly and quietly they would work if they came back and found her and a negro at the head and the foot of the bed, sitting quietly together. How soon they would finish and go! It was madness to stay there. She began to stand up, began to speak....

But she saw Tartar’s eyes. So piteous--and they seemed to take the blame for what had happened, for what might happen still; his black face took the blame. The blood ran out of his cheeks as if he were ashamed. By the look on his face, he was begging her not to speak, not to notice him, not to say that the doctor was dead, because he was a slave, that she was in danger because he was her slave now. He had known the old man longer than she; he had as much right to stay there as she had; she could not ask him to go, and she was afraid to go herself. In the trees by the window, the dark sighed as if content with its perfidy.

The negro was as quiet as the body on the pillows; and the charm of their stillness took the place, for Mary, of courage and safety. Far away, a cockerel warned them, by a hoarse note, that day was about to break. Mary tried to get ready for its coming. A pair of fresh candles flickered less. They sat face to face.... Creeping up under the sky at last, the morning, with its little gusts, shook the oleanders by the door.

“I can go now,” Mary said.

“Where?”

“To the Sanfords’. They’re the nearest Union people.”

She took her husband’s purse out of his coat hanging on a chair, and a roll of bills from a cream pitcher on the shelf, and covered her head with a shawl. Tartar went over to the bed and stood looking down at the stained sheets, his teeth chattering, his tears falling. She left him there.

Rebel houses slept by the road like watchdogs, harmless in sleep; one little black dog sniffed and whined as she passed, and rawboned cattle came down the lanes. The first rays of the sun were as pale as if they also had watched through the night. Three miles of difficult gravel and sand....

She began to call when she drew near the Sanford house. Women in nightcaps came to the door; she told her story; one of them cried and expected her to cry. The men put cartridges in their shotguns, stood them behind the door because she looked frightened, and watched from the windows.

In the middle of the morning a boy came running down the road with the news that a gang of Rebels had buried her husband, burned her house, and were driving her slaves off south.

In fact, a wisp of smoke could be seen over a hill. Behind Mary’s back there was the rustling of the women around the stove, their muttering and whispering. She could scarcely ask herself the simple questions: Where shall I go? What can I do? She spoke of the river boats going north, though she did not have money enough for the passage, and learned that the service had ceased on the declaration of war; only a few darkened barges went up and down still, laden with guns, gunpowder, and drunken men--fugitives.

All morning she looked out of the window without seeing anything. About noon the muttering ceased behind her; the family withdrew, and later she saw them gathered around the stable door and knew what they were talking about: the danger of giving her a refuge, the expense of giving her a home. It did not matter what they said. Her husband lay somewhere in a pile of damp gravel, and men were driving her slaves away, crying in the sunshine.

Mary thought: there is that man; there is that man who is going north. A man in an overland wagon, horses, horses galloping north--nobody else could help her. She did not listen to the women of the house when they came in; she touched her body now and then as one touches a purse in one’s pocket to be sure it is there. She turned toward Mrs. Sanford. “I’m going to see some friends.” The mother and her daughters bit their lips; perhaps they knew that she had no friends.

She walked to a village called Maladee, six miles away, stumbling and trying to make a plan. His name was Cleaver. Was that his name? How could she find him? Her husband had said that the postmistress was for the Union. Among kegs of molasses and sacks of flour, salt, and coffee in the bean, this little woman stared at her with one eye--the other eye was blind.

“Where can I find Mr. Cleaver who’s driving north?”

“Ask at the inn. Like as not he’s there. I hear he’s stabling in their sheds.”

Four men spitting tobacco juice from the veranda; they dropped their feet off the railing. A fat young woman with no upper teeth appeared on the threshold. Mary paused in embarrassment. The young woman dropped her eyes; the men’s lids flickered in a row. They knew, even they knew. To them she was already a lonely widow, a young and pretty widow, and they were wondering what she would do about it.

Mary was humiliated but encouraged. “Is Mr. Cleaver here?”

“If you want to see him, you’ll find him in the back yard with the horses.”

A walk led around the new, dilapidated building. She stopped at the top of three steps which descended to the yard. There was a man on his knees by a great wagon. Her courage failed, and she steadied herself against the trunk of a cottonwood. He was greasing the wheels. She saw the neglected curls running down the back of his neck under the coat collar.

Then he stood up; from the top step Mary realized how tall he was, and caught a glimpse of his face: the soft forehead, the rough sideburns, the moist, bad-tempered mouth. Then she unbuttoned her high collar and folded it back on her shoulders. Lifting her head, she descended; very softly the crinoline brushed the trunk of the cottonwood.

“You are Mr. Cleaver?”

He breathed heavily through his mouth and nodded.

“You are going north?”

“In the morning.”

The most important question was the hardest to ask: “Are you going alone? Are you married?”

“All alone. No, not married.” The moisture in her eyes, her nervous mouth, her immodest throat, had an appearance of passion. So he forgot that they were strangers and did not notice that she scarcely looked at him.

“Will you take me with you?”

He flushed and drew himself up to his full height. She had won. They walked behind the stable along a little path. She told him her name and her story, making the story less tragic, lest he cease to be flattered. He said nothing about the war; apparently he had intended to leave before it broke out. They made plans; they might have been lovers. He kissed her. Mary had never been kissed by a young man, but his breath was musty with drink.

He let her walk back alone in the dusk. There was a moist place on both her sleeves above the elbow--the axle grease from his hands. Without wanting to die, she wished that she were dead; but even the journey north would come to an end.

She said to the women who were making up a bed for her (the first of many): “I am going north. I have money.” They pitied her less, and anger was added to their anxiety. She said, “I will pay you,” and they were ashamed. She fell asleep, finding it very strange to sleep alone.

The next morning she went back to Maladee and talked to an old preacher, letting him think she had known Cleaver while her husband lived. He seemed afraid of her, and stammered: “It is a time of war. God will forgive you. I will perform the ceremony at once.”

She stood up before him with Cleaver at noon, and at three o’clock they drove out of town, Mary in her impatience wanting to whip the horses.

Twelve miles were covered before dusk, and all the way Cleaver smiled sleepily to himself, sliding the oily reins through his fingers. They put up for the night in one of seven shacks on a sandy hill above the Mississippi. At twilight the girl looked down into the tangle of currents and great, mechanical whirlpools, and thought of putting an end to her fatigue, already intolerable--of joining, like a lonely vagrant, that caravan of waters. If the Mississippi had flown north.... But her home was in the North, if she had one; so she turned back. The bed in that village was wide, but there seemed to be no room for her in it, shrinking from the giant she had married.

They drove north, keeping near the river where towns were not too far apart. Tracks in the sand, new highways of gravel, lanes overgrown with grass.... They came to impassable routes, were lost upon détours, and filled quicksands with brush; the horses limped and had to be reshod. He drove while she tried to ease the pain in her back; she drove while he slept with his mouth open. The summer followed them north. The team sucked up water from muddy springs. Cleaver scooped it up in his hands; they lost the tin cup, and Mary drank from his hat. In large, empty valleys the hoofs and the rattling spokes made a sound of delirium.

In some cabins along the road they received a grudging hospitality which they were not allowed to pay for. People were curious. A number of men called them spies; a number of women suspected that they were not married. Innkeepers cheated them; Cleaver was not willing to pay double for a night’s lodging, out of bravado; liquor was expensive, and Mary knew that their funds would not last to the end of the journey.

He made friends with women in rowdy taverns, and once or twice Mary had to hunt for him from room to room before dawn. It was always hard to keep him sober enough at night to go on in the morning. Once, as they drove out of a village, he shouted that she was a loose woman who had fooled him into marriage. She covered his mouth with her hands; still, drunk, he mistook her gesture, and began to make love in the wagon, dropping the reins.

They stayed outdoors when the weather was good, to save money. Over their heads the stars glistened like tinsel. Mary thought of her slaves, their kinky heads done up in bandanas, their mouths all wet with watermelon juice. Where were they now? As she lay half asleep she imagined they were near; the night was so dark, their faces so dark--she would not be able to see them if they were near. Slaves marching and singing--and the branches of the trees swung down like whips; but one whose face she remembered did not march with the rest, did not sing (Tartar, the doctor’s boy), but stood by himself, every night, looking down at the dead man. Often she wished she had stayed and gone further south with him, for they were both slaves. Would his bondage come to an end before hers did? She wondered which side was winning the war.

She was gaunt and weather-beaten. There were sore cracks in her skin, and one bruised finger did not heal. Her clothes were in rags; she wore a man’s coat and a hat of braided straw unraveled at the brim. Cleaver beat her on the slightest provocation.

One night, when it was raining, he started a quarrel in a saloon; a man in high boots cursed her on his account; and they had to leave town at once. The world was full of men like that--booted men; and as she drove through the stormy darkness she thought of them all, without anger, now at last without fear--they had done their worst; and the one she had married, fast asleep in the back of the wagon, made sounds which were almost words but meant nothing.

They crossed the Mississippi near St. Louis, avoiding the city, for they had been told the sheriffs there would demand explanations. They had no more money. In Illinois one of the horses broke out of the stable into a field of wet corn, had colic, and died; they sold the overland wagon, bought an old cart, and went on.

When they came to a town, Mary went from house to house, begging for work to pay for their board; she mended clothes, helped with butcherings, scrubbed floors, and did heavy washings. They moved more slowly, stopping two or three days at a time. Cleaver would make friends in a saloon and want to stay where they were, making fun of her homesickness; but his friendships were brief, he feared the draft, and remembered, perhaps, that among friends she could earn more. And sooner or later he would give offense in the house where she worked; they would have to hitch up the horse and go on. She was sick, but did not think again of taking her own life, for beyond Illinois lay Wisconsin. The road seemed to have no end.

South of Chicago, Cleaver lost the horse and cart at a game of chance. Mary tried to find the man who had won, to plead with him; but he was a stranger and had driven out of town. So she worked for a month in a general store; an old woman gave her ten dollars; she denied herself food and hid her savings. One afternoon they went with the mail wagon to Chicago, took passage on a lake boat to Milwaukee, went on to Aaronsville, hired a buggy from a livery stable, and drove to Hope’s Corner.

There was no festivity for the home-coming. The Hamiltons took them in; her old neighbors came to see her; Cleaver sulked in the barn. Mary could not talk; Adelaide Hamilton told her story all day long. Sitting with downcast eyes in the center of the room, made ugly by deprivation and pain, made stupid by happiness too long delayed, she did not weep; but everyone she had known wept at the sight of her.

They moved into a small house which was vacant while a young man was in the army. Cleaver drank less, hired out as a farm hand, and registered for the draft. More than a month passed. Mary watched the blackbirds and bobolinks, larks, water birds, and warblers, go south, through the trees of her childhood, as the spotted leaves fell; and resolved never to follow them again.

But one day in November Rose Hamilton came running to the house. “I hear your husband’s been talking down at the store. They think he’s a Rebel. They’ve given him a day to leave town.”

Mary trembled and sank to her knees. The girl helped her to a chair, repeating what she knew. There were footsteps in the yard. Cleaver came in; he clung to the door knob. Rose hurried out by the other door.

“Well, Mary, we’re going south again.” The clock struck twice, and he sighed, his large body seeming to droop in his clothes. “They say I’ve got to. I mean those fools down yonder.”

Mary said: “Well, Cleaver, I guess you’re going. But I’m not.”

It was the quick low voice, low like a pigeon’s--many times it had roused his anger! He shouted, “And you’re coming with me!”

“No. I reckon not. I’ve had enough of the South. Anyway, I’ve got to stay here and have your baby.”

He threatened; he could not strike her, for he was afraid of her now, afraid of her condition; and he shed a few tears.

A serious man named Will Davis, who gnashed his teeth slowly as he spoke, came to the door to tell him that it was true, what had been said at the store. The men of the country were roused; it was a time of war; Cleaver would have to go. Mary was in the room, but seemed to pay no attention, and said nothing.

She began to put a few clothes in a bag for him. He kept asking her if she would join him after the child had been born. She would not promise. At noon the next day he set out, and Mary closed her eyes in order not to see him look back.

The child was born dead. Mary grew stronger. She received a post card from Springfield and a letter from Bowling Green: Cleaver had registered for the draft again; he was steady; he had found work; he told her to come. She did not answer. Then a lawyer in Tennessee notified her that he had divorced her to marry again.

The war was over. The men were returning. Mary was teaching school where Rose Hamilton had taught before. Harrison Tower, a millwright, brought her back from her school to Hope’s Corner every Friday night, and she loved him almost as if she had been a girl. They were married, and after several years moved to Oklahoma, where they led a quiet and prosperous life. A son and daughter were born, whom she named Brandon and Elizabeth. She was famous in a large circle of friends for her stories of the old days, regarded Wisconsin as her home, and always said that she wanted to be buried there.

On the Tower lawn, after her funeral, her daughter Elizabeth told her aunt Rose about her mother’s later life and death; and Alwyn sat in the grass, pretending to read, but near enough to listen.

In her sixty-sixth year, after she had grown accustomed to widowhood, when her son-in-law was in good health and her little grandson had gone away to school and there was nothing to keep her, she decided that she had not seen enough of the world. So she went to visit Eliza; and they sailed for Liverpool in the spring. Together they stayed in Brighton, Monte Carlo, and Homburg, as well as the capital cities, and joined a conducted tour of Egypt, Palestine, and the Near East. Eliza, who had changed little, complained, grew tired, and was ill at the wrong moments; Mary bullied her affectionately. She herself was intrepid in visiting monuments, in subduing officials and porters, in pronouncing the names of foreign foods. But she grew tired of a continent whose youth had not been identical with hers; she said that the Egyptians and even the Italians were too much like the slaves in the South. She grew timid in trains and hotels, thinking, perhaps, of the men who had hurt her long ago, though she would not admit it to her sister; and she said, “I miss the birds I am used to,” the birds of the Mississippi Valley. So they came home. Eliza, who hated the West still, would not go to Oklahoma with her; so the two sisters parted after a long embrace, and Mary went on alone, a little old lady, brown and plump, in a cloud of veils. When she arrived at her daughter’s home, she took to her bed, saying: “No doctors, if you please. I’m very well. But I’ve earned a good rest.”

On the day of her death she said, “I’ve taken a good many trips in my time,” and raised her eyes to the mosaic picture frame in which, arm in arm with her thin, timid sister, she herself as a girl looked down undismayed at her deathbed. They heard her whisper, “Still far to go.”

6. His Great-Aunt Nancy Tower’s Unhappiness

After the Civil War, Alwyn’s great-aunt Nancy Tower married a man named Jesse Davis, and went to Iowa to live.

Two years later a hired carriage drove into her brother Henry’s yard. Rose opened the door. Nancy stood on the porch with her child in her arms. Her long fingers were spread in a star against the child’s body, sustaining it anxiously. Quite at ease, as if her arms were a chair, the baby boy gazed at his unknown relative.

“Rose, I’ve come home for a little while. I’ve brought my child Timothy.”

Rose rang the dinner bell--clang upon clang breaking in the solid sky--and presently Henry came in from the fields. When he kissed his sister she burst into tears, gave the child to Rose, and hurried out of doors.

Henry said: “Nancy is overwrought. She was always delicate. Say nothing about it to her.”

When she returned she glanced at her sister-in-law timidly and murmured in explanation, “I was lonesome in Iowa.”

She had married for love. Jesse Davis’s father was a livestock dealer in Iowa, and he had spent two summers with an uncle who was the Towers’ nearest neighbor. Red-haired and heavy, he had worked and shouted in the harvest, while Nancy watched him from a log fence wound with wild vines, her chin in the palm of one hand. At a lake picnic he had come out of the water in a torn blue shirt knotted between his legs, unharnessed a young workhorse and galloped along the shore, beating it with his heels. Nancy had clung to a tree trunk, faint with admiration and terror. Then he had leaped back into the water, and as the light of a half moon filtered into the daylight had floated and swum among the sticky reeds; and he had forced Nancy to wear on her head water lilies in a wet crown.

Young men had never paid attention to her, because she was timid and not unusually pretty. Jesse Davis had forced his love upon her. On Sunday mornings, having searched the marshes, he had brought her bunches of swamp orchids, and on the back of the hand which had thrust them into hers the hair had glistened in a fringe. The girl had shivered and wept; but that hand, brown as the orchids and soiled by the muck of their roots, had seemed to close upon her heart.

But now she did not appear to think of going back to him. Day after day she helped Rose as if it were her own home. When letters came from Jesse, she slipped them hastily into her bodice as a young girl would hide love letters. Henry was surprised that she did not read them aloud.

Both families were troubled. At the end of a month William Davis, Jesse’s uncle, a strong, stupid man, complained to Henry: “Nancy does wrong to stay up here so long. Hard on Jesse. I can’t guess what ails the girl.”

A week later Henry received this letter from his brother-in-law:

Dear Friend Henry:

I guess you don’t realize that Nancy went away from home without
notifying me for how long or why. You are her blood and if you
comprehend her whims please write. I have been a good husband to
her and it is her duty to come back but she doesn’t answer my
letters. Please write,

Your friend and brother-in-law,
Jesse.

Henry asked Nancy, “When do you plan to go back to Iowa?”

She smiled half-heartedly, as if to distract his attention from her miserable eyes. “Why, don’t you want me to stay any longer?”

“It’s not that, sister. I wish you’d never had to leave home. But we can’t do what we like in this life. There’s your duty to Jesse. Have you anything to complain of in his behavior?”

“Oh, Jesse ...” she cried with apparent relief. “He’s a born bachelor. I guess he’s a lot happier without a woman there to nag him.”

Henry said to Rose: “Nancy must be prevailed on to go back home. We’ll ask brother John and Will Davis and his wife to Sunday dinner.”

“It’ll do no good to force her,” Rose replied. “She seems to have fancies. Maybe she’s not quite right in her mind since she married.”

His face darkened. “Don’t say such a thing, Rose.”

They came from church: Mrs. Will Davis in black silk, happy and determined; her husband and John Tower in broadcloth, celluloid collars, and black ties sewed into bows. As they ate the large dinner which Rose had prepared, their eyes blamed Nancy for the blame which they felt called upon to express. She kept the child on her knees. A thick sunbeam fell at her side, in which specks of dust climbed and descended like aimless, miniature people on a staircase; she passed her fingers back and forth in it; the motes took flight, and Timothy clutched at the lean shadow of her hand.

Rose wanted no responsibility for what they were going to say--it was for the Towers and Davises to settle between them; so she cleared the table and remained in the kitchen.

“My nephew writes ...” Mrs. Davis began, her fine eyes sparkling. “You do wrong, that’s my opinion, not to be a good wife to him.”

Nancy turned pale. A woman in a dress which glistened darkly, and three men--their glances hard and tired--sitting in a circle. Why had she not thought of an explanation to offer them? She tried to think of one, and suddenly she herself could not remember why she could not go back to her husband.