Chapter IV: Part 4

Her brother John said, gently: “Nancy is a good wife. She has had a long visit with her folks, and now she will go home.”

The child laid his little red hand on his mother’s trembling mouth and began to whimper. Rose came in from the kitchen and took him out on the lawn where her own children were playing.

Nancy stood up. “Make no mistake,” she said in a loud voice. “This is my home. I haven’t any other. But I’m helpless. I’ll have to go where you send me.” She stood rigidly in the center of the room; her lips continued to move, as if she were giving them a complete explanation, voicelessly.

Mrs. Will Davis snapped her fingers. “Niece, there is no cause to take on so!”

Nancy stopped, and took Henry’s hand, “Forgive me, brother. You don’t understand, but--you know best.” She ignored the other woman. “Uncle Will, write Jesse that I’m coming. Now we’ll say no more about it.” Then she sat down. “Aunt Permelia, is your brother getting on well in California? I wonder if he ever sees Leander.”

To their amazement, she made them talk of other things. So they had their way; and she returned to Iowa.

In January Jesse wrote once more:

Dear Friends:

Nancy can’t seem to settle down and be happy. She is expecting
another baby. Can’t you pay us a visit and I think it would
reconcile her. It would do you both good to have a rest and see
this great state. My business is fine and I would be willing to
send you the fare thinking it would do Nancy good.

Rose left her little children with her sister Adelaide. They arrived in Beacon, Iowa, early in February. Jesse met them in the village, and they drove through the snowdrifts, the jangle of the sleigh bells keeping them from talking.

Nancy, flushed with pleasure and embarrassment, led them to the spare room, and showed them her house proudly. A cot for Timothy stood beside her narrow bed, and she did not open one door at the back of the house. “That is Jesse’s room. It was meant for a hired man, but he likes it best.”

The soft-maple floors gleamed as if they were marble. She lifted the grass-green shades in the parlor windows. There were armchairs drawn up around a table shining with wax, a crocheted tidy on the back of each; and in a cupboard a dinner set decorated with brown bamboo and birds stood in faultless array amid the paper-lace borders. Rose said, “You keep house as if it were a religion.”

A blush colored Nancy’s pale cheeks whenever Jesse came into the house. He was a coarse man, boots to his knees, with filth in the creases; his finger nails were black, and his red mustache stained by chewing tobacco; there was an odor of the stable wherever he went. He had a look of shame and anger, and Rose understood him--he was like her brothers.

Boisterously, proud of a sharp deal in horses or cattle, he would stoop for the laughing child; but his wife would cry, sharply, “Don’t touch him”; then hesitate, smile half-heartedly, and murmur at last: “You haven’t washed. You’ll spoil his clothes.”

Rose found an opportunity to say to him, “Maybe, Jesse, if you kept yourself up better, Nancy would be more satisfied. You know she’s overdelicate.”

He hung his head. “I can’t be governed by her notions. She married me as I am. I can’t change my ways.”

Their visit had failed. It was as if there were to be, sooner or later, a trial of Nancy’s character, and she considered them only as eye witnesses. She talked inconsequently of her housekeeping, Jesse’s habits, and the heat of the Iowa summers--though it was then midwinter. Henry seemed to know what she was talking about, and gnawed the tip of his mustache.

The cutter in which they drove to the station held three, so Nancy did not go with them. Rose said: “Bear up, Nancy. Don’t take it so hard. Jesse is kind and a good provider. You’ll get used to his ways.”

Henry kissed her, clenched his teeth, and walked away without looking back; he could not blame his brother-in-law, nor forgive him.

The cutter slid away in a trough of discolored snow. Nancy began to weep, not because the relatives had gone--she needed to be alone. The house was quiet and sweet, hidden in a snow bank; if she could have it all to herself, with Timothy asleep ... A sinful thought--for a woman has to have a husband, and a child a father. She fingered her wet cheeks--ah! she had touched the horse blanket, had folded it round their feet; and she hurried to wash her hands. Then she sat in the immaculate parlor and tried to be happy for one moment. But her nostrils quivered; there was an odor of Jesse’s stables, faint, floating around her head; and she shrank in the chair, as if it were an invisible hand lifted to strike her.

Spring. The snow and ice went away in thick floods. The sun, rather red and heavy, mounting in the sky, made her think of Jesse in the first summer of their acquaintance. It was lifting itself up to caress every bit of refuse and impregnate every furrow. From the kitchen window she could see wet pyramids of dung being scattered over the fields. In foul nests little chickens which resembled yellow roses broke open the buds of shell; and the garden began to bloom, though she was not strong enough to work in it.

Summer. July burning again, and the air smoky with flies. Nancy could not breathe and could not stop breathing. It was their wedding anniversary; three years ago this same heat had been love. Jesse was to blame. She loved him; love and repugnance were one. She thought, I am a wicked and lost woman.

The evening star peered from a tree; it was like the eye of a bird, a sick bird. She tried to be more religious, in order to forgive the world its uncleanness. With a gross gesture life began; it could end only by decay; if Timothy died, his body ... Filth fed the roots of the clean plants; Jesse’s stables provided her child with food; it was God’s plan. Love married to disgust, everlastingly married; it was a sacrament; it was sinful to want to divorce them. She could not repent, but she could be humble; and in her humility she remembered that her own body was not pure; no earthly water could wash it. An impure cradle.... Nancy threw herself on the floor, and knew that the pain of her second childbirth had begun, too soon.

Jesse wrote to the relatives in Wisconsin:

Our little girl was born too soon and died. Nancy did not see fit
to shed a tear. There is no sense to her misery and it has made her
inhuman. She was very sick, but is now doing well.

Later:

This is to inform you of very bad news. My poor wife seems to be
failing in her mind. She won’t let little Tim drink milk and she
washes him until he gets so tired he cries. She is so set against
me I don’t know what I am going to do.

In November they received a letter from Nancy herself:

Dear Brother and Sister,

I want to tell you that they’re taking me away. They call it a
hospital, it is an asylum. I’m writing so you won’t blame Jesse,
he’s had more than he can bear. They say I’m losing my mind and I
suppose they’re right. I always thought it would end this way.

Before his wife’s eyes Henry’s emotion shook his whole body. It was not pity; he had endured his disaster; everyone had to bear his own, at least everyone of that family. It was not pity--it was fear. His own sister broken by insignificant things, in a despicable combination.... Could he himself be broken as well and whining madness be uncovered? Her breakdown betrayed their common weakness, hidden by dignity until now. She would not be able to forgive herself; he, too, was humiliated--brotherly love taking the form of shame.

Seven months later Jesse wrote:

They say that Nancy is all right again and she came home. I find
her much the same, but she is more clear in her ideas and more
patient with me. God is my witness that I didn’t want her to stay
there any longer than needful but she’s far from a well woman.
Knowing what her trouble is now, I try to overlook more.

The next letter was from Nancy:

It is wicked to say so but if they had let me have my child I’d
have been willing to stay in the Asylum. I dread the summer. I
guess you’ll say something is wrong with my head still. Don’t blame
me.

In September Jesse wrote once more:

My poor wife is getting more flighty again. I can’t say what to do.
If she has to go again I’ll have to give up the little boy, for I
can’t take the care of him that ought to be taken.

In October, without warning as before, Nancy arrived in Wisconsin with Timothy. She threw herself on her knees at Henry’s feet, striking the floor with her hands. Rose did not know what to do with herself, so she took Timothy away.

“Don’t send me back,” Nancy cried. “I’m all right. Don’t shut me up again. I’m not crazy. I’ll be good and work. I’ll do what you tell me. But don’t send me back.”

Far off under the trees her child could be heard crying, cries muffled in Rose’s apron. Henry knelt and prayed. When he stood up his mouth was as firm as if he had not been praying abjectly, but had merely risen from his chair at a family council.

“My mind is made up,” he said. “Stop crying. You shan’t go back. I’ll write Jesse. You ought never to have married. Don’t cry. You’d better pray.” Then he left her and went to find Rose.

She lived with them until spring, when he found a little home for her in Aaronsville. A miracle took place: as soon as she became accustomed to her new way of life, she gave no sign even of eccentricity. Rose said: “You can’t follow the ways of God. Nancy is as sound of mind and body as I am.”

She had only one whim, a desire not to be called Mrs. Davis, but Nancy Tower, as if she had never been married. Soon she was earning a good living as a dressmaker and a weaver of rugs. She became proficient quickly in all the feminine accomplishments of the period, and gave lessons in china painting, embroidery, and leather work. She was a noted housekeeper, whose recipes for cakes and jellies were as celebrated as those of any cookbook.

Timothy grew to be a tall boy of great beauty. He resembled Jesse in many respects, but it was not necessary for Nancy even to forgive him for what had been unendurable in his father.

During his twelfth year they were spending a day at Henry’s, and she went up on the hills alone to gather elderberries. Here and there in the pastures lay a stone pile, like an altar, on which mullein stood in the windless atmosphere--stalk beside stalk of pale yellow fire; and there was a clucking of invisible quail. Nancy stripped the berries from the bushes in drooping, maroon clusters.

Then she saw Rose’s little Jimmie hurrying up the slope. “Aunt Nancy!” he cried; but at first she could not understand the rest, because he was out of breath. He drew near. “Aunt Nancy! Uncle Jesse is down at the farm.”

She dropped the basket, the elderberries tumbling out on the short grass. She remembered her husband’s letters asking to have the boy at least part of each year; he had come for Timothy.

Her nephew started down the hill again, picking up little stones to throw at gophers. “Come back here, Jimmie,” she called. “Where is he now?”

“He ’n’ Tim started for a walk toward the Old Well.”

He and Timothy.... She lifted her skirts and began to run. The little boy stared after her, threw down his pebbles, and hurried home. She was running like a wild animal. Halfway down the hill her hair came down. She frightened a gray cat that was out hunting; it took flight up a tree. She slipped through a barbed-wire fence, tearing her dress. She stumbled in the furrow of a plowed field and fell. Down a lane where there was a spring, leaping from bog to bog; down an aisle of willows....

They were leaning against the railing of the Old Well. Jesse looked prosperous and unhealthy; he was fingering a gold watch fob and his new suit was spotted with grease. He stared at her disheveled hair, her dirty, bruised arms, as if he thought that she had gone mad again.

The boy said in his embarrassment: “I’m glad to see father. Aren’t you?”

“Well, Jesse, you’ve come....”

There was a long pause. A young bull bellowed along the fence not far away, stamping the sod; and a bobolink rose through the sunshine and came down in the parachute of its music.

“You can’t have Timothy,” Nancy said. “He’s my boy. I’ve brought him up. I’ve worked hard to support him for years. You mustn’t take him away.”

“Well, Nancy, I thought I could give him opportunities.”

The boy hung his head, ashamed to have spoiled their reunion, and walked away.

“All right, Nancy, since you take it like that. I don’t want you to have another attack.”

“I won’t have an attack,” she said, fiercely. “I’ve made my way alone now for a long time. I’m strong, Jesse. But Timothy is all I’ve got.”

He stammered: “Say--say no more about it. I’ll go away again. But, Nancy, I’m getting on in years. I’m lonesome.”

She pitied him. “You can come and live with us if you want to. You weren’t to blame. I’ll make a home for you.”

“I wouldn’t do that. No. You’d get worse again. I’d be to blame.” He was husky. “Good-by, wife.” He kissed her and started back to the farmhouse.

She could see Timothy on the crest of a hill, swinging a stick and cutting off the tops of blueweeds; she called to him, but he did not hear. She started to run after Jesse--but what could she say to him? So she sat down on the cow trough and wept. From a slender elm a leaf fluttered through the air like a bird, and lit on the ground.

Three months later she said to Henry: “Jesse has written. He wants to come and live with me. I’ve written him to come. It’s right he should. He’s Tim’s father. I’ll be glad to make a home for him. He’s not in good health, and he wasn’t to blame.”

Henry stared at the sky and shook his head obstinately.

“You can’t believe I’m all right, can you?” she murmured. He had nothing to say.

Jesse arrived. There was a room for him with a door of its own into the back yard. He found work by the day, and later began to drive for the livery stable.

Henry said: “You oughtn’t to allow Jesse to work in a stable. You know it’ll make you nervous again.”

She smiled quietly. “He’s always been with horses; he’ll be more content. I’m glad he’s doing what he likes. I shan’t mind. I want to show that I don’t mind.”

Henry was anxious. Rose said: “Nancy is a changed woman. She has a wonderful character.”

Jesse had changed more than she. He was a heavy, worried man, not boisterous any more; his constant anxiety was grotesque. Nancy, busy with her dressmaking and living for her son, seemed only half aware of his existence. Her good-natured admonitions were more terrible than tragic reproaches. He was never at ease in the house; exchanged his shoes for carpet slippers when he came in; was afraid to sit down in the clean chairs; and ate with downcast eyes for fear his wife or son would look at him with disapproval.

Henry refused to hear his complaints, so he complained to Rose: “I’m not a man in my own house. She can nag at me without saying a word. Tim takes her side. She treats me as if I were a boarder.”

When he was working away from home he was more like his old self, coarse and happy-go-lucky. But he grew strange in his ways, arguing with himself as if in his second childhood, and giving the horses in the livery stable strange names: Lavina, Jesse, and Jubilee, instead of Topsy, Dobbin, and Baldy. He was a man who had provoked madness--it might happen again; and he felt the angry loneliness of those who are dangerous to others.

He wrote to his brother in Iowa to dispose of his house and his share in their father’s livestock business--yards, pastures, horses, and wagons. He drew all the money out of the bank when it came.

Nancy remarked: “I don’t know what has become of Jesse’s money. Goodness knows I don’t want it, or need it either. But I hope he hasn’t made some outlandish investment.”

One Sunday afternoon the Towers had a visitor: a stout woman of middle age in untidy billows of brown percale. Her hat tipped forward under an ostrich plume like a horse’s mane. She advanced over the lawn in a stately fashion.

“I don’t know as you remember me. I am Mrs. Jervis, a widow, and live over by the sawmill. I went to school to you, Mrs. Tower; I was Lavina Trump. Your brother-in-law, Mr. Davis, stayed with me the time he was working on the State Road. I want to ask your advice about something.”

She was embarrassed without being distressed. “Well, you see, it’s this way. Jesse was quite nice to me. It seems he’s not so happy at home.”

She cleared her throat. “Now the other day he came for a visit. I noticed how he had something in a handkerchief. He told how he had sold his property in Iowa. Now what I want to ask is, is there any trouble between him and your sister, that is, his wife, and is he planning on leaving her? Because I’ve always had the greatest respect for your family, and don’t want to cause any trouble. Because all of a sudden he gave me the handkerchief and said he wanted me to have it and would like to marry me. It was full of bills--really a lot of money. I thought I ought to tell you.”

Henry sprang to his feet. “The man is mad!”

“It was his wife, I thought,” the widow murmured. “I heard she was out of her mind once.”

Rose clapped her hands together. “The Lord help us!” she cried. “This beats all!”

“He’s been acting queer,” Henry continued, pacing about the room, “and now he doesn’t know what he’s doing. I’ll have him taken in custody. I tell you, he’s mad.”

Mrs. Jervis sniffed and wiped her eyes. “I’ll tell him. I’ll stop seeing him. To mislead a widow--it was hard.” She took her leave, trying to be majestic and complacent in a way that suited this turn of events.

Henry said to his wife, “Don’t breathe a word to Nancy about this widow.”

Jesse announced a few days later that he would have to go back to Iowa to look after his affairs. “You must understand, Rose,” he said, “that I’m a miserable man. My only friend, a woman you don’t know, has showed me the door. There’s no place for me anywhere.”

He never returned, and did not answer Nancy’s letters. She wrote to his brother, who replied that he was doing chores for a well-to-do farmer who was bedridden, and was in poor health himself.

Nancy did not understand why he had gone; in one way or another, it must have been her fault. His breakdown was a mocking repetition of her own--her own reversed. She asked herself if she ought to have led a different life, and could not answer. Confused and disappointed, she mourned for the fat, unreasonable man she had loved, for the marriage from which she had fled. Timothy was impatient with her melancholy, as his father would have been; and in fact, no one could understand her.

Then Leander came home; he had always been her favorite brother. He had been away during the entire period of her troubles, and wanted to know what had happened; so she talked to him by the hour.

It was a trial of her life and character. His thin face never frowned, never smiled; the tired woman, tired of her own courage, hoped that God’s face would be as indifferent and gentle. He understood. Not any one person had forgiven her--not Henry or Jesse or even Timothy, not Leander whom she had not wronged; but somehow, she had been forgiven. As she told the long, redundant story she reëxperienced the terror of being loved, the shame and loneliness of having lost her mind, the pity of being a widow without the intervention of death; reëxperienced all these things, and did not mind them any more.

7. His Great-Uncle Leander Tower’s Return. The Adoption of Timothy Davis

There was a small house which appeared to have stolen out of Aaronsville as a heartbroken man withdraws from a crowd which he has joined for distraction. Upon his return to Wisconsin, Leander Tower bought it, with all the furniture its owners were willing to leave behind them. His cottage in California was occupied by tenants; but he knew very well that the surrounding fields, on which they hoped to make a living as gardeners, were less fertile than ashes, and doubted whether the rent would ever be paid. So he decided to become a rural postman, and in due time was given an appointment.

Every morning before dawn he harnessed a little sleepy mare, called at the post office for the mail bag, and drove from house to house over a fixed route. He placed under the visors of mail boxes letters from distant sons, post cards covered with kisses, testimonials of drugs which cured all pain, mental and physical, and seed catalogues; and sold stamps and envelopes to housewives or to haggard little girls in pigtails. No one dared to say that he read the post cards, but everyone was embarrassed by his look of understanding.

The correspondence in his custody, none of it addressed to him, represented life and his relation to life: hastily written outcries, half-articulate avowals, and merely practical questions and answers, passing impersonally through his hands. The syncopation of the horse’s hoofs, the faint thunder inside its body when it ran, the drifting fields and branches, soothed him; his mouth relaxed and his eyes grew drowsy.... Winter was a hard season for the postman. The pure sky hung down like a bridal veil. Moist snowflakes pressed with a cruel sensuality here, there, and everywhere. Blizzards reached inside the closed wagon and inside his coonskin coat, to embrace him. High drifts had to be opened with shovels. There were bad days in January when he did not dare leave the village, and the routine which relieved his melancholy was interrupted. But the Wisconsin spring, so remote in January that one forgets what it is, returned at last automatically, its damp mouth half open, full of music--never looking at Leander with its abstract eyes.

He began to surround his house with a garden. One could not see it over the mock-orange hedge; but intermingled with the odor of dust, of sweating horses, of a sweetheart’s cheap scent, the passer-by was likely to detect the odor of Leander’s herbs: sweet basil and carroway, fennel and coriander, dill, sage, summer thyme, true lavender, and wormwood. The whole garden, without the usual showy borders, without the usual golden-glow and peonies, resembled that bed of herbs. The voluble earth, fond of assertions and repetitions, had been forced to whisper a nervous poetry.

He separated the plants, each one perfect of its kind, by artificially arid spaces, and covered the roots of an Ophelia rose with a pavement of pebbles. Two moss roses appeared to bleed from their own thorns. There was mourning-bride thrust full of stamens, one or two flame-flowers, and moonwort, and rock arabis. In the autumn, on the brown dusk, a day-lily with its pale face of a frightened boy, went to sleep.

Leander placed a stool on the path and crouched there, hiding his mouth in his lean hands. A dwarf chrysanthemum sprinkled the air with acrimony. The walls of the sky, like those of a church where nothing has ever been consumed by burning, smelled of a dead fire. An atmosphere of fatigued passion, where passion had never been free. As if he were a man so old that no night is of interest in itself, his thoughts always began: On such a night ...

The Civil War. A village turned into a barracks, a fence turned into a stable. A mule broke loose and kicked a dog, which rolled howling in the bushes. Candlelight pointed by tents. The odor of oleanders and diseases. An accordion out of breath on a soldier’s lap, roughly embraced and crying out. Here and there on the ground camp fires lay like red roses. Seeming to inhale the perfume of one of the fires, there stood Hilary all alone.

Leander could not recall clearly the days when his sister-in-law Rose had been his sweetheart, but he could remember remembering them during the war. Military sorrow mixed with sweetness--Rose’s former sweetness: the cinnamon rose muffled in thorns, the rose all burning cheeks and awkwardness. Then the bright mornings had been so bright that love had thrown shadows in every direction, so bright that he had paid no attention to the shadows....

Shadowy Hilary following them over the hilltops, watching them from a rock or a log fence; a very calm attention, without curiosity--the boy understood everything about love but its cause; watching with the fright of one who sees something unnatural happen every day. One night, one of the boy’s hands extended toward Leander (in silhouette against the window over the bed they shared), the other hand taking it by the wrist and drawing it back. A good-night kiss, abrupt and as it were disdainful. Strange behavior.... On which of these occasions had Hilary been asleep? Day after day, night after night, intermingled with Rose’s wide-awake passion, these obstinacies of sleep....

Then Leander had thought it sufficient to be fond of his brother; years too late he tried to understand him. Hilary’s enthusiasm for the war should have reminded him that it would be fatal: delight in being a frail child in the army, because Leander had to defend him night and day against bullies; delight in the fact that relatives and friends were far away; displeasure when letters arrived. His excitement was a sort of joy, a sort of joy which broke his heart because he knew it could not last forever.

For Leander the war and his own life were divided in two parts by the hour of Hilary’s disappearance. Nine o’clock of an evening in 1864: singing interrupted, the jokes of great fear, half-starved horses whinnying, the enemy close in the dark. Just after the boy left him, staring back over the camp fire with one of those cold expressions which cover inexpressible feeling, Leander understood what it all meant, and whispered one word to himself: “Love ...”

He knew now, in his fortieth year, that if he had been able to believe what he had whispered then, he would have felt an impossible yearning; that if it had been peace time, if he had been at home, he would have been afraid. But the war that night had been altogether fear. One despair more or less, one word spoken or unspoken, changed nothing--the war went on. About half past nine the guerilla fighting, which lasted all night, had begun with loud curses in two dialects; a gun discharged, and a dog screaming here and there, having been shot. And no one had realized until midnight that Hilary was not in the camp.

Over Wisconsin the moon rose, and it looked like a silver pitcher, and a little stream from its mouth splashed on Leander’s temples. He thought of sleep: “If you sleep with the moon in your face, you’ll go mad,” his old mother had said. He went indoors, gathered up the remains of supper--folding cheese in paper, laying aside cobs of sweet corn for the pig, pouring out milk for the cat when she came in from hunting--and blew out the lamps.

But there was no rest in the wide, second-hand, walnut bed. Coming to him over the pastures, the music of a barn dance throbbed as if it were a blood vessel in his own body. He was healthily tired, but could not sleep; he had to go on thinking all night about that hour which had divided his life in two parts.

His regiment was established in a deserted village called Belle, in the Tennessee hills, a little way from the army itself (exhausted along that part of the line by dysentery), to distract the Rebels. A swamp at the foot of the hill was always full of their sharpshooters. A little road was the boundary line; it was called the Bad Road--nobody walked on it. The best shots in the regiment, lying on their stomachs under trees, waited for a Southern face to show in the leaves. If one’s foot slipped on the edge of a gully, one was never heard of again.

There were three brave sisters from Michigan who traveled about, giving concerts for the men; they sang at Belle that night. In a creaking cart drawn by a mule and escorted by dirty, bearded boys, they drove into the village and climbed up on the church veranda. Three women of middle age--the firelight shook on their slightly red faces. They opened their chapped mouths, and three tired, half-male voices--now in unison, now separated in simple harmonies--sounded loudly among the broken porches and the tents. One or two bats hurried in and out of the window without panes over their heads. They sang, _Break the news to mother, Tell her I love no other_; _O my Darling Nellie Gray, They have taken you away_; _The Battle Cry of Freedom_ (in which many of the men joined); _Tenting To-night_; and _In the Gloaming_. Hilary and Leander sat on the cot at the door of their tent.

No one understood what happened then. Perhaps the pickets along the road had drawn away from their posts toward the singing. Or a Rebel came up out of the swamp and slipped between them. A shot was fired; canvas was ripped by a bullet. The singing stopped on a high note; one sister clasped her head, another pressed her fist against her mouth; a hoop skirt caught on the balustrade and tore. Another shot was fired, and something crashed heavily in the brush. The sisters climbed into the cart; somebody whipped the mule; soldiers ran ahead, holding their guns in both hands; the cart rattled out of sight up the hill toward the army. There was a long silence.

A tired lieutenant limped into the firelight to give an order: the pickets were to keep as close to the Bad Road as they could; the rest were to stay where they were, inside the camp, but nobody was to go to bed. He stumbled over a sleepy little negro who was the soldiers’ pet. The child vanished, whimpering; the officer sighed.

Leander lit a candle in the tent. Hilary looked as if the singing had made him drunk. Leander took a purse from his pocket and unwrapped a tintype of Rose: the earrings in the shadow of ringlets, the black lace mitts and great ruffles, the face waiting its turn, waiting for peace to be declared. “I go out to the Bad Road at midnight,” he muttered.

“What are you moping about? What is the matter?” his little brother muttered.

Leander was taken by surprise. “Oh, we’ve had enough of this. I want to go home.”

“Home to Rose ...” the boy whispered. “You’re not my brother any more.” He put his lean hand on Leander’s wrist, and the fingers opened and closed. “I wish ...”

“What?”

“I wish--the war would keep on always.”

Leander stared at the tintype, and below it the young excited fingers, and between them the short yellow hairs on his own wrist catching the candlelight; and he saw Hilary’s other hand creep up among the wool blankets. Suddenly Hilary snatched at the picture. Leander thrust it into his pocket, and he was holding the boy by one shoulder. “Don’t be a fool,” he said huskily.

The boy stood up. Something which had given off sparks for many days, for years, had caught fire in the dangerous night, in the singing and the homesickness--it burned by itself; and the boy’s thin body seemed to sway inside the tent. “I wish,” he said with great difficulty, “that I’d never been born--your brother. I’d rather--be dead. I don’t--count. The war won’t--last. You’ll go back--to her. What’ll I do? I want, I can’t--”

He stooped, and was outside the tent, and stared back over the dying camp fire.

Leander resented the understanding which followed; he was too tired to think, and too lonesome; that night was too dangerous to think in. But he could not help whispering to himself, “Love ...” He wondered where Hilary was, and thought of hunting for him among the soldiers. There was a noise of running and two or three reports near the swamp. He cleaned his gun. At midnight he crawled on his stomach to the Bad Road; the tired man who was there crept back toward the tents, and Leander whispered to him: “Tell somebody to find my brother. I don’t know where he is.” He killed a Rebel. After that everything was quiet. The man who relieved him toward dawn said that Hilary could not be found.

Leander as a man of forty, sleepless in his empty house, repeated that night in his imagination. The dawn when it appeared was greenish and sluggish--so had that other dawn been. They had not been able to find Hilary among the bodies which lay in the bushes. Leander felt sick at dawn, but he was a strong man; so he would get up, harness the mare, go on his mail route, and work in the garden; he could do what had to be done. Nevertheless, he realized that he ought not to go on much longer living alone.

He was universally respected, but had no intimate friends among his neighbors. The farmers were embarrassed by his flower garden and his sad politeness, and country women regard bachelors with timidity. It was clear that he did not mean to marry, and those who had maiden sisters growing old in the family resented his peculiar way of living.

Because of their love of flowers, he and Mrs. Ira Duff, a woman who was not generally liked, came to be friends. They exchanged seeds, bulbs, and cuttings, and read each other’s half-dozen books; she put gifts of cookies and preserves in the mail box; he grafted her young fruit trees and prescribed remedies for worms and blight; and every week or two they spent an hour together in rather formal talk. He was not a churchgoer, and Mrs. Duff would say: “Leander, a man of your refinement would do well to attend church. It looks as if you didn’t think yourself as good as those that do.”

“Ursula,” he answered invariably, “I do not understand God’s will. I can’t pray for what would come too late anyway, and I can’t see fit to say Amen to the life I’ve had to live. I’m too sad a sort of man to be a hypocrite.”

The proud woman, whose husband was notoriously insincere and pious, smoothed the pleats of her dress. At the end of their conversations they were always separated by two sets of secrets, to which neither referred directly.

Leander often thought of going to church with his family, in order to teach a Sunday-school class. He was drawn toward boys of his little brother’s age and tried to gain their affection, making kites as large as barrels, setting the broken legs of dogs in splints, and distributing puzzles whittled out of basswood with which they might mystify one another. On the Fourth of July expensive fireworks were set off in the garden, and he did not complain when his lilies were trampled underfoot. Hilary would always be young, since he was dead; so Leander was unwilling to be old. He watched their rude, flushed faces, and listened to their laughter; he also flushed, with eagerness and anxiety, and tried to understand the remarks which they shouted to one another in his presence.

Sometimes he imagined that Rose’s boys resembled Hilary; but they were rough youngsters, and suspicious of him, like all the rest. For he could not tolerate their hunting, the amorous cruelty with which they killed things and carried in their pockets rabbits’ feet and birds’ tails. He was strict in other ways--angry if they spoke immodestly of women; and all their mothers approved his good influence. So it became a mark of prudery and effeminacy to be his friend, and at last the good postman began to seem ridiculous as well as sad.

His relations with his family were warm, without spontaneity. Rose offered him the same love, pretending to nothing and understanding nothing, which she gave Henry; it embarrassed him, seeming to be less than a husband would want and more than a brother-in-law had a right to. He himself could do no more than remember that he had loved her. Love had been his way of being happy when he was young; he had grown old overnight, and unhappiness had become a habit. A seventeen-year-old habit ...

Seventeen wild summers and winters in California--there was neither fall nor spring out there. The uneasy peace which he enjoyed in his brother’s house aroused a host of images of the West, otherwise unrecalled. A lofty place full of fat foliage and provoking flowers, where the sun crawled away to sleep. A grunting sort of laughter, loose women, and spilled liquor. Gold like a drug in newspaper bundles or dirty pockets; one shouted when one heard of it, and got drunk because somebody else had it. Tedious danger day after day, as if the war had never come to an end. There Leander had made fun of all the spells which had been laid uselessly on his youth, even Hilary’s spell. In the lamplight, with one of Rose’s children on his knees, the ascetic man often shook his head incomprehensibly, having heard in his own mind a venal whimper, or a curse, or a mouthful of obscene song. Only the fact that after Hilary’s death his heart never could be warm again had saved him from dissolution.

He received from Henry a limited affection. The little man was anxious to show that family ties among the Towers had endured the trials of life. But he believed that he had a right to have a brother whom he could admire, and regarded Leander as a weakling, a man with a sick will.

Leander asked himself many questions as the three sat in silence: Had Henry married Rose because he had run away? If he had become Rose’s husband, would she have loved him no more than she loved Henry? Was she capable of other love than this deferential devotion? How much had she understood? Sometimes he was hurt by her lack of interest. Whom did she blame: him, or Hilary--or God? She seemed to blame nobody.

When in 1885 she was pregnant once more, Leander learned that she had forgiven the boy his share in their tragedy, if she had ever known that he had a share; for she announced that she meant to name the child Hilary. The day after its birth Leander stood by her bedroom door. Rose was amazed to have given birth to a female child. Her other little girls had died; she had three rough, strong boys; the world seemed to be a man’s world.... “I was going to name it Hilary, as you know, Leander,” she said. “What shall we call the little thing? You give her a name.”

Between the lace curtains Leander’s eyes seemed to hunt an aisle through the trees, a dip in the sky line, where he might catch a glimpse of his garden. “Call her Flora,” he said.

Then he touched with one finger the tiny hands, red and still wrinkled, and the reddish-yellow down on the tiny head. He too wanted a child. He envied the domestic affections of that house, and contrasted it with the quiet, empty cottage among the snow-in-summer and the lilies (now beginning to dry up) where he slept with recollections and was childless.

His sister Nancy was nearest his heart. They two had disgraced the family; level-headed people had thought them nearly mad; and they experienced an intimacy of regret. But it was a one-sided intimacy: she told the history of her heart; he dared not tell his history, so he held his peace. His excesses in California had been brought to an end by satiety, not by remorse; no repentance and no expiation--there was not enough energy left, he supposed. If he had talked about that, to Nancy, for example, he would have been a sort of outcast at once. More or less an outcast as it was, though no one else knew it; for that story set him apart from the rest without being told.

He said to himself quietly (not pitying himself) that he was the more pitiable of the two. His tragedy had come to an end; Nancy’s had not. His brother was dead; her husband was alive, and when everything else failed, she could hope for a miracle. He had nothing to hope for; miracles were not performed on the hearts of the dead. There was Lazarus ... But Lazarus had been dead only a little while--twenty years had gone by since the war; and if Lazarus had been a boy like Hilary, he would have refused to come to life.

As Nancy talked to him, he talked to himself, without moving his lips, repeating, contradicting himself. No, Nancy’s troubles were always at an end; because she was a woman and less thoughtful than he, she had the gift of letting each moment vanish immediately into the past; day by day she outlived yesterday’s sorrow. In Leander’s mind every moment left an indestructible remnant, as each dying coral plant in the sea leaves a bit of stone where it lived, pink with its blood which does not fade. All the moments of his life lasted; that nine o’clock during the war, for example, when he had felt Hilary’s yearning and his reproach, resembling hate so closely ...

He smiled as he saw Nancy’s eyes brighten, and realized that from the mask of his affectionate face, while she had talked and he had failed to listen, she had received a sort of blessing or absolution. Then she went down the path toward the road, where over the hedge he could see a horse’s mane and its withers, and her son Timothy’s face. Leander smiled severely; certainly he was the more pitiable of the two, for she had Timothy.

Timothy Davis was a boy of great stature and almost perfect beauty. He was indebted to his mother’s family for his eyes blue as a plum, his pointed lips and small nostrils; he inherited from Jesse Davis the burned pink of his skin, his very large hands with round nails, and a certain rudeness of bone and ripeness of muscle, even in childhood. He was the sort of boy who would be mild in ruthlessness, who would reject more gently than other men accept what they have longed for, who would long for little or nothing, and who would never have to learn, or hesitate, or pity.

When he was sixteen, his mother, lying in bed with an influenza which no one feared, was startled by a premonition, and sent him for his uncle. When Leander entered his sister’s bedroom, her eyes hesitantly uttered the word death, but she said merely: “You must be lonesome there by yourself. Tim can help in the garden. I’ve spoiled him but--but he’s a good boy.”

Leander understood only with the final sentence what her eyes were saying.

A few days after her death in December, 1885, Leander received a letter from her husband’s brother in Iowa, saying that Jesse had gone west with a railroad construction gang as a teamster, and his whereabouts were uncertain. He showed the letter to his nephew, and said anxiously, “You might as well stay with me, don’t you think?”

Timothy said, “I could shift for myself, I guess.... But I s’pose I’d be lonesome. Thank you.”

Leander ceased at once to consider his life as a homogeneously bitter thing, with a familiar logic and cruelty of its own. He was not afraid of the incongruity of his happiness. He no longer dreaded the mail route, but welcomed the cold, the obliterated roads, and the blizzards; for at home by the fire was Timothy, waiting for him and dreaming over a book. Leander knew that he did not actually wait, being incapable of impatience; but he mingled his emotion with the boy’s unconcern, deliberately; every day he himself waited in imagination for his own return; so great was his joy. It was poignant joy, because he thought its days were numbered--Jesse would send for his son.

But in March Timothy received a letter from his uncle in Iowa: “Brother Jesse is dead;” the name of a town in Texas, the date of a month in midwinter; “if you are a strong, steady boy, would be willing to give you a job in my business.” Timothy raised his eyebrows as if death were a stranger who had entered the room rudely, without warning.

Leander asked: “Would you be willing for me to take out papers to adopt you? I shall leave some property out West which may be worth a lot of money if people don’t get as sick of California as I did.”

“All right,” the boy answered.

Spring came down along the full watercourses, and its eyes seemed to single out Leander. For twenty years he had seen the yellow and gray bills of the birds move, without hearing what they sang; now he could not believe his ears.

There followed three years of happiness, very difficult happiness which prevented him from remembering the war. Instead, night after night, he was kept awake by a troubled gratitude for the yesterday and to-morrow between which that night lay. California came into his dreams as if it were a hope; there was a tune which he could not hear but saw lying out straight in the air, a mountain broken open and turning into a rose--but never a dream which disturbed the next morning. His desires did not hurt; they were a secret which enriched him with its embarrassment, and he loved his nephew more because he could keep it from him. He told himself that Timothy gave him the place in his affections which his father had not filled.

The boy was magnificently idle. Sunshine was his energy--he lay in it; the fire in the stove was industrious for him--he nestled close to it. Every morning he tried to make coffee before Leander went out with the mail, and every morning Leander actually made it. He shivered sleepily by the hearth, his wide throat unbuttoning the flannel nightshirt, his legs crossed inside an old fur coat, and often fell asleep again before Leander left the house. He pretended to work in the garden, but was afraid that his awkward hands would hurt a plant. He knew _Gulliver’s Travels_ by heart, and would read no other book, gazing at his hands and imagining himself a giant in a race of dwarfs, gazing at the hills or the great clouds and imagining himself a pygmy in a race of giants. Leander wanted to teach him Spanish, but he learned only one song, which he shouted beautifully and incorrectly. Leander tried to rouse in him some ambition and wanted him to go to college; but the boy could not remember from day to day, of what he was failing to be persuaded.

Rose understood him. “He is what my brothers ought to have been,” she said.

Henry muttered, “That boy won’t amount to much.”

Leander was content. So many anxious hopes of their family given up at last; one pair of Tower eyes which refused to look into the future; one flower not fertilized by hopeless ambition; one less regret to wither on the family tree. No embarrassment, no vanity, no resentment or covetousness or haste.... Timothy reversed the family formula, which was to be proud in anticipation, ashamed in retrospect. His hopes were humble; therefore, Leander thought, he might be happy to the end of his life.

Leander’s wages from the government were small, and it was often difficult to make ends meet. But in 1887 his tenants in the West suddenly paid the overdue rent. It was a good omen; and he thought, incidentally, that for some reason his property must have increased in value, that the renters had hastened to fulfill their obligations lest they be ejected. He gave Timothy as much spending money as he dared, in view of the family disapproval. Every six months thereafter a payment came, and they had everything they wanted.

For three years Leander’s felicity did not seem to diminish, but prepared its own end as a summer does. He had certain principles, rooted in emotion, which could not be set aside, even to please Timothy. There was his horror of hunting. “If men weren’t so used to killing animals,” he said, “they’d not kill each other.” He told again and again how he and his brothers and their like had exterminated a race of large pigeons, feeling for their feet among the branches at night, strangling them, and carrying them home in baskets, more than any family could eat. He made the whole world seem for the moment nothing but a dreary woods where birds had been slaughtered, and as he spoke a dark disapproval of his sensibility increased in Timothy’s eyes; it was like the twilight in a tree which favors the designs of hunters.

Furthermore, the fine young men in the country, including Timothy’s cousins, worked all day and were usually exhausted at night. Those with as much time on their hands as he had--younger sons of retired farmers, village merchants and barkeepers’ boys, and livery-stable drivers--were on the whole passively vicious and drunken. Leander thought that drunkenness was appropriate only to sorrow, and wanted his boy to have as little to do with one as with the other. So, courteously but severely, he prevented him from forming close friendships in the village.

There were moments when Timothy’s impatience was evident. This impatience seemed to say that he did not want one man’s affection to displace the good-natured approval of the whole world; that he did not want to have to say yes or no to anything, and did not want to love or be loved. Then Leander would realize, for a moment, that only some sort of slavery could hold two men so unlike together: the slavery of common memories, or duty, or poverty, or passionate love. Timothy was free. Leander would gaze at the young giant sitting with his face in the sun or curled up by the stove; the hair on his head like a military cap of fur, his magnificent hands seeming to promise to break whatever they touched. And Leander would feel as weak as he had once been strong--very suddenly he would remember Hilary’s young worn-out face over the camp fire the night he had been strongest, and fear a further punishment; regret was not enough....

He decided, nevertheless, to behave as if he trusted the future--the Towers had hastened too many disasters by looking forward; and he hoped that now at last God would want to prove that He was good.

But the best of life is over when satisfactions begin to age one as disappointments have done. Joy proved its reality by leaving scars on his face, smaller but deeper than those of sorrow. He began to look haggard and sad even when he smiled.

Rose and Henry were anxious. “Leander is by nature a bachelor,” they said, “and ought not to have a son on his hands--it is too much for him.”

During the summer of 1887 he was ill for a week. “I don’t know why,” the old doctor said, “but you seem to need a rest.”