Chapter V: Part 5

He let his substitute go on delivering the mail two or three days after the doctor had pronounced him a well man, and he and Timothy went to Port Oliver on the lake. They boarded with the storekeeper’s wife. Rose had made a pair of bathing trunks from some red-flannel underwear, and Timothy swam by the side of the fishing dory they rented. When he stood up his chest rose in a great V out of his lean waist, and his thighs arched forward a little from his lean hips. Leander shouted when he sprang overboard and the water splashed in his face. Timothy rowed, grimacing in the sunshine; and Leander, in the stern, watched the gulls hesitate and let themselves be blown by the wind, and the boy’s hands coming rhythmically forward, pulling down his knotted shoulders. After supper they walked along the dunes, and Timothy sang and threw stones into the waves. Leander said, “Some day you must see the Pacific.”

The following winter Timothy discovered a sweetheart--a girl named Iris Lodge, nicknamed Irish. Henry was displeased: “You let that boy of yours take up with a wild no-’count girl, and a Catholic, besides. Poor Nancy was a God-fearing woman. Your ideas are too loose, Leander.”

Leander could imagine Timothy’s emotion (imagining, perhaps, more than the boy felt) because the girl had almost colorless eyes, so sensitive that they continually took refuge under her slant eyelids, and because her mouth was red, pointed, and not gentle. He bought a third horse, so that there should always be a fresh one in the stable to take them to and from husking bees, dances, box parties, and picnics. The boy thanked him by going out night after night, leaving him alone. Sometimes Leander had a certain irritation to hide. One day in the village store he heard the lovely girl call him “Tim’s father and mother”; but she was almost servile in her smiling politeness whenever they met.

In the early autumn of 1888 an astonishing thing happened. A solitary woodcock made its home in the underbrush of a butternut grove above the house. Several times at dusk Leander saw it in one of a row of scrub oaks which grew along a stone fence down to his garden. He was amazed, for the woodcock is more shy than any other game bird, and asked his nephew to keep its presence there a secret. Every night he watched among the bushes, dividing the week into days of its retirement and days of its appearance; and at last began to scatter crumbs and small grain under the trees it had visited. He never saw it eat, and supposed that small, ordinary birds consumed his offering; but little by little it grew bold, and from one stunted tree to another, from the dusk inside a tree to an exposed branch, approached the house.

One day after sunset Timothy called him to the kitchen window, and there it was in the garden among the chrysanthemums, looking like an infinitely old bronze ornament, walking and leaping slowly. They whispered behind the windowpane, complaining of the clouds which their breath made upon it, for the twilight was cold. Something about the bird’s appearance seemed to indicate its unlikeness to others of its kind--its unusual courage, and the intuition by which it knew itself safe and loved. When it stood on a patch of soil, touching a clod now and then with its bill, Leander half expected it to pass from the visible to the invisible without another motion; but it rose at last and fluttered away heavily in the dark.

It came again. Leander waited for it, daydreaming of angels, thinking they must resemble Timothy in certain respects and the bird in others. It made him feel lonely, because no one he had ever known would be so moved by the sight of it as he was--no one but his little dead brother.

It came often. Timothy brought his sweetheart to see it one evening. The strange fowl came punctually, as if by appointment. They went through the cellar and stood in a row on the steps of the outside entrance, resting their elbows on one leaf of the folding door. Iris was more excited by it than Timothy had ever been, her breath coming and going over her lips, her eyes revealing some sort of intimacy with it--that of jealousy, or worship, or desire. Leander’s gaze met Timothy’s across her narrow forehead, and he realized that neither of them was paying attention to their bird; it was as if another wild, casual guest had joined the woodcock in the garden. Suddenly it struck the air once or twice with its wings, and flew away more swiftly than usual.

The next morning Timothy said, limbering his arms inside his blue nightshirt, “Iris wants that woodcock.”

Leander’s heart skipped a beat.

“To make a hat of it,” the boy continued. “Some other girl has one--a Milwaukee girl.”

Leander remarked timidly, “A young savage, your sweetheart,” searching the boy’s face for some sign of disapproval; but its beauty was pure, and closed, and idle. He could not swallow his coffee. Then Timothy smiled affectionately; it was enough--as good as a promise.

But for five succeeding nights it did not appear--not in the scrub oaks, not in the garden. Leander was made miserable by a fear that some sportsman had discovered it, and by what his nephew had said--not by distrust of him; but there must be other girls who would like feather toques, other boys who would be proud of it when it was dead.

On the sixth night Timothy had gone to the village to buy meat and bread for their supper. Leander sat by the window until he gave up hope of the bird’s coming, then lay down on the couch for a nap. He did not fall asleep. He heard the cart clatter into the yard and Timothy throw down his bundles on the table. He did not open his eyes when Timothy tiptoed through the parlor and began to get supper with a great noise of pans and spoons. Leander enjoyed his invisible awkwardness, and wondered what he thought of when sleep seemed to be between them--but of course there was something equally impenetrable between them all the time. He was beginning to fall asleep....

A gun was fired in the garden. Leander sprang to his feet--he had let the boy keep that gun because it had been his father’s. He stumbled into the kitchen. Timothy’s shadow hurried past the house with something in its hand--why hurry now? Timothy came in by the back door. He lit a lamp. “Been asleep?” he said.

Without knowing it, Leander had been facing a blank wall as if it were a window; he turned around. “Well, I see your girl’s going to have her....” His voice failed. “Hat,” he whispered.

Curiously, there was amazement on both faces. Leander caught a glimpse of his own in a mirror framed in leather flowers (Nancy’s handiwork); it had a dry appearance, a gray color. The boy was staring at him--at him--with a sort of horror; he could not understand that. “Why did you do it? Why did you do it?”

“She dared me,” the boy muttered.

Leander sat down. Timothy sat down, and when he moved, his elbows thumped on the table. At last he said, “There’s something I’ve got to--I’ve got to tell you something.”

“What? I don’t blame you.”

Silence.

“I can’t stand it,” the boy began.

Silence, and barely loud enough to be heard, “Stand what?”

“I can’t stand having you--feel so bad.”

“Doesn’t matter. Don’t you mind.”

Silence. The boy said patiently: “I’ve been thinking ... I can’t stand it here. I want to go away.”

The silence kept asking why; Leander did not want to know. But the boy continued: “I’m a man now. You take things too hard. You love me too much. I’m too young.” He spoke very gently. “I feel like a brute. I don’t feel easy here. Things like this’ll keep happening. I want to do what I feel like and like other fellows do. I can’t stand it.”

“All right,” Leander said. Each time there was a silence of the same size as the words which had been spoken. “I’m going to bed now. Get some supper for yourself. I’m not hungry.”

He came back to the door. Timothy had not moved. “What do you want to do? Where do you want to go?”

“I don’t know.”

“All right. We’ll think of something.”

The next afternoon Leander went to Rose’s for the noonday meal, and sat all afternoon in her kitchen. Little Flora sat on his lap; he showed her his watch and placed Hilary’s silver ring (like a wedding ring) over two of her fingers. He scarcely spoke to Rose. She said: “You have a sickly color, Leander. You must take care of yourself.”

That night he took from the cupboard where he kept his papers a letter which had come two or three weeks before and which he had not known how to answer: a letter from a land agency in California offering him a large sum of money for his property, so large a sum, in fact, that he supposed it was worth more. He showed it to Timothy. “Would you like to go out there? I’ll go to town to-morrow and have a deed made out to you. I always meant you to have it; you may as well have it now. It’s not much good to me.”

Timothy could not speak for joy. He put his arms around his uncle and kissed him. Leander shrank from his strength, as very old men shrink from their sons.

“We’ve got enough money in the house for your fare. Better go soon. You don’t need to be miserable here any more.” He added, as if he were ashamed; “Don’t tell your uncle Henry or the others that I’m giving you the land. They know how I’ve always been a failure at everything. Please don’t say that you don’t want to live here any more. We’ll tell them that I’m sending you out there to look after things. I guess California’s not so bad as it used to be, when I went west. Be a good boy out there.”

The night before he left Timothy was in the far bedroom, hunting in a chest for a picture of his father. Leander sat by the kitchen stove, not moving, scarcely breathing, not yet able to think. His cold fingers shrank from one another.

Then in heavy, lovely tones, a little off the key, the one Spanish song sounded from the other end of the house. Timothy could sing only at the top of his voice. Then the song broke off. Leander thought, he does not want to hurt me. A little later the boy began again thoughtlessly, and ceased at the end of the second phrase. Leander thought, he would be singing if I were not here. He could not endure the silence in which that music had been stifled on his account.

So he went outdoors. There lay the garden, severe and fragrant: the chrysanthemums talking to themselves, and the sky mottled a little like a lemon peel. Most of the flowers were gone--the lilies, the day-lily, the little weak ones, the great rose. Most of the vivid leaves, half destroyed by the frost, fainted from their stems. Most of the birds were gathering to go south, gathering, he thought, like the companies of young soldiers before the war; now that Timothy had stopped singing, their din in the marshes was the only sound to be heard....

The garden seemed finer that evening than ever before. Autumn had perfected it as he had planned--autumn with its rags and tatters, its hard, clean hands. It was perfect now and his heart was broken. He fell on his knees in the path.

He was too old to wait for Timothy to come back. He thought, there could be no more surprises. How could even death surprise him now? And life had little left to reveal; he had played both parts; he had been the one who rejected and the one who asked.

Mechanically his hands began to pluck away a dead leaf here and there, to crumble little clods about the roots, as they had always done; but they found a place where the soil was pitted, where something dark and wet had fallen in drops; and there lay a small gray feather. Then he began to break and tear the chrysanthemums; the tough stalks hurt his hands, and the leaves and blossoms gave up their last perfume. No tears came to his eyes, and the violent motion of his chest was regular, as if he had suddenly learned a new way to breathe all the rest of his life.

But he was afraid that Timothy would discover him there: so as soon as he could, he rose and went into the house.

8. The Dead. His Grandmother’s Final Grief. The Photograph Albums

Leander Tower did not live to be an old man. In fact, Alwyn’s grandmother survived most of the friends of her youth. In 1912 her husband passed away; Mary, Nancy, her sister Adelaide, and two of her brothers, were dead; Leander and the two little girls had left her behind long ago. They had forgotten everything, she supposed, leaving her behind to remember for them: how they had lived, what they had wanted, and what the early days had been like. She had always done her duty; and now there was nothing more to do but honor the dead in her old age and go, in God’s good time, where they were.

She was an active woman without much imagination; but she took pride in one or two poetic phrases which referred to the hard mystery of her experience, the mystery still intact when she had told all she could tell. As primitive people said, My love is like a rose, or, The sea is our mother, she would often say, “Life is like a great county fair”; and fall silent, resting her strong index finger against her cheek bone.

During that silence her grandson, gazing in admiration at her solid hand and drooping throat, her resolute, shortsighted eyes, would complete the comparison, detail by detail, and prove its justice to himself. Then he would wonder if there were many people in America who did not know what a county fair was; how well he knew!

Life is a great county fair ... A village of rickety buildings inclosed by a fence too high to climb; a narrow entrance, a narrow exit. A multitude of laughing or irritable people dragging awe-stricken children by one hand. Many spoiling their appetites with the unwholesome refreshments that are for sale--some of these hiding afterward because they are sick. Some stingy, some extravagant; nearly everyone wanting to be more prosperously dressed; everyone tired to death. Women indignant at the neglect of their men; little ones whimpering because their mothers are out of sight. Long separations being brought to an end; good-bys beginning new separations. Love-making on the sly. Games of chance--the players always losing, the proprietors always poor. Eager or scandalized blushes in the tents where there is nakedness to be seen and music to be heard. Shouting around the pits in which human anomalies and sick wild animals are exhibited. Sleek horses charging around the race track in the dust. On a high platform the jugglers, inexpensively gorgeous in spangles and skullcaps, in the red, yellow, or blue nudity of tights, automatically running great risks and making patterns in the air, and seeming to find the loud applause inadequate....

All gathered together for a competition which involves every sphere of activity. In the inclosures and drafty halls are exhibited bread, pies, cakes, conserves, and honey; exercise books and drawings of children, and every sort of fancywork; fruit, flowers, and vegetables, on shelves--a vertical, withering garden; cages of fowls and pigeons; and swine, cattle, sheep, and horses, of all ages and breeds. Innumerable onlookers, cynical or enthusiastic according to temperament; the judges, though no better than the rest, granting or withholding honor and small money prizes; the exhibitors anxious at first, proud or humiliated at last.

Three days, four days, or a week--and it is over. Stalls and shelves emptied, tents bundled up and tied with rope; crates, baskets, cages, lumber wagons, carriages, and racing carts, lovers, enemies, and little worn-out boys beside their irritable, sometimes intoxicated fathers, going through the narrow exit, with crying geese and bulls and lovely mares and rams whose curls are full of sawdust--on their way now to sweet autumn pastures and matings with whole flocks of ewes after the first frost--each decorated or not with ribbons, varying in color according to their strength, their beauty, their conformity to the standards of their kind; the procession separating at crossroads, one losing sight of another in the dust and the gathering darkness as the great countryside absorbs them once more into itself, and seeming to have disappeared.

So his grandmother’s family and friends had been scattered. The living were in California, New York, Montana, New Mexico; the dead lay in many places--perhaps no single burial ground could have held them all.

For Alwyn the cemetery at Hope’s Corner took the place of a city child’s park. In certain evergreens there were sparrows’ nests which resembled untidy blond wigs; butcher birds lived in a cedar, and once or twice he found a dead mouse which they had hung on the thorn of a honey locust or a hawthorn. Old-fashioned roses, lying smothered in the grass, pricked his ankles. Lilies of the valley spread in a light green blanket, so that the graves on which they had been planted seemed to grow larger year by year. The headstone of a girl with a lovely name, Drusilla John, had fallen down; the coffin had collapsed, hollowing the sod above it; and Alwyn sat there by the hour, his legs under the marble slab as if it were a table, reading his favorite books, writing letters to his only friend.

The lots of his relatives were well kept, in proportion to the degree of kinship. The original families, with the single exception of his own, having left the community, the rest of the graveyard was a thicket of weeds, lilies, bushes, roses, and birds’ nests; the conquered wilderness had reasserted itself, in miniature, over the conquerors’ bodies.

Alwyn’s grandmother said, “The neglect of the graveyard is a shame to the present generation,” and held herself responsible for its general upkeep. So in the autumn she drove about the country in search of a man not too busy with the harvest to mow it, offering to pay him well, even willing to have the work done on the Sabbath. As the community filled up with German Catholic immigrants who bought the farms of the old settlers, she made it her business to see that the latter were not forgotten; as one of a proud, subjugated race would try to teach the history of the land and the names of its heroes to ignorant invaders. Eleven Civil War veterans, including her husband, were buried at Hope’s Corner; and every year she persuaded the teacher of the school across the road to arrange a Decoration Day program of recitations and old songs. She took bands of children to the woods to make wreaths and bouquets, and attended the exercises, shepherding the scholars from grave to grave, speaking to those who showed a little reverence, often laughed at by those who had been badly brought up.

These were the dead of a great period of the nation’s history, eleven heroes; she honored their graves as a lesson to the living. Her own departed ones--she scarcely knew where some of them were buried, and it did not matter. She never thought of them as asleep under blocks of marble and granite and drooping bunches of trilliums, mandrake blossoms, and anemones. They were awake somewhere, doing their duty, whatever it was, nobly, invisibly.... Probably they had forgotten her--life was remembrance, so death must be forgetfulness; but she could not forget them for a minute. Left alone at last amid the scenes of their youth, she clasped her souvenirs to her breast, and yearned for all the dead as a mother yearns for children who are living, but no longer children.

She scarcely differentiated between absence and death. She was not likely to see again with living eyes those who were the breadth of America away--each year one or more was added to their number. The others, the dead, were separated from her only by the fact that she herself was still alive. At her age all good-bys were alike.

But according to her faith the phases of the moon took place above their heads, the absent and the dead alike. When the new moon appeared, other old men and women prophesied the weather according to an Indian tradition: a warm, dry spell if the two horns pointed to the sky, rain if the crescent, like a dipper, seemed to spill water on the earth. But she was indifferent to the weather; for her that slight heavenly body swung like a lantern above the house, above the old farm, high enough to be seen from every State in the Union and every foreign land, high enough to be visible even to those who had crossed the boundaries of the world.

So once a month she walked under the cherry trees in the dusk, startling the white pullets and cockerels which burdened the branches. She lifted her eyes to the lovely sickle, sharpened almost out of sight by the luster which continued to rise over the hills from the sun; and wiped away her unwelcome tears with a corner of her apron.

Then she would say to her grandson, who, believing that she was lonely, followed her: “You know, I always think of those who are dear to me when there is a new moon. It is my custom. The same moon shines on them all, the same new moon.” In spite of her tears she spoke firmly, indeed contentedly.

But when her daughter Flora died in 1914, this fortitude came to an end, and serenity gave way to despair. Death was acceptable twice during life: before it began in earnest, and after it was over. Little children died--death deprived them of nothing; their mothers were strong and could bear it. Those who were old belonged to death, as if by contract; she was willing that nature should take its course. But the death of a lovely, unmarried girl was intolerable and against nature. She herself should have been allowed to go instead; life had had its way with her for more than half a century; she could have said Amen.

Hitherto, time had been given her in which to recover, to develop new habits and enjoy new hopes. Now it was too late; she would not live to see the end of this anguish; she could never begin again. She had always accepted things as they were; having protested, she had folded her arms and given in; but her will would never be at peace with the Will which had determined Flora’s death. There was nothing to do but leave the world, unreconciled, and, because of the insubordination of her heart, half ashamed.

She had been proud of her life, the masterpiece of the divine Hand which had guided her hand, a vast and somber picture. The gesture which had drawn certain lines had hurt her; certain colors had been her life’s blood; but looking back she had been able to view the result without much pain and with approbation. Now the giant Hand, with a final stroke, with the stain of a final wound, had spoiled their work.

In the past it had seemed natural for those who had the same sorrows to weep together. Now she could not bear to be seen weeping, apparently ashamed; it was not her fault--but those who have been strong, when they are crippled, want to hide their deformities. She would say to the children, “I can’t have you here now; run off and play,” and sit alone by the window, weeping without covering her face, her cheeks red and shining with the continual tears, her worn-out eyelids fluttering, her lips moving as she repeated to herself the fact that her last-born child was dead.

When she had been happy she had been able to endure the thought of all her former griefs. Now these wounds, suffered and healed long ago, burned with sympathetic pain; and the story of her life, the whole history of the family, seemed unmentionably sad. If young people realized how life ended, they would not want to live; so she would hide her despair and say nothing. Therefore, during the last years, she said very little about Leander, or her husband, or their close relatives, or her sons. Instead she drew near to those who had never been near her heart, and preferred to talk about them.

Accompanied by her grandson, she made a round of afternoon visits to old men and women whom she had known indifferently for years, who had never been more than neighbors. Before them she could pose as a wise woman, strong enough to endure the afflictions which God in His violence had imposed. Distracted by their weaknesses, she could ignore for a few hours her own weakness and dismay. She defended herself from their questions with a hard good nature--the humor of her rude ancestors, hunters and soldiers and vagabonds, masking her heart and hiding the wreckage which death had left in it at last.

She talked to her grandson with a startling sardonic gayety about these people and others like them who were dead: relatives whom she had happened not to love, his grandfather’s friends, the friends of her friends. The disastrous comedies of their lives diverted her from the grief which was all that was left of hers; she could be as brave about their troubles as she had once been about her own. She dwelt without pity on their paradoxical characters, their avowals and frauds, their astonishing whims and failures; and at Alwyn’s request identified among her photographs many of their faces.

There were two albums of embossed leather studded with buttons which resembled shoe buttons, and one with celluloid roses glued upon a velvet binding. There were daguerreotypes in cases closed by a metal clasp or a loop of worn cord, which Alwyn opened and tried to read as if they were a library of miniature books. At the left a leaf of red satin, at the right in a mat of beaded gilt the portraits: heads and busts and family groups, pygmy men and women as if seen through a telescope--the men in a daydream, the women anxious about their children, their lovers, their clothes. Mouths like bits of carved wax, nostrils of an insatiable arrogance; eyes long closed in death--or the young, suspicious eyes of men and women who were now old and patted Alywn’s head and peered at him dimly and beneficently--staring out of the picture frames as if he were an enemy in disguise.... The lifeless light (in which innumerable photographers had covered their heads with large, black handkerchiefs and imitated a bird with their hands) half hid and half revealed all the possible combinations of all the motives there were--greed and sensuality and courage and compassion and cruelty and nostalgia; all the destinies there were--manias, consolations, regrets.

The same motives and similar destinies existed still; but these people whose playground they had been were gone. Nothing came back from the oblivion into which they had vanished (for old age and death were equally oblivion) not a sound came back but a little slightly exultant, unhappy laughter--Alwyn’s grandmother laughing for them.

He listened to her comments--old-fashioned maxims, scraps of tragi-comic narrative, implicitly mocking, explicitly compassionate--and what she told revealed little more than the photograph albums themselves: another set of pictures, photographs of actions and opinions, also noncommittal and badly focused. But he knew what she knew and tried to forget: that each picture was a tomb where a dead heart (or merely the youth and freshness of a heart which was now old) lay buried--buried with its affections, its apathy, its fury. He knew that on each insignificant grave there stood (though he could only guess what it was) a secret like hers, wild and perfect as a wild flower, nodding in its everlasting leaves, or dangling from a broken stem....

_Laura-Belle Barry_

Mrs. Barry, born Laura-Belle Allen and married in her youth to her cousin Will Allen, had once been plump, melancholy, and ravishing--to which the portrait that Alwyn’s grandmother kept because both her brothers had been in love with the lady, bore witness. Her father was the merchant in Aaronsville in the days when stores were few and far apart, and any price could be asked for the necessities of life; he was prosperous, but by nature pessimistic.

Laura-Belle wept over all the boys who loved her. Even her young husband’s passion did not wake her from a resentful daydream. She gave birth to two perfect children; they died of scarlet fever. Her father was believed to be guilty of fraud and died mysteriously. Finally Will Allen was killed; a magnificent spotted bull gored him and trod him underfoot. After his body had been rescued, Laura-Belle stood staring over the fence at the beast until she had to be taken away by force.

When she came to her senses she was a new woman. She never shed a tear for the dead man, but grew more and more emaciated. She began to take an interest in everything and everybody, and then began to be noted for her sense of humor. She dressed in red, and since this color was supposed to enrage bulls, no one dared to ask her why. Eventually she married Barry, a drunkard, and merely laughed at his excesses. Between them they wasted her small fortune, and at last were penniless.

In her old age she wore a ragged, red, one-piece garment or an old dress covered with black braid and jet buttons. If anyone noticed her clothes, she would tear another hole in them, smiling pleasantly, and say, “Blessed be nothing.” She was a saint, though something of a busybody, sparing no one when she spoke. It was reported that even on her deathbed what was left of her once lovely and heavy body--burning eyes, blue-veined hands, long braids of silvery hair, skin and bone--was shaken again and again by her crackling laughter.

Apparently unconscious of the sound of her own laughter, Alwyn’s grandmother said, “Nobody could make a sound like that when she laughed if a hard life hadn’t been too much for her. But it was enough to put the fear of God into your heart, and gave a bad impression.”

_Mr. Sam Peters and wife, born Melissa Duff_

A little man as vague as the wisp of yellow beard between his mouth and his Adam’s apple. An unkind, vigorous, and well-dressed woman. She was Alwyn’s great-aunt on his mother’s side of the house.

His grandmother Tower would say, in his mother’s presence: “That was the most miserable woman that ever lived. I never knew anybody else too mean to give a slice of bread to a tramp that asked for it. Your ma is a wonderful woman; my only complaint is that your pa married into the same family as Melissa Peters.”

Alwyn’s great-aunt Melissa ruled and humiliated her small husband. On one occasion he rose in revolt. She made up her mind to visit her relatives in Canada, spent so much money for new dresses that he could not afford to hire a housekeeper in her absence, and made no mention in her letters of returning. At last he sent a telegram, signed with her brother’s name: “SAM VERY SICK IF YOU DESIRE SEE HUSBAND ALIVE COME HOME AT ONCE IRA.” He met her at the station, smiling foolishly, and seemed quite willing to endure, until the end of his life, her heartbreaking tirades.

_Cousin Matie Share_

His grandmother’s cousin who took care of them in 1854 while her mother visited in Kentucky. Her brothers sat around the house, teasing Matie; they pinched her and dared each other to strip her of her new calico dress and hang it on a tree; and she threw sticks of stove wood at them.

No one did any work: either the cows were not milked, or the cream got too sour to churn; so there was no butter to put on the children’s bread when they went to school. Matie told Rose to milk a cow herself and take the milk in a bottle for their lunch. Rose and Adelaide were afraid that the scholars would laugh at them; so they hid the bottle in a hollow stump and stole away by themselves at noon to drink it.

_Captain Ed Hawks_

This boy was the perfect soldier. Fifteen years old when the Civil War broke out, he ran away to a town in Dodge County where a company was preparing to go south. Every day or two he sent someone to find out if his family would let him enlist. At last his father consented: “He might as well go. He’ll never be good for anything else.”

The child took three prisoners, and was made a captain before peace was declared.

Laughing sturdily, Alwyn’s grandmother said: “I guess old John Hawks wouldn’t have been much put out if something had happened to Ed down South. He was a shame to them, being the only lazy man in the family. He’d work harder to keep from working than anybody else ever had to.”

_Josh Arbuckle_

This was the hired man who ate skunk.

Alwyn’s grandmother said, “In my day, if you had a sore throat, you tied your stocking, warm from your foot, around your neck; and if that didn’t cure you, skunk oil was considered the best remedy. We rendered their fat ourselves, and put it up in bottles.”

One day, when Alwyn’s father and his uncle Jim were boys, they brought to the house the flesh of a skunk, carefully stripped from the pelt in order not to break the sac which contains the stinking secretion. Their mother put it in a spider on the stove to try out the fat. A little later Josh, the hired man, came in, ravenously hungry after his morning’s work in the cold, saw the meat frying, and thought the boys had shot a squirrel for dinner. He took a fork off the table, removed a bit from the pan, and ate it. Alwyn’s grandmother laughed heartily at the face he made when she told him what he had eaten, and laughed still, after thirty years, whenever she remembered it.

_Baltus Valentine_

A portly face full of blood, with ruffled whiskers. This was the man who suffered from violent toothache. When it afflicted him he ran outdoors, bellowing so that he could be heard half a mile away. A heavy man clutching his head with both hands, elbows in the air, galloping round and round the strawstack in the blazing sunshine....

_Mr. Peter Greeley_

This man was a notorious miser, but the daguerreotype showed him as he had looked at the age of twenty-three. An anxious, effeminate face; his moistened hair combed low on his forehead, resembling the parallel strokes of a pen; a wing collar standing well apart from his throat, and a black ribbon fastidiously knotted.

He played a fiddle in his youth. His father had left him one hundred and fifty acres of rich land. He was disdainful of many girls who would have been glad to marry him; but as each girl gave up hope, one delicacy or another vanished from his person; spots of grease multiplied on his clothes; the high collar was forgotten; he ceased to wash, and his hands were covered with red cracks. He sold the violin, and told the woman who kept house for him that he could take care of himself.

Then he lived like a saint who has no god, filthy and miserable, imagining that beastly sins were being committed in the community, and denouncing whoever dared to speak to him. In middle life he sold his property for a large sum of money, keeping only the house and the lot on which it stood. One day he was found dead in the kitchen, holding a battered saucepan in his hand. He had neither relatives nor friends, and the neighbors never discovered what became of the money.

Listless boys with their hands full of stones took the windows for targets, and the rooms were never dismantled, except when someone looked in who was poor enough to want a tin pail, a cup without a handle, a three-legged chair, or a piece of a rusty iron bed.

Alwyn’s grandmother enjoyed exciting the children with talk of the undiscovered gold. From time to time they visited the tumble-down house, and found nickel spoons in a drawer, mismated shoes inhabited by mice, and a curious collection of nails all bent in the same way. Alwyn was not tall enough to look into the chimney cupboard; so he climbed on a box and explored it with one hand, which came away empty but for spots of dust in the form of pennies on the tip of each finger.

_Mr. Homer O’Sullivan_

This well-educated, unsuccessful man looked ill at ease in the photograph; it had paralyzed a singular restlessness of mind and body. But his mouth continued to say yes with a downward, and no with an upward, inflection.

He read Tom Paine and was almost an atheist, hating Christ for His effeminacy and loving Him for His virtue. He defended the Mormons, and at one time advocated Free Silver ardently. As a Good Templar he induced many people to sign the pledge. For him life was a thicket of ideas, and he fluttered from twig to twig like a hungry bird.

His wife was a paralytic; he fed her with a spoon, dressed her, lifted her out of bed in the morning and put her back in the evening; she was his child for forty years.

_Mr. Eli Williamson_

His grandfather’s friend who had gone mad at the sight of a lynching. He had still been sane when this likeness was made, but his hollowed eyes were full of wonder and the violence of a child’s fear of violence.

A hired man named Carty had been lynched. He worked in a German family consisting of an old farmer, his wife, and an orphan grandson named Chris. The old man sold a wagonload of hogs and brought home the money. He went down into the cellar through a trapdoor to fetch some cider, and when he came up Carty hit him on the head with a hammer. The little boy ran out the back door and hid in a cornfield. Carty struck the old woman and forgot the money.

The neighbors heard the old woman scream. The murderer was found before midnight, shuddering and moaning in a haystack.

The next morning a neighbor’s wife, a strong, sick woman, went around from house to house with the child Chris; she shouted and rolled her eyes, and the little boy whimpered all the time. Women stood on front porches wringing their hands; men in barns leaped for their axes and pitchforks, not knowing what to do with them; and a crowd collected around the post office.

About four o’clock the mob took Carty, who turned pale and prayed or pretended to pray, out of jail. Someone’s fast trotting horses were hitched to a cart. The murderer was roped to the axle; the horses raced up and down the road; his body dragged in the dust. Someone set his pet hound on the man, and all the dogs of the town followed--mongrels, hunting hounds, shepherds, and terriers alert as birds--all barking and some tearing the victim with their teeth. Then the mob hanged Carty from the limb of a tree.

Mr. Eli Williamson, looking down from his house which stood on a rise of ground, went mad.

_Mr. and Mrs. Ebenezer Bolt_

The wedding picture of a widow and a widower. Each loved the other’s money, and life was not long enough to adjust their differences.

Alwyn knew them as a very old couple when they lived in Aaronsville. They took a pint of milk for their breakfast, and in order to avoid the shock of a large expenditure at the end of the month, paid for it in turn every morning. The milkman stood on one leg near the door while it was determined by a long dispute which had paid the preceding day.

Mrs. Bolt wore a rusty black dress which closed at the back with a long row of hooks and eyes. Sometimes, after the insults of the milk, her husband refused to fasten it, or she refused his assistance. On these mornings, she appeared wearing it wrong side before--the frills of the bodice drooping over her shoulder blades, her bosom cruelly pressed by the hooks and eyes.

Except in this matter of money, it was a happy marriage.

Mrs. Bolt had a twin sister named Linda, who, having lost her mind, lived in an asylum. Knowing that Linda was dangerously ill, she would not open the door to the superintendent who called to announce her death, fearing that she would be asked to bear the costs of burial.

_Mr. Jim Hallow, Mr. Solomon Royce, Mr. Peters, Mr. John James, etc._

There were many portraits of men of approximately the same age who had fought shoulder to shoulder with Alwyn’s grandfather during the war. Their faces, even the youngest, reminded one of death, as if, having escaped it in battle, they had begun at once to look forward to the time when they would be too hard of hearing, too nearsighted, or too feeble, to escape.

Alwyn had seen a number of them, soon after his grandfather’s death, at an old soldier’s reunion in Aaronsville. These veterans, scarcely able (on account of rheumatism, heart trouble, strokes of paralysis, dyspepsia, or hardening of the arteries) to enjoy their glory, told heroic, interminable anecdotes, hoping to make the young jealous of it. Their nervous wives pitied them, remembering that their prestige was based on the mere fact of survival and could not last much longer. Some soldiers’ widows who were present, as if to keep a chair vacant for an invisible guest, tried rather timidly to take part in the reminiscences. Only Alywn’s grandmother was at ease with the men, dignified and sadly contented, rather like an old soldier herself.

Breathlessly, their white beards tossing here and there, awkwardly, and with an air of bravado, two grandfathers danced a jig; they were like a pair of condemned men dancing in their chains.

_Mrs. Sam Goodwin_

This was the fiercely bright face, amid wisps of gray hair, of a woman who had adopted three children in turn, all of whom had died.

_Uncle Peter Barlow_

Alwyn had seen this man in the eighty-fifth year of his age; and between his eyes and the unrecognizably young face in the oval daguerreotype which lay in his hand, the image of the old story teller appeared, seeming to represent all story tellers. Gripping his cane with a hawk or an eagle’s hand, he had sat all one afternoon beside a well-traveled road, common butterflies fluttering about his head, hens and guinea hens going upon obscure errands about his feet. From time to time there had been a flickering between his eyelids, as in a bed of ashes the falling ash of a twig will seem to be fire itself. And he had told Alwyn a story which has been told in a hundred versions in every tongue, declaring that he had known all the characters in his youth:

“It happened to a boy named Thomas--Jim Thomas. He was a sickly little fellow, scared of ’most everything. That night he was fetching home the cattle, his father told me. The cows came home by themselves, but Jim was nowhere to be seen. His father hallooed and hunted down the road and found the little fellow in the grass, crying as if his heart would break. He told his pa that a night hawk flew down by the cattle for flies and scared him.

“Now in my time families not well-to-do, when they had a death, just put up a board and drove a nail in it and hung up some flowers. There were some of these boards in the graveyard--this was in York State.

“It appears that that afternoon some tough boys at the school had called Jim a coward and dared him. Like as not he was turning that over in his head when he got so scared of the bird. They dared him to go after it got dark to the grave of a woman named Mrs. Gore, one of those wooden monuments, and pound on it with a stone so as they could hear and know he actually was there. Now Mrs. Gore was a woman whose life was a burden, and the hired girl that worked for her husband made out she saw her ghost, and there’d been a lot of talk about that. It appears that little Jim figured he’d best do it and not be a laughingstock.

“So the boys came whistling round his house after dark and he sneaked out unknown to his pa and went along to do it. He took a rock by the side of the road and went into the cemetery. It was pitch dark in there under a lot of trees. The boys were waiting by the side of the road and they heard him pound on the monument, and then he gave a terrible shout. Some got scared and ran home, and two or three of them came sniffling to get his father.

“His father took a lantern and went down and found the little fellow with his coat hooked over one of those nails that were intended to hang posies on. He must have thought the ghost had taken hold of him. The father carried him home and sent for the doctor. The doctor thought it was heart failure. However that may be, he was dead.”

The old man had smiled as if the story pleased him, as if he had ceased to see any difference between tragedy and comedy in what had happened so long ago.

Another day he had told another story:

“In York State in the early days there was a man named Lucas who had a son who was a terror. Old Lucas was a godless kind of man himself and a widower, and he’d not given his boy a very strict bringing-up, I reckon; but he turned religious and got baptized. The boy was wilder than ever--drank and swore and got girls into trouble and wouldn’t work for more’n a few days at anything.

“One winter the boy was hard up and came home to live and stole some money which his pa kept in a coffeepot. His pa found it out and commenced to give him a beating. But the young fellow was beside himself, and he got hold of a shotgun and took his pa by the coat collar and dragged him out of doors.

“Now old Lucas had a fine orchard full of every kind of apple tree, and greengages and berry bushes. So the boy pulled him along into this orchard. And when they came to a little seedling, he said, ‘Pa, bend that!’ And Lucas did. Then they came to a big tree and the boy said, ‘Bend that, you old devil, or I’ll shoot you!’ Old Lucas hollered and got down on his knees and took hold of the tree and held on to young Lucas’s knees. A neighbor’s little boy, there in the currant bushes, saw the whole performance, but he was too scared to go for help. So young Lucas shot his father. Of course they put him in jail, and he was never heard of again.

“I had a son myself, but he died when he was a young fellow, and I don’t even know where they buried him.”

During Alwyn’s twelfth year, this old man appeared in his dreams, and in a youthful, melodious voice told stories too senseless and too cruel even to be remembered in the daytime. But he died, and at last Alwyn remembered him only when he looked at the photograph albums.

_Mr. and Mrs. A. Rollo_

A bridal pair before a vista painted on canvas, beside a taboret like a dancer with iron legs crossed at the knee.

The bride’s coarse veil droops like a lace curtain against the groom’s broadcloth. They are as shy as if they were young; but he is a little bald, and yesterday she was a spinster. Their eyes are looking, not for what they desire, but for the body of desire itself, lost and perhaps dead. Their mouths are the sort which will never tell whether they find it or not.

This couple was childless.

_A boy whose name had been forgotten._

He wore a flowered vest. A pointed curl lay on each of his temples like an arrowhead.

This boy was so beautiful that Alwyn wished he could say to himself: This is the way my father looked when he was a boy. In fact, as he well knew, Ralph Tower had been a rough, homely youngster.

9. His Uncle Jim, the Minister, as a Young Man

Ralph Tower, Alwyn’s father, was not an educated man. Because of their poverty his parents could not hope to send more than one son away to school. They wanted a preacher in the family, for no calling was so honorable as the ministry. Jim, their eldest, was more studious than the other two boys, spoke fluently, and took pains with his appearance. So, while still almost a child, he was chosen to receive an education, and it was useless for Ralph and Evan to have ambitions; they would have to stay on the farm in any case.

The three grew up together happily and roughly. Their mother disciplined them with a worn army belt which hung behind the door; their father ignored them unless there was work to be done. They spent all their spare time in the woods, hunting coons by lantern light, trapping muskrats and skunks, which they drowned and washed in a deserted well. One evening a cow who had dropped her calf alone in the marshes, charged them, and Ralph, the last of the three to take flight, broke his leg. Later Evan fell from a beam in the barn without being seriously hurt, and when he was eleven a furious ram kept him in a tree for several hours. Their clothes and their bodies exhaled a faint animal odor, which, according to their father, made the house smell like a wigwam. They were afraid of girls, and preferred each other to their friends. Undernourished but energetic, half savage but hopeful, a poor farmer’s ordinary sons, dressed in overalls or grown men’s clothes hastily cut down, with copper toes on their boots and rabbits’ feet in their pockets for good luck--until their late adolescence they were as much alike as young dogs of the same litter.

Then mature character developed out of the characterlessness of boyhood, and they drew apart, at first imperceptibly, then with decision, as if, while roving like aimless wild animals over the countryside, they had come upon roads leading in three directions; and Jim, suddenly sober and self-conscious, began to look toward the future which the piety of his parents had chosen for him.

Those were hard times in Wisconsin. They heard their father say to their mother that the farm would have to be mortgaged before long; and for some time the younger boys thought they were as well off as Jim, for apparently, in that family, no one could have a start in life.

But in 1894 Timothy Davis began to send their uncle Leander money from the West every month. Leander was in poor health, and one day he proposed to his brother and sister-in-law that an “old bachelor’s wing” be added to their house; the money Timothy sent should pay for it, keep them from running into debt, and enable them to send Jim to college as well. Henry and Rose promised to care for him as long as he lived; so he gave up the mail route, sold his house and garden, and as soon as the new rooms were completed made his home in one of them, where he sat by himself all day, paying no attention to the farmwork, rarely taking part in family discussions, and watching his nephews with the timid solicitude which is an old bachelor’s way of loving another man’s sons.