(From _Collier’s Weekly_)
I
The sky rolled from side to side like an animal in pain, outstretched
on the soft, saturated trees. Now and again there was a groan of
thunder, and lightning flickered with a glitter of enormous eyes,
rolling in their sockets.
I was driving back to my father’s farm from the village. The downpour
beat on the buggy-top, splashing to the ground and spattering the
rubber laprobe. I disliked the smell of the wet harness leather and the
sweating horse, wishing to enjoy the sour fragrance of the vegetation
half-floating, half-rooted, in the fields. The lantern hanging from
the dashboard hollowed out a space in the darkness into which the rain
poured as bright as tin.
As I crossed a small bridge the lantern-light fell for a moment on the
dripping hat and red face of a man who was leaning against the cement
rampart. It was a neighbor named George Stearns. Should I have stopped
to give him a lift? He was less than half a mile from home; he would be
drunk and troublesome, furthermore I should have had to wake his wife
and daughter, while he alone would roll quietly into the hay-mow.
It was his custom to return from the village in this condition three
or four nights in the week, always on foot, since his daughter Amelia
would not let him take the horse. His drunkenness was proverbial,
and every one who used that road had seen him stumbling through the
underbrush, collapsing backwards into a ditch, or drawn up patiently
out of the way of hoofs and wheels. Weather meant nothing to him; he
dug his way through the drifts, lay in the mud, lurched into cold
creeks, but always got home. He was well liked by his neighbors, who
took a certain pleasure in pardoning a manly weakness, and praised his
good nature whenever his bad habit was mentioned. One autumn, having
swigged too frequently from a bottle behind a beam in the wagon-shed,
he dropped his pitch-fork into the hopper of a threshing-machine,
spoiling the blades which cut the twine; but after the owner had cursed
and threatened, he was not even forced to pay for the damage.
As I passed the lamp rolled low, which Amelia always left in a window
to guide her father, I remembered a story I had heard, how at the age
of eight George had disappeared for a night and most of a day. His
family had lowered a lantern into the well, and shouted in the woods
around the sugar-bush, thinking of wild cats and wolves, which still
came out of the deep forests from time to time to carry off lambs and
ravish the chicken coops. His hysterical mother peered into the bear’s
pen, half-expecting to see strips of clothing on the ground and blood
on the animal’s tusks. The whole countryside was aroused. At last,
after a mournful meal, his father had gone into the basement with a
candle and a pitcher to bring up cider, and found the boy, drunk beside
a barrel.
I thought then how one came to know people by the accumulation of
glimpses; the sight of George, wet and drunk on the little bridge, a
moment too fleeting even to speak to him; and after that his solitude
and my solitude, in which my memory assembled other casual words and
brief encounters. In that country I met my neighbors chiefly on the
road. Thickets and piles of brushwood, the gravel, the puddles, the
barbed-wire fences, the hitching-posts, and the piazzas, filled the
corners of every picture of their lives. A one-horse vehicle brought
me near them, like the field-glasses with which a naturalist detects
a bird in a tree, though its plumage is the color of the tree. All my
relations with George Stearns and his family, for example, were of this
kind: the talk of one of them and myself in a buggy, or between one in
a buggy and one standing beside the wheel or on a porch; the look of
one of them in a barnyard or a field....
Thus about the nucleus of George’s face in the rainstorm, previous
impressions gathered, later images and later conversations were to
gather, rounding out a pointless history. Recollections of similar
men’s lives served as intuition into his life, so that, as I turned
in at my father’s gate, I could see him behind me in the darkness,
blustering and hiccoughing, slipping down in the flooded grass, I could
hear his obstinate sighs in the wind as it pulled the clouds away.
His eighty-acre farm was a miserable piece of property. Gashed with
gullies, the fields of red clay sloped acutely above the house and
barn, which were almost hidden in the edge of a swamp. A lake lay like
an immense ditch in the center of this swamp, and into it the rains
carried the topsoil from increasingly arid fields. George’s father had
understood the weakness of his farm, and had kept the upper acres in
sod-crops, filled the gullies with stone, planted clover to nourish the
soil, rotted the grain-straw in the barnyard, and carted it with manure
into the fields. But George preferred to forget these hard expedients,
and the farm became, as it were, a portrait of himself. He planted only
a little oats for the horse, a little corn for the cattle. The fences
tottered and fell under loads of woodbine and wild grapes. In great
pastures full of thistles two or three sharp-hipped cows gnawed the
june-grass that grew between the stones.
George hired out by the day to his more ambitious neighbors. He was
satisfied with this way of life; to move from farm to farm without
responsibility, to work without haste or worry, to spend his earnings
and his leisure in a saloon. The lot of his wife and daughter was
not so agreeable. They lived like a pair of domestic animals in a
pen: coarse trees on three sides, the tantalizing road on the other;
no variety of duty or scene, no entertainment, no plans, nothing to
expect. Inevitably their poverty would pinch closer and closer, and
they were bound to a man who was happy and didn’t care.
At first Amelia seemed to bear it better than her mother. As a tall,
wry-faced girl Mrs. Stearns, having been assured by her brothers that
she need not expect to be courted for her looks, had married George
to avoid becoming an old maid. George’s mother had suggested that
he might settle down when he married, and she had to take the risk.
The little house like a dry-goods box had seemed, in those days, a
respectable home; but other people’s prosperity had built all around
it, to its shame, incomparable mansions with turrets, lightning-rods,
and picketting around the chimneys, incomparable hip-roofed barns with
the name of the owner stencilled under crossed flags; and George’s
house had deteriorated with his land and himself. Mrs. Stearns fretted
less at her husband’s shortcomings than at the looks of the place.
“Everything’s goin’ to pieces,” I heard her complain one day. “It’s
the worst lookin’ place in the county. Look at that broke rig with the
weeds growin’ through the wheels. The tools all out gettin’ rusted.
I’ll be switched if the mare don’t look mangy!”
“Oh stop it, Ma!” Amelia muttered. “I’m tired of that kind of talk!”
“Nobody goes by on the road,” her mother went on, “nothin’ to see,
nothin’ to do. And me sick. Your pa gets the best of it, he gets out
among folks. We women don’t get no further’n you could throw a stone.”
Amelia marched across from the sink, her round shoulders raised,
shaking her dish-towel angrily. “Who’s to blame for this God-awful
marsh? What’s the good of whimperin’? Who’s to blame, I ast you? Better
go to bed, Ma, and rest.”
When the girl went out to do her milking, the sick woman shuffled off
to bed. If it rained she tossed back and forth on her bed, kept awake
by the water which gushed in all the gullies, washing the best of their
land down to the lake. The temporary rivers gurgled and grew thick,
without foam, and ended as suddenly as they had begun. It seemed that
soon there would be nothing but rocks between the fences.
Amelia was a short, flat-chested girl with muscular arms and extremely
wide hips. Her chapped and freckled skin seemed to have been drawn
tightly over the bones of her face--over the long nose, the cheek-bones
exactly in the center of her cheeks, the receding but stubborn chin--a
face in which were combined poor health and great strength. Her
eyelids fluttered so much that one could not remember the eyes, and her
thin lips pouted habitually.
She did all the work, had always done it. As a child she went to school
only during the winter months, and ceased altogether at fourteen when
the school inspector could not force her to go. She kept the house
decently clean, baked, churned butter, made her own clothes, and
nursed her increasingly bed-ridden mother. Then there were the chores:
she gave the cattle frozen corn-fodder to supplement the straw which
they ate from the stack, milked them, and took the can to the cheese
factory, and pumped from the stinking vat her share of whey for the
pigs. I had seen her staggering down ditches which she had shovelled
in the snow drifts, her long arms almost pulled from their sockets
by the slopping pails of swill, or stooping over the smoke from a
kettle-shaped stove which melted the ice in the water-trough. At
butchering time she worked elbow to elbow with the men, scraping the
bristles from the carcass soused in boiling water, and she alone cut
up the pigs, rubbed and smoked the bacon, and ground the sausage. She
watched over the old sows when they farrowed, sometimes far into the
night, lest they eat their young. Her last duty was to turn down the
lamp in the kitchen window where her father could see it as he stumbled
up the road.
In October I was driving to the village before dawn to meet a cousin
at the station. An odor, iced and musky, came out of the woods. The
dewy red leaves looked swollen, and the thickets very large with mist.
My horse was willing, and I enjoyed the road, pointed like a rod into
distant hollows and forests or lifted up to pierce the sky, feeling an
absolute solitude. But when I came near the Stearns farm I saw some
one waiting for me. It was Amelia, and she waved, and when I stopped,
gripped the wheel with her red hands and stared at me, her face very
sharp as if whittled away.
“Gerson, won’t you stop and look at my pa. He’s sick. I’m
scared--scared to wake him up.”
I followed her--not into the house, to my surprise--but into the barn,
where the light fell with a feeble quiver from the two peepholes and
innumerable cracks. Amelia pointed into the nearly empty hay-mow, where
I saw first a pair of heavy boots, smeared with mud, the toes turned
sharply outward, and beyond them George’s face, enormous, crimson, and
disdainful, with hay in his hair and several stalks in his moustache.
“I’m sorry, Amelia. He’s dead.”
“Oh Lord ... I thought so.”
“Is there anything I can do? Shall I tell anybody?”
“Well you can stop and tell Mrs. Bemis. You’re goin’ to the village?
Tell an undertaker to come, the cheapest one.”
“Is that all?” I repeated, shocked by her perfunctory courage.
“Yeah, that’s all.” She sighed. “I got to wake up mother and tell her.”
Four months later she married a man named Nick Richter. Her mother
expressed a peevish gratification: “Amelia couldn’t stand it, bein’
alone. I ain’t much company no more.” She grew weaker, and kept her
newly married daughter at her bedside all that winter, exercising a
tyranny with her eyes when she could not speak, and they buried her in
April.
There was a large funeral, for during the six months by which she had
survived her husband, the community had decided that she was a martyr
to his drunken shiftlessness. Amelia asked my father and me to bring
two teams to take people from the house to the cemetery, and she
herself rode in my father’s carriage with her only living uncle, his
wife, and another relative. But after the service she separated herself
from her family and climbed into the front seat beside me, looking very
tired, her face tight and yellow, her mouth twitching as if with anger.
“I couldn’t stand those sneaky women another minute. My Aunt Cynthy and
Mrs. Smart, the old hens. They think I don’t show a proper feeling.
They’ll start again’s soon as we get home, but I might’s well have a
rest, I guess.”
“Good idea,” I said.
“Of course I’ll miss her and she was always good to me,” she added
timidly, as if to please me, and buried her pale nose in a handkerchief.
To change the subject I asked, “Are you and Nick going to stay at the
farm?”
“I s’pose so.”
“I thought you might try something else. The land isn’t much good, is
it?”
“No good at all. Worn out, sandy--stones and ditches. It’s gettin’ now
so’s it won’t raise grass--never was manured any. And the fences are
all down. God, I hate it!”