Nick Richter had married to improve his position. His father, a
blacksmith, having speculated in Texas oil, had been forced, just
before he died, to sell his house, his shop, and every hammer and
horseshoe. Nick disliked his father’s trade, and drifted in a radius of
ten miles around the village, working by the day, week, or month, at
odd jobs. He bought a horse and buggy when he could afford to, selling
them if he lost his job, and looked for a wife at every Saturday and
Sunday night dance for several years. But he danced with his jaw, his
neck, and his elbows, and the boisterous girls merely laughed at him,
so these entertainments left him lonely and discouraged.
The lake in the swamp below the Stearns house contained pickerel and
black bass, which George had been too law-abiding as well as too lazy
to exterminate with nets. Since the owner was a bed-ridden widow in
Milwaukee, he was its virtual proprietor, and rented his flat-bottomed
rowboat two or three times a week. Nick drove up before the barn one
Sunday morning, two bamboo poles wagging behind his buggy, and Amelia
showed him where to tie his horse and brought the heavy oars from the
shed.
He was soon recognized as her beau. George had always puttered about
the sheds on Sunday, and Amelia, leaving her chores to him, claimed her
first regular holiday. They went to picnics, and drove from village to
village, stopping at the saloons for soda and beer, and sat very late
on the back porch. Sometimes they went to the lake to fish or pretend
to fish.
I saw them there one morning just before George died, as I walked
through the swamp on an old corduroy road. From the tall maples leaves
floated to the ground like a harvest of ghostly oranges. Through a
clearing I could see the murky hills, and when I approached the lake,
the water glimmered between the boughs in mother-of-pearl strips. From
the tottering boat-house a muddy channel led out through the reeds to
a cup-shaped harbor, separated from the deep water by a sand bar. In
this quiet place a few lilies grew, the yellow thrusting their closed,
hard heads above the surface, the white spreading tufts of petals like
miniature swans.
Here the boat was at rest, the oars hanging from the oarlocks. I stood
on the shore for several minutes, unobserved, and then turned back
into the woods. Nick crouched in the bottom of the boat, half-hidden,
and Amelia, sitting on the broad back seat, held his head in her lap.
Upon her face there was a vague, pale look of ecstasy, an ecstasy of
possession without confidence and without hope.
There followed George’s death, their hasty marriage, the mother’s
illness and death. By spring Nick must have recognized the sterility
of the farm, for he put in only the patch of oats and the patch of
corn, ploughed up the garden for Amelia, and began to hire out to
his neighbors as George had done. He was a good worker in his sour,
muttering way, his shoulders bent forward like the wings of a large
hawk, his gaunt wrists extended stiffly. Perhaps his marriage was a
disappointment; certainly he failed to feel the security of a man of
property, the serenity of a married man, of which he may have dreamed.
Perhaps he had been contaminated by Amelia’s discontent. Perhaps he
was afraid of her: a weak swimmer who had ventured into what looked
like a stagnant pool, to find himself in the embrace of a profound,
indomitable current.
Early in the next harvest I stopped one afternoon to ask Amelia if
Nick could help my father any day that week. The horizon was wrinkled
with heat waves, the zenith as dark as a sea, and one never ceased to
hear the growling of binders. In all the reaped fields the stubble was
spotted with bindweed like drops of blood. As I turned down toward the
swamp I observed the poverty of the fields there, the exhausted soil
gaping through the grass, the thin stand of grain, the great parched
gullies, the bogs where the birds shouted over the ripe weeds. The
trees slept in the sunshine: not a leaf swayed, but sometimes one
feathered prematurely to the ground.
My mare trotted in at Amelia’s gate under the poplars full of
blackbirds. In the semicircle of forest the little house squatted,
staring blindly from its windows. The sheds leaned against the barn. A
sick dove staggered over the rocks by the water-trough. A little way
from the kitchen door, some shirts and stockings and cotton sheets hung
on a line stretched between two posts.
“Hello!” I shouted. No answer. “Amelia!” An echo, small and soft, came
back from the woods: “_Amee-lia!_” I jumped out of the buggy and went
up the steps, certain that if she had gone to town she would have taken
in the washing. The kitchen smelled of boot-leather, manure, soft soap,
and cooking, and there was another odor which I identified as that of
moth-balls.
Could she be asleep? The pendulum of the clock creaked monotonously. I
stepped inside and called again. The breakfast dishes lay in and around
a dishpan of cold water, and the fire in the range was only a handful
of pink coals. I felt the embarrassment of an empty house. Deciding
that she had gone to the woods for blackberries, I drove away.
As I passed one of the farms owned by a man named Beacon, I saw him
sitting on the lawn, a pitcher of water beside him, fanning his
brick-red face with a newspaper. In hot weather he left the heavy work
to his sons, since he weighed more than two hundred and fifty pounds.
He beckoned to me and came down, wheezing and ponderous, to the road.
“As you went by Stearns’,” he asked, with the worried frown of a man
who has a larger harvest than he can handle, “did you see anything of
Nick?”
I shouted because he was deaf. “No, Mr. Beacon. I stopped at the house,
but there wasn’t anybody there.”
“Whew,” he sighed. “Nobody there. Queer. Nick’s been helpin’ us out,
and he hain’t showed up today. He al’ays sends word. I thought he
must’a been sick.”
“It is funny,” I admitted. “Amelia wasn’t there either.”
“Well, it’s a new wrinkle for Nick,” he concluded mournfully.
I intended to stop at Amelia’s again, but as I came back from the
village I detected in the air a faint bitterness of smoke--so faint at
first that I thought it had drifted down from a forest fire in the
north. When I came to the top of a hill I saw it, hanging in a black
mushroom over the swamp. I touched the mare with my whip and rattled
into the alley, where the smoke was thick and steady and the color of
wheat-chaff, blowing slowly overhead.
It was the Stearns house. Through a hole in the roof a great draught
lifted the flame as if in a chimney. The yard was full of men, whose
faces in the ruddy light were strange and glistening. Sweat dripped on
their blue shirts. They were fighting the fire eagerly and with some
skill; already they had chopped away the flaming porch. Three men in
turn worked the handle of the coughing, spurting pump, and bucket after
bucket of water was passed from hand to hand and emptied.
I saw immediately that Amelia and Nick were not there. Some buggies and
an auto had stopped along the road, and several women looked on with
interest, their summer dresses and parasols lending to the catastrophe
an air of picnic. Among the spectators, but near enough to make his
orders heard above the crackle and roar of the fire, the shouts, the
axes, the creak of the pump handle, old Beacon was enthroned on a
dry-goods box.
“Well my boy,” he demanded, “what d’you think of this? Did they have
any insurance?” He smiled wickedly.
Indignant at his suspicion, I tried to offer some explanation, to
remember some clue. Then I shouted into his ear, “They hadn’t any
insurance. I remember. Amelia asked father about it, and he told her
not to bother, but to sell out when she had a chance.”
A look of perplexity, even of disappointment, passed across old
Beacon’s face, that resembled a great, sagacious beet. He swelled his
cheeks and blew wearily. “Well, I’ll be damned, anyway,” he said.
The roof fell, splitting like paper, and after that the fire
diminished. The floor sent up smoke and steam, but no more flame. The
kitchen stove crashed through the charred boards into the cellar.
“But I don’ know what these men are burstin’ themselves for at this
job,” the old man said. “Looks to me like nobody’s goin’ to thank ’em
for it. The mare and the cart’re gone.” He settled his damp cheeks in
the folds of his neck.
“Oh,” I shouted half-heartedly, “I guess they’ve gone to town. They’ll
be back, poor devils.”
“But I knew better.” My eyes had rested on the clothesline; the washing
which had hung there was gone, and on the ground beneath in an uneven
row the clothespins lay. I remembered the harmless dying coals in the
range. I remembered the unwashed dishes and the odor of mothballs.
I remembered what Amelia had said the day her mother was buried: “I
couldn’t go off and leave that house--everything the way it’s always
been.”
Had they been in the house? Had they heard me call? Had they been
hiding there, in the other rooms or behind a door?
The fire left a ruin shaped like a charred pot. The men drew off--wet,
black, tired, and puzzled--washed their faces at the pump and rolled
down their sleeves. The horses were untied, every one piled into one
vehicle or another, and they drove away shouting; but those who spoke
of the cause of the fire did so in pairs, very quietly.
From the charred and broken house the smoke went up straight to the
sky. Now it was as soft as wool, now like a tower or shell. It widened
over the swamp, casting a shadow upon the lake, and persisted until
dusk with an even, melancholy trembling.