IX

One August evening in 1869 a number of Damascenes were gathered

as usual at the railroad station to witness and audit the arrival

and departure of the seven o’clock train. This was an event still

miraculous and unbelievable, requiring verification of the senses. A

young man swung off before the train had quite stopped, walked forward,

and stood watching the small freight unload. When the last of it was

off, one of the heavers, leaning from the car door, called to the

station agent, Andy Weir:

“Give us an extra hand here. There’s a flat passenger.”

Weir came and looked in.

“Them’s rawkis words you use,” he said admonishingly. “Suppose it was

somebody we knew.”

“Come on,” said the heaver. “Give us a hand. This ain’t a hearse. It’s

a railroad train.”

Weir beckoned. Several men stepped out of the crowd to help. With a

hollow grating sound the end of a long pine box was pushed into view.

It came out slowly. Weir felt for handles. There weren’t any. It was a

plain coffin case.

“Shoulder it,” he said to his volunteers.

They walked with it to the far end of the platform and stopped.

“Might rain,” said Weir, changing his mind. “Over there,” he added,

after looking around. “Under the overhang.”

They turned back. Awkwardly, with scraping feet and gruntings, they put

it down against the station wall under the projecting eave, and then

stood looking at it, all a little red from the exertion and stooping.

“Tain’t yours, is it?” said Weir, turning suddenly on the young man who

had followed the box to and fro.

“Yes,” he said.

“Who are you?”

“John Breakspeare.”

The station agent bent down and read the card tacked to the top of the

box. The name was Aaron Breakspeare.

“I knew him,” he said, now gazing at the young man. “Knew him well, I

might say. Everybody around here did. You ain’t his boy?”

“He was my father,” said the young man. “Will it be all right to----?”

“And he’s sent himself home,” said Weir. “Sent himself home to be

buried. You all alone?”

“I’m the whole family,” said the young man with a smile that made Weir

look away. “Will it be all right,” he began to ask again, and hesitated

before the pronoun. For nearly a week he had been travelling with

this freight and the dilemma was new each time. How should one refer

to one’s father in a pine box? Corpse was a sodden, gruesome word.

Body was too cold and distant. Remains,--no. There were left only the

pronouns--_it_, _this_, _that_--and they were disrespectful.

“It’s all right there,” said the station agent, seeing what the young

man meant. “But if you want to leave it all night we’ll take it in.”

“Only for a few minutes,” said the young man. “I’m coming right back.”

The idlers about the station waited until he was out of sight and then

gathered around the box, staring at it, reading the card, looking away,

commenting--

“So that’s poor old Aaron.... As the fellow said, we’re all alike at

the end of the lane.... He wasn’t so oldan, I ought t’know because

wasn’t I born--?... The young one brought him back.... Where’d he come

from, does it say?... Likely looking boy.... What’s his name?... Wonder

what old Gib’l say.... This here one stole his sweetheart away back

there in....”

To John Breakspeare, son of Esther, great grandson of the founder, now

turning his twentieth year, New Damascus was a legend. He had never

been there. Yet without asking his way he walked straight to the inn

that was his grandfather’s, since named Lycoming House, and wrote two

names in the register thus:

{ John Breakspeare. }

{ Aaron ditto } Denver, Colo.

They meant nothing to the clerk, who was new in the place. He blotted

the writing, looked at it, and asked:

“Is your party all here?”

“Not yet,” said the young man. “We want two parlor rooms on the ground

floor.”

“Connecting rooms?”

“Yes.”

“You are John Breakspeare?” the clerk guessed.

“Yes.”

“The other member of your party will be coming tonight?”

“He is waiting at the station,” said the young man. “We shall want the

rooms only for tonight and tomorrow. I’ll pay now, please.”

“We can send a rig to the station,” said the clerk.

“No, thank you,” said the young man.

He looked at the rooms. In the large one he set two chairs six feet

apart, facing. Then lighting all the gas, he went out, locked the door,

and carried the key away in his pocket.

One hour later an undertaker’s wagon, followed by a hack, pulled up in

front of Lycoming House. The young man got out of the hack and stood in

the main doorway waiting. Four men drew the pine box out of the wagon,

shouldered it, and started in.

There was a crash from end to end of the long front veranda overhanging

the street, as twenty men sitting there in tilted chairs, their feet on

the railing, smoking, all with one impulse dropped their legs and sat

up straight to look. A rigid hotel custom forbids hospitality to Mr.

Death. There is only one way for a corpse to pass through a hotel door.

That is out. If you die inside that can’t be helped. You must go out.

But if you die outside you can’t come in.

The clerk ran out to defend the threshold.

“What’s this?” he shouted. “You can’t do this. You can’t rent a

mortuary chapel in a hotel.”

His words were futile. The young man turned his back, beckoned the

undertaker to follow, and led the way through the door and down the

hall to the big parlor room, the door of which he unlocked and threw

open. They put the pine box on the floor, opened it, raised the coffin

to rest on the chairs. The young man followed the empty box to the

street and returned with two high candlesticks and candles. These he

set at the head of the coffin and lighted. Then, locking the door

behind him, he joined the undertaker outside and drove away with him.

The clerk, outraged in both his authority and his traditions, meanwhile

had fallen downstairs and was shaking a red, tissue-logged hulk that

dozed in a hickory chair at the end of the bar. This was Thaddeus

Crawford, the proprietor. He never opened his eyes but to eat and speak

and look at the books. The sign he gave of listening, or of waking when

addressed, was to open his mouth,--a small, cherubic orifice,--and roll

the tip of his tongue round and round it. When he closed his mouth that

was a sign he was no longer interested. When he opened his eyes and

spoke it was a shock to discover that he could speak distinctly, that

his senses were alert, that the triumph of matter was incomplete.

During the clerk’s recital of what was taking place upstairs he rolled

his tongue excitedly without opening his eyes. Then he heaved himself,

achieved locomotion, and went up to look at the names on the register.

He looked at them hard and long, dozed a bit, looked at them again,

then returned inarticulate to the hickory chair downstairs and fell

into it panting.

“What shall we do?” asked the clerk, who had followed him up and down

again.

“Do the dishes,” said Thaddeus. “Wouldn’t, anyhow.... Won’t hurt the

house.... Care a damn if it does.... Time we had a funeral here.” He

dozed off for a minute, chortled in his depths, and spoke again with

his eyes closed.

“Put it on you, didn’t he? Guess he did. Guess yes. Damn smart.... Want

to see him when he comes back.... Knew his father.”

When John Breakspeare returned, the clerk, now very civil, took him

down to Thaddeus.

They talked until long after the bar closed. Thaddeus was surprised to

discover how little the young man knew of his pre-natal history and

proceeded to restore him to his background. The picture was somewhat

blurred in the romantic passages, from a feeling of delicacy. That loss

was more than compensated by high lights elsewhere. He told him in

turgid, topical, verbless sentences what the old Woolwine Mansion was

like in that other time, how Enoch and Aaron founded the iron industry

together, how they prospered, how strange it was that they got along

so well, how they parted suddenly when Esther, the banker’s daughter,

who was engaged to Enoch, changed her mind suddenly and married Aaron

instead, and finally of Aaron’s failure with steel and how he changed

all over after Esther’s death.

The narrative had form and drama and a proper ending, very unexpected

to the young man. The parlor room in which the body of his father then

lay and the one adjoining in which he himself would spend the night

were rooms he had lived in once before. They were the rooms his father

took when he closed the Woolwine Mansion, unable to live there without

Esther, and came to this inn with nurse and infant. That infant was

himself.

It came two o’clock. With no premonitory sign Thaddeus heaved himself

out of the hickory chair and called for the porter to put out the

lights.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

“I haven’t thought of it,” said the young man.

“Stay with us,” said Thaddeus. “Long as you like.”

On his way to bed Thaddeus said to the clerk: “Give him anything he

wants. Don’t send him a bill till he asks for it. Don’t send him a bill

at all.”

A spiritual adventure awaited John Breakspeare to complete his day.

As he re-entered the room where his father’s body was and closed and

locked the door behind him he got suddenly a sense of reality beyond

any perception of things. It was a reality to which he himself merely

pertained. This was a sense of existence. The story he had just heard

in the bar room, as he was hearing it, seemed to concern only his

father; and his father was a separate being who had lived and was dead

and about to be buried. But no. That was not so. Vividly, yet with no

way of saying it, no way of thinking it, with only a way of feeling

it, he became in one instant aware that the story no less concerned

himself. Everything that had happened to his father had happened also

to him. His father was dead, for there he lay. That was the evidence

of things. Beyond was the truth that his father was not dead. The same

life thread continued in him. That naïve delusion of youth in which

oneself is perceived as a separate miracle, beginning at the toes and

ending at the top of the head, was shattered. Back of his father and

mother were others, numberless. Their history was his history. He was

but a link in a continuous scheme, as his father was, and his father’s

father, and so on and on, back through an eternity of moments. The past

surrounded him. It was intangible, enormous, indivisible.

One of the candles, dying with a splutter, startled him. The other one

also was low. He replaced them, lighted the fresh ones, then slid back

the panel of the coffin cover and gazed at the face of his father with

strange, uneasy interest.

How little he knew of him! Always he had thought of him as a man

of sorrow. Yet once he had been gay and spontaneous, full of the

enthusiasms and compulsions of life. Never before had he sensed

anything of that. The first recollection of his father was sad. It

was of going with him, hand in hand, to an open air show, trembling

with excitement. It was a special occasion. His father had come a long

distance to see him. How he knew that he could not remember. There were

animals in the show and men and women who made them perform, and noise

and music and peanuts and wonderful smells and much going on. He was

delirious with happiness until he noticed that his father was weeping.

That almost spoiled the day. After that he could not remember him again

until somebody took him a long journey, lasting many days, for aught

he knew many years, and at last they found his father, who was in bed,

in a little white bed, and very strange, and he had not liked kissing

him. Then was a time, rather dim, when they were together and became

great and equal friends. This could not last. He was sent to school in

Philadelphia and saw his father only at long intervals; and each time

they had to get acquainted all over again. They both looked forward

eagerly to these meetings and always they were disappointed, especially

in the beginnings of new acquaintanceship, until the strangeness

wore off and they had reconstructed their memories of each other. At

least, it had been so with him. He remembered it as a fact. And now he

realized that it had been so also with his father. Intuition multiplied

his recollections and made them new. He remembered something he had

never once thought of before. They were together, waiting for the train

that was to take him back to school. He was restless with childish

impatience and counted the minutes that delayed their parting. The

train was late. When it came he clamored to get aboard, lest he

should be left, and almost forgot to look back and wave. The wistful

sadness in his father’s face meant nothing to him at the time. Now he

understood it.

Suddenly, as he stood there gazing at his father’s face, his spirit

of itself achieved a form of mystical experience such as may occur

naturally and surprisingly at a certain time of youth and is seldom

if ever repeated save in the lives of ascetics. He felt himself

flooded with understanding, though he knew not in the least what it

was he so lucidly understood. There was a sense of new friendship

then beginning with his father,--a friendship that should be perfect,

wordless, indestructible, beyond peril. Never had he felt so near to

his father, so alive to him, so communicative. Death at the same time

changed its aspect. It was a catastrophic event, but inconclusive. It

was not the final enigma. It had nothing to do with life, for life

was a prior transaction and bound to go on. It had nothing to do with

love, for love was parallel to life and reached beyond death. Life and

love,--they were truly mysterious. For death there must be some simple

explanation, like the explanation of night, without which every sunset

would fill mankind with the terror of extinction. It was ... death

was ... death itself was only ... _what?_ He had almost seen it, what

it was, and then suddenly it disappeared. He had looked the wrong way.

For an instant it was there. He tried to reconstruct the point of

view. But when he began to think of what he was thinking the dazzling,

jewel-like space he had been staring into collapsed with an inaudible

crash. All that was left of it was the dead face, reflecting the light

of the candles. That experience was closed. Never in his life was it

repeated. He had no idea what it meant, then or afterward. Yet the

memory of it became his chief spiritual asset. One thought thereafter

controlled his life. He was his father continued.

X

He was yet to see his father in another light. That was the light of

universal human affection. For a day there were two kinds of people in

New Damascus,--those who knew Aaron and others. Nobody was asked. It

was meant to be a private ceremony. But that was impossible. All who

knew him came to assist at the obsequies. They came from Quality Street

and they came from the company houses beyond the canal. There were

hundreds of old iron workers and miners, who, at John’s suggestion,

walked in a body behind the hearse. He was amazed and deeply moved by

all this demonstration of feeling; and saddened by it at the same time,

for here were people strange to him whose knowledge of his father was

older and greater than his own.

Enoch Gib neither came nor stayed away. As the funeral procession

departed from the inn he was observed sitting on the veranda, his feet

on the railing, his hat on his head, smoking a cigar, gazing vacantly

into space.

Somebody said: “Tonight he will give a blue ticket to every man in the

mill who took time off for this. That’s why he came.”

That was not true. Then why did he come? There is no answer. He himself

probably did not know. The mourners returning saw him sitting there

still. He sat there for hours, until evening, utterly oblivious. Then

he rose, crossed the town and disappeared up the path to Throne Rock.

Late that night the furnace men at No. 4, deaf as furnace men by habit

are to the uproar of the smelting process, looked at one another

saying, “What was that?”

It was a sound of ribald laughter off the mountain, home downward by

the wind.

An old man spoke, one who stood in an open shirt, grey hair on his

chest, stray grey curls below the edge of his skull cap, alight in the

furnace glow.

“That’s Enoch,” he said, “crowing over Aaron.”

They listened. The laugh was not repeated. But as they turned away,

letting down their breath, another sound much worse came down the wind

and caused their skins to creep.

That was Enoch screaming.