On the southeastern coast of Massachusetts is a small village with
which I was once familiarly acquainted. It differs little in its general
aspect from other hamlets scattered along that shore. It has its one
long, straggling street, plain and homelike, from which at two or three
different points a winding lane leads off and ends abruptly in the
water.
Fifty years ago the village had a business activity of its own. There
still remain the vestiges of a wharf at a point where once was a
hammering ship-yard. Here and there, in bare fields along the sea,
are the ruins of vats and windmills,--picturesque remains of ancient
salt-works.
There is no visible sign left now of the noisy life of the ship-yards,
except a marble stone beneath a willow in the burying-ground on the
hill, which laments the untimely death of a youth of nineteen, killed in
1830 in the launching of a brig. But traces of the salt-works everywhere
remain, in frequent sheds and small barns which are wet and dry, as
the saying is, all the time, and will not hold paint. They are built of
salt-boards.
There were a good many of the people of the village and its adjoining
country who interested me very greatly. I am going to tell you a simple
event which happened in one of its families, deeply affecting its little
history.
James Parsons was a man perhaps sixty years of age, strongly built,
gray-haired, cleanshaven except for the conventional seaman's fringe of
beard below the chin, and always exquisitely neat. Whether you met him
in his best suit, on Sunday morning, or in his old clothes, going to
his oyster-beds or his cranberry-marsh, it was always the same. He was
usually in his shirt-sleeves in summer. His white cotton shirt, with
its easy collar and wristbands, seemed always to have just come from the
ironing-board. “It ain't no trouble at all to keep James clean,” I have
heard Mrs. Parsons say, in her funny little way; “he picks his way round
for all the world just like a pussycat, and never gets no spots on him,
nowhere.”
You saw at once, upon the slightest acquaintance with James, that while
he was of the same general civilization as his neighbors, he was of
a different type. In his narrowness, there was a peculiar breadth and
vigor which characterized him. He had about him the atmosphere of a
wider ocean.
His early reminiscences were all of that picturesque and adventurous
life which prevailed along our coasts to within forty years, and his
conversation was suggestive of it He held a silver medal from the Humane
Society for conspicuous bravery in the rescue of the crew of a ship
stranded in winter in a storm of sleet off Post Hill Bar. He had a
war-hatchet, for which he had negotiated face to face with a naked
cannibal in the South Sea. He was familiar with the Hoogly.
His language savored always of the sea. His hens “turned in,” at night.
He was full of sayings and formulas of a maritime nature; there was
one which always seemed to me to have something of a weird and mystic
character: “South moon brings high water on Coast Island Bar.” In
describing the transactions of domestic life, he used words more
properly applicable to the movements of large ships. He would speak of a
saucepan as if it weighed a hundred tons. He never tossed or threw even
the slightest object; he hove it. “Why, father!” said Mrs. Parsons,
surprised at seeing him for a moment untidy; “what have you ben doing?
Your boots and trousers-legs is all white!” “Yes,” said Mr. Parsons,
apologetically, looking down upon his dusty garments, “I just took that
bucket of ashes and hove 'em into the henhouse.”
The word “heave,” in fact, was always upon his tongue. It applied to
everything. “How was this road straightened out?” I asked him one day;
“did the town vote to do it?” “No, no,” he said quickly; “there was n't
never no vote. The se-lec'men just come along one day, and got us all
together, and hove in and hove out; and we altered our fences to suit.”
I remember hearing him testify as a witness to a will. It appeared
that the testator was sick in bed when he signed the instrument. He was
suffering greatly, and when he was to sign, it was necessary to lift him
with the ex-tremest care, to turn him to the light-stand. “State what
was done next,” the lawyer asked of James. “Captain Frost was laying on
his left side,” said James. “Two of us took a holt of him and rolled him
over.”
He had probably not the least suspicion that his language had a maritime
flavor. I asked him one night, as we coasted along toward home, “What do
seafaring men call the track of light that the moon makes on the water?
They must have some name for it” “No, no,” he said, “they don't have no
name for it; they just call it 'the wake of the moon.'”
James's learning had been chiefly gained from the outside world and not
from books. I have heard him lay it down as a fact that the word “Bible”
had its etymology from the word “by-bill” (hand-bill). “It was writ,”
he said, “in small parcels, and they was passed around by them that writ
'em, like by-bills; and so when they hove it all into one, they called
it the Bible.'”
But while James had little learning himself, he appreciated it highly in
others. I had occasion to ask him once why it was that the son of one
of his neighbors, in closing up his father's estate, had not settled his
accounts regularly in the probate court. “Oh, I know how that was,” he
replied; “he settled 'em the other way. You see, he went to the college
at Woonsocket, and he learned there how to settle accounts the other
way: and that's the way he settled 'em.” And then he added, “When Alvin
left the college, they giv' him a book that tells how to do all kinds
of business, and what you want to do so's to make money; and Alvin has
always followed them rules. The consequence is, he's made money, and
what he 's made, he 's kep' it. I suppose he's worth not less than
sixteen hundred dollars.”
Sometimes he would venture a remark of a gallant nature. “They don't
generally git the lights in the hall so as to suit me,” he once said.
“I don't want it too light, because then it hurts my eyes; but I want it
light enough so as 't I can see the women!”
James was a large, strong man, but Mrs. Parsons, although she was little
and slight, and was always ailing, constantly assumed the rôle of her
husband's nurse and protector, not only in household matters, but in
other affairs of life. Whenever she had visitors,--and she and James
were hospitable in the extreme,--she was pretty sure to end up, sooner
or later, if James were present, with some droll criticism of him, as
much to his delight as to hers.
James sometimes liked to affect a certain harshness of demeanor; but the
disguise was a transparent one. How well do I remember the time--oh,
so long ago!--when for some reason or other I happened to have his boat
instead of my own, one day, with one of the boys of the village, to go
to Matamet, twelve miles off, to visit certain lobster-pots which we had
set. We were delayed there by breaking our boom, in jibing. We should
have been at home at noon; at seven in the evening we were not yet in
sight. When we got in, rather crestfallen at our disaster, particularly
as the boat was wanted for the next day, James met us at the pier. We
were boys then, and his tongue was free. As he stood there on the shore,
bare-headed, hastily summoned from his house, with his hair blowing in
the wind, waving his hands and addressing first us and then a knot of
men who stood smoking by, no words of censure were too harsh, no
comment on our carelessness too cutting, no laments too keen over the
irreparable loss of that particular boom. The next time I could take my
own boat, if I were going to get cast away. And I remember well how he
ended his tirade. “I did n't care nothing about you two,” he said. “If
you want to git drownded, git drownded; it ain't nothing to me. All I
was afraid of was that you 'd gone and capsized my boat, and would
n't never turn up to tell where you sunk her. But as for you--” and he
laughed a laugh of heartless indifference.
But ten minutes later, and right before his face, at his own front gate,
Mrs. Parsons betrayed him. “I never see father so worried,” she said,
“sence the time he heard about Thomas; why, he 's spent the whole
afternoon as nervous as a hawk, going up on the hill with his
spy-glass; and I don't feel so sure but what he was crying. He said he
did n't care nothing about the boat,--'What 's that old boat!' says he;
but if you boys was drownded out of her, he would n't never git over
it.” At which James, being so unmasked, laughed in a shamefaced way,
and shook us by the shoulders. He had a son who carried on some sort
of half-maritime business on one of the wharves, in the city, and lived
over his shop. When James went at intervals to visit him, he made his
way at once from the railway station to the nearest wharf; then he
followed the line of the water around to the shop. Where jib-booms
project out over the sidewalk, one feels so thoroughly at home! From the
shop he would make short adventurous excursions up Commercial Street and
State Street, sometimes going no farther than the nautical-instrument
store on the corner of Broad Street, sometimes venturing to Washington
Street, or even moving for a short distance up or down in the current of
that gay thoroughfare. He loved to comment satirically on the city, with
a broad humorous sense of his own strangeness there. “The city folks
don't seem to have nothing to do,” he said. “They seem to be all out,
walking up and down the streets. Come noon, I thought there'd be some
let-up for dinner; but they did n't seem to want nothing to eat; they
kep' right on walking.”
I must not leave James Parsons without telling you of two whale's teeth
which stand on his parlor mantel-piece; he ornamented them himself,
copying the designs from cheap foreign prints. One of them is what he
calls “the meeting-house.” It is the high altar of the Cathedral of
Seville. On the other is “the wild-beast tamer.” A man with a feeble,
wishy-washy expression holds by each hand a fierce, but subjugated
tiger. His legs dangle loosely in the air. There is nothing to suggest
what upholds him in his mighty contest.