The coming of death to Tar Moorehead’s mother was without special
dramatic intensity. She died in the night and only Doctor Reefy was
in the room with her. There was no death-bed scene, the husband and
children gathered about, a few last courageous words, weeping children,
a struggle and then the soul taking flight. For a long time Doctor
Reefy had been expecting her death and was not surprised. Having been
summoned to the house, and the children having been sent upstairs to
bed, he sat down to talk with the mother.
There were words said, that Tar, lying awake in a room above, could
not hear. As he afterwards became a writer he often reconstructed
in his imagination the scene in the room below. There was a scene
in a story by Chekhov, the Russian. Readers will remember it--the
scene in the Russian farmhouse, the anxious country doctor, the woman
dying--wanting love before she died. Well, there had always been some
kind of understanding between Doctor Reefy and his mother. The man
never became his own friend, never talked intimately to him as Judge
Blair did later, but he liked to think that the last talk of the man
and woman in the little frame house in the Ohio town was full of
significance to them both. Tar later found out it is in their closer
relationships people live.
He wanted such relationships for his mother. She had seemed, in life,
such an isolated figure. Perhaps he underestimated his father. The
figure of his mother, as she lived later in his fancy, seemed so
delicately poised, capable of quick flashing rushes of feeling. If you
do not make quick and intimate connections with the life that goes on
in others about you, you do not live at all. It is a difficult thing to
do and causes most of the trouble in life, but you must keep trying.
That is your job and if you shirk it you shirk life.
Later thoughts of that sort in Tar, concerning himself--often
transferred to the figure of his mother.
Voices in a room downstairs in a small frame house. Dick Moorehead, the
husband, was away in the country on a painting job. What do two grown
people talk about at such a time? The man and woman in the room below
laughed softly. After the Doctor had been there for some time Mary
Moorehead went to sleep. She died in her sleep.
When she was dead the doctor did not awaken the children, but went
out of the house and got a neighbor to drive off to the country for
Dick and then, coming back, sat down. There were a few books about. At
several times, during long winters, when Dick had no money he became a
book agent--it enabled him to be abroad, going from house to house in
the country, where he managed to make himself welcome though he sold
but few books. As would be natural, the books he tried to sell were
concerned mostly with the Civil War.
There would be a book about a character called “Corporal Si Klegg,” who
enlisted in the war as a green country boy and became a corporal. Si
was full of the naïveté of the free-born American country lad, never
having taken orders before. He was, however, brave enough. The book
delighted Dick and he read it aloud to the children.
There were other books, more technical, also concerned with the war.
Was General Grant drunk during the first day of the battle of Shiloh?
Why did not General Meade pursue Lee after the victory at Gettysburg?
Did McClellan really want the south licked? Grant’s Memoirs.
Mark Twain, the writer, became a publisher and published Grant’s
Memoirs. All of Mark Twain’s books were sold by agents who went from
house to house. There was a special agent’s copy with blank ruled pages
at the front. That was where Dick set down the names of people who
agreed to take one of the books when it came out. Dick might have sold
more books if he had not taken so much time for each sale. Often he
would stop at some farmhouse several days. In the evening the family
gathered about and Dick read aloud. He talked. It was fun to hear him
if you weren’t depending on him for a living.
Doctor Reefy sat in the Moorehead house, with the dead woman in the
next room, reading one of Dick’s books. Doctors see much of death at
first hand. They know all people must die. The book in his hand, in
plain cloth binding so much, in leather, half-Morocco--so much more.
You do not sell many fancy bindings in a small town. Grant’s Memoirs
was the easiest book to sell. Every family in the North thought they
ought to have it. It was a moral duty, as Dick always pointed out.
Doctor Reefy sat reading one of the books and he had himself been in
the war. Like Walt Whitman, he had been a nurse. He never shot any
one, never shot at any one. What did the doctor think? Did he think of
war, of Dick, of Mary Moorehead? He had married a young girl when he
was himself almost an old man. There are some people you get to know a
little when you are a child that you puzzle about all your life and you
can’t quite make them out. Writers have a little trick. People think
writers take their characters from life. They do not. What they do is
to find some man or woman who, for some obscure reason, arouses their
interest. Such a man or woman is invaluable to a writer. He takes the
few facts he knows and tries to build a whole life. People are starting
places for him and when he gets through, often enough, what results has
little or nothing to do with the person he started with.
* * * * *
Mary Moorehead died during a night in the fall. Tar was then selling
papers and John had gone to the factory. When Tar got home in the
early evening, that day, his mother was not at the table and Margaret
said she was not feeling well. It was raining outside. The children ate
in silence, the depression that always came with one of the mother’s
bad times hanging over the house. Depression is something on which the
imagination feeds. When the meal was over Tar helped Margaret wash the
dishes.
The children sat around. The mother had said she did not want anything
to eat. John went off to bed and so also did Robert, Will and Joe. In
the factory John was on piece work. Just when you have got your speed
up and can make pretty good wages they change things on you. Instead of
getting forty cents for polishing a bicycle frame they cut you down to
thirty-two. What are you going to do? You’ve got to have a job.
Neither Tar nor Margaret was a bit sleepy. Margaret made the others go
upstairs softly so as not to disturb mother--if she was asleep. The two
children got their school lessons, then Margaret read a book. It was a
new one the woman who worked in the postoffice had let her have. When
you sit around like that it’s best to think of something outside the
house. Only that afternoon Tar had been in a dispute with Jim Moore
and another boy about baseball pitching. Jim said Ike Freer was the
best pitcher in town because he had the most speed and the best curves
and Tar said Harry Green was the best. Both being on the town team
they did not of course pitch against each other so you couldn’t tell
for sure. What you had to judge by was what you saw and felt. It was
true Harry hadn’t as much speed but you felt, when he pitched, surer of
something. Well, he had some brains. When he knew he wasn’t so good he
said so and let Ike go in, but if Ike wasn’t so good he got bull-headed
and if you took him out he got sore.
Tar thought of a lot of arguments with which to lay out Jim Moore when
he saw him next day and then he went and got the dominoes.
The dominoes were slid silently across the boards of the table.
Margaret had put her book aside. The two children were in the kitchen,
that also served as a dining room, and there was an oil lamp on the
table.
You can play a game like dominoes a long time and not think about
anything much.
When Mary Moorehead was having one of her bad times she breathed
irregularly. Her bedroom was right next the kitchen and at the front
of the house was the parlor where the funeral was afterwards held.
When you wanted to go upstairs to bed you had to go right through the
mother’s bedroom, but there was an offset in the wall and if you were
careful you could go up without being seen. Mary Moorehead’s bad times
were coming more and more regularly. The children had almost got used
to them. When Margaret had got home from school the mother was in bed
and looked very pale and weak and Margaret wanted to send Robert off
for the doctor but the mother said, “Not yet.”
A grown person like that and your mother.... When they say “no,” what
are you going to do?
* * * * *
Tar kept pushing the dominoes across the table and now and then looked
at his sister. Thoughts kept coming. “Harry Green may not have as much
speed as Ike Freer, but he’s got a head. In the long run a good head
will tell. I like a man to know what he’s doing. I guess there are ball
players in the big league who are bone-heads all right, but that makes
no difference. You take a fellow who can do a lot with what little
he’s got. There’s a fellow I like.”
Dick was in the country, painting the inside of a new house Harry
Fitzsimmons had built. He had taken the job on a contract. When Dick
took a job on a contract he hardly ever made any money.
He couldn’t figure much.
Anyway, it kept him busy.
You sit in a house, playing dominoes with your sister, on a night like
that. Who cares who wins?
Now and then either Margaret or Tar went to put a stick of wood in the
stove. Outside the house it rained and the wind came in through a crack
under the door. There were always holes like that in the houses the
Mooreheads lived in. You could throw a cat through the cracks. In the
winter the mother, Tar and John went around and nailed strips of wood
and pieces of cloth over the cracks. It kept out some of the cold.
Time passed, perhaps an hour. It seemed longer. The fears Tar had been
having for a year, John and Margaret also had. You go along thinking
you are the only one who thinks and feels things, but if you do you’re
a fool. Others are thinking the same thoughts. In General Grant’s
Memoirs it tells how when a man asked him whether or not he was afraid
when he was going into a battle he said, “Yes, but I know the other man
is afraid, too.” Tar hadn’t remembered many things about General Grant,
but he remembered that.
All of a sudden, that night when Mary Moorehead died, Margaret did
something. As the two sat playing dominoes they could hear the mother
breathing irregularly in the next room. The sound was soft and broken.
Margaret got up in the middle of a game and tiptoed softly to the door.
She stayed listening a while, hidden so the mother couldn’t see, then
she came back into the kitchen and made a sign to Tar.
She had got all worked up just sitting there. That was it.
It was raining outside and her coat and hat were upstairs, but she did
not try to get them. Tar wanted her to take his cap but she wouldn’t.
The two children got outside the house and Tar knew at once what was
up. They went along the street to Doctor Reefy’s office, not saying a
word to each other.
Doctor Reefy wasn’t there. There was a slate on the door and on it was
written, “Back at 10 o’clock.” It might have been there for two or
three days. A doctor like that, who hasn’t much practice and doesn’t
want much, is pretty careless.
“He might be at Judge Blair’s,” Tar said, and they went there.
At a time like that, when you are afraid something is going to happen,
what you do is to remember other times when you were scared and
everything turned out all right. It is the best way.
Well, you are going for the doctor and your mother is going to die,
although you don’t know it yet. Other people you meet in the street go
along just as they always do. You can’t blame them.
Tar and Margaret walked to Judge Blair’s house, both getting sopping
wet, Margaret without her coat and hat. There was a man buying
something in Tiffany’s drug store. Another man went along with a shovel
on his shoulder. What do you suppose he’s been digging, on a night like
this? In the hallway of the City Hall two men were in an argument. They
had got into the hallway to keep dry. “I said it was Easter when it
happened. He denied it. He don’t read his Bible.”
What were they talking about?
“The reason Harry Green is a better baseball pitcher than Ike Freer is
that he’s more of a man. Some men are just naturally born strong. There
have been famous pitchers in the big leagues who didn’t have much speed
or curves either. They just stood up there and used their noodle and
they lasted a long time. They lasted twice as long as the ones who had
nothing but strength.”
The best writers to be found in the newspapers Tar sold were the ones
who wrote about ball players and sports. They had something to say. If
you read them every day you learned something.
Margaret was getting soaking wet, through and through. If her mother
knew she was out like that, without any coat or hat, she would be
worried. People going along under umbrellas. It seemed long hours since
Tar had come home from taking his papers. You get a feeling like that
sometimes. Some days go by like a shot. Sometimes, in ten minutes, so
many things happen it seems hours. It’s that way when two race horses
are fighting it out down the stretch, at a ball game when some one is
at bat, two men out, two men maybe on bases.
Margaret and Tar got to Judge Blair’s house and sure enough the doctor
was there. It was warm and bright inside, but they didn’t go in. The
Judge came to the door and Margaret said, “Tell the doctor, please,
that mother’s sick,” and she had hardly got the words said when out the
doctor came. He went right along with the two children and when they
were leaving the Judge’s house the Judge came and patted Tar on the
back. “You’re soaked,” he said. He never spoke to Margaret at all.
The children took the doctor home with them and then went upstairs.
They wanted to pretend to the mother that the doctor had just come by
accident--to make a call.
They went up the stairs as softly as they could, and when Tar got into
the room where he slept with John and Robert he undressed and got into
dry clothes. He put on his Sunday suit. It was the only one he had that
was dry.
Downstairs he could hear his mother and the doctor talking. He did not
know that the doctor was telling his mother about the trip in the rain.
What happened was that Doctor Reefy came to the foot of the stairs and
called him down. No doubt he intended to call both children. He made a
little whistling sound and Margaret came out of her room dressed in
dry clothes just as Tar was. She also had to put on her best clothes.
None of the other children heard the doctor’s call.
They went down and stood by the bed and their mother talked, a little.
“I’m all right. Nothing’s going to happen. Don’t worry,” she said. She
meant it, too. She must have thought she was all right, up to the last.
It was a good thing, if she had to go, that she could go like that,
just slip off during her sleep.
She said she would not die, but she did. When she had spoken a few
words to the children they went back upstairs, but for a long time Tar
did not sleep. Neither did Margaret. Tar never asked her afterwards,
but he knew she didn’t.
When you are like that you can’t sleep. What do you do? Some try one
thing, some another. Tar had heard about the schemes of counting sheep
and he tried it sometimes when he was too excited to sleep, but it
wouldn’t work for him. He tried a lot of other things.
You can imagine you are grown up and that you have become something you
would like to be. You can imagine you are a big league baseball pitcher
or a railroad engineer or a race track driver. You are an engineer and
it’s dark and rainy and your engine is swinging along the tracks.
Best not to imagine yourself a hero in an accident or anything. Just
fix your eyes on the rails in front. You are cutting right through a
wall of darkness. Now you are among trees, now in an open country.
Of course, when you are being an engineer like that, you are always
driving a fast passenger train. You don’t want to fool around with a
freight.
You think of that and other things. That night, now and then, Tar
heard his mother and the doctor talking. Sometimes they seemed to be
laughing. He couldn’t just tell. It might only have been the wind
outside the house. Once he was quite sure he heard the doctor run
across the kitchen floor. Then he thought he heard a door open and
close softly.
It might have been he did not hear anything at all.
The worst of all for Tar and Margaret and John and all of them was
the next day and the next and the next. A house full of people, a
sermon to be preached, the man coming with the coffin, the trip to
the graveyard. Margaret got out of it the best. She worked around the
house. They couldn’t make her stop. A woman said, “No, let me do it,”
but Margaret did not answer. She was white and kept her lips tightly
closed together. She went and did it herself.
People came to the house Tar had never seen, worlds of people.