FATHER AND SON.
It is not likely that anything whatever remains standing now of the
Whipple house. It must be a dozen years ago that I shot a black
squirrel as it whisked its way along over the ridge-beam which had once
been Asa Whipple's roof-tree; and the place then was in ruins. The
rafters had fallen in; what was left of the sides were dry-rotten under
a mask of microscopic silver-gray moss. Tangled masses of wild-brier
and lichens surrounded its base, and pushed their way in through the
open, dismantled doorway.
Even at that time, the road which once led past the house had fallen
into disuse. I suppose that to-day it would be as hard to find the
house under the briers as to trace the ancient highway beneath the
carpet of grass and sorrel.
Even during the war, when human beings thought of it as a home, the
Whipple place was a pretty poor sort of habitation. The lowliest of
Elisha Teachout's live-stock were considerably better housed and better
sheltered from the weather than old Asa and his son Mose.
The house, as I remember it, used to interest me because it was so
obviously a remainder from the days when the district round about was
still a veritable part of the Adirondacks. Whether Asa built it or
inherited it from his father, a Revolutionary soldier who took up his
land-patent in these primitive parts, I never knew. It looked old
enough, though, to have been erected by Hendrik Hudson himself.
There must have been a sawmill on the creek at the time, however, for
it was not a log house but a frame building, with broad planks nailed
roughly to its sides, and the joinings of these covered over with
weather-strips.
The frames of the door and the two front windows also came from this
mill, wherever it was; the window on the north side was of rude
construction, and was evidently the work of some person not greatly
skilled in the use of carpenters' tools; perhaps it was made by old Asa
himself.
There was a legend that the roof had once been shingled; in my time it
was made of flattened breadths of spruce bark, which must have leaked
sadly in rainy seasons. There was no cellar under the house, but a
rough lean-to woodshed at the back served to shelter any overflow of
possessions which might trouble the Whipples. This lean-to was given
over chiefly to traps, fishpoles, netting gear, and the like.
There was a barn, but it was roofless and long since disused.
I dare say the original Revolutionary Whipple aimed at being a farmer,
like the rest of his neighbors. Like the others, he cleared his land,
got in his crops, built a barn for his cattle and produce, and ran up
rail fences. Perhaps he even prospered thus, as prosperity was measured
in those lean, toilsome times.
But either in his day, or when his son Asa was a comparatively young
man, the hand of fate was laid on the Whipple place. The black moss
came!
Strong and intelligent farmers, with capital behind them, can
successfully fight and chase off nowadays, they say, this sinister
scourge of the thin-soiled northern farm lands on the forests edges.
But forty years ago, and even much later, it was a common saying that
when the moss came, the man must go.
Asa Whipple did not go. He let farming go instead. When the moss had
seized upon pasture and meadow alike, nothing was simpler than to sell
the cows, and allow the barn to fall to pieces. Much better than taking
anxious thought about the farm, it suited Asa to turn to the woods--the
kindly, lazy, mysteriously tempting woods.
Here were no back-aching ploughs and scythes, no laborious hoeing of
corn and grubbing for roots, and painful wrestling with rain and
drought and frost--and worst of all, the moss--for pitiful coppers.
Here instead were luscious trout for the hook, and otter, mink, and
even an occasional beaver for the trap; here in the greenwood, to the
trained hunter, was spread a never-ending banquet of rare and toothsome
meats, from the game birds, the raccoon, and the squirrel, up to the
fleet-heeled deer and the black bear, lounging his clumsy way through
the undergrowth.
Like father, like son. Time came, indeed, when the woods were no longer
what they had been, and when the influence of advancing civilization
compelled Mose to eke out a scanty living for his father and himself by
hiring out a week or two now and then during busy seasons on the farms
roundabout.
He did this as seldom as he could, however, and he never pretended that
he liked to do it at all.
Of their own land, the Whipples for years had cultivated only a
garden-patch close about the house, and this in so luke-warm a fashion
that the net results--some potatoes, a little sweet corn, a few
pumpkins, and so on--never by any chance saw them through the winter.
Why they did not sell this unproductive land to Elisha Teachout, who
evidently wanted it, instead of borrowing money from him on it to pay
taxes for it, I could never understand. Very likely they did not try to
explain it to themselves.
But it was the fact, nevertheless, that in July of 1863 they owed Mr.
Teachout something over three hundred dollars in accrued interest upon
the mortgages he held, and that to prevent his foreclosing and evicting
them from the house, Mose Whipple went to the war as Teachout's
substitute.
This year of 1863 had still a week of life before it on the morning in
question--when Mose returned from the war.
He had made across the stiff-crusted level wastes of snow from
Teachout's straight as the bee's flight, even before the dawn began to
break. He had heard the talk in the barn about the certainty of his
capture, but it made little impression on his mind. It did not even
occur to him that the matter concerned him. What had stirred him was
Job Parshall's roundabout and reluctant admission that all was not
right with the old man.
He had waited only a few minutes in the haymow after Job had gone to
the farm-house before the temptation to be off again toward home
mastered him. It was silly to linger here for food when the goal was so
close at hand.
He took a couple of English turnips from one of the fodder bins to eat
on the way, and let himself cautiously out by the rear door of the
cow-barn.
It was still quite dark and bitterly cold, but he started briskly off.
After he had left the barnyard an idea occurred to him. His father
might be perishing of hunger! He turned and bent his steps back across
the yard to the hen-house, opened the door, and crept in. A cackling
murmur fell upon the darkened silence, rising all at once into a harsh
and strident squawking, then ceasing abruptly.
Mose emerged upon the instant, shut and hooked the door, and started to
run, stuffing a big, limp and shapeless object into his coat pocket.
When he had rapped upon and rattled vigorously for a third time the
window on the north side of the house he had journeyed so far and
risked so much to return to, Mose was conscious of a heavy, sudden
sinking of the heart. That was the bedroom window; how was it his
father had not heard him?
He knocked once more, more loudly than before, and bent his head to
listen. No answer came.
After a minute's waiting he walked around to the front of the house. In
the broad daylight which had spread itself now over the white
landscape, he noticed something he had missed before. There had been no
path cut through from the house to the road. The frozen drifts lay
packed as they had fallen upon the doorsill. There was no mark of
footsteps save his own. The window-panes were opaque with frost.
Mose tried the latch. It yielded readily, and he entered. The light
inside was so dim, after the morning glow on the snow without, that it
was hard at first to make out the room, familiar as it was to him.
Apparently there was no one there.
A curious change of some sort there had been, though. Mose shut the
door and walked across to the stove, instinctively holding his hands
over it. So dull a semblance of warmth radiated up from the griddles
that he put a finger on the metal. It was only blood-warm.
Some one had left a fire here an hour ago. Where was his father? What
had happened?
Then Mose saw what it was that had at the outset vaguely puzzled him.
The straw tick had been brought from the bed in the other room and
spread there on the floor behind the stove. It was covered with bedding
and old clothes, and under these--
In a flash Mose was on his knees beside the improvised bed, and had
pushed away the coverings at the top. There was disclosed before him
the head of a man asleep--a head which he scarcely recognized at first
sight, so profuse and dishevelled were its masses of white hair and
beard, so pinched to ghastliness the waxen features.
"He is dead!" Mose heard himself say aloud, in a voice that sounded not
at all his own.
But no; there was warmth, and a feeble flicker of pulse at the shrunken
wrist which he instinctively fumbled for under the bedclothes.
"Father! Father!" Mose called, bending till his lips touched the white
hair. "Wake up! I've come back! it's me--Mose!"
The faintest stir of life passed over the corpse-like face, and old Asa
opened his eyes. It did not seem as though he saw his son, or anything
else. His whitened lips moved, emitting some husky, unintelligible
sounds. Mose, stooping still lower, strained his ears to piece together
these terrible words:--
"Starved--many days--don't tell Mose!"
With a cry of rage and horror Mose sprang to his feet. The things to be
done mapped themselves, in the stress of this awful situation, with
lightning swiftness before his brain. He strode to the woodshed door
and opened it. Two sides of the old lean-to were gone, and the snow was
drifted thick across the floor.
Mose realized that the shed had gone for fuel, and in another minute he
had torn down half the roof, and was crushing the boards to splinters
under his heels.
With the same fierce haste he started the fire blazing again; got out
an old frying-pan from under the snow, and put it, filled with ice to
be melted into water, on one of the open griddle holes; hacked the
remaining turnip into slices, and then began at the fowl, stripping the
feathers off in handfuls, and dismembering it as fast as he cleared the
skin from joint to joint, filling the rusty old pan to the brim.
Even as he worked thus, and after the water was steaming, and the rude
stew under way, he kept an eager and apprehensive eye upon the bed
behind the stove. No token of life was forthcoming.
He could not hear his father breathe, even when he bent over him; but
no doubt that was on account of the prodigious spluttering and
crackling which the fire kept up. Through the other griddle hole he
continually thrust in fresh, dry kindlings to swell the blaze.
He had learned some new things about cooking in the army--among others
the value of a pot-lid in hurrying forward the stew. He looked about
for a cover for the frying-pan. There was no such thing in the house,
but he found in the shed an old sheet-iron snow-shovel, and made the
blade of this serve, with a nail-hole punched through it to let out the
steam.
In his researches he was glad to run upon some salt, because it would
help toward making the mess on the stove palatable. But it would not be
easy to tell with what emotions he discovered that there was absolutely
not another eatable thing in the house.
The room had grown decently warm again, under the influence of the
roaring fire, and now it began to be filled with what Mose believed to
be a most delicious odor.
The conviction, though to any one else it might well have seemed
unwarranted, was pardonable in Mose perhaps, for he himself had tasted
his last warm meal nearly sixty hours before.
He munched the turnip peelings almost contentedly as he recalled this
fact. Perhaps there would be some of the stew left, after the old man
had eaten his fill. If not, there were parts of the fowl which could
still be utilized.
An absurd sort of fantasy--a kind of foolish day-dream--began all at
once to rise before him. He seemed to see himself eating the whole of
that glorious stew, lingering with all his soul over the luxury of each
piping-hot mouthful, and giving his father none at all.
This visionary thing grew so upon him, so gripped and enthralled his
mind, that it made him dizzy and faint to put it away from him. When, a
few minutes later, the smell of burning warned him that the cooking was
done, and he lifted the pan from the stove, this brutal temptation
rushed savagely at him again. He set the pan on the table, and walked
away, not daring to lift the cover.
There were two or three old plates on the shelf, and a tea-cup. Mose
got them all down, and arrayed them on the table, with such cutlery and
spoons as he could find. He made a motion then to take off the
improvised lid from the frying-pan, but once more drew back. It was as
if he could not trust himself.
He knelt by the bedside again, now, and putting his arm under his
father's neck sought to raise him to a more upright posture. Old Asa
opened his eyes as before, and made an effort to whisper something, but
he lay an almost inert weight in his son's arms.
Mose swung the tick round, propped the end of it up against the wall
and raised his father into a half-sitting posture.
In this position the old man's face took on a sudden expression of
interest and reviving intelligence. He had begun to smell the savor of
the food.
Looking upon that pallid, vacant, starved face, and wasted, helpless
form, Mose, starving himself, felt strong enough to defy the most
appetizing stew in the world. He took off the cover with decision, and
dipped the tea-cup up half full of the smoking contents. It was too
hot, evidently, to be given to the old man at once, and it was also
very thick.
Mose took it out to the dismantled woodshed, and spooned in snow until
it seemed of the right temperature and consistency. He dipped a little
finger into it to further satisfy himself, but he would not even lick
that finger afterward. It was too dangerous to think about.
Mose fed his father as a mother might a baby--watching solicitously to
see that he did not eat too fast or choke himself. After the first
cupful, he brought a chair to sit in, and held the tick against his
knee while old Asa, leaning more lightly upon it, helped himself.
There was a little left at last for Mose, and he swallowed it gravely,
with a portentous rush of sensations within, but keeping up as best he
could an indifferent exterior. It left him still hungry, but he had
much more important things to dwell upon than that.
The meal worked wonders upon the old man. The combined influences of
food and warmth seemed for a few minutes to send him off to sleep
again.
Mose sat looking down upon him in silence, and noting that something
like color was stealing back into his face.
All at once, however, Asa Whipple sat upright, lifted his hands to
brush back the hair from his forehead, and, turning his face up to look
at his son, smiled. There was no lack of comprehension in his gaze. He
had regained his tongue as well. He patted Mose's knee as he spoke.
"Mose," he said, in a voice strangely altered and aged, but clear
enough, "I'm kind o' 'shamed to tell it, but I'd laid down here just to
go to sleep for good. I thought for quite a spell there, after you come
in, that I was dreaming--sort o' out o' my head, you know."
"How did you come to let yourself down like this, dad?" was the only
reply Mose had at hand.
"Rheumatiz," Asa explained. "It laid me up--I couldn't git around, an'
nobody come near me. I ain't seen a soul since the big snowfall--up'ards
of a fortnight. But--but it's all right now, ain't it, Mose? An' to
think o' your comin' home here like this, right in the nick o' time.
How did you come to git off, Mose?"
For answer there fell the crunching sound of footsteps on the crusted
snow outside, then of a loud, peremptory knock on the door.