There were only three hundred folk living in Old Trail Town. Already two
thirds of their signatures were scrawled on the sheets of foolscap
tacked beneath the notice.
On the day after her return home, Jenny Wing stood and stared at the
notice. Her mother had written to her of the town's talk, but the
placard made it seem worse.
"I'll go in on the way home and see what Mary says," she thought, and
asked for the letter that lay in Mary Chavah's box, next her own. They
gave her the letter without question. All Old Trail Town asks for its
neighbour's mail and reads its neighbour's postmarks and gets to know
the different Writings and to inquire after them, like persons. ("He
ain't got so much of a curl to his M to-day," one will say of a
superscription. "Better write right back and chirk 'im up." Or, "Here's
Her that don't seal her letters good. Tell her about that, why don't
you?" Or, "This Writing's a stranger to me. I'll just wait a minute to
see if birth or death gets out of the envelope.")
As she closed Mary's gate and hurried up the walk, in a keen wind
flowing with little pricking flakes, Jenny was startled to see both
parlour windows open. The white muslin curtains were blowing idly as if
June were in the air. Turning as a matter of course to the path that led
to the kitchen, she was hailed by Mary, who came out the front door with
a rug in her hands.
"Step right in this way," said Mary; "this door's unfastened."
"Forevermore!" Jenny said, "Mary Chavah! What you got your house all
open for? You ain't moving?"
A gust of wind took Mary's answer. She tossed the rug across the icy
railing of the porch and beckoned Jenny into the house, and into the
parlour. And when she had greeted Jenny after the months of her
absence:--
"See," Mary said exultantly, "don't it look grand and empty? Look at it
first, and then come on in and I'll tell you about it."
The white-papered walls of the two rooms were bare of pictures; the
floor had been sparingly laid with rugs. The walnut sofa and chairs, the
table for the lamp, and the long shelves of her grandfather's
books--these were all that the room held. A white arch divided the two
chambers, like a benign brow whose face had long been dimmed away. It
was all exquisitely clean and icy cold. A little snow drifted in
through the muslin curtains. The breath of the two women showed.
"What on earth you done that for?" Jenny demanded.
Mary Chavah stood in the empty archway, the satisfaction on her face not
veiling its pure austerity. She was not much past thirty-three, but she
looked older, for she was gaunt. Her flesh had lost its firmness, her
dressmaking had stooped her, her strong frame moved as if it habitually
shouldered its way. In her broad forehead and deep eyes and somewhat in
her silent mouth, you read the woman--the rest of her was obscured in
her gentle reticence. She had a gray shawl, blue-bordered, folded
tightly about her head and pinned under her chin, and it wrapped her to
her feet.
"I feel like a thing in a new shell," she said. "Come on in where it's
warm."
Instead of moving her dining-room table to her kitchen, as most of Old
Trail Town did in Winter, Mary had moved her cooking stove into the
dining room, had improvised a calico-curtained cupboard for the
utensils, and there she lived and sewed. The windows were bare.
"I'll let the parlour have curtains if it wants to," she had said, "but
in the room I live in I want every strip of the sun I can get."
There were no plants, though every house in Old Trail Town had a window
of green, and slips without number were offered....
"... You can have flowers all you want," she said once; "I like 'em too
well to box 'em up in the house."
And there were no books.
"I don't read," she admitted; "I ain't ever read a book in my life but
"Pilgrim's Progress" and the first four chapters of "Ben Hur." What's
the use of pretending, when books is such a nuisance to dust?
Grandfather's books in the parlour--oh, they ain't books. They're
furniture."
But she had a little bookcase whose shelves were filled with her
patterns--in her dressmaking she never used a fashion plate.
"I like to make 'em up and cut 'em out," she sometimes told her friends.
"I don't care nothing whatever about the dresses when they get
done--more fool the women for ornamenting themselves up like lamp
shades, I always think. But I just do love to fuss with the paper and
make it do like I say. Land, I've got my cupboard full of more patterns
than I'd ever get orders for if I lived to be born again."
She sat down before the cooking stove and drew off her woolen mittens.
She folded a hand on her cheek, forcing the cheek out of drawing by her
hand's pressure. There was always about her gestures a curious
nakedness--indeed, about her face and hands. They were naïve, perfectly
likely to reveal themselves in their current awkwardness and ugliness of
momentary expression which, by its very frankness, made a new law as it
broke an old one.
"Don't you tell folks I've been house cleaning," she warned Jenny. "The
town would think I was crazy, with the thermometer acting up zero so.
Anyway, I ain't been house cleaning. I just simply got so sick to death
of all the truck piled up in this house that I had to get away from it.
And this morning it looked so clean and white and smooth outdoors that I
felt so cluttered up I couldn't sew. I begun on this room--and then I
kept on with the parlour. I've took out the lambrequins and 'leven
pictures and the what-not and four moth-catching rugs and four sofa
pillows, and I've packed the whole lot of 'em into the attic. I've done
the same to my bedroom. I've emptied my house out of all the stuff the
folks' and the folks' folks and their folks--clear back to Grandmother
Hackett had in here--I mean the truck part. Not the good. And I guess
now I've got some room to live in."
Jenny looked at her admiringly, and asked: "How did you ever do it? I
can't bear to throw things away. I can't bear to move things from where
they've been."
"I didn't use to want to," said Mary, "but lately--I do. The Winter's so
clean, you kind of have to, to keep up. What's the news?"
"Here's a letter," Jenny said, and handed it. "I didn't look to see who
it's from. I guess it's a strange Writing, anyway."
Mary glanced indifferently at it. "It's from Lily's boy, out West," she
said, and laid the letter on the shelf. "I meant, what's the news about
you?"
Jenny's eyes widened swiftly. "News about me?" she said. "Who said there
was any news about me?"
"Nobody," Mary said evenly; "but you've been gone most a year, ain't
you?"
"Oh," Jenny said, "yes...."
For really, when Old Trail Town stopped to think of it, Jenny Wing was
Mrs. Bruce Rule, and had been so for a year. But no one thought of
calling her that. It always takes Old Trail Town several years to adopt
its marriages. They would graduate first to "Jenny Wing that was," and
then to "Jenny Wing What's-name," and then to "Mis' Rule that was Jenny
Wing...."
"... You tell me some news," Jenny added. "Mother don't ever write much
but the necessaries."
"That's all there's been," Mary Chavah told her; "we ain't had no
luxuries for news in forever."
"But there's that notice in the post office," cried Jenny. "I come home
to spend Christmas, and there's that notice in the post office. Mother
wrote nobody was going to do anything for Christmas, but she never wrote
me that. I've brought home some little things I made----"
"Oh--Christmas!" Mary said. "Yes, they all got together and concluded
best not have any. You know, since the failure--"
Mary hesitated--Ebenezer Rule was Bruce Rule's uncle.
"I know," said Jenny, "it's Uncle Ebenezer. I don't know how I'm going
to tell Bruce when he comes. To think it's in our family, the reason
they can't have any Christmas...."
"Nonsense," said Mary, briskly; "no Christmas presents is real
sensible, my way of thinking. It's been 'leven years since I've given a
Christmas present to anybody. The first Christmas after mother died, I
couldn't--I just couldn't. That kind of got me out of the idea, and
then I see all the nonsense of it."
"The _nonsense_?" Jenny repeated.
"If you don't like folks, you don't want to give nothing to them or take
nothing from them. And if you do like 'em you don't want to have to wait
to Christmas to give 'em things. Ain't that so?" Mary Chavah put it.
"_No_," said Jenny; "it ain't. Not a bit so." And when Mary laughed,
questioned her, pressed her, "It seems perfectly awful to me not to have
a Christmas," Jenny could say only, "I feel like the Winter didn't have
no backbone to it."
"It's a dead time, Winter," Mary assented. "What's the use of tricking
it up with gewgaws and pretending it's a live time? Besides, if you
ain't got the money, you ain't got the money. And nobody has, this year.
Unless they go ahead and buy things anyway, like the City."
Jenny shook her head. "I got seven Christmas-present relatives and ten
Christmas-present friends, and I've only spent Two Dollars and Eighty
cents on 'em all," she said, "for material. But I've made little things
for every one of 'em. It don't seem as if that much had ought to hurt
any one."
Jenny looked past her out the window, somewhere beyond the snow.
"They's something else," she added, "it ain't all present giving...."
"Nonsense," said Mary Chavah, "take the present trading away from
Christmas and see how long it'd last. I was in the City once for
Christmas. I'll never forget it--never. I never see folks work like the
folks worked there. The streets was Bedlam. The stores was worse.
'What'll I get him?...' 'I've just got to get something for her....' 'It
don't seem as if this is nice enough after what she give me last
year....' I can hear 'em yet. They spent money wicked. And I said to
myself that I was glad from my head to my feet that I was done with
Christmas. And I been preaching it ever since. And I'm pleased this town
has had to come to it."
"It ain't the way I feel," said Jenny. She got up and wandered to the
window and hardly heard while Mary went on with more of the sort. "It
seems kind of like going back on the ways things are," Jenny said, as
she turned. Then, as she made ready to go, she broke off and smote her
hands together.
"Oh," she said, "it don't seem as if I could bear it not to have
Christmas--not _this_ year."
"You mean your and Bruce's first Christmas," said Mary. "Mark my words,
he'll be glad to be rid of the fuss. Men always are. Come on out the
front door if you're going," said Mary. "You might as well use it when
it's open."
As Jenny passed the open parlour door, she looked in again at the bare
room.
"Don't you _like_ pictures?" she asked abruptly.
"I like 'em when I like 'em," Mary answered. "I didn't like them I had
up here--I had a shot stag and a fruit piece and an eagle with a child
in its claws. I've loathed 'em for years, but I ain't ever had the heart
to throw 'em out till now. They're over behind the coal bin."
Jenny thought. "They's a picture over to mother's," she said, "that she
ain't put up because she ain't had the money to frame it. I guess I'll
bring it over after supper and see if you don't want it up here--frame
or no frame." She looked at Mary and laughed. "If I bring it to you
to-night," she said, "it ain't a Christmas present--legal. But if I want
to call it a Christmas present inside me, the town can't help that."
"What's the picture?" Mary asked.
"I don't know who it represents," said Jenny, "but it's nice."
When Jenny had gone, Mary Chavah stood in the snow shaking the rug she
had left outside, and looking at the clean, white town.
"It looks like it was waiting for something," she thought.
A door opened and shut. A child shouted. In the north east a shining
body had come sparkling above the trees--Capella of the brightness of
one hundred of our suns, being born into the twilight like a little
star....
Mary closed the parlour windows and stood for a moment immersed in the
quiet and emptiness of the clean rooms.
"This looks like it was waiting for something, too," she thought. "But
it ought to know it won't get it," she added whimsically.
Then she went back to the warm room and saw the letter on the shelf. She
meant to go in a moment to the stable to make it safe there for the
night; so, with the gray shawl still binding her head and falling to her
feet, she sat by the stove and read the letter.
V
"... because she wasn't sick but two days and we never thought of
her dying till she was dead. Otherwise we'd have telegraphed. She
was buried yesterday, right here, and we'll get some kind of stone.
You say how you think it'd ought to be marked. That's about all
there is to tell except about _Yes_. He's six years old now and
Aunt Mary this ain't a place for him. He's a nice little fellow and
I hate for him to get rough and he will if he stays here. I'll do
the best I can and earn money to help keep him but I want he should
come and live with you...."
"I won't have him!" said Mary Chavah, aloud.
"... he could come alone with a tag all right and I could send his
things by freight. He ain't got much. You couldn't help but like
him and I hate for him to get rough. Please answer and oblige your
loving Nephew,
"JOHN BLOOD."
Mary kept reading the letter and staring out into the snow. Her sister
Lily's boy--they wanted to send him to her. Lily's boy and Adam
Blood's--the man whose son she had thought would be her son. It was
twenty years ago that he had been coming to the house--this same
house--and she had thought that he was coming to see her, had never
thought of Lily at all till Lily had told her of her own betrothal to
him. It hurt yet. It had hurt freshly when he had died, seven years ago.
Now Lily was dead, and Adam's eldest son, John, wanted to send this
little brother to her, to have.
"I won't take him," she said a great many times, and kept reading the
letter and staring out into the snow.
For Lily she had no tears--she seldom had tears at all. But after a
little while she was conscious of a weight through her and in her,
aching in her throat, her breast, her body. She rose and went near to
the warmth of the fire, then to the freedom of the window against which
the snow lay piled, then she sat down in the place where she worked,
beside her patterns. The gray shawl still bound her head, and it was
still in her mind that she must go to the barn and lock it. But she did
not go--she sat in the darkening room with all her past crowding it....
... That first day with Adam at the Blood's picnic, given at his
home-coming. They had met with all that perilous, ready-made intimacy
which a school friendship of years before had allowed. As she had walked
beside him she had known well what he was going to mean to her. She
remembered the moment when he had contrived to ask her to wait until the
others went, so that he might walk home with her. And when they had
reached home, there on the porch--where she had just shaken the rugs in
the snow--Lily had been sitting, a stool--one of the stools now at
length banished to the shed--holding the hurt ankle that had kept her
from the picnic. Adam had stayed an hour, and they had sat beside Lily.
He had come again and again, and they had always sat beside Lily. Mary
remembered that those were the days when she was happy in _things_--in
the house and the look of the rooms and of the little garden from the
porch, and of the old red-cushioned rocking-chairs on the tiny "stoop."
She had loved her clothes and her little routines, and all these things
had seemed desirable and ultimate because they two were sharing them.
Then one day Mary had joined Lily and Adam there on the porch, and Lily
had been looking up with new eyes, and Mary had searched her face, and
then Adam's face; and they had all seemed in a sudden nakedness; and
Mary had known that a great place was closed against her.
Since then house and porch and garden and routines had become like those
of other places. She had always been shut outside something, and always
she had borne burdens. The death of her parents, gadflys of need, worst
of all a curious feeling that the place closed against her was somehow
herself--that, so to say, she and herself had never once met. She used
to say that to herself sometimes, "There's two of me, and we don't
meet--we don't meet."
"And now he wants me to take her boy and Adam's," she kept saying; "I'll
never do such a thing--never."
She thought that the news of Lily's death was what gave her the strange,
bodily hurt that had seized her--the news that what she was used to was
gone; that she had no sister; that the days of their being together and
all the tasks of their upbringing were finished. Then she thought that
the remembering of those days of her happiness and her pain, and the
ache of what might have been and of what never was, had come to torture
her again. But the feeling was rather the weight of some imminent thing,
the ravage of something that grew with what it fed on, the grasp upon
her of something that would not let her go....
She had never seen them after their marriage, and so she had never seen
either of the children. Lily had once sent her a picture of John, but
she had never sent one of this other little boy. Mary tried to recall
what they had ever said of him. She could not even remember his
baptismal name, but she knew that they had called him "Yes" because it
was the first word he had learned to say, and because he had said it to
everything. "The baby can say 'Yes,'" Lily had written once; "I guess
it's all he'll ever be able to say. He says it all day long. He won't
try to say anything else." And once later: "We've taken to calling the
baby 'Yes,' and now he calls himself that. 'Yes wants it,' he says, and
'Take Yes,' and 'Yes is going off now.' His father likes it. He says yes
is everything and no is nothing. I don't think that means much, but we
call him that for fun...." But Mary could not remember what the child's
real name was. What difference did it make? As if she could have a child
meddling round the house while she was sewing. But of course this was
not the real reason. The real reason was that she could not bring up a
child--did she not know that?
"... He's six years old now and Aunt Mary this ain't a place for him.
He's a nice little fellow and I hate for him to get rough and he will if
he stays here...."
She tried to think who else could take him. They had no one. Adam, she
knew, had no one. Some of the neighbours there by the ranch ... it was
absurd to send him that long journey ... so she went through it all,
denying with all the old denials. And all the while the weight in her
body grew and filled her, and she was strangely conscious of her breath.
"What ails me?" she said aloud, and got up to kindle a light. She was
amazed to see that it was seven o'clock, and long past her supper hour.
As she took from the clock shelf the key to the barn, some one rapped at
the back door and came through the cold kitchen with friendly
familiarity. It was Jenny, a shawl over her head, her face glowing with
the cold, and in her mittened hands a flat parcel.
"My hand's most froze," Jenny admitted. "I didn't want to roll this
thing, so I carried it flat out, and it blew consider'ble. It's the
picture."
"Get yourself warm," Mary bade her. "I'll undo it. Who is it of?" she
added, as the papers came away.
"That's what I don't know," said Jenny, "but I've always liked it
around. I thought maybe you'd know."
It was a picture which, in those days, had not before come to Old Trail
Town. The figure was that of a youth, done by a master of the times--the
head and shoulders of a youth who seemed to be looking passionately at
something outside the picture.
"There it is, anyhow," Jenny added. "If you like it enough to hang it
up, hang it up. It's a Christmas present!" Jenny laughed elfishly.
Mary Chavah held the picture out before her.
"I do," she said; "I could take a real fancy to it. I'll have it up on
the wall. Much obliged, I'm sure. Set down a minute."
But Jenny could not do this, and Mary, the key to the barn still in her
hands, followed her out. They went through the cold kitchen where the
refrigerator and the ironing board and the clothes bars and all the
familiar things stood in the dark. To Mary these were sunk in a great
obscurity and insignificance, and even Jenny being there was unimportant
beside the thing that her letter had brought to think about. They
stepped out into the clear, glittering night, with its clean, white
world, and its clean, dark sky on which some story was written in stars.
Capella was shining almost overhead--and another star was hanging bright
in the east, as if the east were always a dawning place for some new
star.
"Mary!" said Jenny, there in the dark.
"Yes," Mary answered.
"You know I said I just couldn't bear not to have any Christmas--_this_
Christmas?"
"Yes," Mary said.
"Did you know why?"
"I thought because it's your and Bruce's first--"
"No," Jenny said, "that isn't all why. It's something else."
She slipped her arm within Mary's and stood silent. And, Mary still not
understanding,--
"It's somebody else," Jenny said faintly.
Mary stirred, turned to her in the dimness.
"Why, Jenny!" she said.
"Soon," said Jenny.
The two women stood for a moment, Jenny saying a little, Mary quiet.
"It'll be late in December," Jenny finished. "That seems so wonderful to
me--so wonderful. Late in December, like--"
The cold came pricking about them, and Jenny moved to go. Mary, the
shawled figure on the upper step, looked down on the shawled figure
below her, and abruptly spoke.
"It's funny," Mary said, "that you should tell me that--now. I haven't
told you what's in my letter."
"What was?" asked Jenny.
Mary told her. "They want I should have the little boy," she ended it.
"Oh...." Jenny said. "Mary! How wonderful for you! Why, it's almost next
as wonderful as mine!"
Mary hesitated for a breath. But she was profoundly stirred by what
Jenny had told her--the first time, so far as she could recall, that
news like this had ever come to her directly, as a secret and a marvel.
News of the village births usually came in gossip, in commiseration, in
suspicion. Falling as did this confidence in a time when she was
re-living her old hope, when Adam's boy stood outside her threshold, the
moment quite suddenly put on its real significance.
"We can plan together," Jenny was saying. "Ain't it wonderful?"
"Ain't it?" Mary said then, simply, and kissed Jenny, when Jenny came
and kissed her. Then Jenny went away.
Mary went on to the barn, and opened the door, and listened. She had
brought no lantern, but the soft stillness within needed no vigilance.
The hay smell from the loft and the mangers, the even breath of the
cows, the quiet safety of the place, met her. She was wondering at
herself, but she was struggling not at all. It was as if concerning the
little boy, something had decided for her, in a soft, fierce rush of
feeling not her own. She had committed herself to Jenny almost without
will. But Mary felt no exultation, and the weight within her did not
lift.
"I really couldn't do anything else but take him, I s'pose," she
thought. "I wonder what'll come on me next?"
All the while, she was conscious of the raw smell of the clover in the
hay of the mangers, as if something of Summer were there in the cold.