We had a poor fellow, named B----, for our saw-miller, whose sad
fortunes are vividly associated with the loveliness of the early summer
in my mind. He was a hapless, harmless, kindly creature, and he had
passed most of his manhood in a sort of peonage to a rich neighboring
farmer whom he was hopelessly in debt to, so that I suppose it was like
the gift of freedom to him when he came into our employ; but his
happiness did not last long.
Within a month or two he was seized with a flux that carried him off
after a few days, and then began to attack his family. He had half a
dozen children, and they all died, except one boy, who was left with his
foolish, simple mother. My oldest brother had helped nurse them, and had
watched with them, and seen them die; and it fell to me to go to the
next village one morning and buy linen to make the last two of their
shrouds. I mounted the italic-footed mare, barebacked, as usual, with my
legs going to sleep on either side of her, but my brain wildly awake,
and set out through the beautiful morning, turned lurid and ghastly by
the errand on which I was bent.
When I came back with that linen in my hand it was as if I were
accompanied by troops of sheeted dead, from whom that italic-footed
nightmare could not be persuaded to escape by any sawing of her mouth,
or any thumping of her sides with my bare heels.
I am astonished now that this terror should have been so transient. The
little ones were laid with their father and their brothers and sisters
in the unfenced graveyard on the top of our hill, where the pigs foraged
for acorns above their heads in the fall; and then my sun shone again.
So did the sun of the surviving B----s. The mother turned her household
goods into ready money, and with this and the wages due her husband
bought a changeable silk dress for herself and an oil-cloth cap for her
son, and equipped in these splendors the two set off up the road towards
the town of X----, gay, light-hearted in their destitution, and consoled
after the bereavement of a single week.
X
Our new house got on slowly. There were various delays and some
difficulties, but it was all intensely interesting, and we watched its
growth with eyes that hardly left it night or day. Life in the log-cabin
had not become pleasanter with the advance of the summer; we were all
impatient to be out of it. We looked forward to our occupation of the
new house with an eagerness which even in us boys must have had some
sense of present discomfort at the bottom of it. We were to have a
parlor, a dining-room, and a library; there were to be three chambers
for the family and a spare room; after six months in the log-cabin we
could hardly have imagined it, if we had not seen these divisions
actually made by the studding.
In that region there is no soft wood. The frame was of oak, and my
father decided to have the house weather-boarded and shingled with
black-walnut, which was so much cheaper than pine, and which, left in
its natural state, he thought would be agreeable in color. In this
neither the carpenter nor any of the neighbors could think with him; the
local ideal was brick for a house, and if not that, then white paint and
green blinds, and always two front doors; but my father had his way, and
our home was fashioned according to his plans.
It appeared to me a palace. I spent all the leisure I had from swimming
and Indian fighting and reading in watching the carpenter work, and
hearing him talk; his talk was not the wisest, but he thought very well
of it himself, and I had so far lapsed from civilization that I stood in
secret awe of him, because he came from town--from the pitiful little
village, namely, where I went to buy those shrouds.
I try to give merely a child’s impressions of our life, which were
nearly all delightful; but it must have been hard for my elders, and for
my mother especially, who could get no help, or only briefly and
fitfully, in the work that fell to her. What her pleasures were I can
scarcely imagine. She was cut off from church-going because we were
Swedenborgians; short of Cincinnati, sixty miles away, there was no
worship of our faith, and the local preaching was not edifying,
theologically or intellectually.
Now and then a New Church minister, of those who used to visit us in
town, passed a Sunday with us in the cabin, and that was a rare time of
mental and spiritual refreshment. Otherwise, my father read us a service
out of the Book of Worship, or a chapter from the Heavenly Arcana; and
week-day nights, while the long evenings lasted, he read poetry to
us--Scott or Moore or Thomson, or some of the more didactic poets.
In the summer evenings, after her long hard day’s work was done, my
mother sometimes strolled out upon the island with my father, and
loitered on the bank to look at her boys in the river. One such evening
I recall, and how sad our gay voices were in the dim, dewy air. My
father had built a flat boat, which we kept oil the smooth waters of
our dam, and on Sunday afternoons the whole family went out in it. We
rowed far up, till we struck the swift current from the mill above us,
and then let the boat drift slowly down again.
It does not now seem very exciting, but then to a boy whose sense was
open to every intimation of beauty, the silence that sang in our ears,
the stillness of the dam, where the low uplands and the fringing
sycamores and every rush and grass-blade by the brink perfectly glassed
themselves and the vast blue sky overhead, were full of mystery, of
divine promise, and holy awe; and life was rich unspeakably.
I recollect the complex effect of these Sunday afternoons as if they
were all one sharp event; I recall in like manner the starry summer
nights when my brother used to row across the river to the cabin of the
B----s, where the poor man and his children lay dying in turn, and I
wondered and shuddered at his courage; but there is one night that
remains single and peerless in my memory.
My brother and I had been sent on an errand to some neighbor’s--for a
bag of potatoes or a joint of meat; it does not matter--and we had been
somehow belated, so that it was well into the night when we started
home, and the round moon was high when we stopped to rest in a piece of
the lovely open woodland of that region, where the trees stand in a
park-like freedom from underbrush, and the grass grows dense and rich
among them.
We took the pole, on which we had slung the bag, from our shoulders, and
sat down on an old long-fallen log, and listened to the closely
interwoven monotonies of the innumerable katydids, in which the air
seemed clothed as with a mesh of sound. The shadows fell black from the
trees upon the smooth sward, but every other place was full of the
tender light in which all forms were rounded and softened; the moon hung
tranced in the sky. We scarcely spoke in the shining solitude, the
solitude which for once had no terrors for the childish fancy, but was
only beautiful. This perfect beauty seemed not only to liberate me from
the fear which is the prevailing mood of childhood, but to lift my soul
nearer and nearer to the soul of all things in an exquisite sympathy.
Such moments never pass; they are ineffaceable; their rapture
immortalizes; from them we know that whatever perishes there is
something in us that cannot die, that divinely regrets, divinely hopes.