THE WINKLE-MAN AND THE WILL
We found the man who gathers winkles sitting on the floor of the
sail-loft. Caleb Snow combined the resources of real estate with
the independence of a fisherman, and sent his daughter to the State
normal-school on the proceeds. When one can go out on the flats at low
tide and pick up a living with a pronged stick, why worry about rents?
Judge Bell, himself too busy attending séances to give the matter his
best thought, had persuaded Caleb Snow to handle the House of the Five
Pines. We wondered if the Winkle-Man would take any interest in either
it or us.
“Judge Bell told us that we might ask you to show us the will of the
late Captain Hawes,” I began.
“You mean the New Captain.”
Caleb went on with the deft mending of the great tarred net, in the
center of which he was bent like some old spider. He was a little man,
and he made us feel even taller than we were as he peered up at us in
the dusk of the low-beamed room, shadowed by the hanging sails and
paraphernalia of ships which obscured the lights from the dusty windows.
“It’s up in the loft,” he said wiping his greasy hands on the seat of
his overalls.
“Can’t we go up there?”
“Can ye?” he answered. He walked slowly over to a steep ladder that led
up into a black hole and began to mount. Near the top he turned around
and called down to us:
“I ain’t a-goin’ to bring it below, not for no one!”
I started after him.
“Isn’t there any light up there?” asked Ruth cravenly, from the bottom
rung.
For answer he swung open a pair of double doors, and the glory of the
afternoon sunshine streamed in upon us. Gold and bronze the water fell
in the long lines of the incoming tide. Deep blue shadows pooled the
mirrored surface beneath the boats that were anchored along the shore.
The radiance of the bay filled the dark corners of the sail-loft like a
blessing.
Caleb Snow bent over an old safe under the eaves and presently lifted
out a manuscript in a long envelope.
“I don’t show this to many folks,” he said; “it wouldn’t do.”
“Will you read it to us?”
“Oh, no.” He thrust it into my hands so quickly that I wondered if he
were afraid of it, or if it was that he simply could not read.
Ruth and I sat down on the lid of an old sea-chest and carefully
examined the document. First there were the usual unintelligible legal
clauses, and then the sum of the whole text--that the New Captain
bequeathed the proceeds of his entire estate to found a home for stray
animals, especially cats.
“Why cats?” I turned to Caleb.
“Well, she allus had ’em,” he explained, “Mattie ‘Charles T. Smith.’
She used to take ’em in when the summer people went away and left ’em
on the beach. Wild like, they get, and dangerous. She had him taught to
notice ’em. That’s why.”
Poor Mattie! Her example had trained his only virtue to her own
detriment. There was not a word about the New Captain’s leaving any of
his money to her, nor even a stick of furniture. I read further.
“It is my wish that Mattie ‘Charles T. Smith’ sit in the room with my
body for a week after I die, thereby fulfilling a last solemn trust.”
“Why did he say that?” I gasped.
Caleb Snow was sitting in the upper doorway, with his legs hanging out,
whittling at a piece of wood.
“Well, you see, he died once before and come to life again, and this
time he didn’t want to disappoint nobody.”
“_What?_”
“He simply stretched out dead one day, like he had heart-failure, and
after Mattie had got the old crape out of the chest and tacked it on
the door, and the undertaker was there going about his business, the
New Captain come to again. It was the coffin turned the trick. He
wouldn’t let ’em put him into it. He had an awful hate towards coffins
after that. Said coffin-makers was a low form of life. He took up some
foreign religion and read books to prove it by. Claimed undertakers
would be caterpillars in their next life, crawling on their bellies
and never coming out of their own cocoons. I bet he don’t stay in his,
neither!”
“Nonsense,” said I; “those things don’t happen twice.”
“If things happen once that hadn’t ought to happen at all, they got a
right to happen twice,” said Caleb doggedly, “or three or four times,
for that matter!”
“But he was cataleptic.”
“Call him anything you like.” Caleb went on whittling. “All I know is,
he was so scairt he would be buried alive, he made Mattie promise she
would watch him for a week.”
“And did she do it?”
“Yep. It was two years after the first time that he died the second
time, and they had it all planned out. She sat there in the back room,
with the shutters closed, and never took her eyes off him. Folks would
go in and out and offer her a cup of tea once in a while, but she let
on as how she didn’t know them. She never was a hand to speak to any
one before that, and after that she never has spoke to any one at all.
If you ask her anything, like I’m obliged to, strictly business, she
looks as if she didn’t have it on her mind what you was talking about.
Nor on anything else, for that matter. It turned her.”
“I should think it would!” said Ruth and I together.
“Yep,” Caleb continued, “he was dead all right when they took him out.
Leastwise, as dead as he will ever get. I didn’t see him; nobody went
to the funeral except Judge Bell, but he O. K.’d it. An’ if Mattie
decided he was beyond recall, why he was; that settles it. For if he
had been only halfway, like the other time, she would ’a’ fetched him
back herself.”
He gave us a look profoundly mysterious.
“You think, then, that Mattie has the power to raise people from the
dead?”
“Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to have it said I _say_ so,” he evaded.
“Not humans, maybe, but cats! I’ve seen her take a dead cat up off the
beach in her apron, drowned or starved, no difference to her, and the
next day there it would be, lapping up milk on the doorstep.” He paused
a minute to let us weigh this, and then he added, “An’ cats ain’t the
only things that has nine lives.”
Ruth and I stared blankly at him and at each other, and back to the
faded ink-written pages of the New Captain’s will.
“Did Mattie ever show this--power--in any other way?”
“I don’t know,” replied Caleb testily. “I don’t know her at all. Nobody
does. She don’t go around where folks are.”
“Didn’t she ever attend church?”
“Not her! She’s got a system of her own. Her and the New Captain got it
up together. The Old Captain and his wife was regular members, but down
to the public library Mis’ Katy says the New Captain used to ask for
books that a Christian would ’a’ been ashamed to be seen carrying up
the street under his arm.”
“Occultism, probably.”
“The judge can tell you. He understands them things.”
“Is he a spiritualist?”
“Not precisely, but leanin’. Goes to the First Baptist on Sunday
mornings, and all over the cape week-days, to parlor meetings. It was
the New Captain started him off, too. The judge, he thinks if he keeps
after it, he’ll get a message from him, and he’s real worried, waitin’.
But Mattie--she goes around in the yard, even, talking out loud to the
cap’n, as if he was right there, diggin’ in the garden.”
“Lots of people talk to themselves.”
“To _themselves_, yes! I know they do. But Turtle’s boy--he takes the
groceries, and he is the only one that will go in there now--he says
sometimes it’s more than he can stand. He jest puts the stuff down
on the step and runs away. She gets that cross-eyed girl next door
to go on errands for her. All that family is--” he tapped his head
significantly, “and don’t know the difference.”
“You mean that Mattie is crazy?” I asked indignantly. “She’s no more
crazy than you or me.”
Ruth smiled then at the look Caleb gave me. It was as much as to say
that he had suspected I was right along, and that now I had admitted it.
“She only appears to us to act,” my friend defended me, “as any one
might who had always lived in one place and felt she had a right
to stay there. Especially, because she is out of contact with life
and does not know any longer how to take it up. There is nothing
weak-minded in the course she is pursuing.”
“No mind at all,” Caleb contradicted her.
But there was something important that I wanted to find out.
“Why,” I asked, “didn’t the New Captain leave Mattie anything in his
will?”
Caleb cocked one eye at the thing that he was whittling.
“He was past the place.”
“You mean that there was a time when he would have left her his money?”
“There was a time when he would have married her--only his mother
wouldn’t let him.”
Somehow the idea of the rugged Captain Hawes, a sailor in his youth and
a terrifying figure in his old age, a recluse around whom strange tales
had been woven by his townspeople, did not seem like a man who could
have been prevented by his mother from marrying an orphan girl.
“You can laugh,” Caleb scolded us; “you never saw her!”
“Old Jeremiah Hawes’ wife?”
“Her!” Caleb jabbed with his jack-knife as he spoke, as if he wished
that it was the old lady he had under his blade.
“But I don’t see why the New Captain could not have married Mattie
after his mother died. They must have lived a long time together in
the House of the Five Pines after that.”
“Forty years is all. Same reason that he didn’t leave her nothin’. He
was past the place where he wanted to.”
Caleb had finished what he was whittling now, and, as if he knew that
Ruth carried all such things home to her children, he handed it to her
with an apologetic smile. It was the hull of a little fishing-boat,
with two masts and a rudder all in place.
We thanked him and backed out down the ladder.
Looking at the toy in the sunlight, Ruth exclaimed. The name of that
fatal ship which had brought the little half-drowned French child to
the sterile land of her adoption had been carved by the Winkle-Man upon
this tiny model--_Charles T. Smith_.
“It must have looked just like that!” I cried.
“It’s like Caleb,” said Ruth, with her slow, fond smile.