DOORYARDS

Tiverton has breezy, upland roads, and damp, sweet valleys; but should

you tarry there a summer long, you might find it wasteful to take many

excursions abroad. For, having once received the freedom of family

living, you will own yourself disinclined to get beyond dooryards,

those outer courts of domesticity. Homely joys spill over into them,

and, when children are afoot, surge and riot there. In them do the

common occupations of life find niche and channel. While bright weather

holds, we wash out of doors on a Monday morning, the wash-bench in the

solid block of shadow thrown by the house. We churn there, also, at the

hour when Sweet-Breath, the cow, goes afield, modestly unconscious of

her own sovereignty over the time. There are all the varying fortunes

of butter-making recorded. Sometimes it comes merrily to the tune of

"Come, butter, come!

Peter stands a-waiting at the gate,

Waiting for his butter-cake.

Come, butter, come!"

chanted in time with the dasher; again it doth willfully refuse, and

then, lest it be too cool, we contribute a dash of hot water, or too

hot, and we lend it a dash of cold. Or we toss in a magical handful of

salt, to encourage it. Possibly, if we be not the thriftiest of

householders, we feed the hens here in the yard, and then "shoo" them

away, when they would fain take profligate dust-baths under the

syringa, leaving unsightly hollows. But however, and with what

complexion, our dooryards may face the later year, they begin it with

purification. Here are they an unfailing index of the severer virtues;

for, in Tiverton, there is no housewife who, in her spring cleaning,

omits to set in order this outer pale of the temple. Long before the

merry months are well under way, or the cows go kicking up their heels

to pasture, or plants are taken from the south window and clapped into

chilly ground, orderly passions begin to riot within us, and we "clear

up" our yards. We gather stray chips, and pieces of bone brought in by

the scavenger dog, who sits now with his tail tucked under him,

oblivious of such vagrom ways. We rake the grass, and then, gilding

refined gold, we sweep it. There is a tradition that Miss Lois May once

went to the length of trimming her grass about the doorstone and

clothes-pole with embroidery scissors; but that was a too-hasty

encomium bestowed by a widower whom she rejected next week, and who

qualified his statement by saying they were pruning-shears.

After this preliminary skirmishing arises much anxious inspection of

ancient shrubs and the faithful among old-fashioned plants, to see

whether they have "stood the winter." The fresh, brown "piny" heads are

brooded over with a motherly care; wormwood roots are loosened, and the

horse-radish plant is given a thrifty touch. There is more than the

delight of occupation in thus stirring the wheels of the year. We are

Nature's poor handmaidens, and our labor gives us joy.

But sweet as these homespun spots can make themselves, in their mixture

of thrift and prodigality, they are dearer than ever at the points

where they register family traits, and so touch the humanity of us all.

Here is imprinted the story of the man who owns the farm, that of the

father who inherited it, and; the grandfather who reclaimed it from

waste; here have they and their womenkind set the foot of daily living

and traced indelible paths. They have left here the marks of tragedy,

of pathos, or of joy. One yard has a level bit of grassless ground

between barn and pump, and you may call it a battlefield, if you will,

since famine and desire have striven there together. Or, if you choose

to read fine meanings into threadbare things, you may see in it a field

of the cloth of gold, where simple love of life and childlike pleasure

met and sparkled for no eye to see. It was a croquet ground, laid out

in the days when croquet first inundated the land, and laid out by a

woman. This was Della Smith, the mother of two grave children, and the

wife of a farmer who never learned to smile. Eben was duller than the

ox which ploughs all day long for his handful of hay at night and his

heavy slumber; but Della, though she carried her end of the yoke with a

gallant spirit, had dreams and desires forever bursting from brown

shells, only to live a moment in the air, and then, like bubbles, die.

She had a perpetual appetite for joy. When the circus came to town, she

walked miles to see the procession; and, in a dream of satisfied

delight, dropped potatoes all the afternoon, to make up. Once, a

hand-organ and monkey strayed that way, and it was she alone who

followed them; for the children were little, and all the saner

house-mothers contented themselves with leaning over the gates till the

wandering train had passed. But Della drained her draught of joy to the

dregs, and then tilted her cup anew. With croquet came her supremest

joy,--one that leavened her days till God took her, somewhere, we hope,

where there is playtime. Della had no money to buy a croquet set, but

she had something far better, an alert and undiscouraged mind. On one

dizzy afternoon, at a Fourth of July picnic, when wickets had been set

up near the wood, she had played with the minister, and beaten him. The

game opened before her an endless vista of delight. She saw herself

perpetually knocking red-striped balls through an eternity of wickets;

and she knew that here was the one pastime of which no soul could tire.

Afterwards, driving home with her husband and two children, still in a

daze of satisfied delight, she murmured absently:--

"Wonder how much they cost?"

"What?" asked Eben, and Della turned, flushed scarlet, and replied:--

"Oh, nothin'!"

That night, she lay awake for one rapt hour, and then she slept the

sleep of conquerors. In the morning, after Eben had gone safely off to

work, and the children were still asleep, she began singing, in a

monotonous, high voice, and took her way out of doors. She always sang

at moments when she purposed leaping the bounds of domestic custom.

Even Eben had learned that, dull as he was. If he heard that guilty

crooning from the buttery, he knew she might be breaking extra eggs, or

using more sugar than was conformable.

"What you doin' of?" he was accustomed to call. But Delia never

answered, and he did not interfere. The question was a necessary

concession to marital authority; he had no wish to curb her ways.

Della scudded about the yard like a willful wind. She gathered withes

from a waiting pile, and set them in that one level space for wickets.

Then she took a handsaw, and, pale about the lips, returned to the

house and to her bedroom. She had made her choice. She was sacrificing

old associations to her present need; and, one after another, she sawed

the ornamenting balls from her mother's high-post bedstead. Perhaps the

one element of tragedy lay in the fact that Della was no mechanician,

and she had not foreseen that, having one flat side, her balls might

decline to roll. But that dismay was brief. A weaker soul would have

flinched; to Della it was a futile check, a pebble under the wave. She

laid her balls calmly aside. Some day she would whittle them into

shape; for there were always coming to Della days full of roomy leisure

and large content. Meanwhile apples would serve her turn,--good alike

to draw a weary mind out of its channel or teach the shape of spheres.

And so, with two russets for balls and the clothes-slice for a mallet

(the heavy sledge-hammer having failed), Della serenely, yet in

triumph, played her first game against herself.

"Don't you drive over them wickets!" she called imperiously, when Eben

came up from the lot in his dingle cart.

"Them what?" returned he, and Della had to go out to explain. He looked

at them gravely; hers had been a ragged piece of work.

"What under the sun'd you do that for?" he inquired. "The young ones

wouldn't turn their hand over for't They ain't big enough."

"Well, I be," said Della briefly. "Don't you drive over 'em."

Eben looked at her and then at his path to the barn, and he turned his

horse aside.

Thereafter, until we got used to it, we found a vivid source of

interest in seeing Della playing croquet, and always playing alone.

That was a very busy summer, because the famous drought came then, and

water had to be carried for weary rods from spring and river. Sometimes

Della did not get her playtime till three in the afternoon, sometimes

not till after dark; but she was faithful to her joy. The croquet

ground suffered varying fortunes. It might happen that the balls were

potatoes, when apples failed to be in season; often her wickets broke,

and stood up in two ragged horns. Sometimes one fell away altogether,

and Della, like the planets, kept an unseen track. Once or twice, the

mistaken benevolence of others gave her real distress. The minister's

daughter, noting her solitary game, mistook it for forlornness, and, in

the warmth of her maiden heart, came to ask if she might share. It was

a timid though official benevolence; but Della's bright eyes grew dark.

She clung to her kitchen chair.

"I guess I won't," she said, and, in some dim way, everybody began to

understand that this was but an intimate and solitary joy. She had

grown so used to spreading her banquets for one alone that she was

frightened at the sight of other cups upon the board; for although

loneliness begins in pain, by and by, perhaps, it creates its own

species of sad and shy content.

Della did not have a long life; and that was some relief to us who were

not altogether satisfied with her outlook here. The place she left need

not be always desolate. There was a good maiden sister to keep the

house, and Eben and the children would be but briefly sorry. They could

recover their poise; he with the health of a simple mind, and they as

children will. Yet he was truly stunned by the blow; and I hoped, on

the day of the funeral, that he did not see what I did. When we went

out to get our horse and wagon, I caught my foot in something which at

once gave way. I looked down--at a broken wicket and a withered apple

by the stake.

Quite at the other end of the town is a dooryard which, in my own mind,

at least, I call the traveling garden. Miss Nancy, its presiding

mistress, is the victim of a love of change; and since she may not

wander herself, she transplants shrubs and herbs from nook to nook. No

sooner does a green thing get safely rooted than Miss Nancy snatches it

up and sets it elsewhere. Her yard is a varying pageant of plants in

all stages of misfortune. Here is a shrub, with faded leaves, torn from

the lap of prosperity in a well-sunned corner to languish under

different conditions. There stands a hardy bush, shrinking, one might

guess, under all its bravery of new spring green, from the premonition

that Miss Nancy may move it tomorrow. Even the ladies'-delights have

their months of garish prosperity, wherein they sicken like country

maids; for no sooner do they get their little feet settled in a dark,

still corner than they are summoned out of it, to sunlight bright and

strong. Miss Nancy lives with a bedridden father, who has grown peevish

through long patience; can it be that slow, senile decay which has

roused in her a fierce impatience against the sluggishness of life, and

that she hurries her plants into motion because she herself must halt?

Her father does not theorize about it. He says, "Nancy never has no

luck with plants." And that, indeed, is true.

There is another dooryard with its infallible index finger pointing to

tell a tale. You can scarcely thread your way through it for vehicles

of all sorts, congregated there to undergo slow decomposition at the

hands of wind and weather. This farmer is a tradesman by nature, and

though, for thrift's sake, his fields must be tilled, he is yet

inwardly constrained to keep on buying and selling, albeit to no

purpose. He is everlastingly swapping and bargaining, giving play to a

faculty which might, in its legitimate place, have worked out the

definite and tangible, but which now goes automatically clicking on

under vain conditions. The house, too, is overrun with useless

articles, presently to be exchanged for others as unavailing, and in

the farmer's pocket ticks a watch which to-morrow will replace with

another more problematic still. But in the yard are the undisputable

evidences of his wild unthrift. Old rusty mowing-machines, buggies with

torn and flapping canvas, sleighs ready to yawn at every crack, all are

here: poor relations in a broken-down family. But children love this

yard. They come, hand in hand, with a timid confidence in their right,

and ask at the back door for the privilege of playing in it. They take

long, entrancing journeys in the mouldy old chaise; they endure

Siberian nights of sleighing, and throw out their helpless dolls to the

pursuing wolves; or the more mercantile-minded among the boys mount a

three-wheeled express wagon, and drive noisily away to traffic upon the

road. This, in its dramatic possibilities, is not a yard to be

despised.

Not far away are two neighboring houses once held in affectionate

communion by a straight path through the clover and a gap in the wall.

This was the road to much friendly gossip, and there were few bright

days which did not find two matrons met at the wall, their heads

together over some amiable yarn; But now one house is closed, its

windows boarded up, like eyes shut down forever, and the grass has

grown over the little path: a line erased, perhaps never to be renewed.

It is easier to wipe out a story from nature than to wipe it from the

heart; and these mutilated pages of the outer life perpetually renew in

us the pangs of loss and grief.

But not all our dooryard reminiscences are instinct with pain. Do I not

remember one swept and garnished plot, never defiled by weed or

disordered with ornamental plants, where stood old Deacon Pitts, upon

an historic day, and woke the echoes with a herald's joy? Deacon Pitts

had the ghoulish delight of the ennuied country mind in funerals and

the mortality of man; and this morning the butcher had brought him news

of death in a neighboring town. The butcher had gone by, and I was

going; but Deacon Pitts stood there, dramatically intent upon his

mournful morsel. I judged that he was pondering on the possibility of

attending the funeral without the waste of too much precious time now

due the crops. Suddenly, as he turned back toward the house, bearing a

pan of liver, his pondering eye caught sight of his aged wife toiling

across the fields, laden with pennyroyal. He set the pan down

hastily--yea, even before the advancing cat!--and made a trumpet of his

hands.

"Sarah!" he called piercingly. "Sarah! Mr. Amasa Blake's passed away!

Died yesterday!"

I do not know whether he was present at that funeral, but it would be

strange if he were not; for time and tide both served him, and he was

always on the spot. Indeed, one day he reached a house of mourning in

such season that he found the rooms quite empty, and was forced to wait

until the bereaved family should assemble. There they sat, he and his

wife, a portentous couple in their dead black and anticipatory gloom,

until even their patience had well-nigh fled. And then an arriving

mourner overheard the deacon, as he bent forward and challenged his

wife in a suspicious and discouraged whisper:--

"Say, Sarah, ye don't s'pose it's all goin' to fush out, do ye?"

They had their funeral.

To the childish memory, so many of the yards are redolent now of wonder

and a strange, sweet fragrance of the fancy not to be described! One,

where lived a notable cook, had, in a quiet corner, a little grove of

caraway. It seemed mysteriously connected with the oak-leaf cookies,

which only she could make; and the child, brushing through the delicate

bushes grown above his head, used to feel vaguely that, on some

fortunate day, cookies would be found there, "a-blowin' and a-growin'."

That he had seen them stirred and mixed and taken from the oven was an

empty matter; the cookies belonged to the caraway grove, and there they

hang ungathered still. In the very same yard was a hogshead filled with

rainwater, where insects came daily to their death and floated

pathetically in a film of gauzy wings. The child feared this innocent

black pool, feared it too much to let it alone; and day by day he would

hang upon the rim with trembling fingers, and search the black, smooth

depths, with all Ophelia's pangs. And to this moment, no rushing river

is half so ministrant to dread as is a still, dull hogshead, where

insects float and fly.

These are our dooryards. I wish we lived in them more; that there were

vines to sing under, and shade enough for the table, with its wheaten

loaf and good farm butter, and its smoking tea. But all that may come

when we give up our frantic haste, and sit down to look, and breathe,

and listen.