In the lonesomest road I travelled while homeward bound from Reading, I
stopped at a little faded cottage to inquire the way and the distance to
the nearest town. An old white haired woman came to the door and gave as
much information as she possessed, but she confessed she hadn’t been to
town for more than sixteen years.
“And do you live all alone in this dreary place the year ’round?” I
inquired. “No, not always alone,” she replied, with a peculiar smile.
“Once a month the groceryman sends the boy out with my store goods and
flour, and a neighbor living just over the hill comes over every week to
see if I have any wood chopped, and to fix the pasture field fence so
that my cow can’t get away. Besides this one or two neighbor women call
sometimes and do their sewing while telling me the news from the outside
world.”
“But at night you are alone, and that is the dreariest time of all,” I
suggested.
“No, I’m not alone even during the night, stranger. I have very realistic
dreams while I sleep. During the year I am visited by all of my old
friends and schoolmates. Not all at one time, to be sure, but every night
one or the other of them will call on me, and we’ll all be young again
and play the dear old games we loved so well when we were boys and girls.
And the boy who was killed in the mines away back in ’78 comes back once
a week and in my dreams I mend his clothes and wash his shirts, the same
as I used to do in the long ago.”
“Sort of a sad dream,” I remarked.
“No, not at all! Why should it make one sad to dream of those we loved,
and who loved us long ago? Last night my husband came back to see me, and
he was killed in the mines away back in ’67. He was just like he appeared
to me the morning he went to the mine and to his death.”
“Were you glad to see him?” I asked, for she stopped short and was
looking out toward the wooded hills with a glad smile on her face.
“Glad to see him? Why, I was just as glad as I was when he used to come
courting me down in Lebanon a half century ago! He always puts his arms
around me and gives me a gentle embrace, and kisses me on the lips, just
as he did when he was my lover and I was his girl sweetheart. And then he
sits at the chimney and lights his pipe and smokes in silence, and I mend
his clothes. By and by I fill his dinner pail, and before he starts away
he asks me to the door, where he embraces me once more, and I hold up my
lips for his farewell kiss; and then I stand there in the early morning
light and watch him pass down the road and around the bend and disappear
behind the bunch of laurels, just as I used to watch him long ago.”
“And your dreams make you feel happy during the next day, I suppose,” I
remarked, for she was again looking dreamily towards the hills.
“Not always,” she sadly replied. “For when my dead baby comes back in the
night and begins to feel with his dead hands all over my bosom, and with
his dead mouth tries to find my breast, I then recall that many and many
the time that same baby groped for my breast when he was starving for the
want of proper food; for in those days John was drinking hard; and did
not provide for his family, and my half-starved body furnished but poor
watery food for my baby boy; and all night long his baby hands reached
for the fountain that had run dry. The doctor said he was so nearly
starved that he could not stand the pneumonia and recover, so he died.”
“Could you forgive your husband after baby died?” I asked.
“Yes, after a manner. You see he straightened up for a time after baby
died, and wasn’t drinking so very hard when he was killed. And he is
always young and sober and industrious in my dreams, the same as he was
when we were married, but baby is always hungry and groping with his dead
mouth for my shriveled breast.”