It wasn't an easy matter for even a member of the family like myself
to keep clearly and untangled in his head all the relationships which
existed under this patriarchal Turnbull roof.
Old Arphaxed had been married twice. His first wife was the mother of
two children, who grew up, and the older of these was my father, Wilbur
Turnbull. He never liked farm-life, and left home early, not without
some hard feeling, which neither father nor son ever quite forgot. My
father made a certain success of it as a business man in Albany until,
in the thirties, his health broke down. He died when I was seven and,
although he left some property, my mother was forced to supplement
this help by herself going to work as forewoman in a large store.
She was too busy to have much time for visiting, and I don't think
there was any great love lost between her and the people on the farm;
but it was a good healthy place for me to be sent to when the summer
vacation came, and withal inexpensive, and so the first of July each
year generally found me out at the homestead, where, indeed, nobody
pretended to be heatedly fond of me, but where I was still treated well
and enjoyed myself. This year it was understood that my mother was
coming out to bring me home later on.
The other child of that first marriage was a girl who was spoken of in
youth as Emmeline, but whom I knew now as Aunt Em. She was a silent,
tough-fibred, hard-working creature, not at all good-looking, but
relentlessly neat, and the best cook I ever knew. Even when the house
was filled with extra hired men, no one ever thought of getting in
any female help, so tireless and so resourceful was Em. She did all
the housework there was to do, from cellar to garret, was continually
lending a hand in the men's chores, made more butter than the household
could eat up, managed a large kitchen-garden, and still had a good
deal of spare time, which she spent in sitting out in the piazza in
a starched pink calico gown, knitting the while she watched who went
up and down the road. When you knew her, you understood how it was
that the original Turnbulls had come into that part of the country
just after the Revolution, and in a few years chopped down all the
forests, dug up all the stumps, drained the swale-lands, and turned the
entire place from a wilderness into a flourishing and fertile home for
civilized people. I used to feel, when I looked at her, that she would
have been quite equal to doing the whole thing herself.
All at once, when she was something over thirty, Em had up and married
a mowing-machine agent named Abel Jones, whom no one knew anything
about, and who, indeed, had only been in the neighborhood for a week
or so. The family was struck dumb with amazement. The idea of Em's
dallying with the notion of matrimony had never crossed anybody's
mind. As a girl she had never had any patience with husking-bees or
dances or sleigh-ride parties. No young man had ever seen her home
from anywhere, or had had the remotest encouragement to hang around
the house. She had never been pretty—so my mother told me—and as she
got along in years grew dumpy and thick in figure, with a plain, fat
face, a rather scowling brow, and an abrupt, ungracious manner. She
had no conversational gifts whatever, and, through years of increasing
taciturnity and confirmed unsociability, built up in everybody's mind
the conviction that, if there could be a man so wild and unsettled in
intellect as to suggest a tender thought to Em, he would get his ears
cuffed off his head for his pains.
Judge, then, how like a thunderbolt the episode of the mowing-machine
agent fell upon the family. To bewildered astonishment there soon
enough succeeded rage. This Jones was a curly headed man, with a
crinkly black beard like those of Joseph's brethren in the Bible
picture. He had no home and no property, and didn't seem to amount to
much even as a salesman of other people's goods. His machine was quite
the worst then in the market, and it could not be learned that he had
sold a single one in the county. But he had married Em, and it was
calmly proposed that he should henceforth regard the farm as his home.
After this point had been sullenly conceded, it turned out that Jones
was a widower, and had a boy nine or ten years old, named Marcellus,
who was in a sort of orphan asylum in Vermont. There were more angry
scenes between father and daughter, and a good deal more bad blood,
before it was finally agreed that the boy also should come and live on
the farm.
All this had happened in 1860 or 1861. Jones had somewhat improved on
acquaintance. He knew about lightning-rods, and had been able to fit
out all the farm buildings with them at cost price. He had turned a
little money now and again in trades with hop-poles, butter-firkins,
shingles, and the like, and he was very ingenious in mending and fixing
up odds and ends. He made shelves and painted the woodwork, and put a
tar roof on the summer kitchen. Even Martha, the second Mrs. Turnbull,
came finally to admit that he was handy about a house.
This Martha became the head of the household while Em was still a
little girl. She was a heavy woman, mentally as well as bodily,
rather prone to a peevish view of things, and greatly given to pride
in herself and her position, but honest, charitable in her way, and
not unkindly at heart. On the whole she was a good stepmother, and Em
probably got on quite as well with her as she would have done with her
own mother—even in the matter of the mowing-machine agent.
To Martha three sons were born. The two younger ones, Myron and Warren,
have already been seen. The eldest boy, Alva, was the pride of the
family, and, for that matter, of the whole section.
Alva was the first Turnbull to go to college. From his smallest boyhood
it had been manifest that he had great things before him, so handsome
and clever and winning a lad was he. Through each of his schooling
years he was the honor man of his class, and he finished in a blaze
of glory by taking the Clark Prize, and practically everything else
within reach in the way of academic distinctions. He studied law at
Octavius, in the office of Judge Schermerhorn, and in a little time
was not only that distinguished man's partner, but distinctly the more
important figure in the firm. At the age of twenty-five he was sent to
the Assembly. The next year they made him District Attorney, and it was
quite understood that it rested with him whether he should be sent to
Congress later on, or be presented by the Dearborn County bar for the
next vacancy on the Supreme Court bench.
At this point in his brilliant career he married Miss Serena Wadsworth,
of Wadsworth's Falls. The wedding was one of the most imposing
social events the county had known, so it was said, since the visit
of Lafayette. The Wadsworths were an older family, even, than the
Fairchilds, and infinitely more fastidious and refined. The daughters
of the household, indeed, carried their refinement to such a pitch
that they lived an almost solitary life, and grew to the parlous verge
of old-maidhood simply because there was nobody good enough to marry
them. Alva Turnbull was, however, up to the standard. It could not be
said, of course, that his home surroundings quite matched those of his
bride; but, on the other hand, she was nearly two years his senior, and
this was held to make matters about even.
In a year or so came the War, and nowhere in the North did patriotic
excitement run higher than in this old abolition stronghold of upper
Dearborn. Public meetings were held, and nearly a whole regiment was
raised in Octavius and the surrounding towns alone. Alva Turnbull made
the most stirring and important speech at the first big gathering, and
sent a thrill through the whole country side by claiming the privilege
of heading the list of volunteers. He was made a captain by general
acclaim, and went off with his company in time to get chased from the
field of Bull Run. When he came home on a furlough in 1863 he was a
major, and later on he rose to be lieutenant-colonel. We understood
vaguely that he might have climbed vastly higher in promotion but
for the fact that he was too moral and conscientious to get on very
well with his immediate superior, General Boyce, of Thessaly, who was
notoriously a drinking man.
It was glory enough to have him at the farm, on that visit of his,
even as a major. His old parents literally abased themselves at his
feet, quite tremulous in their awed pride at his greatness. It made
it almost too much to have Serena there also, this fair, thin-faced,
prim-spoken daughter of the Wadsworths, and actually to call her by her
first name. It was haying time, I remember, but the hired men that year
did not eat their meals with the family, and there was even a question
whether Marcellus and I were socially advanced enough to come to the
table, where Serena and her husband were feeding themselves in state
with a novel kind of silver implement called a four-tined fork. If Em
hadn't put her foot down, out to the kitchen we should both have gone,
I fancy. As it was, we sat decorously at the far end of the table,
and asked with great politeness to have things passed to us, which by
standing up we could have reached as well as not. It was slow, but
it made us feel immensely respectable, almost as if we had been born
Wadsworths ourselves.
We agreed that Serena was "stuck up," and Marcellus reported Aunt Em
as feeling that her bringing along with her a nursemaid to be waited
on hand and foot, just to take care of a baby, was an imposition
bordering upon the intolerable. He said that that was the sort of thing
the English did until George Washington rose and drove them out. But we
both felt that Alva was splendid.
He was a fine creature physically—taller even than old Arphaxed, with
huge square shoulders and a mighty frame. I could recall him as without
whiskers, but now he had a waving lustrous brown beard, the longest and
biggest I ever saw. He didn't pay much attention to us boys, it was
true; but he was affable when we came in his way, and he gave Myron and
Warren each a dollar bill when they went to Octavius to see the Fourth
of July doings. In the evening some of the more important neighbors
would drop in, and then Alva would talk about the War, and patriotism,
and saving the Union, till it was like listening to Congress itself. He
had a rich, big voice which filled the whole room, so that the hired
men could hear every word out in the kitchen; but it was even more
affecting to see him walking with his father down under the poplars,
with his hands making orator's gestures as he spoke, and old Arphaxed
looking at him and listening with shining eyes.
Well, then, he and his wife went away to visit her folks, and then we
heard he had left to join his regiment. From time to time he wrote
to his father—letters full of high and loyal sentiments, which were
printed next week in the Octavius _Transcript_, and the week after in
the Thessaly _Banner of Liberty_. Whenever any of us thought about the
War—and who thought much of anything else?—it was always with Alva as
the predominant figure in every picture.
Sometimes the arrival of a letter for Aunt Em, or a chance remark about
a broken chair or a clock hopelessly out of kilter, would recall for
the moment the fact that Abel Jones was also at the seat of war. He had
enlisted on that very night when Alva headed the roll of honor, and he
had marched away in Alva's company. Somehow he got no promotion, but
remained in the ranks. Not even the members of the family were shown
the letters Aunt Em received, much less the printers of the newspapers.
They were indeed poor misspelled scrawls, about which no one displayed
any interest or questioned Aunt Em. Even Marcellus rarely spoke of his
father, and seemed to share to the full the family's concentration of
thought upon Alva.
Thus matters stood when spring began to play at being summer in the
year of '64. The birds came and the trees burst forth into green, the
sun grew hotter and the days longer, the strawberries hidden under
the big leaves in our yard started into shape, where the blossoms had
been, quite in the ordinary, annual way, with us up North. But down
where that dread thing they called "The War" was going on, this coming
of warm weather meant more awful massacre, more tortured hearts, and
desolated homes, than ever before. I can't be at all sure how much later
reading and associations have helped out and patched up what seem to be
my boyish recollections of this period; but it is, at all events, much
clearer in my mind than are the occurrences of the week before last.
We heard a good deal about how deep the mud was in Virginia that
spring. All the photographs and tin-types of officers which found their
way to relatives at home, now, showed them in boots that came up to
their thighs. Everybody understood that as soon as this mud dried up a
little, there were to be most terrific doings. The two great lines of
armies lay scowling at each other, still on that blood-soaked fighting
ground between Washington and Richmond where they were three years
before. Only now things were to go differently. A new general was at
the head of affairs, and he was going in, with jaws set and nerves of
steel, to smash, kill, burn, annihilate, sparing nothing, looking not
to right or left, till the red road had been hewed through to Richmond.
In the first week of May this thing began—a push forward all along the
line—and the North, with scared eyes and fluttering heart, held its
breath.
My chief personal recollection of those historic forty days is that
one morning I was awakened early by a noise in my bedroom, and saw my
mother looking over the contents of the big chest of drawers which
stood against the wall. She was getting out some black articles of
apparel. When she discovered that I was awake, she told me in a low
voice that my Uncle Alva had been killed. Then a few weeks later my
school closed, and I was packed off to the farm for the vacation. It
will be better to tell what had happened as I learned it there from
Marcellus and the others.
Along about the middle of May, the weekly paper came up from Octavius,
and old Arphaxed Turnbull, as was his wont, read it over out on the
piazza before supper. Presently he called his wife to him, and showed
her something in it. Martha went out into the kitchen, where Aunt Em
was getting the meal ready, and told her, as gently as she could, that
there was very bad news for her; in fact, her husband, Abel Jones,
had been killed in the first day's battle in the Wilderness, something
like a week before. Aunt Em said she didn't believe it, and Martha
brought in the paper and pointed out the fatal line to her. It was not
quite clear whether this convinced Aunt Em or not. She finished getting
supper, and sat silently through the meal, afterwards, but she went
upstairs to her room before family prayers. The next day she was about
as usual, doing the work and saying nothing. Marcellus told me that to
the best of his belief no one had said anything to her on the subject.
The old people were a shade more ceremonious in their manner toward
her, and "the boys" and the hired men were on the lookout to bring in
water for her from the well, and to spare her as much as possible in
the routine of chores, but no one talked about Jones. Aunt Em did not
put on mourning. She made a black necktie for Marcellus to wear to
church, but stayed away from meeting herself.
A little more than a fortnight afterwards, Myron was walking down the
road from the meadows one afternoon, when he saw a man on horseback
coming up from the poplars, galloping like mad in a cloud of dust.
The two met at the gate. The man was one of the hired helps of the
Wadsworths, and he had ridden as hard as he could pelt from the
Falls, fifteen miles away, with a message, which now he gave Myron to
read. Both man and beast dripped sweat, and trembled with fatigued
excitement. The youngster eyed them, and then gazed meditatively at the
sealed envelope in his hand.
"I s'pose you know what's inside?" he asked, looking up at last.
The man in the saddle nodded, with a tell-tale look on his face, and
breathing heavily.
Myron handed the letter back, and pushed the gate open. "You'd better
go up and give it to father yourself," he said. "I ain't got the heart
to face him—jest now, at any rate."
Marcellus was fishing that afternoon, over in the creek which ran
through the woods. Just as at last he was making up his mind that it
must be about time to go after the cows, he saw Myron sitting on a log
beside the forest path, whittling mechanically, and staring at the
foliage before him, in an obvious brown study. Marcellus went up to
him, and had to speak twice before Myron turned his head and looked up.
"Oh! it's you, eh, Bubb?" he remarked dreamily, and began gazing once
more into the thicket.
"What's the matter?" asked the puzzled boy.
"I guess Alvy's dead," replied Myron. To the lad's comments and
questions he made small answer. "No," he said at last, "I don't feel
much like goin' home jest now. Lea' me alone here; I'll prob'ly turn up
later on." And Marcellus went alone to the pasture, and thence, at the
tail of his bovine procession, home.
When he arrived he regretted not having remained with Myron in the
woods. It was like coming into something which was prison, hospital,
and tomb in one. The household was paralyzed with horror and fright.
Martha had gone to bed, or rather had been put there by Em, and all
through the night, when he woke up, he heard her broken and hysterical
voice in moans and screams. The men had hitched up the grays, and
Arphaxed Turnbull was getting into the buggy to drive to Octavius for
news when the boy came up. He looked twenty years older than he had
at noon—all at once turned into a chalk-faced, trembling, infirm old
man—and could hardly see to put his foot on the carriage-step. His
son Warren had offered to go with him, and had been rebuffed almost
with fierceness. Warren and the others silently bowed their heads
before this mood; instinct told them that nothing but Arphaxed's show
of temper held him from collapse—from falling at their feet and
grovelling on the grass with cries and sobs of anguish, perhaps even
dying in a fit. After he had driven off they forbore to talk to one
another, but went about noiselessly with drooping chins and knotted
brows.
"It jest took the tuck out of every thing," said Marcellus, relating
these tragic events to me. There was not much else to tell. Martha had
had what they call brain fever, and had emerged from this some weeks
afterward a pallid and dim-eyed ghost of her former self, sitting for
hours together in her rocking-chair in the unused parlor, her hands
idly in her lap, her poor thoughts glued ceaselessly to that vague,
far-off Virginia which folks told about as hot and sunny, but which
her mind's eye saw under the gloom of an endless and dreadful night.
Arphaxed had gone South, still defiantly alone, to bring back the body
of his boy. An acquaintance wrote to them of his being down sick in
Washington, prostrated by the heat and strange water; but even from his
sick-bed he had sent on orders to an undertaking firm out at the front,
along with a hundred dollars, their price in advance for embalming.
Then, recovering, he had himself pushed down to headquarters, or as
near them as civilians might approach, only to learn that he had passed
the precious freight on the way. He posted back again, besieging the
railroad officials at every point with inquiries, scolding, arguing,
beseeching in turn, until at last he overtook his quest at Juno Mills
Junction, only a score of miles from home.
Then only he wrote, telling people his plans. He came first to
Octavius, where a funeral service was held in the forenoon, with
military honors, the Wadsworths as the principal mourners, and a
memorable turnout of distinguished citizens. The town-hall was draped
with mourning, and so was Alva's pew in the Episcopal Church, which he
had deserted his ancestral Methodism to join after his marriage. Old
Arphaxed listened to the novel burial service of his son's communion,
and watched the clergyman in his curious white and black vestments,
with sombre pride. He himself needed and desired only a plain and
homely religion, but it was fitting that his boy should have organ
music and flowers and a ritual.
Dana Pillsbury had arrived in town early in the morning with the grays,
and a neighbor's boy had brought in the buggy. Immediately after
dinner Arphaxed had gathered up Alva's widow and little daughter, and
started the funeral cortège upon its final homeward stage.
And so I saw them arrive on that July afternoon.