The whole day had been devoted, I remember, to preparations for this
great event. Early in the morning I had been to the butcher's to set in
train the annual negotiations for a loan of cleaver and meat-saw; and
hours afterward had borne these implements proudly homeward through the
village street. In the interval I had turned the grindstone, over at
the Four Corners, while the grocer's hired man obligingly sharpened our
carving-knife. Then there had been the even more back-aching task of
clearing away the hard snow from the accustomed site of our wood-pile
in the yard, and scraping together a frosted heap of chips and bark for
the smudge in the smoke-barrel.
From time to time I sweetened this toil, and helped the laggard hours
to a swifter pace, by paying visits to the woodshed to have still
another look at the pig. He was frozen very stiff, and there were small
icicles in the crevices whence his eyes had altogether disappeared.
My emotions as I viewed his big, cold, pink carcass, with its extended
legs, its bland and pasty countenance, and that awful emptiness
underneath, were much mixed. Although I was his elder by seven or eight
years, we had been close friends during all his life—or all except a
very few weeks of his earliest sucking pighood, spent on his native
farm. I had fed him daily; I had watched him grow week by week; more
than once I had poked him with a stick as he ran around in his sty, to
make him squeal for the edification of neighbors' boys who had come
into our yard, and would now be sharply ordered out again by Aunt Susan.
As these kindly memories surged over me I could not but feel like a
traitor to my old companion, as he lay thus hairless and pallid before
my eyes. But then I would remember how good he was going to be to
eat—and straightway return with a light heart to the work of kicking
up more chips from the ice.
From the living-room in the rear of our little house came the
monotonous incessant clatter of Aunt Susan's carpet loom. Through the
window I could see the outlines of her figure and the back of her head
as she sat on her high bench. It was to me the most familiar of all
spectacles, this tireless woman bending resolutely over her work. She
was there when I first cautiously ventured my nose out from under the
warm blanket of a winter's morning. Very, very often I fell asleep at
night in my bed in the recess, lulled off by the murmur of the diligent
loom.
Presently I went in to warm myself, and stood with my red fingers over
the stove top. She cast but one vague glance at me, through the open
frame of the loom between us, and went on with her work. It was not
our habit to talk much in that house. She was too busy a woman, for
one thing, to have much time for conversation. The impression that she
preferred not to talk was always present in my boyish mind. I call up
the picture of her still as I saw her then under the top bar of the
cumbrous old machine, sitting with lips tight together, and resolute,
masterful eyes bent upon the twining intricacy of warp and woof before
her. At her side were piled a dozen or more big balls of carpet rags,
which the village wives and daughters cut up, sewed together and
wound in the long winter evenings, while the men-folks sat with their
stockinged feet on the stove hearth, and read out the latest "news
from the front" in their _Weekly Tribune_.
I knew all these rag balls by the names of their owners. Not only did
I often go to their houses for them, upon the strength of the general
village rumor that they were ready, and always carry back the finished
lengths of carpet; but I had long since unconsciously grown to watch
all the varying garments and shifts of fashion in the raiment of our
neighbors, with an eye single to the likelihood of their eventually
turning up at Aunt Susan's loom. When Hiram Mabie's checkered butternut
coat was cut down for his son Roswell, I noted the fact merely as a
stage of its progress toward carpet rags. If Mrs. Wilkins concluded to
turn her flowered delaine dress a third year, or Sarah Northrup had her
bright saffron shawl dyed black, I was sensible of a wrong having been
done our little household. I felt like crossing the street whenever I
saw approaching the portly figure of Cyrus Husted's mother, the woman
who dragged everybody into her house to show them the ingrain carpet
she had bought at Tecumseh, and assured them that it was much cheaper
in the long run than the products of my Aunt's industry. I tingled with
indignation as she passed me on the sidewalk, puffing for breath and
stepping mincingly because her shoes were too tight for her.
Nearly all the knowledge of our neighbors' sayings and doings which
reached Aunt Susan came to her from me. She kept herself to herself
with a vengeance, toiling early and late, rarely going beyond the
confines of her yard save on Sunday mornings, when we went to church,
and treating with frosty curtness the few people who ventured to come
to our house on business or from social curiosity. For one thing, this
Juno Mills in which we lived was not really our home. We had only been
there for four or five years—a space which indeed spanned all my
recollections of life—but left my Aunt more or less a stranger and
new-comer. She spared no pains to maintain that condition. I can see
now that there were good reasons for this stern aloofness. At the time
I thought it was altogether due to the proud and unsociable nature of
my Aunt.
In my child's mind I regarded her as distinctly an elderly person.
People outside, I know, spoke of her as an old maid, sometimes winking
furtively over my head as they did so. But she was not really old at
all—was in truth just barely in the thirties. Doubtless the fact that
she was tall and dark, with very black hair, and that years of steady
concentration of sight, upon the strings and threads of the loom, had
scored a scowling vertical wrinkle between her near-sighted eyes gave
me my notion of her advanced maturity. And in all her ways and words,
too, she was so far removed from any idea of youthful softness! I could
not remember her having ever kissed me. My imagination never evolved
the conceit of her kissing anybody. I had always had at her hands
uniformly good treatment, good food, good clothes; after I had learned
my letters from the old maroon plush label on the Babbitt's soap box
which held the wood behind the stove, and expanded this knowledge by
a study of street signs, she had herself taught me how to read, and
later provided me with books for the village school. She was my only
known relative—the only person in the world who had ever done anything
for me. Yet it could not be said that I loved her. Indeed she no more
raised the suggestion of tenderness in my mind than did the loom at
which she spent her waking hours.
"The Perkinses asked me why you didn't get the butcher to cut up the
pig," I remarked at last, rubbing my hands together over the hot stove
griddles.
"It's none of their business!" said Aunt Susan, with laconic promptness.
"And Devillo Pollard's got a new overcoat," I added. "He hasn't worn
the old army one now for upward of a week."
"If this war goes on much longer," commented my Aunt, "every carpet in
Dearborn County 'll be as blue as a whetstone."
I think that must have been the entire conversation of the afternoon.
I especially recall the remark about the overcoat. For two years now
the balls of rags had contained an increasing proportion of pale blue
woollen strips, as the men of the country round about came home from
the South, or bought cheap garments from the second-hand dealers in
Tecumseh. All other colors had died out. There was only this light
blue, and the black of bombazine or worsted mourning into which the
news in each week's papers forced one or another of the neighboring
families. To obviate this monotony, some of the women dyed their white
rags with butternut or even cochineal, but this was a mere drop in the
bucket, so to speak. The loom spun out only long, depressing rolls of
black and blue.
My memory leaps lightly forward now to the early evening, when I held
the lamp in the woodshed, and Aunt Susan cut up the pig.
How joyfully I watched her every operation! Every now and again my
interest grew so beyond proper bounds that I held the lamp sidewise,
and the flame smoked the chimney. I was in mortal terror over this
lamp, even when it was standing on the table quite by itself. We often
read in the paper of explosions from this new kerosene by which people
were instantly killed and houses wrapped in an unquenchable fire. Aunt
Susan had stood out against the strange invention, long after most of
the other homes of Juno Mills were familiar with the idea of the lamp.
Even after she had yielded, and I went to the grocery for more oil and
fresh chimneys and wicks, like other boys, she refused to believe that
this inflammable fluid was really squeezed out of hard coal, as they
said. And for years we lived in momentary belief that our lamp was
about to explode.
My fears of sudden death could not, however, for a moment stand up
against the delighted excitement with which I viewed the dismemberment
of the pig. It was very cold in the shed, but neither of us noticed
that. My Aunt attacked the job with skilful resolution and energy, as
was her way, chopping small bones, sawing vehemently through big ones,
hacking and slicing with the knife, like a strong man in a hurry.
For a long time no word was spoken. I gazed in silence as the head was
detached, and then resolved itself slowly into souse—always tacitly
set aside as my special portion. In prophecy I saw the big pan, filled
with ears, cheeks, snout, feet, and tail, all boiled and allowed to
grow cold in their own jelly—that pan to which I was free to repair
any time of day until everything was gone. I thought of myself, too,
with apron tied round my neck and the chopping-bowl on my knees,
reducing what remained of the head into small bits, to be seasoned by
my Aunt, and then fill other pans as head-cheese. The sage and summer
savory hung in paper flour-bags from the rafters overhead. I looked up
at them with rapture. It seemed as if my mouth already tasted them in
head-cheese and sausage and in the hot gravy which basted the succulent
spare-rib. Only the abiding menace of the lamp kept me from dancing
with delight.
Gradually, however, as my Aunt passed from the tid-bits to the more
substantial portions of her task, getting out the shoulders, the hams
for smoking, the pieces for salting down in the brine-barrel, my
enthusiasm languished a trifle. The lamp grew heavy as I changed it
from hand to hand, holding the free fingers at a respectful distance
over the chimney-top for warmth, and shuffling my feet about. It was
truly very cold. I strove to divert myself by smiling at the big shadow
my bustling Aunt cast against the house side of the shed, and by moving
the lamp to affect its proportions, but broke out into yawns instead. A
mouse ran swiftly across the scantling just under the lean-to roof. At
the same time I thought I caught the muffled sound of distant rapping,
as if at our own rarely used front door. I was too sleepy to decide
whether I had really heard a noise or not.
All at once I roused myself with a start. The lamp had nearly slipped
from my hands, and the horror of what might have happened frightened me
into wakefulness.
"The Perkins girls keep on calling me 'Wise child.' They yell it after
me all the while," I said, desperately clutching at a subject which I
hoped would interest my Aunt. I had spoken to her about it a week or so
before, and it had stirred her quite out of her wonted stern calm. If
anything would induce her to talk now, it would be this.
"They do, eh?" she said, with an alert sharpness of voice, which
dwindled away into a sigh. Then, after a moment, she added, "Well,
never you mind. You just keep right on, tending to your own affairs,
and studying your lessons, and in time it'll be you who can laugh at
them and all their low-down lot. They only do it to make you feel bad.
Just don't you humor them."
"But I don't see," I went on, "why—what do they call me 'wise child'
_for_? I asked Hi Budd, up at the Corners, but he only just chuckled
and chuckled to himself, and wouldn't say a word."
My Aunt suspended work for the moment, and looked severely down upon
me. "Well! Ira Clarence Blodgett!" she said, with grim emphasis, "I am
ashamed of you! I thought you had more pride! The idea of talking about
things like that with a coarse, rough, hired man—in a barn!"
To hear my full name thus pronounced, syllable by syllable, sent me
fairly weltering, as it were, under Aunt Susan's utmost condemnation.
It was the punishment reserved for my gravest crimes. I hung my head,
and felt the lamp wagging nervelessly in my hands. I could not deny
even her speculative impeachment as to the barn; it was blankly
apparent in my mind that the fact of the barn made matters much worse.
"I was helping him wash their two-seated sleigh," I submitted, weakly.
"He asked me to."
"What does that matter?" she asked, peremptorily. "What business have
you got going around talking with men about me?"
"Why, it wasn't about you at all, Aunt Susan," I put in more
confidently. "I said the Perkins girls kept calling me 'wise child,'
and I asked Hi——"
Aunt Susan sighed once more, and interrupted me to inspect the wick of
the lamp. Then she turned again to her work, but less spiritedly now.
She took up the cleaver with almost an air of sadness.
"You don't understand—yet," she said. "But don't make it any harder
for me by talking. Just go along and say nothing to nobody. People will
think more of you."
My mind strove in vain to grapple with this suggested picture of
myself, moving about in perpetual dumbness, followed everywhere by
universal admiration. The lamp would _not_ hold itself straight.
All at once we both distinctly heard the sound of footsteps close
outside. The noise of crunching on the dry, frozen snow came through
the thin clap-boards with sharp resonance. Aunt Susan ceased cutting
and listened.
"I heard somebody rapping at the front door a spell ago," I ventured
to whisper. My Aunt looked at me, and probably realized that I was
too sleepy to be accountable for my actions. At all events she said
nothing, but moved toward the low door of the shed, cleaver in hand.
"Who's there?" she called out in shrill, belligerent tones; and this
demand she repeated, after an interval of silence, when an irresolute
knocking was heard on the door.
We heard a man coughing immediately outside the door. I saw Aunt Susan
start at the sound—almost as if she recognized it. A moment later this
man, whoever he was, mastered his cough sufficiently to call out, in a
hesitating way:
"Is that you, Susan?"
Aunt Susan raised her chin on the instant, her nostrils drawn in, her
eyes flashing like those of a pointer when he sees a gun lifted. I
had never seen her so excited. She wheeled round once, and covered me
with a swift, penetrating, comprehensive glance, under which my knees
smote together, and the lamp lurched perilously. Then she turned
again, glided toward the door, halted, moved backward two or three
steps—looked again at me, and this time spoke.
"Well, I _swan_!" was what she said, and I felt that she looked it.
"Susan! Is that you?" came the voice again, hoarsely appealing. It was
not the voice of any neighbor. I made sure I had never heard it before.
I could have smiled to myself at the presumption of any man calling my
Aunt by her first name, if I had not been too deeply mystified.
"I've been directed here to find Miss Susan Pike," the man outside
explained, between fresh coughings.
"Well, then, mog your boots out of this as quick as ever you can!" my
Aunt replied, with great promptitude. "You won't find her here!"
"But I _have_ found her!" the stranger protested, with an accent of
wearied deprecation. "Don't you know me, Susan? I am not strong, this
cold air is very bad for me."
"I say 'get out!'" my Aunt replied, sharply. Her tone was unrelenting
enough, but I noted that she had tipped her head a little to one side,
a clear sign to me that she was opening her mind to argument. I felt
certain that presently I should see this man.
And, sure enough, after some further parley, Susan went to the door,
and, with a half-defiant gesture, knocked the hook up out of the staple.
"Come along then, if you must!" she said, in scornful tones. Then she
marched back till she stood beside me, angry resolution written all
over her face and the cleaver in her hand.
A tall, dark figure, opaque against a gleaming background of moonlight
and snowlight, was what I for a moment saw in the frame of the open
doorway. Then, as he entered, shut and hooked the door behind him, and
stood looking in a dazed way over at our lamplit group, I saw that he
was a slender, delicately featured man, with a long beard of yellowish
brown and gentle eyes. He was clad as a soldier, heavy azure-hued
caped overcoat and all, and I already knew enough of uniforms—cruel
familiarity of my war-time infancy—to tell by his cap that he was
an officer. He coughed again before a word was spoken He looked the
last man in the world to go about routing up peaceful households of a
winter's night.
"Well, now—what is your business?" demanded Aunt Susan. She put her
hand on my shoulder as she spoke, something I had never known her to
do before. I felt confused under this novel caress, and it seemed
only natural that the stranger, having studied my Aunt's face in a
wistful way for a moment, should turn his gaze upon me. I was truly a
remarkable object, with Aunt Susan's hand on my shoulder.
"I could make no one hear at the other door. I saw the light through
the window here, and came around," the stranger explained. He sent
little straying glances at the remains of the pig and at the weapon my
Aunt held at her side, but for the most part looked steadily at me.
"That doesn't matter," said Aunt Susan, coldly. "What do you want, now
that you _are_ here? Why did you come at all? What business had you to
think that I ever wanted to lay eyes on you again? How could you have
the courage to show your face here—in _my_ house?"
The man's shoulders shivered under their cape, and a wan smile curled
in his beard. "You keep your house at a very low temperature," he said
with grave pleasantry. He did not seem to mind Aunt Susan's hostile
demeanor at all.
"I was badly wounded last September," he went on, quite as if that
was what she had asked him, "and lay at the point of death for weeks.
Then they sent me North, and I have been in the hospital at Albany
ever since. One of the nurses there, struck by my name, asked me if
I had any relatives in her village—that is, Juno Mills. In that
way I learned where you were living. I suppose I ought not to have
come—against doctor's orders—the journey has been too much—I have
suffered a good deal these last two hours."
I felt my Aunt's hand shake a little on my shoulder. Her voice, though,
was as implacable as ever.
"There is a much better reason than that why you should not have come,"
she said, bitterly.
The stranger was talking to her, but looking at me. He took a step
toward me now, with a softened sparkle in his eyes and an outstretched
hand. "This—this then is the boy, is it?" he asked.
With a gesture of amazing swiftness Aunt Susan threw her arm about me,
and drew me close to her side, lamp and all. With her other hand she
lifted and almost brandished the cleaver.
"No, you don't!" she cried. "You don't touch him! He's mine! I've
worked for him day and night ever since I took him from his dying
mother's breast. I closed her eyes. I forgave her. Blood is thicker'n
water after all. She was my sister. Yes, I forgave poor Emmeline, and
I kissed her before she died. She gave the boy to me, and he's mine!
Mine, do you hear?—_mine?_"
"My dear Susan——" our visitor began.
"Don't 'dear Susan' me! I heard it once—once too often. Oh, never
again! You left me to run away with her. I don't speak of that. I
forgave that when I forgave her. But that was the least of it. You
left her to herself for months before she died. You've left the boy to
himself ever since. You can't begin now. I've worked my fingers to the
bone for him—you can't make me stop now."
"I went to California," he went on in a low voice, speaking with
difficulty. "We didn't get on together as smoothly as we might perhaps,
but I had no earthly notion of deserting her. I was ill myself, lying
in yellow-fever quarantine off Key West, at the very time she died.
When I finally got back you and the child were both gone. I could not
trace you. I went to the war. I had made money in California. It is
trebled now. I rose to be Colonel—I have a Brigadier's brevet in my
pocket now. Yet I give you my word I never have desired anything so
much, all the time, as to find you again—you and the boy."
My Aunt nodded her head comprehendingly. I felt from the tremor of
her hand that she was forcing herself against her own desires to be
disagreeable.
"Yes, that war," was what she said. "I know about that war! The honest
men that go get killed. But you—_you_ come back!"
The man frowned wearily, and gave a little groan of discouragement.
"Then this is final, is it? You don't wish to speak with me; you
really desire to keep the boy—you are set against my ever seeing
him—touching him. Why, then, of course—of course—excuse my——"
And then for the first time I saw a human being tumble in a dead swoon.
My little brain, dazed and bewildered by the strange new things I was
hearing, lagged behind my eyes in following the sudden pallor on the
man's face—lagged behind my ears in noting the tell-tale quaver and
gasp in his voice. Before I comprehended what was toward—lo! there was
no man standing in front of me at all.
Like a flash Aunt Susan snatched the lamp from my grasp and flung
herself upon her knees beside the limp and huddled figure. After a
momentary inspection of the white, bearded face, she set the lamp down
on the frozen earth floor and took his head upon her lap.
"Take the lamp, run to the buttery, and bring the bottle of hartshorn!"
she commanded me, hurriedly. "Or, no—wait—open the door—that's
it—walk ahead with the light!"
The strong woman stood upright as she spoke, her shoulders braced
against the burden she bore in her arms. Unaided, with slow steps, she
carried the senseless form of the soldier into the living room, and
held it without rest of any sort, the while I, under her direction,
wildly tore off quilts, blankets, sheets, and feather-tick from my bed
and heaped them up on the floor beside the stove. Then, when I had
spread them to her liking, she bent and gently laid him down.
"_Now_ get the hartshorn," she said. I heard her putting more wood on
the fire, but when I returned with the phial she sat once again with
the stranger's head upon her knee. She was softly stroking the fine,
waving brown hair upon his brow, but her eyes were lifted, looking
dreamily at far-away things. I could have sworn to the beginnings of a
smile about her parted lips. It was not like my Aunt Susan at all.
"Come here, Ira," I heard her say at last, after a long time had been
spent in silence. I walked over and stood at her shoulder, looking
down upon the pale face upturned against the black of her worn dress.
The blue veins just discernible in temples and closed eyelids, the
delicately turned features, the way his brown beard curled, the fact
that his breathing was gently regular once more—these are what I saw.
But my Aunt seemed to demand that I should see more.
"Well?" she asked, in a tone mellowed beyond all recognition. "Don't
you—don't you see who it is?"
I suppose I really must have had an idea by this time. But I remember
that I shook my head.
My Aunt positively did smile this time. "The Perkins girls were wrong,"
she said; "there isn't the least smitch of a 'wise child' about _you_!"
There was another pause. Emboldened by consciousness of a change in
the emotional atmosphere, I was moved to lay my hand upon my Aunt's
shoulder. The action did not seem to displease her, and we remained
thus for some minutes, watching together this strange addition to our
family party.
Finally she told me to get on my cap, comforter, and mittens, and run
over to Dr. Peabody's and fetch him back with me. The purport of my
mission oppressed me.
"Is he going to die then?" I asked.
Aunt Susan laughed outright. "You little goose," she said; "do you
think the doctors kill people _every_ time?"
And, laughing again, with a trembling softness in her voice and tears
upon her black eyelashes, she lifted her face to mine—and kissed me!
* * * * *
No fatality dogged good old Doctor Peabody's big footsteps through
the snow that night. I fell asleep while he was still at my Aunt's
house, but not before the stranger had recovered consciousness, and was
sitting up in the large rocking-chair, and it was clearly understood
that he was soon to be well again.
The kindly, garrulous doctor did more than reassure our little
household. He must have spent most of the night going about reassuring
the other households of Juno Mills. At all events, when I first
went out next morning—while our neighbors were still eating
their buckwheat cakes and pork fat by lamplight—everybody seemed
to know that my father, the distinguished Colonel Blodgett, had
returned from the war on sick leave, and was lying ill at the house
of his sister-in-law. I felt at once the altered attitude of the
village toward me. Important citizens who had never spoken to me
before—dignified and portly men in blue cutaway coats with brass
buttons, and high stiff hats of shaggy white silk—stopped now to
lay their hands on the top of my head and ask me how my father, the
Colonel, was getting along. The grocer's hired man gave me a Jackson
ball and two molasses cookies the very first time I saw him. Even the
Perkins girls, during the course of the afternoon, strolled over to
our front gate, and, instead of hurling enigmatic objurgations at me,
invited me to come out and play. The butcher of his own accord came and
finished cutting up the pig.
These changes came back to me as one part of the great metamorphosis
which the night's events had wrought. Another part was the definite
disappearance of the stern-faced, tirelessly toiling old maid I had
known all my life as Aunt Susan. In her place there was now a much
younger woman, with pleasant lines about her pretty mouth, and eyes
that twinkled when they looked at me, and who paid no attention to the
loom whatever, but bustled cheerily about the house instead, thinking
only of good things for us to eat.
I remember that I marked my sense of the difference by abandoning the
old name of Aunt Susan, and calling her now just "Auntie." And one day,
in the mid-spring, after she and her convalescent patient had returned
from their first drive together into the country round about, she told
me, as she took off her new bonnet in an absent-minded way, and looked
meditatively at the old disused loom, and then bent down to brush my
forehead with her warm lips—she told me that henceforth I was to call
her Mother.