I had come out of the city, where story-telling is a manufactured
science, to the country where story-telling is a by-product of life. Mr.
Siles had arrived to paint my piazza, as per a roundabout agreement
between my cook, my cook’s cousin, my cook’s cousin’s wife, who had been
a Miss Siles, and finally--Mr. Siles himself. If that sentence is
somewhat involved, so was my contract with Mr. Siles. In the country, a
semicircle is the shortest line between two points.
I came at the strange story of Wessel’s Andy in something of the same
circuitous manner. Mr. Siles, as I have said, had arrived to paint my
piazza; but after a long look at the heavens and the heaving sea, he
opined that it would be a wet day and that the painting had best be left
till to-morrow. I demurred. I was acquainted with the to-morrows of this
drowsy Maine village. But while we were arguing the point, a white ghost
began to roll in from the deep.
“Fog,” said Mr. Siles.
“Yes,” I admitted grudgingly.
He stared into the thickening mists with an expression that puzzled me.
I have seen the same look upon the face of a child compelled to face the
dark alone.
“I mistrust it,” said Mr. Siles, simply.
“Mistrust the fog?”
He nodded, his iron-gray beard quivering with the intensity of the
assent.
“Take it in a gale of wind,” he said, “that’s honest weather, though it
blows a man’s soul to Kingdom Come. But fog--”
“I suppose strange things do happen in it,” I replied. It was a chance
shot, but it struck home.
“Strange!” cried Mr. Siles. “You may well say strange! There was
somethin’ happened right here in this village--”
I settled myself comfortably against the naked piazza railing, and Mr.
Siles told me this story.
* * * * *
He was born a thousand miles from deep water. His folks were small
farmers in a middle western grain state, and he was due to inherit the
farm. But almost before he could talk they knew he was a queer one. They
knew he was no more farmer than he was college professor. He was a land
hater from the beginnin’. He hated the look and the feel and the smell
of it. He told me afterward that turnin’ a furrow with a plow set his
teeth on edge like when you scrape your finger nail along a piece of
silk. His name was Andy.
When he was about thirteen year’ old he found a picture of a ship in a
newspaper. It was like a glimpse of another world. He cut it out and
pasted it on the attic wall over his bed. He used to look at it a
hundred times a day. He used to get up in the middle of the night, and
light a match and look at it. Got so, Andy’s father came up early one
mornin’ with a can o’ whitewash and blotted the whole thing out against
the wall. The boy didn’t say a word until the ship was gone. Then he
laughed, a crazy sort o’ laugh.
“That’s the way they go,” he says, “right into the fog,” he says, “and
never come out again!”
He was sick after that. Some sort of a fever. I guess it made him a
little delirious. He told me he was afraid they were goin’ to blot him
out, same as the picture. Used to dream he was smotherin’ to death, and
pleasant things like that. Queer, too....
When the fever finally burned out of him, he was nothin’ but skin and
bones. His people saw he was too sickly to work, so they let him mope
around by himself. He used to spend most of his time in the woodshed,
whittlin’ pine models o’ that whitewashed schooner. He was known all
through those parts as Wessel’s Andy, Wessel bein’ his fam’ly name. See
for yourself what Wessel’s Andy meant. It didn’t mean Andrew Wessel, by
the grace o’ God free, white and twenty-one. It meant “that
good-for-nothin’, brain-cracked boy over to Wessel’s.” That’s what it
amounted to in plain words.
But the strange thing about that name was how it followed him. It came
east a thousand miles, and there wasn’t a town but it crawled into, on
its belly, like a snake into long grass. And it poisoned each place for
him, so that he kept movin’ on, movin’ on, always toward deep water. It
used to puzzle him how strangers knew to call his name hindside
foremost. ’T wan’t any puzzle to me. He hadn’t been in my place two
minutes askin’ for a job, but I say “What’s your name?” And he says,
starin’ hard at the model of the _Lucky Star_ schooner that hung over my
counter, “I’m Wessel’s Andy,” he says, never takin’ his eyes off the
schooner. Likely he’d done the same absent-minded trick all along the
road, though not for just that reason.
I rec’llect the evenin’ he came into my place. I was keepin’ a ship’s
supply store in those days--fittin’s and supplies, down by the Old
Wharf. He shuffled in toward sundown, his belongin’s done up in a
handkerchief, his clothes covered half an inch thick with dust.
“I want a job,” says he.
“What kind of a job?” says I.
“Oh, anything,” says he.
“All right,” I told him, “you can start in here to-morrow. I been
lookin’ for somebody to help around the store.” Then I asked him his
name and he answered “Wessel’s Andy.” Some of the boys was standin’
’round and heard him say it. He was never called anything but Wessel’s
Andy from that time on.
Quietest young fellow ever I saw--plenty willin’ to work, but not very
strong. I paid him four dollars a week and let him bunk in with me at
the back o’ the store. He could have made more money some’ers else, but
he wouldn’t go. Naturally there were a good many seafarin’ men in and
out o’ the shop, and some evenin’s they used to sit around yarnin’ to
one another. Often I’ve seen Wessel’s Andy hunched up on a soap box
behind the counter, his eyes burnin’ and blinkin’ at the model of the
_Lucky Star_ on the opposite wall, his head bent to catch the boys’
stories. Seemed as if he couldn’t get enough o’ ships and the sea.
And yet he was afraid to go, himself. I found that out one night when we
were lockin’ up after the boys had gone.
“Have you ever felt yourself to be a coward, Mr. Siles?” he says, in one
of his queer fits o’ talkin’.
“Why as for that,” I says, “I guess I been pretty good and scared, a
time or two.”
“Oh, I don’t mean that,” he says. “I don’t mean scared. I mean
afraid--day and night, sleepin’ and wakin’.”
“No,” I says, “and nobody else with good sense would be. Ain’t nothin’
in this world to frighten a man steady like that, unless it’s his own
sin.”
Wessel’s Andy shook his head, smilin’ a little.
“Maybe not in this world,” says he, white and quiet, “but how
about--other worlds?”
“What you drivin’ at?” says I. “You mean ghosts?”
“Not ghosts,” he says, lowerin’ his voice and lookin’ out the side
window to where the surf was pawin’ the sand. “Just the feelin’ o’
ghosts.”
“Come to bed,” I says. “You’ve worked too hard to-day.”
“No. Please let me tell you. Please sit up awhile. This is one of the
times when I can talk.”
He grabbed my hand and pulled me down to a chair. His fingers were as
cold as ice. Then he dragged his soap box out from the counter and sat
opposite me, a few feet away.
“I’ll tell you how I know I’m a coward,” he says. And he told me
everything up to the time of his leavin’ home.
“You see,” he says, “I had to come. It was in me to come East. I’ve been
four years workin’ my way to open water, and I’ve had a hell of a time
... a hell of a time. But it was in me to come. There has been a ship
behind my eyes ever since I can remember. Wakin’ or sleepin’ I see that
ship. It’s a schooner, like the _Lucky Star_ there, with all her tops’ls
set and she’s disappearin’ in a fog. I know,” he says, lookin’ at me so
strange and sad it sent the shivers down my back, “I know I belong
aboard o’ that ship.”
“All right,” I says, as though I didn’t think anything of his queer
talk, “all right, then go aboard of her. You’ll find a hundred vessels
up and down the coast that look like the _Lucky Star_. Not to a
seafarin’ man, maybe. But you’re a farmer. You couldn’t tell one from
t’other. Take your pick o’ the lot,” I says, “and go aboard of her like
a man.”
But he just smiled at me, a sickly sort o’ smile.
“There’s only one,” he says, “there’s only one, Mr. Siles. When she
comes I’ll go aboard of her, but I--won’t--go--like--a--man!”
Then all at once he jumped up with a kind o’ moanin’ noise and stood
shakin’ like a leaf, starin’ out the window to the sea.
“There,” he says, kind o’ chokin’. “There, I saw it then! Oh, God, I saw
it then!”