felt awful bad about her husband, but her mourning was somehow kind of
separate from her grieving. Her grieving was done with her feelings, but
her mourning was done more physical, like a diet. After the first year
there was certain things she would and wouldn’t do, count of mourning,
and nothing could change them.
Weddings and funerals Mis’ Fire Chief Merriman stayed true to. She would
go to either. “Getting connect’ or getting buried,” she said, “them are
both religious occasions, and they’s somethin’ so sad about either of
’em that they kind of fit in with weeds.”
But she wouldn’t go to a party if there was more than three or four to
it, and not then if one of ’em was a stranger to her. And she wouldn’t
go to it unless it was to a house--picnics, where you sat around on the
ground, she said, was too informal for them in mourning. Church meetings
she went to, but not club meetings, except the Cemetery Improvement
Sodality ones. It was like keeping track of etiquette to know what to do
with Mis’ Fire Chief Merriman.
“Seems though Aunt Hettie is more married now than she was when Uncle
Eben was living,” her niece use’ to say.
It was on the little niece, Harriet Wells,--named for Mis’ Chief and
come to live with her a while before the Fire Chief died,--it was on her
that Mis’ Merriman’s mourning etiquette fell the heaviest. Harriet was
twenty and woman-pretty and beau-interested; and Amos More, that worked
in Eppleby’s feed store and didn’t hev no folks, he’d been shining round
the Merriman house some, and Harriet had been shining back, modest and
low-wicked, but lit. He was spending mebbe a couple of evenings a week
there and taking Harriet to sociables and entertainments some. But when
the Fire Chief died Mis’ Merriman set her foot down on Amos.
“I couldn’t stand it,” she says, “to hev a man comin’ here that wasn’t
the Chief. I couldn’t stand it to hev sparkin’ an’ courtin’ goin’ on all
around me. An’ if I should hev to hev a weddin’ got ready for in this
house--the dressmakin’ an’ like that--I believe I should scream.”
So Amos he give up going there and just went flocking around by himself,
and Harriet, she give all her time to her aunt, looking like a little
lonesome candle that nothing answered back to. And Mis’ Merriman’s
mourning flourished like a green bay tree.
It was into this state of affairs, more than a year after the Chief
died, that Mis’ Merriman’s cousin’s letter come. Mis’ Merriman’s cousin
had always been one of them myth folks that every town has--the
relations and friends of each other that is talked about and known about
and heard from and even asked after, but that none of us ever sees. This
cousin, Maria Carpenter, was one of our most intimate myths. Next to the
Fire Chief himself, Mis’ Merriman give the most of her time in
conversation to her. She was real dressy--she used to send Mis’
Merriman samples of her clothes and their trimmings, and we all felt
real well acquainted and interested; and she was rich and busy and from
the city, and the kind of a relation it done Mis’ Merriman good to have
connected with her, and her photograph with a real lace collar was on
the parlor mantel. She had never been to Friendship Village, and we used
to wonder why not.
And then she got the word that her cousin was actually flesh-an’-blood
coming. I run in to Mis’ Merriman’s on my way home from town just after
Harriet had brought her up the letter, and Mis’ Merriman was all of a
heap in the big chair.
“Calliope,” she says, “the blow is down! Maria Carpenter is a-comin’
Tuesday to stay till Friday.”
“Well,” I says, “ain’t you glad, Mis’ Fire Chief? Company ain’t no great
chore now the telephone is in,” I says to calm her.
She looked up at me, sad, over her glasses.
“What good is it to have her come?” she says. “I can’t show her off.
There won’t be a livin’ place I can take her to. Nobody’ll see her nor
none of her clothes.”
“It’s too bad,” I says absent, “it didn’t happen so’s you could give a
company for Miss Carpenter.”
Mis’ Fire Chief burst out like her feelings overflowed themselves.
“It’s what I’ve always planned,” she says. “Many a night I’ve laid awake
an’ thought about the company I’d give when Maria come. An’ Maria never
could come. An’ now here is Maria all but upon me, an’ the company can’t
be. I know she’ll bring a dress, expectin’ it. She knows it’s past the
first year, an’ she’ll think I’ll feel free to entertain. I donno but I
ought to telegraph her: _Pleased to see you but don’t you expect a
company._ Wouldn’t that be more open an’ aboveboard? Oh, dear!” Mis’
Fire Chief says, rockin’ in her chair that wouldn’t rock, “I’m well an’
the house is all in order an’ I could afford a company if I didn’t go in
deep. But I couldn’t bear to be to it. That’s it, Calliope; I couldn’t
bear to be to it.”
I remember Mis’ Fire Chief kind of stopped then, like she thought of
something; but I wasn’t looking at her. I was watching Harriet Wells
that was standing by the window a little to one side. And I see her lift
her hand and give it a little wave and lay it on the glass like a signal
to somebody. And all of a sudden I knew it was half past ’leven and that
Amos More went home early to his dinner at the boarding house so’s to
get back at twelve-thirty, when Eppleby went for his, and that nine to
ten it was Amos that Harriet was waving at. I knew it special and sure
when Harriet turned back to the room with a nice little guilty look and
a pink spot up high on both her cheeks. And something sort o’ shut up in
my throat. It seems so easy for folks to get married in this world, and
here was these two not doing it.
All of a sudden Mis’ Fire Chief Merriman jumped up on to her feet.
“Calliope Marsh,” says she, “I’ve got a plan. I can do it, if you’ll
help me. Why can’t I give a company,” she says, “an’ not come in the
room? A hostess has to be in the kitchen most of the time anyway. Why
can’t I just stay there, an’ leave Maria be in the parlor, an’ me not be
to the company at all?”
We talked it over, and neither of us see why not. Mis’ Sykes, when she
gives her series of companies, three in three days running, she often
don’t set foot in the parlor till after the refreshments are served. I
remember once she was so faint she had to go back to the kitchen and eat
her own supper, and we didn’t say good-by to her at all, except as some
of us that knew her best went and stuck our heads out the kitchen door.
So with all us ladies--we done the same way when we entertained, so be
we give ’em any kind of a lay-out.
“I won’t say anything about the party bein’ for Maria, one way or the
other,” she says; “I won’t make a spread about it, nor much of an event.
I’ll just send out invites for a quiet time. Then when they come, you
can stay in the room with Maria at first an’ get her introduced. An’
after that the party can go ahead on its own legs, just as well without
me as with me. I could only fly in now an’ then anyhow, an’ talk to ’em
snatchy, with my mind on the supper. Why ain’t it just as good to stay
right out of it altogether?”
We see it reasonable. And a couple of days before Maria Carpenter was
expected, Mis’ Fire Chief, she went to work, Harriet helping her, and
she got her invitations out. They was on some black bordered paper and
envelopes that Mis’ Fire Chief had had for a mourning Christmas present
an’ had been saving. And they was worded real delicate, like Mis’ Fire
Chief done everything:
Mrs. Merriman, At Home, Thursday afternoon, Four o’clock Sharp,
Thimbles. Six o’clock Supper. Walk right in past the bell.
It made quite a little stir in Friendship Village, because Mis’ Merriman
hadn’t been anywheres yet. But everybody took it all right. And anyway,
everybody was too busy getting ready, to bother much over anything else.
It’s quite a problem to know what to wear to a winter company in
Friendship Village. Nobody entertains much of any in the winter--its a
chore to get the parlor cleaned and het, and it’s cold for ’em to lay
off their things, and you can’t think up much that’s tasty for
refreshments, being it’s too cold to give ’em ice cream. Mis’ Fire Chief
was giving the party on the afternoon of Miss Carpenter’s three o’clock
arrival, in the frank an’ public hope that somebody would dance around
during her stay and give her a return invite out to tea or somewheres.
The morning of the day that was the day, there come a rap to my door
while I was stirring up my breakfast, and there was Harriet Wells,
bare-headed and a shawl around her, and looking summer-sweet in her
little pink muslin dressing sacque that matched her cheeks and showed
off her blue eyes.
“Aunt Hettie wants to know,” she says, “whether you can’t come over now
so’s to get an early start. She’s afraid the train’ll get in before
we’re ready for it.”
“Land!” I says, “I know how she feels. The last company I give I got up
and swep’ by lamplight and had my cake all in the oven by 6 A.M. Come in
while I eat my breakfast and I’ll run right back with you and leave my
dishes setting. How’s your aunt standing it?” I ask’ her.
“Oh, pretty well, thank you,” says Hettie, “but she’s awful nervous. She
hasn’t et for two days--not since the invitations went out o’ the
house--an’ last night she dreamt about the Chief. That always upsets her
an’ makes her cross all next day.”
“If she wasn’t your aunt,” I says, “I’d say, ‘Deliver me from loving the
dead so strong that I’m ugly to the living.’ But she _is_ your aunt and
a good woman--so I’m mum as you please.”
Hettie, she sighs some. “She _is_ a good woman,” she says, wistful;
“but, oh, Mis’ Marsh, they’s some good women that it’s terrible hard to
live with,” she says--an’ then she choked up a little because she _had_
said it. But I, and all Friendship Village, knew it for the truth. And
we all wanted to be delivered from people that’s so crazy to be moral
and proper themselves, in life or in mourning, that they walk over
everybody else’s rights and stomp down everybody’s feelin’s. My eyes
filled up when I looked at that poor, lonesome little thing, sacrificed
like she was to Mis’ Fire Chief’s mourning spree.
“Hettie,” I says, “Amos More goes by here every morning about now on his
way to his work. When he goes by this morning, want to know what I’m
going to tell him?”
“Yes’m,” says Hettie, simple, blushing up like a pink lamp shade when
you’ve lit the lamp.
“I’m a-goin’ to tell him,” says I, “that I’m going to ask Eppleby
Holcomb to let him off for a couple of ours or so this morning, an’ a
couple more this afternoon. I want he should come over to Mis’ Fire
Chief’s an’ chop ice an help turn freezer.” (We was going to feed ’em
ice cream even if it was winter.) “I’m getting too old for such fancy
jobs myself, and you ain’t near strong enough, and Mis’ Chief, I know
how she’ll be. She won’t reco’nize her own name by nine o’clock.”
While I was finding out what cocoanut and raisins and such they’d got in
stock, along come Amos More, hands hanging loose like he’d lost his grip
on something. I called to him, and pretended not to notice Harriet’s
little look into the clock-door looking-glass, and when he come in I
’most forgot what I’d meant to say to him, it was so nice to see them
two together. I never see two more in love with every look of each
other’s.
“Why, Harriet!” says Amos, as if saying her name was his one way of
breathing.
“Good mornin’, Amos,” Harriet says, rose-pink and looking at the back of
her hand.
Amos just give me a little nice smile, and then he didn’t seem to know I
was in the room. He went straight up to her and caught a-hold of the
fringe of her shawl.
“Harriet,” he says, “how long have I got to go on livin’ on the sight of
you through that dinin’-room window? Yes, livin’. It’s the only time I’m
alive all day long--just when I see you there, signalin’ me--an’ when I
know you ain’t forgot. But I can’t go on this way--I can’t, I can’t.”
“What can I do--what can I do, Amos?” she says, faint.
“Do? Chuck everything for me--if you love me enough,” says Amos, neat as
a recipe.
“I owe Aunt Hettie too much,” says Hettie, firm; “I ain’t that kind--to
turn on her ungrateful.”
“I know it. I love you for that too,” says Amos, “I love you on account
of everything you do. And I tell you I can’t live like this much
longer.”
“Well said!” I broke in, brisk; “I can help you over this day anyhow.
You go on down-town, Amos, and get the stuff on this list I’ve made out,
and then you come on up to Mis’ Fire Chief’s. We need a man and we need
you. I’ll fix it with Eppleby.”
They wasn’t any need to explain to Mis’ Fire Chief. She was so excited
she didn’t know whether she was a-foot or a-horseback. When Amos got
back with the things I’d sent for she didn’t seem half to sense it was
him I was sending out in the woodshed to chop ice. She didn’t hev her
collar on nor her shoes buttoned, and she wasn’t no more use in that
kitchen than a dictionary.
“Oh, Calliope,” she says, in a sort of wail, “I’m so nervous!”
“You go and set down, Mis’ Fire Chief,” says I, “and button up your
shoes. I’ve got every move of the morning planned out,” says I, “so be
you don’t interrupt me.”
Of course it was her party and all, but they’s some hostesses you hev to
lay a firm holt of, if you’re the helper and expect the party to come
off at all. And I never see any living hostess more upset than was Mis’
Fire Chief. She give all the symptoms--not of a company, but of coming
down with something.
“Oh, Calliope,” says she, “everything’s against me. I donno,” she says,
“but it’s a sign from the Chief in his grave that I’m actin’ against his
wishes an’ opposite to what widows should. The wood is green--hear it
siss an’ sizzle in that stove an’ hold back its heat from me. The
cistern is dry--we’ve hed to pump water to the neighbors. Not a hen has
cackled this livelong mornin’ in the coop. The milkman couldn’t only
leave me three quarts instead of four, though ordered ahead. An’ I feel
like death--I feel like death,” says she, “part on account of the
Chief--ain’t it like he was speakin’ his disapprovin’ in all these
little minor ways?--an’ part because I know I’m comin’ down with a hard
cold an’ I’d ought to be in bed all lard an’ pepper this livin’ minute.
Oh, dear me! An’ Maria all but upon me. I don’t know how I’ll ever get
through this day.”
“Mis’ Fire Chief,” says I, “you go and lay down and try to get some
rest.”
“No, Calliope,” says she, “the beds is all ready for the company to lay
their hats off, an’ the lounge pillows has been beat light on the line.”
“Well,” says I, “go off an’ take a walk.”
“Not without I walk to the cemetery,” says she, “an’ that I couldn’t
bear. Not to-day.”
“Well,” says I, “then you let me put a wet cloth over your head and
eyes, and you set still and stop talkin’. You’ll be wore to a thread,”
says I.
And that was what I done to her, expecting that if she didn’t keep still
I’d bake the ice cream and freeze the cake and lose my own head entire.
Out in the shed I’d set Amos to cracking ice, and Harriet to cracking
nuts, with a flatiron and a hammer. And pretty soon I stepped along to
see how things was going. Land, land, it was a pretty sight! They was
both working away, but Amos was looking down at her more’n to his work,
and Harriet was looking up at him like he was all of it--and the whole
air was pleasant with something sweeter than could be named. So I left
them two alone, well knowing that I could manage a company sole by
myself yet a while, no matter how much courting and mourning was going
on all around me.
And everything went fine, in spite of Mis’ Fire Chief’s looking like
death in the rocker, with a wet rag on her brow.
But she kept lifting up one corner and giving directions.
“No pink frostin’, Calliope, you know,” she says, “only white. An’ no
colored flowers--only white ones. You’ll have to write the place
cards--my hand shakes so I don’t dare trust myself. But I’ll cut up the
ribbin for the sandwiches--I can do that much,” says she.
The place cards was mourning ones, with broad black edges, and the
ribbin to tie up the sandwiches was black too. And the centerpiece was
one Mis’ Fire Chief and Hettie hed been up early that morning making--it
was a set piece from the Chief’s funeral, a big goblet, turned bottom
side up, done in white geraniums with “He is Near” in purple
everlastings. The table was going to look real tasty, Mis’ Fire Chief
thought, all in black and white so--with little sprays of willow laid
around on the cloth instead of ferns.
“I’ve done the best I could,” she said, solemn, “to make the occasion do
honor to Maria an’ pay reverence to the Chief.”
I had just finally persuaded her to go up-stairs and look the chambers
over and then try to take a little rest somewheres around, when Amos
come to the shed door to tell me the freezer wouldn’t turn no more, and
was it broke or was the cream froze. And Mis’ Fire Chief, seeing him
coming in the shed way, seemed to sense for the first time that he was
there.
“Amos More,” says she, “what you doin’ here?”
“I ask’ him,” says I, hasty; “I had to have his help about the ice.”
She covered her eyes with one hand. “Courtin’ an’ entertainin’ goin’ on
in the Chief’s house,” she said, “an’ him only just gone from us!”
“Well,” s’I, “I’ve got to have _some_ man’s help out here this
afternoon--why not Amos’s?”
“Oh,” says Mis’ Merriman, “you’re all against me but the Chief, an’ him
helpless.”
“The Chief,” says I, “was always careful of your health. You’ll make
yourself sick taking on so, Mis’ Fire Chief,” I told her. “You go and
put flowers in the chambers and leave the rest to me. Put your mind,” I
told her, “on the surprise you’ve got for your guests that’s
comin’--Maria Carpenter here and all! Besides,” I couldn’t help sticking
in, “I donno as Amos is cold poison.”
So we got her off up-stairs.
Maria Carpenter’s train was due at 3:03, so she was just a-going to have
the right time to get ready when the afternoon would begin, because in
Friendship Village “sharp four” means four o’clock. I had left the
sandwiches to make last thing, and I come back from my dinner towards
three and tiptoes through the house so’s not to disturb Mis’ Fire Chief
if she was resting, and I went into the pantry and begun cutting and
spreading bread. I hadn’t been there but a little while before the stair
door into the kitchen opened and I heard Hettie come down, humming a
little. But before I could sing out to her, the woodshed door opened
too, and in come Amos that had been out putting more salt in the
freezer.
“Hettie!” he says in a low voice, and I see she prob’ly hed on her white
muslin and was looking like angels, and more. And--“I won’t,” says Amos,
then--“I won’t--though I can hardly keep my hands off from you--dear.”
“It don’t seem right even to have you call me ‘dear,’” says Hettie, sad.
Amos burst right out. “It is right--it is _right_!” says he. “They can’t
nobody make me feel ‘dear’ is wicked, not when it means as dear as you
are to me. Hettie,” Amos says, “sit down here a minute.”
“Not us. Not together,” says Hettie, nervous.
“Yes!” says Amos, commanding, “I don’t know when I’ll see you again. Set
down here, by me.”
And by the little stillness, I judged she done so. And I says this:
“Them poor things ain’t had ten minutes with each other in over a year,
and if they know I’m here, that’ll spoil this time. I’d better stay
where I am, still, with my thoughts on my sandwiches.” And that was what
I done. But I couldn’t--I _couldn’t_--and neither could most anyone--of
helped a word or two leaking through the pantry door _and_ the sandwich
thoughts.
“I just wanted to pretend--for a minute,” Amos said, “that this was our
house. An’ our kitchen. An’ that we was settin’ here side of the stove
an’ belonged.”
“Oh, Amos,” said Hettie, “it don’t seem right to pretend that way with
Aunt Hettie’s stove--an’ her feelin’ the way she does.”
“Yes, it is right,” says Amos, stout. “Hettie! Don’t you see? She
_don’t_ feel that way. She’s just nervous with grievin’, an’ it comes
out like that. She don’t care--really. At least not anything like the
way she thinks she does. Now don’t let’s think about her,
Hettie--dearest! Think about now. An’ let’s just pretend for a minute it
was then. You know--_then_!”
“Well,” says Hettie, unwilling,--and yet, oh, so willing,--“if it _was_
then, what would you be sayin’?”
“I’d be sayin’ what I say now,” says Amos, “an’ what I’ll say to the end
o’ time: that I love you so much that the world ain’t the world without
you. But I want to hear _you_ say somethin’. What would you be sayin’,
Hettie, if it was _then_?”
I knew how she dimpled up as she answered--Hettie’s dimples was like the
wind had dented a rose leaf.
“I’d prob’ly be sayin’,” says Hettie, “Amos, you ain’t filled the water
pail. An’ I’ll have to have another armful o’ kindlin’.”
“Well,” says Amos, “but then when I’d brought ’em. What would you say
then?”
“I’d say, ‘What do you want for dinner?’” said Hettie, demure. But even
this was too much for Amos.
“An’ then we’d cook it,” he says, almost reverent. “Oh, Hettie--don’t it
seem like heaven to think of us seein’ to all them little
things--together?”
I loved Hettie for her answer. Coquetting is all right some of the time;
but--some of the time--so is real true talk.
“Yes,” she says soft, “it does. But it seems like earth too--_an’ I’m
glad of it_.”
“Oh, Hettie,” says Amos, “marry me. Don’t let’s go on like this.”
“Dear,” says Hettie, all solemn,--and forgetting that “dear” was such a
wicked word,--“dear, I’d marry you this afternoon if it wasn’t for Aunt
Hettie’s feelin’s. But I can’t hurt her--I can’t,” she says.
Well, just then the door bell rung, and Hettie she flew to answer it,
and Amos he lit back to the woodshed and went to chopping more ice like
life lay all that way. And I was just coming out of the butt’ry with a
pan of thin sandwiches ready for the black ribbins, when I heard a kind
of groan and a scuffle, and down-stairs come Mis’ Fire Chief Merriman,
and all but fell into the kitchen. She had something in her hand.
“Calliope--Calliope Marsh,” says she, all wailing like a bereavement,
“Cousin Maria has fell an broke her wrist, an’ she ain’t comin’ _at
all_!”
I stood still, real staggered. I see what it meant to Mis’
Merriman--invites all out, Cousin Maria for surprise and hostess in one,
Mis’ Merriman not figgering on appearing at all, account of the Chief,
and the company right that minute on the way.
“What’ll I do--what’ll I _do_?” cries Mis’ Merriman, sinking down on the
bottom step in her best black with the crêpe cuffs. “Oh,” she says,
“it’s a judgment upon me. I’ll hev to turn my guests from my door. I’ll
be the laughing-stock,” says she, wild.
And just then, like the trump of judgment to her, we heard the front
door shut, and the first folks to come went marching up the stairs. And
at the same minute Amos come in from the shed with the dasher out of the
second freezer, and Hettie’s eyes run to him like he was their goal and
their home. And then I says:
“Mis’ Fire Chief. Leave your company come in. Serve ’em the food of your
house, just like you’ve got it ready. Stay back in the kitchen and don’t
go in the parlor and do it all just like you’d planned. And in place of
Maria Carpenter and the surprise you’d meant,” says I, “give ’em another
surprise. Leave Hettie and Amos be married in your parlor, like they
want to be and like all Friendship Village wants to see ’em. Couldn’t
nothing be sweeter.”
Mis’ Merriman stared up to me, and set and rocked.
“A weddin’,” she says, “a weddin’ in the parlor where the very last
gatherin’ was the funeral of the Chief? It’s sacrilege--sacrilege!” she
says, wild.
“Mis’ Merriman,” I says, simple, “what do you reckon this earth is
about? What,” says I, “is the purpose the Lord God Most High created it
for out of nothing? As near as I can make out,” I told her, “and I’ve
give the matter some study, He’s got a purpose hid way deep in His
heart, and way deep in the hearts of us all has got to be the same
purpose, or we might just as well, and a good sight better, be dead. And
a part of that purpose is to keep His world a-going, and that can’t be
done, as I see it, by looking back over our shoulders to the dead that’s
gone, however dear, and forgetting the living that’s all around us,
yearning and thirsting and passioning for their happiness. And a part of
His purpose is to put happiness into this world, so’s people can
brighten up and hearten out and do the work of the world like He meant
’em to. And you, Mis’ Merriman,” says I, plain, “are a-holding back from
both them purposes of God’s, and a-doing your best to set ’em to
naught.”
Mis’ Merriman, she looked up kind of dazed from where she was a-sitting.
“I ain’t never supposed I was livin’ counter to the Almighty,” she says,
some stiff.