2. Alwyn’s Knowledge of America and His Family

Years after, when all his grandparents were dead, Alwyn sat in a

watering place in the Austrian Alps, where there was a cluster of iron

tables around a café, where nineteenth-century waltzes were played and

the cakes were good.

A boy, on whose cheeks the round flush of illness darkened, was

insisting wearily in French: “You Americans lack the sense of sin. You

have discovered the fountain of youth; it has made you cruel....”

A great psychoanalyst who looked like an old Protestant minister

wavered along the path; and a middle-aged princess brought biscuits in

a paper bag.

Lifting two heavy rings in the air with his blue-white hand, a

hunchbacked critic could be heard saying, “The psychology of love

undergoes a complete revolution every twenty-five years. In America,

I am told, every fifteen years; but they have no fine arts, so their

passions are lacking in interest.”

The grave, well-modulated voices rose against the steady crying of a

river, somewhere below. Far below, a plain lay, patched with cottages

and tidy crops; far above, a number of soft mountains were brocaded by

ice; and over the valley walls seven cataracts fell, shivering on the

stone in mourning--seven vines the color of pewter.

Alwyn was glad to be in Austria; but because of the odor and the bells

of two or three cattle which were driven past, perhaps because of the

poor fat princess who, it seemed, regretted civilization, he began

to think of the early days of America, particularly the early days of

Wisconsin and his family. And the river beat in the small valley as

ardently and roughly as the heart of a Middle Western forest.

Wisconsin, his grandmother’s wilderness.... He remembered one of its

little hills; fancied that he sat, not in Gastein, but on one of its

hills, dreaming of its history. Slain trees, and timber wolves slinking

in search of young pigs, and weather-beaten children stationed in poor

crops to scare off the deer.... He tried to picture to himself his

ancestors: ignorant men with delicate bodies, hoping for wealth as a

reward for virtue; boys with chapped mouths hunting by the light of

lanterns; fearless girls becoming sickly mothers. A company of dead

or distant relatives, on a continent without much elegance, without

palaces, without rest.... There sprang up in his mind a great number of

stories and fragments of stories, in which they were gesticulating and

embracing and working.

Alwyn daydreaming in Austria, a little self-consciously a poet.... And

for a moment the well-bred voices, the philosophies, the orchestras,

were swept away. For a moment all Europe seemed less significant than

the vicissitudes of pioneers, men who were anonymous unless they were

somebody’s relatives. He did not quite like their suffering, their

illiterate mysticism, their air of failure; but he understood them, or

fancied that he did. It did not matter whether he liked them or not--he

was their son.

Among them, of their marriages and love affairs, there had also

been born a composite character, the soul of the race that was not

actually a race; something so vague that one recognized it only as

an atmosphere, a special brightness, or a peculiar quality of the

temperaments and customs and fortunes of Americans; as if it were the

god of the place--half invisible, and so large that one could see at

a given moment only the great arch of its foot, or the dim luxury of

its flesh, or the electricity of its eyes, or the jewels on its giant

hands and head. It had been born in the stables, the cabins, and the

schoolhouses where music, religion, and the three R’s had been taught

in turn. Who could describe the mask that was its face, or estimate its

strength, or define its character? Whatever it was, it was the hero of

the stories that he knew, the tales of his grandmothers. By comparison

with its dwelling-place, Europe seemed only the scene of a classic play

continually repeated; for a moment only.... But there was that moment

in every day of Alwyn’s life.

On another night he was dining with friends at La Turbie. Around the

hotel arid meadows ran down to the cliffs, meadows where sooner or

later the moonlight would come, gently cropping the stone like a flock

of sheep. They sat on a terrace, looking over the balustrade and the

cactus upon Monte Carlo--the casino, the harbor, the large rock covered

with palaces.

One friend said, “Madame R---- is ill.”

Another, “I hate myself for gossiping, but after all ...”

And the first: “The less said about it the better. But I think as you

do; the name of her illness is--hate. The young man ...”

One asked, “So she hates him now?”

And another answered, “Having loved him long enough.”

The little city below was anxious to please, sparkling on the seashore;

the electric light writhed as if it were foliage on fire. As a child

Alwyn had imagined that heaven would be like that; as an adolescent,

the whole of Europe; and it woke other recollections of childhood.

Ostensibly as a comment on Madame R----’s affairs, he began, “My

grandmother Tower ...” He talked of her soldier sweetheart as if it

were someone they all knew; how when he came back from the Civil War,

he did not want her; how she had married instead his elder brother who

was a widower; how she had said, “I don’t blame him.”

His friends listened quietly because they were old friends, familiar

with his passion for relatives who were dead, relatives who had been

very poor, off there in the States. But one asked, “How do you know all

this?”

Alwyn said, “She lived with us when I was a child. I watched them all

closely then, much too closely....”

As he remembered his childhood, it seemed that much of it had been

spent in the center of a carpeted floor; and all about in a circle of

rocking-chairs there had been women and men--grandparents, and their

friends, and old cousins, and great-aunts, and uncles; and behind each

one a life had extended into the past like a corridor--poorly lighted,

long corridors winding away in every direction, through reticence and

forgetfulness, to their youth; and in the ring of rocking-chairs, the

child for whose existence all the corridors had come together, had

shivered in the gusts of emotion which blew vaguely down them, and

tried to understand the strange syllables which echoed from one life to

another.

Alwyn’s friend looked at him sharply over the grapes and figs on the

table. “A good woman.... But I don’t understand how you found out her

secrets. You know them as well as if you had been her lover. But it all

took place before your father was born. She didn’t tell you that story

as you tell it, did she?”

“Not in so many words....”

“Of course you knew them all--your grandfather and grandmother,

your--great-uncle, wouldn’t he be? But they were old then, very

old, I should think; and old people don’t tell that sort of thing.

Don’t be cross,” he added. “You know that we prefer you even to your

grandmother. But what do you know about her and what have you invented?

Perhaps imperceptibly invented ...”

Someone else went on, “Tell us, tell us, please, exactly which elements

of that story you know to be unquestionably true?”

When Alwyn smiled and murmured, “But I don’t know,” they smiled and

spoke of other things.

But he was troubled by their questions. His knowledge of himself, of

his native land, began with stories like that. After all, were they

true? How true?

A child in a ring of rocking-chairs, shut in by secrets.... He had

wanted to understand as other children want to be understood. A phrase

of his grandmother’s, certain glances exchanged over a letter, funeral

sermons among greenhouse flowers, a caress which he had surprised, an

antipathy still evident though worn out by the passage of time--each

had had its peculiar spirit with an enigmatic face. They seemed to have

bent over him even in the cradle, like amorous women, veiled, strangely

bedecked, in old-fashioned dresses. Mysteries, some alive and some

dead; and the dead had clung as close as the living. One had taken his

wrist in its dry hand; one had slipped its arm without weight over his

shoulder; and another had placed on his forehead its long fingers like

a wreath.

He had been excited and frightened. No one else had seemed to notice

them; his parents had looked away, toward things that were actually

happening or going to happen. His grandmother, like an official

representative of the past, had told stories without motivity, without

a moral, and had replied to his timid questions literally, perhaps

timidly.

But he had ignored nothing and forgotten nothing. In so far as he

could he had learned the bare outline of everyone’s life. Then his

grandmother had said, for example, “Your great-aunt Mary Harris laughed

like that woman,” or, “Don’t let a little dirt drive you mad, the way

poor Nancy Tower did.” He had noted every word of sentences he was

not expected to understand, and added each detail, in his memory, to

its proper nucleus. Little by little he had uncovered the life of his

elders; little by little he had grown up....

His mother, to explain her differences with his grandmother, his

grandfather’s harsh temper, his father’s melancholy, had touched upon

secrets which, deliberately, she would not have betrayed to a child.

In New Mexico his uncle John Craig, who had lived away from the family

since he was a boy, who had been more or less an outsider then, had

told him things the others had forgotten or were ashamed of. Alwyn had

given dead people the faces of daguerreotypes and tintypes, old people

the young faces of fading photographs, or invented their appearance

according to vague indications of traits peculiar to this or that

branch of the family; and placed all their quarrels, infatuations, and

disappointments, in a setting of childhood’s exaggerated landscapes.

After he had left home, when most of his older relatives were dead,

certain things of which he had remained in ignorance had continued to

trouble him. For the personages in rocking-chairs, the questionable

spirits leaning over his cradle, had embodied not only the past, but

the future--his own wishes and fears; and he was not to be content

until an everyday light had unveiled all their faces. To bring an

end to his childhood, to drive its ignorance out of his heart, to

conduct or try to conduct his own life in its alarming motion, he had

been obliged to lead in imagination many lives already at an end. Now

and again the riddle of his own experience had resembled one of the

past’s riddles; his personal solutions had solved them as well. Spell

after spell had been lifted. He had been possessed by a family of

spirits--now at last they were exorcised; and in their place there was

this family of stories which he could not have remembered, but seemed

nevertheless to remember.

In his nineteenth year he had written a historical essay, based upon

what he had found out about his relatives: a summary of all these

unwritten biographies; as it were, a short biography of America. A

professor had praised it; his mother had said that she could not

understand it; he himself had been proud of his work. One night, in a

hotel on the French Riviera, he found these pages and reread them:

_At first there broke against European sea walls, the edge of a

uniform world of water; somewhere upon it America lay, a phantom

putting an end to its uniformity. Down to the seaports came

disappointed men--no one who was happy would have set sail for a

phantom. Some were hopelessly poor: they had dreamed of states in

which all the poor would be rich, and their revolutions had been

crushed. Some were sickly: they had invented moralities to curb the

appetites of others, who in turn had abolished their laws. Some

were bondsmen, sold for a time. Some were failures and the sons of

men who had failed: success being impossible on this earth, perhaps

it would be possible on a continent which a few years before had

not been on the earth. Some were criminals or adventurers, whose

regret wore masks of bravado. Some wanted to rule, whose fathers

had not been kings. Some received in hallucinations a knowledge of

pure ceremonies, by which they were not permitted to worship. All

were disappointed--minorities going out to form a majority against

the world._

_In dangerous boats which tottered up and down the water, when they

were not seasick, they sang. Some believed that America was like

a goblet lying in the ocean, and when one drank from it one would

become so happy that one would dare to remember one’s grief. Some

tried to believe that it was an earthly heaven or heavenly earth,

where saintliness which other men would worship would be easy,

where wealth would be apportioned according to saintliness. Those

who died were never disillusioned; and the waves among which they

were laid seemed to sing feebly with those who were left on the

boats._

_Not one ship sank; and they landed on a long coast of bushes and

stone, of stagnant water and sand. The redskins were dangerous

but pitiable, in their animal hiding places; and as the whites

proceeded to exterminate them they could never bear to think what

they were doing. Their own number was reduced by diseases; those

who did not die were strengthened by the thought of the early

Christians._

_They shot red squirrels flickering in the trees, and turkeys

(great, enameled birds); and planted the Indian corn. They gave

thanks when there was enough to eat, and repented of their

insignificant sins when there was not; in the beginning the crops

were always meagre. The evidently poor land kept its wealth

secret, like a young mother who thinks herself a virgin._

_It was the land which God had given them, and it was poor. So God

was poverty, but He was poverty which would become wealth. He was

a precept by which poverty would be changed into wealth; He was a

law. There were songs and talk about sin, but few transgressions.

Preachers of genius painted evil in such perfect colors that men

vomited and women fainted in the churches; they made the agony of

some seem sweeter than love. Dangerous witches appeared among them

and were condemned; and on the chest of a man accused of commerce

with spirits, heavy stones were laid one by one until he died._

_They went further west. Over the Northwest Territory mouth organs

quavered between embarrassed kisses, and cabinet organs quavered

between prayers. From the half-ashamed love-making sprang a great

population, and from the prayers muttered in new log cabins, the

certainty that the God of poverty had blessed this people with His

uplifted, enigmatic finger._

_They came to the Far West, and found valleys as large as kingdoms,

without kings; red mountains and others the color of pearls;

deserts below sea level in which no fire was visible, but the earth

was ashes; and extremes of temperature as in hell, and heavenly

climates. They wasted great forests and unearthed a plunder of oil,

coal, and metals._

_The whole continent came to resemble the childbed of a virgin;

amid cries of axes and moaning sawmills and finally a groan of

factories which rose overnight in fields of refuse (in smokelike

folds of stained linen) wealth was born. There was rejoicing as

extravagant as the singing of angels. In the celebration which took

place skyscrapers were built, so tall that they swayed continually,

so strong that they never fell. Pride wounded too many times turned

into energy. Whoever faltered closed his eyes and summoned up a

fierce idealism. Men, women, and children worked side by side,

making of delicate nerves a machine. In the noon of their holidays

guns were fired and great schemes invented._

_They did forget grief in the efforts they made to annihilate it,

and became the laughing race of the earth. Unhappiness was treason;

no tragic arts flourished. The slaves which had been shipped from

Africa and outcast Jews who took refuge among them brought tragic

songs--to which the Americans danced._

_Men grew rich in a day or overnight; they could always grow

richer; the future was illimitably generous. Nevertheless, millions

remained poor. Before their eyes lay the feast--they could not

eat; and though there were millions of them, each felt alone in

his poverty. They grieved, but stifled their grief, being ashamed

of it; for if they worked harder, if they had led purer lives, if

they still worked harder.... Those who did not give up hated life

secretly; those who did, despised themselves._

_The New World was troubled; even the rich were troubled; they did

not have an excuse for rest. They knew that God was poverty; was He

not then an endless struggle? He seemed to have vanished when the

struggle was over, leaving some lonely. Like a beggar, homeless as

they once had been, He haunted others, who did not know which to

be ashamed of--their wealth or God. He was also the precept which

turned poverty into wealth; the poor in their envy would not let

the rich neglect Him when He had served His purpose; and the rich

tried to force upon the poor virtue and the rewards of virtue,

for they were lonely in the midst of rewards. There was also a

puritanism which was genuine remorse for the sins of others. So a

series of sad persecutions took place._

_It became the land of extreme youth. Middle age was merely a

struggle; old age was a time when failure could not be disguised,

or a time of success which did not satisfy. Men envied young men,

and put them at their sides in positions of great responsibility,

so that from eyes which glittered with reflections of the future,

their eyes might catch fire for a moment. The whole country had

one symbol: a very young man, always at the beginning of a career,

always beside his mother. For she taught him to revere success and

taught him its maxims. He would never forget that when she had been

at his side, the mirage had seemed real and not far away; he would

never again be so happy as he had been, under her spell. So young

wives imitated the mothers of the men they loved. America became a

matriarchate._

_Meanwhile the colonists had moved and moved again, from east

to west, into every corner of the continent; and each migration

repeated, with a little less religion and a little more weariness,

the pilgrimage which had brought them there: disappointed men

going further, hoping still ..._

_At last there was no corner where wealth and joy might be thought

to dwell, no riverbed without a city, no empty valley, no more

coasts. At last those pilgrims who had failed to discover their

hearts’ desire had to look for it in heaven, as it had been in

Europe, as it has always been. Disillusioned but imaginative, these

went through the motions of hope, still pioneers. They will be

seen while America lasts, proud and poor (like pretenders to royal

blood, the site of whose throne has long been forgotten) among

mechanics, surgeons, singers with androgynous voices, reporters,

professional players of games, orators, gamblers in food,

hooded vigilants, gold diggers, salesmen of salves, film stars,

architects, trance mediums...._

It was too well, that is, too badly written, in the style (Alwyn

thought) of a public speech. He regretted its impiety, was ashamed of

its anxious, artificial elegance. But he had not changed his mind; it

was all true, true of America--he was sure that he could prove every

assertion by an account of somebody’s life.

But underneath his balcony a crowd of American sailors from a warship

in the harbor quarreled around a French girl who had fainted away.

Their presence reminded him how ambitious, indeed pretentious, his

essay was; how much its subject was a family affair. Once he had

believed that all Americans, because they were Americans, had embarked

upon the same adventure; now he realized, very humbly, that there were

many adventures. That of the sailors, for example, who were snarling at

one another and shaking hands.... Idly, he drew rows of hearts along

the margins of the typewritten pages, and read them again, half aloud,

because the careful sentences suited his voice. The noisy sailors were

quite as American as he, but he could hardly understand a word they

said. As for his essay, he felt a certain pleasure at having displayed

his intelligence, as having been intelligent at all when young; beyond

that, it did not satisfy him. An honest generalization of one family’s

intimate history, true, perhaps, of America as a whole.... And the

sailors made it ridiculous. Suddenly he felt that he had no native

land--he had a family instead.

_Disillusioned but imaginative, going through the motions of hope.

Pretenders to royal blood, the site of whose kingdom has long been

forgotten._ Perpetual pioneers--the Towers were men of that sort.

“Well, he’s a Tower,” his grandmother had often said, as if in

explanation of her husband’s behavior or that of one of her sons. What

had she meant? Alwyn decided to write a character sketch, enumerating

the traits of his relatives. Turning over the pretentious essay, he

took a fountain pen out of his pocket and wrote on the back of its

pages:

_A curl of dark or ash-blond hair on the forehead; a smile as

strained as a frown; obstinate blue eyes which seemed to see

visions, and mouths which doubted them. Proud men with fine

bodies, frequently ill. Slight men who had a talent for music

and an aptitude for every sort of culture, of which they were

suspicious as forms of weakness; men who were slightly ashamed

both of their gifts and their neglect of them. They did not love

cities, but loved the country as those who take refuge in it from

cities do. Thoughtful without shrewdness--not one had ever got on

in the world. Ill-advised by their imagination, they never forgave

themselves for the mistakes they made; and, in secret, employed

that same imagination to perfect their melancholy, as a saint

perfects his sanctity._

_They were sober, religious, and conscious of not being

appreciated. In the wars which were fought they never achieved the

rank which was due them; their painstaking bravery went unrewarded.

They believed in democracy, hoping that it would reinvest

with power those who deserved it. They marched at the head of

processions, but the processions always turned down a side street,

leaving them alone._

_Generation after generation of coarser men--their inferiors in

probity, in talent, in dignity--took the good things of this world

away from them. Immigrants who began life as their hired men, ended

as landowners and holders of mortgages on their land. The Towers

worked harder and harder, always beyond their strength; and the

harder they worked, the more their resentment grew._

_For somewhere in England, in the sixteenth or seventeenth century,

they had lived on the land as gentlemen. Two younger sons had been

obliged to come to America in search of fortune. They had failed

to find it; their descendants were still seeking, seeking among

fools and brutes. Superior men, cheated of their inheritance,

disguised as inferiors and unable to reveal themselves.... They

said little, but this conviction took possession of all their

minds: they were not born to be beasts of burden; they should

not have to work as these others worked; they were not menials,

but deserved a sweeter fate; life was unjust. This conviction

was inherited by every Tower, from father to son; and in that

inheritance younger son shared equally with elder. A grievance was

their birthright...._

Alwyn knew this grievance in himself in so far as he resembled

his father, his little old grandfather, Leander and Hilary his

great-uncles, his great-aunt Nancy. He was glad that he understood

them; it might save him, in a measure, from the family pride and

brooding, the family resentment and doubt.

Every five seconds the lighthouse in the harbor threw a flake of light

over his head on the ceiling of his room. Most of the sailors had made

peace and vanished into bars and improvised brothels along the quay.

One of them, at least forty years old, unmanageably drunk, was being

taken back to the ship by the guards; he lay down on the pavement and

sobbed: “I want my mother! I want my mother!”

Resting his elbows on the iron railing of his balcony, Alwyn fluttered

the pages of his work. Two records of his opinions, one about America

as a whole, one about his family--that is, the paternal branch

of his family: they were of little value. Staring into the dusky

Mediterranean, he thought of the Tower stories, the lives of his

mother’s parents, Ira and Ursula Duff, of pitiful, red-headed Flora,

his uncles, the minister and the deserter, his great-aunt Mary, the

adventuress, and all the others.

There in his hands, uselessly, were two statements of their

significance; but the best way to explain what they meant would be,

quite simply, to tell the stories themselves. Less impossible but more

difficult than what he had attempted.... Stories like a series of

question marks; questions which did not require an answer, questions

at peace. He was content with their ambiguities, so he knew that they

were the end of understanding, or at any rate, the end of trying to

understand.

Trying to understand, for his own sake, shadowy men, women, and

children.... And as he thought of their lives, he was surprised by

regret (their regret) which weakened and then strengthened his will:

regret that the time for laughter and ease, even for him, seemed never

to come, while work never came to an end.

3. His Grandfather Tower’s Character. A Fragment of Autobiography. The

Rest of His Life

During his grandfather’s lifetime, the alpaca jacket which he put

on when he came in for supper swung from a hook on the door of the

chimney-cupboard room. It held the shape of his body and soul: the

sharp angle of the sleeves at the elbow meant irascible vitality; the

empty pockets, poverty and indifference; the imprint of the stooped

shoulders, fatigue; and the contradictory flare of the collar at the

back, pride.

He died when his grandson was twelve years old; so that Alwyn as a man

could recall only the mysteriously impressive pictures which a child

remembers. The clearest had a background of roses, his grandmother’s

cinnamon-rose bushes. Large bees staggered up and down in the scent

of the old, bright thicket whose blossoms were all imperfect, hanging

in great numbers on the tough stems, as if they had fallen there by

chance. The bent old man came down the path from the woodshed with a

look of great exasperation fixed on nothing in particular. His beard

was parted in the middle, and fell on each side of a large bone button

in his shirt collar; his rheumatic hands were clenched; and wherever he

went, he seemed to be elbowing aside invisible people in his way.

There was little of importance left for him to do. He got up at

daybreak to feed the hens which fluttered uncalled at his heels,

flinging the grain behind him and taking no notice of them; so

that there were sudden cries amid the drumming of their bills, and

agitated flights away from his unsteady feet. His clear, wide-open

eyes were often indifferently unfocused, as if the eyes of his mind

were downcast. But he examined the sky at dawn with infinite care, to

prophesy the weather; for he knew the meaning of sun dogs in winter

(two pale blotches crouching on the horizon at the right and left hand

of the east) and understood the color of clouds, and the various kinds

of wind.

During the day he chopped kindling in the woodshed; cured the hams

in salt and brown sugar, and smoked them with hickory chips; killed

chickens for the table; and brought vegetables to both kitchens (his

wife’s and his daughter-in-law’s), husking and silking the sweet corn,

and breaking winter squashes with an ax. Above all, he worked in the

garden, digging, planting, hoeing, transplanting, and weeding even

patches of turnips, corn, parsley, and carrots, melons, peas, oyster

plant, beets, parsnips, and early and late cabbage.

He offered his grandson (then seven) one cent for every five cabbage

moths that he could catch. Some were pallid, some deep yellow; Alwyn

caught many of both colors with a butterfly net. But the old man said

that a boy of his age ought to know that only the females laid eggs

from which cabbage worms hatched, and harshly refused to pay for the

others. Alwyn could not forgive him.

The children were not allowed in the garden, unless their grandfather

sent them to throw clods at one or two old hens who continually found

holes in the fence. Sometimes Alwyn would ask timidly to go with him

to look at the melons. The old man, only a little taller than the boy,

stooped over the cantaloupe vines, and fingered the stems to see if

they had begun to pull away from the ripening fruit. He thumped the

watermelons, but was too deaf to hear the sound they made, like the

beat of a small drum under the earth; and finally took from his pocket

a horn-handled knife, cut a triangle in the rind, lifted it out, and

peered down into the flesh: if it was pink, the plug was replaced;

if it was blood-red, that melon was placed in a tub of water in the

cellar. Alwyn knew as well as his grandfather how to test melons, but

felt that something ambiguous was also being accomplished, that he was

in the presence of an old, powerful magician, engaged in ceremonies

among the vines.

Alwyn’s father often said, “Your grandfather was no good at farming,

but he is the best gardener in Wisconsin.”

The striped beauty of the garden, its geometrical outlay of faultless

plants on clean soil, suited his refined spirit better than large,

weather-beaten fields. It was dear to him also because it took the

place of the farm he had cleared in the wilderness, now beyond his

control; for he was no longer strong enough to work on the land, and

his son would no longer take orders from him. So he referred to the

secrets of the soil in this or that field with the arrogance of one

who does not expect to be listened to, and angrily made fun of Alwyn’s

father if a crop failed. Injurious things were said in anxious voices,

things hardly meant to be heard; and there were, from time to time,

bitter quarrels.

Once when Alwyn was nine he came round the corner of the house

suddenly. His aunt Flora and his grandfather were going to the village;

the horse and buggy stood by the porch. But the old man strode up

and down, trampling the wild violets which were planted there, and

muttering. Flora wrung her hands and absent-mindedly tore the veil

which hung from her hat. His father was there, sobbing--Alwyn had not

known that grown men ever wept. In the doorway his grandmother stood

with her arms folded, a look of resignation that was half scorn on her

face.

The trouble had something to do with the horse and buggy. Suddenly

the old man sat down on the porch and stared straight ahead with his

farsighted eyes. Alwyn’s father stammered then that he was tired

of being bullied, and the girl defended him and reproached their

father--both speaking loudly because he was deaf. They were telling him

that his life was over and he must not interfere any more--things were

hard enough for them without that.

Then the grandmother saw the child, and said: “Run behind the house,

Alwyn! Run behind the house!”

Stumbling with tragic excitement, he obeyed.

That evening he saw that they had all grown gentle, as if it were the

responsibility of each to make the other forget what had happened; and

his father and grandfather sat quietly side by side on the porch.

During the last six or seven years of the old man’s life he was never

in good health. As a small child Alwyn thought this resulted from

chewing tobacco, a habit condemned in the family. Even his grandfather

himself had said, “Look here, boy. Don’t ever take tobacco. I learned

when I was a boy--those were bad times.” Meanwhile he had put as much

as he could hold between finger and thumb into his mouth, as if to

demonstrate the fatal power of the old days.

Alwyn’s grandmother gave this explanation of his illness: “Your grandpa

has never been a well man since he went to the war. It spoiled his

stomach.”

He feared and despised doctors, and read all the patent-medicine

advertisements in the newspapers, believing for a moment each

flowery promise of an end of pain. He received many pamphlets by

mail--testimonies of miraculous healing, illustrated by photographs

of ugly men and women who had been sufferers--and wrote for salves,

powders, and tonics. His wife sighed and shook her head whenever an

agent drove into the yard with a valise full of samples; but the

old man invariably described his symptoms, the ambitious salesman

invariably expressed his sympathy, gave advice, and received a large

order. Every druggist in the neighboring towns also prepared for him

personal recipes.

All these medicines accumulated in the tall kitchen cabinet: vials and

pill boxes and squat bottles, bearing the formidable names of diseases

in lists like incantations, decorated with portraits of heretic

doctors, Mothers this and that in lace bonnets, and benign priests.

He tried them all, and they failed. At last he found relief only in

Duffy’s whisky, which he drank from a teaspoon because he was a total

abstainer. He was able to eat less and less, and sat by himself after

each meal--his fingers interlaced, on his mouth the shape of a cry for

pity that was never heard.

Though in the midst of his family, gardening faithfully in rain or

shine, his isolation grew more extreme than that of any sick room. The

children feared him, or feared his pain. In the woodshed he gnashed his

teeth because the cats got underfoot; if the price of grain or pork

fell, or La Follette made a speech, he gnashed his teeth as he read his

newspaper. His grandchildren learned that they might be the objects of

the same irritation. Furthermore, he was deaf; they did not know how

to pitch their voices so he could understand, and were not tall enough

to speak in his ear, though he was a small man. So they never asked

questions, and he scarcely ever told them stories.

There was one, however, which he told on various occasions, and Alwyn

could not understand why he remembered it or what it meant: “Early one

morning, when I was a young fellow and going to the barnyard to milk,

I saw a man leaving the strawstack and running down the road. After a

time I saw him coming back again. The day was foggy--you couldn’t tell

about a man more’n six rods away. He turned round and got out of sight.

I wondered what was wanted, so I watched through the horse-stable

window. Pretty soon, there he was, stopping once in a while and going

toward the stack. I ran out and shouted, ‘Look here, stranger! What in

creation are you after?’ He was as white as a sheet and shook from head

to foot. ‘Excuse me, partner,’ said he. ‘I slept in your stack. I left

a pair of shoes there.’ ‘My stars, man! Go and get them!’ I told him.

‘I don’t want any man’s shoes but my own.’”

He told this mysterious anecdote and one or two others like it, with

an air of great satisfaction. But of his more important experiences,

never a word.... Indifferent to the future, set aside in the present,

he must have been brooding all the time on his plans which had failed

to materialize, his dreams which had given him no rest. But he said

nothing, being too ill to idealize and too proud to regret anything.

His wife had kept a few relics of this youth which he seemed to be

concealing. Hating war, he had burned his uniform and thrown away the

badges; but there was a dog’s-eared Testament which he had carried in

his breast pocket; a screw-topped inkwell of dark wood into which he

had dipped his pen (all the letters were lost); a splinter of a tree

under which two generals had signed a truce, the soldiers in a frenzy

having cut down and divided it; a silver ring shaped like a wedding

ring which had belonged to his sixteen-year-old brother Hilary, who

had been taken by the Rebels and had never been heard of. He made no

comments upon them; his wife explained what they were; and when she

taught the children Civil War songs, he went out of the house.

He had been a musician in the war. There were a pair of drumsticks,

blackened where sweating hands had held them, and a trumpet without a

mouthpiece. There were the fife and the flutes; the fife like an ebony

wand, the flutes wrapped in red flannel, their German-silver keys

interlaced around the one of cocoa-wood and the other of a wood called

grenadilla.

Sometimes the old man took out the fife, paying no attention to the

fascinated children who gathered about. One shoe tapping a nervous beat

on the floor, he played the hysterical tunes of the ’sixties. There was

something unearthly in the melody made by his hard lips, pressed on the

little black rod as if in a kiss; and the children shrank, ravished by

a kind of fright. Alwyn dreamed of the Civil War--a war of little old

men, deaf and sad, tapping their feet on the hot rock in the South, a

war of piercing music off the key.

He seemed scarcely human to his grandson--an old ghost of another

epoch, a ghost which, even in its youth, could not have been very

young. All that Alwyn ever knew of this inconceivable boyhood and young

manhood was based upon the vague accounts of others, except what his

grandfather himself wrote about it the year before his death.

Everyone was surprised by his consent to write the history of his

life; his children spoke of the important contribution he could make

to pioneer history, hoping, perhaps, that, in a sentence here and a

paragraph there, he would break his long silence about himself, as it

were by accident. He was to be seen at the double secretary, covering

sheets of foolscap with his crabbed script, muttering complaints of

the stiffness of his fingers....

_January 23d, 1911._

Being urgently requested by the members of my family to write a

brief history of my life, together with some incidents connected

with the early settlement of this part of Wisconsin, I have very

reluctantly consented to do so.

I was born in the State of New York, Onondaga County, town of

Lafayette, village of Cardiff, February 15th, 1830. My father’s

family consisted of five sons and one daughter, all of whom

excepting two have passed to the Silent Land. In the vicinity where

we lived, a gentleman by the name of Farrar, owned and operated an

ax manufactory, but the stream on which his plant was located was

too small to furnish sufficient power to meet the demand, so he

conceived the idea of going West in pursuit of a location suitable

for his business. Arriving at Milwaukee and securing the services

of (what was then called) a Land Looker, they continued their march

Northward when unawares they came to the banks of Stony Creek in

Washington County. This, said Mr. Farrar, is the identical place I

have been looking for.

Upon his return home language failed him to fully describe

the beauty of the new country and the bright prospects of its

development in the near future. At that early period the West was

beckoning to the overcrowded East to come and help to organize what

has proven to be one of the grandest and best States of the Union.

Such was the force of his argument and persuasion, that my Father

concluded to accompany him and seek a home in the far-away West.

They both soon disposed of their belongings and on the 8th day of

September, 1846, they secured passage in the city of Syracuse on

a canal boat for Buffalo. The voyage lasted one week. Arriving

in Buffalo, we found the “Propeller Princeton” about ready to

leave her Dock for Milwaukee and as soon as our goods could be

transferred we commenced our long and tedious journey around the

great chain of lakes, toward the setting sun. On entering Lake

Michigan through the Straits Mackinaw, a terrible storm awaited us,

the wind and waves carrying away the smokestacks of the vessel and

making it necessary to chain the cabins to keep them from being

blown overboard. After being tossed to and fro for a whole week

we were finally put on Terra Firma in the city of Milwaukee. The

entire voyage occupying two weeks, which is now being made in less

than twenty-four hours. We soon found that our lot was cast in a

strange land and among strangers.

Fortunately, Mr. Farrar had a brother-in-law by the name of Wilcox

living about three miles up the lake and one of the very early

settlers of Wisconsin. To his home we wended our way, as it seemed

to be necessary to provide a place for the families to live while

the men were absent building their houses on their land. In the

meantime Father had bought a yoke of oxen and wagon and proceeded

to lay in a store of provisions, consisting of one barrel of salt

pork, one barrel of flour, half bushel of beans, five bushels of

potatoes, tea, coffee, sugar, etc., and a stove. Thus equipped, one

bright Thursday morning in the first part of the month of October,

we started on our journey to Washington County. Late Friday evening

found us at what was called the Aaron settlement and three miles

from our destination. At daylight Saturday morning we started for

our new home in the forest, consuming the entire day in making

the three miles. There were logs to be chopped and drawn out of

the way, swamps and marshes to be avoided, trees to be marked in

order to find the road again. Arriving at our destination, Father

returned to the Aaron home to spend the night, leaving us boys in

the woods to guard the team and provisions. We went to a little

marsh near by and cut each an armful of marsh grass which we

spread under the wagon, on which we placed a blanket, making a bed

fit for royalty to occupy. After retiring to our novel sleeping

room, we were soon lulled to sleep by the mournful voice of the

hoot owl and the sweet, silvery song of the whippoorwill.

On Monday morning Father returned and we began cutting logs of

small size, to build a cabin, in which to live during the time

occupied in building the log house. In two days a shelter 10 × 12

ft. was erected. We brought moss from a little spruce swamp near by

and stuffed it in the crevices, which answered admirably in keeping

out the wind and storm. For a door we hung up a blanket.

I was unanimously chosen cook, while our bill of fare consisted

of pork, potatoes, bread, beans, and an occasional extra of wild

game with which the forest abounded. The streams and lakes were

also swarming with fish of the finest quality. I may say however

that my education in the culinary art as well as in many others had

been sadly neglected. But my observation of my mother’s kitchen had

impressed me, that it required no sleight of hand to boil potatoes,

fry meat, and bake beans. When it came to the bakery division that

was another problem and one over which I stumbled and was obliged

to take our flour to a neighbor’s three miles away and persuade the

lady of the house to do our baking, twice each week. I went for the

bread, carrying it on my back in a flour sack.

We were three days in raising the building, the neighbors being so

widely separated, coming a distance from four to six miles. I may

add without boasting, that I did the cooking for the crowd those

three days, and the compliments I received, added not a little to

the opinion I held of myself as an A No. 1 cook.

I must refer briefly to the construction of the house. All the

sawed lumber in the building was in the two doors. That which was

necessary for floors, partitions and casings was split from poplar

and basswood logs, and hewed one side which was called puncheon.

The material of the roof was split from oak two or three feet long,

which were called Shakes. The crevices in the side of the building

were filled with clay. After making a fireplace in one end of the

house we declared it perfect, and ready for occupancy.

Having completed our labors, we were ready to go to Milwaukee and

bring the family to their new home. On Saturday morning, Father and

I started on our long, tedious march of forty-five miles on foot

and long before the rays of the morning sun began to dance among

the tree tops of the forest, we were well on our way. We made no

halt on our entire journey. Sundown found us a long way from our

destination. The night was dark as ebony; neither moon nor stars

came to our relief, and often we were obliged to feel for the wagon

tracks with our hands, for fear of straying off into the bush,

but constant plodding finally brought us to our temporary home.

The clock struck twelve at midnight, as we opened the door of the

dwelling, fatigued and mud-covered, from head to foot.

The next day (Monday) Father went to the city and engaged two

teams, one horse team with spring wagon, the other an oxen team

and lumber wagon. The former to take the family, the latter the

household goods. My younger brother and I were left to accompany

the man with the ox team and the goods. The roads were in a most

horrible condition and the next thing to bottomless. Night found us

in the vicinity of Germantown. We halted and engaged lodging with a

good-souled German who was the proprietor of what was then called a

Tavern. But what was our surprise, on going out the next morning,

to find our goods dumped on the ground in the yard and our teamster

(I suppose) well on his way back to Milwaukee. While my eyes are

not a fountain of tears, I must admit that they were a little moist

with anger and wrath at the man who had left us in such a plight.

But after a good hearty breakfast and the advice of our genial

host, we went on our way toward Stony Creek in hope but not much

rejoicing, and reached home that evening. The family was safely

sheltered, but the implements for housekeeping were still dumped on

the ground in Germantown. The following day Father started afoot to

find the goods and some one to bring them. On his way he met Mr.

Rix driving two yoke of Mulley oxen, hitched to a lumber wagon.

This was his opportunity. After some preliminaries he promised to

go and bring the goods, which he faithfully kept, occupying two

days’ time in making the trip.

We spent the winter in cutting down the trees near the house,

and farther away, with a view of getting the land in shape for

producing something on which to subsist. The spring and autumn

of 1847 witnessed a high tide of Emigration to this section of

Wisconsin. Families coming from Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York and

many from Europe, especially from Germany and Ireland.

Just at this time a serious question confronted the pioneer mothers

in this section of the township. They said how, when, and where are

we going to educate our children to prepare them for the duties

and responsibilities of life and good citizenship. There was but

one answer to their questions: _viz._, the school. A school we

must and will have. It is a well-known fact, when the women of a

neighborhood are united in carrying forward an enterprise of this

nature, they are terrible as an army with banners, and failure is

an unknown quantity. A meeting was called to which most of the

settlers responded. The question of securing a site and building a

schoolhouse was taken into consideration. It was decided to locate

the building as near the center of the settlement as might be. The

place was finally agreed upon, but unfortunately the land was owned

by a man in Milwaukee by the name of Wait, who had bought it from

the government the previous year for speculative purposes. The next

question was to get into communication with him. It being late in

the season, what was to be done must be done without delay and some

one must go to the city and confer with Mr. Wait personally.

No one volunteering, I was delegated to foot it to Milwaukee and

transact the necessary business, and to start the next day. Mother

put up a liberal lunch consisting of corn bread and honey, with a

good large piece of cold roast venison. As soon as I could see my

way I started on my long wearisome journey of forty-five miles.

I made no halt until I walked into the city, just as the sun was

hiding behind the western hills. I had no difficulty in finding

Mr. Wait, for Milwaukee at that early period did not resemble the

Milwaukee of the present day. I made known to Mr. Wait my errand

and he seemed highly pleased with the proposition, knowing that

improvements of that nature would help to increase the value of

his land. He most kindly invited me to take supper with him, and

I could not find it in my heart to refuse him, for I was short at

that particular time of hotel fare. After supper I informed him

that I would like him to execute the lease that evening. In a very

brief time I had the Document safely pinned in my pocket. Whether

the gentleman mistrusted the leanness of my wallet, or whether from

a true Christian spirit, he cordially invited me to remain with

him overnight. I accepted with thanks from down deep in my heart.

I also informed Mrs. Wait not to disturb herself by getting me an

early breakfast. After thanking them again for their kindness, I

was glad of an opportunity for resting my weary limbs.

The following morning, long before the sun’s rays sparkled on the

waters of Lake Michigan, I was a long distance from the city,

and in the dark forest. As daylight approached I noticed a little

clearing in the woods a short distance ahead of me. On approaching

nearer I saw a small log house and about an acre of cleared land.

About this time I began to feel unmistakable evidences that I had

not been to breakfast. No smoke was rising from the chimney of the

house and a poor prospect of getting anything to eat. On peering

into the garden, I discovered a fine patch of flat turnips. I

skipped over the fence, filled my pockets and hands, and went on my

way rejoicing and eating turnips. They tasted (to me) like Paradise

Apples. At noon I came to what was then called Manor’s Tavern, I

think in the vicinity of Richfield, knowing I had just the amount

of change, (_viz._, 12½ cents) to pay for my dinner. I stepped into

the hotel and ordered the dinner with just as much confidence in

myself and assurance as a guest of the Hotel Pfister or Plankington

in Milwaukee.

After satisfying my hunger, I resumed my journey, and a little

after dark I arrived at the end of my long walk.

The men of the district soon rallied and commenced cutting logs

for the building. In an incredibly short time the schoolhouse was

completed. Benches or seats were made from split logs and hewed

on one side, with legs fastened in. A huge fireplace adorned one

end of the room and a large box stove the other. The architecture

(in style) was the same as that which prevailed in the surrounding

country.

The first school was taught by Mr. Allan Frisby. He boarded at

our home. I did not attend school as my services were demanded in

the woods, cutting down the forest. Mr. Frisby was my own age and

withal an expert on the violin, while I made no little pretension

to being an adept with the flute. So we whiled away many a long

winter evening in front of the big fireplace, giving free concerts

and furnishing our own audience.

At this time, the inconveniences of a new country began to weigh

heavily upon us, the greatest of which was the lack of funds. We

were obliged to have supplies brought from Milwaukee with an ox

team. These consisted of corn meal, a scanty supply of wheat flour,

beans, a few groceries, etc. For our meat we depended entirely upon

the wild game of the forest, which also abounded with wild bees,

with abundance of honey. For coffee, we obtained a root which grew

in the bed of the creek called Evans Root which dried and scorched

in the oven made a very palatable drink. Sometimes Mother used to

run short of saleratus. She would burn a few corn cobs and use the

ashes instead. This was called Cob Ash, and answered a very good

purpose. In a word we lived the simple life, up to the utmost limit.

The year 1847 was one of great hardships and privation, having no

team or cows, consequently no milk or butter. During the winter we

had cleared the timber and brush from three or four acres of land.

We were told before leaving the East that all that was necessary to

raise a crop in Wisconsin was to chop a little hole in the ground

with an old ax, drop in the corn, place your foot on it, and go on

your way rejoicing. While this system might have been all right

in theory, it proved an utter failure in practice. We worked all

summer on that little clearing, hoeing the ground all over with

hoes, but did not get an ear of corn for our labors.

If the pioneer Fathers suffered the hardships and inconveniences

incident to the settlement of a new country, likewise the pioneer

Mothers. To them was committed the care and training of the family.

She was expected to look after their wardrobe, to keep them

decently and comfortably clothed against the rigors of the long,

cold winters. I well remember my own dear Mother who used to sit

the long winter evenings through, and by the dim light of a tallow

dip, with needle and thread, darn, patch, make, and cut down the

worn garments of the older to fit the younger, and was often at her

wits’ end to adjust matters in a satisfactory manner. Were any of

the members of the family sick, she was both physician and trained

nurse. No hand like Mother’s could soothe the aching brow; no voice

like hers could give comfort to the troubled spirit. Dear to us is

the memory of our pioneer Mothers.

In 1848 my brother Harrison, who was a millwright, came on from

the East and erected a sawmill on Stony Creek, which was a great

convenience to the settlers. Immigration was very brisk. The sound

of the woodman’s ax and the crash of falling timber were heard

in all directions, indicating that the Herculean task of making

Wisconsin what it is to-day was fully inaugurated.

In the fall of this year the State authorized a State Road to be

laid from Port Washington to Fond du Lac. The road was surveyed

directly in front of our house. The commissioners made our home

their headquarters as long as they were able to reach it nights.

They were a jolly big-hearted Trio, and their stay with us made an

Oasis in the Desert of Our Loneliness. We passed the evenings in

front of the big fireplace, singing songs, spinning yarns, etc.

In thinking of those bygone days I often think of these lines,

“Oh, for the days that never will come back.” During this time my

imagination was not idle, but pictured to me the old stagecoach

with its four-horse team loaded with passengers and the driver

blowing his bugle announcing his entry into the village. A scene to

which I used to be a daily witness in our Eastern home; but like

most other visions of my early years, with the lapse of time it

vanished. The road never materialized.

The pen slipped from his hand, that fine, pointed hand twice

deformed--by hard work and rheumatism. How should he go on? A pioneer

youth; that much was done, the beginning.... How had the promise of

boyhood been kept? What had come after?

He might have written of his first bride, Serena Cannon. Trembling, in

ruffles of muslin, by the pear tree he had planted the day they were

married. When she loosened the net from her hair it fell down slowly in

folds as black as a crow. While he cleared more land, plowed with the

oxen, and planted corn, she did needlework and made wreaths and hats

of braided straw. In the dusk they talked of the future. The birth of

a son; her fear and her cries; the little body pressing against her

suddenly grown-up breast, white, almost blue-white. He was an old man

now and the father of six more children; but the part of himself which

had been Serena’s lover had not lived to maturity--it lay in the past,

still interlaced with her body.

He might have written of the Civil War. Farewell. Glad to be going

as a musician so that he could hold himself a little apart from the

rest, remembering her with his flute at the head of the regiment.

The officers--he had known them at home--loafers and bullies; some

were drunk, and one of them smiled all the time and found excuses

to flog his orderlies with his bare hands. Dysentery, quarrels, and

obscenities. Stupor in a blare of music, his lips pursed, his fingers

dancing automatically on the flute stops, among men in badly tied

bandages. He was often too ill to play in the band. When the fifer was

sick, he played the fife. The drummer died; and the army could get

along without a flute (Serena’s flute); so he took the dead man’s

drum. Then came the news that his little brother Hilary had disappeared

after a skirmish between Union and Rebel troops in Tennessee; and he

dreaded the sight of his poor mother when, if ever, he should get home.

Peace was declared. He could not sleep, and felt like a sick animal

hurrying home to die. But he knew that he would not die, not there

beside Serena; he would grow strong, prosperous, and happy. She had

written that their boy Oliver had learned to talk.

Home-coming. Serena lay in a fever. She was not delirious, but too

weak to say anything. He never slept, and marched around the bed, and

scarcely dared to speak; for he knew that he himself was delirious, in

secret. All night her eyes were fixed on him, larger than other human

eyes. She died. He wanted to lift the cheap, stiff sheet to look at

her body--he had not touched it since the war began; but he thought it

would be sacrilege, and did not dare.

A widower. Rose Hamilton, his brother Leander’s sweetheart, had lived

with Serena and helped her. When Leander returned, he did not marry

her as she expected, but went West instead. Henry blamed him, and felt

responsible as the elder brother. And how was he going to take care of

little Oliver? The child loved Rose. So he asked her to marry him.

It was part of his duty not to let his young wife know his despair;

she could not comfort him. His old mother lived a few miles away with

his brother John, mourning for Hilary; Henry visited her two or three

times a week. They sat side by side, and her roughened fingers often

smoothed his forehead. Finally she died; and he resolved to let death

have its dead, and to be gentler to Rose. Then his boy Oliver died, and

a week later Rose’s first child was born, a little girl named Polly.

The rest of his life seemed unimportant. Children were born; Rose

always seemed young and coarse; he tried to be kind. There were other

deaths, but none so unpardonable as those which had already taken

place. The laughter of his sons--he wanted to enjoy it, but could not;

their troubles--he left them to his wife; they were her children. There

was another war, and his son Evan, who had been so hard to bring up,

deserted from the army; he knew that he ought to forgive him for what

he himself might have done, but he never forgave anything.

Meanwhile the West, that point of the compass which had glittered with

hope like a star, came to resemble the East--the light went out of

it. Many years of life had been allotted him, and with them had also

been allotted hard work and poverty. Every hope had a rendezvous with

disappointment.

The old man sat at the double secretary under the embossed portraits of

Longfellow, Whittier, and the rest, and stared at what he had written.

What more could he write? What were the picturesque details which had

filled the margin of his life, once life had begun in earnest? How

could he describe the oxen and the yoke hewn from a single block, the

flail joined by a strip of horsehide, the breech-loading gun and the

powderhorn--when his mind’s eye, only his mind’s eye, kept filling with

tears? It was too late to shed them now; it had always been too late.

He folded the sheets of foolscap and put them in the family Bible. He

was seen from the porch, and the expression on his face was so terrible

that no one asked any questions.

After his eighty-second birthday he had to stay in bed. One day, as

the doctor strode away across the lawn, Alwyn asked his grandmother

the name of his illness. “Shrinking of the stomach,” she said. He was

starving to death.

A few days before the end his grandchildren were taken in to see him.

They stood in a row at the foot of the black-walnut bed. On two pillows

lay his brown face, thinner but no older than it had been for years,

the energetic, indifferent, blue eyes staring over their heads.

This was no magician, Alwyn thought; he was old, but not powerful.

Alwyn’s little sister sighed. He held his breath, and heard his own

heart like a drum slowly beaten with one finger. The old man lifted his

head impatiently, letting it fall back on the pillows, and the children

were hurried from the room.

The small boy knew even at the time that his grandfather had not died

with that convulsive motion; but he would always feel that he had been

present at a deathbed. What did death mean to him then? It meant that

an old man who was too deaf to hear what was said to him would not

complain of the noise they made any more; it meant that they could go

into the garden whenever they liked; it meant also that they would have

to work in the garden. These unimportant things--and something more: it

was as if the world, in one moment, forgot much that it knew and had

never been willing to tell.

4. His Grandmother Tower’s Girlhood. Her Soldier Sweetheart. Her

Marriage

Alwyn’s grandmother came to Wisconsin in 1847 as a child of three.

She grew up among bearded men, hunters and trappers. George Hamilton,

her eldest brother, could not read or write; Enoch had lost one

arm in a sawmill; a cousin named Tom Gore also made his home with

them. The ironwoods around the large cabin smelled of skunk, whose

black-and-white pelts, with skins of mink and beaver, turned inside out

on boards, swung from the lower limbs. The three men shot squirrels,

rabbits, young coon, and deer for food, and hunted foxes and timber

wolves for sport. They went by night to the trees where the passenger

pigeons roosted, picked them off the boughs, wrung their necks, and

tied them in bunches with string. They said: “Pretty soon, smart

fellows like those Towers’ll spoil this country. Make a woman’s country

out of it, just like Kentucky. We’re goin’ to git out then, west.”

Firearms and pouches hung upon pegs, wet boots stood by the fire, and

venison smoked inside the fireplace. Their grandmother, whom they

called “the old woman,” fingered her corn-cob pipe in one corner; she

was stone deaf and hated the men. Their mother grumbled, but indulged

them as if they were sickly children. She said, “The world is a man’s

world; women might as well make up their minds to it.”

Rose and her sister Adelaide walked four miles through the woods to

attend school, stoning the bushes into which a fox or a badger had

vanished, terrified of stags. The schoolhouse occupied a clearing on

one of the Indian trails, and two or three times a year the pupils were

allowed to stand outdoors to watch a tribe of Pottawottamies pass. The

ponies were unshod; their hoofs were broken and spread apart, their

hocks deformed by spavins; and their ears, full of burrs, flapped

with each stumbling step. Kettles in pairs, rude implements, and tent

poles, lay across the withers. The round-headed babies like dolls of

copper, borne by the squat women on foot, gave no sign of life though

horseflies crawled round their nostrils. A pack of dogs followed, one

gray bitch whining and running back and forth in the leaves. The men

had formidable mouths, and many of their hard eyes were veiled by

cataracts. They rode without saddles, on folded blankets, the muscles

of their bent knees lying flat on the bone like thongs of leather.

Rose remembered how her grandfather had been killed in Kentucky. He

had been in the sugar bush, stirring the maple sap which boiled over

the iron rim of the kettle. When he looked up he had seen two savages

who sat in a tall tree, watching him; he had shot them, one after the

other; their half-naked bodies had fallen in the underbrush. After that

other Indians had waited their chance, and one day had scalped him.

Indians like these.... But these were harmless. Why didn’t they fight?

Rose wanted to fight for them or against them, because they were male

and emaciated, and looked neither to the right nor the left. Down the

corridor of light branches and stiff trunks they vanished, leaving

behind an odor of wild humanity, dogs, and dried meat.

Often Rose walked up and down the trail, hoping to meet them by

herself. One afternoon men galloped from village to village with word

that the Indians in Minnesota were on the warpath, burning and killing

and coming south. She went to stay with a neighbor, Mrs. Aaron Smith,

who had six children and whose husband was absent. They watched for

two nights with shotguns laid across their knees, the little ones

tossing in two beds, the eldest wide awake with excitement. The mother

trembled continually, but whispered to Rose the news of the community.

They listened, clutching the oily guns, but could hear nothing but the

struggle of the branches with the wind. Rose was frightened when a

child began to cry, or when dogs whined round a carcass in the forest,

but she would not show it; for she felt like a man, defending the weak

woman and her babies. Meanwhile, in the far north, tuberculous tribes

were howling to keep up their courage; then all the ponies, spotted

with sores, faltered, and they rode no farther; it was the last raid in

that part of the West. Rose liked Mrs. Aaron Smith and was sorry to go

home.

She and Adelaide played truant from school, creeping over the hill,

careless of punishment, but eager to enjoy a holiday before they

were caught. Their cousin Tom Gore was hoeing in the potato patch;

he shouted: “Get back to school, young hussies! Get back there!”

and chased them and pelted them with clods. They fled all the way

back, not stopping when they left him behind, panting with pleasant

excitement. When she was thirteen years old Rose had a mature woman’s

breasts and a boy’s awkward elbows. Tom Gore tried to kiss her one day

when they were alone, and ran after her. She climbed up an apple tree.

He caught her ankle and threatened to tear her skirt, but she whipped

him with a small branch until he went away. She complained to her

brother George, and Tom Gore received a thrashing. After that he called

her a tattletale whenever he dared, but seemed to bear no grudge.

During August and September the girls picked wild berries for the

market. One morning Rose caught yellow-and-pink spiders to put in Tom

Gore’s bed, keeping them in her hat. Then the two girls heard laughing

voices and went in the direction from which they came--boys’ voices at

the swimming hole.... They crept into a bunch of elderberry bushes.

Adelaide whispered, “It’s wicked, it’s wicked,” and Rose covered her

mouth with one hand so she could not betray their presence. Adelaide

hid her face and would not look.

Sumach dangled its leaves like parrot feathers in a round, black pool.

Shirts, trousers, and shoes lay on a mound of butternut roots and

sod. A naked boy stood there, white and gaunt; he splashed in among

the others. Rose wanted to be swimming with them; the sight of male

bodies did not trouble a girl reared in a cabin of careless men; she

was comparing their grace and their energy. There were seven: one sat

cross-legged on a log which lay over a bed of cress; on the round chest

of one, older than the others, red hair glistened in the spotted light.

One was lean, one was short and clumsy, one weak; and the strength of

the strongest was common. Six climbed up on the bank and put on their

clothes; under cover of their shouts, Adelaide, whose modesty had grown

tedious, slipped away in the woods.

When Rose looked at the one who was left, she did not want to be

swimming there, feeling instead a surprising, sweet embarrassment; it

was the fourth of the Towers, Leander. Hilary, the youngest, lay in the

grass, also watching his brother, with sad, bright eyes. The others

did not wait. Leander floated on his back, the color of amber in the

water. He was two years older than Rose, and she preferred him to all

the rest. His blond curls washed in his eyes, and he laughed with a

sound of little splashes of water lifted and let fall. Resting on one

elbow, Hilary waited uneasily. Rose envied him because, by the accident

of birth, he was Leander’s playmate; they worked side by side in the

fields, and slept in one bed. At last they too dressed and ran down an

aisle of poplars, leaving Rose alone in the elderberry bush.

As she walked slowly back to the berry patch, hanging her head, a fox

crossed her path; it looked like a dog whose pelt was on fire--she did

not even throw stones at it. She found the basket of berries and her

hat; the gold-and-rose spiders had returned to their webs, but she had

forgotten them.

She grew tired of the life at home. She wanted to look like a lady,

like Arabella and Ursula Raeburn, like young Mrs. Henry Tower; and

it was difficult to bathe and dress amid the gibes of her brothers,

under Tom Gore’s agitated eyes. She thought that short skirts made her

resemble a boy who is too fat; so a yellow taffeta dress was made for

her, with a hoop and seven rows of ruffles. She forced Adelaide to

pierce her ears with a darning-needle, and her grandmother gave her a

pair of gold earrings she had brought from Kentucky. She put up her

hair in a chignon and trained a damp curl over each ear. Her cheeks

were as rough and pink as a cinnamon rose.

Then she took a school three miles from home. She was slow at books;

the schools she herself had attended had been unruly; so each night she

studied the exercise in the speller and the arithmetic problems which

she would have to teach next day. She was not afraid of half-grown men,

and understood tomboys; the school board congratulated her upon her

discipline. The large girl in a grown woman’s dress who returned to

Hope’s Corner at the end of each week had reason to be proud.

On Saturday nights Henry Tower held a singing school in the Corner

schoolhouse. He struck the key with a tuning fork and taught them to

sing by the scale, _Do re mi fa so la ti do_. All that family were

singers; Henry led the men with a pure voice which sounded lonely among

the rest, and his lovely wife Serena led the trebles. Hilary still sang

with the women--his voice, very sweet and shrill, less like a voice

than an instrument--sitting beside Serena, seeming to sing only for

her and Leander. Rose also sang for them. She wanted nothing in the

world, neither in the wilderness she knew nor in the countries she

would never know, but to be acceptable to that family, loved by Leander.

At the end of an evening she said to him: “Will you take me home? I’m

frightened to-night.”

He only blushed; but Henry had heard, and he whispered, “Leander,

behave like a gentleman.”

Serena pressed her hand and said, “I hear you’re doing finely with your

school.”

Hilary followed them as if it were a matter of course. But in the dark

she could touch Leander’s arm, stumbling more than she would have done

if she had been alone, and the tips of her fingers tingled.

Soon the neighbors said they were sweethearts, and they were together

wherever they went. Miraculously, Leander did not seem to see that

she was less beautiful than Serena. He never touched her, but she had

read no books and did not expect caresses. Love meant gentleness and

courtesy; it meant having many opportunities to enjoy his tireless

grace, and being proud as if it belonged to her, and forgetting that

she herself was too heavy and too tall. Her failure to understand

him moved her as nothing else could. And when that which passed her

understanding was kind, she did not require kisses to feel a tumult

like that of wild bees over their hidden honey.

They stood under a mountain ash in the autumn. He wore a corduroy

jacket the color of his hair and skin. He had grown a beard which

did not hide the blush and the smile which took turns in his face.

She knew that Hilary was watching them, perched on a log fence; she

wondered why, but she did not care. The young tree drooped with its

clusters of mature berries, like drops of something suspended over

their upturned faces, drops bright as blood, not human blood--the

blood of angels. “It’s a beauty,” Leander said. Rose forgot that

Hilary existed and that she existed; there were only two things in the

world--the tree and Leander.

If she had been imaginative, if she had ever feared anything which was

not physical danger, she would have feared Hilary. Staring at her,

his eyes grew large, as if they were a great pair of tears about to

fall; and he bit his lips until they bled. One evening she thought it

was love; another evening, when he muttered, “Girls who pretend to be

afraid of the dark--” she knew it was hate. When Leander was not with

them, he was friendly and timid. They met by accident in the woods and

gathered mushrooms all one afternoon, and she taught him to recognize a

rare variety, almost indistinguishable from others which are poisonous.

Then the Civil War began. Her brothers went quickly, well pleased with

the adventure. John, Harrison, and Henry Tower enlisted.

One night she stood with Leander by a gate. Dreamily he said--but with

a tone which was like that of decision in a dream--“I suppose I’d

better go.”

Rose turned sick; she had not thought of that. She clenched her fists

in hatred; he was too young, and he was hers.... Then there followed

this realization, novel for the primitive girl: that was the sort of

thing Towers did; there were ideas and ideals, quite separate from

themselves, quite unimportant, which they cared about, so much.... She

would learn to care, she who wanted to be a Tower--it was time now. So

she laid her fingers against his chest and felt, through the coarse

flannel, his breath going in and out in a miniature tide; and one word

was almost impossible to pronounce. “Maybe,” she said.

So he enlisted. Hilary refused to be left at home; his mother wept, and

he wept with her, but they could not change his mind. And the farewell

night came upon them all, more suddenly, it seemed, than any night

had ever come upon its own day. The spring stirred all about Rose and

Leander when they said good-by--beckoning sprays of wet leaves, flowers

he would not find in the South; Rose had no eyes to see. She was

thinking that if he died down there, it would mean that death was more

living than life and more rich, with a blond boy in its arms.... Then

she felt the awkward softness of his kiss--the first kiss; she smiled,

because that was a woman’s duty, and because his lips were sweet; and

he turned away to go to war, with his little brother.

When Rose’s school closed, Serena Tower asked her to live with her.

She had been received into the family; she was proud. There was little

money, though Henry, who had enlisted as a musician, sent home his pay.

Rose grew fond of Oliver, the slight child with languorous eyes, and

came to love Serena more than anyone else in the world but Leander.

Serena was never in good health. Rose did all the work, trying to make

the men they hired care for Henry’s farm as well as he would have done,

a difficult task for the daughter of shiftless farmers. She took a

man’s responsibilities, and learned the cost of a man’s gentleness.

It was a long war, long as an illness during which one knows that at

its end the time will have passed like an hour of sleep. There were

letters, brief, monotonous, and precious. The draft began; Serena and

Rose were glad that the inevitable had not come to them as an officer

of the law. The widowed mother of five soldiers sat with them on the

porch, thinking chiefly of the fifth, who had already broken her heart.

They knitted socks, sewed military garments, and scraped linen to

make gauze for wounds, praying that it would be placed on the wounds

of strangers. Lists of casualties were published. Then Leander wrote

that Hilary had disappeared. His mother fell to the floor, and refused

to eat for many days. After that it was their duty to express hope

tirelessly, without any hope. Serena fell desperately ill. Suddenly

peace was declared. Rose had not time to feel impatience for the

home-coming, caring for the sick woman, the child, and the old mother

for whom alone there was to be no home-coming.

Leander was the first to return. Rose drove to the station. He stood

before her, heedless and gaunt. He kissed her. They could not speak. He

got into the carriage; she took up the reins. She told him that Serena

was ill; they said nothing of Hilary; the sound of water had gone out

of his voice. They drove to his mother’s house. Never again in her life

was there to be a moment as cruel as that in which he stumbled forward,

fell on his knees, and hid his face under the old woman’s hands. Rose

closed her eyes; it was not enough--she could hear their sobs; and she

herself was all but a stranger. So she got into the carriage and drove

away, quite unnoticed.

That afternoon he came to his brother’s house. Serena, who had been

lying in an apathy which no voice could penetrate, wept when she heard

his voice, and cried out, “No, it is not Henry!”

They left Adelaide in the sick room and walked toward the hills.

Finally Rose paused and said (for the first time to him and the only

time in her life): “I love you. Are we going to get married?”

The pupils of his eyes, large and dark, were shaking. In that voice

of some other man, a man who was still in the South, he answered: “I

don’t.... In the war.... You don’t know-- Try to understand....”

But Rose did know and did not need to understand. That knowledge and

lack of knowledge could not be endured quietly, standing up, and not

alone. She gathered up her heavy skirts and ran, like the wild Hamilton

girl who had ceased to exist.

She was crouching on a porch. A man was driving into the yard and

getting out of a buggy. She had pressed her head between her hands so

long that the gold earrings had left marks on her cheeks like scars.

In that moment she knew what life was made up of; she would never

forget again. As if from a great distance, by transference from someone

else’s thought, she knew that Serena was delirious--it was the doctor

who was walking up the path--there was work to be done.

Two days later Henry came. He was too late; Serena could not speak.

After the funeral Rose went home, thinking that the rude cabin would

never give her up again.

At the end of the month Leander went to California. Henry Tower was

living alone with his little son, and one day asked Rose to marry him.

She felt as if she had been dead, in an apparent eternity of lazy

hunters, their gibes and their quarrels; and suddenly, in the widower’s

melancholy voice, permission to return to the earth she loved was

granted. Leander had not wanted her, but she was acceptable to the

Towers.

It was her duty not to let her husband see how she grieved for his

brother; he could not comfort her. She did not hope to be loved, and

she realized once more how rough and homely she must appear beside the

memory of Serena. She continued to grow heavier; the coarse roses did

not disappear from her cheeks, but came to resemble dead rose leaves,

covered with a network of tiny veins.

Life was not sad, though Henry was obstinate and sad. She never

understood him. Would she have understood Leander? She often found

him unreasonable; but after argument and protest, when his eyes grew

abstract as if they were staring at things which did not exist, or when

a rare, bitter word escaped from his tight lips, she folded her arms

and gave in.

Her mother-in-law died, saying at the end, “Now I know that Hilary is

dead; he will meet me on the other side.”

Little Oliver died, and a week later Polly was born. Four more children

were born; their names were Ada, James Arthur, Ralph, and Evan. There

were deaths in the family, but her children were spared; she gave

thanks to God.

Then an epidemic of scarlet fever broke out in the community. Henry and

five-year-old Ralph fell sick. An old woman named Minerva Foote came

to help her. Henry was delirious and called her Serena. He and Ralph

got better. The little girls fell sick. Rose cried by the hot kitchen

stove, the hot sunlight pressing through the shutters.

Old Min Foote said: “Now you stay away from them. Who’s going to cook

for the hungry mouths if you come down with it? I’m childless; I’ve

nothing to fear. They’re not yours, anyway--they’re God’s now, till the

fever is past.”

Polly and Ada died. Life was teaching her methodically; this was the

second lesson; she was a strong woman and could learn. On the day of

the funeral the heat was broken by a thunderstorm. The cheap little

coffins were of the same length. Rose attended two other funerals that

week, children’s funerals, saying, “It shall never be said that my

sorrow has hardened me toward others.”

In the spring of 1884 she received a letter from Leander, which read:

Dear Sister Rose,

I want to come back to the old country. If you’d rather I didn’t,

please tell me so. I’ve made some money and would like to buy a

little house near you and Henry. After these long years, I love my

own people more than ever before. Love to Henry and your children.

Henry said nothing. Rose was glad he was coming back to Wisconsin. It

was his home. He would be forty years old and greatly changed, as they

all were. He would be her brother now, yet not like a brother, for

she understood her brothers; and the Towers were men she could never

understand, men she could only love, quite humbly.

Leander’s return marked the middle of her life. Thereafter, absorbed

in maternal duties and matriarchal reminiscences, she took every

disappointment for granted and wanted nothing for herself. In fact, she

was more like the strong, serene grandmother, perfectly willing to be

old, whom Alwyn knew, than like the girl who had loved Leander.