When Alwyn was ten years old there was a solemn excitement at the
farmhouse. His great-aunt Mary, the most romantic member of the family,
was dead, and her daughter, a woman in black veils whom no one had
seen before, brought her body to be buried at Hope’s Corner, as she
had requested. His grandparents and his father and mother went to the
station to meet her, and they proceeded directly to the cemetery.
There Alwyn and his little sister waited on a stone pile, and stared
over the fence, over the shrubs and the monuments, at the nearly
soundless funeral. The tall stranger and the great blue-gray box had
come a thousand miles from a place called Oklahoma City; and Alwyn
breathed heavily as the coffin, covered with bouquets, disappeared in
the new grave, because the heroine of an old story had come back to the
place where her travels had begun.
This one of his great-aunts had undertaken many journeys in her
lifetime. Later in the day her daughter, sitting on the porch between
Alwyn’s grandparents, told how her house was cluttered with souvenirs
of the last journey, a trip to Europe, which appeared to have hastened
the old woman’s death: water in tiny bottles--water of the Rhine, the
Jordan, the Nile; chips of stone from the Alps, and Vesuvian lava;
shells from the Channel and the Ægean Sea, all carefully labeled;
pressed flowers, a box of sand from the Sahara, and a picture frame
of Italian mosaic like petrified confetti, in which she had placed a
tintype of herself and her sister Eliza when they were girls. The care
of these relics was a problem; no one had any use for them; they would
have to be thrown away. Alwyn wanted them, but his mother said it would
be too expensive to have them sent from the Far West.
Mary Tower, born Harris, had been brave, energetic, and virtuous; and
Alwyn’s grandmother, who had not seen her for half a century, loved
her still, and said she was “the greatest of the pioneer women.” This
adventurous life embodied not all the womanly qualities of the period,
but all that his grandmother admired and meant to praise. So she told
the story of it whenever she was asked, and in her very old age, on
important occasions such as family reunions or Thanksgiving dinners,
she began it without invitation.
Thus the life of this woman was fixed in Alwyn’s memory like the plot
of the first book he ever read. A life in profile, an almost incredible
history, a boy’s adventure story with a single female musketeer for
heroine.... Her death added nothing to the adventure, and subtracted
nothing from it; Alwyn’s grandmother went on repeating the story--the
same words appearing in the same order--as if she had been dead a long
time, or had never actually lived, or could never die.
So, quite naturally, as Alwyn grew up, the October afternoon on which
she was buried, among her relatives and his own, mingled in his memory
with the afternoons of her girlhood, at the very beginning of the
story. Autumn stood that day like a scarecrow at the crossroads, and
the blackbirds, pigeons, and plovers fluttered overhead. Autumn had
stood there before, its great sleeves flapping in the wind; and birds
in October never know which way they are going. Across the road, like
a large dry-goods box, stood the district school which he attended,
where, before the Civil War, the dead woman’s sister Eliza had taught.
In Eliza Harris’s day it was a hard school. The pupils had to stand
around the stove in winter, three or four at a time, to keep their ears
from freezing. Girls with full breasts and wild boys in their teens
founded friendships and flirtations on plans to shame her and make her
cry before the class.
One evening, when her work was done, Eliza turned the key in the lock
and started home. She shivered at the clumps of bushes so close to
the road that they seemed to stagger to meet her. As she passed a
willow thicket two or three girls ran out, howling, with switches;
half paralyzed by fear, she stumbled away, but received a dozen cuts
under her long skirts. Speechless with sobbing and incessant fits of
coughing, she pushed open the door of her mother’s cabin.
Her failure as a teacher was a tragic misfortune, for her mother and
sister lived on her salary. After Samuel Harris’s death his widow
had sold the small farm he had cleared in the ’forties, rearing the
children on the proceeds; now they were penniless.
The widow Harris resembled Eliza. All that evening she shuffled up and
down the one room in which they lived--Eliza crying in one corner,
sixteen-year-old Mary giggling irrepressibly in another--now raging
against the young hussies of the school, now scolding her daughters in
turn.
Having been too frightened to see which ones had attacked her, Eliza
said nothing to her pupils next day, and left the schoolroom unswept;
and the following afternoon Mary came at four to help do the work and
to take her home.
Mary was small and plump; she had an olive skin and ash-blond hair;
and her way of speaking quickly in a low voice reminded one of a bird.
Together they put the room in order and went down the road, Eliza
peering into thickets and hanging back.
“It was there they set on me before,” she said, but they passed the
place unmolested. Suddenly there was a war whoop, and two girls jumped
out of another bush, brandishing willow switches. Screaming feebly,
Eliza left Mary to face them.
“Devils! You devils!” Mary cried. “I know you, Allie Jones! I know you,
Mary Ann Murphy! You’ll catch it for this! You’ll catch it!” Eliza
stumbled forward and backward, wringing her hands; Mary stood her
ground. “Run! Run or I’ll stone you,” she shouted, throwing handfuls of
gravel at the girls in flight.
Mary made her sister visit the parents, as a result of which one
girl was thrashed, another was taken out of school, and Eliza’s
authority was strengthened. Mary and the widow gave her advice, but
her misfortunes excited her beyond all thought of policy; ineffectual
tantrums made her ridiculous, and many parents thought her a tyrant.
Matters went from bad to worse, and she coughed incessantly.
There was a harelipped boy who tormented her; he was too big to punish
(she dared to whip only the little ones) and it was useless to speak
to his father; both father and son were proud of being hated by her.
One day in January, when the small children could not get through the
drifts, this boy tipped up the bench on which he sat, so that a fat
girl rolled on the floor. “Order!” shouted Eliza. The girl and the
harelipped boy sat down again. “Ezra, stand in the corner,” said Eliza.
Smiling, he rose; the fat girl tumbled off the end of the bench again,
and the school rocked with laughter.
Eliza overturned her chair and took up a heavy ruler. The boy with the
harelip lifted his elbow in front of his eyes. There was a dead silence
which frightened her. She set her teeth, broke the ruler in her large
hands, and threw the pieces in his face.
A growl rose from the back of the room. “It wan’t his fault,” one
shouted; another, “Do what we said we would.” One ran to the door,
one opened a window, and the two oldest boys jumped over the benches,
lifted her roughly, and threw her out into a snowdrift.
Eliza lay in the snow, choking with anger. Then she waded around the
building, went into the entry, and pushed at the door. “You shan’t
get in here for a while,” the one who was holding it muttered. So she
shook the snow out of her sleeves, put on a coat, and went home.
During the night, in a paroxysm of weeping, a small quantity of blood
escaped from her lungs, and the next day she had a fever. The school
was closed for ten days, and then a substitute was hired. “How Eliza
Harris had been put out” was common talk, and the subject of two or
three quarrels. The widow and her daughters were dependent on charity.
All winter the neighbors brought stove wood, sacks of potatoes, and
hams, tallow dips and corn meal, and eggs in hand-woven baskets. On the
bed, Eliza closed her eyes while her mother complained of unruly girls
and what they deserved. Mary did all the work cheerfully.
The widow Harris talked of her relatives in Missouri as if distance had
cheated her of a resource to which she had a right. Some one suggested
that they be sent south; ambitious men and women who begrudged the
provisions, those with large families to support, and those who pitied
them, welcomed the solution with equal relief. Two box parties were
given in the spring, to which the girls brought supper for two in
decorated boxes which were sold at auction to their sweethearts; and a
purse of money was given to the helpless women.
Mrs. Harris wrote to her brother, and when he replied, preparations
were made for their departure. She dreaded the trip down the great,
savage valley; perhaps dreaded no less the welcome of a brother she had
not seen in years and a sister-in-law whom she had never seen. Eliza
was eager to escape from a State peopled in her imagination with wild
girls bearing switches. Mary was glad to go, welcoming all the years of
the rest of her life as if they were people about to become friends.
They went down the Mississippi on a river boat. There were whisperings
of the water and a sound of kisses around the prow as it advanced
through regular ripples which were like a wedding veil. Negroes on
invisible boats sang in the dark, burdening it with their hearts’
burden. Spring quickened its pace, and the deck was drenched with
unfamiliar odors and unusually sweet rain. Three women going south....
The tanned captain followed Mary with his warm eyes as she moved
excitedly among the hampers and sacks and bales.
They disembarked and drove overland through poor cotton fields where
slaves were at work; and at last they found their relatives, a gaunt,
booted man and a plaintive woman. The blond South dozed by the
river--it would never wake up; and over the incessant lapping of the
water there was a lapping of dry wind, like the river caressing the
earth scantily clad with bushes, and like the river yellow with dust.
Mrs. Harris complained, and her health failed. A sallow young man
with red eyelids who had come from her home in Vermont began to
feel a dolorous excitement in Mary’s presence, and finally proposed
marriage. When she said No, he trembled with either anger or sadness,
and turned his attentions to Eliza, dwelling on the disappointments
of the West and wooing her with praise of the East. Mournfully but
enthusiastically she agreed. So Eliza and he were married. The
preacher had to raise his voice above the sobs which the widow muffled
in her sleeve; a few boxes and carry-alls were packed, and they said
good-by.
Then the widow Harris died, leaving Mary alone. She was unhappy with
her relatives. Her presence reminded them that they had no children;
her dependence reminded them of their poverty; all the coming and
going, and the widow’s death, increased their longing to return to the
East--they dreaded death in Missouri. They had nothing to say to Mary;
their silence at meals made what she ate seem like the bread given to a
tramp on the doorstep, to whom one never knows what to say. So she sat
sadly on the porch when her work was done, watching the birds go north;
there must have been one in all their number as lonely as she--but
luckier, having its wings. She scarcely ever sang now; but when the
tunes rose round the dusky shanties they seemed to be sung for her,
more heartless tunes than any she could sing.
Her aunt was always ailing, and the doctor, a widower of fifty-nine,
lean and cheerful, came to the house every three or four days. Mary
knew that he liked her. One day he found her alone, drawing water from
the well, and said: “You’re not happy. You ought to be happy. Before
I leave, go down the road a ways. Meet me. I have something to say to
you.”
When she got into his buggy he said: “I am lonely. And you’ve no home.
If you will marry me, I will give you a good home.”
Mary considered it as a vague necessity--like another journey down
another river; there was no likelihood of music on that stream, only
years without danger or liberty. Six months later her uncle and aunt
returned to the town in the East where Eliza was living; and Mary was
the last of her family on that frontier.
Dr. Brandon had a small plantation, six darkies, and innumerable
patients. Mary was lonely. She played with the pickaninnies, washing
them in the creek and spreading them out on the grass to dry, and with
the doctor’s help nursed all the sick slaves in the county. On some
days she tried to learn their songs; on others she tried not to hear
them. The Missouri women gossiped about the way she behaved.
There was a young mulatto named Tartar, the doctor’s most valuable
slave, who had cooked for him and slept in the house while he was a
widower. Mary was always aware of his presence, and never forgot that
he was as young as she; and once or twice, as she lay by her husband,
this boy’s ugly face rose out of her sleep; she confused him with the
night because they were the same color, and feared both.
Then in far towns whose names people heard for the first time, the
Civil War broke out. After a few days the State was divided, neighbor
against neighbor. Private hatreds paraded in uniforms of opinions
hastily put together. State rights and the souls of the negroes were
taken as a pretext for murderous appetites, and many slept with
shotguns at the head of the bed.
The doctor said to Mary, “Better not be seen from the road with the
blacks. All the old women will talk.”
He was a Unionist. “Slavery doesn’t matter,” he said. “There’ll
always be slaves, whether we buy ’em or pay ’em wages. But a pack of
desperadoes can rule round a post office; they don’t get so far as
Washington. So if the Union breaks up, we go to wrack and ruin.”
He expressed these opinions recklessly beside the sick beds of both
factions. The fanatical Unionists could not defend him because he was
a complacent slaveholder, so that of all those whom the Rebels hated,
he was the weakest as well as the least discreet. An old man, thinking
only of politics and the battles in the East, he paid no attention to
the echoes of war in Missouri, the drunkenness of war increasing around
his house.
Tired by the anger of sick Rebels whom he continued to visit, the
doctor went to bed early one night. In the same room Mary tried to read
_Pilgrim’s Progress_ by the light of two candles, but her attention
wandered. She was a married woman now, and her marriage was like a
return from childhood of the father she could scarcely remember. He too
had been kind. But she was tired of Missouri, tired and terrified. She
had heard of a man named Cleaver who was starting north in a few days
with a team and overland wagon; if only the doctor had loved Wisconsin
as she did.... But he had never been there. So she would have to stay
always on the frontier between the North and the South, with a war
breaking out between the two. She dreamed of the war, the lifting of
row on row of mournful trumpets, far away.... Would it stay far away?
The stove stood in one corner of the room, her table in another, the
door in another, and in the fourth, the bed where presently she would
lie, and perhaps fail to sleep, beside the husband who was like a
father. She knew by his breathing that he slept, and thought of the
sighs which revealed, in the daytime, how troubled he was.
A knock at the door. There were two men, strangers, on the threshold.
“We want to see the doctor.” Their mouths were so drawn--evidently
someone was ill.
“My husband has gone to bed. I will wake him. Won’t you come in?”
The two men shouldered her aside and strode across the room, one of
them fumbling in his pocket. Then a shot was fired. Mary fainted away.
She lay in the center of the dark, broad floor. The room was
empty--frightful and empty. She stumbled to her chair under the
candles; she did not need to look at the bed. She was all alone now.
Why didn’t the darkies come? They must have heard; they were afraid.
She could not stay there alone.
The young negro slept in a shack by the door, and she whispered into
it: “Tartar. Tartar.”
More faintly still he whispered back: “What, missie?”
“Come. They’ve killed your master.”
He slipped in, looking infinitely young, younger than she now (for she
was a widow). His eyes sought the bed, but he turned so they could not
reach it.
The two flames fattened while the two candles decreased in stature.
Silence lay in the corner with its arms outstretched on a wet pillow.
Mary and the boy sat face to face, the distance between them the length
of the bed; it was as if they were keeping watch at the head and foot
of a bed. Mary was not thinking of the future, not even of to-morrow,
nor of anything. Strange how white Tartar’s mouth was.... And why did
the dark plantations betray now and then the anxiety of a dog? No feet
and no wheels on the road, the road running north and south down which
the war had come, without any trumpets.
A moth staggered in out of the dark and around the candles, narrowly
avoiding the flame, and fell at her feet. Blunt wings, white and tan;
from the middle of each wing a spot like an eye looked at them. Mary
covered it with her handkerchief and let it out through the window;
it was so dark that she could not see it fly away, and she began to
shudder. More deaths were hiding there, deaths which had not yet
happened, and perhaps crowds of nameless men waiting their turn, two
by two, to knock at her door. She could scarcely find her chair in the
unconsciousness which rolled up under her feet; but she did find it, or
she would have fainted again.
There, sitting in the chair which faced her chair, was the black boy.
She felt like a fugitive who finds the trace which he has left a moment
before, which will betray him a moment after. How swiftly and quietly
they would work if they came back and found her and a negro at the head
and the foot of the bed, sitting quietly together. How soon they would
finish and go! It was madness to stay there. She began to stand up,
began to speak....
But she saw Tartar’s eyes. So piteous--and they seemed to take the
blame for what had happened, for what might happen still; his black
face took the blame. The blood ran out of his cheeks as if he were
ashamed. By the look on his face, he was begging her not to speak, not
to notice him, not to say that the doctor was dead, because he was a
slave, that she was in danger because he was her slave now. He had
known the old man longer than she; he had as much right to stay there
as she had; she could not ask him to go, and she was afraid to go
herself. In the trees by the window, the dark sighed as if content with
its perfidy.
The negro was as quiet as the body on the pillows; and the charm of
their stillness took the place, for Mary, of courage and safety. Far
away, a cockerel warned them, by a hoarse note, that day was about to
break. Mary tried to get ready for its coming. A pair of fresh candles
flickered less. They sat face to face.... Creeping up under the sky at
last, the morning, with its little gusts, shook the oleanders by the
door.
“I can go now,” Mary said.
“Where?”
“To the Sanfords’. They’re the nearest Union people.”
She took her husband’s purse out of his coat hanging on a chair, and a
roll of bills from a cream pitcher on the shelf, and covered her head
with a shawl. Tartar went over to the bed and stood looking down at the
stained sheets, his teeth chattering, his tears falling. She left him
there.
Rebel houses slept by the road like watchdogs, harmless in sleep; one
little black dog sniffed and whined as she passed, and rawboned cattle
came down the lanes. The first rays of the sun were as pale as if they
also had watched through the night. Three miles of difficult gravel and
sand....
She began to call when she drew near the Sanford house. Women in
nightcaps came to the door; she told her story; one of them cried and
expected her to cry. The men put cartridges in their shotguns, stood
them behind the door because she looked frightened, and watched from
the windows.
In the middle of the morning a boy came running down the road with the
news that a gang of Rebels had buried her husband, burned her house,
and were driving her slaves off south.
In fact, a wisp of smoke could be seen over a hill. Behind Mary’s back
there was the rustling of the women around the stove, their muttering
and whispering. She could scarcely ask herself the simple questions:
Where shall I go? What can I do? She spoke of the river boats going
north, though she did not have money enough for the passage, and
learned that the service had ceased on the declaration of war; only a
few darkened barges went up and down still, laden with guns, gunpowder,
and drunken men--fugitives.
All morning she looked out of the window without seeing anything. About
noon the muttering ceased behind her; the family withdrew, and later
she saw them gathered around the stable door and knew what they were
talking about: the danger of giving her a refuge, the expense of giving
her a home. It did not matter what they said. Her husband lay somewhere
in a pile of damp gravel, and men were driving her slaves away, crying
in the sunshine.
Mary thought: there is that man; there is that man who is going north.
A man in an overland wagon, horses, horses galloping north--nobody else
could help her. She did not listen to the women of the house when they
came in; she touched her body now and then as one touches a purse in
one’s pocket to be sure it is there. She turned toward Mrs. Sanford.
“I’m going to see some friends.” The mother and her daughters bit their
lips; perhaps they knew that she had no friends.
She walked to a village called Maladee, six miles away, stumbling and
trying to make a plan. His name was Cleaver. Was that his name? How
could she find him? Her husband had said that the postmistress was for
the Union. Among kegs of molasses and sacks of flour, salt, and coffee
in the bean, this little woman stared at her with one eye--the other
eye was blind.
“Where can I find Mr. Cleaver who’s driving north?”
“Ask at the inn. Like as not he’s there. I hear he’s stabling in their
sheds.”
Four men spitting tobacco juice from the veranda; they dropped their
feet off the railing. A fat young woman with no upper teeth appeared on
the threshold. Mary paused in embarrassment. The young woman dropped
her eyes; the men’s lids flickered in a row. They knew, even they knew.
To them she was already a lonely widow, a young and pretty widow, and
they were wondering what she would do about it.
Mary was humiliated but encouraged. “Is Mr. Cleaver here?”
“If you want to see him, you’ll find him in the back yard with the
horses.”
A walk led around the new, dilapidated building. She stopped at the
top of three steps which descended to the yard. There was a man on his
knees by a great wagon. Her courage failed, and she steadied herself
against the trunk of a cottonwood. He was greasing the wheels. She saw
the neglected curls running down the back of his neck under the coat
collar.
Then he stood up; from the top step Mary realized how tall he was, and
caught a glimpse of his face: the soft forehead, the rough sideburns,
the moist, bad-tempered mouth. Then she unbuttoned her high collar and
folded it back on her shoulders. Lifting her head, she descended; very
softly the crinoline brushed the trunk of the cottonwood.
“You are Mr. Cleaver?”
He breathed heavily through his mouth and nodded.
“You are going north?”
“In the morning.”
The most important question was the hardest to ask: “Are you going
alone? Are you married?”
“All alone. No, not married.” The moisture in her eyes, her nervous
mouth, her immodest throat, had an appearance of passion. So he forgot
that they were strangers and did not notice that she scarcely looked at
him.
“Will you take me with you?”
He flushed and drew himself up to his full height. She had won. They
walked behind the stable along a little path. She told him her name and
her story, making the story less tragic, lest he cease to be flattered.
He said nothing about the war; apparently he had intended to leave
before it broke out. They made plans; they might have been lovers. He
kissed her. Mary had never been kissed by a young man, but his breath
was musty with drink.
He let her walk back alone in the dusk. There was a moist place on both
her sleeves above the elbow--the axle grease from his hands. Without
wanting to die, she wished that she were dead; but even the journey
north would come to an end.
She said to the women who were making up a bed for her (the first of
many): “I am going north. I have money.” They pitied her less, and
anger was added to their anxiety. She said, “I will pay you,” and they
were ashamed. She fell asleep, finding it very strange to sleep alone.
The next morning she went back to Maladee and talked to an old
preacher, letting him think she had known Cleaver while her husband
lived. He seemed afraid of her, and stammered: “It is a time of war.
God will forgive you. I will perform the ceremony at once.”
She stood up before him with Cleaver at noon, and at three o’clock they
drove out of town, Mary in her impatience wanting to whip the horses.
Twelve miles were covered before dusk, and all the way Cleaver smiled
sleepily to himself, sliding the oily reins through his fingers. They
put up for the night in one of seven shacks on a sandy hill above
the Mississippi. At twilight the girl looked down into the tangle of
currents and great, mechanical whirlpools, and thought of putting an
end to her fatigue, already intolerable--of joining, like a lonely
vagrant, that caravan of waters. If the Mississippi had flown north....
But her home was in the North, if she had one; so she turned back. The
bed in that village was wide, but there seemed to be no room for her in
it, shrinking from the giant she had married.
They drove north, keeping near the river where towns were not too far
apart. Tracks in the sand, new highways of gravel, lanes overgrown with
grass.... They came to impassable routes, were lost upon détours, and
filled quicksands with brush; the horses limped and had to be reshod.
He drove while she tried to ease the pain in her back; she drove while
he slept with his mouth open. The summer followed them north. The team
sucked up water from muddy springs. Cleaver scooped it up in his hands;
they lost the tin cup, and Mary drank from his hat. In large, empty
valleys the hoofs and the rattling spokes made a sound of delirium.
In some cabins along the road they received a grudging hospitality
which they were not allowed to pay for. People were curious. A number
of men called them spies; a number of women suspected that they were
not married. Innkeepers cheated them; Cleaver was not willing to pay
double for a night’s lodging, out of bravado; liquor was expensive, and
Mary knew that their funds would not last to the end of the journey.
He made friends with women in rowdy taverns, and once or twice Mary had
to hunt for him from room to room before dawn. It was always hard to
keep him sober enough at night to go on in the morning. Once, as they
drove out of a village, he shouted that she was a loose woman who had
fooled him into marriage. She covered his mouth with her hands; still,
drunk, he mistook her gesture, and began to make love in the wagon,
dropping the reins.
They stayed outdoors when the weather was good, to save money. Over
their heads the stars glistened like tinsel. Mary thought of her
slaves, their kinky heads done up in bandanas, their mouths all wet
with watermelon juice. Where were they now? As she lay half asleep
she imagined they were near; the night was so dark, their faces so
dark--she would not be able to see them if they were near. Slaves
marching and singing--and the branches of the trees swung down like
whips; but one whose face she remembered did not march with the rest,
did not sing (Tartar, the doctor’s boy), but stood by himself, every
night, looking down at the dead man. Often she wished she had stayed
and gone further south with him, for they were both slaves. Would his
bondage come to an end before hers did? She wondered which side was
winning the war.
She was gaunt and weather-beaten. There were sore cracks in her skin,
and one bruised finger did not heal. Her clothes were in rags; she wore
a man’s coat and a hat of braided straw unraveled at the brim. Cleaver
beat her on the slightest provocation.
One night, when it was raining, he started a quarrel in a saloon; a man
in high boots cursed her on his account; and they had to leave town at
once. The world was full of men like that--booted men; and as she drove
through the stormy darkness she thought of them all, without anger, now
at last without fear--they had done their worst; and the one she had
married, fast asleep in the back of the wagon, made sounds which were
almost words but meant nothing.
They crossed the Mississippi near St. Louis, avoiding the city, for
they had been told the sheriffs there would demand explanations. They
had no more money. In Illinois one of the horses broke out of the
stable into a field of wet corn, had colic, and died; they sold the
overland wagon, bought an old cart, and went on.
When they came to a town, Mary went from house to house, begging
for work to pay for their board; she mended clothes, helped with
butcherings, scrubbed floors, and did heavy washings. They moved more
slowly, stopping two or three days at a time. Cleaver would make
friends in a saloon and want to stay where they were, making fun of her
homesickness; but his friendships were brief, he feared the draft, and
remembered, perhaps, that among friends she could earn more. And sooner
or later he would give offense in the house where she worked; they
would have to hitch up the horse and go on. She was sick, but did not
think again of taking her own life, for beyond Illinois lay Wisconsin.
The road seemed to have no end.
South of Chicago, Cleaver lost the horse and cart at a game of chance.
Mary tried to find the man who had won, to plead with him; but he was
a stranger and had driven out of town. So she worked for a month in a
general store; an old woman gave her ten dollars; she denied herself
food and hid her savings. One afternoon they went with the mail wagon
to Chicago, took passage on a lake boat to Milwaukee, went on to
Aaronsville, hired a buggy from a livery stable, and drove to Hope’s
Corner.
There was no festivity for the home-coming. The Hamiltons took them in;
her old neighbors came to see her; Cleaver sulked in the barn. Mary
could not talk; Adelaide Hamilton told her story all day long. Sitting
with downcast eyes in the center of the room, made ugly by deprivation
and pain, made stupid by happiness too long delayed, she did not weep;
but everyone she had known wept at the sight of her.
They moved into a small house which was vacant while a young man was in
the army. Cleaver drank less, hired out as a farm hand, and registered
for the draft. More than a month passed. Mary watched the blackbirds
and bobolinks, larks, water birds, and warblers, go south, through the
trees of her childhood, as the spotted leaves fell; and resolved never
to follow them again.
But one day in November Rose Hamilton came running to the house. “I
hear your husband’s been talking down at the store. They think he’s a
Rebel. They’ve given him a day to leave town.”
Mary trembled and sank to her knees. The girl helped her to a chair,
repeating what she knew. There were footsteps in the yard. Cleaver came
in; he clung to the door knob. Rose hurried out by the other door.
“Well, Mary, we’re going south again.” The clock struck twice, and he
sighed, his large body seeming to droop in his clothes. “They say I’ve
got to. I mean those fools down yonder.”
Mary said: “Well, Cleaver, I guess you’re going. But I’m not.”
It was the quick low voice, low like a pigeon’s--many times it had
roused his anger! He shouted, “And you’re coming with me!”
“No. I reckon not. I’ve had enough of the South. Anyway, I’ve got to
stay here and have your baby.”
He threatened; he could not strike her, for he was afraid of her now,
afraid of her condition; and he shed a few tears.
A serious man named Will Davis, who gnashed his teeth slowly as he
spoke, came to the door to tell him that it was true, what had been
said at the store. The men of the country were roused; it was a time of
war; Cleaver would have to go. Mary was in the room, but seemed to pay
no attention, and said nothing.
She began to put a few clothes in a bag for him. He kept asking her
if she would join him after the child had been born. She would not
promise. At noon the next day he set out, and Mary closed her eyes in
order not to see him look back.
The child was born dead. Mary grew stronger. She received a post
card from Springfield and a letter from Bowling Green: Cleaver had
registered for the draft again; he was steady; he had found work;
he told her to come. She did not answer. Then a lawyer in Tennessee
notified her that he had divorced her to marry again.
The war was over. The men were returning. Mary was teaching school
where Rose Hamilton had taught before. Harrison Tower, a millwright,
brought her back from her school to Hope’s Corner every Friday night,
and she loved him almost as if she had been a girl. They were married,
and after several years moved to Oklahoma, where they led a quiet and
prosperous life. A son and daughter were born, whom she named Brandon
and Elizabeth. She was famous in a large circle of friends for her
stories of the old days, regarded Wisconsin as her home, and always
said that she wanted to be buried there.
On the Tower lawn, after her funeral, her daughter Elizabeth told her
aunt Rose about her mother’s later life and death; and Alwyn sat in the
grass, pretending to read, but near enough to listen.
In her sixty-sixth year, after she had grown accustomed to widowhood,
when her son-in-law was in good health and her little grandson had gone
away to school and there was nothing to keep her, she decided that she
had not seen enough of the world. So she went to visit Eliza; and they
sailed for Liverpool in the spring. Together they stayed in Brighton,
Monte Carlo, and Homburg, as well as the capital cities, and joined
a conducted tour of Egypt, Palestine, and the Near East. Eliza, who
had changed little, complained, grew tired, and was ill at the wrong
moments; Mary bullied her affectionately. She herself was intrepid in
visiting monuments, in subduing officials and porters, in pronouncing
the names of foreign foods. But she grew tired of a continent whose
youth had not been identical with hers; she said that the Egyptians
and even the Italians were too much like the slaves in the South. She
grew timid in trains and hotels, thinking, perhaps, of the men who had
hurt her long ago, though she would not admit it to her sister; and she
said, “I miss the birds I am used to,” the birds of the Mississippi
Valley. So they came home. Eliza, who hated the West still, would
not go to Oklahoma with her; so the two sisters parted after a long
embrace, and Mary went on alone, a little old lady, brown and plump, in
a cloud of veils. When she arrived at her daughter’s home, she took to
her bed, saying: “No doctors, if you please. I’m very well. But I’ve
earned a good rest.”
On the day of her death she said, “I’ve taken a good many trips in my
time,” and raised her eyes to the mosaic picture frame in which, arm
in arm with her thin, timid sister, she herself as a girl looked down
undismayed at her deathbed. They heard her whisper, “Still far to go.”