After the Civil War, Alwyn’s great-aunt Nancy Tower married a man named
Jesse Davis, and went to Iowa to live.
Two years later a hired carriage drove into her brother Henry’s yard.
Rose opened the door. Nancy stood on the porch with her child in her
arms. Her long fingers were spread in a star against the child’s body,
sustaining it anxiously. Quite at ease, as if her arms were a chair,
the baby boy gazed at his unknown relative.
“Rose, I’ve come home for a little while. I’ve brought my child
Timothy.”
Rose rang the dinner bell--clang upon clang breaking in the solid
sky--and presently Henry came in from the fields. When he kissed his
sister she burst into tears, gave the child to Rose, and hurried out of
doors.
Henry said: “Nancy is overwrought. She was always delicate. Say nothing
about it to her.”
When she returned she glanced at her sister-in-law timidly and murmured
in explanation, “I was lonesome in Iowa.”
She had married for love. Jesse Davis’s father was a livestock dealer
in Iowa, and he had spent two summers with an uncle who was the Towers’
nearest neighbor. Red-haired and heavy, he had worked and shouted
in the harvest, while Nancy watched him from a log fence wound with
wild vines, her chin in the palm of one hand. At a lake picnic he had
come out of the water in a torn blue shirt knotted between his legs,
unharnessed a young workhorse and galloped along the shore, beating it
with his heels. Nancy had clung to a tree trunk, faint with admiration
and terror. Then he had leaped back into the water, and as the light of
a half moon filtered into the daylight had floated and swum among the
sticky reeds; and he had forced Nancy to wear on her head water lilies
in a wet crown.
Young men had never paid attention to her, because she was timid
and not unusually pretty. Jesse Davis had forced his love upon her.
On Sunday mornings, having searched the marshes, he had brought her
bunches of swamp orchids, and on the back of the hand which had thrust
them into hers the hair had glistened in a fringe. The girl had
shivered and wept; but that hand, brown as the orchids and soiled by
the muck of their roots, had seemed to close upon her heart.
But now she did not appear to think of going back to him. Day after
day she helped Rose as if it were her own home. When letters came from
Jesse, she slipped them hastily into her bodice as a young girl would
hide love letters. Henry was surprised that she did not read them aloud.
Both families were troubled. At the end of a month William Davis,
Jesse’s uncle, a strong, stupid man, complained to Henry: “Nancy does
wrong to stay up here so long. Hard on Jesse. I can’t guess what ails
the girl.”
A week later Henry received this letter from his brother-in-law:
Dear Friend Henry:
I guess you don’t realize that Nancy went away from home without
notifying me for how long or why. You are her blood and if you
comprehend her whims please write. I have been a good husband to
her and it is her duty to come back but she doesn’t answer my
letters. Please write,
Your friend and brother-in-law,
Jesse.
Henry asked Nancy, “When do you plan to go back to Iowa?”
She smiled half-heartedly, as if to distract his attention from her
miserable eyes. “Why, don’t you want me to stay any longer?”
“It’s not that, sister. I wish you’d never had to leave home. But we
can’t do what we like in this life. There’s your duty to Jesse. Have
you anything to complain of in his behavior?”
“Oh, Jesse ...” she cried with apparent relief. “He’s a born bachelor.
I guess he’s a lot happier without a woman there to nag him.”
Henry said to Rose: “Nancy must be prevailed on to go back home. We’ll
ask brother John and Will Davis and his wife to Sunday dinner.”
“It’ll do no good to force her,” Rose replied. “She seems to have
fancies. Maybe she’s not quite right in her mind since she married.”
His face darkened. “Don’t say such a thing, Rose.”
They came from church: Mrs. Will Davis in black silk, happy and
determined; her husband and John Tower in broadcloth, celluloid
collars, and black ties sewed into bows. As they ate the large dinner
which Rose had prepared, their eyes blamed Nancy for the blame which
they felt called upon to express. She kept the child on her knees. A
thick sunbeam fell at her side, in which specks of dust climbed and
descended like aimless, miniature people on a staircase; she passed
her fingers back and forth in it; the motes took flight, and Timothy
clutched at the lean shadow of her hand.
Rose wanted no responsibility for what they were going to say--it was
for the Towers and Davises to settle between them; so she cleared the
table and remained in the kitchen.
“My nephew writes ...” Mrs. Davis began, her fine eyes sparkling. “You
do wrong, that’s my opinion, not to be a good wife to him.”
Nancy turned pale. A woman in a dress which glistened darkly, and three
men--their glances hard and tired--sitting in a circle. Why had she not
thought of an explanation to offer them? She tried to think of one, and
suddenly she herself could not remember why she could not go back to
her husband.
Her brother John said, gently: “Nancy is a good wife. She has had a
long visit with her folks, and now she will go home.”
The child laid his little red hand on his mother’s trembling mouth and
began to whimper. Rose came in from the kitchen and took him out on the
lawn where her own children were playing.
Nancy stood up. “Make no mistake,” she said in a loud voice. “This is
my home. I haven’t any other. But I’m helpless. I’ll have to go where
you send me.” She stood rigidly in the center of the room; her lips
continued to move, as if she were giving them a complete explanation,
voicelessly.
Mrs. Will Davis snapped her fingers. “Niece, there is no cause to take
on so!”
Nancy stopped, and took Henry’s hand, “Forgive me, brother. You don’t
understand, but--you know best.” She ignored the other woman. “Uncle
Will, write Jesse that I’m coming. Now we’ll say no more about it.”
Then she sat down. “Aunt Permelia, is your brother getting on well in
California? I wonder if he ever sees Leander.”
To their amazement, she made them talk of other things. So they had
their way; and she returned to Iowa.
In January Jesse wrote once more:
Dear Friends:
Nancy can’t seem to settle down and be happy. She is expecting
another baby. Can’t you pay us a visit and I think it would
reconcile her. It would do you both good to have a rest and see
this great state. My business is fine and I would be willing to
send you the fare thinking it would do Nancy good.
Rose left her little children with her sister Adelaide. They arrived
in Beacon, Iowa, early in February. Jesse met them in the village,
and they drove through the snowdrifts, the jangle of the sleigh bells
keeping them from talking.
Nancy, flushed with pleasure and embarrassment, led them to the spare
room, and showed them her house proudly. A cot for Timothy stood
beside her narrow bed, and she did not open one door at the back of
the house. “That is Jesse’s room. It was meant for a hired man, but he
likes it best.”
The soft-maple floors gleamed as if they were marble. She lifted the
grass-green shades in the parlor windows. There were armchairs drawn up
around a table shining with wax, a crocheted tidy on the back of each;
and in a cupboard a dinner set decorated with brown bamboo and birds
stood in faultless array amid the paper-lace borders. Rose said, “You
keep house as if it were a religion.”
A blush colored Nancy’s pale cheeks whenever Jesse came into the house.
He was a coarse man, boots to his knees, with filth in the creases;
his finger nails were black, and his red mustache stained by chewing
tobacco; there was an odor of the stable wherever he went. He had a
look of shame and anger, and Rose understood him--he was like her
brothers.
Boisterously, proud of a sharp deal in horses or cattle, he would stoop
for the laughing child; but his wife would cry, sharply, “Don’t touch
him”; then hesitate, smile half-heartedly, and murmur at last: “You
haven’t washed. You’ll spoil his clothes.”
Rose found an opportunity to say to him, “Maybe, Jesse, if you kept
yourself up better, Nancy would be more satisfied. You know she’s
overdelicate.”
He hung his head. “I can’t be governed by her notions. She married me
as I am. I can’t change my ways.”
Their visit had failed. It was as if there were to be, sooner or
later, a trial of Nancy’s character, and she considered them only as
eye witnesses. She talked inconsequently of her housekeeping, Jesse’s
habits, and the heat of the Iowa summers--though it was then midwinter.
Henry seemed to know what she was talking about, and gnawed the tip of
his mustache.
The cutter in which they drove to the station held three, so Nancy did
not go with them. Rose said: “Bear up, Nancy. Don’t take it so hard.
Jesse is kind and a good provider. You’ll get used to his ways.”
Henry kissed her, clenched his teeth, and walked away without looking
back; he could not blame his brother-in-law, nor forgive him.
The cutter slid away in a trough of discolored snow. Nancy began to
weep, not because the relatives had gone--she needed to be alone. The
house was quiet and sweet, hidden in a snow bank; if she could have
it all to herself, with Timothy asleep ... A sinful thought--for a
woman has to have a husband, and a child a father. She fingered her
wet cheeks--ah! she had touched the horse blanket, had folded it
round their feet; and she hurried to wash her hands. Then she sat
in the immaculate parlor and tried to be happy for one moment. But
her nostrils quivered; there was an odor of Jesse’s stables, faint,
floating around her head; and she shrank in the chair, as if it were an
invisible hand lifted to strike her.
Spring. The snow and ice went away in thick floods. The sun, rather red
and heavy, mounting in the sky, made her think of Jesse in the first
summer of their acquaintance. It was lifting itself up to caress every
bit of refuse and impregnate every furrow. From the kitchen window
she could see wet pyramids of dung being scattered over the fields. In
foul nests little chickens which resembled yellow roses broke open the
buds of shell; and the garden began to bloom, though she was not strong
enough to work in it.
Summer. July burning again, and the air smoky with flies. Nancy
could not breathe and could not stop breathing. It was their wedding
anniversary; three years ago this same heat had been love. Jesse was to
blame. She loved him; love and repugnance were one. She thought, I am a
wicked and lost woman.
The evening star peered from a tree; it was like the eye of a bird,
a sick bird. She tried to be more religious, in order to forgive the
world its uncleanness. With a gross gesture life began; it could end
only by decay; if Timothy died, his body ... Filth fed the roots of
the clean plants; Jesse’s stables provided her child with food; it was
God’s plan. Love married to disgust, everlastingly married; it was a
sacrament; it was sinful to want to divorce them. She could not repent,
but she could be humble; and in her humility she remembered that her
own body was not pure; no earthly water could wash it. An impure
cradle.... Nancy threw herself on the floor, and knew that the pain of
her second childbirth had begun, too soon.
Jesse wrote to the relatives in Wisconsin:
Our little girl was born too soon and died. Nancy did not see fit
to shed a tear. There is no sense to her misery and it has made her
inhuman. She was very sick, but is now doing well.
Later:
This is to inform you of very bad news. My poor wife seems to be
failing in her mind. She won’t let little Tim drink milk and she
washes him until he gets so tired he cries. She is so set against
me I don’t know what I am going to do.
In November they received a letter from Nancy herself:
Dear Brother and Sister,
I want to tell you that they’re taking me away. They call it a
hospital, it is an asylum. I’m writing so you won’t blame Jesse,
he’s had more than he can bear. They say I’m losing my mind and I
suppose they’re right. I always thought it would end this way.
Before his wife’s eyes Henry’s emotion shook his whole body. It was not
pity; he had endured his disaster; everyone had to bear his own, at
least everyone of that family. It was not pity--it was fear. His own
sister broken by insignificant things, in a despicable combination....
Could he himself be broken as well and whining madness be uncovered?
Her breakdown betrayed their common weakness, hidden by dignity
until now. She would not be able to forgive herself; he, too, was
humiliated--brotherly love taking the form of shame.
Seven months later Jesse wrote:
They say that Nancy is all right again and she came home. I find
her much the same, but she is more clear in her ideas and more
patient with me. God is my witness that I didn’t want her to stay
there any longer than needful but she’s far from a well woman.
Knowing what her trouble is now, I try to overlook more.
The next letter was from Nancy:
It is wicked to say so but if they had let me have my child I’d
have been willing to stay in the Asylum. I dread the summer. I
guess you’ll say something is wrong with my head still. Don’t blame
me.
In September Jesse wrote once more:
My poor wife is getting more flighty again. I can’t say what to do.
If she has to go again I’ll have to give up the little boy, for I
can’t take the care of him that ought to be taken.
In October, without warning as before, Nancy arrived in Wisconsin with
Timothy. She threw herself on her knees at Henry’s feet, striking the
floor with her hands. Rose did not know what to do with herself, so she
took Timothy away.
“Don’t send me back,” Nancy cried. “I’m all right. Don’t shut me up
again. I’m not crazy. I’ll be good and work. I’ll do what you tell me.
But don’t send me back.”
Far off under the trees her child could be heard crying, cries muffled
in Rose’s apron. Henry knelt and prayed. When he stood up his mouth was
as firm as if he had not been praying abjectly, but had merely risen
from his chair at a family council.
“My mind is made up,” he said. “Stop crying. You shan’t go back. I’ll
write Jesse. You ought never to have married. Don’t cry. You’d better
pray.” Then he left her and went to find Rose.
She lived with them until spring, when he found a little home for her
in Aaronsville. A miracle took place: as soon as she became accustomed
to her new way of life, she gave no sign even of eccentricity. Rose
said: “You can’t follow the ways of God. Nancy is as sound of mind and
body as I am.”
She had only one whim, a desire not to be called Mrs. Davis, but Nancy
Tower, as if she had never been married. Soon she was earning a good
living as a dressmaker and a weaver of rugs. She became proficient
quickly in all the feminine accomplishments of the period, and gave
lessons in china painting, embroidery, and leather work. She was
a noted housekeeper, whose recipes for cakes and jellies were as
celebrated as those of any cookbook.
Timothy grew to be a tall boy of great beauty. He resembled Jesse in
many respects, but it was not necessary for Nancy even to forgive him
for what had been unendurable in his father.
During his twelfth year they were spending a day at Henry’s, and she
went up on the hills alone to gather elderberries. Here and there in
the pastures lay a stone pile, like an altar, on which mullein stood in
the windless atmosphere--stalk beside stalk of pale yellow fire; and
there was a clucking of invisible quail. Nancy stripped the berries
from the bushes in drooping, maroon clusters.
Then she saw Rose’s little Jimmie hurrying up the slope. “Aunt Nancy!”
he cried; but at first she could not understand the rest, because he
was out of breath. He drew near. “Aunt Nancy! Uncle Jesse is down at
the farm.”
She dropped the basket, the elderberries tumbling out on the short
grass. She remembered her husband’s letters asking to have the boy at
least part of each year; he had come for Timothy.
Her nephew started down the hill again, picking up little stones to
throw at gophers. “Come back here, Jimmie,” she called. “Where is he
now?”
“He ’n’ Tim started for a walk toward the Old Well.”
He and Timothy.... She lifted her skirts and began to run. The little
boy stared after her, threw down his pebbles, and hurried home. She
was running like a wild animal. Halfway down the hill her hair came
down. She frightened a gray cat that was out hunting; it took flight
up a tree. She slipped through a barbed-wire fence, tearing her dress.
She stumbled in the furrow of a plowed field and fell. Down a lane
where there was a spring, leaping from bog to bog; down an aisle of
willows....
They were leaning against the railing of the Old Well. Jesse looked
prosperous and unhealthy; he was fingering a gold watch fob and his new
suit was spotted with grease. He stared at her disheveled hair, her
dirty, bruised arms, as if he thought that she had gone mad again.
The boy said in his embarrassment: “I’m glad to see father. Aren’t you?”
“Well, Jesse, you’ve come....”
There was a long pause. A young bull bellowed along the fence not far
away, stamping the sod; and a bobolink rose through the sunshine and
came down in the parachute of its music.
“You can’t have Timothy,” Nancy said. “He’s my boy. I’ve brought him
up. I’ve worked hard to support him for years. You mustn’t take him
away.”
“Well, Nancy, I thought I could give him opportunities.”
The boy hung his head, ashamed to have spoiled their reunion, and
walked away.
“All right, Nancy, since you take it like that. I don’t want you to
have another attack.”
“I won’t have an attack,” she said, fiercely. “I’ve made my way alone
now for a long time. I’m strong, Jesse. But Timothy is all I’ve got.”
He stammered: “Say--say no more about it. I’ll go away again. But,
Nancy, I’m getting on in years. I’m lonesome.”
She pitied him. “You can come and live with us if you want to. You
weren’t to blame. I’ll make a home for you.”
“I wouldn’t do that. No. You’d get worse again. I’d be to blame.” He
was husky. “Good-by, wife.” He kissed her and started back to the
farmhouse.
She could see Timothy on the crest of a hill, swinging a stick and
cutting off the tops of blueweeds; she called to him, but he did not
hear. She started to run after Jesse--but what could she say to him?
So she sat down on the cow trough and wept. From a slender elm a leaf
fluttered through the air like a bird, and lit on the ground.
Three months later she said to Henry: “Jesse has written. He wants to
come and live with me. I’ve written him to come. It’s right he should.
He’s Tim’s father. I’ll be glad to make a home for him. He’s not in
good health, and he wasn’t to blame.”
Henry stared at the sky and shook his head obstinately.
“You can’t believe I’m all right, can you?” she murmured. He had
nothing to say.
Jesse arrived. There was a room for him with a door of its own into the
back yard. He found work by the day, and later began to drive for the
livery stable.
Henry said: “You oughtn’t to allow Jesse to work in a stable. You know
it’ll make you nervous again.”
She smiled quietly. “He’s always been with horses; he’ll be more
content. I’m glad he’s doing what he likes. I shan’t mind. I want to
show that I don’t mind.”
Henry was anxious. Rose said: “Nancy is a changed woman. She has a
wonderful character.”
Jesse had changed more than she. He was a heavy, worried man, not
boisterous any more; his constant anxiety was grotesque. Nancy, busy
with her dressmaking and living for her son, seemed only half aware of
his existence. Her good-natured admonitions were more terrible than
tragic reproaches. He was never at ease in the house; exchanged his
shoes for carpet slippers when he came in; was afraid to sit down in
the clean chairs; and ate with downcast eyes for fear his wife or son
would look at him with disapproval.
Henry refused to hear his complaints, so he complained to Rose: “I’m
not a man in my own house. She can nag at me without saying a word.
Tim takes her side. She treats me as if I were a boarder.”
When he was working away from home he was more like his old self,
coarse and happy-go-lucky. But he grew strange in his ways, arguing
with himself as if in his second childhood, and giving the horses in
the livery stable strange names: Lavina, Jesse, and Jubilee, instead
of Topsy, Dobbin, and Baldy. He was a man who had provoked madness--it
might happen again; and he felt the angry loneliness of those who are
dangerous to others.
He wrote to his brother in Iowa to dispose of his house and his share
in their father’s livestock business--yards, pastures, horses, and
wagons. He drew all the money out of the bank when it came.
Nancy remarked: “I don’t know what has become of Jesse’s money.
Goodness knows I don’t want it, or need it either. But I hope he hasn’t
made some outlandish investment.”
One Sunday afternoon the Towers had a visitor: a stout woman of middle
age in untidy billows of brown percale. Her hat tipped forward under
an ostrich plume like a horse’s mane. She advanced over the lawn in a
stately fashion.
“I don’t know as you remember me. I am Mrs. Jervis, a widow, and live
over by the sawmill. I went to school to you, Mrs. Tower; I was Lavina
Trump. Your brother-in-law, Mr. Davis, stayed with me the time he was
working on the State Road. I want to ask your advice about something.”
She was embarrassed without being distressed. “Well, you see, it’s
this way. Jesse was quite nice to me. It seems he’s not so happy at
home.”
She cleared her throat. “Now the other day he came for a visit. I
noticed how he had something in a handkerchief. He told how he had sold
his property in Iowa. Now what I want to ask is, is there any trouble
between him and your sister, that is, his wife, and is he planning on
leaving her? Because I’ve always had the greatest respect for your
family, and don’t want to cause any trouble. Because all of a sudden
he gave me the handkerchief and said he wanted me to have it and would
like to marry me. It was full of bills--really a lot of money. I
thought I ought to tell you.”
Henry sprang to his feet. “The man is mad!”
“It was his wife, I thought,” the widow murmured. “I heard she was out
of her mind once.”
Rose clapped her hands together. “The Lord help us!” she cried. “This
beats all!”
“He’s been acting queer,” Henry continued, pacing about the room, “and
now he doesn’t know what he’s doing. I’ll have him taken in custody. I
tell you, he’s mad.”
Mrs. Jervis sniffed and wiped her eyes. “I’ll tell him. I’ll stop
seeing him. To mislead a widow--it was hard.” She took her leave,
trying to be majestic and complacent in a way that suited this turn of
events.
Henry said to his wife, “Don’t breathe a word to Nancy about this
widow.”
Jesse announced a few days later that he would have to go back to Iowa
to look after his affairs. “You must understand, Rose,” he said, “that
I’m a miserable man. My only friend, a woman you don’t know, has showed
me the door. There’s no place for me anywhere.”
He never returned, and did not answer Nancy’s letters. She wrote to his
brother, who replied that he was doing chores for a well-to-do farmer
who was bedridden, and was in poor health himself.
Nancy did not understand why he had gone; in one way or another, it
must have been her fault. His breakdown was a mocking repetition of
her own--her own reversed. She asked herself if she ought to have led
a different life, and could not answer. Confused and disappointed, she
mourned for the fat, unreasonable man she had loved, for the marriage
from which she had fled. Timothy was impatient with her melancholy, as
his father would have been; and in fact, no one could understand her.
Then Leander came home; he had always been her favorite brother. He had
been away during the entire period of her troubles, and wanted to know
what had happened; so she talked to him by the hour.
It was a trial of her life and character. His thin face never frowned,
never smiled; the tired woman, tired of her own courage, hoped that
God’s face would be as indifferent and gentle. He understood. Not any
one person had forgiven her--not Henry or Jesse or even Timothy, not
Leander whom she had not wronged; but somehow, she had been forgiven.
As she told the long, redundant story she reëxperienced the terror of
being loved, the shame and loneliness of having lost her mind, the pity
of being a widow without the intervention of death; reëxperienced all
these things, and did not mind them any more.