There was a small house which appeared to have stolen out of
Aaronsville as a heartbroken man withdraws from a crowd which he has
joined for distraction. Upon his return to Wisconsin, Leander Tower
bought it, with all the furniture its owners were willing to leave
behind them. His cottage in California was occupied by tenants; but
he knew very well that the surrounding fields, on which they hoped to
make a living as gardeners, were less fertile than ashes, and doubted
whether the rent would ever be paid. So he decided to become a rural
postman, and in due time was given an appointment.
Every morning before dawn he harnessed a little sleepy mare, called at
the post office for the mail bag, and drove from house to house over
a fixed route. He placed under the visors of mail boxes letters from
distant sons, post cards covered with kisses, testimonials of drugs
which cured all pain, mental and physical, and seed catalogues; and
sold stamps and envelopes to housewives or to haggard little girls in
pigtails. No one dared to say that he read the post cards, but everyone
was embarrassed by his look of understanding.
The correspondence in his custody, none of it addressed to him,
represented life and his relation to life: hastily written outcries,
half-articulate avowals, and merely practical questions and answers,
passing impersonally through his hands. The syncopation of the horse’s
hoofs, the faint thunder inside its body when it ran, the drifting
fields and branches, soothed him; his mouth relaxed and his eyes grew
drowsy.... Winter was a hard season for the postman. The pure sky
hung down like a bridal veil. Moist snowflakes pressed with a cruel
sensuality here, there, and everywhere. Blizzards reached inside the
closed wagon and inside his coonskin coat, to embrace him. High drifts
had to be opened with shovels. There were bad days in January when he
did not dare leave the village, and the routine which relieved his
melancholy was interrupted. But the Wisconsin spring, so remote in
January that one forgets what it is, returned at last automatically,
its damp mouth half open, full of music--never looking at Leander with
its abstract eyes.
He began to surround his house with a garden. One could not see it
over the mock-orange hedge; but intermingled with the odor of dust,
of sweating horses, of a sweetheart’s cheap scent, the passer-by was
likely to detect the odor of Leander’s herbs: sweet basil and carroway,
fennel and coriander, dill, sage, summer thyme, true lavender, and
wormwood. The whole garden, without the usual showy borders, without
the usual golden-glow and peonies, resembled that bed of herbs. The
voluble earth, fond of assertions and repetitions, had been forced to
whisper a nervous poetry.
He separated the plants, each one perfect of its kind, by artificially
arid spaces, and covered the roots of an Ophelia rose with a pavement
of pebbles. Two moss roses appeared to bleed from their own
thorns. There was mourning-bride thrust full of stamens, one or two
flame-flowers, and moonwort, and rock arabis. In the autumn, on the
brown dusk, a day-lily with its pale face of a frightened boy, went to
sleep.
Leander placed a stool on the path and crouched there, hiding his
mouth in his lean hands. A dwarf chrysanthemum sprinkled the air
with acrimony. The walls of the sky, like those of a church where
nothing has ever been consumed by burning, smelled of a dead fire. An
atmosphere of fatigued passion, where passion had never been free. As
if he were a man so old that no night is of interest in itself, his
thoughts always began: On such a night ...
The Civil War. A village turned into a barracks, a fence turned into
a stable. A mule broke loose and kicked a dog, which rolled howling
in the bushes. Candlelight pointed by tents. The odor of oleanders
and diseases. An accordion out of breath on a soldier’s lap, roughly
embraced and crying out. Here and there on the ground camp fires lay
like red roses. Seeming to inhale the perfume of one of the fires,
there stood Hilary all alone.
Leander could not recall clearly the days when his sister-in-law Rose
had been his sweetheart, but he could remember remembering them during
the war. Military sorrow mixed with sweetness--Rose’s former sweetness:
the cinnamon rose muffled in thorns, the rose all burning cheeks and
awkwardness. Then the bright mornings had been so bright that love
had thrown shadows in every direction, so bright that he had paid no
attention to the shadows....
Shadowy Hilary following them over the hilltops, watching them from
a rock or a log fence; a very calm attention, without curiosity--the
boy understood everything about love but its cause; watching with the
fright of one who sees something unnatural happen every day. One night,
one of the boy’s hands extended toward Leander (in silhouette against
the window over the bed they shared), the other hand taking it by the
wrist and drawing it back. A good-night kiss, abrupt and as it were
disdainful. Strange behavior.... On which of these occasions had Hilary
been asleep? Day after day, night after night, intermingled with Rose’s
wide-awake passion, these obstinacies of sleep....
Then Leander had thought it sufficient to be fond of his brother; years
too late he tried to understand him. Hilary’s enthusiasm for the war
should have reminded him that it would be fatal: delight in being a
frail child in the army, because Leander had to defend him night and
day against bullies; delight in the fact that relatives and friends
were far away; displeasure when letters arrived. His excitement was a
sort of joy, a sort of joy which broke his heart because he knew it
could not last forever.
For Leander the war and his own life were divided in two parts by the
hour of Hilary’s disappearance. Nine o’clock of an evening in 1864:
singing interrupted, the jokes of great fear, half-starved horses
whinnying, the enemy close in the dark. Just after the boy left him,
staring back over the camp fire with one of those cold expressions
which cover inexpressible feeling, Leander understood what it all
meant, and whispered one word to himself: “Love ...”
He knew now, in his fortieth year, that if he had been able to believe
what he had whispered then, he would have felt an impossible yearning;
that if it had been peace time, if he had been at home, he would have
been afraid. But the war that night had been altogether fear. One
despair more or less, one word spoken or unspoken, changed nothing--the
war went on. About half past nine the guerilla fighting, which
lasted all night, had begun with loud curses in two dialects; a gun
discharged, and a dog screaming here and there, having been shot. And
no one had realized until midnight that Hilary was not in the camp.
Over Wisconsin the moon rose, and it looked like a silver pitcher,
and a little stream from its mouth splashed on Leander’s temples. He
thought of sleep: “If you sleep with the moon in your face, you’ll
go mad,” his old mother had said. He went indoors, gathered up the
remains of supper--folding cheese in paper, laying aside cobs of sweet
corn for the pig, pouring out milk for the cat when she came in from
hunting--and blew out the lamps.
But there was no rest in the wide, second-hand, walnut bed. Coming to
him over the pastures, the music of a barn dance throbbed as if it were
a blood vessel in his own body. He was healthily tired, but could not
sleep; he had to go on thinking all night about that hour which had
divided his life in two parts.
His regiment was established in a deserted village called Belle, in the
Tennessee hills, a little way from the army itself (exhausted along
that part of the line by dysentery), to distract the Rebels. A swamp at
the foot of the hill was always full of their sharpshooters. A little
road was the boundary line; it was called the Bad Road--nobody walked
on it. The best shots in the regiment, lying on their stomachs under
trees, waited for a Southern face to show in the leaves. If one’s foot
slipped on the edge of a gully, one was never heard of again.
There were three brave sisters from Michigan who traveled about, giving
concerts for the men; they sang at Belle that night. In a creaking cart
drawn by a mule and escorted by dirty, bearded boys, they drove into
the village and climbed up on the church veranda. Three women of middle
age--the firelight shook on their slightly red faces. They opened their
chapped mouths, and three tired, half-male voices--now in unison, now
separated in simple harmonies--sounded loudly among the broken porches
and the tents. One or two bats hurried in and out of the window without
panes over their heads. They sang, _Break the news to mother, Tell her
I love no other_; _O my Darling Nellie Gray, They have taken you away_;
_The Battle Cry of Freedom_ (in which many of the men joined); _Tenting
To-night_; and _In the Gloaming_. Hilary and Leander sat on the cot at
the door of their tent.
No one understood what happened then. Perhaps the pickets along the
road had drawn away from their posts toward the singing. Or a Rebel
came up out of the swamp and slipped between them. A shot was fired;
canvas was ripped by a bullet. The singing stopped on a high note; one
sister clasped her head, another pressed her fist against her mouth; a
hoop skirt caught on the balustrade and tore. Another shot was fired,
and something crashed heavily in the brush. The sisters climbed into
the cart; somebody whipped the mule; soldiers ran ahead, holding their
guns in both hands; the cart rattled out of sight up the hill toward
the army. There was a long silence.
A tired lieutenant limped into the firelight to give an order: the
pickets were to keep as close to the Bad Road as they could; the rest
were to stay where they were, inside the camp, but nobody was to go to
bed. He stumbled over a sleepy little negro who was the soldiers’ pet.
The child vanished, whimpering; the officer sighed.
Leander lit a candle in the tent. Hilary looked as if the singing had
made him drunk. Leander took a purse from his pocket and unwrapped a
tintype of Rose: the earrings in the shadow of ringlets, the black lace
mitts and great ruffles, the face waiting its turn, waiting for peace
to be declared. “I go out to the Bad Road at midnight,” he muttered.
“What are you moping about? What is the matter?” his little brother
muttered.
Leander was taken by surprise. “Oh, we’ve had enough of this. I want to
go home.”
“Home to Rose ...” the boy whispered. “You’re not my brother any more.”
He put his lean hand on Leander’s wrist, and the fingers opened and
closed. “I wish ...”
“What?”
“I wish--the war would keep on always.”
Leander stared at the tintype, and below it the young excited fingers,
and between them the short yellow hairs on his own wrist catching the
candlelight; and he saw Hilary’s other hand creep up among the wool
blankets. Suddenly Hilary snatched at the picture. Leander thrust it
into his pocket, and he was holding the boy by one shoulder. “Don’t be
a fool,” he said huskily.
The boy stood up. Something which had given off sparks for many days,
for years, had caught fire in the dangerous night, in the singing and
the homesickness--it burned by itself; and the boy’s thin body seemed
to sway inside the tent. “I wish,” he said with great difficulty, “that
I’d never been born--your brother. I’d rather--be dead. I don’t--count.
The war won’t--last. You’ll go back--to her. What’ll I do? I want, I
can’t--”
He stooped, and was outside the tent, and stared back over the dying
camp fire.
Leander resented the understanding which followed; he was too tired
to think, and too lonesome; that night was too dangerous to think in.
But he could not help whispering to himself, “Love ...” He wondered
where Hilary was, and thought of hunting for him among the soldiers.
There was a noise of running and two or three reports near the swamp.
He cleaned his gun. At midnight he crawled on his stomach to the Bad
Road; the tired man who was there crept back toward the tents, and
Leander whispered to him: “Tell somebody to find my brother. I don’t
know where he is.” He killed a Rebel. After that everything was quiet.
The man who relieved him toward dawn said that Hilary could not be
found.
Leander as a man of forty, sleepless in his empty house, repeated that
night in his imagination. The dawn when it appeared was greenish and
sluggish--so had that other dawn been. They had not been able to find
Hilary among the bodies which lay in the bushes. Leander felt sick at
dawn, but he was a strong man; so he would get up, harness the mare, go
on his mail route, and work in the garden; he could do what had to be
done. Nevertheless, he realized that he ought not to go on much longer
living alone.
He was universally respected, but had no intimate friends among his
neighbors. The farmers were embarrassed by his flower garden and his
sad politeness, and country women regard bachelors with timidity. It
was clear that he did not mean to marry, and those who had maiden
sisters growing old in the family resented his peculiar way of living.
Because of their love of flowers, he and Mrs. Ira Duff, a woman who was
not generally liked, came to be friends. They exchanged seeds, bulbs,
and cuttings, and read each other’s half-dozen books; she put gifts
of cookies and preserves in the mail box; he grafted her young fruit
trees and prescribed remedies for worms and blight; and every week or
two they spent an hour together in rather formal talk. He was not a
churchgoer, and Mrs. Duff would say: “Leander, a man of your refinement
would do well to attend church. It looks as if you didn’t think
yourself as good as those that do.”
“Ursula,” he answered invariably, “I do not understand God’s will. I
can’t pray for what would come too late anyway, and I can’t see fit to
say Amen to the life I’ve had to live. I’m too sad a sort of man to be
a hypocrite.”
The proud woman, whose husband was notoriously insincere and pious,
smoothed the pleats of her dress. At the end of their conversations
they were always separated by two sets of secrets, to which neither
referred directly.
Leander often thought of going to church with his family, in order to
teach a Sunday-school class. He was drawn toward boys of his little
brother’s age and tried to gain their affection, making kites as
large as barrels, setting the broken legs of dogs in splints, and
distributing puzzles whittled out of basswood with which they might
mystify one another. On the Fourth of July expensive fireworks were
set off in the garden, and he did not complain when his lilies were
trampled underfoot. Hilary would always be young, since he was dead; so
Leander was unwilling to be old. He watched their rude, flushed faces,
and listened to their laughter; he also flushed, with eagerness and
anxiety, and tried to understand the remarks which they shouted to one
another in his presence.
Sometimes he imagined that Rose’s boys resembled Hilary; but they were
rough youngsters, and suspicious of him, like all the rest. For he
could not tolerate their hunting, the amorous cruelty with which they
killed things and carried in their pockets rabbits’ feet and birds’
tails. He was strict in other ways--angry if they spoke immodestly of
women; and all their mothers approved his good influence. So it became
a mark of prudery and effeminacy to be his friend, and at last the good
postman began to seem ridiculous as well as sad.
His relations with his family were warm, without spontaneity. Rose
offered him the same love, pretending to nothing and understanding
nothing, which she gave Henry; it embarrassed him, seeming to be less
than a husband would want and more than a brother-in-law had a right
to. He himself could do no more than remember that he had loved her.
Love had been his way of being happy when he was young; he had grown
old overnight, and unhappiness had become a habit. A seventeen-year-old
habit ...
Seventeen wild summers and winters in California--there was neither
fall nor spring out there. The uneasy peace which he enjoyed in his
brother’s house aroused a host of images of the West, otherwise
unrecalled. A lofty place full of fat foliage and provoking flowers,
where the sun crawled away to sleep. A grunting sort of laughter, loose
women, and spilled liquor. Gold like a drug in newspaper bundles or
dirty pockets; one shouted when one heard of it, and got drunk because
somebody else had it. Tedious danger day after day, as if the war had
never come to an end. There Leander had made fun of all the spells
which had been laid uselessly on his youth, even Hilary’s spell. In
the lamplight, with one of Rose’s children on his knees, the ascetic
man often shook his head incomprehensibly, having heard in his own mind
a venal whimper, or a curse, or a mouthful of obscene song. Only the
fact that after Hilary’s death his heart never could be warm again had
saved him from dissolution.
He received from Henry a limited affection. The little man was anxious
to show that family ties among the Towers had endured the trials of
life. But he believed that he had a right to have a brother whom he
could admire, and regarded Leander as a weakling, a man with a sick
will.
Leander asked himself many questions as the three sat in silence: Had
Henry married Rose because he had run away? If he had become Rose’s
husband, would she have loved him no more than she loved Henry? Was she
capable of other love than this deferential devotion? How much had she
understood? Sometimes he was hurt by her lack of interest. Whom did she
blame: him, or Hilary--or God? She seemed to blame nobody.
When in 1885 she was pregnant once more, Leander learned that she had
forgiven the boy his share in their tragedy, if she had ever known that
he had a share; for she announced that she meant to name the child
Hilary. The day after its birth Leander stood by her bedroom door. Rose
was amazed to have given birth to a female child. Her other little
girls had died; she had three rough, strong boys; the world seemed
to be a man’s world.... “I was going to name it Hilary, as you know,
Leander,” she said. “What shall we call the little thing? You give her
a name.”
Between the lace curtains Leander’s eyes seemed to hunt an aisle
through the trees, a dip in the sky line, where he might catch a
glimpse of his garden. “Call her Flora,” he said.
Then he touched with one finger the tiny hands, red and still wrinkled,
and the reddish-yellow down on the tiny head. He too wanted a child.
He envied the domestic affections of that house, and contrasted it
with the quiet, empty cottage among the snow-in-summer and the lilies
(now beginning to dry up) where he slept with recollections and was
childless.
His sister Nancy was nearest his heart. They two had disgraced the
family; level-headed people had thought them nearly mad; and they
experienced an intimacy of regret. But it was a one-sided intimacy:
she told the history of her heart; he dared not tell his history, so
he held his peace. His excesses in California had been brought to an
end by satiety, not by remorse; no repentance and no expiation--there
was not enough energy left, he supposed. If he had talked about that,
to Nancy, for example, he would have been a sort of outcast at once.
More or less an outcast as it was, though no one else knew it; for that
story set him apart from the rest without being told.
He said to himself quietly (not pitying himself) that he was the more
pitiable of the two. His tragedy had come to an end; Nancy’s had not.
His brother was dead; her husband was alive, and when everything
else failed, she could hope for a miracle. He had nothing to hope
for; miracles were not performed on the hearts of the dead. There was
Lazarus ... But Lazarus had been dead only a little while--twenty years
had gone by since the war; and if Lazarus had been a boy like Hilary,
he would have refused to come to life.
As Nancy talked to him, he talked to himself, without moving his lips,
repeating, contradicting himself. No, Nancy’s troubles were always at
an end; because she was a woman and less thoughtful than he, she had
the gift of letting each moment vanish immediately into the past; day
by day she outlived yesterday’s sorrow. In Leander’s mind every moment
left an indestructible remnant, as each dying coral plant in the sea
leaves a bit of stone where it lived, pink with its blood which does
not fade. All the moments of his life lasted; that nine o’clock during
the war, for example, when he had felt Hilary’s yearning and his
reproach, resembling hate so closely ...
He smiled as he saw Nancy’s eyes brighten, and realized that from the
mask of his affectionate face, while she had talked and he had failed
to listen, she had received a sort of blessing or absolution. Then she
went down the path toward the road, where over the hedge he could see
a horse’s mane and its withers, and her son Timothy’s face. Leander
smiled severely; certainly he was the more pitiable of the two, for she
had Timothy.
Timothy Davis was a boy of great stature and almost perfect beauty.
He was indebted to his mother’s family for his eyes blue as a plum,
his pointed lips and small nostrils; he inherited from Jesse Davis the
burned pink of his skin, his very large hands with round nails, and a
certain rudeness of bone and ripeness of muscle, even in childhood.
He was the sort of boy who would be mild in ruthlessness, who would
reject more gently than other men accept what they have longed for, who
would long for little or nothing, and who would never have to learn, or
hesitate, or pity.
When he was sixteen, his mother, lying in bed with an influenza which
no one feared, was startled by a premonition, and sent him for his
uncle. When Leander entered his sister’s bedroom, her eyes hesitantly
uttered the word death, but she said merely: “You must be lonesome
there by yourself. Tim can help in the garden. I’ve spoiled him
but--but he’s a good boy.”
Leander understood only with the final sentence what her eyes were
saying.
A few days after her death in December, 1885, Leander received a letter
from her husband’s brother in Iowa, saying that Jesse had gone west
with a railroad construction gang as a teamster, and his whereabouts
were uncertain. He showed the letter to his nephew, and said anxiously,
“You might as well stay with me, don’t you think?”
Timothy said, “I could shift for myself, I guess.... But I s’pose I’d
be lonesome. Thank you.”
Leander ceased at once to consider his life as a homogeneously bitter
thing, with a familiar logic and cruelty of its own. He was not afraid
of the incongruity of his happiness. He no longer dreaded the mail
route, but welcomed the cold, the obliterated roads, and the blizzards;
for at home by the fire was Timothy, waiting for him and dreaming over
a book. Leander knew that he did not actually wait, being incapable
of impatience; but he mingled his emotion with the boy’s unconcern,
deliberately; every day he himself waited in imagination for his own
return; so great was his joy. It was poignant joy, because he thought
its days were numbered--Jesse would send for his son.
But in March Timothy received a letter from his uncle in Iowa: “Brother
Jesse is dead;” the name of a town in Texas, the date of a month in
midwinter; “if you are a strong, steady boy, would be willing to give
you a job in my business.” Timothy raised his eyebrows as if death were
a stranger who had entered the room rudely, without warning.
Leander asked: “Would you be willing for me to take out papers to adopt
you? I shall leave some property out West which may be worth a lot of
money if people don’t get as sick of California as I did.”
“All right,” the boy answered.
Spring came down along the full watercourses, and its eyes seemed to
single out Leander. For twenty years he had seen the yellow and gray
bills of the birds move, without hearing what they sang; now he could
not believe his ears.
There followed three years of happiness, very difficult happiness which
prevented him from remembering the war. Instead, night after night, he
was kept awake by a troubled gratitude for the yesterday and to-morrow
between which that night lay. California came into his dreams as if
it were a hope; there was a tune which he could not hear but saw
lying out straight in the air, a mountain broken open and turning
into a rose--but never a dream which disturbed the next morning. His
desires did not hurt; they were a secret which enriched him with its
embarrassment, and he loved his nephew more because he could keep
it from him. He told himself that Timothy gave him the place in his
affections which his father had not filled.
The boy was magnificently idle. Sunshine was his energy--he lay in it;
the fire in the stove was industrious for him--he nestled close to it.
Every morning he tried to make coffee before Leander went out with the
mail, and every morning Leander actually made it. He shivered sleepily
by the hearth, his wide throat unbuttoning the flannel nightshirt, his
legs crossed inside an old fur coat, and often fell asleep again before
Leander left the house. He pretended to work in the garden, but was
afraid that his awkward hands would hurt a plant. He knew _Gulliver’s
Travels_ by heart, and would read no other book, gazing at his hands
and imagining himself a giant in a race of dwarfs, gazing at the hills
or the great clouds and imagining himself a pygmy in a race of giants.
Leander wanted to teach him Spanish, but he learned only one song,
which he shouted beautifully and incorrectly. Leander tried to rouse in
him some ambition and wanted him to go to college; but the boy could
not remember from day to day, of what he was failing to be persuaded.
Rose understood him. “He is what my brothers ought to have been,” she
said.
Henry muttered, “That boy won’t amount to much.”
Leander was content. So many anxious hopes of their family given up at
last; one pair of Tower eyes which refused to look into the future;
one flower not fertilized by hopeless ambition; one less regret to
wither on the family tree. No embarrassment, no vanity, no resentment
or covetousness or haste.... Timothy reversed the family formula, which
was to be proud in anticipation, ashamed in retrospect. His hopes were
humble; therefore, Leander thought, he might be happy to the end of his
life.
Leander’s wages from the government were small, and it was often
difficult to make ends meet. But in 1887 his tenants in the West
suddenly paid the overdue rent. It was a good omen; and he thought,
incidentally, that for some reason his property must have increased in
value, that the renters had hastened to fulfill their obligations lest
they be ejected. He gave Timothy as much spending money as he dared, in
view of the family disapproval. Every six months thereafter a payment
came, and they had everything they wanted.
For three years Leander’s felicity did not seem to diminish, but
prepared its own end as a summer does. He had certain principles,
rooted in emotion, which could not be set aside, even to please
Timothy. There was his horror of hunting. “If men weren’t so used to
killing animals,” he said, “they’d not kill each other.” He told again
and again how he and his brothers and their like had exterminated a
race of large pigeons, feeling for their feet among the branches at
night, strangling them, and carrying them home in baskets, more than
any family could eat. He made the whole world seem for the moment
nothing but a dreary woods where birds had been slaughtered, and as
he spoke a dark disapproval of his sensibility increased in Timothy’s
eyes; it was like the twilight in a tree which favors the designs of
hunters.
Furthermore, the fine young men in the country, including Timothy’s
cousins, worked all day and were usually exhausted at night. Those
with as much time on their hands as he had--younger sons of retired
farmers, village merchants and barkeepers’ boys, and livery-stable
drivers--were on the whole passively vicious and drunken. Leander
thought that drunkenness was appropriate only to sorrow, and wanted his
boy to have as little to do with one as with the other. So, courteously
but severely, he prevented him from forming close friendships in the
village.
There were moments when Timothy’s impatience was evident. This
impatience seemed to say that he did not want one man’s affection to
displace the good-natured approval of the whole world; that he did not
want to have to say yes or no to anything, and did not want to love
or be loved. Then Leander would realize, for a moment, that only some
sort of slavery could hold two men so unlike together: the slavery of
common memories, or duty, or poverty, or passionate love. Timothy was
free. Leander would gaze at the young giant sitting with his face in
the sun or curled up by the stove; the hair on his head like a military
cap of fur, his magnificent hands seeming to promise to break whatever
they touched. And Leander would feel as weak as he had once been
strong--very suddenly he would remember Hilary’s young worn-out face
over the camp fire the night he had been strongest, and fear a further
punishment; regret was not enough....
He decided, nevertheless, to behave as if he trusted the future--the
Towers had hastened too many disasters by looking forward; and he hoped
that now at last God would want to prove that He was good.
But the best of life is over when satisfactions begin to age one as
disappointments have done. Joy proved its reality by leaving scars on
his face, smaller but deeper than those of sorrow. He began to look
haggard and sad even when he smiled.
Rose and Henry were anxious. “Leander is by nature a bachelor,” they
said, “and ought not to have a son on his hands--it is too much for
him.”
During the summer of 1887 he was ill for a week. “I don’t know why,”
the old doctor said, “but you seem to need a rest.”
He let his substitute go on delivering the mail two or three days after
the doctor had pronounced him a well man, and he and Timothy went to
Port Oliver on the lake. They boarded with the storekeeper’s wife. Rose
had made a pair of bathing trunks from some red-flannel underwear, and
Timothy swam by the side of the fishing dory they rented. When he stood
up his chest rose in a great V out of his lean waist, and his thighs
arched forward a little from his lean hips. Leander shouted when he
sprang overboard and the water splashed in his face. Timothy rowed,
grimacing in the sunshine; and Leander, in the stern, watched the gulls
hesitate and let themselves be blown by the wind, and the boy’s hands
coming rhythmically forward, pulling down his knotted shoulders. After
supper they walked along the dunes, and Timothy sang and threw stones
into the waves. Leander said, “Some day you must see the Pacific.”
The following winter Timothy discovered a sweetheart--a girl named Iris
Lodge, nicknamed Irish. Henry was displeased: “You let that boy of
yours take up with a wild no-’count girl, and a Catholic, besides. Poor
Nancy was a God-fearing woman. Your ideas are too loose, Leander.”
Leander could imagine Timothy’s emotion (imagining, perhaps, more than
the boy felt) because the girl had almost colorless eyes, so sensitive
that they continually took refuge under her slant eyelids, and because
her mouth was red, pointed, and not gentle. He bought a third horse,
so that there should always be a fresh one in the stable to take
them to and from husking bees, dances, box parties, and picnics. The
boy thanked him by going out night after night, leaving him alone.
Sometimes Leander had a certain irritation to hide. One day in the
village store he heard the lovely girl call him “Tim’s father and
mother”; but she was almost servile in her smiling politeness whenever
they met.
In the early autumn of 1888 an astonishing thing happened. A solitary
woodcock made its home in the underbrush of a butternut grove above the
house. Several times at dusk Leander saw it in one of a row of scrub
oaks which grew along a stone fence down to his garden. He was amazed,
for the woodcock is more shy than any other game bird, and asked his
nephew to keep its presence there a secret. Every night he watched
among the bushes, dividing the week into days of its retirement and
days of its appearance; and at last began to scatter crumbs and small
grain under the trees it had visited. He never saw it eat, and supposed
that small, ordinary birds consumed his offering; but little by little
it grew bold, and from one stunted tree to another, from the dusk
inside a tree to an exposed branch, approached the house.
One day after sunset Timothy called him to the kitchen window, and
there it was in the garden among the chrysanthemums, looking like
an infinitely old bronze ornament, walking and leaping slowly. They
whispered behind the windowpane, complaining of the clouds which their
breath made upon it, for the twilight was cold. Something about the
bird’s appearance seemed to indicate its unlikeness to others of its
kind--its unusual courage, and the intuition by which it knew itself
safe and loved. When it stood on a patch of soil, touching a clod now
and then with its bill, Leander half expected it to pass from the
visible to the invisible without another motion; but it rose at last
and fluttered away heavily in the dark.
It came again. Leander waited for it, daydreaming of angels, thinking
they must resemble Timothy in certain respects and the bird in others.
It made him feel lonely, because no one he had ever known would be so
moved by the sight of it as he was--no one but his little dead brother.
It came often. Timothy brought his sweetheart to see it one evening.
The strange fowl came punctually, as if by appointment. They went
through the cellar and stood in a row on the steps of the outside
entrance, resting their elbows on one leaf of the folding door. Iris
was more excited by it than Timothy had ever been, her breath coming
and going over her lips, her eyes revealing some sort of intimacy
with it--that of jealousy, or worship, or desire. Leander’s gaze met
Timothy’s across her narrow forehead, and he realized that neither of
them was paying attention to their bird; it was as if another wild,
casual guest had joined the woodcock in the garden. Suddenly it struck
the air once or twice with its wings, and flew away more swiftly than
usual.
The next morning Timothy said, limbering his arms inside his blue
nightshirt, “Iris wants that woodcock.”
Leander’s heart skipped a beat.
“To make a hat of it,” the boy continued. “Some other girl has one--a
Milwaukee girl.”
Leander remarked timidly, “A young savage, your sweetheart,” searching
the boy’s face for some sign of disapproval; but its beauty was pure,
and closed, and idle. He could not swallow his coffee. Then Timothy
smiled affectionately; it was enough--as good as a promise.
But for five succeeding nights it did not appear--not in the scrub
oaks, not in the garden. Leander was made miserable by a fear that some
sportsman had discovered it, and by what his nephew had said--not by
distrust of him; but there must be other girls who would like feather
toques, other boys who would be proud of it when it was dead.
On the sixth night Timothy had gone to the village to buy meat and
bread for their supper. Leander sat by the window until he gave up hope
of the bird’s coming, then lay down on the couch for a nap. He did not
fall asleep. He heard the cart clatter into the yard and Timothy throw
down his bundles on the table. He did not open his eyes when Timothy
tiptoed through the parlor and began to get supper with a great noise
of pans and spoons. Leander enjoyed his invisible awkwardness, and
wondered what he thought of when sleep seemed to be between them--but
of course there was something equally impenetrable between them all the
time. He was beginning to fall asleep....
A gun was fired in the garden. Leander sprang to his feet--he had let
the boy keep that gun because it had been his father’s. He stumbled
into the kitchen. Timothy’s shadow hurried past the house with
something in its hand--why hurry now? Timothy came in by the back door.
He lit a lamp. “Been asleep?” he said.
Without knowing it, Leander had been facing a blank wall as if it were
a window; he turned around. “Well, I see your girl’s going to have
her....” His voice failed. “Hat,” he whispered.
Curiously, there was amazement on both faces. Leander caught a glimpse
of his own in a mirror framed in leather flowers (Nancy’s handiwork);
it had a dry appearance, a gray color. The boy was staring at him--at
him--with a sort of horror; he could not understand that. “Why did you
do it? Why did you do it?”
“She dared me,” the boy muttered.
Leander sat down. Timothy sat down, and when he moved, his elbows
thumped on the table. At last he said, “There’s something I’ve got
to--I’ve got to tell you something.”
“What? I don’t blame you.”
Silence.
“I can’t stand it,” the boy began.
Silence, and barely loud enough to be heard, “Stand what?”
“I can’t stand having you--feel so bad.”
“Doesn’t matter. Don’t you mind.”
Silence. The boy said patiently: “I’ve been thinking ... I can’t stand
it here. I want to go away.”
The silence kept asking why; Leander did not want to know. But the boy
continued: “I’m a man now. You take things too hard. You love me too
much. I’m too young.” He spoke very gently. “I feel like a brute. I
don’t feel easy here. Things like this’ll keep happening. I want to do
what I feel like and like other fellows do. I can’t stand it.”
“All right,” Leander said. Each time there was a silence of the same
size as the words which had been spoken. “I’m going to bed now. Get
some supper for yourself. I’m not hungry.”
He came back to the door. Timothy had not moved. “What do you want to
do? Where do you want to go?”
“I don’t know.”
“All right. We’ll think of something.”
The next afternoon Leander went to Rose’s for the noonday meal, and sat
all afternoon in her kitchen. Little Flora sat on his lap; he showed
her his watch and placed Hilary’s silver ring (like a wedding ring)
over two of her fingers. He scarcely spoke to Rose. She said: “You have
a sickly color, Leander. You must take care of yourself.”
That night he took from the cupboard where he kept his papers a letter
which had come two or three weeks before and which he had not known how
to answer: a letter from a land agency in California offering him a
large sum of money for his property, so large a sum, in fact, that he
supposed it was worth more. He showed it to Timothy. “Would you like
to go out there? I’ll go to town to-morrow and have a deed made out to
you. I always meant you to have it; you may as well have it now. It’s
not much good to me.”
Timothy could not speak for joy. He put his arms around his uncle and
kissed him. Leander shrank from his strength, as very old men shrink
from their sons.
“We’ve got enough money in the house for your fare. Better go soon.
You don’t need to be miserable here any more.” He added, as if he were
ashamed; “Don’t tell your uncle Henry or the others that I’m giving
you the land. They know how I’ve always been a failure at everything.
Please don’t say that you don’t want to live here any more. We’ll tell
them that I’m sending you out there to look after things. I guess
California’s not so bad as it used to be, when I went west. Be a good
boy out there.”
The night before he left Timothy was in the far bedroom, hunting in a
chest for a picture of his father. Leander sat by the kitchen stove,
not moving, scarcely breathing, not yet able to think. His cold fingers
shrank from one another.
Then in heavy, lovely tones, a little off the key, the one Spanish song
sounded from the other end of the house. Timothy could sing only at the
top of his voice. Then the song broke off. Leander thought, he does not
want to hurt me. A little later the boy began again thoughtlessly, and
ceased at the end of the second phrase. Leander thought, he would be
singing if I were not here. He could not endure the silence in which
that music had been stifled on his account.
So he went outdoors. There lay the garden, severe and fragrant: the
chrysanthemums talking to themselves, and the sky mottled a little like
a lemon peel. Most of the flowers were gone--the lilies, the day-lily,
the little weak ones, the great rose. Most of the vivid leaves, half
destroyed by the frost, fainted from their stems. Most of the birds
were gathering to go south, gathering, he thought, like the companies
of young soldiers before the war; now that Timothy had stopped singing,
their din in the marshes was the only sound to be heard....
The garden seemed finer that evening than ever before. Autumn had
perfected it as he had planned--autumn with its rags and tatters, its
hard, clean hands. It was perfect now and his heart was broken. He fell
on his knees in the path.
He was too old to wait for Timothy to come back. He thought, there
could be no more surprises. How could even death surprise him now? And
life had little left to reveal; he had played both parts; he had been
the one who rejected and the one who asked.
Mechanically his hands began to pluck away a dead leaf here and there,
to crumble little clods about the roots, as they had always done; but
they found a place where the soil was pitted, where something dark and
wet had fallen in drops; and there lay a small gray feather. Then he
began to break and tear the chrysanthemums; the tough stalks hurt his
hands, and the leaves and blossoms gave up their last perfume. No tears
came to his eyes, and the violent motion of his chest was regular, as
if he had suddenly learned a new way to breathe all the rest of his
life.
But he was afraid that Timothy would discover him there: so as soon as
he could, he rose and went into the house.