Leander Tower did not live to be an old man. In fact, Alwyn’s
grandmother survived most of the friends of her youth. In 1912 her
husband passed away; Mary, Nancy, her sister Adelaide, and two of her
brothers, were dead; Leander and the two little girls had left her
behind long ago. They had forgotten everything, she supposed, leaving
her behind to remember for them: how they had lived, what they had
wanted, and what the early days had been like. She had always done her
duty; and now there was nothing more to do but honor the dead in her
old age and go, in God’s good time, where they were.
She was an active woman without much imagination; but she took pride
in one or two poetic phrases which referred to the hard mystery of her
experience, the mystery still intact when she had told all she could
tell. As primitive people said, My love is like a rose, or, The sea is
our mother, she would often say, “Life is like a great county fair”;
and fall silent, resting her strong index finger against her cheek bone.
During that silence her grandson, gazing in admiration at her solid
hand and drooping throat, her resolute, shortsighted eyes, would
complete the comparison, detail by detail, and prove its justice to
himself. Then he would wonder if there were many people in America who
did not know what a county fair was; how well he knew!
Life is a great county fair ... A village of rickety buildings inclosed
by a fence too high to climb; a narrow entrance, a narrow exit. A
multitude of laughing or irritable people dragging awe-stricken
children by one hand. Many spoiling their appetites with the
unwholesome refreshments that are for sale--some of these hiding
afterward because they are sick. Some stingy, some extravagant; nearly
everyone wanting to be more prosperously dressed; everyone tired
to death. Women indignant at the neglect of their men; little ones
whimpering because their mothers are out of sight. Long separations
being brought to an end; good-bys beginning new separations.
Love-making on the sly. Games of chance--the players always losing,
the proprietors always poor. Eager or scandalized blushes in the tents
where there is nakedness to be seen and music to be heard. Shouting
around the pits in which human anomalies and sick wild animals are
exhibited. Sleek horses charging around the race track in the dust. On
a high platform the jugglers, inexpensively gorgeous in spangles and
skullcaps, in the red, yellow, or blue nudity of tights, automatically
running great risks and making patterns in the air, and seeming to find
the loud applause inadequate....
All gathered together for a competition which involves every sphere of
activity. In the inclosures and drafty halls are exhibited bread, pies,
cakes, conserves, and honey; exercise books and drawings of children,
and every sort of fancywork; fruit, flowers, and vegetables, on
shelves--a vertical, withering garden; cages of fowls and pigeons; and
swine, cattle, sheep, and horses, of all ages and breeds. Innumerable
onlookers, cynical or enthusiastic according to temperament; the
judges, though no better than the rest, granting or withholding honor
and small money prizes; the exhibitors anxious at first, proud or
humiliated at last.
Three days, four days, or a week--and it is over. Stalls and shelves
emptied, tents bundled up and tied with rope; crates, baskets, cages,
lumber wagons, carriages, and racing carts, lovers, enemies, and little
worn-out boys beside their irritable, sometimes intoxicated fathers,
going through the narrow exit, with crying geese and bulls and lovely
mares and rams whose curls are full of sawdust--on their way now to
sweet autumn pastures and matings with whole flocks of ewes after the
first frost--each decorated or not with ribbons, varying in color
according to their strength, their beauty, their conformity to the
standards of their kind; the procession separating at crossroads, one
losing sight of another in the dust and the gathering darkness as the
great countryside absorbs them once more into itself, and seeming to
have disappeared.
So his grandmother’s family and friends had been scattered. The living
were in California, New York, Montana, New Mexico; the dead lay in many
places--perhaps no single burial ground could have held them all.
For Alwyn the cemetery at Hope’s Corner took the place of a city
child’s park. In certain evergreens there were sparrows’ nests which
resembled untidy blond wigs; butcher birds lived in a cedar, and once
or twice he found a dead mouse which they had hung on the thorn of a
honey locust or a hawthorn. Old-fashioned roses, lying smothered in the
grass, pricked his ankles. Lilies of the valley spread in a light green
blanket, so that the graves on which they had been planted seemed to
grow larger year by year. The headstone of a girl with a lovely name,
Drusilla John, had fallen down; the coffin had collapsed, hollowing
the sod above it; and Alwyn sat there by the hour, his legs under the
marble slab as if it were a table, reading his favorite books, writing
letters to his only friend.
The lots of his relatives were well kept, in proportion to the degree
of kinship. The original families, with the single exception of his
own, having left the community, the rest of the graveyard was a thicket
of weeds, lilies, bushes, roses, and birds’ nests; the conquered
wilderness had reasserted itself, in miniature, over the conquerors’
bodies.
Alwyn’s grandmother said, “The neglect of the graveyard is a shame to
the present generation,” and held herself responsible for its general
upkeep. So in the autumn she drove about the country in search of a
man not too busy with the harvest to mow it, offering to pay him well,
even willing to have the work done on the Sabbath. As the community
filled up with German Catholic immigrants who bought the farms of the
old settlers, she made it her business to see that the latter were not
forgotten; as one of a proud, subjugated race would try to teach the
history of the land and the names of its heroes to ignorant invaders.
Eleven Civil War veterans, including her husband, were buried at
Hope’s Corner; and every year she persuaded the teacher of the school
across the road to arrange a Decoration Day program of recitations and
old songs. She took bands of children to the woods to make wreaths and
bouquets, and attended the exercises, shepherding the scholars from
grave to grave, speaking to those who showed a little reverence, often
laughed at by those who had been badly brought up.
These were the dead of a great period of the nation’s history, eleven
heroes; she honored their graves as a lesson to the living. Her own
departed ones--she scarcely knew where some of them were buried, and
it did not matter. She never thought of them as asleep under blocks
of marble and granite and drooping bunches of trilliums, mandrake
blossoms, and anemones. They were awake somewhere, doing their duty,
whatever it was, nobly, invisibly.... Probably they had forgotten
her--life was remembrance, so death must be forgetfulness; but she
could not forget them for a minute. Left alone at last amid the scenes
of their youth, she clasped her souvenirs to her breast, and yearned
for all the dead as a mother yearns for children who are living, but no
longer children.
She scarcely differentiated between absence and death. She was not
likely to see again with living eyes those who were the breadth of
America away--each year one or more was added to their number. The
others, the dead, were separated from her only by the fact that she
herself was still alive. At her age all good-bys were alike.
But according to her faith the phases of the moon took place above
their heads, the absent and the dead alike. When the new moon appeared,
other old men and women prophesied the weather according to an Indian
tradition: a warm, dry spell if the two horns pointed to the sky, rain
if the crescent, like a dipper, seemed to spill water on the earth. But
she was indifferent to the weather; for her that slight heavenly body
swung like a lantern above the house, above the old farm, high enough
to be seen from every State in the Union and every foreign land, high
enough to be visible even to those who had crossed the boundaries of
the world.
So once a month she walked under the cherry trees in the dusk,
startling the white pullets and cockerels which burdened the branches.
She lifted her eyes to the lovely sickle, sharpened almost out of sight
by the luster which continued to rise over the hills from the sun; and
wiped away her unwelcome tears with a corner of her apron.
Then she would say to her grandson, who, believing that she was lonely,
followed her: “You know, I always think of those who are dear to me
when there is a new moon. It is my custom. The same moon shines on them
all, the same new moon.” In spite of her tears she spoke firmly, indeed
contentedly.
But when her daughter Flora died in 1914, this fortitude came to an
end, and serenity gave way to despair. Death was acceptable twice
during life: before it began in earnest, and after it was over. Little
children died--death deprived them of nothing; their mothers were
strong and could bear it. Those who were old belonged to death, as
if by contract; she was willing that nature should take its course.
But the death of a lovely, unmarried girl was intolerable and against
nature. She herself should have been allowed to go instead; life had
had its way with her for more than half a century; she could have said
Amen.
Hitherto, time had been given her in which to recover, to develop new
habits and enjoy new hopes. Now it was too late; she would not live
to see the end of this anguish; she could never begin again. She had
always accepted things as they were; having protested, she had folded
her arms and given in; but her will would never be at peace with the
Will which had determined Flora’s death. There was nothing to do but
leave the world, unreconciled, and, because of the insubordination of
her heart, half ashamed.
She had been proud of her life, the masterpiece of the divine Hand
which had guided her hand, a vast and somber picture. The gesture which
had drawn certain lines had hurt her; certain colors had been her
life’s blood; but looking back she had been able to view the result
without much pain and with approbation. Now the giant Hand, with a
final stroke, with the stain of a final wound, had spoiled their work.
In the past it had seemed natural for those who had the same sorrows to
weep together. Now she could not bear to be seen weeping, apparently
ashamed; it was not her fault--but those who have been strong, when
they are crippled, want to hide their deformities. She would say to
the children, “I can’t have you here now; run off and play,” and sit
alone by the window, weeping without covering her face, her cheeks red
and shining with the continual tears, her worn-out eyelids fluttering,
her lips moving as she repeated to herself the fact that her last-born
child was dead.
When she had been happy she had been able to endure the thought of
all her former griefs. Now these wounds, suffered and healed long
ago, burned with sympathetic pain; and the story of her life, the
whole history of the family, seemed unmentionably sad. If young people
realized how life ended, they would not want to live; so she would hide
her despair and say nothing. Therefore, during the last years, she said
very little about Leander, or her husband, or their close relatives, or
her sons. Instead she drew near to those who had never been near her
heart, and preferred to talk about them.
Accompanied by her grandson, she made a round of afternoon visits to
old men and women whom she had known indifferently for years, who
had never been more than neighbors. Before them she could pose as a
wise woman, strong enough to endure the afflictions which God in His
violence had imposed. Distracted by their weaknesses, she could ignore
for a few hours her own weakness and dismay. She defended herself
from their questions with a hard good nature--the humor of her rude
ancestors, hunters and soldiers and vagabonds, masking her heart and
hiding the wreckage which death had left in it at last.
She talked to her grandson with a startling sardonic gayety about these
people and others like them who were dead: relatives whom she had
happened not to love, his grandfather’s friends, the friends of her
friends. The disastrous comedies of their lives diverted her from the
grief which was all that was left of hers; she could be as brave about
their troubles as she had once been about her own. She dwelt without
pity on their paradoxical characters, their avowals and frauds, their
astonishing whims and failures; and at Alwyn’s request identified among
her photographs many of their faces.
There were two albums of embossed leather studded with buttons which
resembled shoe buttons, and one with celluloid roses glued upon a
velvet binding. There were daguerreotypes in cases closed by a metal
clasp or a loop of worn cord, which Alwyn opened and tried to read
as if they were a library of miniature books. At the left a leaf of
red satin, at the right in a mat of beaded gilt the portraits: heads
and busts and family groups, pygmy men and women as if seen through
a telescope--the men in a daydream, the women anxious about their
children, their lovers, their clothes. Mouths like bits of carved wax,
nostrils of an insatiable arrogance; eyes long closed in death--or the
young, suspicious eyes of men and women who were now old and patted
Alywn’s head and peered at him dimly and beneficently--staring out of
the picture frames as if he were an enemy in disguise.... The lifeless
light (in which innumerable photographers had covered their heads
with large, black handkerchiefs and imitated a bird with their hands)
half hid and half revealed all the possible combinations of all the
motives there were--greed and sensuality and courage and compassion
and cruelty and nostalgia; all the destinies there were--manias,
consolations, regrets.
The same motives and similar destinies existed still; but these people
whose playground they had been were gone. Nothing came back from the
oblivion into which they had vanished (for old age and death were
equally oblivion) not a sound came back but a little slightly exultant,
unhappy laughter--Alwyn’s grandmother laughing for them.
He listened to her comments--old-fashioned maxims, scraps
of tragi-comic narrative, implicitly mocking, explicitly
compassionate--and what she told revealed little more than the
photograph albums themselves: another set of pictures, photographs of
actions and opinions, also noncommittal and badly focused. But he knew
what she knew and tried to forget: that each picture was a tomb where
a dead heart (or merely the youth and freshness of a heart which was
now old) lay buried--buried with its affections, its apathy, its fury.
He knew that on each insignificant grave there stood (though he could
only guess what it was) a secret like hers, wild and perfect as a wild
flower, nodding in its everlasting leaves, or dangling from a broken
stem....
_Laura-Belle Barry_
Mrs. Barry, born Laura-Belle Allen and married in her youth to her
cousin Will Allen, had once been plump, melancholy, and ravishing--to
which the portrait that Alwyn’s grandmother kept because both her
brothers had been in love with the lady, bore witness. Her father was
the merchant in Aaronsville in the days when stores were few and far
apart, and any price could be asked for the necessities of life; he was
prosperous, but by nature pessimistic.
Laura-Belle wept over all the boys who loved her. Even her young
husband’s passion did not wake her from a resentful daydream. She gave
birth to two perfect children; they died of scarlet fever. Her father
was believed to be guilty of fraud and died mysteriously. Finally Will
Allen was killed; a magnificent spotted bull gored him and trod him
underfoot. After his body had been rescued, Laura-Belle stood staring
over the fence at the beast until she had to be taken away by force.
When she came to her senses she was a new woman. She never shed a tear
for the dead man, but grew more and more emaciated. She began to take
an interest in everything and everybody, and then began to be noted
for her sense of humor. She dressed in red, and since this color was
supposed to enrage bulls, no one dared to ask her why. Eventually she
married Barry, a drunkard, and merely laughed at his excesses. Between
them they wasted her small fortune, and at last were penniless.
In her old age she wore a ragged, red, one-piece garment or an old
dress covered with black braid and jet buttons. If anyone noticed her
clothes, she would tear another hole in them, smiling pleasantly, and
say, “Blessed be nothing.” She was a saint, though something of a
busybody, sparing no one when she spoke. It was reported that even on
her deathbed what was left of her once lovely and heavy body--burning
eyes, blue-veined hands, long braids of silvery hair, skin and
bone--was shaken again and again by her crackling laughter.
Apparently unconscious of the sound of her own laughter, Alwyn’s
grandmother said, “Nobody could make a sound like that when she laughed
if a hard life hadn’t been too much for her. But it was enough to put
the fear of God into your heart, and gave a bad impression.”
_Mr. Sam Peters and wife, born Melissa Duff_
A little man as vague as the wisp of yellow beard between his mouth and
his Adam’s apple. An unkind, vigorous, and well-dressed woman. She was
Alwyn’s great-aunt on his mother’s side of the house.
His grandmother Tower would say, in his mother’s presence: “That was
the most miserable woman that ever lived. I never knew anybody else too
mean to give a slice of bread to a tramp that asked for it. Your ma is
a wonderful woman; my only complaint is that your pa married into the
same family as Melissa Peters.”
Alwyn’s great-aunt Melissa ruled and humiliated her small husband.
On one occasion he rose in revolt. She made up her mind to visit her
relatives in Canada, spent so much money for new dresses that he could
not afford to hire a housekeeper in her absence, and made no mention
in her letters of returning. At last he sent a telegram, signed with
her brother’s name: “SAM VERY SICK IF YOU DESIRE SEE HUSBAND ALIVE
COME HOME AT ONCE IRA.” He met her at the station, smiling foolishly,
and seemed quite willing to endure, until the end of his life, her
heartbreaking tirades.
_Cousin Matie Share_
His grandmother’s cousin who took care of them in 1854 while her mother
visited in Kentucky. Her brothers sat around the house, teasing Matie;
they pinched her and dared each other to strip her of her new calico
dress and hang it on a tree; and she threw sticks of stove wood at them.
No one did any work: either the cows were not milked, or the cream got
too sour to churn; so there was no butter to put on the children’s
bread when they went to school. Matie told Rose to milk a cow herself
and take the milk in a bottle for their lunch. Rose and Adelaide were
afraid that the scholars would laugh at them; so they hid the bottle in
a hollow stump and stole away by themselves at noon to drink it.
_Captain Ed Hawks_
This boy was the perfect soldier. Fifteen years old when the Civil War
broke out, he ran away to a town in Dodge County where a company was
preparing to go south. Every day or two he sent someone to find out if
his family would let him enlist. At last his father consented: “He
might as well go. He’ll never be good for anything else.”
The child took three prisoners, and was made a captain before peace was
declared.
Laughing sturdily, Alwyn’s grandmother said: “I guess old John Hawks
wouldn’t have been much put out if something had happened to Ed down
South. He was a shame to them, being the only lazy man in the family.
He’d work harder to keep from working than anybody else ever had to.”
_Josh Arbuckle_
This was the hired man who ate skunk.
Alwyn’s grandmother said, “In my day, if you had a sore throat, you
tied your stocking, warm from your foot, around your neck; and if that
didn’t cure you, skunk oil was considered the best remedy. We rendered
their fat ourselves, and put it up in bottles.”
One day, when Alwyn’s father and his uncle Jim were boys, they brought
to the house the flesh of a skunk, carefully stripped from the pelt
in order not to break the sac which contains the stinking secretion.
Their mother put it in a spider on the stove to try out the fat. A
little later Josh, the hired man, came in, ravenously hungry after his
morning’s work in the cold, saw the meat frying, and thought the boys
had shot a squirrel for dinner. He took a fork off the table, removed
a bit from the pan, and ate it. Alwyn’s grandmother laughed heartily
at the face he made when she told him what he had eaten, and laughed
still, after thirty years, whenever she remembered it.
_Baltus Valentine_
A portly face full of blood, with ruffled whiskers. This was the man
who suffered from violent toothache. When it afflicted him he ran
outdoors, bellowing so that he could be heard half a mile away. A heavy
man clutching his head with both hands, elbows in the air, galloping
round and round the strawstack in the blazing sunshine....
_Mr. Peter Greeley_
This man was a notorious miser, but the daguerreotype showed him as he
had looked at the age of twenty-three. An anxious, effeminate face;
his moistened hair combed low on his forehead, resembling the parallel
strokes of a pen; a wing collar standing well apart from his throat,
and a black ribbon fastidiously knotted.
He played a fiddle in his youth. His father had left him one hundred
and fifty acres of rich land. He was disdainful of many girls who
would have been glad to marry him; but as each girl gave up hope,
one delicacy or another vanished from his person; spots of grease
multiplied on his clothes; the high collar was forgotten; he ceased to
wash, and his hands were covered with red cracks. He sold the violin,
and told the woman who kept house for him that he could take care of
himself.
Then he lived like a saint who has no god, filthy and miserable,
imagining that beastly sins were being committed in the community, and
denouncing whoever dared to speak to him. In middle life he sold his
property for a large sum of money, keeping only the house and the lot
on which it stood. One day he was found dead in the kitchen, holding a
battered saucepan in his hand. He had neither relatives nor friends,
and the neighbors never discovered what became of the money.
Listless boys with their hands full of stones took the windows for
targets, and the rooms were never dismantled, except when someone
looked in who was poor enough to want a tin pail, a cup without a
handle, a three-legged chair, or a piece of a rusty iron bed.
Alwyn’s grandmother enjoyed exciting the children with talk of the
undiscovered gold. From time to time they visited the tumble-down
house, and found nickel spoons in a drawer, mismated shoes inhabited by
mice, and a curious collection of nails all bent in the same way. Alwyn
was not tall enough to look into the chimney cupboard; so he climbed
on a box and explored it with one hand, which came away empty but for
spots of dust in the form of pennies on the tip of each finger.
_Mr. Homer O’Sullivan_
This well-educated, unsuccessful man looked ill at ease in the
photograph; it had paralyzed a singular restlessness of mind and body.
But his mouth continued to say yes with a downward, and no with an
upward, inflection.
He read Tom Paine and was almost an atheist, hating Christ for His
effeminacy and loving Him for His virtue. He defended the Mormons,
and at one time advocated Free Silver ardently. As a Good Templar he
induced many people to sign the pledge. For him life was a thicket of
ideas, and he fluttered from twig to twig like a hungry bird.
His wife was a paralytic; he fed her with a spoon, dressed her, lifted
her out of bed in the morning and put her back in the evening; she was
his child for forty years.
_Mr. Eli Williamson_
His grandfather’s friend who had gone mad at the sight of a lynching.
He had still been sane when this likeness was made, but his hollowed
eyes were full of wonder and the violence of a child’s fear of violence.
A hired man named Carty had been lynched. He worked in a German family
consisting of an old farmer, his wife, and an orphan grandson named
Chris. The old man sold a wagonload of hogs and brought home the money.
He went down into the cellar through a trapdoor to fetch some cider,
and when he came up Carty hit him on the head with a hammer. The little
boy ran out the back door and hid in a cornfield. Carty struck the old
woman and forgot the money.
The neighbors heard the old woman scream. The murderer was found
before midnight, shuddering and moaning in a haystack.
The next morning a neighbor’s wife, a strong, sick woman, went around
from house to house with the child Chris; she shouted and rolled her
eyes, and the little boy whimpered all the time. Women stood on front
porches wringing their hands; men in barns leaped for their axes and
pitchforks, not knowing what to do with them; and a crowd collected
around the post office.
About four o’clock the mob took Carty, who turned pale and prayed or
pretended to pray, out of jail. Someone’s fast trotting horses were
hitched to a cart. The murderer was roped to the axle; the horses raced
up and down the road; his body dragged in the dust. Someone set his
pet hound on the man, and all the dogs of the town followed--mongrels,
hunting hounds, shepherds, and terriers alert as birds--all barking and
some tearing the victim with their teeth. Then the mob hanged Carty
from the limb of a tree.
Mr. Eli Williamson, looking down from his house which stood on a rise
of ground, went mad.
_Mr. and Mrs. Ebenezer Bolt_
The wedding picture of a widow and a widower. Each loved the other’s
money, and life was not long enough to adjust their differences.
Alwyn knew them as a very old couple when they lived in Aaronsville.
They took a pint of milk for their breakfast, and in order to avoid
the shock of a large expenditure at the end of the month, paid for it
in turn every morning. The milkman stood on one leg near the door while
it was determined by a long dispute which had paid the preceding day.
Mrs. Bolt wore a rusty black dress which closed at the back with a long
row of hooks and eyes. Sometimes, after the insults of the milk, her
husband refused to fasten it, or she refused his assistance. On these
mornings, she appeared wearing it wrong side before--the frills of the
bodice drooping over her shoulder blades, her bosom cruelly pressed by
the hooks and eyes.
Except in this matter of money, it was a happy marriage.
Mrs. Bolt had a twin sister named Linda, who, having lost her mind,
lived in an asylum. Knowing that Linda was dangerously ill, she would
not open the door to the superintendent who called to announce her
death, fearing that she would be asked to bear the costs of burial.
_Mr. Jim Hallow, Mr. Solomon Royce, Mr. Peters, Mr. John James, etc._
There were many portraits of men of approximately the same age who had
fought shoulder to shoulder with Alwyn’s grandfather during the war.
Their faces, even the youngest, reminded one of death, as if, having
escaped it in battle, they had begun at once to look forward to the
time when they would be too hard of hearing, too nearsighted, or too
feeble, to escape.
Alwyn had seen a number of them, soon after his grandfather’s death,
at an old soldier’s reunion in Aaronsville. These veterans, scarcely
able (on account of rheumatism, heart trouble, strokes of paralysis,
dyspepsia, or hardening of the arteries) to enjoy their glory, told
heroic, interminable anecdotes, hoping to make the young jealous of
it. Their nervous wives pitied them, remembering that their prestige
was based on the mere fact of survival and could not last much longer.
Some soldiers’ widows who were present, as if to keep a chair vacant
for an invisible guest, tried rather timidly to take part in the
reminiscences. Only Alywn’s grandmother was at ease with the men,
dignified and sadly contented, rather like an old soldier herself.
Breathlessly, their white beards tossing here and there, awkwardly, and
with an air of bravado, two grandfathers danced a jig; they were like a
pair of condemned men dancing in their chains.
_Mrs. Sam Goodwin_
This was the fiercely bright face, amid wisps of gray hair, of a woman
who had adopted three children in turn, all of whom had died.
_Uncle Peter Barlow_
Alwyn had seen this man in the eighty-fifth year of his age; and
between his eyes and the unrecognizably young face in the oval
daguerreotype which lay in his hand, the image of the old story teller
appeared, seeming to represent all story tellers. Gripping his cane
with a hawk or an eagle’s hand, he had sat all one afternoon beside a
well-traveled road, common butterflies fluttering about his head, hens
and guinea hens going upon obscure errands about his feet. From time to
time there had been a flickering between his eyelids, as in a bed of
ashes the falling ash of a twig will seem to be fire itself. And he had
told Alwyn a story which has been told in a hundred versions in every
tongue, declaring that he had known all the characters in his youth:
“It happened to a boy named Thomas--Jim Thomas. He was a sickly little
fellow, scared of ’most everything. That night he was fetching home the
cattle, his father told me. The cows came home by themselves, but Jim
was nowhere to be seen. His father hallooed and hunted down the road
and found the little fellow in the grass, crying as if his heart would
break. He told his pa that a night hawk flew down by the cattle for
flies and scared him.
“Now in my time families not well-to-do, when they had a death, just
put up a board and drove a nail in it and hung up some flowers. There
were some of these boards in the graveyard--this was in York State.
“It appears that that afternoon some tough boys at the school had
called Jim a coward and dared him. Like as not he was turning that
over in his head when he got so scared of the bird. They dared him to
go after it got dark to the grave of a woman named Mrs. Gore, one of
those wooden monuments, and pound on it with a stone so as they could
hear and know he actually was there. Now Mrs. Gore was a woman whose
life was a burden, and the hired girl that worked for her husband
made out she saw her ghost, and there’d been a lot of talk about
that. It appears that little Jim figured he’d best do it and not be a
laughingstock.
“So the boys came whistling round his house after dark and he sneaked
out unknown to his pa and went along to do it. He took a rock by the
side of the road and went into the cemetery. It was pitch dark in there
under a lot of trees. The boys were waiting by the side of the road
and they heard him pound on the monument, and then he gave a terrible
shout. Some got scared and ran home, and two or three of them came
sniffling to get his father.
“His father took a lantern and went down and found the little fellow
with his coat hooked over one of those nails that were intended to hang
posies on. He must have thought the ghost had taken hold of him. The
father carried him home and sent for the doctor. The doctor thought it
was heart failure. However that may be, he was dead.”
The old man had smiled as if the story pleased him, as if he had ceased
to see any difference between tragedy and comedy in what had happened
so long ago.
Another day he had told another story:
“In York State in the early days there was a man named Lucas who had
a son who was a terror. Old Lucas was a godless kind of man himself
and a widower, and he’d not given his boy a very strict bringing-up, I
reckon; but he turned religious and got baptized. The boy was wilder
than ever--drank and swore and got girls into trouble and wouldn’t work
for more’n a few days at anything.
“One winter the boy was hard up and came home to live and stole some
money which his pa kept in a coffeepot. His pa found it out and
commenced to give him a beating. But the young fellow was beside
himself, and he got hold of a shotgun and took his pa by the coat
collar and dragged him out of doors.
“Now old Lucas had a fine orchard full of every kind of apple tree,
and greengages and berry bushes. So the boy pulled him along into this
orchard. And when they came to a little seedling, he said, ‘Pa, bend
that!’ And Lucas did. Then they came to a big tree and the boy said,
‘Bend that, you old devil, or I’ll shoot you!’ Old Lucas hollered and
got down on his knees and took hold of the tree and held on to young
Lucas’s knees. A neighbor’s little boy, there in the currant bushes,
saw the whole performance, but he was too scared to go for help. So
young Lucas shot his father. Of course they put him in jail, and he was
never heard of again.
“I had a son myself, but he died when he was a young fellow, and I
don’t even know where they buried him.”
During Alwyn’s twelfth year, this old man appeared in his dreams, and
in a youthful, melodious voice told stories too senseless and too cruel
even to be remembered in the daytime. But he died, and at last Alwyn
remembered him only when he looked at the photograph albums.
_Mr. and Mrs. A. Rollo_
A bridal pair before a vista painted on canvas, beside a taboret like a
dancer with iron legs crossed at the knee.
The bride’s coarse veil droops like a lace curtain against the groom’s
broadcloth. They are as shy as if they were young; but he is a little
bald, and yesterday she was a spinster. Their eyes are looking, not for
what they desire, but for the body of desire itself, lost and perhaps
dead. Their mouths are the sort which will never tell whether they find
it or not.
This couple was childless.
_A boy whose name had been forgotten._
He wore a flowered vest. A pointed curl lay on each of his temples like
an arrowhead.
This boy was so beautiful that Alwyn wished he could say to himself:
This is the way my father looked when he was a boy. In fact, as he well
knew, Ralph Tower had been a rough, homely youngster.