I
When I was a little girl, and lived in Hillsboro with my grandparents,
there were two Decoration Days in every year. One was when all we
school-children took flowers put to the cemetery and decorated the graves
of the soldiers; and the other was when the peonies and syringas bloomed,
and grandfather and I went alone to put a bouquet on the grave of old
Jedediah Chillingworth.
Grandfather did this as a sort of penance for a great mistake he had made,
and I think it was with the idea of making an atonement by confession that
he used always to tell me the story of his relations with the old man. At
any rate, he started his narrative when we left the house and began to
walk out to the cemetery, and ended it as he laid the flowers on the
neglected grave. I trotted along beside him, faster and faster as he grew
more and more interested, and then stood breathless on the other side of
the grave as he finished, in his cracked old voice, harsh with emotion.
The first part of his story happened a very long time ago, even before
grandfather was born, when Jedediah Chillingworth first began to win for
himself the combination title of town-fool and town-liar. By the time
grandfather was a half-grown boy, big enough to join in the rough crowd of
village lads who tormented Jed, the old dizzard had been for years the
local butt. Of course I never saw him, but I have keard so much about him
from all the gossips in the village, and grandfather used to describe him
so vividly, that I feel as if I know all about him.
For about ten years of his youth Jedediah had been way from our little
Vermont town, wandering in the great world. From his stories, he had been
everywhere on he map. In the evening, around the stove in the village
post-office, when somebody read aloud from the newspaper a remarkable
event, all the loafers turned to Jed with wide, malicious grins, to hear
him cap it with a yet ore marvelous tale of what had happened to him. They
gathered around the simple-minded little old man, their tongues in their
cheeks, and drew from him one silly, impossible, boastful story after
another. They made him amplify circumstantially by clumsily artful
questions, and poked one another in the ribs with delight over his deluded
joy in their sympathetic interest.
As he grew older, his yarns solidified like folk-lore, into a consecrated
and legendary form, which he repeated endlessly without variation. There
were many of them--"How I drove a team of four horses over a falling
bridge," "How I interviewed the King of Portugal," "How I saved big Sam
Harden's life in the forest fire." But the favorite one was, "How I rode
the moose into Kennettown, Massachusetts." This was the particular
flaunting, sumptuous yarn which everybody made old Jed bring out for
company. If a stranger remarked, "Old man Chillingworth can tell a tale or
two, can't he?" everybody started up eagerly with the cry: "Oh, but have
you heard him tell the story of how he rode the moose into Kennettown,
Massachusetts?"
If the answer was negative; all business was laid aside until the withered
little old man was found, pottering bout some of the odd jobs by which he
earned his living. He was always as pleased as Punch to be asked to
perform, and laid aside his tools with a foolish, bragging grin on his
face, of which grandfather has told me so many times that it seems as if I
had really seen it.
This is how he told the story, always word for word the same way:
"Wa'al, sir, I've had queer things happen to me in my time, hain't I,
boys?"--at which the surrounding crowd always wagged mocking heads--"but
nothin' to beat that. When I was ashore wunst, from one of my long v'y'ges
on the sea, I was to Kennettown, Massachusetts."
"How'd ye come to go there, Jed?" This was a question never to be omitted.
"Oh, I had a great sight of money to take to some folks that lived there.
The captain of our ship had died at sea, and he give me nine thousand five
hundred and seventy-two English gold guineas, to take to his brother and
sister."
Here he always stared around at the company, and accepted credulously the
counterfeit coin of grotesquely exaggerated amazement which was given him.
"Wa'al, sir, I done it. I give the gold to them as it belonged to, and I
was to leave town on the noon stagecoach. I was stayin' in the captain's
brother's house. It was spang up against the woods, on the edge of town;
and, I tell ye, woods _was_ woods in them days.
"The mornin' I was to leave I was up early, lookin' out of my window, when
what should I see with these mortial eyes but a gre't bull moose, as big
as two yoke o' oxen, comin' along toward the house. He sort o' staggered
along, and then give a gre't sigh I could hear from my room--I was on the
ground floor--fell down on his knees, and laid his head on the ground 's
if he was too beat out to go another step. Wa'al, sir, I never waited not
long enough even to fetch a holler to wake the folks I just dove out o'
the window, and made for him as fast as I could lick in. As I went by the
wood-pile, I grabbed up a big stick of wood----"
"What kind of wood?" everybody asked in chorus.
"'Twas a big stick of birch-wood, with the white bark on it as clean as
writin'-paper. I grabbed that up for a club--'twas the only thing in
sight--and when I got to the moose I hit him a clip on the side of the
head as hard as I could lay on. He didn't so much as open an eye, but I
saw he was still breathing and I climbed up on his back so's to get a good
whack at the top of his head. And then, sir, by Jupiter! he riz right up
like a earthquake under me, and started off at forty miles an hour. He
throwed his head back as he run, and ketched me right between his horns,
like a nut in a nutcracker. I couldn't have got out of them horns--no,
sir, a charge of powder couldn't scarcely have loosened me."
There was another pause at this place for the outcries of astonishment and
marvel which were never lacking. Then Jed went on, mumbling his toothless
gums in delight over his importance.
"Wa'al, sir, I dassent tell ye how long we careered around them woods and
pastures, for, after a while, he got so plumb crazy that he run right out
into the open country. I'd hit him a whack over the head with my stick of
wood every chanst I got and he was awful weak anyhow, so he'd kind o'
stagger whenever he made a sharp turn. By an' by we got to goin' toward
town. Somehow he'd landed himself in the road; an', sir, we rid up to the
hotel like a coach and four, and he drapped dead in front of the steps, me
stickin' as fast between his horns as if I'd 'a' growed to him. Yes, sir,
they ackchally had to saw one of them horns off'n his head before they got
me out."
He came to a full stop here, but this was not the end.
"What became of the horns, Jed? Why didn't ye bring 'em along?"
"I did take the one they sawed off, to give to my partner, big Sam Harden.
He was the biggest man I ever see, Sam Harden was. I left th' other horn
in Kennettown for the captain's sister. She was as smart an' handsome a
widow-woman as ever I see, an' I wanted for her to have a keepsake from
me."
This was really the end. The circle of inquisitors left their unconscious
victim nodding and grinning to himself, and went on down the road.
Grandfather said he still felt mean all over to remember how they laughed
among themselves, and how they pointed out to the stranger the high lights
in the story.
"Not only ain't there never been seen a moose in the State of
Massachusetts, and not only are a moose's horns set too wide to catch a
little squinch of a man like Jed, but what do you think?--there ain't no
Kennettown in Massachusetts! No, nor in any other State. No, nor never
was. Old Jed just made the town up out of his head, like the moose, an'
the money, and the birch-bark and the handsome widow. Don't he beat
_all_?"