“JEE'S” TIDINGS
Time was when I had known the Hagadorn house, from the outside at
least, as well as any other in the whole township. But I had avoided
that road so long now, that when I came up to the place it seemed quite
strange to my eyes.
For one thing, the flower garden was much bigger than it had formerly
been. To state it differently, Miss Esther's marigolds and columbines,
hollyhocks and peonies, had been allowed to usurp a lot of space where
sweet-corn, potatoes and other table-truck used to be raised. This not
only greatly altered the aspect of the place, but it lowered my idea of
the practical good-sense of its owners.
What was more striking still, was the general air of decrepitude and
decay about the house itself. An eaves-trough had fallen down; half
the cellar door was off its hinges, standing up against the wall; the
chimney was ragged and broken at the top; the clap-boards had never
been painted, and now were almost black with weather-stain and dry rot.
It positively appeared to me as if the house was tipping sideways, over
against the little cooper-shop adjoining it—but perhaps that was a
trick of the waning evening light. I said to myself that if we were not
prospering on the Beech farm, at least our foe “Jee” Hagadorn did not
seem to be doing much better himself.
In truth, Hagadorn had always been among the poorest members of our
community, though this by no means involves what people in cities think
of as poverty. He had a little place of nearly two acres, and then
he had his coopering business; with the two he ought to have got on
comfortably enough. But a certain contrariness in his nature seemed to
be continually interfering with this.
This strain of conscientious perversity ran through all we knew of his
life before he came to us, just as it dominated the remainder of his
career. He had been a well-to-do man some ten years before, in a city
in the western part of the State, with a big cooper-shop, and a lot
of men under him, making the barrels for a large brewery. (It was in
these days, I fancy, that Esther took on that urban polish which the
younger Benaiah missed.) Then he got the notion in his head that it was
wrong to make barrels for beer, and threw the whole thing up. He moved
into our neighborhood with only money enough to buy the old Andrews
place, and build a little shop.
It was a good opening for a cooper, and Hagadorn might have flourished
if he had been able to mind his own business. The very first thing
he did was to offend a number of our biggest butter-makers by taxing
them with sinfulness in also raising hops, which went to make beer.
For a long time they would buy no firkins of him. Then, too, he
made an unpleasant impression at church. As has been said, our
meeting-house was a union affair; that is to say, no one denomination
being numerous enough to have an edifice of its own, all the farmers
roundabout—Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and so on—joined
in paying the expenses. The travelling preachers who came to us
represented these great sects, with lots of minute shadings off into
Hard-shell, Soft-shell, Freewill, and other subdivided mysteries which
I never understood. Hagadorn had a denomination all to himself, as
might have been expected from the man. What the name of it was I seem
never to have heard; perhaps it had no name at all. People used to say,
though, that he behaved like a Shouting Methodist.
This was another way of saying that he made a nuisance of himself in
church. At prayer meetings, in the slack seasons of the year, he would
pray so long, and with such tremendous shouting and fury of gestures,
that he had regularly to be asked to stop, so that those who had taken
the trouble to learn and practise new hymns might have a chance to be
heard. And then he would out-sing all the others, not knowing the tune
in the least, and cause added confusion by yelling out shrill “Amens!”
between the bars. At one time quite a number of the leading people
ceased attending church at all, on account of his conduct.
He added heavily to his theological unpopularity, too, by his action in
another matter. There was a wealthy and important farmer living over on
the west side of Agrippa Hill, who was a Universalist. The expenses of
our union meeting-house were felt to be a good deal of a burden, and
our elders, conferring together, decided that it would be a good thing
to waive ordinary prejudices, and let the Universalists come in, and
have their share of the preaching. It would be more neighborly, they
felt, and they would get a subscription from the Agrippa Hill farmer.
He assented to the project, and came over four or five Sundays with his
family and hired help, listened unflinchingly to orthodox sermons full
of sulphur and blue flames, and put money on the plate every time. Then
a Universalist preacher occupied the pulpit one Sunday, and preached
a highly inoffensive and non-committal sermon, and “Jee” Hagadorn
stood up in his pew and violently denounced him as an infidel, before
he had descended the pulpit steps. This created a painful scandal.
The Universalist farmer, of course, never darkened that church door
again. Some of our young men went so far as to discuss the ducking
of the obnoxious cooper in the duck-pond. But he himself was neither
frightened nor ashamed.
At the beginning, too, I suppose that his taking up Abolitionism made
him enemies. Dearborn County gave Franklin Pierce a big majority in
'52, and the bulk of our farmers, I know, were in that majority. But
I have already dwelt upon the way in which all this changed in the
years just before the war. Naturally enough, Hagadorn's position also
changed. The rejected stone became the head of the corner. The tiresome
fanatic of the 'fifties was the inspired prophet of the 'sixties.
People still shrank from giving him undue credit for their conversion,
but they felt themselves swept along under his influence none the less.
But just as his unpopularity kept him poor in the old days, it seemed
that now the reversed condition was making him still poorer. The truth
was, he was too excited to pay any attention to his business. He went
off to Octavius three or four days a week to hear the news, and when
he remained at home, he spent much more time standing out in the road
discussing politics and the conduct of the war with passers-by, than he
did over his staves and hoops. No wonder his place was run down.
The house was dark and silent, but there was some sort of a light in
the cooper-shop beyond. My hope had been to see Esther rather than her
wild old father, but there was nothing for it but to go over to the
shop. I pushed the loosely fitting door back on its leathern hinges,
and stepped over the threshold. The resinous scent of newly cut wood,
and the rustle of the shavings under my feet, had the effect, somehow,
of filling me with timidity. It required an effort to not turn and go
out again.
The darkened and crowded interior of the tiny work-place smelt as well,
I noted now, of smoke. On the floor before me was crouched a shapeless
figure—bending in front of the little furnace, made of a section of
stove-pipe, which the cooper used to dry the insides of newly fashioned
barrels. A fire in this, half-blaze, half-smudge—gave forth the light
I had seen from without, and the smoke which was making my nostrils
tingle. Then I had to sneeze, and the kneeling figure sprang on the
instant from the floor.
It was Esther who stood before me, coughing a little from the smoke,
and peering inquiringly at me. “Oh—is that you, Jimmy?” she asked,
after a moment of puzzled inspection in the dark.
She went on, before I had time to speak, in a nervous, half-laughing
way: “I've been trying to roast an ear of corn here, but it's the worst
kind of a failure. I've watched ‘Ni’ do it a hundred times, but with me
it always comes out half-scorched and half-smoked. I guess the corn is
too old now, any way. At all events, it's tougher than Pharaoh's heart.”
She held out to me, in proof of her words, a blackened and unseemly
roasting-ear. I took it, and turned it slowly over, looking at it with
the grave scrutiny of an expert. Several torn and opened sections
showed where she had been testing it with her teeth. In obedience to
her “See if you don't think it's too old,” I took a diffident bite, at
a respectful distance from the marks of her experiments. It was the
worst I had ever tasted.
“I came over to see if you'd heard anything—any news,” I said, desiring
to get away from the corn subject.
“You mean about Tom?” she asked, moving so that she might see me more
plainly.
I had stupidly forgotten about that transformation of names. “Our
Jeff, I mean,” I made answer.
“His name is Thomas Jefferson. _We_ call him Tom,” she explained; “that
other name is too horrid. Did—did his people tell you to come and ask
_me_?”
I shook my head. “Oh no!” I replied with emphasis, implying by my
tone, I dare say, that they would have had themselves cut up into
sausage-meat first.
The girl walked past me to the door, and out to the road-side, looking
down toward the bridge with a lingering, anxious gaze. Then she came
back, slowly.
“No, we have no news!” she said, with an effort at calmness. “He wasn't
an officer, that's why. All we know is that the brigade his regiment is
in lost 141 killed, 560 wounded, and 38 missing. That's all!” She stood
in the doorway, her hands clasped tight, pressed against her bosom.
“_That's all!_” she repeated, with a choking voice.
Suddenly she started forward, almost ran across the few yards of floor,
and, throwing herself down in the darkest corner, where only dimly
one could see an old buffalo-robe spread over a heap of staves, began
sobbing as if her heart must break.
Her dress had brushed over the stove-pipe, and scattered some of the
embers beyond the sheet of tin it stood on. I stamped these out, and
carried the other remnants of the fire out doors. Then I returned, and
stood about in the smoky little shop, quite helplessly listening to the
moans and convulsive sobs which rose from the obscure corner. A bit of
a candle in a bottle stood on the shelf by the window. I lighted this,
but it hardly seemed to improve the situation. I could see her now, as
well as hear her—huddled face downward upon the skin, her whole form
shaking with the violence of her grief. I had never been so unhappy
before in my life.
At last—it may not have been very long, but it seemed hours—there rose
the sound of voices outside on the road. A wagon had stopped, and some
words were being exchanged. One of the voices grew louder—came nearer;
the other died off, ceased altogether, and the wagon could be heard
driving away. On the instant the door was pushed sharply open, and
“Jee” Hagadorn stood on the threshold, surveying the interior of his
cooper-shop with gleaming eyes.
He looked at me; he looked at his daughter lying in the corner; he
looked at the charred mess on the floor—yet seemed to see nothing of
what he looked at. His face glowed with a strange excitement—which in
another man I should have set down to drink.
“Glory be to God! Praise to the Most High! Mine eyes have seen the
glory of the coming of the Lord!” he called out, stretching forth his
hands in a rapturous sort of gesture I remembered from class-meeting
days.
Esther had leaped to her feet with squirrel-like swiftness at the sound
of his voice, and now stood before him, her hands nervously clutching
at each other, her reddened, tear-stained face a-fire with eagerness.
“Has word come?—is he safe?—have you heard?” so her excited questions
tumbled over one another, as she grasped “Jee's” sleeve and shook it in
feverish impatience.
“The day has come! The year of Jubilee is here!” he cried, brushing
her hand aside, and staring with a fixed, ecstatic, open-mouthed smile
straight ahead of him. “The words of the Prophet are fulfilled!”
“But Tom!—_Tom!_” pleaded the girl, piteously. “The list has come? You
know he is safe?”
“Tom! _Tom!_” old “Jee” repeated after her, but with an emphasis
contemptuous, not solicitous. “Perish a hundred Toms—yea—ten thousand!
for one such day as this! ‘For the Scarlet Woman of Babylon is
overthrown, and bound with chains and cast into the lake of fire.
Therefore, in one day shall her plagues come, death, and mourning, and
famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire: for strong is the
Lord God which judged her!’”
He declaimed these words in a shrill, high-pitched voice, his face
upturned, and his eyes half-closed. Esther plucked despairingly at his
sleeve once more.
“But have you seen?—is _his_ name?—you must have seen!” she moaned,
incoherently.
“Jee” descended for the moment from his plane of exaltation. “I
_didn't_ see!” he said, almost peevishly. “Lincoln has signed a
proclamation freeing all the slaves! What do you suppose I care for
your Toms and Dicks and Harrys, on such a day as this? ‘Woe! woe! the
great city Babylon, the strong city! For in one hour is thy judgment
come!’”
The girl tottered back to her corner, and threw herself limply down
upon the buffalo-robe again, hiding her face in her hands.
I pushed my way past the cooper, and trudged cross-lots home in the
dark, tired, disturbed, and very hungry, but thinking most of all that
if I had been worth my salt, I would have hit “Jee” Hagadorn with the
adze that stood up against the door-still.