THIRTY YEARS
PENNYROYAL bore witness to the permanence of material things untroubled
by spirit. Thirty years had passed since Ambrose Thompson's last
honeymoon, and yet the little town had not greatly changed.
One afternoon in October, when from the same double row of linden trees,
with only here and there a fallen comrade, a shower of wrinkled golden
leaves was filling the ruts in the same road that once held the blossoms
of an earlier spring, the door of a cottage opened and an elderly man
stepped forth, humming a tune and began walking slowly down toward the
front gate. He was dressed in gala attire and, observing a bed of purple
asters that were growing near his path, stooped to gather one of the
flowers. Getting up with a groan, he placed a hand on the small of his
back, remarking testily: "Looks like I was gettin' powerful onlimber
these days," and then jigging stiffly about to disprove his assertion he
placed the aster in his buttonhole.
Pennyroyal was unusually stirred up over something, for at five o'clock
her streets were filling with people in their best clothes, all moving
toward the same spot--the new red brick Baptist church, with a cupola,
which stood where Brother Bibbs's old frame meeting house had once held
place.
A carriage advanced slowly, an open Victoria drawn by a pair of handsome
Kentucky horses and containing besides the coachman two other persons, a
man and a woman. The man was a product of an oratorical period in
Kentucky; he had the beak nose, the rolling black eyes, long hair and
heavy forensic shoulders that had already landed the Hon. Calvin
Breckenridge Jones as representative of the Pennyroyal district in the
State Capitol at Frankfort, while it was a common supposition that only
a lack of money had kept him from climbing higher. His companion, the
Widow Tarwater, was the richest widow in the county.
Now as the carriage drew near the man at the gate, the bow with which
he greeted the widow had in it the dignity and devotion of a
benediction.
"Lord, what a woman!" he exclaimed a moment later in a deliciously rich
and reasonable voice. "Looks like there's some people same as fruits,
they don't noways mellow till age gets 'em."
Then once more lifting his hat, the speaker, Ambrose Thompson, now a man
of almost sixty, attempted pushing back the hair from his forehead,
apparently forgetting that his hair had retreated so far backward over
his high dome that the few remaining locks tastefully arranged in front
suggested the ripples left by a receding wave along a shore. Also his
face was deeply lined and his shoulders stooped considerably, and yet in
spite of these and other signs of age in some indefinable way Ambrose
Thompson had kept his boyishness. Not having travelled more than a
hundred miles out of Pennyroyal, nevertheless he had the eternal
youthfulness of spirit which belongs to all life's true adventurers.
"Ambrose Thompson's lookin' powerful spruce this evenin', ain't he?" A
woman of about forty, with quick birdlike movements, shrieked this
remark into an ear trumpet which was being held up by a shrivelled
figure in a wheeled chair that had just been projected forth from the
house next door with such suddenness that it seemed likely to spill out
its feeble occupant.
The old woman's head nodded helplessly, and yet out of her withered face
her black eyes still shone with an unquenchable fire. At this instant
Ambrose, catching sight of Mrs. Barrows, blew a kiss across his dividing
fence to her, so that she laughed, before replying, the pleased
monotonous laugh of deafness and old age.
"Ef it's an evergreen spruce you're meanin', Susan Jr., then you're
more'n right, for it seems Ambrose Thompson's leaves are forever green
and the sap runnin' in him same as spring. But hurry me along, I don't
want to miss nothin' of this oyster party, and mebbe ef you kin set me
right about in the middle of the new Sunday-school room, I kin sort er
reckon on what's goin' on."
The two women then moved so rapidly down the street that they almost ran
into a man who was hobbling in the opposite direction leaning on a
cane; his face as dry of any human emotion as though it had been a
squeezed-out dishcloth. He was attempting to move past the wheeled chair
without speaking, when a claw hand reached out after him. "Scared of a
female past eighty, Miner Hobbs," the old voice cheered. "Ain't it a
God's blessing no woman has run off with you--yet?"
Still at the gate the smile that greeted the approach of this dried-up
little man was as radiant as the love of a woman.
"It's mortal good of you, Miner, to be goin' to the oyster show with me
to-night, bein's as how you hate gatherin's," Ambrose began
affectionately; "you've done give up a heap of tastes fer me first and
last, ain't you, old friend? Now ef you'll wait here for me a few
moments longer I'll be wholly ready to join you, for I kinder thought
I'd like to speak with a few friends before the supper begins."
Ambrose started hastily back toward his front door with such an
unmistakably jaunty air, such a forgetting of his rheumatic joints, that
Miner's ferret eyes gleamed upon him suspiciously. Besides, was he not
wearing an historic long coat, a strangely rusty stovepipe hat, and a
white starched shirt over which his large lavender silk tie was crossed
like a breastplate, and was he not also revealing yards of newly gray
trousered legs?
"You wasn't aimin' to speak to no one in particular, was ye?" Miner
inquired.
The long man stopped, noticeably blushing, and then, although the rest
of his face remained grave, his eyes twinkled. "S'pose you don't know,
Miner, how hard it is sometimes not to lie to the folks you love just
because you love 'em? The Widow Tarwater druv past here a few minutes
agone, she that was Peachy Williams, and though I ain't had more'n a
bowin' acquaintance with her fer nigh forty years, knowin' that the
Honourable Jones and our new Baptist preacher the Rev. Elias Tupper, are
both after her, I kinder thought I'd like to see which one she favours
the most."
Then Ambrose went quickly inside his cottage while Miner patiently
waited on the outside, understanding that this moment of withdrawal to
his own bedroom before finally leaving his home had become his friend's
invariable custom since the death of his second wife, Emily, five years
before.
In his bedroom the elderly man was standing before his bureau, where to
one side hung the daguerreotype of a young woman.
"It's mortal queer, honey," he said aloud, "how I ain't ever able to go
places or to do things 'thout expectin' you to come along, yet there's
times when it feels like you'd been gone from me forever and then agen
when it don't seem more'n a few weeks."
He was afterward leaving the room with his head bent and his eyes misty
with tears when suddenly a smile twitched the end of his nose and the
corners of his mouth lifted as he turned once more toward his picture.
"Lord, Em'ly darlin', wouldn't you laugh if three old codgers was to get
into the race after the widow instid of two? I would admire to see them
sure winners beaten by a dark horse!"
Five minutes later, Uncle Ambrose Thompson as he was now called by
almost everybody in Pennyroyal, with every trace of lamentation removed
clean from his face, was walking toward the new red brick church,
having Miner's arm through his after their custom of more than thirty
years. Moses could no longer accompany them, but was resting somewhat
deeper under the apple tree than had been his habit in life.
While in the course of their walk Miner never once lifted his hat,
Ambrose's was seldom allowed to rest for a moment on his head, for women
of all ages smiled upon him and children breaking away from grown up
hands came to be tossed in the air by his long arms. Uncle Ambrose had
grown very popular with the children of Pennyroyal since the death of
his and Emily's only child twenty years before, since it was then that
he began bringing home to Emily for repairs all the crying babies he
could steal, the boys who had stumped their toes and the girls with torn
frocks and feelings.
In the Sunday-school room he immediately sailed up to the widow as
gallantly as though his ship had not failed to enter her port in nearly
forty years, and this when she was sheltered between the law and the
gospel. But before Uncle Ambrose could speak a large soft hand grasped
his lean and vital one.
"Welcome!" said the minister with unction.
Three years before, the Rev. Elias Tupper had entered Pennyroyal and
with this same soft hand had since patted and soothed his congregation
into following where their shepherd led. Indeed, the building of the
brick church had been a tribute to his powers and to-night's oyster
supper a kind of harvest festival to celebrate the last payment of the
church's debt.
Nevertheless an unspoken antagonism had always existed between the
Reverend Tupper and Ambrose Thompson, and indeed this was the first
appearance of the tall man within the new church's domains.
Brother Tupper was a man of only medium height, but of considerable
breadth, with cheeks as smooth and clean as a woman's. And while his
lips were thin and his eyes expressionless his face managed to give the
impression of a permanent smile, the kind of smile that can come from
but one source, having nothing to do with amusement over people or
things, nor even contentment in God's plan for His universe, but
manifests only a supreme and personal self-satisfaction.
Now for the life of him Ambrose could not refrain from frowning,
because, while his lips said, "Thank you," to himself he protested: "I
ain't able to bear it; this man actin' toward me as though _he_ was
forgivin' me some mortal sin every time we meet."
Neither was the widow's greeting of him cheering, since forty years had
not completely wiped away a certain never-explained retreat.
The promised plenitude of Peachy Williams' girlhood had been nobly
fulfilled in the Widow Tarwater, for now she suggested an abundant
harvest. A handsome black silk gown folded over her more than ample
bosom, a double chin rippled from under the soft fulness of her broad
face, her skin was white and crimson as a child's, her auburn hair
without a thread of gray in it, and her huge brown eyes never having
looked deep down into the waters of life showed none of its troubled
reflections.
Uncle Ambrose nodded approvingly at her appearance the while she looked
at him coldly, saying: "I ain't seen you to talk to in a long time,
Ambrose Thompson."
His reply flatteringly included the member of the Kentucky legislature
on the widow's right. "'Course you ain't, Peachy," he answered
gallantly, "for when big stars is shinin' so close to a planet, t'ain't
to be expected that the planet kin notice the little ones twitterin'
about in her neighbourhood."
And yet when supper was served the widow found herself placed at a table
for four whose other occupants were three men instead of the two whom
she had expected.