I seem sixty and married, but these effects are due to my condition and
sufferings, for I am a bachelor, and only forty-one. It will be hard for
you to believe that I, who am now but a shadow, was a hale, hearty man
two short years ago, a man of iron, a very athlete!--yet such is the
simple truth. But stranger still than this fact is the way in which I
lost my health. I lost it through helping to take care of a box of guns
on a two-hundred-mile railway journey one winter's night. It is the
actual truth, and I will tell you about it.
I belong in Cleveland, Ohio. One winter's night, two years ago, I
reached home just after dark, in a driving snow-storm, and the first
thing I heard when I entered the house was that my dearest boyhood
friend and schoolmate, John B. Hackett, had died the day before, and
that his last utterance had been a desire that I would take his remains
home to his poor old father and mother in Wisconsin. I was greatly
shocked and grieved, but there was no time to waste in emotions; I must
start at once. I took the card, marked “Deacon Levi Hackett, Bethlehem,
Wisconsin,” and hurried off through the whistling storm to the railway
station. Arrived there I found the long white-pine box which had been
described to me; I fastened the card to it with some tacks, saw it put
safely aboard the express car, and then ran into the eating-room
to provide myself with a sandwich and some cigars. When I returned,
presently, there was my coffin-box back again, apparently, and a young
fellow examining around it, with a card in his hands, and some tacks and
a hammer! I was astonished and puzzled. He began to nail on his card,
and I rushed out to the express car, in a good deal of a state of mind,
to ask for an explanation. But no--there was my box, all right, in the
express car; it hadn't been disturbed. [The fact is that without my
suspecting it a prodigious mistake had been made. I was carrying off a
box of guns which that young fellow had come to the station to ship to a
rifle company in Peoria, Illinois, and he had got my corpse!] Just then
the conductor sung out “All aboard,” and I jumped into the express car
and got a comfortable seat on a bale of buckets. The expressman was
there, hard at work,--a plain man of fifty, with a simple, honest,
good-natured face, and a breezy, practical heartiness in his general
style. As the train moved off a stranger skipped into the car and set a
package of peculiarly mature and capable Limburger cheese on one end of
my coffin-box--I mean my box of guns. That is to say, I know now that it
was Limburger cheese, but at that time I never had heard of the article
in my life, and of course was wholly ignorant of its character. Well,
we sped through the wild night, the bitter storm raged on, a cheerless
misery stole over me, my heart went down, down, down! The old expressman
made a brisk remark or two about the tempest and the arctic weather,
slammed his sliding doors to, and bolted them, closed his window down
tight, and then went bustling around, here and there and yonder, setting
things to rights, and all the time contentedly humming “Sweet By and
By,” in a low tone, and flatting a good deal. Presently I began to
detect a most evil and searching odor stealing about on the frozen air.
This depressed my spirits still more, because of course I attributed
it to my poor departed friend. There was something infinitely saddening
about his calling himself to my remembrance in this dumb pathetic way,
so it was hard to keep the tears back. Moreover, it distressed me on
account of the old expressman, who, I was afraid, might notice it.
However, he went humming tranquilly on, and gave no sign; and for this I
was grateful. Grateful, yes, but still uneasy; and soon I began to feel
more and more uneasy every minute, for every minute that went by that
odor thickened up the more, and got to be more and more gamey and hard
to stand. Presently, having got things arranged to his satisfaction, the
expressman got some wood and made up a tremendous fire in his stove.
This distressed me more than I can tell, for I could not but feel that
it was a mistake. I was sure that the effect would be deleterious upon
my poor departed friend. Thompson--the expressman's name was Thompson,
as I found out in the course of the night--now went poking around his
car, stopping up whatever stray cracks he could find, remarking that
it didn't make any difference what kind of a night it was outside,
he calculated to make us comfortable, anyway. I said nothing, but I
believed he was not choosing the right way. Meantime he was humming to
himself just as before; and meantime, too, the stove was getting hotter
and hotter, and the place closer and closer. I felt myself growing pale
and qualmish, but grieved in silence and said nothing.
Soon I noticed that the “Sweet By and By” was gradually fading out; next
it ceased altogether, and there was an ominous stillness. After a few
moments Thompson said,
“Pfew! I reckon it ain't no cinnamon 't I've loaded up thish-yer stove
with!”
He gasped once or twice, then moved toward the cof--gun-box, stood over
that Limburger cheese part of a moment, then came back and sat down near
me, looking a good deal impressed. After a contemplative pause, he said,
indicating the box with a gesture,
“Friend of yourn?”
“Yes,” I said with a sigh.
“He's pretty ripe, ain't he!”
Nothing further was said for perhaps a couple of minutes, each being
busy with his own thoughts; then Thompson said, in a low, awed voice,
“Sometimes it's uncertain whether they're really gone or not,--seem
gone, you know--body warm, joints limber--and so, although you think
they're gone, you don't really know. I've had cases in my car. It's
perfectly awful, becuz you don't know what minute they'll rise up and
look at you!” Then, after a pause, and slightly lifting his elbow toward
the box,--“But he ain't in no trance! No, sir, I go bail for him!”
We sat some time, in meditative silence, listening to the wind and the
roar of the train; then Thompson said, with a good deal of feeling,
“Well-a-well, we've all got to go, they ain't no getting around it. Man
that is born of woman is of few days and far between, as Scriptur' says.
Yes, you look at it any way you want to, it's awful solemn and cur'us:
they ain't nobody can get around it; all's got to go--just everybody, as
you may say. One day you're hearty and strong”--here he scrambled to his
feet and broke a pane and stretched his nose out at it a moment or two,
then sat down again while I struggled up and thrust my nose out at the
same place, and this we kept on doing every now and then--“and next day
he's cut down like the grass, and the places which knowed him then knows
him no more forever, as Scriptur' says. Yes'ndeedy, it's awful solemn
and cur'us; but we've all got to go, one time or another; they ain't no
getting around it.”