The Grandmothers/Chapter 3
DURING his grandfather's lifetime, the alpaca jacket which he put on when he came in for supper swung from a hook on the door of the chimney-cupboard room. It held the shape of his body and soul: the sharp angle of the sleeves at the elbow meant irascible vitality; the empty pockets, poverty and indifference; the imprint of the stooped shoulders, fatigue; and the contradictory flare of the collar at the back, pride.
He died when his grandson was twelve years old; so that Alwyn as a man could recall only the mysteriously impressive pictures which a child remembers. The clearest had a background of roses, his grandmother's cinnamon-rose bushes. Large bees staggered up and down in the scent of the old, bright thicket whose blossoms were all imperfect, hanging in great numbers on the tough stems, as if they had fallen there by chance. The bent old man came down the path from the woodshed with a look of great exasperation fixed on nothing in particular. His beard was parted in the middle, and fell on each side of a large bone button in his shirt collar; his rheumatic hands were clenched; and wherever he went, he seemed to be elbowing aside invisible people in his way.
There was little of importance left for him to do. He got up at daybreak to feed the hens which fluttered uncalled at his heels, flinging the grain behind him and taking no notice of them; so that there were sudden cries amid the drumming of their bills, and agitated flights away from his unsteady feet. His clear, wide-open eyes were often indifferently unfocused, as if the eyes of his mind were downcast. But he examined the sky at dawn with infinite care, to prophesy the weather; for he knew the meaning of sun dogs in winter (two pale blotches crouching on the horizon at the right and left hand of the east) and understood the color of clouds, and the various kinds of wind.
During the day he chopped kindling in the woodshed; cured the hams in salt and brown sugar, and smoked them with hickory chips; killed chickens for the table; and brought vegetables to both kitchens (his wife's and his daughter-in-law's), husking and silking the sweet corn, and breaking winter squashes with an ax. Above all, he worked in the garden, digging, planting, hoeing, transplanting, and weeding even patches of turnips, corn, parsley, and carrots, melons, peas, oyster plant, beets, parsnips, and early and late cabbage. He offered his grandson (then seven) one cent for every five cabbage moths that he could catch. Some were pallid, some deep yellow; Alwyn caught many of both colors with a butterfly net. But the old man said that a boy of his age ought to know that only the females laid eggs from which cabbage worms hatched, and harshly refused to pay for the others. Alwyn could not forgive him. The children were not allowed in the garden, unless their grandfather sent them to throw clods at one or two old hens who continually found holes in the fence. Sometimes Alwyn would ask timidly to go with him to look at the melons. The old man, only a little taller than the boy, stooped over the cantaloupe vines, and fingered the stems to see if they had begun to pull away from the ripening fruit. He thumped the watermelons, but was too deaf to hear the sound they made, like the beat of a small drum under the earth; and finally took from his pocket a horn-handled knife, cut a triangle in the rind, lifted it out, and peered down into the flesh: if it was pink, the plug was replaced; if it was blood-red, that melon was placed in a tub of water in the cellar. Alwyn knew as well as his grandfather how to test melons, but felt that something ambiguous was also being accomplished, that he was in the presence of an old, powerful magician, engaged in ceremonies among the vines.
Alwyn's father often said, "Your grandfather was no good at farming, but he is the best gardener in Wisconsin."
The striped beauty of the garden, its geometrical outlay of faultless plants on clean soil, suited his refined spirit better than large, weather-beaten fields. It was dear to him also because it took the place of the farm he had cleared in the wilderness, now beyond his control; for he was no longer strong enough to work on the land, and his son would no longer take orders from him. So he referred to the secrets of the soil in this or that field with the arrogance of one who does not expect to be listened to, and angrily made fun of Alwyn's father if a crop failed. Injurious things were said in anxious voices, things hardly meant to be heard; and there were, from time to time, bitter quarrels.
Once when Alwyn was nine he came round the corner of the house suddenly. His aunt Flora and his grandfather were going to the village; the horse and buggy stood by the porch. But the old man strode up and down, trampling the wild violets which were planted there, and muttering. Flora wrung her hands and absent-mindedly tore the veil which hung from her hat. His father was there, sobbing—Alwyn had not known that grown men ever wept. In the doorway his grandmother stood with her arms folded, a look of resignation that was half scorn on her face.
The trouble had something to do with the horse and buggy. Suddenly the old man sat down on the porch and stared straight ahead with his farsighted eyes. Alwyn's father stammered then that he was tired of being bullied, and the girl defended him and reproached their father—both speaking loudly because he was deaf. They were telling him that his life was over and he must not interfere any more—things were hard enough for them without that.
Then the grandmother saw the child, and said: "Run behind the house, Alwyn! Run behind the house!"
Stumbling with tragic excitement, he obeyed.
That evening he saw that they had all grown gentle, as if it were the responsibility of each to make the other forget what had happened; and his father and grandfather sat quietly side by side on the porch.
During the last six or seven years of the old man's life he was never in good health. As a small child Alwyn thought this resulted from chewing tobacco, a habit condemned in the family. Even his grandfather himself had said, "Look here, boy. Don't ever take tobacco. I learned when I was a boy—those were bad times." Meanwhile he had put as much as he could hold between finger and thumb into his mouth, as if to demonstrate the fatal power of the old days.
Alwyn's grandmother gave this explanation of his illness: "Your grandpa has never been a well man since he went to the war. It spoiled his stomach."
He feared and despised doctors, and read all the patent-medicine advertisements in the newspapers, believing for a moment each flowery promise of an end of pain. He received many pamphlets by mail—testimonies of miraculous healing, illustrated by photographs of ugly men and women who had been sufferers—and wrote for salves, powders, and tonics. His wife sighed and shook her head whenever an agent drove into the yard with a valise full of samples; but the old man invariably described his symptoms, the ambitious salesman invariably expressed his sympathy, gave advice, and received a large order. Every druggist in the neighboring towns also prepared for him personal recipes.
All these medicines accumulated in the tall kitchen cabinet: vials and pill boxes and squat bottles, bearing the formidable names of diseases in lists like incantations, decorated with portraits of heretic doctors, Mothers this and that in lace bonnets, and benign priests. He tried them all, and they failed. At last he found relief only in Duffy's whisky, which he drank from a teaspoon because he was a total abstainer. He was able to eat less and less, and sat by himself after each meal—his fingers interlaced, on his mouth the shape of a cry for pity that was never heard.
Though in the midst of his family, gardening faithfully in rain or shine, his isolation grew more extreme than that of any sick room. The children feared him, or feared his pain. In the woodshed he gnashed his teeth because the cats got underfoot; if the price of grain or pork fell, or La Follette made a speech, he gnashed his teeth as he read his newspaper. His grandchildren learned that they might be the objects of the same irritation. Furthermore, he was deaf; they did not know how to pitch their voices so he could understand, and were not tall enough to speak in his ear, though he was a small man. So they never asked questions, and he scarcely ever told them stories.
There was one, however, which he told on various occasions, and Alwyn could not understand why he remembered it or what it meant: "Early one morning, when I was a young fellow and going to the barnyard to milk, I saw a man leaving the strawstack and running down the road. After a time I saw him coming back again. The day was foggy—you couldn't tell about a man more'n six rods away. He turned round and got out of sight. I wondered what was wanted, so I watched through the horse-stable window. Pretty soon, there he was, stopping once in a while and going toward the stack. I ran out and shouted, 'Look here, stranger! What in creation are you after?' He was as white as a sheet and shook from head to foot. 'Excuse me, partner,' said he. 'I slept in your stack. I left a pair of shoes there.' 'My stars, man! Go and get them!' I told him. 'I don't want any man's shoes but my own."
He told this mysterious anecdote and one or two others like it, with an air of great satisfaction. But of his more important experiences, never a word. Indifferent to the future, set aside in the present, he must have been brooding all the time on his plans which had failed to materialize, his dreams which had given him no rest. But he said nothing, being too ill to idealize and too proud to regret anything.
His wife had kept a few relics of this youth which he seemed to be concealing. Hating war, he had burned his uniform and thrown away the badges; but there was a dog's-eared Testament which he had carried in his breast pocket; a screw-topped inkwell of dark wood into which he had dipped his pen (all the letters were lost); a splinter of a tree under which two generals had signed a truce, the soldiers in a frenzy having cut down and divided it; a silver ring shaped like a wedding ring which had belonged to his sixteen-year-old brother Hilary, who had been taken by the Rebels and had never been heard of. He made no comments upon them; his wife explained what they were; and when she taught the children Civil War songs, he went out of the house.
He had been a musician in the war. There were a pair of drumsticks, blackened where sweating hands had held them, and a trumpet without a mouthpiece. There were the fife and the flutes; the fife like an ebony wand, the flutes wrapped in red flannel, their German-silver keys interlaced around the one of cocoa- wood and the other of a wood called grenadilla.
Sometimes the old man took out the fife, paying no attention to the fascinated children who gathered about. One shoe tapping a nervous beat on the floor, he played the hysterical tunes of the 'sixties. There was something unearthly in the melody made by his hard lips, pressed on the little black rod as if in a kiss; and the children shrank, ravished by a kind of fright. Alwyn dreamed of the Civil War—a war of little old men, deaf and sad, tapping their feet on the hot rock in the South, a war of piercing music off the key.
He seemed scarcely human to his grandson—an old ghost of another epoch, a ghost which, even in its youth, could not have been very young. All that Alwyn ever knew of this inconceivable boyhood and young manhood was based upon the vague accounts of others, except what his grandfather himself wrote about it the year before his death.
Everyone was surprised by his consent to write the history of his life; his children spoke of the important contribution he could make to pioneer history, hoping, perhaps, that, in a sentence here and a paragraph there, he would break his long silence about himself, as it were by accident. He was to be seen at the double secretary, covering sheets of foolscap with his crabbed script, muttering complaints of the stiffness of his fingers. . . .
January 23d, 1911.
Being urgently requested by the members of my family to write a brief history of my life, together with some incidents connected with the early settlement of this part of Wisconsin, I have very reluctantly consented to do so.
I was born in the State of New York, Onondaga County, town of Lafayette, village of Cardiff, February 15th, 1830. My father's family consisted of five sons and one daughter, all of whom excepting two have passed to the Silent Land. In the vicinity where we lived, a gentleman by the name of Farrar, owned and operated an ax manufactory, but the stream on which his plant was located was too small to furnish sufficient power to meet the demand, so he conceived the idea of going West in pursuit of a location suitable for his business. Arriving at Milwaukee and securing the services of (what was then called) a Land Looker, they continued their march Northward when unawares they came to the banks of Stony Creek in Washington County. This, said Mr. Farrar, is the identical place I have been looking for.
Upon his return home language failed him to fully describe the beauty of the new country and the bright prospects of its development in the near future. At that early period the West was beckoning to the overcrowded East to come and help to organize what has proven to be one of the grandest and best States of the Union. Such was the force of his argument and persuasion, that my Father concluded to accompany him and seek a home in the far-away West.
They both soon disposed of their belongings and on the 8th day of September, 1846, they secured passage in the city of Syracuse on a canal boat for Buffalo. The voyage lasted one week. Arriving in Buffalo, we found the "Propeller Princeton" about ready to leave her Dock for Milwaukee and as soon as our goods could be transferred we commenced our long and tedious journey around the great chain of lakes, toward the setting sun. On entering Lake Michigan through the Straits Mackinaw, a terrible storm awaited us, the wind and waves carrying away the smokestacks of the vessel and making it necessary to chain the cabins to keep them from being blown overboard. After being tossed to and fro for a whole week we were finally put on Terra Firma in the city of Milwaukee. The entire voyage occupying two weeks, which is now being made in less than twenty-four hours. We soon found that our lot was cast in a strange land and among strangers.
Fortunately, Mr. Farrar had a brother-in-law by the name of Wilcox living about three miles up the lake and one of the very early settlers of Wisconsin. To his home we wended our way, as it seemed to be necessary to provide a place for the families to live while the men were absent building their houses on their land. In the meantime Father had bought a yoke of oxen and wagon and proceeded to lay in a store of provisions, consisting of one barrel of salt pork, one barrel of flour, half bushel of beans, five bushels of potatoes, tea, coffee, sugar, etc., and a stove. Thus equipped, one bright Thursday morning in the first part of the month of October, we started on our journey to Washington County. Late Friday evening found us at what was called the Aaron settlement and three miles from our destination. At daylight Saturday morning we started for our new home in the forest, consuming the entire day in making the three miles. There were logs to be chopped and drawn out of the way, swamps and marshes to be avoided, trees to be marked in order to find the road again. Arriving at our destination, Father returned to the Aaron home to spend the night, leaving us boys in the woods to guard the team and provisions. We went to a little marsh near by and cut each an armful of marsh grass which we spread under the wagon, on which we placed a blanket, making a bed fit for royalty to occupy. After retiring to our novel sleeping room, we were soon lulled to sleep by the mournful voice of the hoot owl and the sweet, silvery song of the whippoorwill.
On Monday morning Father returned and we began cutting logs of small size, to build a cabin, in which to live during the time occupied in building the log house. In two days a shelter 10 x 12 ft. was erected. We brought moss from a little spruce swamp near by and stuffed it in the crevices, which answered admirably in keeping out the wind and storm. For a door we hung up a blanket.
I was unanimously chosen cook, while our bill of fare consisted of pork, potatoes, bread, beans, and an occasional extra of wild game with which the forest abounded. The streams and lakes were also swarming with fish of the finest quality. I may say however that my education in the culinary art as well as in many others had been sadly neglected. But my observation of my mother's kitchen had impressed me, that it required no sleight of hand to boil potatoes, fry meat, and bake beans. When it came to the bakery division that was another problem and one over which I stumbled and was obliged to take our flour to a neighbor's three miles away and persuade the lady of the house to do our baking, twice each week. I went for the bread, carrying it on my back in a flour sack.
We were three days in raising the building, the neighbors being so widely separated, coming a distance from four to six miles. I may add without boasting, that I did the cooking for the crowd those three days, and the compliments I received, added not a little to the opinion I held of myself as an A No. I cook.
I must refer briefly to the construction of the house. All the sawed lumber in the building was in the two doors. That which was necessary for floors, partitions and casings was split from poplar and basswood logs, and hewed one side which was called puncheon. The material of the roof was split from oak two or three feet long, which were called Shakes. The crevices in the side of the building were filled with clay. After making a fireplace in one end of the house we declared it perfect, and ready for occupancy.
Having completed our labors, we were ready to go to Milwaukee and bring the family to their new home. On Saturday morning, Father and I started on our long, tedious march of forty-five miles on foot and long before the rays of the morning sun began to dance among the tree tops of the forest, we were well on our way. We made no halt on our entire journey. Sundown found us a long way from our destination. The night was dark as ebony; neither moon nor stars came to our relief, and often we were obliged to feel for the wagon tracks with our hands, for fear of straying off into the bush, but constant plodding finally brought us to our temporary home. The clock struck twelve at midnight, as we opened the door of the dwelling, fatigued and mud-covered, from head to foot.
The next day (Monday) Father went to the city and engaged two teams, one horse team with spring wagon, the other an oxen team and lumber wagon. The former to take the family, the latter the household goods. My younger brother and I were left to accompany the man with the ox team and the goods. The roads were in a most horrible condition and the next thing to bottomless. Night found us in the vicinity of Germantown. We halted and engaged lodging with a good-souled German who was the proprietor of what was then called a Tavern. But what was our surprise, on going out the next morning, to find our goods dumped on the ground in the yard and our teamster (I suppose) well on his way back to Milwaukee. While my eyes are not a fountain of tears, I must admit that they were a little moist with anger and wrath at the man who had left us in such a plight. But after a good hearty breakfast and the advice of our genial host, we went on our way toward Stony Creek in hope but not much rejoicing, and reached home that evening. The family was safely sheltered, but the implements for housekeeping were still dumped on the ground in Germantown. The following day Father started afoot to find the goods and some one to bring them. On his way he met Mr. Rix driving two yoke of Mulley oxen, hitched to a lumber wagon. This was his opportunity. After some preliminaries he promised to go and bring the goods, which he faithfully kept, occupying two days' time in making the trip.
We spent the winter in cutting down the trees near the house, and farther away, with a view of getting the land in shape for producing something on which to subsist. The spring and autumn of 1847 witnessed a high tide of Emigration to this section of Wisconsin. Families coming from Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York and many from Europe, especially from Germany and Ireland.
Just at this time a serious question confronted the pioneer mothers in this section of the township. They said how, when, and where are we going to educate our children to prepare them for the duties and responsibilities of life and good citizenship. There was but one answer to their questions: viz., the school. A school we must and will have. It is a well-known fact, when the women of a neighborhood are united in carrying forward an enterprise of this nature, they are terrible as an army with banners, and failure is an unknown quantity. A meeting was called to which most of the settlers responded. The question of securing a site and building a schoolhouse was taken into consideration. It was decided to locate the building as near the center of the settlement as might be. The place was finally agreed upon, but unfortunately the land was owned by a man in Milwaukee by the name of Wait, who had bought it from the government the previous year for speculative purposes. The next question was to get into communication with him. It being late in the season, what was to be done must be done without delay and some one must go to the city and confer with Mr. Wait personally.
No one volunteering, I was delegated to foot it to Milwaukee and transact the necessary business, and to start the next day. Mother put up a liberal lunch consisting of corn bread and honey, with a good large piece of cold roast venison. As soon as I could see my way I started on my long wearisome journey of forty-five miles. I made no halt until I walked into the city, just as the sun was hiding behind the western hills. I had no difficulty in finding Mr. Wait, for Milwaukee at that early period did not resemble the Milwaukee of the present day. I made known to Mr. Wait my errand and he seemed highly pleased with the proposition, knowing that improvements of that nature would help to increase the value of his land. He most kindly invited me to take supper with him, and I could not find it in my heart to refuse him, for I was short at that particular time of hotel fare. After supper I informed him that I would like him to execute the lease that evening. In a very brief time I had the Document safely pinned in my pocket. Whether the gentleman mistrusted the leanness of my wallet, or whether from a true Christian spirit, he cordially invited me to remain with him overnight. I accepted with thanks from down deep in my heart. I also informed Mrs. Wait not to disturb herself by getting me an early breakfast. After thanking them again for their kindness, I was glad of an opportunity for resting my weary limbs. The following morning, long before the sun's rays sparkled on the waters of Lake Michigan, I was a long distance from the city, and in the dark forest. As daylight approached noticed a little clearing in the woods a short distance ahead of me. On approaching nearer I saw a small log house and about an acre of cleared land. About this time I began to feel unmistakable evidences that I had not been to breakfast. No smoke was rising from the chimney of the house and a poor prospect of getting anything to eat. On peering into the garden, I discovered a fine patch of flat turnips. I skipped over the fence, filled my pockets and hands, and went on my way rejoicing and eating turnips. They tasted (to me) like Paradise Apples. At noon I came to what was then called Manor's Tavern, I think in the vicinity of Richfield, knowing I had just the amount of change, (viz., 121⁄2 cents) to pay for my dinner. I stepped into the hotel and ordered the dinner with just as much confidence in myself and assurance as a guest of the Hotel Pfister or Plankington in Milwaukee.
After satisfying my hunger, I resumed my journey, and a little after dark I arrived at the end of my long walk.
The men of the district soon rallied and commenced cutting logs for the building. In an incredibly short time the school-house was completed. Benches or seats were made from split logs and hewed on one side, with legs fastened in. A huge fireplace adorned one end of the room and a large box stove the other. The architecture (in style) was the same as that which prevailed in the surrounding country.
The first school was taught by Mr. Allan Frisby. He boarded at our home. I did not attend school as my services were demanded in the woods, cutting down the forest. Mr. Frisby was my own age and withal an expert on the violin, while I made no little pretension to being an adept with the flute. So we whiled away many a long winter evening in front of the big fireplace, giving free concerts and furnishing our own audience.
At this time, the inconveniences of a new country began to weigh heavily upon us, the greatest of which was the lack of funds. We were obliged to have supplies brought from Milwaukee with an ox team. These consisted of corn meal, a scanty supply of wheat flour, beans, a few groceries, etc. For our meat we depended entirely upon the wild game of the forest, which also abounded with wild bees, with abundance of honey. For coffee, we obtained a root which grew in the bed of the creek called Evans Root which dried and scorched in the oven made a very palatable drink. Sometimes Mother used to run short of saleratus. She would burn a few corn cobs and use the ashes instead. This was called Cob Ash, and answered a very good purpose. In a word we lived the simple life, up to the utmost limit.
The year 1847 was one of great hardships and privation, having no team or cows, consequently no milk or butter. During the winter we had cleared the timber and brush from three or four acres of land. We were told before leaving the East that all that was necessary to raise a crop in Wisconsin was to chop a little hole in the ground with an old ax, drop in the corn, place your foot on it, and go on your way rejoicing. While this system might have been all right in theory, it proved an utter failure in practice. We worked all summer on that little clearing, hoeing the ground all over with hoes, but did not get an ear of corn for our labors.
If the pioneer Fathers suffered the hardships and inconveniences incident to the settlement of a new country, likewise the pioneer Mothers. To them was committed the care and training of the family. She was expected to look after their wardrobe, to keep them decently and comfortably clothed against the rigors of the long, cold winters. I well remember my own dear Mother who used to sit the long winter evenings through, and by the dim light of a tallow dip, with needle and thread, darn, patch, make, and cut down the worn garments of the older to fit the younger, and was often at her wits' end to adjust matters in a satisfactory manner. Were any of the members of the family sick, she was both physician and trained nurse. No hand like Mother's could soothe the aching brow; no voice like hers could give comfort to the troubled spirit. Dear to us is the memory of our pioneer Mothers.
In 1848 my brother Harrison, who was a millwright, came on from the East and erected a sawmill on Stony Creek, which was a great convenience to the settlers. Immigration was very brisk. The sound of the woodman's ax and the crash of falling timber were heard in all directions, indicating that the Herculean task of making Wisconsin what it is to-day was fully inaugurated.
In the fall of this year the State authorized a State Road to be laid from Port Washington to Fond du Lac. The road was surveyed directly in front of our house. The commissioners made our home their headquarters as long as they were able to reach it nights. They were a jolly big-hearted Trio, and their stay with us made an Oasis in the Desert of Our Loneliness. We passed the evenings in front of the big fireplace, singing songs, spinning yarns, etc. In thinking of those bygone days I often think of these lines, "Oh, for the days that never will come back." During this time my imagination was not idle, but pictured to me the old stagecoach with its four-horse team loaded with passengers and the driver blowing his bugle announcing his entry into the village. A scene to which I used to be a daily witness in our Eastern home; but like most other visions of my early years, with the lapse of time it vanished. The road never materialized.
The pen slipped from his hand, that fine, pointed hand twice deformed—by hard work and rheumatism. How should he go on? A pioneer youth; that much was done, the beginning. . . . How had the promise of boyhood been kept? What had come after?
He might have written of his first bride, Serena Cannon. Trembling, in ruffles of muslin, by the pear tree he had planted the day they were married. When she loosened the net from her hair it fell down slowly in folds as black as a crow. While he cleared more land, plowed with the oxen, and planted corn, she did needlework and made wreaths and hats of braided straw. In the dusk they talked of the future. The birth of a son; her fear and her cries; the little body pressing against her suddenly grown-up breast, white, almost blue-white. He was an old man now and the father of six more children; but the part of himself which had been Serena's lover had not lived to maturity—it lay in the past, still interlaced with her body.
He might have written of the Civil War. Farewell. Glad to be going as a musician so that he could hold himself a little apart from the rest, remembering her with his flute at the head of the regiment. The officers he had known them at home—loafers and bullies; some were drunk, and one of them smiled all the time and found excuses to flog his orderlies with his bare hands. Dysentery, quarrels, and obscenities. Stupor in a blare of music, his lips pursed, his fingers dancing automatically on the flute stops, among men in badly tied bandages. He was often too ill to play in the band. When the fifer was sick, he played the fife. The drummer died; and the army could get along without a flute (Serena's flute); so he took the dead man's drum. Then came the news that his little brother Hilary had disappeared after a skirmish between Union and Rebel troops in Tennessee; and he dreaded the sight of his poor mother when, if ever, he should get home.
Peace was declared. He could not sleep, and felt like a sick animal hurrying home to die. But he knew that he would not die, not there beside Serena; he would grow strong, prosperous, and happy. She had written that their boy Oliver had learned to talk.
Home-coming. Serena lay in a fever. She was not delirious, but too weak to say anything. He never slept, and marched around the bed, and scarcely dared to speak; for he knew that he himself was delirious, in secret. All night her eyes were fixed on him, larger than other human eyes. She died. He wanted to lift the cheap, stiff sheet to look at her body—he had not touched it since the war began; but he thought it would be sacrilege, and did not dare.
A widower. Rose Hamilton, his brother Leander's sweetheart, had lived with Serena and helped her. When Leander returned, he did not marry her as she expected, but went West instead. Henry blamed him, and felt responsible as the elder brother. And how was he going to take care of little Oliver? The child loved Rose. So he asked her to marry him. It was part of his duty not to let his young wife know his despair; she could not comfort him. His old mother lived a few miles away with his brother John, mourning for Hilary; Henry visited her two or three times a week. They sat side by side, and her roughened fingers often smoothed his forehead. Finally she died; and he resolved to let death have its dead, and to be gentler to Rose. Then his boy Oliver died, and a week later Rose's first child was born, a little girl named Polly.
The rest of his life seemed unimportant. Children were born; Rose always seemed young and coarse; he tried to be kind. There were other deaths, but none so unpardonable as those which had already taken place. The laughter of his sons—he wanted to enjoy it, but could not; their troubles—he left them to his wife; they were her children. There was another war, and his son Evan, who had been so hard to bring up, deserted from the army; he knew that he ought to forgive him for what he himself might have done, but he never forgave anything.
Meanwhile the West, that point of the compass which had glittered with hope like a star, came to resemble the East—the light went out of it. Many years of life had been allotted him, and with them had also been allotted hard work and poverty. Every hope had a rendezvous with disappointment.
The old man sat at the double secretary under the embossed portraits of Longfellow, Whittier, and the rest, and stared at what he had written. What more could he write? What were the picturesque details which had filled the margin of his life, once life had begun in earnest? How could he describe the oxen and the yoke hewn from a single block, the flail joined by a strip of horsehide, the breech-loading gun and the powderhorn—when his mind's eye, only his mind's eye, kept filling with tears? It was too late to shed them now; it had always been too late. He folded the sheets of foolscap and put them in the family Bible. He was seen from the porch, and the expression on his face was so terrible that no one asked any questions.
After his eighty-second birthday he had to stay in bed. One day, as the doctor strode away across the lawn, Alwyn asked his grandmother the name of his illness. "Shrinking of the stomach," she said. He was starving to death.
A few days before the end his grandchildren were taken in to see him. They stood in a row at the foot of the black-walnut bed. On two pillows lay his brown face, thinner but no older than it had been for years, the energetic, indifferent, blue eyes staring over their heads.
This was no magician, Alwyn thought; he was old, but not powerful. Alwyn's little sister sighed. He held his breath, and heard his own heart like a drum slowly beaten with one finger. The old man lifted his head impatiently, letting it fall back on the pillows, and the children were hurried from the room.
The small boy knew even at the time that his grand-father had not died with that convulsive motion; but he would always feel that he had been present at a deathbed. What did death mean to him then? It meant that an old man who was too deaf to hear what was said to him would not complain of the noise they made any more; it meant that they could go into the garden whenever they liked; it meant also that they would have to work in the garden. These unimportant things—and something more: it was as if the world, in one moment, forgot much that it knew and had never been willing to tell.