Tiverton Tales
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Alice Brown >> Tiverton Tales
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18 TIVERTON TALES
BY ALICE BROWN
[Illustration: Publisher icon]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1899
COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY ALICE BROWN
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
TO M. H. R.
A MASTER MAGICIAN
CONTENTS
DOORYARDS
A MARCH WIND
THE MORTUARY CHEST
HORN-O'-THE-MOON
A STOLEN FESTIVAL
A LAST ASSEMBLING
THE WAY OF PEACE
THE EXPERIENCE OF HANNAH PRIME
HONEY AND MYRRH
A SECOND MARRIAGE
THE FLAT-IRON LOT
THE END OF ALL LIVING
TIVERTON TALES
DOORYARDS
Tiverton has breezy, upland roads, and damp, sweet valleys; but should
you tarry there a summer long, you might find it wasteful to take many
excursions abroad. For, having once received the freedom of family
living, you will own yourself disinclined to get beyond dooryards, those
outer courts of domesticity. Homely joys spill over into them, and, when
children are afoot, surge and riot there. In them do the common
occupations of life find niche and channel. While bright weather holds,
we wash out of doors on a Monday morning, the wash-bench in the solid
block of shadow thrown by the house. We churn there, also, at the hour
when Sweet-Breath, the cow, goes afield, modestly unconscious of her own
sovereignty over the time. There are all the varying fortunes of
butter-making recorded. Sometimes it comes merrily to the tune of
"Come, butter, come! Peter stands a-waiting at the gate, Waiting for his
butter-cake. Come, butter, come!"
chanted in time with the dasher; again it doth willfully refuse, and
then, lest it be too cool, we contribute a dash of hot water, or too
hot, and we lend it a dash of cold. Or we toss in a magical handful of
salt, to encourage it. Possibly, if we be not the thriftiest of
householders, we feed the hens here in the yard, and then "shoo" them
away, when they would fain take profligate dust-baths under the syringa,
leaving unsightly hollows. But however, and with what complexion, our
dooryards may face the later year, they begin it with purification. Here
are they an unfailing index of the severer virtues; for, in Tiverton,
there is no housewife who, in her spring cleaning, omits to set in order
this outer pale of the temple. Long before the merry months are well
under way, or the cows go kicking up their heels to pasture, or plants
are taken from the south window and clapped into chilly ground, orderly
passions begin to riot within us, and we "clear up" our yards. We
gather stray chips, and pieces of bone brought in by the scavenger dog,
who sits now with his tail tucked under him, oblivious of such vagrom
ways. We rake the grass, and then, gilding refined gold, we sweep it.
There is a tradition that Miss Lois May once went to the length of
trimming her grass about the doorstone and clothes-pole with embroidery
scissors; but that was a too-hasty encomium bestowed by a widower whom
she rejected next week, and who qualified his statement by saying they
were pruning-shears.
After this preliminary skirmishing arises much anxious inspection of
ancient shrubs and the faithful among old-fashioned plants, to see
whether they have "stood the winter." The fresh, brown "piny" heads are
brooded over with a motherly care; wormwood roots are loosened, and the
horse-radish plant is given a thrifty touch. There is more than the
delight of occupation in thus stirring the wheels of the year. We are
Nature's poor handmaidens, and our labor gives us joy.
But sweet as these homespun spots can make themselves, in their mixture
of thrift and prodigality, they are dearer than ever at the points where
they register family traits, and so touch the humanity of us all. Here
is imprinted the story of the man who owns the farm, that of the father
who inherited it, and the grandfather who reclaimed it from waste; here
have they and their womenkind set the foot of daily living and traced
indelible paths. They have left here the marks of tragedy, of pathos, or
of joy. One yard has a level bit of grassless ground between barn and
pump, and you may call it a battlefield, if you will, since famine and
desire have striven there together. Or, if you choose to read fine
meanings into threadbare things, you may see in it a field of the cloth
of gold, where simple love of life and childlike pleasure met and
sparkled for no eye to see. It was a croquet ground, laid out in the
days when croquet first inundated the land, and laid out by a woman.
This was Della Smith, the mother of two grave children, and the wife of
a farmer who never learned to smile. Eben was duller than the ox which
ploughs all day long for his handful of hay at night and his heavy
slumber; but Della, though she carried her end of the yoke with a
gallant spirit, had dreams and desires forever bursting from brown
shells, only to live a moment in the air, and then, like bubbles, die.
She had a perpetual appetite for joy. When the circus came to town, she
walked miles to see the procession; and, in a dream of satisfied
delight, dropped potatoes all the afternoon, to make up. Once, a
hand-organ and monkey strayed that way, and it was she alone who
followed them; for the children were little, and all the saner
house-mothers contented themselves with leaning over the gates till the
wandering train had passed. But Della drained her draught of joy to the
dregs, and then tilted her cup anew. With croquet came her supremest
joy,--one that leavened her days till God took her, somewhere, we hope,
where there is playtime. Della had no money to buy a croquet set, but
she had something far better, an alert and undiscouraged mind. On one
dizzy afternoon, at a Fourth of July picnic, when wickets had been set
up near the wood, she had played with the minister, and beaten him. The
game opened before her an endless vista of delight. She saw herself
perpetually knocking red-striped balls through an eternity of wickets;
and she knew that here was the one pastime of which no soul could tire.
Afterwards, driving home with her husband and two children, still in a
daze of satisfied delight, she murmured absently:--
"Wonder how much they cost?"
"What?" asked Eben, and Della turned, flushed scarlet, and replied:--
"Oh, nothin'!"
That night, she lay awake for one rapt hour, and then she slept the
sleep of conquerors. In the morning, after Eben had gone safely off to
work, and the children were still asleep, she began singing, in a
monotonous, high voice, and took her way out of doors. She always sang
at moments when she purposed leaping the bounds of domestic custom. Even
Eben had learned that, dull as he was. If he heard that guilty crooning
from the buttery, he knew she might be breaking extra eggs, or using
more sugar than was conformable.
"What you doin' of?" he was accustomed to call. But Della never
answered, and he did not interfere. The question was a necessary
concession to marital authority; he had no wish to curb her ways.
Della scudded about the yard like a willful wind. She gathered withes
from a waiting pile, and set them in that one level space for wickets.
Then she took a handsaw, and, pale about the lips, returned to the house
and to her bedroom. She had made her choice. She was sacrificing old
associations to her present need; and, one after another, she sawed the
ornamenting balls from her mother's high-post bedstead. Perhaps the one
element of tragedy lay in the fact that Della was no mechanician, and
she had not foreseen that, having one flat side, her balls might decline
to roll. But that dismay was brief. A weaker soul would have flinched;
to Della it was a futile check, a pebble under the wave. She laid her
balls calmly aside. Some day she would whittle them into shape; for
there were always coming to Della days full of roomy leisure and large
content. Meanwhile apples would serve her turn,--good alike to draw a
weary mind out of its channel or teach the shape of spheres. And so,
with two russets for balls and the clothes-slice for a mallet (the heavy
sledge-hammer having failed), Della serenely, yet in triumph, played her
first game against herself.
"Don't you drive over them wickets!" she called imperiously, when Eben
came up from the lot in his dingle cart.
"Them what?" returned he, and Della had to go out to explain. He looked
at them gravely; hers had been a ragged piece of work.
"What under the sun 'd you do that for?" he inquired. "The young ones
wouldn't turn their hand over for 't. They ain't big enough."
"Well, I be," said Della briefly. "Don't you drive over 'em."
Eben looked at her and then at his path to the barn, and he turned his
horse aside.
Thereafter, until we got used to it, we found a vivid source of interest
in seeing Della playing croquet, and always playing alone. That was a
very busy summer, because the famous drought came then, and water had to
be carried for weary rods from spring and river. Sometimes Della did not
get her playtime till three in the afternoon, sometimes not till after
dark; but she was faithful to her joy. The croquet ground suffered
varying fortunes. It might happen that the balls were potatoes, when
apples failed to be in season; often her wickets broke, and stood up in
two ragged horns. Sometimes one fell away altogether, and Della, like
the planets, kept an unseen track. Once or twice, the mistaken
benevolence of others gave her real distress. The minister's daughter,
noting her solitary game, mistook it for forlornness, and, in the warmth
of her maiden heart, came to ask if she might share. It was a timid
though official benevolence; but Della's bright eyes grew dark. She
clung to her kitchen chair.
"I guess I won't," she said, and, in some dim way, everybody began to
understand that this was but an intimate and solitary joy. She had grown
so used to spreading her banquets for one alone that she was frightened
at the sight of other cups upon the board; for although loneliness
begins in pain, by and by, perhaps, it creates its own species of sad
and shy content.
Della did not have a long life; and that was some relief to us who were
not altogether satisfied with her outlook here. The place she left need
not be always desolate. There was a good maiden sister to keep the
house, and Eben and the children would be but briefly sorry. They could
recover their poise; he with the health of a simple mind, and they as
children will. Yet he was truly stunned by the blow; and I hoped, on the
day of the funeral, that he did not see what I did. When we went out to
get our horse and wagon, I caught my foot in something which at once
gave way. I looked down--at a broken wicket and a withered apple by the
stake.
Quite at the other end of the town is a dooryard which, in my own mind,
at least, I call the traveling garden. Miss Nancy, its presiding
mistress, is the victim of a love of change; and since she may not
wander herself, she transplants shrubs and herbs from nook to nook. No
sooner does a green thing get safely rooted than Miss Nancy snatches it
up and sets it elsewhere. Her yard is a varying pageant of plants in all
stages of misfortune. Here is a shrub, with faded leaves, torn from the
lap of prosperity in a well-sunned corner to languish under different
conditions. There stands a hardy bush, shrinking, one might guess, under
all its bravery of new spring green, from the premonition that Miss
Nancy may move it to-morrow. Even the ladies'-delights have their months
of garish prosperity, wherein they sicken like country maids; for no
sooner do they get their little feet settled in a dark, still corner
than they are summoned out of it, to sunlight bright and strong. Miss
Nancy lives with a bedridden father, who has grown peevish through long
patience; can it be that slow, senile decay which has roused in her a
fierce impatience against the sluggishness of life, and that she hurries
her plants into motion because she herself must halt? Her father does
not theorize about it. He says, "Nancy never has no luck with plants."
And that, indeed, is true.
There is another dooryard with its infallible index finger pointing to
tell a tale. You can scarcely thread your way through it for vehicles of
all sorts congregated there to undergo slow decomposition at the hands
of wind and weather. This farmer is a tradesman by nature, and though,
for thrift's sake, his fields must be tilled, he is yet inwardly
constrained to keep on buying and selling, albeit to no purpose. He is
everlastingly swapping and bargaining, giving play to a faculty which
might, in its legitimate place, have worked out the definite and
tangible, but which now goes automatically clicking on under vain
conditions. The house, too, is overrun with useless articles, presently
to be exchanged for others as unavailing, and in the farmer's pocket
ticks a watch which to-morrow will replace with another more problematic
still. But in the yard are the undisputable evidences of his wild
unthrift. Old rusty mowing-machines, buggies with torn and flapping
canvas, sleighs ready to yawn at every crack, all are here: poor
relations in a broken-down family. But children love this yard. They
come, hand in hand, with a timid confidence in their right, and ask at
the back door for the privilege of playing in it. They take long,
entrancing journeys in the mouldy old chaise; they endure Siberian
nights of sleighing, and throw out their helpless dolls to the pursuing
wolves; or the more mercantile-minded among the boys mount a
three-wheeled express wagon, and drive noisily away to traffic upon the
road. This, in its dramatic possibilities, is not a yard to be despised.
Not far away are two neighboring houses once held in affectionate
communion by a straight path through the clover and a gap in the wall.
This was the road to much friendly gossip, and there were few bright
days which did not find two matrons met at the wall, their heads
together over some amiable yarn. But now one house is closed, its
windows boarded up, like eyes shut down forever, and the grass has grown
over the little path: a line erased, perhaps never to be renewed. It is
easier to wipe out a story from nature than to wipe it from the heart;
and these mutilated pages of the outer life perpetually renew in us the
pangs of loss and grief.
But not all our dooryard reminiscences are instinct with pain. Do I not
remember one swept and garnished plot, never defiled by weed or
disordered with ornamental plants, where stood old Deacon Pitts, upon an
historic day, and woke the echoes with a herald's joy? Deacon Pitts had
the ghoulish delight of the ennuied country mind in funerals and the
mortality of man; and this morning the butcher had brought him news of
death in a neighboring town. The butcher had gone by, and I was going;
but Deacon Pitts stood there, dramatically intent upon his mournful
morsel. I judged that he was pondering on the possibility of attending
the funeral without the waste of too much precious time now due the
crops. Suddenly, as he turned back toward the house, bearing a pan of
liver, his pondering eye caught sight of his aged wife toiling across
the fields, laden with pennyroyal. He set the pan down hastily--yea,
even before the advancing cat!--and made a trumpet of his hands.
"Sarah!" he called piercingly. "Sarah! Mr. Amasa Blake's passed away!
Died yesterday!"
I do not know whether he was present at that funeral, but it would be
strange if he were not; for time and tide both served him, and he was
always on the spot. Indeed, one day he reached a house of mourning in
such season that he found the rooms quite empty, and was forced to wait
until the bereaved family should assemble. There they sat, he and his
wife, a portentous couple in their dead black and anticipatory gloom,
until even their patience had well-nigh fled. And then an arriving
mourner overheard the deacon, as he bent forward and challenged his wife
in a suspicious and discouraged whisper:--
"Say, Sarah, ye don't s'pose it's all goin' to fush out, do ye?"
They had their funeral.
To the childish memory, so many of the yards are redolent now of wonder
and a strange, sweet fragrance of the fancy not to be described! One,
where lived a notable cook, had, in a quiet corner, a little grove of
caraway. It seemed mysteriously connected with the oak-leaf cookies,
which only she could make; and the child, brushing through the delicate
bushes grown above his head, used to feel vaguely that, on some
fortunate day, cookies would be found there, "a-blowin' and a-growin'."
That he had seen them stirred and mixed and taken from the oven was an
empty matter; the cookies belonged to the caraway grove, and there they
hang ungathered still. In the very same yard was a hogshead filled with
rainwater, where insects came daily to their death and floated
pathetically in a film of gauzy wings. The child feared this innocent
black pool, feared it too much to let it alone; and day by day he would
hang upon the rim with trembling fingers, and search the black, smooth
depths, with all Ophelia's pangs. And to this moment, no rushing river
is half so ministrant to dread as is a still, dull hogshead, where
insects float and fly.
These are our dooryards. I wish we lived in them more; that there were
vines to sing under, and shade enough for the table, with its wheaten
loaf and good farm butter, and its smoking tea. But all that may come
when we give up our frantic haste, and sit down to look, and breathe,
and listen.
A MARCH WIND
When the clouds hung low, or chimneys refused to draw, or the bread
soured over night, a pessimistic public, turning for relief to the local
drama, said that Amelia Titcomb had married a tramp. But as soon as the
heavens smiled again, it was conceded that she must have been getting
lonely in her middle age, and that she had taken the way of wisdom so to
furbish up mansions for the coming years. Whatever was set down on
either side of the page, Amelia did not care. She was whole-heartedly
content with her husband and their farm.
It had happened, one autumn day, that she was trying, all alone, to
clean out the cistern. This was while she was still Amelia Titcomb,
innocent that there lived a man in the world who could set his foot upon
her maiden state, and flourish there. She was an impatient creature. She
never could delay for a fostering time to put her plants into the
ground, and her fall cleaning was done long before the flies were gone.
So, to-day, while other house mistresses sat cosily by the fire,
awaiting a milder season, she was toiling up and down the ladder set in
the cistern, dipping pails of sediment from the bottom, and, hardy as
she was, almost repenting her of a too-fierce desire. Her thick brown
hair was roughened and blown about her face, her cheeks bloomed out in a
frosty pink, and the plaid kerchief, tied in a hard knot under her chin,
seemed foolishly ineffectual against the cold. Her hands ached, holding
the pail, and she rebelled inwardly against the inclemency of the time.
It never occurred to her that she could have put off this exacting job.
She would sooner have expected Heaven to put off the weather. Just as
she reached the top of the cistern, and lifted her pail of refuse over
the edge, a man appeared from the other side of the house, and stood
confronting her. He was tall and gaunt, and his deeply graven face was
framed by grizzled hair. Amelia had a rapid thought that he was not so
old as he looked; experience, rather than years, must have wrought its
trace upon him. He was leading a little girl, dressed with a very patent
regard for warmth, and none for beauty. Amelia, with a quick, feminine
glance, noted that the child's bungled skirt and hideous waist had been
made from an old army overcoat. The little maid's brown eyes were sweet
and seeking; they seemed to petition for something. Amelia's heart did
not respond at that time, she had no reason for thinking she was fond of
children. Yet she felt a curious disturbance at sight of the pair. She
afterwards explained it adequately to the man, by asserting that they
looked as odd as Dick's hatband.
"Want any farmwork done?" asked he. "Enough to pay for a night's
lodgin'?" His voice sounded strangely soft from one so large and rugged.
It hinted at unused possibilities. But though Amelia felt impressed, she
was conscious of little more than her own cold and stiffness, and she
answered sharply,--
"No, I don't. I don't calculate to hire, except in hayin' time, an' then
I don't take tramps."
The man dropped the child's hand, and pushed her gently to one side.
"Stan' there, Rosie," said he. Then he went forward, and drew the pail
from Amelia's unwilling grasp. "Where do you empt' it?" he asked.
"There? It ought to be carried further. You don't want to let it gully
down into that beet bed. Here, I'll see to it."
Perhaps this was the very first time in Amelia's life that a man had
offered her an unpaid service for chivalry alone. And somehow, though
she might have scoffed, knowing what the tramp had to gain, she believed
in him and in his kindliness. The little girl stood by, as if she were
long used to doing as she had been told, with no expectation of
difficult reasons; and the man, as soberly, went about his task. He
emptied the cistern, and cleansed it, with plentiful washings. Then, as
if guessing by instinct what he should find, he went into the kitchen,
where were two tubs full of the water which Amelia had pumped up at the
start. It had to be carried back again to the cistern; and when the job
was quite finished, he opened the bulkhead, set the tubs in the cellar,
and then, covering the cistern and cellar-case, rubbed his cold hands on
his trousers, and turned to the child.
"Come, Rosie," said he, "we'll be goin'."
It was a very effective finale, but still Amelia suspected no trickery.
The situation seemed to her, just as the two new actors did, entirely
simple, like the course of nature. Only, the day was a little warmer
because they had appeared. She had a new sensation of welcome company.
So it was that, quite to her own surprise, she answered as quickly as he
spoke, and her reply also seemed an inevitable part of the drama:--
"Walk right in. It's 'most dinner-time, an' I'll put on the pot." The
two stepped in before her, and they did not go away.
Amelia herself never quite knew how it happened; but, like all the other
natural things of life, this had no need to be explained. At first,
there were excellent reasons for delay. The man, whose name proved to be
Enoch Willis, was a marvelous hand at a blow, and she kept him a week,
splitting some pine knots that defied her and the boy who ordinarily
chopped her wood. At the end of the week, Amelia confessed that she was
"terrible tired seein' Rosie round in that gormin' kind of a dress;" so
she cut and fitted her a neat little gown from her own red cashmere.
That was the second reason. Then the neighbors heard of the mysterious
guest, and dropped in, to place and label him. At first, following the
lead of undiscouraged fancy, they declared that he must be some of
cousin Silas's connections from Omaha; but even before Amelia had time
to deny that, his ignorance of local tradition denied it for him. He
must have heard of this or that, by way of cousin Silas; but he owned to
nothing defining place or time, save that he had been in the war--"all
through it." He seemed to be a man quite weary of the past and
indifferent to the future. After a half hour's talk with him,
unseasonable callers were likely to withdraw, perhaps into the pantry,
whither Amelia had retreated to escape catechism, and remark jovially,
"Well, 'Melia, you ain't told us who your company is!"
"Mr. Willis," said Amelia. She was emulating his habit of reserve. It
made a part of her new loyalty.
Even to her, Enoch had told no tales; and strangely enough, she was
quite satisfied. She trusted him. He did say that Rosie's mother was
dead; for the last five years, he said, she had been out of her mind. At
that, Amelia's heart gave a fierce, amazing leap. It struck a note she
never knew, and wakened her to life and longing. She was glad Rosie's
mother had not made him too content. He went on a step or two into the
story of his life. His wife's last illness had eaten up the little
place, and after she went, he got no work. So, he tramped. He must go
again. Amelia's voice sounded sharp and thin, even to her, as she
answered,--
"Go! I dunno what you want to do that for. Rosie's terrible contented
here."
His brown eyes turned upon her in a kindly glance.
"I've got to make a start somewhere," said he. "I've been thinkin' a
machine shop's the best thing. I shall have to depend on somethin'
better'n days' works."
Amelia flushed the painful red of emotion without beauty.
"I dunno what we're all comin' to," said she brokenly.
Then the tramp knew. He put his gnarled hand over one of hers. Rosie
looked up curiously from the speckled beans she was counting into a bag,
and then went on singing to herself an unformed, baby song. "Folks'll
talk," said Enoch gently. "They do now. A man an' woman ain't never too
old to be hauled up, an' made to answer for livin'. If I was younger,
an' had suthin' to depend on, you'd see; but I'm no good now. The better
part o' my life's gone."
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