by Graeme Davis
“Now this very minute something comes into my head that I haven’t told you about, that I don’t believe I ever told anybody about; I don’t know as I can tell it now. It is like a sound that comes to you from way, way off, that you think you catch, and then it’s gone. It was just only a word Maria used two or three times after she came back, a dreadful, dreadful curious word. It wasn’t like any word I ever heard spoke or read in a book; ’twasn’t anything I can shape out in my mind to bring back now. First time I heard it she was sitting on the doorstep at night, all by herself. It was a nice night with no moon, but thousands of shining little stars, and the sky so sort of dark bluish and way, way off. Maria didn’t know I was nigh, but I was, and I was peeking at her as she sat there. She looked up right overhead at the sky, and the shining and the blue, and then she spoke that word, that curious, singular word. I say she spoke it, and that I heard it, but somehow that don’t make it plain what I mean. Seems if she only meant it, thought it, and I sort of catched it, felt it—oh, that sounds like crazy talk, I know, but I can’t do any better. Somehow I knew without using my ears that she was saying or thinking a word, the strangest, meaningest, oh, the curiousest word! And once she said it in her sleep when I went into her room in the night, and another time as she sat by her own grave in the little burying-ground, and I had followed her there unbeknownst. I tell you, that wasn’t any word they use in Vermont, or in the United States, or anywheres in this whole living world. It was a word Maria brought back, I’m certain sure from—well, wherever she’d been that time.
“Well, it was wearing to see Maria those days, growing poorer and poorer, and bleacheder and bleacheder, and failing up steady as the days went by. And one day just at dusk, when she and me were sitting by ourselves, I mustered up courage to speak out. ‘Maria,’ I says, ‘you don’t appear to be satisfied these times.’
“‘Satisfied!’ she says, ‘course I ain’t. Was I ever satisfied in all my born days? Wasn’t that the trouble with me from the beginning? Ain’t it that got me into all this dreadful trouble? Deary, deary me, if I’d only a stayed where’—She shut up quick and sudden, looking so mournful and sorry and wore out that I couldn’t hold in another minute, and I burst out, ‘Maria, if you feel that way about it, and I can see myself it’s just killing you, why in the world don’t you—go back again?’ I was scared as soon as I’d said it, but Maria took it real quiet. ‘Don’t you suppose I’ve thought of that myself?’ she says. ‘I ain’t thought of much else lately, I tell you. But as far’s I know, and I know a lot more than you do about it, there ain’t but just one way to there, and that,’ she says, speaking kind of low and solemn, ‘that is—the way—I went before. And I own up, Lyddy,’ says she, ‘I’m scaret o’ that way, and I scursely dast to do it again.’ ‘But,’ I says, getting bolder when I saw she wasn’t offended at my speaking, ‘you say yourself you ain’t sure. Maybe there is some other way of getting back; there’s that way—well, that way you came from there, you know.’
“‘That’s different,’ says Maria. But I saw she was thinking and studying over something all the evening, and after she went to her bedroom she was walking about, up and down, up and down, the biggest part of the night. In the morning when it got to be nigh on to seven o’clock, and she not come down, I felt something had happened, and went up to her room. She wasn’t there. The bed was made up, and everything fixed neat and nice, and she had gone away.
“‘Oh, dear,’ I says to Mr. Weaver, ‘that poor thing has started off all alone, weak as she is, to find her way back.’ ‘Back where?’ says Polios. Just as if I knew.
“But we both agreed on one point. We couldn’t do anything. We felt to realize our own ignorance, and that this was a thing Maria must cipher out by herself, or with somebody that was way, way above us to help her. It was a dreadful long day, I tell you. I couldn’t go about my work as if nothing had happened, and I couldn’t get out of my head for one single minute that poor woman on her curious, lonesome travels. Would she find the road? I kept a-thinking to myself, and it was a hard, dark one like the one everybody else had to go on before they got to the afterwards-life, a valley full of shadows, according to Scripture, with a black, deep river to ford, a ‘swelling flood,’ as the hymn says?
“Well, the day went by somehow,—most days do, however slow they seem to drag along,—and the night came on. Though we didn’t mean to meddle or interfere in this matter, Mr. Weaver and me, we had asked a few questions of folks who dropped in or went by that day. Maria had been seen by people all along the same road she had come home by that other time, and on both the roads that joined it. Two or three, seeing how beat out and white she looked, had offered her a ride, but whichever direction they were going she had always answered the same thing, that she wasn’t going their way. It was nigh nine o’clock, and we were just shutting up the house for the night, when I heard steps outside and the gate screaked.
“I felt in a minute that it was Maria, and I opened the door as quick as I could. There she was trying to get up the steps, and looking just ready to drop and die right there and then. It took Polios and me both to get her in and upstairs. It wasn’t any time for questions, but when Mr. Weaver had gone, and I was getting her to bed, I says, as I saw her white face with that dreadful look of disappointedness, ‘You poor thing, you’re all beat out.’ ‘Yes,’ she whispers, her voice most gone she was so wore out, ‘and I couldn’t find the road. There ain’t but one,—leastways to go there by,—and, that’s the way I went first-off. I’d oughter known it. I’d oughter known it.’
“I couldn’t bear to see her so sorrowful and troubled, and I said what I could to comfort her by using Scripture words and repeating the promises made there about that dark valley and the deep waters, and the help and company provided for the journey. But that mournful look never left her face, and she kept a-whispering, ‘That’s for once; not a word about the second time. Mebbe there ain’t any provision for the second time.’ And what could I say?
“I believe I haven’t told you how much time the poor woman spent those days in the graveyard, sitting by her own grave. I can’t get over that, even after all these years, that queer, uncommon sight of a person watching over their own burying place, weeding it and watering it as if their own nighest friend lay there. I don’t see why, either. I don’t even know whether her body was there. Folks don’t have two, and she’d brought one back, and was in it now. And, as far as we could see, it was the very same body she wore when she died, and that we’d buried next to Mr. Bliven. Anyway, she appeared to like that place, and showed a lot of interest in taking care of it. There wasn’t any headstone. We had ordered one, but it hadn’t come home when she returned, and we had told Mr. Stevens to keep it a spell till we fixed what to do about it. I was glad it wasn’t up. I can’t think of anything that would be more trying than to see your own gravestone with your name and age and day you died, with a consoling verse, all cut out plain on it. I know, one time, I saw her putting a bunch of sweet-williams on that grave. She looked sort of ashamed when she saw I was watching her, and she says, a mite bashful, ‘You know they was always her favorite posies.’ ‘Whose?’ I asked, just to see what she’d say. But she was so busy fixing the sweet-williams she didn’t take any notice.
“Maria failed up after this right along, and pretty soon she was that weak she couldn’t get as far as the graveyard, hardly even down to the gate. And I says to Mr. Weaver that she needn’t worry about finding the way back to where she belonged, for she’d just go as she went the other time if she didn’t flesh up and get a little ruggeder. One day, when I went into her room, she says to me, ‘Lyddy, I want help, and mebbe I can get it in the old way we used to try. You fetch me the big Bible and let me open it without looking, and put my finger on a verse and then you read it out. Mebbe they’ll take that way of telling me what to do, just mebbe.’
“I never approved of that kind of getting help, it always seemed like tempting Providence, but I felt I must do most anything that
would help satisfy that poor woman, and I got the Bible. She opened it, her lean hands shaking, and she laid one of her bony fingers on a passage. I must say it took my breath away when I saw how appropriate it was, how pat it came in. ’Twas in Ezekiel, and it went this way: ‘He shall not return by the gate whereby he came in.’
“Maria give a sort of cry and laid her head back against the pillow on the big chair she was sitting in. ‘There, there,’ she says, all shaking and weak, ‘I most knew it afore, and now I’m certain sure. I’ve got to go—the—old—way.’
“And so she did. After all, I wasn’t with her when she went, and it wasn’t from our house she started. I got run down and pindling from taking care of her and studying how to help her out of her troubles. So Mr. Weaver wrote to John Nelson, and after a spell it was fixed that he should take Maria over to his house in Hanover, and he did. It was a hard journey for her, so weak as she was, and she didn’t stand it very well. But she had one more journey to take, the one she’d been dreading so long, and trying to put off.
“It wasn’t so dreadful hard, I guess, after all, for they said she fell asleep at the last like a baby. Just before she went, she says very quiet and calm, all the worry and fret gone out of her voice, she says to John and Harriet, who was standing by the bed, ‘I’m dreadful tired, and I guess I’ll drowse off a mite. And mebbe I’ll be let to go in my sleep.’ Then in a minute she says slow and sleepy, her eyes shut up, ‘And if I do, wherever they carry me this time, I guess when I wake up I shall—be—satisfied,’ and she dropped off.
“I guess she was, for she went for good that time and stayed. She was buried there in Hanover in John’s lot. We all thought ’t was best. It would have been awk’ard about the old grave, you know, whether to open it or not, and what to do about the coffin. So we thought ’t was better to start all over again as if ’twas the first time, with everything brand-new, and nothing second-handed, and we did. But Maria Bliven’s the only person I know that’s got two graves. There’s only one headstone, though, for we took the one we’d ordered before from Mr. Stevens, he altering the reading on it a little to suit the occasion. You see, the first time we’d had on it a line that was used a good deal on gravestones then, ‘Gone forever.’ That didn’t turn out exactly appropriate, so we had it cut out, and this time we had on—Elder Fuller put it into our heads—that Scripture verse, a good deal like Maria’s dying words, though I don’t believe she knew she was quoting when she said it, ‘I shall be satisfied.’”
“Well,” said good Elder Lincoln one July day as we met on the Lisbon road, “have you heard Mrs. Weaver’s account of Maria Bliven’s unexpected return?”
The Elder had been at Streeter Pond fishing for pickerel, for he belonged to that class styled by dear old Jimmy Whitcher “tishin’ ministers.” He had not met with great success that day, but he had been all the morning in the open, and there was about him a breezy, woodsy, free look which seemed to dissipate shadows, doubts, and dreads. “Yes,” I replied, “I have heard it all. What in the world do you make of it?”
“Well, I don’t make anything of it,” said the Elder. “There’s no conspicuous moral to that story. Mrs. Weaver did not make the most of her opportunities, and we do not gain much new light from her account. Old Cephas Janeway, who wrote a ponderous work on Probation which nobody read, was largely responsible, I guess, for the feverish dream of the old woman. But to her it’s all true, real, something that actually happened. And, do you know, somehow I almost believe it myself as I listen to the homely details, and it brings ‘thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls.’”
He was silent a minute, then taking up his fishing basket, very light in weight that day, he raised the lid, looked with unseeing eyes at its contents, and said absently, “I can’t help wishing I had met Maria after she came back. There is just one thing”—He did not complete the sentence, and I saw that his thoughts were far away. With a good-by word which I know he did not hear, I turned aside, leaving him there in the dusty road.
*Sodium bicarbonate.
THE READJUSTMENT
by Mary Austin
1908
Mary Hunter Austin was born in Illinois and graduated from Blackburn College in 1888. That same year, her family moved to California and established a homestead in the San Joaquin Valley. In 1891, she married Stafford Wallace Austin—apparently no relation—in Bakersfield.
Mary studied Native American life in the Mojave Desert, and became an outspoken advocate for Native American and Spanish-American rights as well as an early feminist. She wrote novels, poetry, and plays, most notably The Arrow Maker, which drew on her familiarity with Paiute life. Her tribute to the deserts of California, The Land of Little Rain (1903), also won acclaim.
Forced out of the Owens Valley in California’s Water Wars, Mary’s husband moved to Death Valley, while she joined the arts colony of Carmel-by-the-Sea, whose members included Jack London, Ambrose Bierce, and Sinclair Lewis. She plunged into the colony’s bohemian lifestyle, but her interest waned after she was disappointed by a 1915 production of The Arrow Maker in Carmel’s Forest Theater, and her visits to Carmel became shorter.
In 1918, she visited Santa Fe, with its growing artistic community. She helped establish the Santa Fe Little Theatre (still operating today as the Santa Fe Playhouse) and the Spanish Colonial Arts Society, and co-authored Taos Pueblo with the photographer Ansel Adams.
Mary died in Santa Fe in 1934. Mount Mary Austin, in the Sierra Nevada near her longtime home in Independence, California, was named in her honor.
“The Readjustment” was published in the April 1908 issue of Harper’s Magazine. It is an unusual story, in which a disapproving spirit is treated to a few home truths by a down-to-earth neighbor.
Emma Jossylin had been dead and buried three days. The sister who had come to the funeral had taken Emma’s child away with her, and the house was swept and aired; then, when it seemed there was least occasion for it, Emma came back. The neighbor woman who had nursed her was the first to know it. It was about seven of the evening, in a mellow gloom: the neighbor woman was sitting on her own stoop with her arms wrapped in her apron, and all at once she found herself going along the street under an urgent sense that Emma needed her. She was half-way down the block before she recollected that this was impossible, for Mrs. Jossylin was dead and buried, but as soon as she came opposite the house she was aware of what had happened. It was all open to the summer air; except that it was a little neater, not otherwise than the rest of the street. It was quite dark; but the presence of Emma Jossylin streamed from it and betrayed it more than a candle. It streamed out steadily across the garden, and even as it reached her, mixed with the smell of the damp mignonette, the neighbor woman owned to herself that she had always known Emma would come back.
“A sight stranger if she wouldn’t,” thought the woman who had nursed her. “She wasn’t ever one to throw off things easily.”
Emma Jossylin had taken death, as she had taken everything in life, hard. She had met it with the same hard, bright, surface competency that she had presented to the squalor of the encompassing desertness, to the insuperable commonness of Sim Jossylin, to the affliction of her crippled child; and the intensity of her wordless struggle against it had caught the attention of the townspeople and held it in a shocked, curious awe. She was so long a-dying, lying there in the little low house, hearing the abhorred footsteps going about her house and the vulgar procedure of the community encroach upon her like the advances of the sand wastes on an unwatered field.