The Town

by Conrad Richter

  It was always a dark moment when something tore him away from that world. Today he sat very still on his rude stool, struggling with the black feelings he ever found waiting to spring out at him from the shadows of the cabin when he got back. Often had he wrestled with these old enemies before, the heavy rain feeling, the melancholy gray-sky feeling, the sad, old, sooty fireplace feeling, and the sick and bloody earth feeling, while all the time something like a severed muscle in his chest palpitated and quivered.

  Then he heard the sound again and knew what fetched him back. It was the strange little girl’s father crying out loud. Oh, that was a terrible sound for a small boy to hear, a grown-up man giving way to his feelings. His hair was rough and brown but it could not disguise his narrow, gentle head. He held it to one side tenderly. His eyes were sad and brooding. He looked like a man who had never laid a hand to a tool in his life. He was afraid, he cried to Chancey’s father. Never had he known anything like the forest out here choked with monster trees and vines. He was afraid his strength would not hold out till his place was cleared and the ground planted to keep his loved ones alive. Chancey saw the little girl look up at her father with sudden terror, holding fast to his white hand lest she lose him, and how then would she ever find her way back to her mother, sisters and brothers again? Chancey could see it all as the man sobbed, the bright house they had left in the eastern city, and now the dim hut in these Western woods with the wild solitude shutting them in.

  Did his mother hear the man cry out, the little boy wondered. She had mighty sharp ears and heard a great deal more than she let on. Mostly when she wanted anything in this room she sent one of the girls in. But today the door from the windsweep opened, and there she stood herself in a clean apron. Her face was grave but her eyes looked mild at the man who had cried out and at his little girl.

  “Supper’s ready, I’d like you folks to stay,” she said.

  The man and his little girl got up quickly. They were like two rabbits in the woods ready to break and run at the sound of a foot in the brush.

  “I have plenty and won’t make company of you,” Chancey’s mother promised.

  But the man and his little girl couldn’t stay, he said. They were away from their place in the woods too long now. They had just come to see about title and deed to his land. It would be dark before they got home as it was. The rest of the family was back there in the woods alone and would be worried if they didn’t come. No, they couldn’t stay even for the special dishes. Chancey saw water come to the little girl’s mouth at the sound of sweet milk, but her eyes stayed fast on her father’s face, and her feet were ready with his to go. They couldn’t leave quick enough, and off they went. Chancey stood at the office door, something in him hurting as he watched them go, the man who had cried out he was afraid and his little girl holding fast to his hairy white hand. When the mists swallowed them up, the boy felt an inconsolable loss. Sooner would he have gone with them if he could, for he knew just how they felt in this gloomy and alien world.

  His mother had to call him twice for supper, and then Massey was obliged to fetch him. Still he went slowly. He was loathe to leave those two out there where he could not see them. He didn’t want to break the cord that stretched from his heart to theirs departing in the mist and rain. He felt closer to them than his own family. Oh, never would he breathe a word of this even to Massey, but in his heart he knew that those he lived with here in this house were not his real people. No, they were only his foster people with whom he had been given by his real parents to live. Who his real father and mother were, he did not know, only that they must be like he was. His three brothers were old enough to be his uncles and four of his sisters acted like cousins. You could tell they had different blood than he the way they quarreled and fought, laughed and shouted, ran and jumped, while all he could do was sit out his small, puny life on his stool.

  Now he looked up unwillingly as Massey dragged him in. There they were as he knew they would be, in a long square around the table, his father in his white collar and black stock standing up to carve, and at the other end his mother in her apron and cap. In between were all the rest from Resolve down to Dezia and then a gap of years till you came to Massey and himself.

  As he climbed his bench, the little boy heard the worst. They were talking about Nilum. A pang went through him at the name. Why couldn’t they wait till tomorrow? Then it would be bad enough, but at least the tragedy would be over and this terrible anguish done. Now he would have to sit and hear them tell again why the Shawanees were killing Nilum. It would be at sunset tonight, just a little time from now. They claimed him the fault of another Indian’s death. But the real reason, Chancey’s father said, was that Nilum was too friendly to the whites.

  Now who would have dreamed that with all the mean and ugly and drunken Indians, it was good, kind Nilum who had to die? More than once Chancey had seen him out at the barn using their grindstone or sitting in their kitchen eating his mother’s bread. His Indian name was long and hard to say, so the whites called him Nilum. It meant nephew, Chancey’s mother said. Once when a family in the woods had nothing to eat, Nilum had carried off the white boy. The family was much afraid but Nilum sent him back with his pants over his shoulder. Nilum had tied the bottoms of the legs with whang and filled them with corn.

  “I was out and talked to Nilum,” Chancey heard his father tell Resolve. “It’s an interesting case. Shows you the basic difference between Indian law and ours.”

  The little boy sat hunched and rigid on his bench. Now he would have to hear his father tell the whole terrible story again, how he had gone out to Shawaneetown, and Nilum himself said it was no use. Oh, life was sweet to him as any other man who lived, he said, but he was judged guilty by his people and must die. The white people shouldn’t try to stop it. If they tried, he and the other Indians would go only deeper in the forest and carry it out just the same, for it was Indian law and custom. He said, “You tell white people forget about Nilum. Now I take a rag and wipe away all remembering from white people. Now nobody feel bad about poor Nilum any more.” Chancey wished he had never heard those pitiful words of Nilum. Ever since, he could see nothing but Nilum kneeling by his open grave and the father and three brothers of the dead Indian firing their rifles into Nilum’s breast just as the sun went down.

  Oh, this, Chancey knew, was why he hated to come back from the Dream World to the dark and bloody earth. Once when his mother told him the story how a family she knew had only six grains of corn to eat, he had to cry out for her to stop. His mother had looked at him as if he had done wrong. And now at supper all of them looked at him as if he did wrong that he couldn’t touch his food. How could they eat tonight and talk about Nilum?

  “If you don’t like this, you don’t know what’s good!” Huldah told him crossly, taking his plate and cutting the meat finer as if that might be why he had no stomach tonight. As she passed it back, she smacked her red lips over a tidbit from the tenderest portion that her father had served his littlest.

  “You should be thankful, Chancey. The starving heathen would be very glad for it,” Dezia preached at him.

  “A man must do his duty at the table,” Guerdon told him. “Your insides are plumb empty. I kin hear your big guts a growlin’ at your little ones.”

  Of all who claimed to be his brothers and sisters, only little Massey guessed what ailed him, for she was just a year older than he, and for two months every year they were the same age. The stretch of years between them and the others made them closer.

  “Maybe the Indians will wait tonight, Chancey,” she whispered. “Because they can’t tell when the sun goes down in the rain.”

  Something inside the little boy rose instantly, and with it a flood of feeling. It shot from his eyes like a warm flame gratefully enveloping Massey. Good old Massey. And now that warm flame that had licked around Massey was enveloping the whole room. For a long moment the brown face of his mother looked beautiful and serene, and the steam curli
ng over her teapot hung like in a picture. A secret inner rosy light glowed from the cherry cupboard and even the hard earth that had pushed up between the puncheons purred like Aunt Genny’s cat. He could eat a little now, he believed. Strength and well being rose in him with every bite, for all was well now with Nilum.

  Not till supper was almost over did he notice the cries of children at play. His spoon halted suddenly in his rigid hand. He listened. The sound of rain on the roof had ceased. From somewhere came a sudden revival of saw and hammer. The ferry bell rang, showing that someone was out and wanting to cross the river, while from some open town door or window a cornet started to play, Christ My All, making sad drawn-out tantarara on the late afternoon air.

  “It’s getting lighter,” Hulda said with satisfaction, for she was going out tonight.

  Their father looked out of the window.

  “The mist’s dissolving into air—into thin air,” he declared, and then, as if that reminded him of something, he lifted his head and began reciting half to himself and half to the room in his low, deep, courtroom voice.

  Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

  As I foretold you, were all spirits and

  Are melted into air, into thin air.

  He didn’t stop there, but went on, his deep voice lingering lovingly over the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces and great globe itself.

  Yea, all which it inherit shall dissolve,

  And like this insubstantial pageant faded,

  Leave not a rack behind. We are of such things

  As dreams are made on, and our little life

  Is rounded with a sleep.

  There was something about it that made Chancey shake with terror. Oh, well he knew what his father meant. It was Nilum’s elegy he was giving. The little boy climbed over the bench and stumbled from the table. From the open kitchen door he could begin to see the town through the mist. Once it was all their land, his mother had said, but now there were houses and half a public square. The mist was rising over it in twists and swirls. Already he could make out the different buildings, the brick front of the old store, the two-story house of the new, the brown shape of the mill. Farther this way loomed the long low ferry house, the church with the new steeple, the tan yard and the stillhouse with smoke floating about like mist. The latter was almost gone now. Rows of houses stood with their wet roofs shiny under the sky. People were out on the street with the cows and pigs that had been there all the time, not minding the rain. Up the lane by the academy marched old lady Winters’ flock of geese like a row of scholars reciting with their necks stretched out.

  A faint something caught his eye. At first he didn’t know what it was, a patch of color high over the boat yard. He could see clouds through it. Then it grew and blossomed like the tree of life. Another tree of life shot up near the mill. An arch joined them, and there it stood, fragile and dazzling, the mysterious bow of the sky, reminding him of nothing so much as something from that other world he knew. It shone with color, yet nobody painted it. Nothing held it up and nothing could tear it down except God.

  “Ta-ra-ra!” played the horn.

  He could hear town children squealing with delight but Chancey’s heart went cold. Never had he thought he would sometimes dread to see a bow in the sky. But now he thought he couldn’t bear it. Not today. Already the sun must be shining up there through the raindrops, his father said, and that’s what made the bow. Soon, the boy knew, the sun must be out everywhere, for the rain was over. Perhaps it was already shining in Shawaneetown with every Indian watching it sink farther and farther toward earth until it touched the horizon and struck like a hammer.

  Every moment, the little boy thought, the bow must fade, but the delicate colors lingered like everlasting. The first of the night flocks of woods pigeons making for their roosts flew under it. The dark ferry crossing the river passed slowly through. Now why did that send a shiver down his spine? He strained his eyes far as he could see. Did the man who had cried and his little girl see it? Where were they in the dark forest now? Why did he keep thinking of and feeling for these two he never saw before? Was it that they knew nothing of Nilum and with them he would have oblivion and peace? Or could it be perhaps that the little girl like a china chick might be his sister, his true sister, and the man, who held his narrow head tenderly to one side, was his father kept from him ever since he could remember? He recollected now how the man had smiled to him when first he came and had laid a hand on his head as he passed. The little boy could still feel that hand. The impact of a great secret went over him. It must be he was his real father, he told himself, and that was the reason he had cried.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE BRIDE’S BED

  Beyond that under their shirts they’re all alike.

  In the dark you couldn’t know one from the next.

  THE TIME OF MAN

  DID a young one, Sayward wondered, ever know how its mother felt for it? Likely not. Perhaps some dark night long after its mammy was dead and gone, such a one now grown up might recollect the glimmer of light around it when it was little. But hardly could it guess how tender its mother had held it in her mind, how loving, how anxious for blessings on it, how constant and everlasting, year in and year out, even when it was a grown man going about his business.

  She didn’t believe in being partial. She did her best to love one like the other. Yet you couldn’t help but carry the baby of the family around in your heart the most. And when that littlest was puny and ailing, you prayed more times than you could cipher that he might live and have his chance to go through life like the others, for all things were possible to God.

  Just the same, after she had managed to drag Chancey alive through ill omen and pestilence, she fretted once or twice that for his sake she might regret it some day. She hated to reckon she had ever gone against the will of God. She felt relieved when it turned out one day that his small lips could talk and hardly could she hold the gratitude in her heart when she found his little mind flowed clear as spring water. But she didn’t like him wanting to be alone so much. Her eight others throve on sociability and their fellows. Now this last one would sooner drag himself to a window inside or some corner outside with his own self for company.

  That didn’t go down so well with Sayward. Even the Bible said it wasn’t good for man to be alone. Didn’t she know? Hadn’t Chancey’s own pappy been a solitary in the woods when first he came to this Western country, holing up in his cabin of buckeye logs and hearing no voice for weeks on end but his own or some frogs’ wild croaking? Some went so far as to say he’d still be there if it hadn’t been for her. That was nonsense. Also she didn’t like what Genny hinted, that there might be a queer streak in Portius’s family, and that’s why he never breathed a word of his folks or why he left the Bay State. She told Genny mighty quick there was nothing to it. But to herself she promised that she would do for Chancey all she had for his pappy, keep him from shutting his mind up in himself, throw what life and living with folks she could his way, for in all mortal creatures, she reckoned, was a great hankering to live or never would they have come into this living world.

  That’s how she came to put overnight company in to sleep with Chancey. He might avoid them by day and hardly speak a word to them even when he ought to. But he could rub shins and elbows with them by night. It would be sociability for him and it wouldn’t hurt him. It might even toughen up his thin skin a little, get it used toward all these folks he was put on earth to live with and make the best of.

  —

  To little Chancey, night was the dark ages. Of all the torments he found waiting for him in life, night time was the worst, to have to lay yourself down in the dark and try to make your thoughts leave your mind and your body give up life for a kind of death. Night came so often and lasted so long. Weekdays had a change on Sunday and every once in a while on public day. But night had no holiday. Every afternoon at the melancholy hour when the shadows started to fall, he could see
it waiting there ahead of him, the dungeon he would have to lie in chained hand and foot till morning.

  Could he only run around all day like the others, he believed he might be more satisfied to lie still at night. But to sleep the dark hours through was a trick that baffled him. Never could he get the hang of this strange coma that gripped his brothers and sisters, father and mother, so that until early morning they lay as if struck by lightning or by some mysterious nocturnal drunkenness, their heavy breathing filling the cabin. Oh, it was hard for a little boy to lie there wakeful and think up things to pass the whole live-long night. He didn’t know what he’d do without the Yankee clock down on the log wall. It never stopped talking to him, gave him something to look forward to, that golden moment at which it struck. Each time he lifted his head from the bolster and counted. At the end he prayed it would strike just once more and that much nearer morning. Then when the pitiless silence ensued, his heart always sank knowing that until he heard it again, the whole eternity of an hour would have to be lived through.