The Town

by Conrad Richter

  “Why wouldn’t you come home?” Chancey asked him, but from then on until after dinner time, Guerdon was silent. Like a bittern that called only in the morning and again toward night, he said little or nothing through the middle of the day. All he talked when they passed teams or folks was to brag Chancey to the skies.

  Late that afternoon he started talking to the boy again.

  “You’re only a little feller, Chancey, but let me tell you something. Never get mixed up lawful with a woman.”

  “Not even when I’m grown up?” Chancey wondered.

  “That’s the worst. Have nothing to do with them. Oh, you’ll reckon other women might be no good, but you got the master woman. You’ll be soft to her. You’ll give her all you have. Some times she’ll act real nice to you and say nice things. You’ll reckon you’re the luckiest man alive and her the finest woman. Then some time you’ll come home unexpected and find something you wished you hadn’t.”

  “Mush again for supper?” Chancey guessed.

  “Worse than that. You know what song I used to sing, ‘One night I come a ridin’ home as drunk as drunk could be. I seen a head on the bolster where my head ought to be.’ That’s what you’d find, somebody sleepin’ in bed with your woman.”

  The little boy thought it over.

  “I have to sleep in bed with a woman sometimes.”

  Guerdon clasped him affectionately on one small knee.

  “You could a slept in bed with my Effie any time you wanted. Any time you wanted, Chancey, and I wouldn’t a minded, either. You’re no dark diddler.”

  “What’s a dark diddler?” Chancey asked.

  “Don’t you know yet? Well, your pap was a dark diddler once on a time. This was a good while ago. Kinzie and me was up in the brush and seen him.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Well, he did something to a woman he had no right to and hadn’t ought to.”

  “Isn’t he a dark diddler now?”

  “Not that I know of. But that don’t excuse him any. He ain’t left off that easy. He has a young one by that woman running around right here in Americus. And she ain’t much older than you.”

  “Is it Massey?”

  “No, it’s not Massey. She’s got another mam than we do. Now I don’t want to tell you who she is or you might say something and maybe she don’t know it yet. But I used to pass her when I went downtown. And when your pap goes down, he sees her too, and don’t you forget it. You can guess what he thinks when he sees her a running around and called by another name than Wheeler. And all the time he knows she’s a full daughter to him and that other people know it, too.”

  Hector was about played out when they came through the Narrows and could see the first roofs of Americus ahead against the sky. Some boys saw them. They came and looked in the chaise and then ran ahead. Guerdon said it was to tell the news that little Chancey Wheeler was still alive. By the time they reached town, women stood out in front of their houses to see them go by. Young ones ran a piece alongside to hear Guerdon tell the story. Just before they reached the boat yard, the cannon up at the Ferry House boomed out.

  “That’s for you!” Guerdon told the little fellow.

  Will Beagle was out in the street now. Aunt Genny came running to kiss Chancey. Tears spoiled her face like she was kissing the dead. By the time they got to the square, a whole company of children ran beside the chaise. Massey among them for a minute and then streaked out for home. All his sisters stood near the barn on Wheeler Street waving handkerchiefs to greet them when they turned in the lane. Chancey looked up the stretch of wheel tracks. There at the end of it, at the door to the kitchen, stood his mother. Even at this distance the boy could tell that her face was cruel with secret feeling. Panic seized him.

  “Don’t tell her I went down the river on the bridge!” he begged Guerdon. “She’ll claim I’m lying and put me to bed and I won’t get any supper.”

  But Guerdon wouldn’t listen. Chancey couldn’t understand how they believed now all the unbelievable things that happened to him and yet they wouldn’t the time he had just ridden over to town on a red cow. His mother cooked him and Guerdon a special supper and his sisters stood around piling more on their plates than they could eat. All evening company came to hear the story told again and to make a fuss over him. The minister thanked God Almighty for “guiding our young Noah on his humble ark and preserving him from a watery grave.”

  Never had he seen his mother like she was tonight, meeting everybody at the door, greeting them like they hadn’t seen each other for a long time, swapping words and talk, listening to the girls tell over and over again what had happened to Chancey, pouring refreshment to all. It seemed like she couldn’t do enough for everybody who came. Now what made her like this, Chancey wondered. It couldn’t be jubilee over having him home again, for only once had she hugged him and that was when he first came. Had she been his real mother, she would have caught him up many times and told him how she loved him, covered his face with kisses.

  It was toward morning and all were in their beds, when a rapping came on the law room door. Whoever it was had to rap twice, but Chancey heard it the first time.

  “Who’s there?” his father asked.

  “It’s me, Collier,” a voice at the window said, and Chancey knew it was the sheriff. “Is Guerdon here, Mr. Wheeler?”

  “Guerdon? He wouldn’t be here,” Portius said. Then he must have turned his face toward the bed. “Or is he, Sayward?”

  Chancey could hear his mother sitting up in bed.

  “Guerdon’s not here, Mr. Collier. What did you want him for?”

  “Could you tell me where he is, Mrs. Wheeler?”

  “Why, out at Fishtown. He lives with his wife’s folks and went home around midnight. Is he all right?”

  “As far as I know, ma’am. But he had some trouble out there on account of his wife. It happened about one o’clock this morning. I’m sorry to say he hit the man with a stool and the man’s dead.”

  For a minute there was heavy silence downstairs.

  “But that don’t sound like Guerdon,” his mother said.

  “I guess his wife wasn’t much good, Mrs. Wheeler,” the sheriff apologized. “He’s had a good deal of trouble with her on account of this old boarder of hers. I understand he came home early this morning and found him there again. The two had a fight and then Guerdon lit out. Well, if he’s not here, I reckon I’ll light out, too.”

  “Wait, Collier,” Chancey’s father said incisively. “I want you to come in and make a search as you would any other place. I’ll help you.”

  “Oh, no, I’ll take your word, Mr. Wheeler,” the sheriff told him.

  Chancey heard his father pull on his clothes and leave the house with the sheriff. Where he went to, the little boy didn’t know, only that it must have been nearly morning because he could hear their rooster out at the barn crowing loud and clear while far off in town the other roosters answered him. When the crowing stopped and daylight came in slowly by the window, slow terrible sounds, half aloud and half in whisper, rose from downstairs. The little boy crawled to the loft hole and saw his mother on her knees by the bed, her head down, her hands locked and straining. She still had on her bedgown, coarse and rumpled around her. The bare feet and legs that stuck out of it looked heavy, knotted and indecent.

  He drew back quickly. It was as if he had been looking on something he shouldn’t. Ever before had he seen his mother strong and unvanquished. Now she seemed humbled, debased, beaten down like the runaway black woman he heard tell of that a Kentucky sheriff took back to slavery. Did Guerdon mean so much to her then, he wondered. Yes, for he was her own flesh and blood. She could cry out and pray from the depths of her heart for him. If Guerdon came back now, she would take him in her arms and tell him how much she loved him. But she couldn’t do that for her youngest though he had come back from a watery grave, for she wasn’t his real mother.

  CHAPTER TEN

  A POSY FOR PORTI
US

  All at once she lifted her body and flung her head to the great sky that reached over the hills and shouted:

  “Here I am!”

  THE TIME OF MAN

  THIS was the summer that sickness came to Americus. Some called it the plague and some cholera, saying that it came across the sea from the hot countries, and that seemed likely to Sayward, for the hottest month here was the worst. For three weeks you didn’t see a house fly or hear a bird. Where they went to nobody ever found out. Anselm Lengel at Robeauch’s died in four hours, and a Harris boy, whose married sister wouldn’t let him in the house when he came there sick, was found dead on the river bank in the morning.

  Most of those who caught it were poor folk, but Dr. Pearsall’s wife lived in a fine house and she took sick handing medicine to a patient. While they helped her to her bed, her face turned black, and before they could get the doctor home from the country, she had stopped breathing. Dr. Pearsall said her death was so fast and the contortion of the muscular system so powerful that the extensor muscles of her arm lifted it from where it was folded on her cold breast and laid it full length in his lap as he sat by the bed a full hour after life was extinct.

  It was a very bad time for Americus. Forty were carried off in one week, five out of one cabin, and nobody would go in to get them out. The council had to appoint a committee of citizens to oversee burying of the dead, and set the death beds out in the street, to lime the sidewalks and attend to those in distress.

  Sayward had to steel herself when she heard Portius’s name was head of that list. Genny said they might have picked somebody who didn’t have nine children. But who else could they get that took the part of the underdog like Portius, Sayward asked herself. She hated to see him go into the Hill cabin with John Quitman and two of his half-drunk keel boatmen to fetch out the five bodies, but nobody else would go in for love or money, and somebody had to do it.

  When Portius fell sick, the first thing Sayward thought of was little Chancey. He took everything that ever came along, and now God’s black ox must surely tramp him, for even the stout and hearty seldom overed the plague. Portius himself was given only twenty-four hours to live by Dr. Pearsall, but when the Old England doctor came around next morning Portius was still among the living. And so was he the third day. The doctor never told Sayward but he did General Morrison that he was out of cholera medicine that day and all he could give Portius were pills rolled out of red pepper and asafoetida, so it must have been the liquor Portius drank all his life that saved him. He was too pickled and preserved by alcohol to die. It went all over town, and the taverns did a mint of business during the plague. Genny said it shamed her to hear it, but Sayward got down on her knees and thanked the Almighty for whatever it was that saved Portius and the rest of her family, too, for not another of hers that were around here took it. She didn’t know about Guerdon, for only God knew where he was at.

  It left Portius mighty weak, but at least it left him in his bed and not in the grave. And now the hot drought was broken by thunder showers. Folks began to say that they heard birds in the fields and saw house flies around again, so the worst was over. But Portius looked terrible, the color of ashes. Today Sayward was with him by the bed attending to his wants when through the open doors to the windsweep a faint knock sounded on the kitchen door. The girls had Chancey out while they worked in the truck patch, so she had to leave Portius and go.

  That was a picture not easy to forget, leaving Portius feeble and leaden-faced in his sick bed and coming out on this delicate tender young girl standing by the door with a bunch of garden flowers in her hand. Her slender legs looked like they never belonged in that coarse gray calico dress she had on, and her white face had the singular shape of one of her blossoms. Washed and rightly dressed and combed, she would be oddly beautiful, Sayward thought. Now the little girl just stood there, not saying a word.

  “You’re welcome to come in,” Sayward told her gravely, and when the child had as gravely entered. “You live around here?”

  “Over along the river,” she said and her mouth as she said it looked sensitive as a wild thing. Now who did she look like, Sayward racked her brain, or where did she see her before?

  “I feel sure I know you, but I can’t call your name,” Sayward told her.

  “My name’s Rosa.”

  “Rosa what?”

  “Rosa Tench.”

  The sound of the name gave Sayward a turn. For a minute she just stood looking. So this was the child conceived in sin by the pretty school mistress who, they said, looked like a hag now, who would not set foot out of her house since the babe was born, nor would she wash or comb! Why, the girl was no bigger than Chancey, though she must be a year or two older. And now Sayward knew, with the feel of knife in her side, who the girl looked like.

  Did the girl know it, too? Her face quivered.

  “I brought some flowers for Mr. Wheeler,” she said, very low, holding out her handful.

  “I’m sure he’ll be much obliged to you,” Sayward told her, stolid as could be, taking them from her, steeling herself, hardening her hand toward the soft clinging feel of those fingers. Now how much did the child know, she wondered. “Did you bring these your own self or did somebody tell you to?” she asked.

  “My father told me.” The girl’s eyes were like the most delicate of wide slate gray liquid curtains that threatened to be torn down.

  “And was he feeling all right when he told you?” Sayward kept on, her face bitter, for hardly could she see Jake Tench in his right mind doing this thing.

  “No, he was very drunk,” she whispered, shrinking.

  So that was it, Sayward thought. She could see it better now. Oh, this was just the trick Jake would play on some highly respectable bigwig like Zephon Brown, send a bastard child to him with flowers when he was sick, but Jake would have to be mighty tipsy to play it on his own foster child and Portius. Why, he had threatened death on any who told Rosa that she was not his own, or so she heard. He would blow a tattletale to hell, he said, for even a broad hint.

  Right then she thought she heard Portius calling and remembered how she had left him.

  “You want to take a chair till I get back?” she asked. She set the flowers in a crock and went to the front room.

  It took longer to get Portius straightened out than she reckoned, and till she got back to the kitchen, Huldah and Libby were there, but no sign of the younger girl.

  “Where is she?” she asked them.

  “Do you know who that was?” Huldah leered at her.

  “Of course I know. What did you do to her?”

  “We didn’t do anything,” Libby said. “We just looked at her, that’s all.” But her face said, “That sent her home a flying.”

  “I can guess how you looked at her,” Sayward said sternly. She went to the door but Rosa had vanished.

  It vexed her that she had to stay so long. Why, it had so bamfoozled her to see the girl here, she had hardly said a word on her own account about the flowers. Now she picked them up and set them in a smaller crock, first dipping the crock in water. Then she wiped off the crock and took it to Portius’s room, setting it on his desk where he couldn’t help but see the flowers from his bed. Tomorrow when he was better, she would say to him, “Little Rosa Tench brought these over for you.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE TWO DIGGINGS

  The sons of revolutionary sires, some of them sharers of the great baptism of the republic, make the anniversary of their country’s freedom a day of ceremony and rejoicing.

  FROM AN ORATION BY PORTIUS WHEELER

  YOU could tell when Portius was himself again. Then he would call Chancey Noah like he did for a while after the bridge went out.

  “Noah, how’s the old boatman today?” he would say.

  Sayward wished Chancey would not look so unhappy and helpless. That only made his father say it again next time. What he ought to do was give no notice he had heard. That’s the way she did wh
en he called her playful names, mostly Juno.

  “Now what’s Juno?” she asked Resolve one time he was home.

  “She was the consort of Jupiter, the god,” Resolve told her.

  “What did she look like?” Sayward asked suspiciously.

  “I never had the pleasure of seeing her,” Resolve said smiling. “But I think she was supposed to be on the plump side.”

  “I thought so,” his mother nodded.

  So that was it, Portius taking a dig at her and at the same time giving himself a puff. She could be Juno, the fleshy consort, but he was Jupiter, the god. Well, if he liked it that way, it was all right to her.

  Never had she seen him so high as lately. Oh, he carried himself grave and dignified as usual, but inside he was pleased as a dog with two tails and a silver collar. Times were good for Americus. The tide of improvement rode high and Portius sat on top, for now he was made lawyer for the new canal company. They were running a ditch to join up the English Lakes and the Ohio. Folks like Will Beagle and John Quitman were wild for a canal. Then boats need never halt for flood or low water but go about their business till ice shut them in. Portius talked canal to all who would listen. He could recite the bill they passed in the legislature far better than the Lord’s Prayer. “The act to provide for the internal improvement of the state by navigable canals,” he called it.

  Now if the town trustees wanted it, you’d think they’d know where to put it. But they fought over it like they had where to set the bridge. Some said the canal ought to run straight down the middle of Water Street with a roadway on either side and the sidewalks cut to five feet. But how would the mills get their power from the race then or their tail water into the river? The canal would be in the way. If they didn’t decide soon, Portius said they’d wake up some morning and find the canal had passed Americus by. He kept pestering Sayward. Would she sell the canal company a rightaway through the farm?