The Town

by Conrad Richter

  “They’re only sugar balls, my boy. Try one. They won’t hurt you. Also they won’t cure you.”

  “How is he, doctor?” Sayward asked.

  The doctor seated himself as though figuring out what to say. He looked extremely sad and resigned.

  “Did you see Mrs. Crane and old Mr. Oliver in the waiting room? They come to me, the aged and the palsied, the weary and the worn out. If we knew what was waiting for us farther on in life, Mrs. Wheeler, the woe and death of all our hopes, the wormwood of the approaching grave, I wonder would we waste our lives in vain regret for one who must die so young.”

  Chancey felt his heart turn over like a startled squirrel in a cage, while behind him something dark and silent and very terrible made ready to spring at him. He thought Dezia saw it, too, for her face was faintly paler. Only their mother stood there as if she hadn’t heard.

  “What can you do for him, doctor?” she asked.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Wheeler,” he said, “but I can’t cure your boy.”

  Chancey saw that familiar bitter look come on his mother’s face, but not a word of complaint did she make.

  “No, I can’t cure him,” the doctor went on, “but Nature can. Nature made us what we are in the first place. But we must give Nature a chance. Don’t tie up this colt in the stable. Put him out to pasture and let him run.”

  “He isn’t tied up, doctor,” she said. “But it seems he can’t run.”

  The doctor nodded, leaned back and put his thumbs under his vest. Now who did he remind him of, Chancey wondered. Then he remembered what his father had said. The stable boy! The doctor’s hands, he remembered, had run over him gentle as over a colt’s legs.

  “I want to tell you something, Mrs. Wheeler,” he said. “You and I and all creatures in captivity are lazy. Where we get it, I don’t know, certainly not from the devil. But I know why we get it. Because we shut ourselves up from Nature. Let me tell you a case I had of a storekeeper who came to me sick and ailing. I told him to walk. He got mad as a wet hen. That’s what was the matter with him, he said. He was worn out walking up and down behind the counters of his store. But that’s not the same thing, I told him. Go to Nature. Walk the streets and the country. That’s my prescription. He followed it and it cured him. Now let me tell you another. When I was a stable man, I had a mare that was balky. She got lame as soon as you started out with harness on her. But I noticed she didn’t limp in pasture. And she didn’t limp when I put her oats and hay where she had to walk across the stable yard to get them. After while I had her walking down the alley to another stable where I’d feed her. In the end I used to drive her out in the country to feed her and she’d run without limping all the way home. I had her hardened up and cured in no time. You do the same. That’ll be fifty cents.”

  Chancey looked at his mother and then at the doctor with bewilderment. What did the stories about the storekeeper and horse have to do with his sick heart? He stumbled out with his mother when she left. Oh, the air outside would have been sweet as locust blossoms if she hadn’t said that he couldn’t get up in the chaise.

  “Now that I’m this far, I think I’ll drive up and see Effie and the baby,” she told them. “It isn’t a good place for you to be, so you’ll have to walk home.”

  “Walk, Mama!” Chancey stammered.

  “When you’re tired, you can rest,” his mother said firmly. “When you get home, you can lay down. It isn’t far. You can almost see it from here.”

  Chancey felt so wounded, he turned his head so he wouldn’t see her drive away. She didn’t have to go up and see Effie. No, he understood now, she just went up there so he would have to walk home. She and the doctor and Little Turtle, they were all cracked on walking. They didn’t care what happened to his heart. Neither did Dezia. Oh, Libby and Huldah and Sooth would holler at him, but they had soft hearts underneath. They would carry him a piece if he got tired. But not Dezia. She wouldn’t tease him or jeer, and neither would she do anything for him she wasn’t supposed to. She was a little old Yankee. She’d preach at you how good you had to be, but she never had any mercy. If you owed her anything, you had to pay on the dot.

  “Now let’s go,” she told him primly. “We’ll walk down Water Street and you can look at the river. Lift your feet and don’t go so slow.”

  Chancey knew before he started that he wouldn’t make it farther than the nail mill. Aunt Genny used to live near there before she moved to the boat yard. When they got there, Dezia didn’t want to stop, but Chancey sat down on the curb of the wooden pump that stood on the street. He wanted to lie down but Dezia wouldn’t let him.

  “Now don’t look over at those awful Tenches!” she told him. Before he knew it, she said it was time to start again. He made like he didn’t hear her. She tried to pull him up to his feet, but he fought her and shrieked so dreadfully, she let go.

  “You’ll be sorry,” she warned. “I was just going to take you as far as the fulling mill. You can rest there and see the dye come out in the tail race. But if you won’t come, I’m going straight home. Are you coming? I mean it.”

  She did mean it, too, Chancey knew. He heard her start away. She looked back once, and her cool eyes appraised him. She must have seen he didn’t intend coming, for she went on this time and didn’t look around. He felt a sudden fear to see her go. She walked so fast. But he closed his mouth tightly so he wouldn’t call.

  Hardly was she past the fulling mill when two boys came out of a yard across the way. One he knew was Turkey Tench. He was about as big as Chancey, the other a good deal smaller. As they came close, they had that peculiar acid odor he noticed on some boys. Massey said it was because they never washed themselves all over or changed their clothing. They stood now and eyed him hard like enemies.

  “What’s the matter you can’t walk?” Turkey jeered.

  “My heart jumps.”

  “Where does it jump to?”

  “No place. Just up and down.”

  “I don’t see it jump.”

  “You can’t see it, but you can hear it if you put your head on my chest. That’s the way my doctor does. Right on here.”

  Turkey stood there skeptically. He would never do such a sissy intimate thing as lay his head on Chancey’s chest. But he was willing to put his grimy hand on it.

  “What makes it jump?” he asked, subdued.

  “The doctor said he couldn’t do anything for it.”

  “I want to feel it!” the little Tench cried. He felt but drew his hand away quickly leaving another black smudge on Chancey’s white blouse.

  “Kin Rosa feel it?” Turkey asked.

  “I don’t care,” Chancey said.

  “Rosa!” the little Tench yelled.

  Suddenly Chancey felt he was their confederate and friend. They took his arms and helped his gingerly movements toward the yard. Almost at once Chancey felt stronger. This was better than going home with Dezia. The fence was of slabs and he couldn’t see through till they came in the gate.

  Then he felt full of wonder, for the yard was like no yard he had ever seen before. Back home everything had to be put away neatly. “A place for everything and everything in its place,” his mother used to say. In this yard things were thrown anywhere. The whole yard lay choked with useless traps and belongings. Here were used kegs and barrels, a heap of trimmed stone, a hogshead with the head knocked out, nests of wet excelsior, a pile of boat lumber, a broken kettle, a row boat with a stoved-in side, some rusty iron, a bottomless cedar tub, some long oars with split and smashed blades, a sawbuck and wooden horses, a mossy drawbucket from some well, a bench with a leg split off, and a thousand things more, all worn out or worthless, jumbled helter-skelter, thrown together or strewn apart, most of them dark and damp from the weather.

  Chancey stood over an old boat pole drinking it all in. It was like he had entered a different world, a new life, a place where he didn’t have to take care, where nobody would make him wash his hands or pick up his traps and put them awa
y. He felt curiously blessed and lightened.

  They went on to the porch, a narrow shelf of plank with a dipping roof. The floor was tracked with dried mud and piled at one end with empty bottles, jugs, jars, earthenware, cooking pots, plant boxes and other trash.

  “Rosa!” Turkey yelled.

  The door to the house stood open and amid the dim disorder inside Chancey glimpsed a girl. She didn’t seem any older than he or Turkey. Her face looked white and delicately perfect in this untidy and disorderly place. She came out, slow and calm, in a torn dress that showed one slender leg almost to her thigh. A grimy child clung to one hand but the girl herself looked miraculously clean and spotless as if no dirt could soil her.

  “Rosa, you want to hear his heart jump?” Turkey said, and now he boldly put his wax-filled ear to Chancey’s chest, showing her how to listen.

  Chancey scarcely moved as the girl came toward him. He felt in a summer trance. Not even the white chick of a sister he treasured in his mind all these years made him feel like this. Beyond the girl and around her he could see the white halo of the river. The yard was a loaded flatboat, the house the captain’s cabin, and all were floating down stream. He floated with it. He could hear the river gurgle to itself. Up in the sky the great white clouds ran toward each other. So slowly they went, you wouldn’t hear them when they met. But you could feel their meeting on ahead, and he could feel something of the girl running ahead of her on foot, running toward him while behind it slowly walked her other self. He stood there in a kind of daze, closing his eyes a little, waiting for her to reach and touch him.

  Something in him cracked when the spell was broken.

  “Chancey!” an angry voice cried. It was Dezia, and there she was walking swiftly into the yard. Now why did she have to come back and spoil it, and what made her so mad? Her eyes flashed fire.

  “Let me be!” he bawled at her.

  “You walked in here, you can walk home!” she said and dragged him for the street.

  Hardly had they gone halfway to the gate when such a cry as Chancey never heard came after. Dezia didn’t even slacken. Just as she pulled him through the gate, Chancey looked back. Something like a witch had her head out of the window. A wild mat of hair came down over her face like an animal’s.

  “So that’s who he is!” she screamed. “Take that young Wheeler home and keep him there and never let him come near my Rosa again!”

  Chancey looked up at Dezia in terror.

  “Now I hope you know better!” she told him righteously. “That’s one place you must never go to, and don’t ever talk to that girl again! If Mama or Papa knew you were in there with Rosa Tench, you’d be whipped every night for a week and put to bed without your supper.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ROSA’S RAINBOW

  Hail sweet asylum of my infancy!

  CHILDREN OF THE ABBEY

  IF there was anybody more hardset and stubborn than his mother, Chancey didn’t know who it was. You would think she’d be shamed to have done what she did to him when it didn’t work out. But never would she give in and say so.

  Ever since his father had to come and fetch him home from near the fulling mill on Water Street, he was worse off than before. He had strained his sick heart trying to walk all that way home, his father said. It was true, too, because now he couldn’t walk even the short pieces he used to. Oh, he’d try hard enough, take it slow and halfway hold his breath so as not to exert himself. And still he couldn’t make it. Before he’d get there, his heart would flap in his chest like a chicken with its head off. It would act worse if his mother was around. He would look at her to see if she noticed what she had done to him. Just to have her standing by with her head turned away would make something come up in him so he would almost faint. How could she be his mother and not even look at him when he tried to walk and couldn’t like her other children?

  Oh, if his real mother was here, it would be different. She would run to his side and bear him up with her soft white arms. She would make him sit down and beg him not to try to walk any more, for he didn’t have to. As long as she lived, she would take care of him, wait on him hand and foot. She would wash and dress him, bring his food and read to him. With her he would have security.

  But all this woman they said was his mother would do was turn toward him a cruel and bitter face when she thought he wasn’t looking.

  “Well, what do you think of your horse doctor now?” his father said to her one time they had to carry him back in the house.

  Not a word could she say, and yet she wouldn’t give in. He couldn’t walk to the barn without stopping, and yet he had to go to the Boatmen’s Frolic. The girls daren’t go. It wasn’t genteel enough. His mother couldn’t go because Fay expected a baby, and she promised to come at the first word. Only his father had to go, for professional reasons, he said, and now he had to take Chancey along.

  “It will do him good to get out,” his mother said. “He won’t hardly have to walk a step, since you’re going in boats and the grove lays right on the river.”

  The boy could see his father didn’t want to take him. He had to make a speech, Portius complained, and talk to a lot of people. But Sayward was obdurate.

  “Now recollect Chancey’s with you,” she said when they left, and young as he was, the boy knew what that meant. Chancey’s father knew it, too.

  “What refreshment I take will be strictly in the interest of the many,” he deviled her for being saddled with Chancey. “The more I consume, the less there’ll be to debauch others.”

  Fowler’s Grove stood north of Americus on the far side of the river. Some days you could see its blue skyline from the cabin. From downtown its bulk stood out darkly against the hills. It was the only woods left close to Americus, they said, that hadn’t been cut down. Pigeons still nested in its hinder parts where the ground was wet and soggy, and coon were trapped on its paths. You could get to it by the new bridge and a long pair of wheel tracks running through stumpy meadows and standing water. Or you could go by boat clean to the grove’s edge on the river bank, and that’s how Chancey and his father and most of the boatmen went today, in rowboats and poleboats and flatboats like King Sam used to have for his ferry.

  It was a hot day even on the river, but from the moment they stepped off the boat, Chancey could feel the chill of the great trees. Here they grew in their native soil, standing in immense silence and shade like his mother had told him. All his young life had he heard tales of the big butts from her mouth and Aunt Genny’s and from the old men and women who came to their kitchen, of the mad wolf that bit Jude MacWhirter, of the panther that tried to come down Aunt Genny’s chimney and of the blood-red beast, with its hide skinned off that Resolve saw run through the trees. Oh, his mother could talk of the deep woods all day if she wanted. She hated the darkness by day and the terror by night, and by day and night the eyes of the heathen trees a watching you. At night Aunt Genny said, they made themselves into savage frightening shapes. When you tried to sleep, their long fingers tapped on your window pane. If you visited too long, they grew right up in your cabin while you were gone. And if you were foolish to go out alone, they addled your wits and turned you around so the sun rose in the West and set in the East, and never could you find your way home again. They had swallowed up his Aunt Sulie and never was she found even to this day. But the worst was the Wild Thing without a name that followed you in the deep woods, and no man knew whether it was flesh or spirit. His grandfather Luckett had known it, and once his mother had felt it so close that she broke out in a cold sweat and her legs tried to run, but never did she see what kind of thing it was.

  Chancey felt glad today he was not alone, that all this end of the woods was filled with boatmen and their families. Their colored shirts and dresses brightened the shade, and their cheerful talk and cries warmed the chill. He saw Aunt Genny and Uncle Will, the whole Quitman family, the Fices and the Gannons, the Tenches and the McCunes and many more. Young ones ran and yelled
and played. The only ones that stood still were he and Rosa Tench.

  Now why did she have to stand so alone, he wondered. He had to hug the log where his father set him, but she had no bad heart to hold her. And yet for a long time he saw how she kept away from the others. Did she have no girl friend like Massey did, he wondered. It went through his mind that she was different from the rest, like she lived in some other world. He sat there very still, thinking this over, feeling the green light on his lids, the mysterious shadows on his skin, measuring the height of the vaulted ceiling, tasting the breath of the wild fern and the scent of the bruised ground. When he looked for her, she was gone.

  A good part of the day passed till he saw her again. For hour after hour he had to “go out,” but he didn’t dare. The other boys, he noticed, just ran behind a handy tree, anxious to get back to their game. But never could he do that, stand where others could see him. Besides, with others watching, likely it wouldn’t come. That’s the way it was when he was little and he had to do it in the bucket while a stranger sat in the kitchen. As the day wore on, he grew desperate and more desperate still, wishing for the back house at home and peace and privacy. His father was busy, surrounded by people. He wouldn’t dare to tell him what he wanted. Folks would think him a baby who didn’t know he had a flyhole in his britches.

  In the end he started painfully for the bull laurel where he noticed that the girls and women went. It was far but he daren’t come back without what he sought. Little by little, resting on logs and roots, he made it. When he heard strange women coming, he stumbled out quickly on the other side. That’s how he found himself alone in the great woods, or he thought himself alone. His eye ran down the dim aisles till it stopped, fearing to be lost, and there coming back from the depths of the forest, was Rosa.