Sayward could tell nothing from the doctor’s face now, but the switching of the queue was going slower and slower. After while it stopped, and Dr. Pearsall laid down the small wrist.
“Oh, Guerdon!” Sayward called silently from the depths of her heart. “It’s no use to come back now, for you have no babe asking about her pappy any more.”
The sun was coming up when Sayward made her way home, but her face stayed set and cruel. A good many had she known who had to die, but never anyone who made such small fuss as Gerty did, like she was just going on a visit. Was she really out of her sick bed now, Sayward wondered, a running and playing like she claimed the angel had said? Maybe she was, but though Sayward looked hard, never had she seen her get up and run out the door or rise to heaven either. Save when her grandmammy’s loving hands straightened the tiny limbs and closed the worn eyes, the scanty body never moved. Hardly did it used to take a lick of muscle for that small body to lift itself up. Yet now it lay almighty still. Just the same, if it wasn’t true what Gerty told about the angel, it was the only thing that wasn’t. Now how did she know that Portius would be called up to Tateville? He didn’t know it his own self when Sayward left home yesterday afternoon and yet way back last week Gerty had said, “Now you better kiss me goodby, Granpappy, because you won’t see me again.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE MANSION HOUSE
The last button off Gabe’s coat.
OLDTIME SAYING
THE ROOF was up and the bricks laid out for the most part when Portius had enough of building himself a fine house and paying for it, too. He never said so. He had to go argue a case at an appellate court and couldn’t tell how long it would drag on. At least, that’s what he claimed. Then the legislature was naming a new justice for the county, he said, and Fred Godwin, the senator from Tateville, wanted him to make the legislators’ acquaintance. Would Sayward look after his house-building while he was gone?
“Why don’t you get Oliver Meek?” she wondered. “He’s put up a good many houses.”
“It would be an imposition,” he said shortly.
“Well, how about Resolve? You wouldn’t have to mind asking him.”
“Resolve’s too young and inexperienced to cope with such matters.”
“He’s thirty years old. You can depend on him.”
“Not like I can depend on you, Sayward,” he said and gave her such a good sociable smile it minded her of the night they were married. She couldn’t refuse him then. Nor could she now, though by today she knew him backwards and forwards, his fine ways, his good points, and his Yankee tricks.
But she didn’t know what she was in for this time till he had gone. Every day she put off going over to the house. Gowan was a master carpenter and no one had put up finer houses in Americus and Tateville. He took care of most everything, Portius said, drawing the plans, writing the bills of lumber, making contracts with masons and plasterer and overseeing their labors. None could handle a T square or triangle like he could, but his crew of journeymen carpenters did the work. His wood carver had been busy all summer on the fine Pennsylvania pine that came down the Ohio for the doorway and chimney pieces. Gowan showed him what to do. All there was to know about putting up a house, Gowan knew, Portius claimed. Gowan’s word was good as his bond. Then what was the use, Sayward asked herself, of her going over?
So she waited till he came to see her, a broad man of great dignity, in a striped cotton coat, his face red against his white hair as service berries in the snow. He lifted his hat with honest respect at the door.
“I am loathe to trouble you, Mrs. Wheeler, but would you come over to the house?”
“Well, I wouldn’t know what use I’d be,” she told him. “But I’ll come if you want me.”
“It will do the journeymen good to see you take an interest,” he said with great relief. “They complain they’ll never get their money.”
Sayward took a quick gulp and swallowed it.
“Are you saying the men are back in their wages?” she put to him.
“Not too far, Mrs. Wheeler,” he said like it had to be dragged from him with horses. “Mr. Wheeler said you would make everything right when you came.”
Sayward stood so quiet, never would you guess the bump she had had inside of her.
“I guess maybe I better come over and look at it right away,” she told him. “You can expect me some time this morning.”
So that was it, she told herself as she started up the new street. That’s what she got for thinking to mind her own business and stay out of other folks’ doings. All this time had she kept clear of Portius’s house, for she heard enough about it from the girls and from visitors to her kitchen. Of course, she couldn’t help seeing the brick walls heaving up when she went that way. She could tell it was no cabin or shanty that Portius was putting up, but she had no notion how big it really was till she came up Wheeler Street today and saw it standing in front of her on the square like Captain Loudon’s brick mansion house when she was a girl along the Conestoga. Only the Loudon house stood flat on the ground while Portius had set his up high and proud. It would take many a step to reach that big front door, though now all they had was plank running up from the ground.
She hated real hard to turn in and go up that mortar-encrusted gangway. The house seemed a monster roofed shell, owning neither doors nor window lights. All stood open to wind and owls. The sight of broad vacant floors and bare high walls, the stink of wet plaster, the great lack of things still to be done and paid for before you could live in here fazed her. But she made herself tramp with Mr. Gowan from one big empty room and floor to another. It looked like they had more room than the court house with the jail thrown in. What in the name of the white-whiskered man did Portius want with all this living space? He wouldn’t, she knew, let her rent any of it out. Why, if she was a little tyke she’d have to watch out or she’d get lost in here. Oh, her eyes looked close at what the carpenter pointed out. She listened sober to all he told her, of sash and blinds, of shutters and baseboard, of door and window jambs, cornice gutters and scuttle, of back stoop and front stoop and sloping cellar door. But all the time in her mind she was reckoning how much Portius’s grand house would cost her.
“I can’t tell you exact,” Gowan said at the end when she asked him. “But I can give you an idea.”
“That’ll have to do then.”
“You expect to finish it, don’t you, Mrs. Wheeler?” he asked and looked at her like a grandsire begging for the life of his grand littling.
“I can’t rightly tell you till tomorrow,” Sayward said. “But you’ll have to tell me today.”
Not till then did he draw from his back pocket his Master Builder’s Price Book and Estimator bulging with ciphering.
Well, she got what she asked for, she told herself on the way home. That’s the way it went sometimes. Run through everything you had. Let little in at the spile and all out at the bung! Make common folks point when they went by and say, “That’s Lawyer Wheeler’s fine house.” Make tony folks a little less proud when they came calling, a climbing marble steps to a hall wide enough to drive a four horse wagon through and stairs running up and up like they went to a church belfry. Wasn’t it curious, Sayward thought, how some folks had to bamboozle other folks with the clothes they wore or strike them all in a heap with the grand house they lived in!
When the rest were in bed that night, Sayward took out what bank notes she had put away between the logs behind the chinking. Under the hearth stone she took up her old kettle with a hole but heavy with gold and Spanish silver. She counted standing by Portius’s desk table, summing up what she had in the bank and out with folks on interest. Oh, she had plenty to make buckle and tongue meet, and that didn’t count her land leased and unleased. What went against her so hard was putting so many bells on one horse, squandering for something she didn’t want in the first place and would have to live in against her will in the second. Neither did she take kindly to the Yanke
e way Portius had fastened it on her, running off without opening his mouth. She had no notion he had used up all his Aunt Unity’s money. Likely he would get still more when her house was sold. No, he had put in what he reckoned was his half of the house. Now she could put in the other half, for wasn’t she going to live in it the same as he would? That must be the way he figured.
She stayed up a while reckoning this thing out, casting up one side against the other. In the end she put back the kettle and went to bed. The mansion house was too far built to give up now, unless you didn’t want to look folks in the eye any more. No use fretting all night. The more you cried, the less you had to pee, as Granny MacWhirter used to tell the young ones. If Portius wouldn’t pay his honest debts, she would have to, a little slowly perhaps, one at a time like lawyers went to heaven. And if it took all she had to lay her hands on, she’d have to spit on them and take a fresh holt.
Portius came home in a fortnight, but the house took nigh onto two years to finish. The staircase alone swallowed up four months with its treads, risers, posts and handrail. Oh, Portius was back home a good while before the house was done, but never did he take over again. He had no time, now that he was a judge, he claimed, looking at her when he said it like he wanted her to see what his fine house had brought him already. He acted like he was glad enough to let her bear the brunt, now that she couldn’t strike down any of the walls or rooms but would have to accept them without mutiny.
Sayward let him shirk, satisfied to do the rest to suit her. The woodwork inside and out she had painted white. It would take more dusting and scrubbing to keep clean, but Gowan told her this was the color Portius wanted. In those matters Portius had been unwise not to speak to Gowan about, she used her own good sense, choosing the plainer when Gowan assented and fetching in Fay and Resolve for their opinion when he didn’t. Oh, Gowan was a great help on one hand and a thorn in her side on the other, knowing all the fine houses he did and how they had been built inside and out. “Now in the Maclay house in Pennsylvania,” he would say, or “If I could show you General Gregg’s house in Kentucky….” Little by little she let herself be pounded or cajoled into wall paper and mortise locks, inside shutters and plenty other things she did not know much about but had to put in for Resolve, Huldah, Sooth or Gowan even though they would not live there.
The moving she put off till the very last. The truth was she hated to leave the cabin. Most of her life had she lived here. Now she would have to give it up for a place where it looked like she was putting on airs, thinking herself better than ordinary folks. The last day she kept looking about the cabin. How many times had she stood at the fire with her long-handled pan, or gone down on her knees of a morning to puff at the coals. This ladder and those steps, how often had she climbed them when one of the young ones lay abed ailing. Why, forty years of her life had she spent between these log walls. And now she had to go and leave them.
Welly Palsgrove and his one-horse wagon helped her move. Yesterday was the first Portius claimed to have been in the new house since it had doors and windows, and he couldn’t get done praising how well she finished it. Today when she and two of the girls got to the square with their first wagonload, a heap of boards and crating lay in the front yard.
Massey came running out, her pigtails flying.
“You ought to see, Mama!” she cried. “Papa has all Aunt Unity’s things in!”
Libby and Dezia raced ahead, but Sayward stayed behind with Welly to help him lift off and carry in. Just the same she couldn’t help seeing when she got inside. A noble hatrack, table and settee stood in the wide hall, and through the door to the room Fay always called the front parlour she had a look at stylish chairs and sofas with fine cloth seats and backs, and small shiny tables with curved legs. Rugs lay this way and that on the boards. Upstairs, when she and Welly got there with her cherry bedstead, she found beds already set up in both front bedrooms, one of yellow maple and one of some tony red wood, both with high posts. The girls were hanging up the curtains. Dower chests lay under two windows. Standing around were rush-bottom chairs and small rockers, bureaus and what Mrs. Morrison called highboys. This room she looked in had something else, like a massive redwood chest of drawers save for the slanting top which opened to the length of a chain, showing it a desk with red pigeon holes, the writing part stained by blobs of black ink.
“What do you think of it?” she heard Portius ask, and there he was behind her.
“Well, I ain’t had much time to think about it yet, Portius,” Sayward said. “It looks real grand though, I must say.”
“I thought I’d take this room and you could have the one across the hall,” he told her. “These are Aunt Unity’s best beds.” His eyes fell on what she and Welly had fetched up, the heavy headboard of the bed that had seemed so fine and served them so long and faithfully in the cabin. “Don’t you want to take that up on the third floor for one of the children?” he asked.
It came over her then and as she went on fetching in her other things how poor and puny they looked here beside Aunt Unity’s. Why, she thought she had half forgot she was a woodsy, but this made her feel like one of those sassafrac folks from out in the brush fetching her poor traps in a fine mansion house. It was really her house as much as Portius’s, for hadn’t she built and paid a good half of it? And yet she found no welcome between these fine plaster walls or among the rich Wheeler trappings. Always had she seen a little Monsey blood in her pappy and Achsa, but this was the first time she felt it stand out in herself.
Dog tired as she was, it went hard to fall asleep in Aunt Unity’s bed that night, lying like a corpse at a wake, she thought, between the polished posts like mourners holding some net over her so her flesh would not be fly-eaten. She felt so far off the floor. Even when the gentry lay down to sleep not knowing if they’d wake or not, they had to hold themselves high and mighty as possible. She would hate to have the old time friends and neighbors she knew in the woods see her pranked out at night like this. Saird has changed, they would say. She has forgot how naked she came into this world and in company with what worms she has to go out.
When Sayward first woke up next morning, she had to lie and think for a lick where she was. It came in her head next how on both sides they had strange folks lying in bed the same as they and so close she could throw a stone at them. She got up mighty quick then and went down the back stairs. It was hardly daylight, but that was all the better, for those on either side would not be out yet. She would have given a good deal to be back in the cabin, but she was only thankful she had a kitchen here. It helped her to start a fire and feel her own pots and pans in her hands. Here with the smell of mush and coffee over the fire, she believed she could come when she got homesick and find relief.
They reddied up the house pretty well the next few days. Saturday about supper time it started to rain, but that, she noticed, didn’t keep Huldah and George, and Sooth and Peter with little Sairdy from coming over. Afterwards Genny and Will came in the back way while Resolve and Fay came the front, without Henry and Mary Leah who had a nursemaid to look after them. Something was up, Sayward knew, but she reckoned it only a kind of house warming. Not till she saw this man at the door in reddish sideburns very wide at the bottom and in the high choking collar and multiple buttons of a junior officer in the navy did she guess.
“Kinzie!” she called out in that strange hollow voice she’d heard her mother use when she was so beat out. Then she stood like a stump while he came over. She felt her knees tremble. Could this grown-up officer who held himself so easy and strong be the freckle-faced boy that rode east on horseback those years ago and had been all over the world since! Now how could he have got here at such a good time? It must be the girls and Portius had been keeping him posted, for he landed the first week they were in the new house. Before he reached her, his navy face broke into a freckled grin, she saw the tooth she’d know anywhere and felt the water run from her eyes as she hugged him. But only half that water, she kne
w, was for him. The rest flowed for his brother who wasn’t here at all, and God Almighty alone knew where he was or whether still among the living.
“So this is Massey!” Kinzie said, swinging her up. He hadn’t seen her since she was a little tyke or Chancey since a tot in a red plaid skirt that had come down from Libby to Sooth to Dezia and none of them could wear it out. To Massey he gave a kiss, but he only twisted Chancey’s weak arm, giving a funny look at his spindly legs and the scraggly nape of his neck as if to say, is this little old feller who can’t make the riffle and looks scared of his own shadder my brother?
Oh, Chancey felt himself shrink at that look. But if Kinzie didn’t think much of him as a brother, Chancey didn’t reckon him a brother at all. Under his navy officer clothes and ways, he was just like the rest of the Wheelers, made of some everlasting mortal stuff that never tired or flinched, never gave up or wore out. You couldn’t miss that certain quality tonight now that they were all together again, talking at once, running over with vitality, each a glut for punishment, quick to go on their lip or muscle. Just to sit quiet among them drained Chancey like a sieve. He didn’t mind hearing it was past his and Massey’s bed time.
Up in his room on the third floor, he could still hear what his father called the Luckett Indian whoop. It was just energy and enthusiasm that came out at times like this. It spoke a great many things, surprise, anger, scorn, disbelief, congratulation, amusement or just enjoyment of life, as they whooped tonight when they saw a boyhood friend catch his first sight of Kinzie since he was back.
A new sound fetched Chancey out of bed and into the hall. Faint light came up the third floor stairs and a rich sound with it. Somebody was touching Aunt Unity’s piano. The boy leaned over the bannister. He could look down the deep well of stairs to the reddish whale-oil light in the hall. He could see a green strip of carpet, the edge of the table and settee. It might be Fay showing Sooth how to play, he thought. First would come sure rich notes, then after a little, slower and less certain ones. If that was Sooth, she was catching on fast. The sure hands played again. They ran among strange keys and worked out chords that made Chancey stand stock still, his bare toes gripping a bannister post. He held his breath trying to hold his emotion. The music changed to another part, came back to the first part again. Just as it reached the most beautiful part of all, the talk, that had been going on all the time, broke out in shouts and laughter, drowning out the piano. The desecration angered the boy. His heart filled with blackness and oaths.
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