The Town

by Conrad Richter

“I had no idee o’ that,” Worth told her tartly. “Or I’d never settled here.”

  “You are too modest about the good you’ve done,” Cornelia rebuked him mildly. “When you came here, there must have been nothing but a formidable wilderness. Today the country is developed and the people civilized and benefited.”

  “I’d say it’s plumb the other way round,” he said flatly. “The country’s spoilt and folks are gettin’ less account every day. If you’d a been here forty, fifty year ago, you’d know it’s gospel. God Almighty made this country the way He wanted, and he never laid any out purtier. He stocked it with game outa the ark and told ’em to breed. Why, not far from this place the bucks would come so thick to rub off their horns in the spring, it looked like the deer park I heerd my grandpap tell about in the old country. You’d run into bear or painters most any place. Mink and fisher fox traveled the runs. I seed squirrels thick in the trees as pigeons. You ever hear a gray moose call, ma’am? That’s something to stir up your liver. He’s a callin’ to his lady love so they kin get together and multiply like the Good Book says. You wouldn’t soon forget it. But this town scum never heerd it and never will. They stick in one place. They go through the whole rumpus of gettin’ born and dyin’ and have no idee how the Lord Almighty meant them to live. Moughty few ever heerd gabby birds a talkin’. They’d sooner wear them on their hats, the purtiest birds you ever laid eyes on. A kind of poll parrot, not very big. I’ve seed the trees red and yaller and blue with them. They’d talk to each other like humans. They’d talk to the beaver and otter, too, and warn ’em. One time I was watchin’ a family of otter. It was up on Crazy Crick near as I kin make out, where a fullin’ mill stands now. You kain’t shoot otter in the water or they’ll sink and you kain’t get ’em, but I could a shot these many a time up on them rocks. A course it was summer and their skins wasn’t much good anyways. But them otter played together like humans. Then they’d sit on the rocks a watchin’ for fish. When they saw one, they’d tell which one had to go in for it. You’d reckon they’d jump in doggy-fashion, but they’d peel in that water slick as an eel. Oh, they wouldn’t catch a fish every time, specially not the young ones. But when they did, they’d fetch it out on the rocks and leave those bones picked clean as a human.

  “That was up on Crazy Crick, and not far from them rocks I used to keep track of a drone beaver. You know what a drone beaver is? Well, the rest drive him out because he won’t work. He’d dug hisself a hole in the bank and lived there all alone. Just cut down enough trees to eat. He didn’t have no house and no woman. The rest wouldn’t let him. I used to feel kinda sorry for the old varmint and never shot him, but likely somebody else did. He was an ole bachelor, you might say, a pore ole hermit. Me and him got mighty friendly, though what happened to him after I pulled out, I kain’t tell you. I stayed only so long as it was God’s country.”

  “But there were no people!” Portius’s sister from the Bay State protested.

  “Thank God Almighty, no!” Worth said fervently. “What would we want with people? What could beef-witted ploughmen and dainty town bodies a done in the woods? They’d a starved to death. Oh, we wasn’t plumb alone. We had friends to visit when we got lonesome. They was some around, scattered here and yonder. White-skinned and red-skinned both. I don’t know to this day which was the best. I’ve been took in by both and give shelter and rations. Once when I had lung fever and bloody flux, a Delyware woman nursed me kinder than my own woman could. Another time when I was a small tyke, I played with Injun boys. You know where the Suskyhanny is? You crossed it when you come West. Well, right up the West Branch where Deep Crick came in, they used to be a Delyware town. Them was the boys I used to play with. One time I was wrasslin’ and fell off a high cliff up the crick. The water hit me purty hard and I sunk in a deep hole. I knew whar I was all the time, but I couldn’t do nothin’! I couldn’t move a finger. Once I laid on the bottom it seemed like I could breathe again good as anybody. If this was dyin’, I tole myself, it wasn’t so bad. Next thing I knew I was out on the bank over a log. Them Injun boys had got me out and were runnin’ the water outa me. Best friends I ever had. They built a fire and dried my shirt and britches, and I never had dare tell their mams or paps I fell in or they’d all got jesse for near drownin’ me.”

  Sayward looked up. She thought she heard the back door open. Genny stood there. She must have been trailing Worth.

  “I was just going by,” she apologized. “Father, I’m going home. Don’t you want to go along?”

  “Where are them good Delyware, Shawanee and Wyndotte folks now?” Worth went on, paying Genny no attention, especially that she had called him “Father.” “Killed off and run off. Pushed one place, then another. Now they want to move them over the Mississippi. What fer? To give their land to men who hadn’t the guts to come out in the first place. That’s the kind that’s mostly got it now. And what do they want with it? Why, they want to make it just like the country they left back East. Already they’ve put in flour mills and wool mills and saw mills and fullin’ mills and all kinds of mills. Any old thing with wheels that water’ll turn!” He was hollering now. “Money, that’s what they’re crazy about. Money! A cabin’s not good enough any more. They have to have a mansion house like this. A bag of meal used to make a whole family feel good. Now it don’t mean nothin’. Folks must live high these days and dress fancy—make their selves believe they’re more than they are. They kain’t even tramp with the legs God Almighty gave them but have to ride their selves around with hosses and fancy riggin’. At home they sit on their porch stoop or behind their window light and watch folks with nothin’ more to do than their selves. Now when we come out, we didn’t have no hosses. We had nobody pushin’ us on a boat or drivin’ us packed like chestnuts in a bur. We came on our own legs and toted our plunder on our backs.”

  “Father, it’s time to go home,” Genny said sharply.

  “He’s all right here, Genny,” Sayward told her.

  “I knew a woman done something for money once,” Worth went on. “It never brought her any good either. She was one of these fine town bodies back in Pennsylvany. Her man owned three farms and a good house and stable in town. They had a smart boy, just a little feller, and his pap took him along one day in front of him on horseback out to his farm in Nippenose Valley. The Mingoes shot him and took the boy. Well, his woman got the house and stable and half the farms but she wasn’t satisfied. She wanted the half that was willed to the boy. When my old Colonel got all them Injun prisoners, that woman come to Carlisle lookin’ for her boy. He wasn’t ’ar. She could easy tell him. He had a birthmark like a berry by the nipple of his right breast. But she wouldn’t give up. She wanted the other half of those farms they were holdin’ for him. So she took a boy nobody claimed. Swore that was her boy and took him home, though everybody back ’ar knew he wasn’t. Well, he grew up ugly and loose. He wasn’t satisfied with his share when he got old enough. He went through that and then started on her share. He ran through everything she had. He even ran through her rings and household stuff. I heerd she died on charity. The real boy they never did find. You could have told him sure by that mark near the nipple of his right breast. It looked so much like a strawberry you could almost pick it off and eat it, they said. That’s how natural it looked.”

  “Pappy, I’m a goin’,” Genny said, losing patience and forgetting herself.

  “That woman was about the run of folks back East,” Worth declared. “This was in Pennsylvany but it could a been in Jersey or the Bay State where you come from. They’re never satisfied. When they come out here, they have to make God’s country over. So they make it like the place they left. Before they come, a man’s house out here was open to all that came. He took you in and gave you a bed if he had one to spare. If not, you could make a pallet on the floor. His woman gave you supper when you come and breakfast before you went, if she had any to share with you. Now show me a town body here or back in the Bay State who’ll do that for you.
The best folks come out here at the start, if they wasn’t here already. They was all man and woman, I kin tell you. Them that come after or stayed behind were second raters. They were faint-hearted, weak-legged or money grubbing, and it’s good they never come early. They couldn’t have stood the gaff. They’d a starved or been scared to death. I been around, and I kin tell you. I been in the piney woods where they have runs with the purest water and yet trees die without nobody knowing why. I been out on the prairies of Ioway where horses and cattle don’t need to be stabled but feed out all year on grammer and buffaler grass. I been in the mountings and in the Spanish settlements, and I’m a telling you—”

  “You’re talking too much, Pap!” Genny broke in angrily. “Come on home now and we’ll eat.”

  “I’ll lay a plate for him here, Genny,” Sayward said. “It will save me sending his basket down.”

  Worth got up from his chair pretty quick then.

  “No, I got to go. Well, come on, Ginny, if you’re a comin’.”

  Dezia’s face was a picture of relief and Genny’s a foretaste of what she would say to him on the way home. But Portius’s bold features only showed regret that the show was over. As for Sayward, she didn’t see why Genny got so worked up. Cornelia would understand that old men acted mighty strange sometimes. It was their nature. Just the same, it tickled her a little how he jumped on Cornelia and her town folks. She never saw him so stuck up and proud. Why, he carried on like him and his kind were kings of creation and town folks the ragtag bobtail and small fry. Now who was the blue stocking, she wanted to know, Worth or Cornelia?

  She wondered another thing. Tomorrow Cornelia’s visit would be over. All this time she had been here, and not a word of the trouble that made Portius leave home and hide out in Ohio. Was it a murder? Or was it, as Sayward felt, a woman at the bottom? For thirty-five years she had hankered to know. It used to torment her what this woman was like and did Portius still have a secret wish to go back to her? When she heard that Portius’s sister was coming, she told herself she would find out. Cornelia would tell her, or at least drop some broad hint. Now Cornelia was going without having breathed a word. Sayward knew one thing. Whatever had happened way back yonder, it hadn’t set Portius or the Wheelers up any, and that’s why Cornelia kept still.

  Of course, Sayward could come right out and ask her before she went. But she hadn’t seen fit to ask Portius whom she lived with all these years, why should she ask his sister she hardly knowed? Now wasn’t it strange that it didn’t bother her so much any more? Her children, her grandchildren and herself had got this far without knowing. Whatever it was Portius had done back there, it couldn’t hurt them any more. If it still came to her un-besought in some way, let it come. But if it didn’t, she reckoned she could go to her grave ignorant and unawares.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  ROSA’S CLOUDBERRIES

  And are we not as good as the best now, grandmother?

  In everything but circumstances, my child.

  ELLEN GLASGOW

  ROSA was glad that her mother had three friends. The finest was Mrs. Phillips who sent the books. She was ever too busy to come herself, and you couldn’t expect her to, for she was rich. Her house had a room for only books, and what would Rosa’s mother have done without them?

  Then there was Mrs. Clocker next door. Virtually never a day passed without Mrs. Clocker waddling solicitously to the fence and rapping on the Tench window. How did Mrs. Tench feel today? Well might she stay to her bed, for this was a cold morning. It looked like rain on her wash, maybe snow. Her lines were frozen stiff before daylight. Rosa’s mother listened but said little in return, and this together with Mrs. Clocker’s invariable manner toward her established in Rosa’s mind the fact that her mother was of a definitely higher social position than her neighbor. Mrs. Clocker never dared to come in either, save one time when Rosa’s mother lay on her bed as one dead. But when Rosa’s mother opened her eyes and saw her, Mrs. Clocker hastily beat a retreat.

  The third friend was Miss Bogardus, and that was she coming up the street right now. You could tell her a long ways off. She was housekeeper for old Mr. Millard who lived on the Square. Oh, she was no common housemaid, and when she tramped up Water Street, moving sedately by the slab fence, it seemed that a faded, slightly shabby but undeniable lady was coming to call on them. How old she was Rosa couldn’t guess. She seemed to be made out of some thin, sallow, yet everlasting substance. She had pale blue eyes like the finest porcelain and brought with her a whole floating cloud of the past. She had known Rosa’s mother’s family in Philadelphia and liked to tell about Grandmother Bartram, a real lady of the Quaker faith, and what a pity that she had to die of lung fever before she was thirty. Miss Bogardus didn’t come in the house either but came closest to it, calling only in mild weather when she sat on the porch in a chair that Rosa was told to fetch out for her. Here in plain view of everybody who went by she visited with Rosa’s mother who sat in the shadows just inside the door, invisible from the street but everyone knew she was there.

  Looking at her now, Rosa couldn’t say that she liked Miss Bogardus, but she felt pleased and honored when she came. Just to see her settled on the porch and hear her thin positive voice telling of Rosa’s mother’s family in Philadelphia, of great-aunts, uncles and cousins, of bonnets and gowns, of house furnishings and bric-a-brac, brought an invisible wave of respectability and peace to the girl, something so substantial she could almost lie on it and let it bear her among the scent of plush and carpets and dyes of the brick Bartram house with white scrubbed marble step in the City of Brotherly Love between the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers.

  Already Rosa had sunk to the edge of the porch out of reach of her mother’s eyes. Here she waited, letting her mind and body subside to that certain relaxed, almost limp, state in which Miss Bogardus’s words could levitate and transport her. But all the time while she floated and hovered, a part of her waited for the high point of the visit when for some mysterious reason Miss Bogardus and her mother invariably wanted her to leave.

  At last Miss Bogardus turned her head and fixed her pale eyes on the girl.

  “Rosa, don’t you want to run out somewhere and play?”

  Rosa didn’t say anything, just sat there mildly, looking down at her hands, touching her thumb and fingers together one after the other softly.

  “Rosa!” her mother ordered. “Go down and see if Mrs. Doan doesn’t have something for you to do.”

  But Rosa kept sitting there in her trance-like repose, and inside of her the anticipation rose. Miss Bogardus was getting ready to tell her mother about the Wheelers. Oh, her mother never asked a word or mentioned the Wheeler name, but she would sit there with such silent decorum and bitter dignity that sooner or later Miss Bogardus always came around to the Wheelers, and nearly always she ran them down. There was something peculiarly vindictive in her tone. She accused, although whom she accused and why, Rosa did not quite know. Her mother listened so pitilessly and cruel. It fixed every word and scene in Rosa’s mind, such as the time a summer or two ago when Miss Bogardus talked about Libby Wheeler.

  “Who’d have thought that big lump would ever get married? Why most people thought she was more man than woman! Her mother could have put britches on her and few would have known the difference. Nobody ever saw her do anything but act the fool. She’d play Ducks with the boys and throw rocks with them, tussle with them on the Square. I saw her knock boys down more than once. They yelled and carried on, but do you think that woman would come out of her house or even call from the window!” (That woman, Rosa had long since learned, was Judge Wheeler’s wife.) “Now, would you believe it, Miss Libby’s changed! Her breasts are filled out. Almost over night! She doesn’t rip and tear any more. What that young doctor from Connecticut sees in her, I don’t know, but he started to court her and pretty quick they were married. Some say they had to get married, but you’d think a doctor would know how to get around that.”

  The l
ast time Miss Bogardus was here, she talked about Mrs. Holcomb, the oldest Wheeler girl—“that Huldah,” Miss Bogardus called her.

  “Well, it’s true,” she told. “She and the iron master couldn’t make a go of it. They’re parted for good, and it’s all her fault, everybody says. You know how she went out to his place years ago and tried to get him without a stitch of clothes on her shameless body! Then after they were married, she had no use for him. They lived together like fighting cocks. You’d think he’d a made her lie in the bed she made, but he let her have her way, never lifted a hand in court against her. If there’d been children, maybe it would be different, but she wouldn’t bear him any. Now she’s going with that England man, George Seton. The one that brought in these English sawmills. They say he’ll be a lord some day if his older brother ever dies, and that’s what she’s after. It would make her a lady. Can you imagine that common thing a titled English lady? I thought it would disgust the iron master with the Wheelers. But I’ve lost my respect for him. He still comes to the house, they say, and sits and talks to that woman and asks her advice just as if she was still his mother-in-law!”

  Miss Bogardus’s chief spite seemed directed toward “that woman.” She told with contempt how Judge Wheeler’s wife couldn’t read or write until her own children taught her, and even now any school child could read rings around her.

  “You can tell she was never used to anything. She won’t have a maid in that big house but makes the girls help. She raises things in her vacant lots as if she was still on the farm. I don’t know where she gets that from, because her father isn’t worth a whoop and never was. But to hear her, you’d think he was a saint. She calls him Pappy, and it’s Pappy this and Pappy that. And yet she won’t have him in the house. He has to stay down in that shanty in Beagle’s boat yard, and she sends his supper down in a basket every day to make people believe she does something for her Pappy.”