The Town

by Conrad Richter

  However, it was when Miss Bogardus talked about Judge Wheeler that Rosa felt the strangest, bitterest silence come over her mother.

  “You remember the little Canada man that killed one of the Clarks in Tateville? He’s crazy as a loon. That’s why they didn’t hang him. And dangerous, too. You might know, if he’s a murderer. But Judge Wheeler lets him out a while every day. Calls him his messenger. Lets him run his errands. Why, he goes all over the city some days, and could kill any of us, but Judge Wheeler claims he’s harmless. He lets him go in his own house and that woman feeds him at the kitchen table. I’m scared of him. If you call him Crazy Bill, he gets mad. He says, ‘Johnny Meigs is crazy but I’m only simple.’ Can you imagine that? It shows how crazy he is. Of course, he sleeps in the jail house at night, but he could do a lot of damage in the daytime. It’s all Judge Wheeler’s doings, and if you ask me, I think he’s very high handed. Mr. Millard’s cousin was taking up a collection for that poor woman whose husband was drowned last month. She lives down near the basin. ‘I know all about her,’ Judge Wheeler stopped him. ‘She’s a poor widow with four children and takes in washing. I won’t give her a cent.’ ‘What do you mean?’ Mr. Millard’s cousin asked, so surprised. ‘Why won’t you help her?’ ‘Because she’s good and virtuous,’ the judge told him. ‘I never help that kind of person. There’s a hundred other people that will. I help only the devil’s poor. When you’re taking up a collection for somebody drunken and worthless that nobody else will give a hand to, come around and I’ll contribute.’ That’s exactly what he said. I heard Mr. Millard’s cousin say so myself. It’s lucky for him that judges are appointed and not elected or he wouldn’t get a vote except from his devil’s poor. Now who would ever think that to see him walking down the street so noble and grand?”

  She spoke as if Rosa’s mother went abroad in the city like other people. Rosa sat on the edge of the porch missing no word. She could see Judge Wheeler in her mind, going down the street, and that’s how he looked, noble and grand like Miss Bogardus said. Oh, he looked almost like God Almighty Himself in a high hat and frock coat, his lion’s head sunken on his breast, his eyes looking neither to the right nor left. When he passed her, he wouldn’t give her a glance. One time after he went by, a man came up and said something to her.

  “You’re as good as he is,” he told her. “And you ought to be living in his house.”

  Now what had this man meant by such a saying, Rosa often wondered, but never for a moment could she dare to ask. One or two loafers must have heard what he said because that night her father came home, his face black to all save her. He called the boys in and took down his rifle.

  “I want to tell you young ’uns something,” he swore. “Rosa is your sister and this is where she belongs. In this house with me and her mam. Anybody that says different, I want you to tell me. I don’t care if it’s man, woman or child, I’ll fix him so he won’t say it again. Like I’m going to fix somebody tonight who talked too much.”

  Rosa looked quickly at her mother but nothing showed on her tired, olive, hawklike face. Her father went on down town with his rifle, but they never heard that he shot anybody. The boys thought he might have done it in the dead of night and thrown the body in the river, but Rosa prayed that the man who spoke to her got out of town. That was the first and last time anybody said such a thing to her. Sometimes her brothers would look at her with strange eyes, but that’s as far as they went. It didn’t mean anything, she told herself. That man was likely just a Van Buren man mad at a Clay man like Judge Wheeler. But so long as she didn’t actually know, she could always hoard the mysterious secret in her breast. Whenever she heard the Wheeler name or saw one of the many Wheelers down town, a faint unexplained excitement rose in her and the man’s words came back to her ears. She kept those words in the sheltered shade of her heart. They would shrivel up if she brought them out in the light of day.

  Today the magic state was on her like a spell. She could sit on the broken edge of the porch, with the empty stone jugs on one side and the sack of old rags on the other, with the trash and refuse and junk of the yard in front, and taste the scent and feeling of the Wheeler mansion house all around her. Miss Bogardus was telling her mother today how Judge Wheeler’s fine sister was visiting him now from the Bay State. In her mind Rosa could see her in her elegant gray taffeta like Miss Doan’s sister from Maryland wore whom Rosa never saw either. But Mrs. Doan had told her about her sister many times, and how she needn’t lift a hand or foot, for she had a hundred slaves to do her bidding.

  Sitting here today with Miss Bogardus’s voice in her ear and the pictures of Judge Wheeler’s sister in her mind, Rosa thought, wouldn’t it be wonderful if Mrs. Doan’s fine sister, Ellin, came to visit Mrs. Doan while Judge Wheeler’s sister was in Americus! Likely the two knew each other back East and when they met down on Market Street or High Street, Judge Wheeler’s sister would say how glad she was to see her friend out here in Ohio and wouldn’t she come to dinner on Sunday?

  “I can come and thank you, but I can’t come without my sister,” Mrs. Doan’s sister would say.

  “Then bring her along by all means,” Judge Wheeler’s sister would tell her, for she knew that Mrs. Doan had been the finest milliner in all of the state of Maryland before she left.

  Then of a sudden on Saturday night Mrs. Doan’s sister, Ellin, would get sick and they’d have to have the doctor.

  “Jenny, I’m a sick woman and can’t go to Judge Wheeler’s sister’s Sunday dinner tomorrow,” she would tell. “It’s too late to stop it now. You’ll have to go and take somebody in my place.”

  “Then I’ll take Rosa Tench, for she runs all my errands, and matches ribbons and threads for me at Meek’s Emporium, and she has a good eye,” Mrs. Doan would say. She would say nothing, however, about the rum she sent Rosa for sometimes. No, not a word would she mention about that or how she would sit and stir brown sugar in it and sip it while her face got heavier and her nose got thicker and shorter till she looked like the Houcks’ pug dog sitting on a box. No, all she would do and say now with her sister, Ellin, visiting her was call a Gatchell boy across the street and send for Rosa. And Rosa would hurry down.

  “Rosa, you are the truest friend I have in Americus,” Mrs. Doan would say. “Will you go to the Wheelers’ mansion house to Sunday dinner with me tomorrow?”

  “But I have no dress, Mrs. Doan,” Rosa would have to tell her.

  “Then I’ll make you one,” Mrs. Doan would say, and she’d sew all night with her sister helping, for Ellin wouldn’t be so sick that she couldn’t help with the needle. And next day after everybody was home from church, she would walk down town with Mrs. Doan in her fine dress for Sunday dinner, and everybody would see her, even Miss Bogardus from the Millard windows. And Judge Wheeler’s sister would look at her and say I am sorry my friend couldn’t come but glad that you are the one Mrs. Doan brought. And Rosa would sit in the dining room at the mahogany table and eat from china dishes with gold and pink flowers and put a solid silver fork to her mouth. And across the table, Judge Wheeler would have to look at her and say, didn’t he see her some place before? And after dinner she and Massey and Chancey could go out in the yard.

  “Rosa!” a voice broke suddenly into her daydream. It sounded like her brother Turkey calling from down the street. “Rosa! Mrs. Doan wants you!”

  It was a shock as if Heaven had suddenly named her. She was wide awake now but inside she felt shaking. Was it coming true like she had dreamed? She went out of the gate, hurrying a little, a delicious knot in her breast. Down the street she could see the dirty little yellow Doan house with dirtier and darker doors and window frames. A little crowd was gathered on the vacant lot aside of the house. She mustn’t run, she told herself. If Mrs. Doan’s sister was there, she mustn’t see her do anything undignified. Then as she grew closer, the people on the lot moved so that she could see by them, and her legs didn’t try to hurry any more.

  “No!” she moaned
to herself a little, but she knew it was true. It was the same old story. Between the people she could see Mrs. Doan’s short stout body lying on the ground. She must have got some money on a bill and was drunk again, lying out in the vacant lot under the sun with only her shift on.

  “Get up, Mrs. Doan!” Mrs. Gatchell said, poking her. “You’re a disgrace lying out half naked in the day time. You’ll catch the distemper.”

  But Mrs. Doan lay quiet and peaceful, a small mountain of flesh on the ground, never bothering, one plump hand that could trim a hat so deftly lying open on a clump of grass.

  “Go away,” she murmured. “I am in my room in bed, I am sure. Go out now and shut the door.”

  “You’re drunk!” Mrs. Gatchell bent down to her. She plucked up a fistful of stones. “Are these what you got in your house on your bed? Look and tell me, Mrs. Doan!”

  But Mrs. Doan lay in fine oblivion, letting the world go by, and that, Rosa thought, was proof that Mrs. Doan was really of high born stock, for nothing could disconcert or discommode her.

  “Go out of my house now and close the door and leave me in peace!” she told them.

  “She’s drunk as a sow!” Mrs. Gatchell said to any who would hear. “She’ll never listen to you, Rosa.”

  The name stirred life in the sluggish small mountain of flesh on the ground.

  “Rosa!” it moaned. “It’s about time you came. Show these rude people out and lock the door.”

  The girl went up to her quietly. It was curious but seldom did she feel shy or inferior with Mrs. Doan. Rather she felt like a poor but acknowledged relation. And sometimes as now like a worthy and equal relation. Even when Mrs. Doan was sober, at her best, skillfully trimming a bonnet, turning it in her hands to look at it this way and that, telling of the grandeurs of her sister’s life in Maryland, she treated Rosa like a special person. With Mrs. Doan, Rosa’s mother, family and house faded cleanly from her mind, and there was left only good and gentle blood in her veins. Ever Rosa felt free to act and say what she wished when she was with Mrs. Doan.

  “They have a right to be here and I can’t make them go, Mrs. Doan,” she said in a low voice.

  The bleary eyes opened and back in those round and swollen organs a distorted being regarded her like the misshapen creature that looked out at her from a pug’s pop eyes.

  “Are you going to tell me I’m not in my own house and bed!” she warned.

  “I wouldn’t say that, Mrs. Doan. But I have to tell you you’re not in the right bed. If you get up now, I’ll help you back to your right bed, and then all these people can’t see you and bother you any more.”

  Grumbling and moaning and with great difficulty, Mrs. Doan worked herself up, bearing heavily on the small thirteen year old girl. She had thought all the time she wasn’t in her right bed, she said. It felt too hard and lumpy. Why didn’t somebody tell her? Why did she have to wait all this humiliating while for Rosa to come? She swayed on her feet like a tree with severed roots, pulling the girl this way and that. Her body stank like a whiskey barrel. Her hair had fallen completely down. No stranger, Rosa thought, would ever know her now as the finest milliner in all of Maryland. But through the puffy skin and soiled shift and disheveled hair, Rosa could still see with affection the one whose clever hands were the mistress of any bonnet and whose sister had a hundred slaves to wait on her hand and foot from morn till night and, if need be, again till morning.

  “We’re almost there, Mrs. Doan,” she encouraged her several times. The stupefied woman let the girl lead her to the gate and into the little yellow house with the dirty yellow doors and window casings.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  ANT SULIE

  Blown from night and the north.

  SOPHOCLES

  THE LAST month or two he lived, Worth gave Genny plenty of trouble. Every time Sayward saw her, she would complain.

  “He won’t wear those new clothes we got for him. No, he holds like grim death to the old. He just does it for spite. He wants to keep me mending and patching, and make it look like we won’t keep our own pappy looking decent in front of folks. Then he won’t hardly eat what I cook him during the day. Nothing tastes good, he says. But when Will comes home late at night, he sticks his head out of the shanty. ‘Will, fetch me something to eat!’ he calls so loud the whole neighborhood can hear. You’d think I half starved him. If it was me, I wouldn’t take him out anything, but Will is fool enough to give him what he wants.”

  A month to the day that Portius’s sister went back home, Worth gave up and died. Genny cried at Sayward’s neck when she saw her. You’d reckon Worth had been a wonderful father to her.

  “I made him such a nice dinner, Saird,” she said, drawing back and wiping her eyes. “I asked him early this morning what was he hungry for. He answered back like usual. Oh, nothing tasted good any more. But you know the way he liked brown flour gravy. I asked if he wouldn’t like some of that. Well, that would taste as good as anything, he said. So I made him some flapjacks to put the gravy over, and some boiled cabbage and some of that sausage I still have away in lard. He ate pretty good for him. After dinner, I had no idea of anything. He just sat there at the table and flushed up a little. I asked if he didn’t want to lay down. He said he didn’t care, so he laid down on the settee in the kitchen. I should have knowed from that. Most times he would have no other way than go back to his cabin. But you know how contrary he’s been lately. Anyway he laid down on the settee and crossed his feet. And that’s the last I knowed of him for a while. He did give a couple of snores and grunts, but he always did that. They sounded natural except they had a kind of rattle at the end. Mrs. Heberling was in the front room with me. She could look out through the kitchen door and said, ‘I believe your pap’s dying.’ I looked right away and called Will to run for you and the doctor. But Pap give up before either of you got here. He died so nice and easy. Look at him. Did you ever see a nicer corpse? You wouldn’t think now to look at him what a trial he’s been to us all his life.”

  “I can see Wyitt in him for the first time,” Sayward mentioned.

  “I can see more of Achsa,” Genny said. “Especially around the mouth.”

  The neighbors gone, the sisters closed the door, rolled up their sleeves and made ready to wash the silent figure and dyke him out in the new clothes he’d never consent to wear when alive. Now, how long had it been since she and Genny had done this thing for their mother? It must be close to forty years. Wasn’t it strange that Worth, who never was good for very much, should have been blessed with such long life and that he should look sweeter in death than he ever had in his lifetime?

  “Well, it’s a blessing to go quick, and we ought to be thankful if we’re ever that lucky,” Sayward mentioned.

  “He didn’t go that quick,” Genny said. “He told me something before he went. I could hardly believe it.”

  Sayward looked sharply at her sister. Genny went on.

  “It’s good I was here. He opened his eyes and saw me standing over him. Then he told me. It was about Sulie.”

  “Sulie!” Sayward echoed, her own Sulie coming first to mind.

  “It was our Sulie he meant,” Genny explained. “He found her. She’s still a living—out in Indiany. I said, ‘Pap, are you sure?’ and he said he lived at her house a while. Her name’s Harris. She has a good man and is good off, Pap said. He told me the name of the town, and Mrs. Heberling set it down. I don’t know if you can read it, her hand was trembling so, and I don’t know if it would do you any good if you could.”

  Sayward was never so beat out as by what Genny told her. So their youngest sister was still among the living! Not once all these years had she ever buried Sulie in her mind. No, she clung to the thread that some Indians had found her. But hardly had she looked to have word from her after all this time. Even Portius was stirred up. Indeed the news that Sulie Luckett was still alive after almost forty years shook the Wheeler family more than Worth’s death. Why, ever since they were old enoug
h to be talked to, the children and grandchildren had heard the story of their Ant Sulie who got lost in the woods. The cows had come home and their Uncle Wyitt but never did she. A whole company of men had scoured the deep woods for days. All they found beside Indian signs were teeth marks on a spicewood twig, a red thread on a haw, a few small footprints in a sandy run and the bower she had made. Oh, the Wheeler children had heard plenty about that bower. Even the grandchildren could tell you what it was like, a little bitty house made from sticks, with a bark roof, a block of wood for a table and a piece from Sulie’s red dress for a table cloth. Just to see it, the men could tell a small girl had done this. Away back in the trackless wilderness, far from any human this little lost tyke had made herself a play house to mind herself of her pappy’s cabin and of her sisters and brother she never would see again or not for forty years anyway.

  Worth was buried a Thursday. On Friday Sayward sat down and wrote a letter to Mrs. Sulie Harris, Vinita, Indiana. If she was her sister, Sulie Luckett, lost in the woods and never found save perhaps by Indians, would she write back and tell her? Their pap was dead and buried now, but his last words told about her. Would she like to know about her brother and sisters? Wyitt and Ascha had left home and were never heard from again. But Genny lived here, Will Beagle was her man. Sayward herself was lawfully married, the mother of ten children and nine of them still living as far as she knew. Her married name was Wheeler. She did not say her man was a judge; let her find that out in due course. Dezia could have written the letter in her fine backhand and saved her mother much labor, but Dezia would want to say everything grand like in the copybooks, and Sayward wanted it like she was just sitting down with Sulie and talking to her. The letter filled one side of a foolscap till it was done. But though she looked anxiously to Chancey whenever he fetched the mail after that, no answer to her letter ever came.