The Town

by Conrad Richter

  It was much later when they came back down Dock Street. They had passed the cabin of the Wizard of the Dell, Rosa said. A little farther on, her young arm stopped him. Ahead in the darkness stood a house of one and a half stories with a squat ugly roof. Save for one lonely window, the house was dark. In that window a woman stood mysteriously swinging a lantern. Boldly, almost blasphemously, she would bisect the window from top to sill and from corner to corner. Afterward she would make occult signs and symbols across her head, across her feet, and then around in circles that grew gradually larger or smaller.

  “They say she’s a witch,” Rosa whispered. “Something evil is surely going to happen now.”

  Chancey had never seen anything like it before. He watched with a kind of horrible fascination while the woman performed her secret rites. She seemed to be writing on the night. All she did was of a pattern, had to be done exactly right, and when she finished one series, she would remain utterly still and grim on her feet and rest. Then suddenly, almost vengefully, the lantern would start again. Chancey and Rosa stood a long time watching while the streaks of light were drawn across the darkness in mysterious design and while around them the shadows rose and fell with obscure implications.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  THE FLOWERING OF THE WILDERNESS

  Come day, go day, God send Sunday.

  OLDTIME SAYING

  SAYWARD was beat out about Chancey.

  She hoped she didn’t show it too much, but hardly did she know any more what to do with her youngest. Most everything else she had ever got up against, she found she could lick if she stuck to it long enough. But this little old feller from her own womb baffled her. Wasn’t it singular? You could wrassle down famine and solitude, the wilderness and the big butts, but the Lord knew just where and how to lay His hand on you to fetch you to your knees.

  From the year he was born, Chancey had been a cross laid on her. She didn’t mind it so much for her own self. She felt thankful enough for all the good luck her other young ones had. If this littlest one had to be puny, she’d nurse and feed him best she could. She’d give him from her own self what he needed. She’d make a man out of him yet. But all the time, she knew now, the cards were stacked against her, and against every other mother like her. Oh, a mother can do most anything she wants for her young ones while they’re little. But she better recollect they grow up mighty soon. And then they do as they please. Next December Chancey would be eighteen years old and had his own mind this long time. It was a good mind, too, from his father’s side. His stubbornness likely came from both sides. But where, she pondered, did all his strange notions and ways come from?

  Ever since he was little, he had made up stories and claimed they were true—like riding on a cow that time and that she and Portius weren’t his real mother and father. No, according to Chancey, they were just some hirelings, his real folks had left him with till they’d come for him. Genny said that was the most ungrateful thing from a young one she ever heard, but Sayward reckoned it wasn’t bad as all that. Some young ones just took curious notions like they did ailments such as St. Vitus dance. Given time, they’d outgrow them. But Chancey never did grow out of his. She thought it was the St. Vitus dance that made him go around by himself. This was a good while ago. He didn’t want other folks looking at him when he jerked and twitched, and she didn’t blame him. But when that was over, he shied from folks just the same, and then for a while he made an awful fuss about going to church, claiming that people in church whispered about him.

  “You’re fourteen years old and too big for such bosh!” she told him vigorously. “Folks have more important things to talk about than you.”

  It didn’t do much good, and in the end she blamed herself that she hadn’t raised him right. If she’d worked him harder, he’d have been stout enough to keep up his end of the log that time at the raising. If she’d kept on doing her own butchering like she used to and made him help, he wouldn’t have swooned at the sight of blood and had the names Off-ox and Butcher Boy, called after him. Where she made the mistake was letting a little sickness coddle him. Had she brought him up rough and tumble like his brothers and sisters, he’d known how to call back worse names than he got, and then the others would be glad to leave him alone. Of course it would have been still better to knock down and drag out a few. Then he’d had some real peace. But never would Chancey stand a hitch with anybody. He wouldn’t turn on his tormentors, the only ones he ever answered were some harmless old men that teased him down by the bridge, and then he said the wrong thing. It went all over town.

  “You can make fun of me now!” Chancey called back. “But remember my name. If you live long enough, I’ll make you ashamed that you ever made fun of Chancey Wheeler!”

  That was a summer or two ago. This spring he tried every excuse to get out of working in the lot and garden. When she held him to it, he cried out it was a disgrace. She was thunderstruck though she tried not to show it.

  “Why is honest work a disgrace?” she wanted to know.

  “It’s all right for those who have to,” he told her. “But you’re the richest woman in Americus and I’m your son and yet we have to go out and work like hired men in the field.”

  It came to her mind to say, I thought you said you weren’t my son, Chancey, but never would she cast that up to him.

  “Work’s the best thing we can do, Chancey,” she said.

  “Robert Owen didn’t think so and he was one of the greatest thinkers of our age. He said if you make a man happy, you make him virtuous. That’s his whole system—making people happy.”

  “We want to make you happy, too, Chancey,” she said mildly.

  “That’s what you say. But what you mean is you want me to work and be happy. You’re so used to working all your life, Mama, you can’t live without working. You wouldn’t know what to do with yourself. Thank God I’ve never been spoiled like that.”

  “Spoiled?” Sayward swallowed.

  “Yes, you won’t even have a hired girl in this big house. You insist on doing all the work yourself. Don’t you understand, Mama, there are more important things than work in this world?”

  “What for instance?”

  “Well, Robert Owen said that one of the main occupations of working people should be play. He practised it, too. He arranged in his factories that the laborers could dance, relax, talk and sing and amuse themselves all they wanted. He was the real pioneer, Mama, not you and the settlers. Now phalanxes are taking up his revolutionary ideas. Every member of a phalanx is going to be equal. Nobody can order another around. Everybody can choose his own work and do as little of it as he wants to. That’s in the constitution.”

  “If everybody can pick the easy work, who’ll do the hard and ugly work?” Sayward asked meekly.

  “Of course there’ll have to be a little repulsive labor at first,” Chancey admitted. “But progress will do away with all toil and labor in time. Meanwhile those who do that work will get a little more credit against their rent and meals. They’ll also get a share of the profits. Everybody else will share alike. There’ll be no rich people and no poor people, just brothers and sisters. And everybody will have security and happiness.”

  “Everybody but your mother,” Portius put in. “I can’t conceive of her being happy there.”

  “Not if I had to work to make up for all those lazy shirkers who wanted to dance and play and have a good time all the time!” Sayward agreed bitterly. “I’d sooner go out on the desert with savages and rattlesnakes for my brothers and sisters and live my own life and get paid for my own labor. Such schemes never worked in this world and never will, but the’re always cracked people getting born who try to get something for nothing.”

  “See, I told you!” Chancey said to his father.

  “Now just a minute, Sayward,” Portius rumbled in his easy powerful way that made you feel small for getting hot under the collar. “I don’t support everything the boy stands for, but he has a point. It wa
s essential for you and me to toil and sweat when first we came to the wilderness. We had to cut down the tremendous forest and break in the new land in order to live. If the young folks had to do that today, I believe they could—”

  “And a good thing it would be for them, too,” she interjected.

  “But the point is they don’t have to do it today. And you don’t have to any more either. We are well off and so are our children. Things have changed.”

  “I don’t see our grandchildren coming in the world with didies on now that things have changed and folks are so well off like you say,” she retorted. “There always was work and there always will be. Some folks just never want to do any. Even those who had to slave and sweat the most to get their heads above water now say they don’t want their young ones to have to go through what they had to. They’d never reckon to train a young horse by letting him stand in the stable or pasture. They know mighty well the minute they’d put him in a plow or on the road, he’d sweat his self to pieces. He’d be too soft. But that’s the way they coddle their own flesh and blood. Well, what they don’t learn their young ones about work and hardship, life will learn them later on.”

  “That’s a cruel and outmoded thing to say,” Portius declared. “People are more enlightened now in the nineteenth century.”

  “Robert Owen says, Papa,” Chancey put in, “relieve the people of want, and you relieve them of evil and unhappiness.”

  “Bosh and nonsense, Chancey!” his mother flared. “Making a body happy by taking away what made him unhappy will never keep him happy long. The more you give him, the more he’ll want and the weaker he’ll get for not having to scratch for his self. The happiest folks I ever knew were those who raised their own potatoes, corn and garden stuff the first spring out here. They’d been half starved but they found out they could get the best of their own troubles. They wouldn’t have traded that first sack of meal from their own corn for half of Kentuck. That kind made good neighbors, too, and mighty handy to have around in time of trouble. If making your young ones work off their own troubles is old-fashioned, and out of date, then the good Lord is out of date because that’s the way He lets us sink or swim with our troubles.”

  “I’m not acquainted with the ways of the Almighty,” Portius said with irony. “But the Indians practised the philosophy you mention, and you know how far they got with it.”

  That’s the way it went, on and on. She would fire one barrel, and Chancey or Portius the next. In the end she saw it was no use. Talking never got you anywhere. You can’t make somebody believe what he doesn’t want to. Besides, she didn’t like falling out with her own boy. If he couldn’t make the best of her as she was, she could of him as he was.

  “You said folks had to do a little work at first, Chancey,” she said humbly. “If you don’t want to work out in the lot, what do you want to do?”

  “Work in my room upstairs,” he told her.

  She had to admit she was bamfoozled.

  “What do you aim to do up there?”

  “Write letters to the newspapers. Exchange views with leaders like Robert Owen.”

  Sayward turned away. So that was his idea of work! It was bad enough for her own son to take stock in all these crack-brained schemes for lazy folks to shirk work and have a good time doing what they wanted to do. Now he was going to shut himself up like a hermit, the way his pappy did years ago before she broke him of it.

  A month passed and all this time Chancey hadn’t worked in the lot. Sayward did his share herself. Whenever she went by in the upstairs hall, she saw him sitting at his little table by the window. He had made it his writing desk. Most times when she made his bed or changed it or while she cleaned up his room trying to make no more dust with her rag and broom than she had to, he sat there looking out of the window. Only once in a while did she hear his quill scratch. What he was setting down on the white paper, she had no idea, save that it must be something serious the way his lower lip pushed out and his blue eyes were on fire.

  “Is this what you like to do, Chancey?” she asked one day timidly, and he nodded like his thought was far away on something grand and more important.

  What would come out of such strange makeshift for work, Sayward didn’t know. But one day Genny came and asked had she read last week’s Centinel. It had a poem in it she said that Sayward ought to know about, if she didn’t, for some said the person, Ripheus, who signed it, was no other than Chancey, and he and Portius might have reasons of their own not to show it to her.

  When Genny was gone, Sayward hunted till she found the paper and spelled that poem through. Could it be Chancey who did this, she pondered. Oh, from his school work she knew he could write. Many a rhyme of his had Massey or Dezia read to her. He stammered sometimes when he talked, but not on paper. Portius said he would some day put his father to shame with the pen. But never had that devilish quality of his father so come out in Chancey like it did in this poem. She felt queer all over when she read it, for this sounded like some of her own talk against progress turned back against her.

  THE FROGS’ PETITION

  To those who rule Americus

  Our meek petition we address:

  Return unto the status quo

  Of forty, fifty years ago!

  Reverend sirs, today be known

  Our race has grievance with your own.

  Hard have we suffered by your rude

  Assaults upon our solitude.

  By thoughtless youth we’ve pelted been

  Till bones were broken, also skin.

  Not satisfied with this, you’ve schemed

  A human course we never dreamed.

  You drained the water from our land

  And left us perish or be damned.

  Your only reason for our fate

  Is progress, to be up-to-date.

  Now beg we that this thing you do,

  Our great just cause take into view.

  Return unto the status quo

  Of forty, fifty years ago.

  Remember that our nightly song

  Your children’s sleep would much prolong.

  From early in the evening hours.

  You all have heard when copious showers

  From Heaven descend upon our dwelling,

  It makes our throats with joy be swelling.

  Do then, kind sirs, take pity on us.

  Let water once more be upon us.

  Shut up this ditch, then we will pay

  Our best respects and humbly pray

  That you who are so very clever

  May live in peace with us forever,

  Close by our sweetly stagnant stream,

  The insect’s hum, the panther’s scream,

  Back in the golden status quo

  Of forty, fifty years ago.

  Ripheus.

  The strange feeling the poem gave her discomfited Sayward long after she laid it down. Everybody who read it must know she was the one it meant. The city had wanted to drain land that would drain her Beaver Gats and she had got up a petition against it. When she wanted her land drained, she said, she would drain it herself. And now Chancey had gone and poked fun at his own mother, siding her with the frogs. But she had to give in that it was a master poem and clever. Portius could not have rhymed it better. She hadn’t reckoned Chancey could be so sly. Oh, if it was he who did it, she felt proud of him. She’d tell Portius and the others they needn’t have held it back from her. The only part that made her feel bad was that somebody else had to tell her about it. With careful shears she cut out the poem and laid it in her Bible. It was, she told herself, the first rhyme any Luckett ever had printed in the paper.

  But she had a curious notion it was not the last. Only yesterday the girls told her they heard that Chancey was trying to get a position on the Centinel. They didn’t altogether approve. They said working in General Morrison’s bank would suit him better because it didn’t open till ten o’clock in the morning and closed shortly after noon. But Sayward
rather hoped it was true. Barnaby Lane from Rhode Island had started the Centinel. He had printed it first in Tallow Alley on a hand-press he fetched up the river. Sometimes in the early days when stock was scarce, it would come around on pink or yellow paper. The girls and even Resolve used to call it the Palladium of Human Liberty because that was the motto printed under the name.

  “Well, I see the Palladium of Human Liberty’s come,” Libby would say, fetching it in. But Sayward stood up for it then and now. She said Barnaby Lane had gone into business without running out and borrowing money like the bank did, only the bank called it capital. What’s more, Lane put in an honest day’s work. She had passed his place one time at night and saw him setting type by the light of a tallow candle. Now who ever saw one of these bankers in their offices after dark, she asked.

  This afternoon an envelope from the Centinel came to the house for Chancey. A boy fetched it. She laid it at Chancey’s place for supper, hoping he would say something. When he sat down at the table, he opened and read it, but not a word to anybody what was in it. That evening when she had to run up on the third floor, his room was empty.

  “He’s gone,” Massey told her. “I saw him right after supper going toward the canal.”

  —

  It had been one of those days, Chancey told himself, when hardly could he stand it any longer at home. Even in his room on the third floor he could feel the strong vibrations of his family below him, the robust exertions and pleasures of their lives. It was in the banging of pots and pans, the certain sound of doors and dishes, in the vigorous pitch of their talk, for company and other members of the family were always dropping in.