The Town

by Conrad Richter

  They were so sufficient to themselves, he thought. That was it. Nothing stopped them. Any one of his people could go it alone, ask for no quarter, do without your help. There was Huldah across the sea in England now. All the wild things she had done that she shouldn’t, and yet she thought it fitting that she should be mistress of a castle and have people call her Lady Huldah since George Seton’s father, the lord, had died. Hardly could Kinzie wait till his ship docked in England so he could put on his finest uniform and visit her. The Wheelers were like that, ready for anything, afraid of nothing. His mother called it snap; his father, the dash of the pioneers.

  If only there had been another in the family puny, lazy and cowardly like he! Just the thought of having such a brother or sister, perhaps one even worse than he was, lifted him up, made him feel better. But his mother wouldn’t admit he was puny or cowardly or anything else that wasn’t good. He was strong as anybody else, she claimed. He could see through her stand. She would hound him till he was hearty as his Uncle Wyitt, ambitious like Resolve, smart as his father and musical as Sooth. But nobody could make that much out of him, Chancey told himself, for none understood him save Rosa.

  Tonight at supper when he read the penciled note from Mr. Lane, it came to him what he would do. Now as he left the house, he felt at once like a different person. When he came down Sixth Street and saw the Basin ahead shining in the late afternoon light, his body turned ten pounds lighter. The soft heavy smell of the canal relaxed him. The broad letters of a boat’s name, like MARY ELLEN or BETSY ANN, painted around the stern, gave him feelings he never had at home, as when sometimes through the murky water of the river he had seen a great fish swim and was gone. Scarcely anybody down here knew him or expected anything of him. He could do as he pleased. He was just Chancey, and if he was a Wheeler, that was as good a name as the next. They didn’t hold it against him that he was of the gentry, so long as he put on no airs. The Wizard of the Dell told Rosa he liked him because he was common as anybody.

  But let him turn back toward home right now, and he would feel his family take hold of him like he was a horse suddenly hitched to a mill’s machinery. At once he would be fast again, pulling the heavy interlocking wheels and cogs of the Wheelers, the brick mansion house on the square, the court house where his father reigned like the priest in his robe and Resolve like a prince of the realm. Just to think of his brother standing up so cool and composed in front of a crowded courtroom made him feel all funny, for it was not Resolve but himself standing up there in his mind, and he wasn’t cool and collected at all. Had he told them tonight at the table about the note from Mr. Lane, he knew in advance how it would go. “A position on the Centinel!” Dezia, who was home for supper, would say. “How much does it pay?” His father would nod sagely. “Lane is not too brilliant. But he has sound views. Are you going to take it?” And that cruel look of strong secret feeling he knew so well would come out on his mother’s face.

  Never would Rosa unsettle and debase him so. He waited to tell her tonight till they walked up to Butterman’s Lock. It had started to get dark when he gave her the letter, but it was still light enough to read the large penciled handwriting. Seldom had she given him such a blinding look as when she handed it back to him, and not a word should he take the position or how much would he get.

  “I knew from my dream last night that something wonderful was going to happen to you,” she told him. “We were on some high place with castles all around. They brought you a royal diary out of a stone tower. It said that once you had come secretly to see the queen. They pointed up at a circle of stars in the sky and called it the Crown or Corona. Two or three bright shining stars were moving in the circle. The people called out it was a good sign. You were pleased. I remember you wore a cream-colored robe with strips of soft brown fur around your neck and shoulders. You looked like a king or a high judge of the land.”

  He kept perfectly quiet, waiting for her to go on. She always said things that made him feel so wonderful, gave him such confidence in himself. Never were they the same thing, always new, ever a surprise. He thought she would say more now, but she didn’t. He wondered if there was something else in the dream that she didn’t want to tell him.

  “Next Saturday’s the end of the month, and when I get paid, I’m going to buy you a present,” he told her.

  “That would be wonderful, Chancey!”

  “Either a brown or a green parasol, I haven’t made up my mind yet which.”

  Her eyes were brilliant.

  “Brown, if you can, Chancey. A golden colory brown!”

  Now he was almost sure that there had been nothing bad in the dream. Her eyes were clear as amber. All the mysterious dark flecks and shadows had vanished. He felt their world rising around them, his and Rosa’s private world, but mostly was it Rosa’s, textured by her dress and face and voice and by the things she said. All evening he would live and move in it, and so hard was that world to die that even after he left her for the night, its half-painful sweetness would follow him home.

  Of the three worlds which Chancey knew, it was the one most to be desired, never to be given up, always to be held to. His first world, of the Square and his family, was the heaviest. The second world, the one he used to retreat to in order to get away from the first, was the lightest, of fragile weight and fabric so that when he returned from its dreams and shadows he could scarcely remember what it was really like, although he knew and understood perfectly while he was there. These two worlds lay far apart and never would they meet. But his and Rosa’s world moved at will into one or the other, could be at the same time apart from and parcel of either, and all the while be both real and insubstantial, remembered and forgotten. The talk of the first world was hard and clear, that of the second world in few words at all. But the talk of his and Rosa’s world was sometimes spoken, sometimes thought, and ever held meanings more subtle and significant than either, like the poems he wrote for the Centinel which were meant to go far beyond the inky newspaper office, to be carried over city and countryside, to be read, remembered and forgotten days from now in houses and under trees and on decks of boats following the canal as far as Cincinnati.

  Chancey dropped no hint to his mother about the Centinel when he got home. Not often had he risen so early as he did on Monday morning, nor had bed ever tasted so sweet. If he was surprised to see his mother already down in the kitchen, he didn’t show it, and neither did she to see him, although he had to admit hers might be the bigger surprise. Presently he found himself among other silent men tramping the misty streets of Americus toward work.

  He had thought to sit most of the day at an office table writing as he did at home. But there was no low table in the Centinel office. Desks stood four feet high. In the shop he found type cases as high or higher, stone tables and presses. He learned he had to run errands, collect mercantile announcements, deliver proofs and printing jobs, help turn presses. When he hadn’t anything more to do, he could stand at a desk and write copy for the paper. Hardly could he crawl home those first nights. So this was what men went through who toiled for a living, he told himself. As long as he lived, he felt that the six a.m. bells would give him a sick feeling at his stomach. A fierce gratitude came up in him for Robert Owen and all those revolutionary thinkers who would lighten labor, the curse of the world since Adam, and root out its evil. They knew what it did to human souls.

  He didn’t believe he’d have lasted through the week save for the image of Rosa in his mind, a bright Rosa in the gloom, a fresh Rosa when he was sweated and wearied, and in the heat, a cool Rosa like one of those statues they prayed to in the Irish church. Thank God today was Saturday. Now he could lick his wounds for the week and spend his wages. He noticed with mixed feelings that the apprentices received no pay. The printers were handed envelopes heavy with money, but to Chancey, Mr. Lane gave no more than a slip of paper.

  “What’s this for?” the boy stammered.

  “That’s an order for your wages. Ca
sh is scarce, but if you take it to Harley Fry, I think he’ll pay you the two dollars he owes me. He’s owed it for eighteen months.”

  Chancey took the order and left for uptown at once. If he hurried he could collect his wages and still get home in time for supper that his mother never failed to keep warm for him. Harley Fry was a cabinet maker. The long double front room stood crowded with bedsteads and footboards, bureaus, wash stands and coffins. The house smelled of paint, varnish and supper.

  “I can pay you,” the old man said. “But not in ready money. You can see for yourself all the goods I have on hand. But I’ll give you an order on Albert Logan. He owes me a good deal more than that. Maybe you can get two dollars out of him. I can’t.”

  Chancey felt the life go from him like air from a blown bladder. He left Harley Fry’s slowly, ashamed to go home so late now without his wages. It took a long time and desperation to get up courage to knock on the Logan door. He knew before it opened that he would not get his money. Had he been Resolve or his father standing there with power and presence, it might have been different, he felt. But these men would only shoo a boy from one to another. He found Albert Logan a big man and stone mason. Like a hammer knocking off pieces of rock with each word, he gave his opinion of Harley Fry and other well-to-do men who pushed him for money and still worse, those who owed him and wouldn’t pay. He hadn’t a dollar, he claimed, but if Chancey sat down and wrote him out an order on Minor Jones, the jobber, he’d sign it.

  Chancey never did get his supper that night. Minor Jones wasn’t at home when he got there and the boy had to wait a long time. When he did come, he said he had been down town for Saturday night and had spent what cash he had in his pocket. The banks were closed. It was late. He would have to give him an order on Tom Brill, the grocer. If Chancey hurried, he could still get his money from him. The boy left as soon as he was able, but it was ten o’clock and Brill was putting the heavy wooden shutters on his store windows when the boy got there. The grocer stood reading the order, his dour lips moving.

  “It’s too late to send me to anybody else tonight!” Chancey begged to forestall him.

  “Well,” the storekeeper said shrewdly, “sign it ‘Received in full’ and I’ll pay you. But you’ll have to take it out in trade. Now be smart about it. I’m closing.”

  Chancey wanted to cry out that the grocer surely must have the money in his till. It was Saturday night and he had done business all day. But the words wouldn’t come. Desperately he looked around the store. If only it had been a general store, there would have been umbrellas among the blankets, piece goods, queensware and such. But here were only things to eat, not a parasol or bolt of goods in the house. In the end, goaded by the grocer, he let himself be loaded down with flour, loaf sugar, stick candy and milk lunch crackers. He had to pay a penny for each paper sack. Then hoping that Rosa would take the things for her mother and understand, he stumbled out into the darkness for the waterfront.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  WINTER IN

  Sweet Phosphor, bring the day.

  ROBERT HERRICK

  WHAT had come over her, Rosa whispered to herself, that she didn’t like winter any more? Why, it had always been her favorite season! Of course, so was summer when it came, and so were fall and spring. But only winter had coasters and skaters, the black and white she passionately loved and the crispness of being that her secret self fed on. Only in winter could she ride the north wind, survive the frost and prove that she was immortal.

  Then how was it that already in December she hungered for spring, for green and warmth, for the sun? Every evening, the six o’clock darkness and long winter night came bitter and cruel. They had never seemed so before. Was it some deep disorder or foreboding—what her mother called “a messenger”? Or could it be Chancey, that he didn’t come around to her mother’s little house behind the Red Mule any more?

  In January, at a safe distance, Rosa stood in the snowy square one evening and looked across at the great Wheeler house. How high it looked and wide! You might think it needn’t be very deep to hold the needs of the Wheelers, and yet as she moved on and more of the house came into view, it astonished her again how far back the side walls and windows reached. It was a brick world in itself. Chancey’s folks must have more space than they knew what to do with. If some of the family were in one room, the rest could go to another. And if company came to that room, they could move on to another and still another room, all downstairs, not counting the hall nor the rooms upstairs.

  What was it about the Wheeler house gave her this strange feeling, she wondered, half burning hot, half icy cold. It came to her on the street, when she sighted one of the Wheelers or heard the name spoken. Was it her bond with Chancey? Or could it be what some folks whispered to her, that she wasn’t a Tench and ought to be with the Wheelers? Hardly could that be true, she thought, for, save Chancey, none of them would look at her when she passed, only he and that old woman, his mother, with her face brown as an Indian’s, her hair combed tight as could be, and she not a Wheeler anyway save by name.

  Well, except for Chancey, neither did she, Rosa, give a hait about any of the Wheelers, but she couldn’t say that about her own family. If she wasn’t a Tench, why did she look forward all day just to see them again in the evening, although she had left them only that morning? And when one of her brothers lay sick in his bed or was in trouble for doing what he shouldn’t, why did pity flood her like a hemorrhage, proving he was truly of her own flesh and blood? She even felt loving toward Turkey’s wife, Lulu, who came to live with them and she could hardly wait for the day when Lulu’s baby came to make her Aunt Rosa and bring more life to their little house, for how could it crowd them as some folks said, a tiny helpless thing no bigger than a minute?

  But where was Chancey? Before Christmas, the canal had frozen up, the boatmen had gone home, if they had any, and there was skating all along the waterfront, especially in the basin. Then for a day or two the weight lifted on Rosa, for she felt sure Chancey would come. She came home early on purpose Saturday afternoon. The lively scene lay in front of her, the bright reds and greens of the skaters, the children on sleds, the long chains of boys and girls, the graceful ladies with skirts almost sweeping the canal, the stout men and old men light on their feet as dancing masters. But nowhere among them could her eye make out Chancey though she watched till the misty hills looked furry in the sunset light that was blue with the woodsmoke from a thousand chimneys. The first time it snowed, the men and boys swept it off with a will. It snowed again heavily the third day and this time they shoveled only a wide path to skate up and down and another from bank to bank. The third time it snowed, only the children came to clear a ring or two, and that for a long while was the end of the skating.

  So far, since winter had set in, there hadn’t been a day of thaw. The first snow still lay on the ground under all the rest. Was it to be this way all winter, she asked herself, no break in this long bitter stretch until spring? The first snow had been pleasant enough when it fell, casting such a friendly feeling upon everybody out on errands or shoveling paths. It made even the grumpy cheerful, and uptown among the big houses all seemed so cordial and gay. On the night of the second fall, Rosa stood a while out in the back yard, drinking it in; the pale light, the utter stillness and the snow lying thick over houses and out buildings, bushes and fences. This is what she used to do as a little girl when they lived along the river, stand out somewhere alone in the evening and feel the magic of the new world she found herself in. It was like nothing else she knew. The soft fragrant smell of the snow was in her nostrils. Sometimes she could feel a fine rain of flakes from the roofs in her face. The snow on the roof edges rose like bread, and she thought of the rabbit sitting in his warm nest. Winter is the best time of the year, she told herself, if you are snug and happy. She could hear the fine bells of cutters uptown and the bobsleds’ deep bells down Dock Street. Oh, winter was far and away the finest season, she thought, but why when
everything lay so white and pure in the world, should such dark shadows lay on her mind?

  The cold set in after Christmas like a strong man settling himself in bed. Night after night Rosa could hear the house crack like a fowling piece with the frost. A big thermometer hung nailed with a hundred other signs to Meeks’ store front. Mornings on her way to the millinery shop, Rosa saw that the mercury was swallowed up, vanished. The red crept out a little until she came home in the evening. Sometimes it rose high enough to foretell snow again, but by another morning or two the glassy upright line would stand pale and bleak once more. Roof icicles stabbed toward the ground, and over the shoveled piles of snow you could see little more than the driver and the nodding heads of his horses.

  But where was Chancey? Had his heart’s blood frozen in his veins like the red stuff in Meeks’ thermometer? She kept remembering all the good times they had had last summer, especially the night at Dixes’ wake. Chancey hadn’t wanted to go at first, and once there, he looked like he would bolt, for the Dixes had no cool room to put the corpse in but had to keep her in the kitchen-sleeping room with the company. All the time somebody had to stand there sopping baking soda water on one cloth over the corpse’s face and on another cloth over the folded hands so the smell of Death would not rise too strong.

  Rosa thought nothing of doing her turn, but Chancey stood from her as far as he could, looking like the whitewash on the wall.

  Then after the barroom closed, Turkey came.

  “I been working all night and I’m hungry!” he bawled and went to the cupboard. “What! Didn’t she bake anything before she died? Well, she’ll pay for it, I’m a tellin’ you.”

  He went across the room and tickled the bare feet of the corpse’s older sisters lying on the bed. They thought it was flies and kept twitching and shooing. The whole company had to choke to keep back from laughing, and that was only the start. When Rosa and Chancey got outside, they had to hold each other. She wasn’t over it by the time she got home. Her mother asked her what could be funny at a wake, and she hadn’t dared tell on account of Turkey.