The Town

by Conrad Richter

  Even when she stood in the basket, Chancey kept his face turned away as if he had never known her. “Oh, Chancey, couldn’t you give me one small sign that you saw me before!” she wanted to say to him but never would she till they were free from the crowd. Now wouldn’t you think that this aerial car would feel foreign to her, but her shoes seemed to find firm and familiar footing among the sacks of sand and among the extra ballast of blackened iron that lay in broken scattered pieces on the floor of the basket, broken stove plates, pieces of chimney rods and the rusty heads of two eelspears. The crew was letting out the rope now, and the bag surged upward like some live celestial thing eager to return to its world. She could feel her and Chancey rising, the heavy ground falling away beneath them, and in herself a growing and effortless lightness of being. So this was how it felt, she whispered to herself, to leave Americus? Never if she could help it, would she ever return again.

  How long they let her and Chancey up in God’s free air, she didn’t know, but the time must have been very short. She could hardly believe it was over when she felt them starting to pull the basket down. Why, scarcely had she time to say the first word to him. He still stood silent, stiff and obdurate. She could see the upturned faces of the crowd waiting cruelly below. Must she now go back and face them, return to the heavy air of Americus, to the smell of frying fish, to the crowded little house behind the Red Mule saloon and her mother’s mouldy chair! It looked like such a slender little rope that pulled them down. Where it pressed the rim of the basket, the hard-woven willow and many winds had frayed it. Not much would it take for the strands that were left to give way. Only a touch, and she and Chancey could go where he had so long wished, not to return again.

  Never had she known her hand to do such a swiftly reckless and irresponsible thing before. Chancey’s back was still turned, but she thought she felt him give a start at the lightened jerk of the basket. Then he must have looked at her when it was too late, with the rusty bit of eelspear head safely out of sight in her bosom and the parted rope falling unseen below. The quick bag had leaped like an uprushing pheasant. It took a moment for the cry of the crowd to reach them. Then it came like a storm on the already distant earth. What the look must be on Chancey’s face, she could only faintly guess. She was alone with him now, and such a sensation came up in her as she had not known since riding the sled last winter and coursing in fancy among the clouds. Her hands held tightly to the basket rim, but inside of her something had let go and was flying free. Was this how birds felt, she wondered. Heavy and awkward on the ground, with what ease they spread their wings and returned to the sky.

  Over their heads the buoyant bag rode magnificently, the basket swinging in stately rhythm below. They were racing toward a high golden cloud. Below and beyond on the eastern horizon, a fleet of small white cloud boats sailed in a turquoise sea. Looking down, she could see the earth still falling away from them. Already they had left the fairgrounds behind them, the cross lines of Americus and the green square where Chancey lived. Around such were tied the wide and narrow ribbons of river and canal, white with sky, and the round blob of basin and level. That smudge of gray near it must hold Dock Street and her mother’s ugly little house although she could not see it. Never, she told herself, would she see it again. Let God blow them eastward now, over fields and towns, over streams and woods, ever eastward over the wide Ohio and on to the mountains and Philadelphia where her mother’s people had lived in respect and decency so long.

  But she hadn’t reckoned on Chancey. When first she turned to smile courage to him, his face was yellow with fear and he crouched back in the basket where he need not see how high and far they had gone. But now he was on his legs, grim and atremble. One hand gripped the basket rim. The other hunted for something overhead in the nipple of the bag. Suddenly she saw he had hold of a red cord and it flashed through her mind that this must be something the balloonist had told him about for his piece in the Centinel.

  “No, Chancey! Don’t!” she screamed, but her cry was lost in the wind and sky.

  She saw him pull the cord so hard that it tore out in his hands. Almost at once the great bag above them reeled like a stricken thing. Life seemed to bleed from it and from her as well. The effortless lightness of her body fled from her. She felt her old weight return and with Chancey’s bear down on basket and bag, forcing them to the ground. The golden cloud no longer seemed akin to her, and she knew now she would never reach the horizon to sail with all those small white boatlike clouds floating in a turquoise sea. She looked down. The strong sweep from earth was irretrievably lost. The earth’s face came up to meet them, a broad heavy face marked with the shapeless features of fields and brush patches. Looking back she could see on the last rim of earth before the sky, a faint dot that was the city. Hardly had they even got away from Americus. Someone with sharp eyes or a telescope at the fairgrounds must have seen them falling from the heavens like a dark burned-out star.

  The bag caught in a fence row of trees between two patches of swamp land. They had to climb down as best they could, watched by a farm boy and his dog. Rosa was still at the farm house that night when the first team from Americus reached them. In the second were the balloonist and Sheriff Shand. Rosa thought she knew at last what it meant to come to the end of things. She would have to go back to Americus now.

  She felt herself an old woman next morning walking into her mother’s kitchen. Could it be that ever she had lived here? It seemed like some small, crowded and airless cave.

  “So you thought you’d run off?” her mother greeted her grimly.

  “The rope was nearly worn through,” Rosa faltered.

  “Yes, but the rest was cut, they say. Did you or that young hellion cut it?” And at Rosa’s silence, “Where’s the knife?”

  “I don’t know any knife, Mama.”

  “You don’t need to tell me anything. I know. I told you what would happen to you if you didn’t watch out. Do you know what they’re saying about you now?”

  “I don’t and I don’t want to, Mama.”

  “It’s all over town,” her mother informed her. “You know that dead baby they found on Pine Street Wednesday morning. It was wrapped in a dirty Centinel. Well, they say that was yours and young Wheeler’s baby!”

  Rosa stood very still. Her head felt numb. It seemed that she must move her brain with her hand to think. A little later she caught a glimpse of herself in the glass. Her face looked shapeless, lifeless, like the stricken bag of the fallen balloon.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  ALL HER BORN YEARS

  God buy me for a penny!

  OLD SAYING

  CHANCEY didn’t believe it when they told him. Of course, he knew that news traveled fast in Americus. More than once when his mother served him breakfast, she had told him something that had happened since he had gone to bed the night before. But this Saturday morning she said nothing, only gazed at him with her tight mouth and the cruel look in her eyes that he had seen so often. He knew what it meant, or thought he did, her bitterness over what had happened in front of everybody at the fairgrounds yesterday, that he and Rosa had brought out into the open the ugly thing about his father that had been buried so long. What his mother didn’t know, nor would he tell her, was how little he had to do with it. The whole thing had just happened to him. He had gone alone and unsuspecting into the basket. It was really Rosa who was responsible and to blame.

  All the way to the Centinel office he went over the incident in his mind, checking it step by step, and it only proved his contention, even though he could never come out and say so. Mr. Lane looked up at him searchingly when he came in. A tall spare man, his hair hung down behind his ears, and a stained black stock crossed around his stand-up collar. His thin face was mostly bone, the forehead seamed with parallel lines, his mouth wide and his eyes sunken pits, like the eyes of a man who had died and which still followed you about from his portrait hung on the court house wall.

  He seemed to be wr
iting unusually savagely this morning, Chancey thought, his fingers holding a very thick pencil, the whole arm moving from elbow to fingers, making sharp dots and dashes. When done, he held the long foolscap sheet up to read, but he turned and spoke to Chancey instead.

  “You want me to write the news column today?”

  “Why, no, sir,” Chancey felt surprised.

  The deep eyes did not spare him.

  “You’ve heard the news?”

  “I don’t know what news you mean, sir.”

  The fierceness on the editor’s face dissolved, leaving his head like a kind of skull.

  “Well, I’m sorry to be the one to tell you. Your little friend, the Tench girl, died last night. She took her own life. They found the body this morning.”

  That was when for the moment Chancey couldn’t believe it. Rosa dead, and by her own hand! It couldn’t possibly be and yet inside of him he felt all his blame against her collapse suddenly like a house of cards. Mr. Lane’s face was inscrutable. For a time he held it stiff and grave, as if this was a moment of importance, of dignity to the dead, or perhaps he couldn’t find the exact words he wanted to say. He went on finally.

  “We can say nothing of that in the paper, of course. Merely state that the deceased met her death at her mother’s home early this morning, exact time unknown. Everybody knows about it anyway. I understand the whole town is shocked by the details.”

  Chancey stood there rigid and confused. What were these shocking details, part of him cried out to know, but the rest of him closed its ears and would hear nothing. He felt Mr. Lane’s eyes search him but whether with pity or scorn, he had no means of telling. It would have been better, he knew afterward, to have had the whole story then instead of filling his mind with horror and uncertainty of the unknown. He tried to prepare himself by fearing the worst, but it turned out to be so much worse than he had dreamed. He couldn’t escape it anyway. Everywhere he went that day he heard snatches of the cruel talk and exclamations.

  “You’d reckon she’d throw herself in the canal, wouldn’t you, sooner than make such a mess!”

  “It was an old eelspear head she done it with. They said it was honed sharp as a razor.”

  “That was something to see, for fair, the blood dripping down through the loft boards. It turned my stomach. I couldn’t eat a bite of dinner.”

  “She done it after she went to bed and was that quiet, nobody in the house heard a blessed thing.”

  “If it wasn’t true what they said about her, what did she ever do it for? Folks don’t make way with themselves without a reason.”

  “That old witch! Do you reckon she’ll go out of the house now to the funeral?”

  “Didn’t you think it queer, the blood dripping down on her own mother? You suppose she done it on purpose like that? Anyway, it gave me the creeps when I started to think about it.”

  “Dr. Keller said she was all cut up. He didn’t see how a body could cut their own self that way. He said it looked exactly like she thought she had something wrong inside of her and was trying to cut it out. But he couldn’t find a thing the matter with her.”

  All the time Chancey went about his work, while he set down the facts that Miss Martha Fuller and Mr. Mayhugh Jones were united in holy matrimony in the First Methodist Church, or while he wrote an advertisement for Mr. Wells, the storekeeper, “Don’t mind loud cries of others but call and you shall see more new goods and cheaper still, grandurells and fashionable bonnet trimmings at the Enterprise on Water Street,” the ugly words about Rosa were the ones he kept writing over and over in his mind. Now he felt sickened by his own treatment of her at the farm house. Could that have been only evening before last? Something inside of him struggled and fought to reach across that short space of time, trying to get back to Rosa still alive when he could make everything all right. Even then, he remembered, that through his sullenness, Rosa had stayed her own gentle self. It must have dashed her hopes to the ground to have to go back to Americus, to her mother and their shabby house on Dock Street, and yet she had been the one who had tried to cheer him. He remembered now the strange thing she had told him that evening, but then Rosa was always telling him strange things.

  He was not to worry too much, she said, about her not getting away from Americus. Now that she had seen him again, she would be all right. And she could always get away to her secret places. He knew what those words meant. One of her “secret places” was the canal. More than once as they walked the tow path or stood on the bridge, especially on a clear day, she had pointed to the world of reflection in the water.

  “At first it looks upside down,” she had said. “But if you look at it long enough, it changes around and our world up here is the one that’s upside down. See the sky down there! It’s just like the sky up here, but isn’t it lighter and softer and a more beautiful blue? And the trees and grass! Everything’s so peaceful and free down there. When I go down in it, I feel I’m getting back to a wonderful place I know.”

  “It’s just your imagination,” he had told her. “You can never really go down there.”

  “Oh, yes, I can,” she had said.

  “Not with your body.”

  “With my body,” she had insisted. “I can move my arms like I’m swimming and float right over those trees.”

  “It’s impossible,” he had told her sharply. “If your body went down there, you’d get wet and drown.”

  That had stopped her for a moment, and her face went grave.

  “If I don’t go down with this body,” she had said slowly, “then I must go down with some other body that’s just as good as this one.”

  It had made him angry at the time but now it only gave him pity, like the pity you feel for a child, while recurrent tingles ran along his spine. He cursed his own stupidity. If he hadn’t been sullen and blind the other evening, he might have known of what dark things she was thinking.

  Tonight as he tramped the dark streets everything that Rosa ever said or did came up in his mind, things she would never say or do again. He could see her lying slight and still in that little dark house, dressed in her green or brown silk, while rough hands sopped her white face and her small folded hands with baking-soda water. That night he scarcely closed his eyes, and in the morning nothing could have kept him from her burial. Oh, never would he dared to go to it directly. By a devious route he went to the waterfront and stood around the corner from the Wizard-of-the-Dell’s cabin. There he waited till he saw the six young women in white dresses come out of the front door of the saloon. They were bearing the unpainted diamond-shaped coffin to the Basin delivery wagon. Cold and sweating, Chancey watched the stream of mourners follow. Everybody, he thought, was there, everybody but her real father and her Wheeler half brothers and sisters. In life they had ignored her and in death deserted her. Of all that side of the family, only himself attended, and that by stealth, sneaking cowardly as he had in her life time.

  What rats these Wheelers were, he told himself, as moving by different streets he followed the funeral down along the canal, across to the river and the little old cemetery they called the Devil’s Acre. Here a jockey had been buried, a gambler, some bad women, a few Negroes, several men and women who had been hung or who had hung or drowned themselves or had otherwise placed themselves beyond the pale. Among them Rosa had to lie. Had it been out in the country he might have forgiven it, but here the shabby fringes of the city had grown around it, shutting it in. Coarse uncut river grass covered it, hiding the sunken graves and the few board markers, most of them flat and rotting on the ground. Chancey thought he had never seen such a pitiful sight as that group of mourners and white pallbearers standing for a few minutes in grieved attention before leaving Rosa to her desolation. From time to time the words of the preacher, some of whose beliefs had only horrified Rosa, drifted across in the cold wind. Later Chancey could see yellow clay flung into the air. Not until all had gone, preacher, singers, pallbearers, mourners, the tag end and curious, Ed Malcol
m’s delivery wagon and finally the gravediggers themselves, their shovels on their shoulders, did Chancey go over and stand close by that bleeding mound of earth. Only then he realized that he hadn’t even brought flowers. At the thought of her lying down there in the wet ground, with the desolate scene above and the bleakness of winter coming on, such a feeling went over him that he didn’t believe he could endure it.

  It must pass, he told himself, for time heals all things, but day after day it never did. When he woke in the night, it was there. What he would have done without his work at the Centinel, he never knew. He seldom read in print what he wrote or remembered it afterward. But it was something to hold on to and lose himself in. He was aware of Mr. Lane’s eye on him when he answered strangely and of the silent watchers at home when he came stumbling in. But none of them spoke to him about what lay like lead in his breast, none but his mother and he shut his ears to her as if he hadn’t heard and climbed the stairs to his room.

  One of them must have spoken to someone else, for Dr. Shotwell, the family minister, sent Chancey word that he wanted to see him. Half unwillingly, half in faint secret hope, he went across the square.

  There had been a church standing on the corner ever since he could remember. When he was a little fellow, it had been frame, and before that, something else. Now it was of brick, the biggest church in the city and with the greatest congregation, a huge structure with wide steps running up to a portico, with three front doors topped by carved fan lights and four huge white fluted pillars. There were two rows of white windows all around, one upstairs and one down, and the white steeple went up so far that God help the people around there if it ever blew down. From its belfry on a clear day you could see Tateville, and once when the wind was right, it was claimed they heard the bell out there, although many doubted. Anyhow, it was a long way from the first little log church that had stood there not much bigger than a cabin, his mother said.