The Town

by Conrad Richter

  At his last sentence, Sayward felt her face grow bleak. She didn’t trail along with Portius on that. Take away all the hardship from the world, and man wouldn’t amount to much, she opined. He’d just lay back and grow fat and feeble as a pug on a lap. Not that she wanted to start an argument with Portius. They had wrassled the subject too often before. She didn’t want to see a war start in this country either. But sometimes you had to stand up for your rights or lose them, and you couldn’t stand up sitting down. It went hard enough for her to sit down and let that Peace Society drive Chancey from home, make him give up that nice room of his on the corner and three meals a day she took pleasure cooking for him.

  But she said nothing though it gave her a bad turn. The others, save Guerdon, she hadn’t minded going. They had taken care of themselves in the past and there was no reason to fret they couldn’t do as much in the future. But Chancey was her baby. She’d had to nurse and pray him into growing up. Now that he was grown, he had got it into his head to leave, and no thanks to her or Portius. Well, she didn’t know as she looked for any. But neither had she looked for it to be like this when he went. But who would have reckoned any likeness between Chancey and Wyitt! Why, Chancey took to books and learning like a duck to water, while her brother, Wyitt, could hardly write his own name. And yet when they got to be their own men, nobody could hold either one. Could Wyitt wait till he got off by himself? No! Could he be satisfied eating her rations and sleeping where she knew he was safe and sound? Not him. And now her youngest and puniest, the last she could ever give birth to, was a following him.

  Chancey went on a winter’s day when the snow lay deep in the street and the cold blew down from the English Lakes so that she had to worry all night did he have enough covers where he was at to keep him warm. Most every day she looked out the window on the chance she might see his thin face and shoulders coming back across the square. He might have forgot one of his traps, she thought, or got hungry for a taste of her pigeon pie or what he had called Blubblub ever since he was a little feller, a couple pieces of toast swimming around in a dish of hot milk and butter. Or he might have wanted to see again the house where he was raised, to climb the stairs one more time to his old room that she kept just like he left it. Portius mentioned seeing him in the court house, and the others dropped word of running into him here and yonder. But although often during the day she would catch herself stopping to listen, it was a long time till she heard his familiar step at the door. She thought surely he’d drop in sometimes for dinner or supper. Twice she had Dezia stop at the Centinel and bid him home for Sunday dinner when the family would be there. The first time he sent word back that he couldn’t make it on account of something else. The next time Dezia said he wasn’t there any more. He’d had trouble with Mr. Lane over something he’d written. So he quit last Saturday and went to Cincinnati where they said he was going to be editor of the New Palladium and the youngest editor in Ohio.

  “It’s that peace society woman,” Dezia said. “She bought the paper and made Chancey editor. She’s ten years older than him if she’s a day. Leave it to him always to be taken in by some woman.”

  It was just talk, about this woman, Sayward told herself. Perhaps Dezia made it up. She and Chancey never got along together anyhow, not even when they were little. But if it was true, at least Chancey was an editor. Now don’t go feeling so proud over him, she told herself. She had Portius send money for the paper and there it was, The New Palladium, two long sheets, printed both sides, and Chancey’s name down as editor. She’d have known it even if his name wasn’t there. The minute she started reading, she could hear Chancey’s voice speaking the words in her mind. Friday evenings when she laid down the paper, she could hardly believe that he hadn’t been sitting here talking to her and had now just gone up to his room, so strong and clear the impression of him remained.

  Oh, there were some things in the paper that gave her a turn until she got used to them. Especially the editorials which she spelled clean through. She used to ponder over the paper’s motto printed with a raring horse on either end. “Liberty, Equality and Peace,” it said, but Sayward found a lot more in the paper about equality and peace than about liberty. Most everybody who had made something out of himself around this part of the country got digs from the New Palladium. Could it be, Sayward pondered, that Chancey was trying to pull such folks down to make himself feel a little better?

  Resolve’s face sobered when he saw the paper in his mother’s hands.

  “I’m surprised you read that scurrilous sheet, Mam,” he said. “I understand Chancey writes all the letters to the editor himself. There’s one against me and my candidacy most every issue. There was also a very bitter one against you. It didn’t give your name but called you the Petticoat Plutocrat.”

  “I read that one,” Sayward admitted calmly. “Just what is a plutocrat, Resolve?”

  “It’s a very rich person who makes everybody dance to his money and influence. Chancey’s against you. In fact, he’s against everybody and everything.”

  “He’s not against the railroad coming in,” she defended.

  “No, nor anything else that will save him from the exertion of walking or doing any kind of honest toil,” Resolve retorted.

  Sayward looked mildly grave. Now that wasn’t very partial to facts. You’d still have to walk or drive your horse or ox to the railroad. You could tell Resolve was the lawyer for the canal company. Canal folks claimed the railroad a crack-brained swindle. They said all the land it bought was waste and extravagance, that the low places it filled in and the hills it cut through would stand useless as Indian mounds after the bubble burst. It would be a monument to folly and anybody who put his money in it deserved to lose it. Sayward hoped for Chancey’s sake it wouldn’t work out that way. It would be a shame not to win out after the way he had stuck up for it. Most every time his paper came, it bragged up the railroad. In her mind she thought of it as Chancey’s railroad, and, despite what Resolve said, she put a little secret money into it to help it along.

  Nothing would have kept her from the celebration that day the railroad’s locomotive came. The paper said it had run under its own steam as far west as there were rails to travel on. Then mechanics had taken it apart and shipped the pieces down the Ohio and up the canal. When Sayward got downtown they had already fetched the pieces from the boat to the Fourth Street crossing where they had about put them together. The crowd was so thick she couldn’t get nearer than Dr. Keller’s drug store and he took her upstairs where his family and friends were watching from the windows.

  She had to admit Resolve nearer right than Chancey when first she laid eyes on the thing setting down there on the rails. Black and besotted, with a vicious iron point in front to cut you to pieces and a fierce stack belching smoke and fire, it looked like it came from where canal folks claimed, the pits of hell. On the side in sulphurous letters was the monster’s name, SHAWANEE. A gang of boys carried pails of water from the nearest pumps to fill the greedy belly of the boiler, while men fed stacks of cord wood to the furnace. The first time they blew the whistle, folks started to run in the street. Seeing the steam and hearing the shriek, they reckoned the boiler had exploded. At last slowly with more hoots and screechings and a great hissing and grunting, the engine began to move. Dogs dropped their tails between their legs and ran off howling, while men in front of the engine cleared ditches and fences at a single bound. Old men and women leaned on their staffs and gazed as if doomsday was at hand. Only the young seemed unafraid, running alongside the engine with leaps and capers.

  The Shawanee moved as far as Buttonwood Street and came back drawing an open car behind it. Sayward made out Portius, Resolve and Dr. Shotwell among the notables on the car. But where was Chancey? Why wasn’t he standing on the first train of his railroad? Dr. Shotwell prayed the Lord to bless this new instrument of man. Resolve was introduced as “our next governor” and spoke a few words. But it was Portius who gave the oration. Standing th
ere on the strange movable platform, he appeared to pay no attention to it or the strange iron contraption in front. Instead he started telling quiet as could be how he had found the woods hereabouts when first he came. You could have heard a pin drop. He went from the woods to the axe and plough, from the cabin to the court house and mill, from the Indian trace to the ox and canal. Not till then did he come to the railroad; but he hadn’t need to before, because all the while he spoke the iron dragon stood there in front of everybody’s eyes breathing out smoke and steam.

  Oh, Portius was getting up in years like she was, but he could still spellbind you. Sayward reckoned she wouldn’t easy forget the last few words he spoke.

  “When I look back on the unbroken forest that stood here when first I came—when sight of and communion with another human being was a rare privilege and blessing—when our only light was the fire, the tallow dip and lard lamp—when the time made on horseback was considered exceedingly fast—and when I stop now and look around me at the growth of civilization, at our countryside flowing with milk and honey, at our cities humming with humanity and the spinning jenny, and now at the steam locomotive able to transport people and goods for a hundred miles in less than half a day—when I think of all these stupendous and undreamed of changes, all within the span of one short life, speech fails me and my power of astonishment is almost exhausted.”

  That night after supper, sitting alone in her kitchen which she had let dark on purpose, Sayward thought of Jary lying mouldered away yonder in the old churchyard and what she would say could she come back and see what Sayward had this day, the fine buildings on the streets, the boats a swarming like fish in the canal, and the shiny new steel road they called the railroad. “By Jeems’ cousin!” she could hear her mother say. But what Jary would be taken with first, Sayward thought, would be her grandchildren she had never seen.

  “Lawsy me!” she could hear her mother say. “I kain’t git over our Kinzie a ship captain a knowin’ the seven seas. But never did I reckon one of my seed would go back on the United American States for Old England! Now how is it, Libby, a doctor’s wife, is blessed with nary chick nor child, while Sooth has so many she don’t know what to do with ’em? And Dezia is much too smart, a teachin’ school all day and readin’ books half the night. She better watch out her head don’t bust. And that Massey! How kin she stay so lively? At her age, with one in the cradle and another on the way, women in my time used to settle down. Then that little old feller, Chancey, writin’ pieces for the paper all the way from Cincinnati!” But what her mother would come back to again in the end would be the tall, three-and-four-story buildings standing right here where the woods used to be, and now the unbelievable wonders of the railroad! “By Hokey day. I’m plumb beat out,” she could hear her mother sigh.

  After while Sayward rose and walked out in the yard. The sky hung covered with fine clouds like small pieces of cotton batting. Down here on the garden walk all was still, but up there those clouds ran to the east like sheep over the moon. If you stopped and looked at them a minute, it seemed it was the moon that ran and the clouds that stood still. Now what was that funny feeling it gave you? All her life she had heard it was not the sun and moon but the earth that moved, turning like a fat old turkey carcass on the spit. Tonight she could well believe it. Looking at that old moon a rushing to the westward she could feel for the first time in her life the old earth rolling to the eastward, turning under her, pushing against her feet and carrying her along.

  Yes, she knew it now, if she never had before, that the world really moved.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  PAST AND PRESENT

  A-ah, law! That was a time gone.

  LAMB IN HIS BOSOM

  IF it hadn’t been for Mrs. Wray, Chancey felt he would never have gone near Resolve’s reception. He had no intention to let Resolve think that now he was governor, his youngest brother was running after him and would support him in office. The impressive invitation from the governor’s mansion only aroused his criticism. He told Mrs. Wray that the money for the reception could be better spent giving bread to the poor and education to the unenlightened.

  But he noticed that Mrs. Wray’s fingers kept tight hold of the card. She was an intelligent woman with a long, narrow aristocratic head. An upright collar like a cleric’s stood above the dark collar of her dress. Her highly bred face almost never seemed to get its quota of blood and life. Yet now a faint warmth and color softened it.

  “After all, he’s your brother, and I think you should go,” she said. “There will be very important people there. I only wish we had their names on our subscription list. Your presence won’t hurt the cause—or the paper either. Perhaps you would be considerate and let me come along. After all, the governor is your brother, and I could do a little missionary work.”

  Chancey wished then he had never shown the invitation. He was caught now and would have no other way than go and suffer the torments of the damned, which he did. All the way from Cincinnati to the capital he dreaded the evening at the governor’s mansion and once there among all the blazing candles and whale oil lights, he felt distressed and oppressed. Why, he asked himself, did he always feel like this among the ruling class, especially among strong, successful, self-made people? It was their great power and self-assurance, he told himself, their blind devotion to themselves, to their families and their particular rounds of duties. Hardly ever could they be instructed or enlightened in their own duties and affairs. The more rugged their struggle with life had been, the more they clung to what they knew and believed. They were sure as eggs is eggs of all their old beliefs and resisted like flint any ideas that were new.

  “Most potent, grave and reverend signiors, my noble and approved good masters!” he repeated to himself bitterly, quoting a once-favorite quotation of his father’s. Well, tonight he would try to plough some of these stick-in-the-muds loose from their earthy roots, sow what seed he could on their rocky soil and let time struggle to bring in a crop of reform.

  It grew late before he had the chance. Once Mrs. Wray was welcomed to the big house, she forsook him for an evening of gayety and social chatter. That was a woman for you, he told himself. Well, he would neither forget nor be bribed. He would give an account of his presence that these infallibles would long remember. Meanwhile austerely he resisted all advances. Most everyone treated him too cordially to please him. It was for his mother’s or his father’s sake, he knew, because he was a Wheeler. No one showed fear or consternation as he approached, not even those he had pilloried in the New Palladium. His father greeted him as always. If his stalwart mother felt emotion, she showed none when she hugged him. Not until now that he had been away from her so long did he realize what a creature of past ages she was, a relic of the deep woods, with her heavy skirts, her stout waist, firm mouth and her severely parted gray hair. Little wonder, he thought, that as a child she never seemed like his parent. And yet on her part she took him around tonight, introducing him as her youngest son and editor of the New Palladium. The way she said it, as if it were the Cincinnati Gazette or Boston Advertiser, made Chancey wince.

  All evening the forces of restlessness and rebellion in him gathered. When he blundered into a large back room upstairs, he knew instinctively that this was his Battle of Armageddon. There were only men in that room, swimming in the strong fumes of whiskey and tobacco. His old aversion to both rose to sicken and trouble him, but he dare not back out now. His eyes took in some of the most important men in the state: a lordly white-headed supreme court justice; a fierce general with a cane whose only command now was as marshal preserving order at funerals; a famous abolitionist preacher whose red nose said, Drink, and whose tight mouth said, Be Damned; and a thick silent man whose name Chancey recognized as that of the most influential business lord and financial power in the state. There were present also, besides men he did not know: Chancey’s father; Fay’s father; a senator from Washington; several congressmen; a pair of leading lawyers one of whom
had thrown a chopping axe across the court house roof; the governor and a tousled ex-governor. Of them all, the senator was the one with whom Chancey felt most congenial, because of his courageous saying, “If I were a Mexican as I am an American, I would welcome the American troops to Mexico with bloody hands and to hospitable graves.” School boys in Ohio liked to recite that, dyeing their faces and hands with pokeberry juice.

  “Come in, Chancey, and join the crowd,” his father said, not too enthusiastically. “No, Tom, you’ll have to drink that yourself. I’m afraid that Chancey doesn’t indulge.”

  The boy was sensitive that the words belittled him. In the awkward lull that followed, he made his way to a scarlet-covered stool in the corner. He felt he had interrupted something, a discussion evidently of extreme importance, probably matters of state, perhaps a national policy. Nothing less could be talked about when such leading and influential men got together. He sat down meekly on his stool, and after a moment or two the parted atmosphere joined and flowed over him again.

  “Go on, judge,” Resolve prompted.

  “Well, as I was saying, Governor,” the justice resumed, “their father left those boys in the woods all winter, and a mighty severe winter it was, too. They lived alone in an open cabin till spring and, mind you, they were only nine and eleven years old. All they had to eat were the rabbits they caught in hollow logs and what was left of a deer after the wolves got through with it. Once in a while they tramped fifteen or twenty miles down the Indian trace to Hiram Sadler’s place for a little cornmeal. They had no gun, only an axe between them, and yet when their father fetched their mother back in the spring, they had made a considerable clearing.”