“Oh, that was common, common,” the gray-headed congressman rumbled. “I was brought up in the Firelands. One summer everybody in Claysport was down with both ague-and-fever and bilious fever. Everybody but a boy named Charley Snyder. He had only the ague-and-fever. He was considered quite lucky. Every day he tramped five miles through the woods for a peck of cornmeal. He mashed it first at Judge Hamil’s where he got it, in the judge’s hand-mill. Then he waited till his second attack of ague came on. After that he fetched the meal to Claysport and we all had rations for another day.”
Chancey listened with growing astonishment. Was it possible that these distinguished and influential men had closeted themselves together for nothing more important than that fallacy of the good old days and how much better they were off then.
One of the lawyers stirred.
“I’ve told you this before,” he rumbled, “but it may not hurt to tell it again. When I was a boy, my father read to us evenings by the light of pine knots. I had to gather them. Later on when he found that hickory bark made better light, I had the chore of gathering that, too. I can still see him sitting there in the cabin with the fire blazing and a book in his hands. I’d be hatchelling and carding wool. My mother would be spinning. He’d make us take turns reading sometimes while we chored, but we would all rather work ourselves and hear him. When our books ran out, he bought a share in the library. Nobody had any money. They had to buy things with the skins of game. They called it the Coonskin Library, and I’m sure some of you heard of it. I can name you today every book they had in that library, in my time. We read them all, history, geography, theology, law. In fact, that’s where I learned the rudiments of my Blackstone.”
“Is that where you learned your law in the Thomas-Acton case, John?” the old justice twitted him.
“No, judge,” the other came back at him. “If anything ailed my law in the Thomas-Acton case, it was all the law books and luxury I’ve seen since. What gave our generation enterprise and a keen mind was the deprivation we had in the woods, the hard work we enjoyed and the freedom from deadly refinement and ease.”
“I can go one better, John,” the preacher said. “In fact I will say without fear of contradiction that I am the only one in this room who ever wore a nettle shirt. Some of you must know the old nettle patch. It always grew in the richest ground. Everybody avoided it like the plague. My mother rotted, broke, scutched and spun it like flax. If you ever walked barefoot you know how nettles sting. But you should have worn one all winter next to your skin. The holy men of ancient times had their hair shirts to carry them as they thought, to heaven. Well, I would prescribe nettle shirts to the ease-and-pleasure-loving youth of today.”
Chancey could hold himself back no longer.
“That would be unjust!” he cried. “Nobody, not even you, reverend, wore that nettle shirt because it was good for you. You wore it because you were poor and had no wool or flax. But today we are rich and have sheep and woolen mills. To inflict nettle shirts today on the young would be tyranny in its worst form.”
“Saving the soul of our youth would be excuse enough, young man!” the old abolitionist answered fiercely.
“I would try to understand youth before you try to save it!” Chancey replied, trembling. “Especially when you commit it to a life of hardship. And to the scourge of civil war on the excuse of freeing slaves!” He did not stop there but launched into an eloquent defense of youth and peace. The words came fast. He wished Mrs. Wray could be there to take notes so he might use them in an editorial. And yet of all the telling things he said, he could remember only the last few sentences. “You gentlemen speak of the past. But the past is dead and gone. Soon you old men who belong to it will be gone, too. Only youth will be left. The old can never understand youth nor the problems of youth. Only youth itself can. Youth is the native of its own times and carries with it the key to its own salvation.”
Nobody answered when he finished this time. There was a long, grave silence. Then the senator spoke.
“It wasn’t only the shirts that were strong in those days, doctor,” he said. “It was the pants, too. My mother made me a pair out of the hide of a buck my father shot on the way to Sunday meeting. Whether that made it any better, I don’t know, but I couldn’t wear those pants out. No brush or thorns could make a dent in them. After they got wet once or twice, you couldn’t cut them with a knife. When I’d get through ploughing, I’d hold on to the bar and let Buck and Berry drag me down to the barn, hoping to rip those pants to pieces but nothing fazed them. Well, sir, one time I was ploughing in our swamp field. My father talked about draining it but never got around to it. There was a locust stump in that field he never could get out, either. The sprouts came up all around every year like locust does and that day the thorns gave old Buck a bite. I don’t know if Berry felt it too, but he was willing. The minute Buck lit out, Berry did, too. I held on to the plough handles. My pants caught on the stump and when we got to the lower end of the field I found we had pulled out the stump, dragged it behind us and dug the prettiest drainage ditch you ever saw clean across that swamp.”
When he first started telling it, Chancey thought the senator must be on his side, but he wondered at the laugh that came at the end. He could overlook, he thought, the man who had made the speech against the Mexican war, but he never would forgive the general for his story.
“Your oxen, senator, remind me of the sheep that said baa to old Forley. Old Forley came over from the old country, he claimed, to escape service in the army. Unless he died lately, he’s still living in the Appleton Valley just outside of Center City. He once knocked a neighbor’s calf dead with his fist. When the neighbor took him to court, he claimed the calf kicked him first. When he had a little too much to drink, the boys in Center City used to follow him home calling, ‘Mooo! It kicked me first.’ He had a favorite sheep and one time when he came home drunk, he gave the sheep what he gave the calf. ‘It was baaing at me like them boys,’ he told his wife.”
Chancey could feel no point to the story, and yet he felt the cold chills go over him as the general gave it. He thought the excessive laughter from the men at this time cruel as their prescription for youth. As the anecdotes went on, one catching fire from another, he could feel that the old-timers were belittling him, putting him in his place, killing his argument with hilarity and savagery. He looked around. Savagery was the word. He saw that unmistakable flame he had noticed before in pioneer eyes, that wild mark of violence and passion that seemed to go hand in hand with their strong comradeship and mutual understanding. Bitterness for their souls possessed him. Here were gathered together some of the master minds of the state, leaders of government, and they degraded themselves in cruel horseplay and blind delusions of the past.
When he could, he rose and slipped out. He had the feeling he was neither noticed nor missed. But what was that shout of laughter and extra pitch of exuberance that seemed to follow him down the hall?
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
A SLIPPED COLLAR
Be still and know that I am God.
TEXT FOR JUDGE WHEELER’S FUNERAL SERMON IN WHICH THE CHURCH HAS THE LAST WORD
SAYWARD sat in Portius’s bedroom upstairs waiting for the funeral to start. Sooth with her big family to get ready had just come in the room, but Libby with only a man to fetch, hadn’t showed up yet.
“Now don’t be hard on her, Mama,” Massey said. “It’s all right to be a little late.”
But not for your father’s funeral, Sayward thought, although she said nothing. She just sat tightly in her strong basque and the voluminous folds of her black silk. If Libby and Harry were late, they were late. But when it came to the last thing they could do for Portius, she would rather they were on time.
The air seemed close in here. The bed stood piled with family wraps. Chairs from neighboring houses crowded the floor. Sayward had a little trouble catching her breath, but none of the others said anything, so she kept still. Out of the window she
could see the overflow of folks in the front yard. She wished Portius could know the big turnout for his funeral. Resolve had wanted it in church. So did Dezia and the others, and Dr. Shotwell had supported them, but Sayward had stood firm. Portius never went to church when he could help himself, and she wouldn’t play such a trick on him as take him there now when he couldn’t. She would make him out no hypocrite or turncoat at the last minute. Whatever faults he had, they were not those. Some of the rogues and knaves out there in the cold of the yard looked like they would rather stay out anyway. It was nice of them to pay their last respects to Judge Wheeler, and they were welcome to come in the warm if they wanted, but a few of them might not feel at home sitting down with pious, God-fearing folks. Portius had lent a hand to so many scalawags in his time, jailbirds, drunkards and bad women. Hardly ever would he give to a good cause.
“That’s a fine and noble charity,” he used to say. “I wouldn’t give it a penny. I give only to the devil’s kin, the sinners nobody else will help. Even the door of Heaven is closed against them.”
A good many of those he helped or their friends had come to the funeral. Now here were Libby and Harry saying something about a patient who made them late. And there was Dr. Shotwell’s voice from downstairs, coming right on behind like a pedlar’s pack. It was plain that this was what he had been waiting for. His voice rang out brisk as an auctioneer’s through the house. The family, mourners and the rest might be stricken with grief and fright before the specter of death, but he wasn’t. Death was everyday to him. Disposing of it was his trade. His words came matter of fact like this was an old story to him to be put through without waste of time on corners and edges. All the sweat and fire would be saved for the funeral sermon to crown the saint and punish the sinner and put the fear of God and of hell in all who heard him.
Sayward had to get hold of herself once or twice. It wasn’t easy to sit calm and hear yourself parted forever from the man you lived with for going on forty-five years and the father of your children. Nor would she have just bad said about him at his funeral when he lay helpless and silent in his box and couldn’t rise up to defend himself. That’s why she had taken Dr. Shotwell into Portius’s library last night, closed the door and come right out with where she stood. What Portius believed, she said, was his and the Lord’s business, and what end he came to. The Lord would judge and the Lord would know what to judge from. Oh, Portius had made some mistakes in his time. He was no saint. But she had lived with him long enough to know a lot of decent things about him, and if the bad would be played up more than the good, she would have no funeral sermon said over him at all. To herself she added that nobody looked more peaceful than Portius a lying there in his box. If he had gone to a bad place, he certainly gave no sign of it.
She had to admit Dr. Shotwell did an honest job. He didn’t whitewash but he said the bad first, and gave it no more talking about than it deserved. Then he started on the good. Sooth was the first to sob. The other girls followed. When the choir sang “The River Between,” Sayward saw even Resolve and Chancey wipe their eyes. Sayward tried to, too. It didn’t look right, she felt, sitting there like a dry stone in the run. Those crowded in the upstairs hall could look right in and reckon she still held against Portius what he had done to her thirty years ago. But she couldn’t help it. If she couldn’t cry, she couldn’t. Tears had never come to her easy. Not even when her mother went, coughing up her heart’s blood, or when little Sulie spoke the last time with her blackened lips, looking up at her with no lashes on her eyes, begging her not to scold her that she had burned herself. Even when the news came about Guerdon, at last, how he had paid back the life he took, giving his own for his country, enduring wounds to die of fever and be buried in some heathen place with a Mexican name two thousand miles from his Ohio home, she couldn’t give way and melt the cruel knot twisted inside of her. If she hadn’t then, how could she cry for Portius now? He had been luckier than most, going quick, one hour on the bench and the next being carried home a corpse. She hoped it might be that way with her when her time came, still in harness and all over in a hurry, but whatever way it came, she would have to take it.
The funeral service seemed mighty long. It comforted her a little to count it in her mind the service for Guerdon, too, who didn’t have much of any. Later she stood at the grave, leaning forward like a tree on the river bank with some of its roots washed out. When she turned away, she told herself, that much was behind her now. She would have to leave the dead with the Lord and think about the living. There was Chancey getting into the carriage behind her, looking like he needed clothes and rations. He had fallen off since she saw him last. For months she had heard rumors that his lady, Mrs. Wray, had flitted to some other flower patch and left him with the paper. Business was shaky. The stores wouldn’t advertise any more in what they called a copperhead paper. Creditors were pushing him. Now what could Chancey do when he had no paper to sound out his views in?
Sayward just felt thankful that she could feed him today at the funeral dinner. This would be the first time he sat down to a meal in his mammy’s house since he pulled up stakes and left. Wasn’t it a pity that it took the death of your father to fetch you home to your mother’s table! Even so, it was uncommon that he stayed long enough to eat. Sayward reckoned she knew what he waited for. It was to hear how much his father left him.
The girls tried to drag her away, but she had to see that folks at the second and third tables got enough to eat. Resolve called her twice before she would come to the library. The rest of the family was already inside. Sure enough, there was Chancey, sitting like he didn’t care, but none of them had bigger ears. Already his face looked filled out since he had a square meal inside of him. If only she had him home for a while, she could plump him up and put roses in his cheeks. She would ask him today, wouldn’t he stay and keep her company, but she had no notion he would agree. He would say he had to go back to Cincinnati. That was the way it went! And here she would be all alone in a big house with no one to cook for but an old woman who hardly got hungry any more save for a crust of bread and a cup of tea.
Now wasn’t it a shame that Portius didn’t leave Chancey an inheritance so he could keep on with his paper! Sooth could have used something, too, with her big family. Even in his will, Portius had to be himself and leave his children their youth, their wit and their sense of humor, as he called it. He always had to have his little joke. It was true he had given his children their wit and some of their being able to laugh, but he hadn’t had much to do with their youth. Some of them weren’t even young any more. There was Resolve, high in his forties. Portius might have left Resolve his law books, but then he would have had to match that gift to the others. It was better, he must have reckoned, to bestow on his widow what he had to by law anyway. The rest could go to his fund for rogues and sinners.
Oh, his heirs looked at each other with hard eyes when Resolve laid down the will. Massey and Libby spit out what they thought. But Chancey acted like when as a small boy he would get hurt easy and hide in the loft. One minute he was here, and the next Sayward couldn’t find him.
“Chancey! Did you see Chancey? I want to talk to him!” she called going about the house, but Chancey had left neither hat nor word behind him.
One by one, friends and family followed. Resolve had an important meeting. Sooth and Massey had to get their young ones to bed. Libby said she ought to be at home now for the evening patients. The members of bar and bench had long since paid their respects and taken leave. The Morrisons, the Sutphens, the Quitmans and the rest had drifted off. A few stayed on, George Holcomb and Will Beagle among them. George wanted to hear about Huldah, and likely Will hated to go back to his lonely house, after a funeral fetched up in his mind about Genny. Sayward was glad to have him stay. Will was one of the oldest friends she had left, the only brother-in-law she owned, save for Sulie’s Indian man. It was a pity Genny couldn’t have given Will some young ones in her time. They would be a comfort to him
now in his old age.
Every time the door shut, the house felt a little lonelier. In the end, it looked mighty empty with just her and Dezia. She was thankful Dezia didn’t have to go back to her teaching at the ladies’ seminary till Sunday. Now Dezia, you better go to bed, she said. She would come soon her own self, she promised, but in her heart she felt grateful for the few things that neighbors and friends had left undone, small things that only the woman of the house could attend to, redding up here and straightening out there and putting back yonder. When she did climb the stairs, it wasn’t to sleep. God knows she had been up enough the last few days to drop off the minute her head hit the bolster. And yet her eyes didn’t want to shut tonight or her body let go to such a point where she wouldn’t know where she was at.
The big house stood mighty still around her. Once upon a time on nights like this it was filled with sleeping, restless, snoring young life, charging up energy to be spent violently on the morrow. One by one they had cleared out, taking something out of the house with them. And now you could tell that Portius was gone too. That certain living power of his presence was missing from the rooms, that feel and flavor she had had of him from the day Will Beagle had told her how he had caught the Bay State solitary tramping up and down outside his cabin made of buckeye logs, reciting Latin and Greek or some other dead language.
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