The Town

by Conrad Richter

  Sayward’s mouth set like it used to years ago.

  “I’ve always tried to be even-handed, Libby,” she reminded sharply. “But if one gets a lick more than another while I’m alive, the others will find it taken care of in the will.”

  “We know you want to be impartial, Mama,” Libby said humbly. “Just the same, it’s mighty funny. But I didn’t come here to talk about Chancey. We wanted you to know about this so you could be ready and we wouldn’t have any trouble with you when the time came.”

  She said a great deal more than that, explaining to her mother just how they had everything worked out so it would be best for her. When finally she got up to go, Sayward wet her lips.

  “Did Chancey say right out you should move me, Libby?”

  “Why, yes, Mama. We asked him and he said he hadn’t a thing against it.” Libby started for the hall. “Now don’t you dare get up! I can let myself out.”

  For a wonder Sayward obeyed. She heard the door close and Libby’s step outside.

  “Even you, Chancey!” then she said aloud.

  For a while she kept sitting there in a kind of stolid brooding. In her time she had looked forward to a good many things that came to pass, but never had she looked forward to outlasting her time. Where were those now she knew as a girl in the woods: Genny and Achsa, Will and Mary Harbison, George Roebuck, the Covenhovens, the MacWhirters and the Tulls, Jake Tench, the McFalls and the Browns, the Morrisons and the Sutphens, even Will Beagle? They were gone, all gone. More than once as a girl she hadn’t seen a strange face in the woods from one month to the other, and yet all the time she had her pappy and her brother and sisters. But when your brother and sisters and then your man drop off one by one; when the friends and neighbors you grew up with are dead and buried; when all the folks you knew who lived and felt like you did, are gone, lock, stock and barrel never to return; and you’re the the last of your generation, then you can drink a draft of loneliness you never drank before.

  She reckoned she knew now how one of those old butts in the deep woods felt when all its fellows were cut down and it was left standing lone and gaunt against the sky, with only whips and brush and those not worth the axe pushing up around it. The second growth trees you saw today were mighty poor and spindly specimens beside the giants she had known when first she came to this country. Those wild shaggy mossy oldtime butts would be out of place in Americus today as would the shaggy oldtime folks she had known. Yes, and she was out of place her own self, living her old life like she did in her day, taking care of herself at her age and doing her own work, giving no thought if she lived or died. That’s one reason why her children wanted to move her. Younger folks couldn’t stand seeing her do it. It was too hard on their “narve strings.”

  What gave folks “narve strings” today and made them soft so they couldn’t stand what folks could when she was young? Oh, she was no learned judge like Portius, just an old woodsy woman who hadn’t learned to read and write till her own young ones taught her. Her eyes were not so good any more and her mind would lately forget. But she had her own notions. It had taken a wild and rough land to raise the big butts she saw when first she came here, and she reckoned it took a rough and hard life to breed the kind of folks she knew as a young woman. If you made it easy for folks, it seemed like their hardihood had to pay for it. Didn’t she know? Which one of her young ones was it she had raised the softest, done the most for, coaxed and prayed along, saved from bad things one time after the other? Wasn’t it the same one that now could take life and his country the least and wanted to change God’s world over from top to bottom? It was the same with sick folks, Sayward noticed. Once they had been taken care of too long, they got to feeling the world ought to be changed and softened, centered toward themselves.

  But what in God’s name did soft and weak folks want to make the whole world over like they were for? In her time in the woods, everybody she knew was egged on to be his own special self. He could live and think like he wanted to and no two humans you met up with were alike. Each had his own particular beliefs and his reasons for owning to them. Folks were a joy to talk to then, for all were different. Even the simple-minded were so original in their notions they either made you laugh or gave you pause. But folks in Americus today seemed mighty tiresome and getting more so. If you saw one, you saw most. If you heard one talk, it’s likely you heard the rest. They were cracked on living like everybody else, according to the fashion, and if you were so queer and outlandish as to go your own way and do what you liked, it bothered their “narve strings” so they were liable to lock you up in one of their newfangled asylums or take you home where they could hold you down to their way of doing, like Libby wanted to.

  What was the world coming to and what hearty pleasures folks today missed out of life! One bag of meal her pap said, used to make a whole family rejoice. Now folks came ungrateful from the store, grumbling they had to carry such a heavy market basket. Was that the way this great new country of hers was going to go? The easier they made life, the weaker and sicker the race had to get? Once a majority of the men got weak and soft, what weak, harmful ways would they vote the country into then? Well, her pap’s generation could get down on their knees and thank the Almighty they lived and died when they did. How would they ever have come and settled this wild country if they said to each other, “Ain’t you afeard?” How would her pappy have fetched them the long way out here on foot if he’d kept asking all the time, “Are ye all right! How do ye feel? Do ye reckon ye kin make it?” No, those old time folks she knew were scared of nothing, or if they were, they didn’t say so. They knew they ran bad risks moving into Indian country, but they had to die some time. They might as well live as they pleased and let others bury them when the time came. Now Libby’s generation, it seemed, lived mostly to study and fret about ailing and dying.

  The knocker on the front door sounded. Who could that be? Likely some other fearful soul to ask was she all right and wasn’t she afeard to stay in the house by herself at her age not knowing what might happen? She turned down the light. She didn’t know as she wanted to listen to any more tales tonight of how some other bodies living all alone got sick or fell and there they lay till strangers came in and found them. Rat a tat! Yes, it was some timid soul. Already he or she was getting discouraged, for that knock was not so hearty as the first time.

  What a difference it was when Alec came last year, or was it the year before! Anyway, she was sitting in the kitchen that time when the knocker sounded. She had had a run of callers all day. She had her pipe in her mouth and her shoes off taking her ease, and she thought she wouldn’t go to the door. Then she heard that big brass knocker with the Wheeler name on it cast aside and a fist pound on the door. Didn’t it sound good again to hear plain knuckles rap on the wood? And when she didn’t answer that, a stick beat on the door. That wasn’t a town body, Sayward told herself. No! Such would have fretted she might be upstairs or sick. It would be a terrible hardship to rouse an ailing woman in her eighties and run her downstairs to the door her own self. But this rowdy body, whoever it was out there now, didn’t care if she was up in years or not. He reckoned she could come to the door. By hokey day, she told herself, she would put on her shoes and see who this was that didn’t think she ought to lay abed and have somebody wait on her.

  She opened the front door and there standing looking up at her was a smiling young girl she ought to know and a little old man with snow white hair, red cheeks and a cane. She reckoned she never saw him before. Now wait a minute! There was something familiar about those little bear eyes and the small mouth and face swollen around the cheeks. Then suddenly she knew who he looked like. It was old Judah who died of a mad wolf bite way back when Resolve was only a whip of a boy.

  “Alec MacWhirter! What on earth! I thought you were dead and buried long ago up in Wisconsin or wherever you went to. Come in both of you. And to think I almost didn’t go to the door!”

  “Oh, we’d a gone around to t
he back if you didn’t come to the front,” he told her. “And if you didn’t come to the back, we’d a come in and hollered. And if the door was locked, we’d a gone to your neighbors to help rout you out. You wouldn’t a got rid of us that easy.”

  What a treat that had been for her to visit with Alec MacWhirter, one of the few of her own kind left. You might say of her own family. Why, the MacWhirters and the Covenhovens had been the closest to the Lucketts there was, the oldest settlers around here save themselves. All evening she and Alec talked of the old days. Hardly was Portius decently asked about and buried till they were at it. She asked if he remembered the time his brother Dave’s bare feet got cold and he stepped in his granny’s kettle of hominy to get them nice and warm. And Alec asked her if she recollected when Achsa took her pap’s saw up on the leaning elm and sawed off the branch she was setting on. Sayward minded him of the time Jep walked for miles in his sleep, scaring the wits out of some folks who reckoned him a spirit in his bed gown. And Alec told of the first he ever tasted coffee. It was in a cup, he said, set in a bigger and flatter cup and tasted like neither milk, nor mush, nor hominy. The tears ran down his face, he claimed, while he drank it. Oh, one thing that night led to another. She would tell one story, like the time Tod Wylder got mad at his wife for giving his red mittens to the Indians. Then he would come back with another, like the time Will Beagle drank her pokeberry juice.

  “I kin still mind it plain as day,” Alec told her. “We were all boys together. Your brother Wyitt told Will the pokeberry juice was wine and Will drank it. Then Jake Tench told him it was dye, and a course, it was. But Jake said it was pure poison. He said Will would be stiff as a frozen skunk in two hours by the clock. The only thing that could save him was hog fat. Now Will believed him, for everybody knew that hog fat was why a rattlesnake was no good against a hog. Well, sir, I don’t know where you were at, Saird, but Jake fed him your hog fat. Wyitt showed him where you kep’ it. Now Will hated fat, especially hog fat and most of all when it was soft and slippery. He could hardly get one piece down. And then he hollered he couldn’t look at a second piece. But Jake gave him no rest. He said, do you want to die and be buried in all this sloppy weather? Till it was over Will was sick as a dog puking in the grass. But do you reckon Jake would let him be? No, he had to get one more piece down to live. Every time it was just one more piece.”

  Sayward could still see Alec sitting there a telling it with his small mouth and swollen around the red cheeks. His little bear eyes would look at her fierce, then his face would crease and his throat give out such a yell of laughter that his great-niece would jump. No, they didn’t do things by half in the old days. That little grandniece of his must have reckoned they were both wild and crazy as whaups. Only when it grew late and Alec got up to leave, did they let themselves get serious. He stood there holding her hand and neither knew if they’d ever see each other again, and then you could see it for the first time in his eyes.

  “Folks loved each other then, Saird,” he said sober. “It ain’t like now. Pride and style have took the place of religion. You may go where you will, you’ll have a hard time finding folks like when we were young.”

  “Not around here anyways,” Sayward agreed. “A good many ask me lately about those days. How was it on the frontier, they say. To hear them talk, you’d reckon our life was terrible, something flesh and blood couldn’t put up with. They say, but didn’t you have a hard time, and I reckon we did, but gladly would I live it all over again, Alec, if I ever got the chance. If I was young and there was such a place, that’s where I’d go to.”

  Yes, that had been such a nice visit from Alec. He had sat right over there on that hickory chair, laughing fit to kill. Hardly a year ago it had been, or was it two? And now he was gone like the rest, those red cheeks of his in the grave. Sayward heard some whistling boy go by out in the square. When he passed, the stillness settled over the house again like the tomb. It seemed like she had lived a long time, longer than anybody that ever lived, and all those days back in her youth were like the time of Greece and Rome that her young ones used to write school papers about. She could recollect how dead those days from Resolve’s history books used to seem, like they’d never really been. Well, that’s the way her and Alec MacWhirter’s early days must seem to young folks today.

  She picked up her lamp to go to the library. She had promised young Monroe Cottle to set down her accounts every day before she forgot them. Now what was she standing here in the hall for, and what was she a listening to? For a while she didn’t know. Then she heard it again and it took her back to the deep woods. Why, it sounded like the wind in the great white oak at the MacWhirters. Judah had left it stand over their log house, and when you went there you could hear the air draw through. She could still see that monster tree in her mind as it looked when she and Portius would go to call. The MacWhirters’ house was two stories but it looked like a child’s play house under that white oak. Some folks claimed it would draw lightning. But it never did. Old General Washington, Cora used to call it.

  Well, it was too far over to the MacWhirters. What she heard must be from the sugar maples standing by Portius’s log academy. Where was Portius tonight and why wasn’t he home yet? She went to the kitchen and took her old shawl from the back of the settee. Out in the faint moonlight light she stood a little confused and uncertain. Why, what were all these buildings a looming up yonder! She had looked for black woods a raising against the sky. But the only trees she could make out were these few in her side yard. She went up to them squinting and peering. Why they weren’t wild trees or first growth at all! They’d be no more than step-children to those big butts she was looking for.

  Then her eyes made out her own stable, and she felt shamed. Why, that stable wasn’t here or hardly anything else when the academy stood. No, she recollected now, the academy wasn’t up here at all. It was down near the cabin where they used to live. This was her and Portius’s mansion house she was at, and these trees out here were the ones she had planted her own self so it wouldn’t look so naked and bare. Portius was dead now, and all those old time trees, she remembered, had been cut down and burnt up long ago, the big white oak at the MacWhirters, the twin walnuts of the Covenhovens and the sugar maples by the academy. All that was left around here today was poor and spindly second-growth.

  Now what was she so hard on these young trees of hers for? She hadn’t meant to be. Her mind had just slipped a little. It wasn’t their fault they weren’t any bigger, that they were town trees instead of wild butts. They couldn’t help being mild and tame any more than humans could today. Wasn’t it Chancey or Portius who said once that present day folks could cut down the woods and break in new land, if they had to, but they didn’t have to. That was the trouble. When natural hardships petered out, the government ought to set up some hand-made hardships for the younger generation to practise on. No, she couldn’t blame these young trees of hers. They did uncommon well since they were planted. Sometimes at night, especially when there was no moon, she thought they changed into wild trees. Then they looked mighty tall. They stood like Indian chiefs, letting the dark come over them, like this was still their land and they were the masters of it, like they hadn’t lost heart. Oh, she had to admire their spunk and feel for them, three young forest trees against a whole city. Sometimes she wished she could give them back their land, for it was she who had taken it from them. But all she could do now was save them from their enemies. Whoever had his eyes on this lot when she died, expected first to cut down these trees and build. He’d have a jolt when her will was read that the lot could only be leased. The trees would have to stand unharmed. Resolve hadn’t liked to set that down. He acted like she sided with these trees against her own children, for how could they get the full value of the lot if the buyer couldn’t chop down the trees?

  All this time Sayward puttered around, patting and talking to her basswood, maple and whitewood poplar. They needn’t worry, she told them. She’d look after
them. Nobody with an axe or saw would come in to fetch them low. She had done enough of that her own self in her time. Oh, she hadn’t dare be too sorry for what chopping she’d done. It had to be, she reckoned. No, it was something else of late made her feel that way toward the trees, although she couldn’t say what it was.

  Now she better go in before Libby came along or Harry drove by in his new buggy and caught her out in the night air. Besides, she had to get a mite of sleep. That painter fellow would be here with his brushes in the morning.

  She woke up before daylight like usual and went down to cook her breakfast. She thought she better eat a mite extra this morning to try to fill out her loose skin. She wouldn’t like to show up on that painting looking poor as a shad. After breakfast she fetched in her broom and dust rag. If any of her parlor was going to get in the picture, it had better be clean. Libby came about nine and made a fuss that her mother wasn’t dressed. She took her upstairs and brushed her hair, putting it up to suit herself. Then she ran down to answer the knocker.

  The painter fellow was there when Sayward got down. He was a nice-enough man with a brown goatee and a velvet corduroy coat to match. He bowed over her hand like an eat-frog feller, but before he straightened up Sayward could see that his eyes were taking in her and the room. He told her just where to sit, with Portius’s bust in back of her on one side and the painting of Portius’s grandfather on the other. Sayward said she didn’t know as she liked that, having her likeness painted under one of the gentry like he was somebody from her side of the house when he wasn’t. But the painter and Libby saw no harm in it.

  Once the artist went to his easel, Sayward felt rueful sitting there. She had never looked for them to do such a monster picture of her. Why, there was enough canvas there for a barn door. He’d have to draw her big as a cow. The painter’s hand moved fast as his eyes. Whether he was drawing her natural or not, she couldn’t tell, for the picture was turned away. Several times he had her move her chair or hold her head just so. It was going to be a “tejus” job, Sayward saw, a good deal worse than a tintype. But she stayed meek as she could and did all they told her to, at least until they brought in the cushion.