It was the painter who started it, although Libby was just as bad. He told Libby something and she fetched the red velvet pillow from the blue brocaded stool. The painter said it was the very daddle. He laid it on the floor in front of Sayward’s chair and had her lift one foot on it, so her shoe showed outside her skirt.
“Now what’s that for?” she wanted to know.
“It’s for composition, Mrs. Wheeler,” the painter said.
“It’s the fashion, Mama,” Libby told her. “It makes you look ladylike and genteel.”
Libby should have known better than say that. Up to this time Sayward had done everything they told her though it meant feeling foolish and acting like a body in her second childhood. But now they had gone too far. This she would never submit to, sit here for her picture with her shoe resting in plain sight on a red velvet cushion, as if the floor wasn’t good enough for her feet or anybody else’s.
Before she knew it she had raised up and kicked that pillow out of the way, not caring if it knocked down the easel or not.
“Now I’ve had enough of this,” she said, heaving a little. “If you want to draw me like I am, you can. If not, I’m going upstairs and take these Sabbath things off.” That’s all she said, but she could see her daughter and the painter fellow look at each other.
Well, she told herself when the painting went on, she didn’t know as she had ever done that before, kick anything, let alone her own pillow. It must have been that business about the house yesterday flying out of her at the same time as the pillow. Now that she had time to think on it, she didn’t know as she would give in about the house either. No, they could wait for her to get out till they carried her out like they did Portius. They shouldn’t have to wait too long.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
THE WOODCUTTER
The tree casts its shade upon all, even upon the woodcutter.
OLD PROVERB
CHANCEY stood it as long as he could, but when they started auctioning off his faithful old Washington press, he turned his back and went to the window. That press had been his ally and friend. It had printed his burning words of liberty and equality, of progress and peace, and sent them across the country for all to read. Now the press was lost to him, the New Palladium was lost, and the work for peace was lost, too. Outside the window he could see a regiment of Union troops, eager for glory and mad for death, marching down the street on their way to answer their backwoods president’s war call.
Why couldn’t his unknown patron, he thought bitterly, have supported the cause a little longer? All he knew of that nameless subscriber was that he demanded a statement each month of the money Chancey took in and spent. If his admirer had only waited a little while! Any day now Chancey looked for his mother’s death, and then there would be money to keep the paper going for years to come. That is, of course, if she gave him his rightful share of the estate. But would she ever do that? Sometimes he doubted it. He knew her and her practical kind too well. Likely he would have to use it for something a dead woman in her will approved.
The most ironical of all was that now he had no further justification to stay away any more. He would have to go home and see her before she died. Libby had written him. Sooth and Massey had written him. Resolve had stopped in at the New Palladium office and abused him for staying away, as if he could drop his paper’s fight for life and run whenever they whistled. Only last week Dezia had telegraphed him. But evidently his mother was living as yet, for no word had come of her death. How he hated death and dying! That’s why he fought so bitterly against war. It was the horror of suffering, of wanton crippling, of gangrene and early extinction. Never would he forget the degradation of Rosa’s youth in the grave.
He stored with friends his few personal things. His precious file of the New Palladium, he put in their attic.
“I’ll be back soon and start all over again,” he promised them. “Meantime I may write an answer to Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
At the Americus railway station nobody seemed to know him in his brown beard, for which he felt grateful. How huge his native city had grown! Wandering these busy streets among all the uncounted new buildings, he could hardly believe that here as a small boy he had been carried across the fields. As he approached the square, he felt the old telltale nearness of his mother’s house come over him, that timid, helpless and angry feeling in the face of his family’s boundless strength and confidence, its great animal courage and decision.
The square had changed. All was business now, stores, offices, churches, a new court house and this morning, a cattle market, with steers and calves bawling and the government buying horses for war and death. But his mother’s house showed no change, as he knew it would not so long as she lived. There it stood, tall and deep, its faded red brick, its white lintels and steps, flaunting the uselessness of its old-fashioned side yard in the face of all the crowded progress.
A maid he didn’t know answered his mother’s door. Then at the sound of his voice Libby came down the stairs.
“It’s about time,” she said as she cooly kissed him.
“I came when I could,” he told her with dignity, and after a moment, “How is everything?” carefully avoiding any reference to his mother, but Libby knew.
“Mother’s just the same. There’s no change. Harry says he never saw such an iron constitution.”
Thoughtfully he hung up his hat and moved toward the library.
“Then there’s no hurry. I’ll go up and talk to her after while.”
“I’m afraid you won’t talk to her after while or any other time,” Libby told him in the library. “You’re too late, Chancey.”
“I thought you said—”
“She doesn’t know anybody, not even Harry or Manda.”
Chancey felt appalled, but it was swiftly followed by something like relief.
“Then there’s no need for me to go up at all, if she won’t know me,” he said, taking a free breath.
“She might not know you, but you’ll know her!” Libby told him sharply. “You want to see your own mother, don’t you? You feel a little grief for her dying, surely?”
“Certainly I do,” he said warmly. “No, not exactly grief, perhaps. She wouldn’t want my grief. She’s had a long life, longer than you and I will likely ever see. She’s also had a great deal more than she ever expected. She’s never had much trouble. For instance, she’s never been sold out by the sheriff like I just was. No, she wouldn’t want me to grieve, and if I did it would be over somebody who died young and unhappy and had nothing but misery and degradation,” he added bitterly.
“Who’s that?” Libby asked.
“Your sister and mine.”
“Well, I must say you didn’t act toward her like a sister.”
There they were, at it again, he told himself. Before he was here three minutes. And after all these years! He felt the blood drain from his face, the old passion to be free of house and these creatures of his own flesh who bullied and angered him. But he must remember he was no small boy now. He must move temperately to the hall and take his hat from the ugly old walnut octopus of a wall rack.
Libby stood angry and formidable between him and the front door.
“Oh no, you don’t, Chancey. Not this time. You’re the only one that’s footloose. The rest of us have our families except Dezia and she has two weeks more of teaching. Huldah is on the ocean now. Can’t you wait for once in your life anyway until they come? Don’t you want to do a little something for your mother you haven’t seen for five or six years? Or is it longer?”
Chancey felt echoes of the old childish sense of terror.
“What could I do?” he stammered.
“You don’t need to do anything but live here in your own home. Hatty will get your meals and Manda will look after Mama. The rest of us come every day and stay with her and help out as long as we can. But there ought to be a member of the family in the house with Mama all the time. Harry says you can never tell. She migh
t go suddenly. She might get back her mind and speech for a minute beforehand. She might call for us. Then there’d be one of her children that could be at her bedside when she went.”
Chancey felt the old sense of suffocation in his chest. Why he hadn’t had that since he was a boy. It showed how this house acted on him. He wanted to get away. Everything in him cried to escape while there was still time. But he was a grown man with a beard, an editor of some years. He couldn’t run away like a child. He would stay then, he said with dignity, until Dezia came. To himself he added that he had nowhere else to stay or money to pay for lodgings until his mother died and he came into his own.
He didn’t mind it so much as he feared, especially while other members of the family were there. He liked best when the grandchildren came. Then he could even stand in the doorway of his mother’s sick room untroubled by the silent shape in the bed, so long as they were about. It was at night when he minded it the most, or when he had been out for a breath of fresh air and came back. To enter the old house at such times was like returning to the tomb, the musty smell of ancient carpets and hangings, the stillness and shadows on the stair. There was an air of decay and dissolution, of death and dying. He had begun to see now that the real corpse wouldn’t be his mother. No, it would be the whole fabulous legend of pioneer days on which he had been bred and raised. Then the legend had seemed heroic and very real, but today it had been moved into its proper perspective, and you could see that it had been only a dream, the self-made illusion of a rude and primitive race back there in the twilight of the forest.
Somehow it seemed fitting now that before she died, his mother’s lips had been closed. He and his younger generation must interpret her and her kind from this on, reconstruct her from their better knowledge. Surely he knew and understood her generation more clearly than that generation understood itself, the strong fare they lived on, their incredible epic tales like the nettle shirt and the buckskin pants, Guerdon chopping off his finger and the two Welsh children living through a wilderness winter alone.
And so he listened with a polite but faintly mocking air to all those who came to ask how Mrs. Wheeler was and stayed to tell him some memory they treasured of her, some trifling thing that had happened perhaps far in the past and that they had magnified into nobility and importance. Now that they knew he was there, the maid wouldn’t satisfy them. “Could I see Mr. Chancey?” they’d ask. Or, if he went to the door himself, “Aren’t you Mr. Chancey?” and they’d go into a long story about his mother, making a great deal of some minor connection with this rich old woman dying in her landmark of a house. Sometimes even tears would come into their eyes.
One woman with an old black cap and gray curls sticking out in front told how his mother had fed her father and mother when first they came through. “That was before you were born,” she said. And a stout bareheaded woman from the country told how her mother had come to town one day when it was still Moonshine Church and had been sheltered in the Wheeler house. “Your father was away and she slept with your mother that night. I often heard my mother tell how Mrs. Wheeler shared her bed with her. That was when you still lived down in the cabin.” The callers weren’t all women. A very black Negro with the whitest fleece told him of the time “Miz Wheeler” stood off the Kentucky sheriff and his posse, wouldn’t let them lay foot on the steps of her house where he lay trembling in the cellar. And a man with a green baize bag who said he came only to ask how Mrs. Wheeler was today, insisted on coming in and sitting down and telling a long story how when he was a young lawyer on his first big case, he had complained to Chancey’s mother that Judge Wheeler was prejudiced and had ruled against him on every exception. “Maybe he believes in your side and is just doing that so he can decide for you later on. Then they can’t say he favored you,” Chancey’s mother said sagely, he claimed, and so it turned out.
Even the girls together with Manda and Harry contributed to the myth. Manda said she asked if she wasn’t scared of the Rebellion, and Mrs. Wheeler said, why should she be, she was a war baby herself, born during the Revolution. But she didn’t like Harry coming to see her every day with his doctor’s bag. “You can’t help me any more. What do you come so often for?” she complained. “I have to give Libby a daily bulletin,” he defended himself. “People want to know how you are.” “In my day, there was no such thing as a daily bulletin,” she told him bitterly. “You either got well or died right off and that was an end to it.” Even then, before she lost the power of speech, she had picked the text for her funeral sermon. It was from Luke, “Now let thy servant depart in peace,” and that text had gone all over the city.
But it was a doughty little old lady named Miss Jenkins who annoyed Chancey the most. She sat a whole evening lecturing him like he was a small boy, telling him how his father was “brilliant but flighty and even queer” and if it hadn’t been for his mother marrying and saving him, he’d “a gone crazy and been plumb ruined” when he was a “solitary” out in the woods. “What’s more,” she said, “your father was queer more or less all his life, and if it hadn’t been for your mother to keep him on an even keel, he’d a never been a judge or amounted to anything.”
She fixed her pale blue eyes on him.
“Aren’t you the baby of the family, the one that writes? You ought to write a piece about your mother. You’ll never find a truer body in this world to write about. I could tell you a lot and so could some others. If you wasn’t lazy, you could get up enough for a book like the one they printed about General Harrison. He wasn’t one-two-three with your mother. I’m sure a good many would want to read it. Especially here in Shawanee county.”
Chancey kept a cool silence. Miss Jenkins would be surprised, he thought, should he write a piece about his mother and interpret some of the things about her he knew. Those who praised her hospitality to the skies would be astounded to read that hospitality was a savage virtue, like Tallyrand said, and his mother was hospitable simply because all those years in the woods she suffered a need and thirst for human companionship that wouldn’t be satisfied long after the need was filled. The Negro slave she saved from the sheriff would be startled and confused to hear that it wasn’t “Miz Wheeler’s” kindness of heart that had protected him from his owner so much as an inbred intolerance for others who believed in something she did not, such as slavery. All their lives the pioneers had to fight Indians, wild game, the trees hardship, starvation, and it was this habitual contentiousness and resulting cruelty that had made his mother accustomed to and even eager for the horrors of war. Didn’t he know? Hadn’t she refused to let her own sick son be taken to school in a carriage but compelled him to walk every day to and fro. And the lawyer who believed her a sage would be confounded to learn how little she really knew of life and the world outside, how she couldn’t even read or write until her own children taught her, and then her lips would move and hiss painfully and, while writing, her tongue twist and writhe in her mouth.
He himself was surprised, when he started to think about it, how many stories and anecdotes about his mother there were, and how revealing their interpretation. There was one she liked to tell of the time Resolve was governor and a French dignitary came to see him. “He’s out on the farm,” they told him, and then, “He’s out in the field.” The Frenchman went out and saw a man helping to cradle wheat. “But I want to see the governor of the state, not a working man,” he said. “That’s the governor,” he was told. The French dignitary couldn’t believe it, that the head of a great American state would work like a common man. When he found it was true, he couldn’t get over it, and apparently neither could Resolve’s mother. Sooth said she told the story at every opportunity, and Chancey thought that both Sooth and her mother would be shocked to know that it wasn’t the story and moral that made his mother repeat it so much as the impulse to remind her visitors and self that her son was governor, which made herself more in their eyes and her own.
It was one thing for Chancey to think this out and
another to tell it to Resolve. He thought he told it amusingly, but his brother turned on him in anger.
“And the reason she kept your paper going all these years was so she could tell people she was the mother of an editor, I take it!”
“I don’t know what you mean.” Chancey was taken aback. “She never paid me anything but her subscription.”
“So you charged her even for that!”
“I didn’t charge her anything. She paid up her subscription years in advance, and that’s the only money I ever saw from her.”
“She fooled us, too,” Resolve said grimly. “If you don’t believe it, ask Monroe Cottle when he comes. She wouldn’t trust me. She was afraid I’d tell the girls. So she gave the money to Monroe and Monroe sent it to a Cincinnati lawyer named Hartzel who gave it to you. She’s also fixed it that once she dies, you can go on printing what you like as long as you live.”
Chancey stood there thunderstruck. He couldn’t, he wouldn’t, believe such a thing—that his cherished patron, his philanthropic and ardent reader, who had supported not only his paper but his own courage and spirit, was nobody save his own mother. His pride and world of achievement came crashing down around his ears. But, no, it couldn’t be. Why should she spend her money making it possible for him to say and print what he wanted, things she didn’t believe in, even attacks upon herself and her kind? Certainly he would never have done such a thing for anyone, and wasn’t he far more progressive, enlightened and humane than she?
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