Despite himself he found his steps drawn toward his mother’s room. The sick smell, the solemn and gloomy air, the plain and ancient furnishings repelled him as formerly, the dark wall paper, the gray and red stripes of humble rag carpet on the floor, the rough table and bench that had been in the cabin. Here she had kept all these years the crude box for fixens that his Uncle Will had made for her out of rough hickory bark. It looked uncouth as the picture of her homely and beloved backwoods president standing on top of it. She had the picture faced toward her so she could see the ungainly face from the bed. This was the same cherry bed that she and his father had once slept in. Finer beds had come from his Grandfather Wheeler’s in Massachusetts, beds with tall polished posts and handsome canopies, but his mother always said she could never sleep well under frippery and vanity such as that.
On the small pine table near the bed, he glimpsed his mother’s large-type Bible. Often as a child in the evening he had seen her laboriously spelling her way through it. Today the book looked worn and singularly fat and flabby. It bothered him a little when he opened it and found it stuffed with familiar clippings. Her own hand must have cut them from the New Palladium, all poems, articles and editorials he had written. Even that savage piece attacking her and her generation she had saved. He winced now as he picked it up and read a few tattered lines. Could it be true then that she was the one who had kept the New Palladium going! He couldn’t deny it any more, for in his heart he knew that it was just since his mother had been paralyzed that the mysterious money through Lawyer Hartzel had stopped coming.
A strange, uneasy feeling ran over him. If he had been wrong about his mother in this, might he by any chance have been wrong in other things about her also? Could it be even faintly possible that the children of pioneers like himself, born under more benign conditions than their parents, hated them because they themselves were weaker, resented it when their parents expected them to be strong, and so invented all kinds of intricate reasoning to prove that their parents were tyrannical and cruel, their beliefs false and obsolete, and their accomplishments trifling? Never had his mother said that. But once long ago he had heard her mention, not in as many words, that the people were too weak to follow God today, that in the Bible, God made strong demands on them for perfection, so the younger generation watered God down, made Him impotent and got up all kinds of reasons why they didn’t have to follow Him but could go along their own way.
Hardship and work, that’s what his mother always harped on. Once when at home he had refused to work on the lot, she had said, “You’re going to live longer than I do, Chancey. Watch for all kinds of new-fangled notions to take away folks’ troubles without their having to work. That’s what folks today want and that’s what will ruin them more than anything else.” Could there be something after all in this hardship-and-work business, he pondered. He had thought hardship and work the symptoms of a pioneer era, things of the past. He believed that his generation had outlived and outlawed them, was creating a new life of comfort, ease and peace. And yet war, the cruelest hardship of all, war between brothers, was on them today like a madness. Did it mean that the need for strength and toughness was to be always with them; that the farther they advanced, the more brilliant and intelligent they became, the more terrible would be the hardship that descended upon them, and the more crying the need of hardihood to be saved?
He had always felt a little scorn for those who came to ask his mother’s opinion, especially grown men and women. Even his father used to do it. But now there were just one or two questions he wished he could put to her, not that he would accept her answers as infallible or sage, no matter how matriarchal and wise she looked lying there.
“Mama!” he spoke to her aloud.
She paid him no attention. He had half expected it and yet at the experience an incredulous stunned emotion crept over him. Why, he was her favorite, her pet, they all claimed. Massey had written him once that if he only came home, it would make his mother well just to see him. Now here he was by her bed and she took no more notice of him than a chair.
“Her mind’s on another world,” Manda said piously.
Standing there, Chancey observed that his mother’s eyes continued to hang on some point off to the right beyond the foot of her bed. He followed their gaze. All he could make out was the narrow bar of light from the window where it had been opened perhaps a foot and the shade lowered save for the same distance.
“It’s the trees,” Manda told him. “We moved her bed when she first took sick. She wanted to see the trees.”
Again that strange feeling ran over Chancey. Why, she had always claimed how as a girl and young woman she had hated the trees. He remembered a dozen stories of her abhorrence and bitter enmity for what she called “the big butts.” And yet now all she lived for was the sight and sound of those green leaves moving outside her window. Was there something deeper and more mysterious in his mother’s philosophy than he and his generation who knew so much had suspected; something not simple but complex; something which held not only that hardship built happiness but which somehow implied that hate built love; and evil, goodness?
He bent closer to her. Something in him flinched at her face shriveled as a mummy’s, at the ancient brown skin marked with great purplish liver blotches. Were those blotches like her faults, he wondered, part of his mother’s strength, like roughness and hardness are part of an oak, and if you take them out, you destroy the strength also?
“Mama!” he called louder.
There was no quiver of the eyelids. His mother only lay there, silent and oblivious as in the majesty of death. He knew now that she would never answer him again, that from this time on he would have to ponder his own questions and travel his way alone.
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The Town Page 38