Mrs. Roberto - Or the Widowy Worries of the Moosepath League

by Van Reid

  “Your father recited a poem about his woodlot to us last fall,” said Mister Walton, “and I thought at the time he might have written it.”

  “He does write about trees, as a usual thing,” said Sundry. “Or dogs.” He turned to nod at Mr. Fern for some reason. “Once he wrote a poem about a dog and a tree.”

  “Look into a darkened mirror,” said Aunt Beatrice, “and you risk the likelihood of seeing someone unknown to yourself looking out.”

  “We saw an unknown grave today,” said Sundry. “I thought of your story last night, Mr. Fern.”

  “Yes, Mom,” said Madeline. “Tell Sundry about the grave of the unknown man up at the cemetery.”

  “What unknown man?” said Bonny, and Homer said, “What grave?”

  “I think talk in this house has been decidedly morbid,” said the mother, which was a little more than opinion and slightly less than reproof. “Homer, go help your brother with the cows.”

  Homer looked distressed but stopped short of protest when he saw the firm expression on his mother’s face.

  “Bonny, you didn’t make your bed this morning,” continued Ruth Fern.

  “Mommy!”

  “Upstairs.”

  “But I’m simply going to mess it up in a few hours—”

  “You can mess it up right now, if you like.”

  Bonny huffed, but did so on her way out of the kitchen.

  Susan was very quietly scrubbing a plate and stopped altogether as the attention of the room fell upon her. Mrs. Fern must have decided that her second daughter was old enough to hear what came next, for she only looked at Susan for a moment, then turned back to Madeline and Sundry.

  “People thought they knew him when he was alive,” she said quietly. “He called himself Jonah Redbrook, but the town fathers discovered, after he was dead, that he couldn’t be.”

  “Couldn’t be dead?” asked her husband wryly. It was remarkable how much the man had changed since the evening before.

  “No,” she replied evenly. “He couldn’t be Jonah Redbrook.

  “It was in my grandfather’s day—Homer Mason, who built this kitchen, and the small walls around it. Bowdoinham was living as much on the wood trade as farmwork in those days, and strange men were not uncommon, I am told. Often they would work from place to place as they moved inland, till they could disappear in the wilderness and carve out their own livelihood.

  “Now, Jonah Redbrook—or the man who called himself Jonah Redbrook—arrived one day in late summer and worked for the people up the road. They were the Billings—very nice folk and churchgoing people. Jonah said he came from Kittery, and that he was the third son of his family and without hope of inheritance. He lived in the Billingses’ barn and proved an amiable fellow and a moderate hard worker. He was not good looking, Grandfather said, but he had a manner about him that attracted people and not a few young women among them. Some thought he might find the means to settle down in Bowdoinham and make something of himself, and that he would be welcome.

  “There was a widow in town then—Ethel Dale. She was not young, but she had always been beautiful. Grandfather said that middle years only added grace to Mrs. Dale. She was a quiet, melancholy woman who had loved her husband, and loved him still, it seemed, for she offered no encouragement to suitors, lived alone in a large house with a single maid, and lived off her husband’s shipping legacy. People were a little proud to have her in their town and pointed her out to visiting relatives at church.

  “No one ever knew exactly when the man called Jonah Redbrook first was taken by Ethel Dale’s beauty, but of a sudden he was seen bringing little gifts to her door—a bit of harvest, a load of kindling. He was a tolerable good carver, and he made toys for the nephews and nieces when Mrs. Dale’s family came to Christmas.

  “People had mixed feelings about Jonah’s seeming courtship of Mrs. Dale. No one knew how Mrs. Dale felt about it. He was a likeable fellow, but it did seem unjust that he might win the suit that had been lost by so many local men, and himself without two pennies to rub together. After the New Year, he shoveled snow for her, and she even hired him to do some odd jobs around the house. This seemed more proper, as no one could imagine that Mrs. Dale would ever marry a hired man.

  “It was in February—the lost month, my grandfather called it. Grandfather had a perfect dislike for February and thought its only blessing was that it was shorter than every other month. I don’t think I ever knew why he hated it so, but it can be a bleak time of year.

  “The man called Jonah Redbrook disappeared in February of 1823. It was after a two-day blizzard, and it was feared he’d been lost in the snow and frozen to death. Grandfather was eleven years old at the time and remembered the distress of the Billings family when they came to town looking for him. A search was made all over the countryside. They sent for a Micmac Indian down to Woolwich to find the man. His name was Jimmy Salmontail, and it wasn’t his woodcraft, in the end, that served the purpose, if they had only listened to him. He never found Jonah, though he led the men on snowshoes with some dogs around the borders of the town and among the forests over by Mallon Brook, and even as far as Wheeler Hill across the town line to Bowdoin. He told someone, though, that he’d had a dream of a man suspended beneath a hovering owl, that there wasn’t anything holding the man up in the dream and that meant death, but the owl meant a hole in a tree or an old building.

  “Nothing was made of this, however, for Mrs. Dale came forward and admitted that the man had come to her house the first night of the blizzard and asked her to marry him. He had been courdy and polite and spoke softly, but he was ardent in his attachment to her. She had been a little shocked (though no one else could say they were to hear it) and listened to more of his love-making than might have been proper, with her maid standing outside in the hall in case she should need rescue. But Mrs. Dale had refused the man as kindly as she could and he had left with a bow, an apology for his boldness, and hardly an expression on his face.

  “And that was the last she had seen of him.”

  Mrs. Fern surveyed the faces before her and Mister Walton’s seemed most stricken, though Sundry’s was not too far behind. She looked almost sorry to have been so effective with her tale, but she could not know that Mister Walton’s own troth—if not absolutely refused because it had not been absolutely proposed—had yet been guardedly warded away. He took his spectacles from his nose and, producing a handkerchief from some pocket behind him and began to rub them thoroughly.

  “Bonny,” said the mother.

  “Yes, Mommy,” came a voice from outside the kitchen.

  “You might as well come in and hear the rest where I can look at you.”

  Bonny Fern meekly came in from the pantry.

  “I’m not sure this is a tale for a girl your age, but Susan will be with you if you’re awake tonight.”

  Susan was the picture of eyes and ears, and might herself be subject to bad dreams.

  “What happened, Ruth?” said Vergil Fern, who meant, really, “Tell us what happened,” as he had already heard the story.

  “Mrs. Dale had a barn, though she only used it for her carriage. She sometimes rented horses and paid the ostler to drive her around town in the warmer months, but no one ever ventured into the barn during much of the year. It was in April, during a late storm, that the children were having a snowball fight, when one group drove the other onto the Dale property. It was a noisy game, and Mrs. Dale was enjoying the sight of the children creeping about in the snow. One child was peering through a barn window, while another snuck around the corner with plans of ambush. The first child suddenly screamed and ran away and a few minutes later they all gathered at the window, some pointing and others shouting and crying till Mrs. Dale went to her front door and frantically called to them to go away.

  “‘What are you playing at?’ she asked them. “It’s very upsetting to watch you!’

  “‘There’s a man in your barn, Mrs. Dale,’ one of the children cried.
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  “She was shocked to hear it, of course, and she asked what he was doing.

  “‘He’s just standing,’” said one of the children, ‘but we can’t see what he’s standing on.’”

  “Good heavens!” said Mister Walton. He was not the less shocked for having suspected the terrible truth.

  Susan gulped, and Madeline, who had heard the story before, unconsciously put a hand to her own neck. Bonny didn’t understand what it all meant.

  “But you said that he wasn’t Jonah Redbrook,” prompted Sundry. He thought it odd how cold the kitchen had become of a sudden.

  “I did,” said Mrs. Fern. The pleasure of telling even such a tale of horror was a little evident in her expression. Her eyes settled upon each of her listeners before she began again. “Some of the children had known immediately what they were seeing and they ran for their fathers or the constable. Mrs. Dale’s house and yard became the subject and scene of investigation, and Grandfather said she was never the same during the short time afterward that she remained in Bowdoinham. The man had hung himself in the barn, it was determined, on the very night of her refusal, and the blizzard had covered his tracks.

  “The cold had done much to preserve his remains and he was casketed and put in the unheated attic of the grange till his family could be notified.

  “Mail was slow and unreliable in those days, so an adventurous young fellow set out with horse and sleigh to Kittery, and it is only a wonder that they hadn’t put the poor dead body in there with him. The strangest business of all was to be had, however, when the messenger arrived at the Redbrook house in Kittery and was informed that Jonah Redbrook, the only man ever known by that name in that town, had been dead for three years.

  “The Bowdoinham man spoke to several people—the family patriarch, the town constable, the minister who officiated at the burial—and the story was always the same: there had only ever been the one Jonah Redbrook and he was three years dead. Finally he went to the cemetery, there in Kittery, and saw the headstone for himself.

  “Much was made of it, as you can imagine, and the tales grew wilder as the years passed. Some even speculated that Mrs. Dale had known her suitor’s intentions and that she had even watched him dig a path to the barn door and disappear within—but it was a cruel story. That and others like it, not to mention the very real tragedy itself, drove Mrs. Dale from Bowdoinham before the following summer was gone.

  “And there were those who speculated about the real identity of the man they had called Jonah Redbrook. Some went so far as to suggest that he was the very man he claimed to be, that he had been banished from his family and they had performed a ceremonial burial. Great mysteries were woven around this idea, so that Jonah Redbrook became at once a ghost, a hero, and a scoundrel.

  “There was great debate over the proper way to bury him. Many did not think it fitting that he be interred in the cemetery with Christian people, but a compromise was worked out and he was interred within the graveyard but in his own secluded corner, till people forgot his story and thought nothing of encroaching upon that plot.”

  There was a moment’s silence, whereupon Aunt Beatrice lifted the plate of applesauce cake and said, “Have another slice, Mr. Moss.”

  “Thank you,” said the young man, and he took a piece of cake from the plate in rather mechanical fashion.

  “Mister Walton?” said the old woman.

  “Yes,” said the portly gentleman, till he realized that he hadn’t finished the piece in hand. “Oh,” he said, very quietly, then, “In a moment, I think, thank you.”

  “It will be someone else’s turn to tell about a grave unknown tomorrow night, I think,” said Mr. Fern. He pronounced the subject of this anticipated story in a melodramatic tone and waved his fingers like a conjurer at his daughter Bonny, who let out a small squeal.

  “People see him sometimes,” said Mrs. Fern unexpectedly. She had given every indication of having finished her tale.

  “See him?” said Sundry.

  “Yes. People say they’ve seen Mr. Redbrook, or at least the man they knew as Mr. Redbrook, standing at his grave.”

  There was a moment’s silence. They could hear the boys coming in from the barn with the milk. When they opened the door, everyone in the kitchen understood that the weather had changed. The human barometer that detects these things sensed a subtle drop in air pressure.

  Madeline shivered.

  Mrs. Fern was the first to speak and to move. She rose and began to gather the tea things from among them. “More tea, anyone?” she asked.

  44. Room to Consider a Lack of Happenstance

  “Well, he didn’t kiss her.”

  “The idea! Get away from that window, Fale!”

  “It might be a good idea, were he a’mind,” he said.

  “It’s getting dark out, and, with the light in here, they might be able to see you,” insisted Mother Pilican.

  Fale chortled as he scurried away from the window; he even disappeared into the pantry before the front door opened. Dee came into the hall, pulling her scarf from around her neck. Olin Bell came in after with a box in hand, looking diffident.

  “Good evening, Mom,” came Dee’s musical greeting.

  “Good evening, dear,” said the old woman. “We were beginning to wonder if you’d get home before dark. Good evening, Olin.”

  “I’m afraid I’m to blame for being late.”

  “Nonsense,” said Dee. “I insisted that he show me the fairgrounds.”

  “Insisted, did you?” said the mother.

  They could hear Fale chuckling in the pantry.

  “Come in here and stop eavesdropping,” said Mrs. Pilican.

  “I was not!” said the old man, still with a laugh.

  “He was watching out the window,” said Dee.

  Deborah Pilican had a magazine in her lap and she used this to swat at her brother when he passed her. He darted forward with surprising nimbleness and let out a shout. “It’s not safe in here anymore!”

  “Olin has your tobacco, Uncle Fale.”

  Olin held up the box in his hands, and Fale pointed to the stand in the hall. “Thank you, Olin,” he said. “Who do I owe?”

  “I took care of it,” she said. “You can pay me later.”

  “There’s weather coming,” said the old man.

  “There is an odd look to the sky,” said Olin by way of agreement.

  “Did you have a nice drive?” Uncle Fale asked Dee.

  “Yes, very.”

  “Dee says you like old-fashioned roses,” said Olin to Mrs. Pilican.

  “Oh, I love them,” said the old woman. ”Judd planted one for me over on the south side of the house, but it died two years ago when we had that awful frost in June. It nearly broke my heart to see it go.”

  “My aunt planted some on the hill above the farm,” said Olin, “years ago, when she first came here. But they’ve spread everywhere. I’ll bring you as many as you like.”

  “That would be lovely, Olin,” said Mrs. Pilican. “But just one, planted on the south side of the house, would make me happy as could be.”

  Dee pulled a face. She thought she saw tears in her mother’s eyes. Suddenly the daughter walked across the parlor and hugged her mother. “What’s this? What’s this?” asked Mrs. Pilican, delighted.

  Dee simply straightened up, half shrugged, and said, “Are you going to use your real name for your new book?”

  “I’m considering it. It will probably be my last book, so I might as well. I can’t suffer from the scandal if I’m not here.”

  “Her last five books have been her last books,” Dee informed the man in the hall. “Olin read Wembley Upon the Hill.”

  “Goodness, did he?”

  Olin was standing at the threshold to the hall, one shoulder against the casing, his hat in hand.

  “What must he think?” wondered Mrs. Pilican aloud. She had never gotten used to the idea that her neighbors might read her books.

  “I got quite
perturbed with Matilda,” he said without irony.

  “And well you should,” said the old woman. “She was an awful handful. I couldn’t get her to do anything I wanted.”

  “I could have understood Mr. Wembley waiting for her all those years, if she’d deserved it.”

  “Ah, well,” said the old woman. “Love is not always founded in merit.”

  Olin thought about this. He nodded without indicating that he entirely agreed. “I hope he was happy, in the end.” He did not consider that he was speaking of a person grown whole from the mind of the woman before him, nor guess how much pleasure he had given her by evincing his concern for Mr. Wembley.

  He left with almost as much awkwardness as he had arrived, which is to say quite a bit. His afternoon with Dee might have been like an unfinished conversation, wherein neither participant can quite decide what it was he wanted to tell the other. He dismissed himself suddenly with a wave of his hat and the assertion that he must be going.

  Dee felt as if she wanted Olin to stay but could not think of any good reason for him to do so. She thanked him several times over for thinking of her, and for the lovely drive, and he looked more awkward with every expression of gratitude. He hesitated at the door and on the stoop and on the walk, turning to say “Good-bye” and “Think nothing of it.” Dee couldn’t decide whether to shut the door and let him drive off gracefully or extend the evidence of their sudden friendship by waving him out of sight. She simply waved one last time when he shook Hank’s reins, then she shut the door.

  “You might have asked him to supper,” said her mother.

  Dee thought a moment, took hold of the door again and almost yanked it open. She stopped herself, looked ready to open the door several times in a series of fleeting half seconds, and finally let go the black knob. She was a little vexed with herself, but she shook her head, let out a puff to clear her emotions (which tactic was not very successful), and walked into the parlor. “You might have asked him,” she said to her mother.

  “I didn’t know if you’d want me to,” said Mrs. Pilican.