by Van Reid
“Daddy!” called one of the children.
“Vergil, be careful!” shouted Ruth Fern.
To the north and east, the sky was filled with clouds, but low in the west sailed an irregular moon. As the three men spilled into the yard, a series of startling squeals, human and porcine, pierced the otherwise still night. A buckboard had been drawn up at the side of the house, led by a brace of lively looking horses. A lantern swayed on a short pole at the front of the rig and gave a weird radiance to the scene as an aged fellow attempted to rest a traveling bag from Hercules’s jaws. An elderly woman stood in the seat of the wagon and shouted incoherent instructions to the man, which were interspersed with certain descriptives regarding the pig that would do no credit to the verbal character of a dockworker, much less a country lady.
“Aunt Beatrice!” shouted Mr. Fern, upon which astounded identification Hercules let go of the bag and the man tugging upon the bag fell backward.
“Jacob!” shouted the woman, and she snatched up the carriage whip like an old teamster and gave it a skillful snap over the proceedings.
Several voices shouted out, and Hercules gave a happy squeal to see that reinforcements had arrived. The man with the bag scrambled to his feet. Sundry took hold of Mister Walton’s arm and backed the portly fellow away. Mr. Fern was frozen in his steps and the pig bounded his great mass behind the wagon, knocking over the ladder that was propped against the side of the house. “Mr. Fern!” called Sundry. “Get back!” With the ladder crashing among them, and Aunt Beatrice whipping up the horses as the man with the bag climbed aboard, it was prudent to follow this advice. Still, Sundry had to drag his host away.
Mr. Fern shouted and shook his fist in the air. Mister Walton gasped in amazement, but Sundry Moss almost smiled after the eloping couple. They had seen a sad Mr. Fern, and a placid, happy Mr. Fern, but now they were witness to a thunderous, shaking, vehement Mr. Fern. The farmer charged after the wagon, and they thought he might catch it and leap on board. He may have used too much of his energy shouting, however (he was shouting still while he ran), for he suddenly lost all speed and came to a flagging halt.
The buckboard reached the road and headed south toward the village, the sound of hooves and wheels rattling against the road and the snap of the whip and the creak of the rig as immediate as thunder in the still air.
“That drunken sot!” Mr. Fern was shouting. “That intemperate rum peddler!” He was shaking his fist again, only adding to the general astonishment of his guests. “That liquorious cornwinkle! Why, I’ll—!” He let out an angry shout, arms flailing, and he leaped into the air as if he might snatch the beard from the object of his wrath. Hercules tromped up to the farmer with anxious grunts and Mr. Fern fell over the animal.
“Good heavens!” said Mister Walton, and he and Sundry rushed forward to help the man, while the wagon’s single lantern dwindled and finally disappeared over the nearest rise.
“Daddy!” came a shout from Aunt Beatrice’s window.
“Vergilius!” came another.
“Oh, Mother!” called Mr. Fern to his wife. “My aunt has run away with a rumrunner!”
“What?”
“Aunt Beatrice has eloped!”
A general noise was heard from the room above, and it might have been made up of as much laughter and delight as outrage; the men could hear the news being handed back to those not immediately at the window and the shrieks and refusals to believe that ensued.
“Gracious powers, Vergilius!” said Mrs. Fern. With the light in the room behind her and her face in shadow, it was difficult to see her expression. “Aunt Beatrice has gone off with Jacob Lister?”
Mr. Fern simply hung his head and moaned. Hercules sat back on his haunches and grunted sympathetically.
“Well, what’s to be done?” said the woman in the window, a query that was more philosophic than practical.
Mr. Fern’s head came up. “Done?” he shouted. “I’ll tell you what’s to be done! I’ll go after them!”
Mrs. Fern bumped her head against the sash, said, “Ouch!” and then, “Vergilius Fern! Don’t be absurd!”
“Absurd?”
Madeline disappeared from the window, and Mrs. Fern leaned further out.
“Vergilius!”
But he was running for the barn with Hercules close behind. One tall door was lying on its side, where it had fallen from the might of the great pig’s massive charge.
“Vergilius!”
“What’s he going to do?” wondered Mister Walton.
“He’s going after them, I guess,” said Sundry.
“Good heavens!” Mister Walton would never have imagined that the seemingly mild farmer had such reserves of energy and wrath.
Mrs. Fern disappeared from the window, and in a moment the front door crashed open and Madeline came rushing out. “Daddy!” she was shouting. “Daddy! Mr. Moss! What does Daddy think he’s doing?”
“I think he thinks he’s going after his aunt.”
Madeline rolled her eyes and headed for the barn.
“I was thinking,” Sundry called after her, “that maybe a ride in the night air might cool him down a bit.”
“We had better go with him,” said Mister Walton.
Madeline turned back, saying, “Oh, would you?” she pleaded. “Please keep him from doing anything grievous!”
“I will go along to be sure that calm heads prevail,” said Mister Walton. It was his specialty.
“Oh, thank you, Mister Walton.”
Mrs. Fern came charging out of the house, bypassing these conversants to run for the barn and shouting, “Vergilius!”
“Sundry?”
“I wouldn’t miss it for the world, Mister Walton.”
Mr. Fern was in the barn, shouting his determination to rescue his aunt and to bring Jacob Lister to justice.
“But the woman is eighty-three years old!” declared his wife.
“Well, Sundry,” said Mister Walton. “What shall we do?”
“Let’s hitch the horse,” said Sundry. “‘The game’s afoot.’ Isn’t that what Mr. Holmes said?”
The portly gentleman hurried after his friend. There was a great commotion in the barn as Mr. Fern readied the carriage.
“I think that was Shakespeare, actually,” said Mister Walton.
47. Philosophy Among the Trees
They had seen stars, of course, and they had been out of an evening, but they had never seen, while stretched upon their backs, the constellations flicker from behind a canopy of leaves; Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump had never experienced a campfire’s pleasures—the contrast between the cool night air at their backs and the heat upon their faces, the mesmerizing light flashing among the trees, and the inspired cascade of sparks disappearing into the vast darkness to mingle with the blinking starlight.
There was, as well, a rough camaraderie to the gathering on Blinn Hill that was foreign to the Moosepath League. At first, they were doubtful about spending the night beneath the stars but forgot their qualms when the first of the hoboes arrived on foot, greeting them like long-lost friends. It was too jolly for doubt, meeting these men after the day’s journey, watching as they raised their tents or claimed a patch of moss for their bedroll. The provender rendered from the hoboes’ kits was more appetizing than the slumgullion at the shantytown in Bangor (or, perhaps, the gentlemen of the club were more hungry); a sack of potatoes arrived with one fellow, another man appeared with a whole plucked chicken (and no exact account of where he found it), and someone hefted a small keg from his shoulder and rolled it into the middle of the gathering (Thump bent over the keg and thought it smelled curiously like turpentine).
The members of the club had never seen anything like the campfire in the woods. The conflict between the snapping flames and the darkening atmosphere only increased the fire’s fascination for them. The east appeared uncertain to Eagleton, whose weather eye was ever watchful. The sun had set but the land was still visible, and he returned to the sou
thern edge of the forest to look out over the stone walls, the fields, and the hills and river valleys.
Jasper Packet went with him and together they considered the strange sky. “Looks like weather,” said Jasper.
“Yes,” agreed Eagleton. He was not used to the term weather being used to indicate stormy weather, so he took Jasper’s declaration as pleasingly obvious. “Yes, it does,” he said. He tried to think of something else to add, but the word weather seemed to cover the subject pretty thoroughly. He turned around and appraised the trees behind them. He had not spent very much time near to so many oaks and maples and chestnuts; when taken together, their size and numbers were surprising to him. After a deep and appreciative breath, he said, “Looks like a forest.”
Jasper frowned up at the green crowns, wondering if he’d missed something.
“It’s forty minutes past the hour of seven,” said Ephram when Eagleton and Jasper Packet returned from the forest’s edge.
“Hmmm,” said Thump. He wished he had his tide almanac with him.
Eagleton, too, was a little lost without a recent weather prediction from the Portland Daily Advertiser.
Ephram looked apologetic and put his watch away.
“What did you see?” asked Blind Po.
“Looks like weather,” said Jasper.
“It’s interested in what we’re up to,” said one of the hoboes. “It’s followed us all the way from Bangor.”
“It’s kept its distance,” said another.
“We’ll feel something of it,” said Blind Po, “though I warrant we won’t get wet.”
“I wouldn’t welcome getting rained on,” came a voice from some yards away.
“Henry says, “I wouldn’t welcome getting rained on,’” came another.
Several of the men about the fire cocked an appraising eye at Blind Po. “It reminds me of Yellow Tuesday, back in “81,” said one of them. “There were black skies for nearly a week before then, but they were to the west.”
“Yes, yes!” said Eagleton. “Yellow Tuesday!” He remembered it with a mixture of pleasure and awe—perhaps even a measure of apprehension. He’d been almost twenty-four on September 6, 1881.
“Was that the Tuesday before the Thursday?” wondered Ephram.
“Yes, yes!” said Eagleton.
“Hmmm,” said Thump, for that Tuesday before the Thursday, that September 6, 1881, had been, in retrospect, a red-letter day in the marvelous history of their society, though the Moosepath League per se would not exist for almost another fifteen years.
“Good heavens!” said Ephram. “Yellow Tuesday!”
It had been, in fact, the very day that Matthew Ephram, Christopher Eagleton, and Joseph Thump first met. The Thursday following was remarkable for being the day of their first meal together at the Shipswood Restaurant.
“There were black skies, weren’t there,” said Ephram. Dark clouds had been rising in the west for two days that September, but on Tuesday the sixth people along the northeastern seaboard rose to find the sky suffused with a coppery tinge. Certain jovial spirits said that the world was coming to an end, and many a church was filled to capacity as pastors and priests did their best to soothe their flocks or to castigate them for the obdurate behavior that had led civilization to such precarious ends.
Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump had each gotten up late, only to find, respectively, the Baptist, Methodist, and Episcopalian houses of worship filled to capacity. It seemed then, to each of them (and independently), sensible to visit the waterfront, where a larger portion of the sky could be observed. And so they met.
Ephram was in the midst of recollection now. “Thump was on the sidewalk, looking down the wharf, when I came along,” he said. “I was looking at the sky. You helped us back on our feet,” he said with a nod to Eagleton. “It is fitting,” he said to the hoboes nearby, “that the very first memory I have of Eagleton is of his hand reaching out to help.”
Eagleton waved a hand, embarrassed.
“No, no,” said Ephram. “Credit where it is due.”
“Hmmm,” said Thump. He was trying to remember the day, fifteen years ago, but after colliding against Ephram’s rugged chin with his forehead his mental faculties had, for a while, been a little foggy.
“Ah, what a day!” said Eagleton.
“And it was very yellow,” said Ephram.
“A volcano in Bali,” said Jasper. “It filled the sky with soot. Or a fire in Montana. I can’t remember which.”
The light beyond the trees had reached an amber hue, as if the sun behind the rim of the earth had turned to brass, and past the trunks of oak and maple the grass shone like gold, so that it might have been the height of summer when the hay is near cutting; but the leaves along the western edge of the woods were lined with a similar yellow and this put the gathering in mind of fall. The air seemed warm and close among the trees, and hardly a breath of wind stirred the branches.
Almost in the space of a thought, the light was gone from the world and stars began to show at the height of the sky, blinking on like the lamps in the village windows below.
The novelty of the Moosepathian’s experience continued with the evening meal. It was strange to the members to be dining without silverware. The affair was simpler than any they had known before and more haphazard, but everything was tasty, and it seemed to them that the most elegant and elegantly turned-out meal at the Shipswood Restaurant paled in comparison.
The three friends had come to trust the wherewithal of their new companions, however rustic it might prove, and they were not disappointed when the time came to bed down. Several fellows contributed blankets or offered advice on how best to make themselves comfortable. The night was a continued revelation to Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump. Thump listened, most of all, to the small but increasing stir among the trees, thinking that the rise and fall of the night breeze in the spring foliage sounded a great deal like waves upon a shore. “It’s a very beautiful sound,” he said quietly, hardly knowing that he had spoken aloud.
“It’s very springlike,” said Jasper.
“Is it?” wondered Thump.
“Oh, yes,” said this philosopher. “The young leaves have their own sort of sound in the wind.”
“They do?”
“Not at all like summer leaves. Summer leaves, when you hear them, are much more ... summerlike.”
Thump had never imagined such a thing, but was grateful for this intelligence and took Jasper at his word. He had heard the wind in trees before, of course, and in all seasons, but not in so many trees at once and that rush among leaf and limb had always competed with the sounds of the city. “And in fall?” he asked Jasper.
“You’ve never heard a sound so peculiar to the season. It’s very ... fall-like”
Thump stared up with wide eyes. The movement of the trees was all the more difficult to understand in the wavering light of the campfires. Lying there, he had the sudden awareness that seasons had been passing by without his full attention, or even his ... awareness.
“I like the fall,” came a voice from the darkness, and then, “Henry says, ‘I like the fall.’”
Ephram was thinking upon the passage of time. It had occurred to him, out here in the wilderness, that the movements of his beloved clocks and watches were of little import to a tree, much less an entire forest. It was not even a very big forest, to be truthful, but its sense of permanence gave the lie to what his watch might say about the minute and the hour. He was awed, somewhat as Thump had been by the passage of seasons, but also a little troubled. He held one of his watches and rubbed the back of it with his thumb, rather like Leander Spark rubbing his bit of rabbit fur.
Eagleton, for his part, was speculating about the weather, recalling the Tuesday before the Thursday in September of 1881, and the days that preceded it.
“It was a very yellow day,” he said aloud.
“There was another yellow day back in “43,” came a voice from beyond the fire. Eagleton could not place
who was speaking. “My mother was a Millerite, and my father gave Mom her head in most things, so he went along.”
“I had an uncle who followed old Miller,” said Big Eye.
“Don’t know him,” said someone. “This Miller.”
“He allowed how the world was going to end,” said Big Eye.
“Well, won’t it?”
“Yes, but he allowed how it would end fairly quick, and even gave it a date. He said things would close shop round about the third of April 1843.”
“What happened?” wondered someone further off, whereupon soft laughter and chuckles filled the night air.
“A comet came by,” said the first voice, still unidentified by Eagleton and his fellow members of the club. “Then there was a yellow day soon after and a great crowd of folk—not just the Millerites—went to the cemetery to meet their ancestors, who were expected to rise up. Some of them had special white gowns for the purpose, hoping to look like angels when Judgment came even if they hadn’t behaved like them. Some people went to the graveyards, naked as the day they were born.”
“Good heavens!” came three distinct voices.
“My mother,” continued the storyteller, “parked her carcass on her first husband’s grave, saying she was that anxious to see him again. My father was so disgusted he went back to the house and made himself supper. I was nine years old.
“After a few hours, when a single ghost didn’t show, there were those of us who got a little hungry and thought Dad had the right idea. We got back to the house and he met us on the porch. ‘Great socks and shoes!’ he said to Mother. ‘What makes you think he’d so much as poke his head out if you were sitting there waiting for him?’ He was that disgusted.”
“The end of the world!” said someone. “Foolishness!”
“No, it’s not,” came the trembly voice of Blind Po, who lay so close by the fire that Eagleton thought he might singe his beard. “It’s only foolishness to name the hour. ‘But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.’”