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

by Van Reid

  “Yes, Mr. Moss! I do remember you,” said Thaddeus Spark in his high piping voice. “Welcome! Welcome! Mr. Ephram, you continue to honor us with your presence!”

  Mrs. Spark came out, wiping her hands on her apron, and she was introduced to Sundry. The daughters came out to look and be looked at, as well. Sundry thought the mermaid had hardly lied.

  “Will you stay to eat?” said Thaddeus. “Or just a piece of pie and a cup of coffee?”

  Sundry begged off. Sounding as gallant as Mister Walton, he said, “I couldn’t resist stopping by after hearing such praise about the place.”

  “Oh, but you must meet Mr. Gunwight before you go,” insisted Thad-deus, and he conducted them toward the darkest corner of the room where a peculiar-looking fellow sat with a stack of green-bound copybooks and a steaming cup of something on the table before him. “Ben Gun!” declared Thaddeus. “I’ve been telling you about the Moosepath League. Well, here’s a pair of them just walked in to say hello.”

  The fellow at the table stood slowly, mild interest lighting his face. He was perhaps fifty years old, with salt-and-pepper hair that grew a little wild. His spectacles were missing a lens, his collar had not recently been laundered, and his chin not shaven for a day or so, but he offered his hand and bowed as if he were at court.

  “Mr. Ephram, Mr. Moss,” Thaddeus was saying. “Mr. Benjamin Gunwight.”

  “Benjamin Granite Gunwight,” said the fellow, not by way of correction, but simply as amendment to this gracious introduction.

  Thaddeus said, “I gathered that you gentlemen are fond of books, and Mr. Gunwight, here, is a writer of some pretty fine ones.”

  “Are you indeed?” said Ephram, who was instantly fascinated.

  Mr. Gunwight let out a high laugh—almost a giggle. “Mr. Spark is very kind,” said Ben Gun (as he was familiarly known). “I have written several—no, many—volumes, some of which you may have seen.”

  “You should read his books!” averred Thaddeus. “He’s got old Daniel Boone down to a bright penny! I read them to the boys, you know.”

  “Daniel Boone Conquers the Amazon was my latest,” said Mr. Gun.

  “I never knew he did,” said Sundry.

  “And my last, as it happens.”

  “It’s a corker,” promised Thaddeus.

  “Is it?” said Ephram. He was not familiar with the term.

  “Absolutely bust your buttons!”

  Ephram was startled by this contention.

  “Your last, Mr. Gun?” said Sundry.

  “Yes,” Thaddeus answered for the man. “They’ve gone and fired him.”

  “Good heavens!” said Ephram. It sounded a very discourteous thing.

  “Alas, yes,” said Ben Gun. “Forty-two volumes of Daniel Boone, seventeen of Davy Crockett, and several tales of Hawk of the Hurons, Paul Bunyan, and Wilma of the Mountains, but I have penned my last tale for the Intrepid Publishing Company of Portland, Maine!” He declaimed this like an actor; Ephram was much impressed, and very sorry, that Mr. Gun should be so cast to the winds.

  “I’ve been telling Ben he needs another subject,” said Thaddeus. “He should be writing about yourselves, is what I think. He’s thinking of writing romantics for old wives and spinsters—women fainting when they discover their husbands’ bad investments and Italian doctors running off with heiresses and the like. My own wife reads them like gossip. But it’s hardly healthy, in my mind, for a fellow to mix himself up in all those trianglements!”

  “Oh, my!” said Ephram. He had just finished a book about a Spanish doctor and a wealthy heiress.

  “And why pace about your room trying to think what will happen next,” asked Thaddeus, “when the Moosepath League is here to provide you with the whole kit and caboodle?”

  “The Moosepath League,” said Ben Gun quietly, then he shot a hand in the air and declaimed, “Moving with practiced skill through the verdant forest! Following the ancient pathways of Indian and deer! Or parting the thickets to tread those wards unfamiliar with the boot of civilized humanity!”

  Ephram hadn’t the slightest idea who the man could be talking about.

  “A pretty fair description,” admitted Sundry with a thoughtful nod.

  Mr. Gunwight focused his eyes somewhere above their heads. “The wilderness!” he said. “The stoic endeavors of the forested brotherhood!”

  Ephram looked up at the ceiling.

  “Mr. Ephram almost captured Captain Kidd’s buried treasure,” said Sundry, who was content to further excite the man.

  “Good heavens!” said Ephram. It was more than he would have said.

  But Ben Gun was inspired. His talk devolved into incomplete sentences, splashed with phrases concerning pirates and pitched battle, skulking figures sneaking through dark forests, and the small but intrepid membership of the Moosepath League.

  “What do you say, Chief,” said Thaddeus. The two youngsters of the household had appeared from the kitchen and were listening to the writer’s meanderings with expressions of awe. Timothy’s face was the more impressive for a swollen eye. “Ben Gun is going to write about the Moosepath League,” said Thaddeus to his son as he inspected this shiner. “I swear, that eye of yours is blacker than an hour ago.”

  Timothy shrugged. He was more interested in Mr. Gun’s writing career. Melanie, still dressed like a boy, and looking uncertain, said it was “some business!”

  Sundry and Ephram made for the door with Thaddeus and the boys and Mr. Gun in tow. They spilled out onto the sidewalk, Mr. Gun with pencil and copybook in hand. He was writing furiously as he asked Ephram questions about things like yardarms and bowsprits. He’d been in the wilderness with Boone and Crockett for years and needed to brush up on things piratical. Ephram referred him to Mr. Joseph Thump of India Street.

  “You’ll come again, Mr. Moss,” Thaddeus was saying. “And bring your friend, Mister Walton, and the lady he was with. She seemed very pleasant.”

  “Miss McCannon, yes,” said Sundry. He was remembering his mission and thought they should be going.

  Timothy and Melanie went up the street. A little ways on, Melanie paused and Timothy called after her. “You be careful, Chief,” Thaddeus shouted. “And stay on the street here.”

  Sundry wondered why the one with the black eye should appear the most confident. That black eye troubled him. “They seem like good boys,” he said.

  “One of them, at any rate,” said Thaddeus.

  Sundry revealed his interest with a frown.

  “The small one?” said Thaddeus. “That’s Melanie Ring.”

  “Melanie?”

  “She’s a girl.” Thaddeus had almost said “He’s a girl.”

  “I wouldn’t have guessed,” said Sundry.

  “We never did. Found out the other day.” He explained the child’s situation. “We thought we’d adopt him, then found out he’s a her, or she’s a her, and thought we’d adopt her. Her father’s near to killing himself with drink and—she or he—Melanie’s a good kid, as you say.”

  “You thought you’d adopt her,” said Sundry.

  “Well, it’s tough,” said Thaddeus. He had come to respect the Moosepath League and anyone connected with them, and didn’t mind hearing this young man’s opinion. “It surprises a person when a boy turns out to be a girl, and there are folks who are having a problem with it.”

  “I wouldn’t say it was anybody’s business,” suggested Sundry.

  “I wouldn’t either, but there’s always someone, or several of them, if you take my meaning. And the kids around about have made things difficult. Timothy took that shiner in her defense just this morning.” He regarded Sundry with the look of a man who wants to know what the listener thinks. “I think she’s got to go live someplace, wearing a dress where no one has seen her wear anything else. The problem is, where. Other people’s kids aren’t in huge demand, as far as I can tell. Now, where have they gone?” The father took a step or two up the sidewalk and looked for Tim and Melanie. “I to
ld that boy to keep close. I’d better go after them. A pleasure to meet you again, Mr. Moss.” Thaddeus waved, rather than pause to shake hands, before hurrying up the street.

  “My, he looks like Thump!” said Ephram.

  It was remarkable, Sundry agreed. They continued their progress east, Ephram greatly absorbed in Ben Gun’s questions, the writer’s flights of inspiration pouring forth, and his occasional dissertations on varied subjects. The man exhausted a block and a half describing the eccentric behavior of Wild Bill Hickok’s childhood nurse, who saw pookas and talked to plants, and he was so enraptured by his own tale of Henry VIII sitting on his crown (and the wound inflicted thereby) that he halted in the midst of Commercial Street and was almost run over by the trolley.

  At the steamship company, Sundry spoke with a man behind a desk about berths on the Manitoba. He and Mister Walton would have separate quarters, but he was interested in what the man called “our double staterooms.”

  “He was a very nice gentleman,” said Ephram when they came out onto Commercial Street and blinked in the sunlight.

  “And yet he assisted in arrangements he could not understand,” said Ben Gun, “contracting with men bent upon adventure and expedition!”

  “I think those single rooms might be bought up pretty soon,” said Sundry. “He didn’t seem to have too many left.”

  Ephram had not been under the same impression. “Perhaps we should reserve two of them.”

  “They would search the seas themselves for further exploit!” said Ben Gun. He liked this and wrote it down in his copybook

  “I’m not very keen on traveling by water,” said Sundry.

  Ephram thought this strangely unenthusiastic of the young man who had always seemed so ready for anything.

  “I am a farmer by birth,” explained Sundry. He spotted a peanut vendor

  Ephram felt his legs flagging and he suggested a cab. “We are not far from Thump’s place,” he said, thinking that Mr. Moss might benefit from that man’s dutiful presence.

  Ensconced in his apartments and surrounded by books and charts, Thump had been inspecting the tide tables when the knock came at his door. He was immensely pleased with the unexpected company. Straightaway, Mr. Gun informed him of the difference between the armadillo of the American southwest and the African pangolin. “I’ve never seen them,” Thump admitted.

  “You could throw them to first base, they make such a perfect ball when they roll up,” said Ben Gun.

  Thump wondered what he had said to encourage this information

  They were soon back in the hired carriage, and nothing would do but they find Eagleton on Chestnut Street. He was standing at the window, looking toward the ocean, when the visitors were announced; he hadn’t noticed the cab pull up to the sidewalk. Eagleton had thought he might take a trip to the Portland Observatory, from the top of which he always felt a little nearer to the weather, but he was overjoyed to be interrupted in this design.

  When they were all crammed into the cab, Sundry thought that he had done things a little backward. He had intended to give Mister Walton and Miss McCannon time alone together and now he was returning with a cab full of men. The members of the club were uncertain whether they should be calling on their chairman unannounced, and Sundry knew, then, that Mister Walton could not be imposed upon by his friends, and that he would find Ben Gun of great interest.

  Ben Gun was delighted that the Moosepath League was soon to be gathered complete before his eyes. “And you have a woman in your club!” he marveled when they told him about Miss McCannon. It was his authorial opinion that this feminine exception gave their society a distinctly bohemian touch.

  Their arrival had something of an event about it; even Sundry felt it when they piled out of the cab on Spruce Street and Ephram paid the driver. They had not gone very far up the front walk when they were hailed by Mister Walton and Miss McCannon themselves. The two were coming around from the east lawn, arm in arm and looking as happy as Sundry had ever seen them.

  The sun had sunk behind the green crown of an immense chestnut, its light winking through the leaves as they were stirred by a freshening breeze. A gray squirrel watched the group of humans from a safe distance, his broad tail forming a question mark.

  Mister Walton looked like a man who has just been accorded a wondrous honor, and Sundry was struck by an unsubstantiated and unheralded certainty, rather as if he’d been hit in the chest. He’d never seen the bespectacled fellow stand so erect or with his chin raised to such a degree. In any other man, the posture would have looked vain and even arrogant. Miss McCannon appeared misty eyed and particularly beautiful. She held Mister Walton’s arm with both her hands, as if a breeze might come and take him away.

  “Gentlemen, gentlemen!” Mister Walton was saying. He was clearly ecstatic to see them all. “Sir,” he said to Ben Gun, “how are you? Mr. Ephram!”

  “Mister Walton,” said Ephram. He was almost dizzy with the light from the chairman’s beaming face. And Miss McCannon was so striking! “Miss McCannon!” he pronounced.

  She only smiled.

  “Mr. Eagleton!” said Mister Walton.

  “Mister Walton!” said Eagleton. He was shaking a little. “Miss McCannon!” he said.

  She only smiled for reply.

  “Mr. Thump!” said Mister Walton. There was no sense of preference or hierarchy in the order in which he named them.

  “Hmmm!” said Thump. “Mister Walton!” He stood as straight as the chairman, though he occupied less vertical space. He hmmmed several more times, his expression invisible behind his beard. “Miss McCannon!”

  Miss McCannon’s smile widened and Thump started as if he were hit.

  “Sundry,” said Mister Walton. His face clouded unexpectedly, and, contrarily, Sundry laughed. “I hope you will not be offended,” said the great man, “if I suggest that you take some respite from my company.”

  “On the contrary,” said Sundry, “I would congratulate you.” He held his hand out to Mister Walton, with whom he had not shaken hands since he first became the portly fellow’s gentleman’s gentleman. Mister Walton gripped Sundry’s hand and shook it with great feeling. “Congratulations, Miss McCannon,” said Sundry. He didn’t know which of them was the most fortunate.

  Phileda leaned forward and embraced Sundry—not briefly but with a long, heartfelt squeeze. The members were astonished, and not any less so when she treated them each with the same attention.

  And when she had done this, and Mister Walton had vigorously shaken each of their hands, he considered their mystified expressions—himself beaming—and said, “Miss McCannon has honored me by accepting my proposal of marriage! We have spoken with Reverend Seacost by telephone and he will perform the ceremony here on the lawn, weather permitting, on Friday afternoon.”

  “Fair weather expected for the remainder of the week!” announced an astonished Eagleton.

  “It’s twenty minutes before the hour of noon,” said an awestruck Ephram, referring to one of the three or four watches that he kept about his person.

  “There are several double staterooms available on the steamer for Halifax,” said Sundry.

  “High tide at 1:18 P.M.” said a wide-eyed Thump.

  Ben Gun was writing furiously in his green-bound copybook.

  EPILOGUE

  THE WOMAN HERSELF June 3, 1897

  Sundry was finishing a letter to his mother when he heard laughter outside his room. He stuck his head into the hall to see Mister Walton at the landing with his hands at his side and his round face lifted in merriment. Sundry went so far as to consider the ceiling to understand the source of his friend’s humor.

  Mister Walton leaned forward, then, and Sundry had a flash of the man falling over at Iceboro. Sundry let out a small shout, but his friend was only slapping his knees. “Oh!” said Mister Walton, his surprise at Sundry’s shout merely an extension of his humor. Sundry had to laugh himself. “It comes to me now,” said Mister Walton, still laughing under
his speech.

  “Does it?” said Sundry.

  “Do you know what I told those gentlemen at the store in Bowdoinham?”

  “Well, I don’t.”

  “I told them that Iowa is a great pig producer,” said Mister Walton, expressing this verity with the same contracted words that had confused Mr. Fink.

  “You do surprise me,” replied Sundry.

  “‘Important pig producer,’ I believe is how I put it.”

  “It’s a side of you I never knew.”

  “No, no,” explained Mister Walton, laughing still. “Iowa ... is ... an important producer of pigs.”

  Sundry began to laugh all over again. “You did say that?”

  Mister Walton was shaking all over and there were tears in his eyes. “I’m afraid I did.”

  “Well, God bless the error.”

  “I must write the Ferns.”

  “Do you think you should?”

  “Oh, it is too good to let go,” said Mister Walton. “Otherwise, I would say, let sleeping pigs lie.”

  “What are you boys up to now?” came Mrs. Baffin’s small voice from the foot of the stairs. She beamed from ear to ear to hear such laughter in the old house, though she had been beaming since hearing of the impending wedding.

  Preparations were fast under way. Messrs. Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump were shopping for clothes suitable for such an occasion. People had been hastily invited—friends from Hallowell and Portland. A rehearsal would take place on Thursday, and a dinner would celebrate the coming marriage, quite fittingly, on Thursday evening at the Shipswood Restaurant. Miss McCannon’s brother Jared, an antiquarian for the Peabody Museum at Harvard, was coming to “give her away,” which phrase Phileda declared “scandalous.”