“You as good as saved his life.”
“Oh, there wasn’t the least danger of his dying.”
In those days Ann relented more and more to the man whom she saw still so little able to realize their situation. One morning she found him, after seeking everywhere else for him, in the empty log cabin, coming down from the loft as if he had been looking the forlorn place over. “Owen,” she accused him, “I do believe you’ve been seeing if this hovel would do for us if David comes to live in the new house.”
He laughed in a guilty way. “I’ve been seeing that it would not do,” he ended, with a sigh.
“Oh,” she said, “if you could only see that the whole place won’t do, and never would!”
“I dare say I shall come to that,” he consented, sadly.
He moped, she felt, as the time went by, and he was cheerfuler only when some letter, full of hope without expectation, came from Dick. The boy had got a temporary place in the New Church book-store; but the business was not for sale, and he was looking for something else. The most discouraging of the letters seemed to cheer Powell most: he was like a condemned man to whom respite brings the hope of reprieve. That vexed Ann with him; but she knew he could not help it, and her heart ached for him. She had always had to fortify him for his encounters with the world, and she understood how in this retreat from it he had felt a safety and peace that he had never felt in its presence. With her practical mind she had not been able to enter into his poetic joy in a return to the simple things dear to him from his boyhood, but with her heart she could divine the anticipative homesickness that now possessed him.
Late one afternoon the Dreamer, who had been sent to Spring Grove for the mail, came back with a letter from Dick, which the mother tore open and read through with a flushing face, and then looked about her for the father. He was not in the house, and she ran to the back door and saw him stretched upon the hill slope above; there, propped on one elbow, he seemed to be gazing out over the landscape. She started eagerly toward him, but her steps grew slower, and she hid the letter in the pocket of her dress and kept her hand on it there as if it might escape.
As she came near and nearer the gentle child-hearted man, whom she knew so brave and wise for all high occasions, her breast filled with worship and pity of him), and it seemed to her as if she were going to deal him some cruel hurt with the news she had. She remembered how good and patient he had been through the trials of their life in the squalor of that place, which he could have liked no more than she; how hard he had worked; how he helped her keep her courage through their common trials from the rude conditions among the rude neighbors, in the hope of bettering both. She remembered the unselfish purpose which he had infused into the necessity of their coming, and how he had not chosen to come, but, being chosen, had sought for beauty in their squalid lot; how he had never repined at the worst of it, but with his sweet humor had tried to laugh the ugliness away. She knew the gifts of heart and mind which needed only the push of ambition to make him valued in the world, and she blamed herself for blaming him that he had taken so modestly the ignorant ill-will of the clowns and savages about him. She considered, swiftly, as she slowed her swift pace, that his solace and reparation were in her and in their children, and that he had not cared for anything outside of his home except for the aspect of those fields and woods which she abhorred. She perceived as never before that he loved the countenance of the seasons and the skies, unvexed by the noise and turmoil of the town where he had somehow found himself so unfitted for the struggle in which she believed he might have succeeded. She was going now to take him from the simple things of nature so dear to him, and hurry him back into the town, and plunge him again into the cares and troubles which might harass him into another failure. She could not bear it, and she ran toward him with the renunciation in her will that took her breath and made her heart beat so that she shook with it as she stood beside him.
“I was just thinking, Ann,” he said, smiling without waiting for her to speak, “how beautiful this prospect is. I suppose that in the spiritual world there will be scenery that will far surpass it; in fact, according as our mood is there, we shall create scenes of heavenly beauty. But — but — this is dear because it is familiar, because it is like a beloved face, because I know it — Why, Ann!”
She had sunk down beside him, and she began to cry, with her face in her hands. He took them down and wiped away her tears with his handkerchief, as if they were young people together. “What is the matter, my poor girl?”
She turned bravely upon him. “Owen,” she demanded, “would you like to stay here? Because if you would I am ready to stay, and I will never say another word against the place. I know we could make the log cabin do.”
“Have you had a letter from David? Have they decided to come?”
“No, it isn’t from him. But whether they come or not Pm ready to stay. Don’t you believe me, Owen?” He took the hand she had put on his knee and held it there in his hand. “I believe you would try, and that is all that is expected of us. But we can’t stay, Ann. The cabin is hardly fit for cattle, and, besides, how could I carry on the mills? I have no means, and I realize that I am unfit to deal with the people about here. I think they are friendlier than they were, but they don’t understand me, and I don’t believe I’ve ever understood them.”
“They are savages!” Ann passionately broke out.
“Oh no, oh no; not quite so bad as that, though they are not very polished. I fancy I can get on better with people of a somewhat more advanced civilization.
At any rate, I am willing to make the experiment.”
“Do you say that because you know I want it?”
“I know you want it, but I don’t say it for that reason. I rather want it myself at times. This has been a beautiful dream—”
“Owen, if ever I said a true word to you in my life I am saying it now! I want to stay here; I want to stay here, and not go to the City.”
“But you can’t stay, Ann; that dream is passed, and we can’t dream it over again.”
“Then, there!” she said, and she pulled Richard’s letter out of her pocket and threw it into his lap. “Dick has got the business for you. The Wilsons are willing to give up the store, and they will take your notes for the stock and good-will; they’ve just heard of a chance in Chicago; they say that’s quite a growing place, and there are more New Church people there. They have been very good to Dick, and they’ve asked him to stay with them till we can come down and take hold; and now we needn’t even hurry.”
“I think,” Powell said, formally, “that it will be better not to lose any time,” and now he lost none in confirming himself in the things she had said from Richard’s letter. “It seems a good opportunity, and we must not let it slip through our fingers by any sort of delay.”
He spent the evening in making a box to hold his books; but he decided to leave the harp, trusting it to the fraternal tenderness of David, in the possibility that some of David’s children might learn to play on it; his own had not, but Powell was inwardly aware that he himself had not. Ann and he sat up late talking the whole affair over, and it appeared to him more and more probable that something in the nature of a New Church periodical might succeed in connection with the book-store.
When they were settled in the City he was patient with the reasons which his New Church friends urged against the scheme. He had known some of them before, and he found them very agreeable and cultivated men. They were rather conservative in some things, but Powell himself, while holding fast to the fundamental principles of justice in politics, now confined his assertion of them to aiding the escape of fugitive slaves from Kentucky, whom he enjoyed hiding in the basement of his store, till he could forward them to some other underground station. He did not relinquish the ideal of a true state of things which he and his brothers had hoped to realize at New Leaf Mills, but he was inclined to regard the communistic form as defective. The communities of Robert Owen had everywhere f
ailed as signally as that of New Leaf Mills, which indeed could scarcely be said to have passed the embryonic stage. But he argued, not so strenuously as he used to argue things, but as formally, that if some such conception of society could possess the entire State, a higher type of civilization would undoubtedly eventuate.
THE END
THE LEATHERWOOD GOD
CONTENTS
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
THE LEATHERWOOD GOD
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
The author thinks it well to apprise the reader that the historical outline of this story is largely taken from the admirable narrative of Judge Taneyhill in the Ohio Valley Series, Robert Clarke Co., Cincinnati. The details are often invented, and the characters are all invented as to their psychological evolution, though some are based upon those of real persons easily identifiable in that narrative. The drama is that of the actual events in its main development; but the vital incidents, or the vital uses of them, are the author’s. At times he has enlarged them; at times he has paraphrased the accounts of the witnesses; in one instance he has frankly reproduced the words of the imposter as reported by one who heard Dylks’s last address in the Temple at Leatherwood and as given in the Taneyhill narrative. Otherwise the story is effectively fiction.
THE LEATHERWOOD GOD
Already, in the third decade of the nineteenth century, the settlers in the valley of Leatherwood Creek had opened the primeval forest to their fields of corn and tobacco on the fertile slopes and rich bottom-lands. The stream had its name from the bush growing on its banks, which with its tough and pliable bark served many uses of leather among the pioneers; they made parts of their harness with it, and the thongs which lifted their door-latches, or tied their shoes, or held their working clothes together. The name passed to the settlement, and then it passed to the man, who came and went there in mystery and obloquy, and remained lastingly famed in the annals of the region as the Leatherwood God.
At the time he appeared the community had become a center of influence, spiritual as well as material, after a manner unknown to later conditions. It was still housed, for the most part, in the log cabins which the farmers built when they ceased to be pioneers, but in the older clearings, and along the creek a good many frame dwellings stood, and even some of brick. The population, woven of the varied strains from the North, East and South which have mixed to form the Mid-Western people, enjoyed an ease of circumstance not so great as to tempt their thoughts from the other world and fix them on this. In their remoteness from the political centers of the young republic, they seldom spoke of the civic questions stirring the towns of the East; the commercial and industrial problems which vex modern society were unknown to them. Religion was their chief interest and the seriousness which they had inherited from their Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, and Moravian ancestry was expressed in their orderly and diligent lives; but the general prosperity had so far relaxed the stringency of their several creeds that their distinctive public rite had come to express a mutual toleration. The different sects had their different services; their ceremonies of public baptism, their revivals, their camp-meetings; but they gathered as one Christian people under the roof of the log-built edifice, thrice the size of their largest dwelling, which they called the Temple.
I
A storm of the afternoon before had cleared the mid-August air. The early sun was hot, but the wind had carried away the sultry mists, and infused fresh life into the day. Where Matthew Braile sat smoking his corncob pipe in the covered porchway between the rooms of his double-log cabin he insensibly shared the common exhilaration, and waited comfortably for the breakfast of bacon and coffee which his wife was getting within. As he smoked on he inhaled with the odors from her cooking the dense rich smell of the ripening corn that stirred in the morning breeze on three sides of the cabin, and the fumes of the yellow tobacco which he had grown, and cured, and was now burning. His serenity was a somewhat hawklike repose, but the light that came into his narrowed eyes was of rather amused liking, as a man on a claybank horse rode up before the cabin in the space where alone it was not hidden by the ranks of the tall corn. The man sat astride a sack with a grist of corn in one end balanced by a large stone in the other, and he made as if he were going on to the mill without stopping; but he yielded apparently to a temptation from within, since none had come from without. “Whoa!” he shouted at the claybank, which the slightest whisper would have stayed; and then he called to the old man on the porch, “Fine mornun’, Squire!”
Braile took out his pipe, and spat over the edge of the porch, before he called back, “Won’t you light and have some breakfast?”
“Well, no, thank you, Squire,” the man said, and at the same time he roused the claybank from an instant repose, and pushed her to the cabin steps. “I’m just on my way down to Brother Hingston’s mill, and I reckon Sally don’t want me to have any breakfast till I bring back the meal for her to git it with; anyway that’s what she said when I left.” Braile answered nothing, and the rider of the claybank added, with a certain uneasiness as if for the effect of what he was going to say, “I was up putty late last night, and I reckon I overslep’,” he parleyed. Then, as Braile remained silent, he went on briskly, “I was wonderin’ if you hearn about the curious doun’s last night at the camp-meetun’.”
Braile, said, without ceasing to smoke, “You’re the first one I’ve seen this morning, except my wife. She wasn’t at the camp-meeting.” His aquiline profile, which met close at the lips from the loss of his teeth, compressed itself further in leaving the whole burden of the affair to the man on the claybank, and his narrowed eyes were a line of mocking under the thick gray brows that stuck out like feathers above them.
“Well, sir, it was great doun’s,” the other said, wincing a little under the old man’s indifference. Braile relented so far as to ask, “Who was at the bellows?”
The other answered with a certain inward deprecation of the grin that spread over his face, and the responsive levity of his phrase, “There was a change of hands, but the one that kep’ the fire goun’ the hardes’ and the hottes’ was Elder Grove.”
Braile made “Hoonck!” in the scornful guttural which no English spelling can represent.
“Yes, sir,” the man on the claybank went on, carried forward by his own interest, but helpless to deny himself the guilty pleasure of falling in with Braile’s humor, “he had ’em goun’ lively, about midnight, now I tell you: whoopun’ and yellun’, and rippun’ and stavun’, and fallun’ down with the jerks, and pullun’ and haulun’ at the sinners, to git ’em up to the mourners’ bench, and hurrahun’ over ‘em, as fast as they was knocked down and drug out. I never seen the beat of it in all my born days.”
“You don’t make out anything very strange, Abel Reverdy,” Braile said, putting his pipe back into his mouth and beginning to smoke it again into a lost activity.
“Well, I hain’t come to it yit,” Reverdy apologized. “I reckon there never was a bigger meetun’ in Leatherwood Bottom, anywhere. Folks there from twenty mile round, just slathers; I reckon there was a thousand if there was one.”
“Hoonch!” Braile would not trouble to take out his pipe in making the sound now; the smoke got into his lungs, and he coughed.
Reverdy gained courage to go on, but he went on in the same strain, whether in spite of himself or not. “There was as many as four exhorters keepun’ her up at once to diff’rent tunes, and prayun’ and singun’ everywhere, so you couldn’t hear yourself think. Every exhorter had a mour
ners’ bench in front of him, and I counted as many as eighty mourners on ’em at one time. The most of ’em was settun’ under Elder Grove, and he was poundun’ the kingdom into ’em good and strong. When the Spirit took him he roared so that he had the Hounds just flaxed out; you couldn’t ketch a yelp from ‘em.”
“Many Hounds?” Braile asked, in a sort of cold sympathy with the riotous outlaws known to the religious by that name.
“Mought been ‘fore I got there. But by that time I reckon they was most of ’em on the mourners’ benches. They ought to tar and feather some of them fellers, or ride ’em on a rail anyway, comun’ round, and makun’ trouble on the edge of camp-meetun’s. I didn’t hear but one toot from their horns, last night, and either because the elder had shamed ’em back into the shadder of the woods, or brought ’em forwards into the light, there wasn’t a Hound, not to call a Hound, anywheres. I tell you it was a sight, Squire; you ought to ‘a’ been there yourself.” Reverdy grinned at his notion. “They had eight camp-fires goun’ instead o’ four, on top of the highest stageun’s yit, so the whole place was lit up as bright as day; and when the elder stopped short and sudden, and the other exhorters held back their tommyhawks, and all the saints and sinners left off their groanun’ and jerkun’ to see what was comun’, now it was a great sight, I tell you, Squire. The elder he put up his hand and says he, ‘Let us pray!’ and the blaze from all them stageun’s seemed to turn itself right onto him, and the smoke and the leaves hung like a big red cloud over him, and everybody had their eyes fastened tight on his face, like they couldn’t turn ’em anywhere else if they tried. But he didn’t begin prayun’ straight off. He seemed to stop, and then says he, ‘What shall we pray for?’ and just then there came a kind of a snort, and a big voice shouted out, ‘Salvation!’ and then there come another snort,— ‘Hooff!’ — like there was a scared horse got loose right in there among the people; and some of ’em jumped up from their seats, and tumbled over the benches, and some of ’em bounced off, and fell into fits, and the women screeched and fainted, thick as flies. It give me about the worst feelun’ I ever had in my life: went through me like a ax, and others said the same; some of ’em said it was like beun’ scared in the dark, or more like when you think you’re just goun’ to die.”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 908