The Eighth Day

by Thornton Wilder

  There followed a long silence, broken at last by drumbeats and shouting. This was the Dance of the Kangaheela, the heart of the flint, dear to the All-Father as His eye. This is the dance which has been so widely copied. Even the Saysays of Michigan have been invited to perform it in their debased and trumpery version at world’s fairs—admission: fifty cents; children a quarter. At the conclusion of the dance there was another silence—but all expectation, all held breath. The sachem seemed to descend into the furthest reaches of his body; he collected himself; he rose. This was the Book of Promises. Who can describe the consolation of that great song? The aged forgot their incommodities; to boys and girls it made clear why they were born and why the universe was set in motion. There are many peoples on the earth—more men than there are leaves in the forest—but He has singled out the Kangaheelas from among them. He will return. Let them BLAZE THE TRAIL against that day. The race of men will be saved by a few.

  So much for the Indians. The professors estimate that there were never more than three thousand Kangaheelas alive at one time.

  The white men came. They brought their account of the creation, their name for the All-Father, their laws and tabus, their catalogue of heroes and traitors, their burden of reproach, their hopes of a golden age. There was very little dancing, but a good deal of music, sacred and profane. They brought, too, a speculative turn of mind, unknown to the red man; its product was loosely referred to as philosophy. All the citizens, young and old, occasionally troubled their heads with questions about why are human beings alive and what’s the sense of living and dying—what Dr. Gillies called “the four-o’clock-in-the-morning questions.” Dr. Gillies was Coaltown’s most articulate and exasperating philosopher. In flat contradiction to the Bible he believed that the earth had been millions of years in the making and that Man was descended from you-know-what. Moreover, he talked of serious things in a way that left his listeners puzzled as to whether he was joking or not. A choice selection of the town’s citizens was to remember for a long time an occasion when Dr. Gillies’s speculative turn of mind was given a free rein.

  It was on a New Year’s Eve, but not just an ordinary New Year’s Eve: it was December 31, 1899—the eve of a new century. A large group was gathered in front of the courthouse waiting for the clock to strike. There was a mood of exaltation in the crowd, as though it expected the heavens to open. The twentieth century was to be the greatest century the world had ever known. Man would fly; tuberculosis, diphtheria, and cancer would be eradicated; there would be no more wars. The country, the state, and the very town in which they lived were to play large and solemn roles in this new era. When the clock struck all the women and some of the men were weeping. Suddenly, they burst out singing, not “Auld Lang Syne,” but “O God, Our Help in Ages Past.” Soon they were throwing their arms about one another; they were kissing—an unheard-of demonstration. Breckenridge Lansing and Olga Sergeievna Doubkov—who hated one another—kissed; John Ashley and Eustacia Lansing—who loved one another—kissed, for the only time in their lives, and evasively. (Beata Ashley avoided gatherings; she was sitting beside the tall grandfather’s clock at “The Elms,” surrounded by her three daughters, Lily, Sophia, and Constance.) Roger Ashley, fourteen years and fifty-one weeks old, kissed Félicité Lansing, to whom he would be married nine years later. George Lansing, fifteen, the town’s “holy terror,” stricken dumb with awe at the portentousness of the occasion and by the behavior of the grownups, hid behind his mother. (Great artists tend to be ebullient in gloomy company and subdued in the midst of elation.) Finally the crowd dispersed; about twenty lingered under the great clock, seeking some further expression of an emotion that was giving place to reflection and questioning. They went into the Tavern in order—as they said—to drink something hot. The young girls were sent to their homes. The group entered the bar wherein no woman had ever been admitted and presumably would not be admitted again for a hundred years. They went into the back room. Mugs of hot milk, hot grog, and “Sally Croker” (spiced crabapples floating in hot cider) were passed around by the great Mr. Sorbey himself.

  Breckenridge Lansing—always at his best in company, the perfect host, and, as resident manager of the mines, the first citizen in town—spoke up for the company.

  “Dr. Gillies, what will the new century be like?”

  The ladies murmured, “Yes! . . . ? Yes! . . . ? Tell us what you think.” The men cleared their throats.

  Dr. Gillies made no deprecatory noises, but began:

  “Nature never sleeps. The process of life never stands still. The creation has not come to an end. The Bible says that God created man on the sixth day and rested, but each of those days was many millions of years long. That day of rest must have been a short one. Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day.”

  He described the earth before the appearance of life—millions of years of steam arising from the boiling waters . . . ? The noise, the terrible winds, the waves . . . ? the noise. Then tiny floating organisms choking the seas. Passive . . . ? then, here and there, one and other, acquiring the ability to propel themselves toward light, toward food. A nervous system began to take shape in the Pre-Cambrian age; fins and feet began to afford sufficient strength to walk on dry land in the Upper Devonian; blood grew warmer in the Mesozoic.

  It was somewhere in the Mesozoic age that Mr. Goodhue, Coaltown’s banker, exchanged an outraged glance with his wife. They rose and left the room, head high, gazing straight before them. Evolution! Godless evolution! Dr. Gillies went on. Having divided the plants from the animals he sent them off on their long journeys. The birds and fishes, after some hesitation, parted company. The insects multiplied. The arrival of the mammals and that breathtaking moment when they stood on their rear feet releasing their front feet for a varied activity.

  “Life! Why life? What for? To what end? Something came out of the ooze. Where was it going?”

  He paused. His gaze rested with such inquiry on the boys that they felt impelled to answer. They murmured. “To man.”

  “Yes,” said Dr. Gillies, “to all kinds of men.”

  A pained uneasiness had descended on the company. Breckenridge Lansing, an experienced chairman, again spoke up for the group. “You haven’t answered our question, Dr. Gillies.”

  “I have laid down the ground plan for my answer to your question. In this new century we shall be able to see that mankind is entering a new stage of development—the Man of the Eighth Day.”

  Dr. Gillies was lying for all he was worth. He had no doubt that the coming century would be too direful to contemplate—that is to say, like all the other centuries.

  Dr. Gillies was the only member of the group to have felt no elation. He had had no part in the congratulations and embraces. At a quarter before twelve he had slipped into the Tavern and paid a call on old Mrs. Billings, his long-time patient. His soul (a word he used only in jest) was filled with bitterness. Twenty-three months ago his son had died in a sledding accident at Williams College in Massachusetts—Hector Gillies who should be entering tonight into the twentieth century—his other self, his extended self, his lengthened shadow. Dr. Gillies had no faith in progress, in the future of mankind. He knew more about Coaltown than any of its citizens. (As he had known much about Terre Haute, Indiana, during his first ten years of practice.) Coaltown was no worse and no better than any other town. Any community is a portion of the vast body of the human race. You may cut into Breckenridge Lansing or the Emperor of China; you will find the same viscera. Like the devil in the old story, you may lift the roofs of Coaltown or Vladivostok; you will hear the same phrases. His midnight reading of the great historians confirmed his sense that Coaltown is everywhere—though even the greatest historians fall victim to the distortion induced by elapsed time; they elevate and abase at will. There are no Golden Ages and no Dark Ages. There is the oceanlike monotony of the generations of men under the alternations of fair and fou
l weather.

  What would the twentieth century and its successors be like?

  He lied roundly because his eyes rested on Roger Ashley and George Lansing. He spoke as he would have spoken if Hector had been there. It is the duty of old men to lie to the young. Let these encounter their own disillusions. We strengthen our souls, when young, on hope; the strength we acquire enables us later to endure despair as a Roman should.

  “The New Man is emerging. Nature never sleeps. Hitherto the sporadic great man, the lone genius, has carried the children of fear and inertia on his coattails. Henceforth, the whole mass will emerge from the cave-dwelling condition . . . ?”

  Oh, it was splendid!

  “. . . ? emerge from the cave-dwelling condition where most men cower still—terrified of encroachment, hugging their possessions, in bondage to fears of the Thunder God, fears of the vengeful dead, fears of the untamable beast in themselves.”

  It was splendid.

  “Mind and Spirit will be the next climate of the human. The race is undergoing its education. What is education, Roger? What is education, George? It is the bridge man crosses from the self-enclosed, self-favoring life into a consciousness of the entire community of mankind.”

  A number of his listeners had soon fallen asleep in the beatific air of the twentieth century—not John Ashley and his son, not Eustacia Lansing and her son.

  Olga Doubkov walked home with Wilhelmina Thoms, Lansing’s secretary at the mines.

  “Dr. Gillies didn’t believe a word of it,” she said. “I did. I believed every word of it. And so did my father. I couldn’t walk straight if I didn’t.”

  It has never been satisfactorily explained why the early settlers of Coaltown (or Maple Bluffs, as it was first called) chose to center and expand their agglomeration in a sunless gorge when they might have built their homes, their first church, and their first school in the open meadows to the north and south. The town lay on a moderately important trade route. The itinerant vendors are still with us. Coaltown has always been a favorite with commercial travelers—fortunately for Beata Ashley and her children when the time came—even when Fort Barry, thirty miles to the north, and Summerville, forty miles to the south, offered larger returns. The Illinois Tavern of the Sorbeys, builder, son, and grandson, suited them. They assigned two nights to it in their itineraries. Its rooms were spacious; its thirty-five-cent dinners generous. The woodwork and brass fixtures in the saloon were installed in expectation of an ever greater prosperity. The genial smell of sawdust, spilt beer, and mash whiskey welcomed the tired wanderer. There were nightly games in the back room. Free transportation was available to a number of establishments a few miles south on the River Road—Hattie’s Hitching Post and Nicky’s We Have It. Business representatives (agricultural implements and wholesale pharmaceuticals) arrived by train; drummers (sewing machines, jewelry, patent medicines, and kitchenware) by horse and buggy. Pedlars drew up by the side of the road and slept under their carts.

  With the discovery of coal came black, gray, yellow, and white dust; came turbid water into the Kangaheela; came the town’s first and last rich man, Airlee MacGregor; came more foreigners—the Silesians and West Virginians, Miss Doubkov’s father (an exiled Russian prince, some said), John and Beata Ashley from New York, speaking the “New York dialect.” Many birds, beasts, fishes, and plants retreated from the region. It became customary to say that the soil was “sour.” Above all came poverty and unrest and the threat of violence. Many of the men who worked ten hours a day underground seemed unable to feed and clothe a twelve- or four-teen-headed family, even when, of a Saturday afternoon, their dear offspring laid their week’s wages in the father’s hand. Shoes played an important role. They haunted the dreamer. Even horses had shoes. A father could feed his family on beans, bran, greens, apples, and occasionally fatback; but it was generally understood that worshipers did not go to church unshod. One’s children went turn and turn about. A number of times in the last half of the nineteenth century there had been revolt in the wind. There are few things more dispiriting than half-hearted strikes. They were ill led and ill supported. The windows of the miners’ store were broken, the company offices wrecked. A group of roaming men was dispersed after it had torn up the picket fence surrounding Airlee MacGregor’s house and hurled his croquet balls at his front door. (Through all that din and splintering wood Old MacGregor sat in his front room, his rifle by his side, righteous as Moses.) Holidays were looked forward to with apprehension. In 1897 the Mayor prudently canceled the Fourth of July parade and oration in Memorial Park. The quadrennial election days were particularly dreaded. The miners swarmed down the hills and gave vent to their long frustration and rage. The administration strictly deducted fines from their wages for nonappearance in the shafts the following day. The men drank and shouted through the night and started lurching up the slopes at dawn; their wives collected them from the ditches beside the road. Many children were born the following August, resignedly welcomed. People in Coaltown had locked their doors at night from as long ago as anyone could remember and the better-off had installed various reinforcements and barricades. Breckenridge Lansing was not the first to train his family in the use of firearms, though it was to be expected of him as managing director of the mines. It astonished the out-of-town reporters at the trial, but not the citizens of Coaltown, to learn that he was murdered during his customary Sunday afternoon rifle practice.

  Five years after that notorious trial the mines near Coaltown closed down—the “Bluebell Mine” and the “Henrietta B. MacGregor.” The quality of the coal had been deteriorating for a long time and now the quantity was diminishing. The town dwindled in size. The families of the convict and the murdered man moved away. Their houses changed hands a number of times. They bore signs that said ROOMS and FOR SALE, but finally the signs became illegible and fell from the walls. Their broken windows admitted rain and snow; birds built nests upstairs and down; their picket fences leaned across the sidewalks like breaking waves. The summerhouse behind “The Elms” slid into the pond. In the autumn children were sent by their mothers to gather the butternuts at “St. Kitts,” the chestnuts at “The Elms.”

  With the cessation of activity in the mines the quality of the air improved. No housewife ventured to hang white window curtains, but the girls at the high school’s graduation exercises first wore white dresses in 1910. There were fewer hunters; deer, foxes, and quail increased. Caperfish and checkerbelly and Mulligan trout found their way up the Kangaheela in large numbers. The redbud and goldenrod and poneytail which had long bypassed the region began advancing upon it from all directions.

  Often in the spring after heavy rains a strange roar filled the air. The hills were honeycombed with abandoned mines; the earth’s surface above them caved in with a noise that sounded more like an earthquake than a landslide. The townspeople would drive out to peer into these earthworks. They seemed more to resemble the ruins of some past greatness than the prisons where so many had labored twelve hours—later, ten hours—a day and where so many had coughed and spat their lungs away. Even small boys were hushed by the view of those long galleries and arcades, rotundas and throne rooms. By the following year squawbush and wild vines were covering the entrances to the underworld. The population of bats increased, emerging at first dark in whirling clouds above the valley.

  As Dr. Gillies was so fond of saying, “Nature never sleeps.”

  Coaltown no longer has a post office building. The mail is distributed in a corner of Mr. Bostwick’s grocery store. The county seat has been transferred to Fort Barry.

  I. “THE ELMS”

  1885–1905

  “The Elms” was the second-handsomest house in Coaltown. It had been built by Airlee MacGregor in the days when the mines were less dependent on the administration in Pittsburgh and the resident supervisors could make money for themselves. He had sunk the shafts of the “Bluebell” and the “Henrietta B. MacGregor” and had become a very rich man. John Ashley could n
ever have afforded to buy it outright. He had been called to Coaltown as mere maintenance engineer when the mines were already in decline. It was his duty on a straitened budget to repair and shore up a dilapidating fabric. The owners could not have foreseen that his gifts lay, precisely, in ingenuity and improvisation. He was delighted with the work, though his salary was little over a third that of Breckenridge Lansing, the managing director. Ashley was a poor man and would have acknowledged it with a smile. He had everything he wanted and more. His wife was an accomplished housekeeper, and both he and Beata were extremely resourceful at supplying necessities and devising amenities that require little or no outlay of money. He gradually came into ownership of the house through half-yearly payments. The house had long stood vacant. The people of lower Illinois are not given to superstition; they did not say the house was haunted, but it was known that “The Elms” had been built in spite, maintained in hatred, and abandoned in tragedy. Every town of some size had one or two such houses. John Ashley was more superstitious than his neighbors; he believed that no misfortune could befall him. He and Beata lived there in happiness for almost seventeen years.