“I can never forget her comment on the first sermon in which I let myself go into the fervor which was given me by nature. It was an appeal for foreign missions, a cause always dear to my heart. I was carried away by my feelings, and fairly poured out my soul to my listeners. I have always considered that to be my first real sermon, the first time I felt sure of my Vocation. Afterwards, as I stood in the robing room, faint with the reaction after my emotion, I heard some one just outside the door say, ‘Well, Aunt Almera, what did you think of thesermon?’ And what do you think her answer was! She said, ‘Oh, Iliketo see anybody enjoy himself as much as that young man did.’”
This unexpected conclusion brought to me such a sudden horrifying desire to laugh that I felt quite shaken by the necessity to curb it. And it was essential not to let it be seen. For he had wound himself up again to a heat which astonished me. It was as if he had meant casually to show me an old scar, and had found to his surprise that the wound was as raw and smarting as ever.
“Why,” he cried, “she all but drove me wholly out of preaching, at the very outset of my career, sitting there as she did, Sunday after Sunday, fixing that cynical aged eye on me. You can’t know ... I hear that you have been brought up, luckily for you, outside of this deadly New England atmosphere.... You can’timaginehow it kills and freezes all the warmth and color and fire out of life to have such a ... if I hadn’t escaped out of it to....”
“I’m afraid I’ve been brought up mostly in a New England atmosphere,” I said, beginning to feel very cross and prickly.
As if struck by something in my tone, he now looked at me very hard. I don’t know what he sawin my face ... perhaps a family resemblance of expression ... but he suddenly seemed to come to himself with a start. He said abruptly, with an expression of extreme annoyance once more on his face, “I beg your pardon for bringing all this up. I can’t think what in the world made me!” and turned away with a noticeable lack of suavity and grace of manner.
Once I was taken to see an old Irishwoman who had come from Ireland as a young girl, just after the great famine in ’48, and had gone to work for Great-grandmother, who was then sixty-three years old. She told me this story, in her thick, thick early-nineteenth-century brogue, which I will not try to reproduce here: “There was a pretty girl, young and happy-looking, that lived up the road with her father, a poor weak rag of a man with a backbone like a piece of string. He’d married for his second wife a hard, hard woman. And when they found out the girl was in trouble, and her sweetheart that was the cause of it off up in the North Country for the winter to work as a lumberjack, didn’t the stepmother turn the poor girl out—yes, out like a dog. And old Mrs. Canfield—that was some kin to you, I forget what—where I was working, she went rightout and brought her in, and kept her there safe and sound all winter, treating her as nice as anybody, letting her sew to pay for her keep, and helping her make the baby clothes. She’d go with her to church every Sunday, the girl right on her arm, and nobody daring to say a word, for fear of old Mrs. Canfield’s tongue, ‘For,’ she used to say, ‘let ’em say a word if they dare, and I’ll tell a few things I know about some folks in this town who had to be married in a hurry, and whose babies came into the world ahead of time.’ You see, she was so old she knew everything that had happened from the beginning almost. She’d say, ‘There’s lots worse things done every day in this town than anything Margaret’s done,’ she’d say, and nobody to answer her back a word.
“But everybody was thinking it very certain that the man would never come back, and if he did, he’d never own the child, nor have anything to do with Margaret, poor girl! You see, in those days there weren’t any mails that were carried ’way back off in the woods, and she neither had any word of him nor he of her. Well, old Mrs. Canfield knew what people were saying all right, and I could see that she was troubled in her mind, though she never lowered her high head by an inch. Margaret’s timedrew near, and no sign from John Dawson that was away. But Margaret never lost her faith in him a minute. ‘When John is back,’ she’d say, just as sure of him as though they’d been married by the priest; but I could see old Mrs. Canfield look queer when she’d hear Margaret talking that way.
“And then one morning, in April ’twas, and we’d all the doors and windows open for the first time, Margaret had gone down the walk to look at the lilac bush to see if there were any buds on it, and around the corner came John Dawson!
“Her back was to him and he hadn’t any idea she was there, so when she turned round, they stared at each other for just a minute, as if they’d never seen each other. Now the moment had come, Margaret stood there frozen, just waiting, like a little scared, helpless—I had the half of me hanging out the kitchen window to see what would happen, and I’ll never forget it—never—never—never—the look on his face, the astounded look on his face, so full of pity and love, so strong with pity and love. ‘Margie!Margie!’ he said in a loud voice, and threw his sack off his back and his gun from his hand, and ran, ran to take her in his arms.
“Well, when I could see again, I went off to tell old Mrs. Canfield, and there was the old lady in herown bedroom, standing bolt upright in the middle of the floor, and crying at the top of her voice. Her wrinkled old face was just a-sop with tears. Faith, but it was the grand cry she was having! And the good it did her! When she came to, she says to me, ‘Well,’ says she, ‘folks aren’t so cussed as they seem, are they?’
“And then we went downstairs to get out the fruit-cake and the brandied peaches; for the minister married them in our parlor that afternoon.”
One day old Mr. Morgan, the one-armed Civil War veteran, took me along with him, to get out of the buckboard and open gates, on the back road along the river. He was going up to a hill pasture to salt his sheep. It took forever to get there, because his horse was so slow, and he had time to tell me a great many stories. This was one of them: “When I was a boy at school, I worked at Aunt Almera Canfield’s doing chores night and morning. I remember how she used to loosen herself up in the morning. She was terribly rheumaticky, but she wouldn’t give in to it. Every morning she’d be all stiffened up so she couldn’t stand up straight, nor hardly move her legs at all; but she’d get herself dressed somehow, and then two of her sons came into help her get started. She’d make them take hold of her, one on each side, and walk her around the room. It was awful to hear how she’d yell out—yell as though they were killing her! And then they’d stop, the sweat on their faces to see how it hurt her, and then she’d yell at them to go on, go on,shehadn’t asked them to stop! They were over sixty, both of them, with grandchildren themselves, but they didn’t dare not do what she said, and they’d walk her round again. She’d kick her poor legs out in front of her hard, to get the joints limbered up, and holler with the pain, and kick them out again, till by and by she’d get so she could go by herself, and she’d be all right for the day. I tell you, I often think of that. Yes, lots of times, it comes back to me.”
Up in the sheep pasture, as we sat to rest the horse, he told me this: “I always thought Aunt Almera knew all about the John Brown raid before most folks did—maybe she sent some money to help him. She wasn’t a bit surprised, anyhow, when she heard of it, and all through the whole business she never thought of another thing, nor let anybody else. He was caught—any of us that lived in that house those days will never forget a one of those dates—and put in jail on the 9th of October, and his triallasted until the 31st. Aunt Almera made us get together in the evenings, me and the hired girl and one of her grandsons and her daughter, all the family, and she’d read aloud to us out of the ‘Tribune’ about what had happened that day at his trial. I never saw her so worked up about anything—just like ashes her old face was, and her voice like cold steel. We got as excited about it as she did, all of us, especially her grandson, that was about my age. The day of his execution—December 2d, it was—Aunt Almera came at dawn to wake me up. ‘Put on your clothes,’ says she, ‘and go over to the church and begin to toll the bell.’ I didn’t need to ask her what for, either. I’ll never forget how awful she looked to me.
“Well, we tolled the bell all day long, one or the other of the family, never stopped a minute. You never heard anything so like death. All day long that slow, deep clang—and then a stillness—and thenclang!again. I could hear it in my head for days afterwards. Folks came in from all around to find out what it meant, and Aunt Almera called them all into her parlor—she sat there all day and never ate a mouthful of food—andtoldthem what it meant, so they couldn’t ever get the sound of her voice out of their ears. Between times she’d readout of the Bible to whoever was there, ‘Avenge thou thy cause, O Lord God of battles,’ and ‘It is time for thee, O Lord, to lay to thy hand, for they have destroyed thy law,’ and ‘Let there be no man to pity them; nor to have compassion of their fatherless children.’ It was the darndest thing to hear her!
“You’d better believe when Abraham Lincoln sent out the first call for men there wasn’t a boy of military age in our town that didn’t enlist!”
An aged cousin had just died, and as we sat downstairs talking with the doctor, he said to my aunt, who had been taking care of the sick woman: “She took it hard! She took it hard!”
They both frowned, and my aunt looked rather sick. Then the doctor said, “Not much like your grandmother, do you remember?”
“Oh, yes, I remember,” said my aunt, her face quivering, her eyes misty, her lips smiling.
The doctor explained to me: “Your great-grandmother was an old, old woman before she ever was really sick at all, except for rheumatism. And then she had a stroke of paralysis that left her right side dead. She lived four days that way—the only days she’d spent in bed in years, since she was a youngwoman, I suppose. Her mind wasn’t very clear, she couldn’t talk so that we could understand her, and I don’t think she rightly knew anybody after her stroke. I guess she went back, ’way back, for we saw from what she did that she thought she had a little baby with her. I suppose she thought she was a young mother again, and that was why she was in bed. We used to see her spread out her arm, very gentle and slow, the only arm she could move, so’s to make a hollow place for a little head, and then she’d lie there, so satisfied and peaceful, looking up at the ceiling with a smile in her eyes, as if she felt a little warm, breathing creature there beside her. And sometimes she’d half wake up and stretch out her hand and seem to stroke the baby’s head or snuggle it up closer to her, and then she’d give a long sigh of comfort to find it there, and drop off to sleep again, smiling. And she’d always remember, even in her sleep, to keep her arm curved around so there’d be room for the baby; and even in her sleep her face had that shining new-mother look—that old wrinkled face, with that look on it! I’ve seen lots of death-beds, but I never—” he stopped for a moment.
“Why, at the very last—do you remember?”—he went on to my aunt, “I thought she was asleep, butas I moved a chair she opened her eyes quickly, looked down as if to see whether I had wakened the baby, and looked at me, to warn me to be quiet, her fingers at her lips. ‘Sh!’ she whispered.
“And that was the way she died.”