THE FAIRFIELD POET
Time, 1881
Tragedy, which is never far from the most prosperous lives, continually trod upon the tenderest-hearted woman in Fairfield. She hated Fairfield as a background to her existence, but there had fate nailed her for life. It was the forlornest of Indiana railroad stations, looking like a scar on the face of a beautifully wooded country, peopled by the descendants of poor white Carolinians and Tennesseeans. The male portion of the community sat on the railroad platform in yellow jeans, sprawling their naked toes to the sun, whittling, and jetting with the regularity of fountains upon the meerschaum-colored boards. The women might have lived lives of primitive simplicity, dignified by child-bearing and neighborly sympathywith one another; but they stained their human kindness with trivial disagreements.
This one among them all felt the progress of the age tearing her heartstrings out while her circumstances kept her at a standstill. I do not say her life would have been more symmetrical or her experience richer if she had lived in the whirl. She was a plain, ground-loving woman who enjoyed the companionship of her fruit-trees and flowers, and worked with her hands. Indeed, crowds annoyed her, and she was undecided what toilets ought to be made for a large public. The striped silk dresses of her prosperous days, the fringed crape shawls and gimp-edged mantillas, agreed ill with bonnets of the passing season, and she had more respect for what was rich and old than for new inventions. But she was fiercely ambitious for her children, especially her eldest son, and for him in spite of his misfortune. The younger boy and girl were still leaping like colts upon their few remaining acres,sound in limb and wind, with the hopes of a future sheathed in their healthy present, when Willie was tall as a man, and far up in his teens.
His mother had a picture of him taken when he was going to school in Cincinnati, under his uncle’s care. At that time his auburn curls were unshorn, and he was beautiful.
A few days before cottons took their terrific rise during the civil war, Mr. Harbison had stocked in thousands of yards. Those were Fairfield’s best days, and he kept a general store, making money so rapidly that the lazy people around him felt helplessly injured. He began his fine brick house, building on a generous and artistic plan, at the edge of Fairfield, where he could surround himself with fruit-trees, and have fields for his cattle. Whether it is a more distinct misery to build the temple of your home and see someone else inhabit it, or to shelter yourself for years in a house youhave not the power of finishing, the latter fate was reserved for the Harbisons. With a crash they came down from what had been Fairfield’s opulence nearly to a level with Fairfield’s poverty. They kept the house and grounds and a meadow, but under such weight of mortgages that it was comparatively no grief at all to see the ornamental cornices lying around the partly plastered parlors, balustrades and newel-post standing on end beside the skeleton stairway, and to find the bathroom useless except as a rubbish closet. The man who had employed half of Fairfield was now obliged to become himself an employee, and the general verdict of the world against those who fail was emphasized by communistic envy.
But the habit of being a woman of consideration is not easily forgotten. Mrs. Harbison still made the village respect her. She had something to give to the poorest. She was the wife of a man who had made a fortune before he lost it, and sat in the state Senate.More than all, she had her children, the eldest of them a continual surprise to her. He seemed born to stir her pride and tenderness to their depths. He was tall, fair, and Roman-featured, shy as a girl toward every one but his mother, and so ravenous in mind that he was partly through college when his father’s reverses brought him home.
Then he was seized with a spotted fever, and approached the next world so close that he left part of his faculties there, and was never the same Willie he had been before. He could hear nothing, and seldom spoke an audible word—Mrs. Harbison’s boy, who was made to take the world by storm—and what had been the shyness of a country-bred youth became the set-apart seclusion of a hoofed and goat-eared faun. Willie Harbison was to be seen whirring as noiseless as a bat upon his bicycle across the open ground at dusk. He was met coming from the woods, silent as an Indian, and his eyes wereon everything in earth or sky except the human beings just before him.
Whatever were the faults of Fairfield, it loved and respected Willie Harbison, and humored his self-withdrawal. And he loved Fairfield with a partiality which saw mere picturesqueness in the row of whittling men, and various forms of motherhood or sisterhood in the women. He would dismount from his wheel to let the boys tilt with it at the old warehouse. He loved the woods; he loved Wild-cat and Kitten creeks, which ploughed rock-bedded channels through the woods; and what joy in life he fished out of those waters only Willie himself knew. He loved to watch from the mill, on a clear morning, that plume of steam the south-bound train sent around the curve, to watch another plume roll over the first, and finally to see the train stand suddenly on the summit of the grade, sharp-cut against the sky. All common life was pleasant to him. Who but his mother could be witness that a double nature dwelt under his floury mill clothes?
Willie worked in the mill with his father, where the roar of grinding and bolting and the whir of belts made silent liveliness around him. This had been bitterness to his mother—her Willie should work with his head alone; but she accepted it as the result of his physical misfortune.
The parlors were Willie’s workshop, in which he sawed, hammered, and glued, or put noiseless inventions together. A carpenter’s bench was set before two uncased windows, and his father’s old store desk had fallen to his unmercantile use. Its lock was never opened unless Willie had something which he could force himself to show to his mother. That ripe instant arriving, he sought her in her kitchen, her garden, or at her spinning-wheel upstairs, and seized her by the hand. She went with him to the parlors, they fastened the doors, Willie undid his desk, and placed his paper in her fingers. The paper itself was sometimes brown, sometimes the blue cap left from thestore, sometimes gilt-edged note having penciled landscapes along the margins, or the flowers he rhymed of done in water-colors; for his hand was as skillful as his eye was discerning. The poems were usually short, and sensitive in rhyme and rhythm. Willie’s themes were the common sights and the common pathos or humor of the situations in which he found the people around him: his interpretation of the flicker’s feelings; his delight in certain thick fleeces of grass; the panorama of sky and field as it marched across his eye; the grotesque though heartily human family party made by old man Persons and his wife, where half of their descendants, unable to get into the small house, sat on the fence while the rest ate dinner. Willie was deaf, but he had inward music. Every smooth and liquid stanza was like wine to his mother. She compared his poems to Burns’s, and could not find the “Mountain Daisy” a whit better than her poet’s song about the woods in frost.
Even Mr. Harbison thought well of Willie’s performances. They were smuggled to him by the mother, and carefully returned to their place when the poet was out of the house. Mr. Harbison knew all that was going on in the world. A dozen times a year he left the grinding of the mill to meet his old chums at the capital, or to quicken the action of his blood in Chicago. A couple of stimulating days tinctured and made endurable his month of mill work. A man of luxurious tastes cannot lose his tastes with his means. He was a judge of poets, and said Willie might as well take to poetry as to anything, for business did not pay a man of sound faculties in these days.
The hum of bees could be heard all around this unfinished brick house growing mossy at the gables, and its shadow was long on the afternoon sunshine. It was that alert and happy time of year when the earth’s sap starts new from winter distillation.
You could hear the voices of children calling in play as they loitered home from school; the days were so long that the cows would not come up the pasture until nearly seven o’clock.
Willie trudged across lots to supper. Mrs. Harbison met him at the north side of the house, having her garden knife and rake in her hands. She put them on the stepless front-door sill, which had never been and never would be pressed by the foot of an arriving guest. This stone sill was high enough for a seat, and she sat down, tilting her sunbonnet back, and smiling at Willie. He was floured from head to foot. Little of his boyish beauty except its clear innocence remained to him. His nose was large for his head, and on his head the auburn curls were shorn to a thin crisping layer.
His young sister was putting supper on the table in the dining-room, his brother was fisting with another boy on the railroad, andup the cow lane came his father with the slow step and somewhat of the ponderous white presence of the walking statue in “Don Giovanni.” But closest knit of all this family, mother and son talked together in silence, some birds in the mulberry-tree over their heads making the only calling and replying that could be heard. Before Willie reached her, he held up his hands and signed in the deaf-mute language:—
“The preacher has come back.”
Mrs. Harbison raised her hands and darted her fingers into various shapes, saying thereby, “Did you see him?”
“No,” Willie replied as swiftly; “I only saw his coffin in the wagon, and Nancy Ellen sitting beside it. She had to bring him the whole twenty miles from where he died, in a wagon.”
“Because it wasn’t on a railroad?”
Willie nodded.
His mother wove on: “Poor Nancy Ellen! Her father wouldn’t let her have thepreacher for so long, and turned her off when she did marry him. Now she’s a widow in her honeymoon, and old man Morton saying he told her a preacher as old as himself wasn’t any match for her. Did you see her father? How did he act?”
“He got into the wagon by the driver,” said Willie’s fingers.
“Well, that was something for him.”
“And they drove to his place.”
“I suppose he’ll let her come back and live at home now.”
“I wish you had seen Nancy Ellen.”
“I’m going to see her after the milking is done.”
“Seen her by the preacher,” insisted Willie’s passes. “She looked like a captive coming in chains to Rome.”
“Yes, I’ll be bound she did. Every jolt of that twenty miles is stamped inhermind.”
“I wish,” flashed Willie, “I knew what the preacher sung to himself all along the road.”
“What a notion! You’ll have to fix it up in poetry now, won’t you?”
Willie shook his head many times and reddened.
“You said the preacher used to sing home from meeting in the dark.”
“Yes, he did,” affirmed Mrs. Harbison. “And Nancy Ellen used to listen for him to go by their place.”
Their talk paused, and Willie looked up at the birds in the mulberry. Having afterward caught his mother’s eye, he wove out slowly:—
“When in the tree above his headThe sap goes tingling through the bark,She will remember it was dead,And hear him singing in the dark.”
“When in the tree above his headThe sap goes tingling through the bark,She will remember it was dead,And hear him singing in the dark.”
“When in the tree above his head
The sap goes tingling through the bark,
She will remember it was dead,
And hear him singing in the dark.”
“Oh, Willie, is that the first verse or the last? Have you written it down?”
Willie smiled shyly, putting his head down toward one shoulder, without making any reply. His mother urged, with eager fingers:—
“Print it in some place when you get it done. Nancy Ellen would be pleased.”
“I’m not an obituary poet,” wove Willie.
“But that’s so good.” Mrs. Harbison moved her lips, repeating it to herself. “And ain’t you ever going to publish anything you write? I’ve heard of people getting money for it.”
Willie uttered a gentle sneer. He laughed at his mother in a way that always made her laugh with him.
“But if you would let your father fix up your writings,” she continued, repeating an old plea, “and send them to some publishing house, I know they would put them in a book for you.”
The gate, weighted by a stone, slammed to behind his father coming to the evening meal. But before his mother rose, Willie found time to make dance before her eyes the characters indicating this promise:—
“Some day I’ll get on my bicycle and ride and ride until I come to a publisher.If you miss me, you’ll know where I’ve gone. You can just say to yourself, ‘He’s off having his poems published.’ Wait till then, mother; that will be soon enough.”
“You’ll never do it,” said his mother, having no idea how near the time was.
She gave her family their supper and helped to milk the cows. She thought of Willie’s stanza when the milk first sang in the pail, and kept repeating it until the rising froth drowned all sounds of the lashing streams quite at her pail’s brim.
When the house was tidy and full of twilight stillness, Mrs. Harbison put on a clean apron and took her sunbonnet to make her call of condolence. It was likely they would want watchers at Morton’s, and she was ready to do anything. She had helped bear the burden of life and death so long in Fairfield that illness, a new baby, or the mysterious breathless presence in any house was a peremptory invitation to her.
The boys were playing hide-and-seekaround the warehouse, and as she crossed the open lot she saw the usual line of wise men sitting on the edge of the platform with their legs across the rail, as if they had all agreed to make an offering of their feet to the Juggernaut of the next passing train.
Willie darted like a bat or a night bird on his bicycle far up and far down the smooth wagon road. Now he took a turn, and came spinning among the boys, scattering them before him, and escaping as often as they chased him. In one of these excursions he crossed his mother’s way.
The last red streaks and high sunset lights were not gone out of the sky. She lifted up her hands and spelled, “Are you starting out to hunt a publisher now?”
And Willie laughed and nodded and made her a sign of good-by.
The pleasant stillness of the evening fell around her like a blessing as she went on. Fireflies were filling one field, as if a conflagration under that particular ground sentup endless streams of sparks. She smelled the budding elders, and was reminded of tile-like bits in her past, fitted oddly together.
Morton lived but a few steps beyond the village. She had been talking a mere moment with Nancy Ellen, and had not yet entered the room where the preacher lay when another neighbor came in with excitement, and said aloud, over the whispered talk of the mourning house, that something was wrong down at the station.
“That express has run into something again,” proclaimed the neighbor, “and looks, by the way folks run, as if it wasn’t a cow this time. Enough cows and pigs has been killed by that railroad.”
“I haven’t seen the express,” said Mrs. Harbison, feeling her head full of wheels. “It was all quiet when I was there a minute ago.”
“The express has stopped. Good reason! There’s something on the track, I tell ye,” insisted the neighbor.
Willie’s mother was sure it could not be Willie. He was conscious of his infirmity, and so cautious that she had long ceased to be anxious about him. He knew the times of all the trains with nice exactness, also. Yet she started from the house without speaking another word, and ran until she reached the crowd.
The engine stood hissing; it confronted her with the glare of its eye, a horrid and remorseless fate, ready to go its way with bell-clanging and all cheerful noise, no matter who had been ground under its wheels.
The conductor was just stepping on board, for time and orders wait for nothing. The engineer had already climbed back to his cab; he saw a running woman kneel down on the platform and draw the boy up from the boards to rest in her arms. Having seen that much, the engineer turned away his head and wept out loud; and the train moved on, bearing pale faces that lookedbackward as long as they could discern anything.
Mrs. Harbison had stumbled over Willie’s bent wheel first. When she found him indeed laid in the midst of the crowd, she did not believe it. He was not mangled. His bones were sound—she felt them with a fiercely quick hand. There was no mark about him excepting a dirty-looking spot on one temple.
“Willie,” she cried, shaking him. “Willie! Willie!”
“We’ll have to carry him home,” said her husband at her side, his voice sounding far off as if it came strained through some dense medium.
She looked up, and could not understand it.
“He’s knocked senseless,” she claimed. “Why doesn’t somebody bring water?”
“He never knowed what hurt him,” cautiously said one villager to another. “The train was goin’ so fast, and he come up fromamong the houses onto it so fast, that it was done in a flash.”
“And I don’t never want to see no better boy than Willie Harbison was,” responded the other.
But only his mother—when she had him at home lying in that pomp of death with which we all shall impress beholders—could have pronounced the true oration over him. Through her dumb tragedy she wanted to make deaf-mute signs to some intelligence that here lay one of Nature’s poets, with a gift virgin and untarnished.
He had never hunted a public. His public was the woods and sky, and his critic one fond woman. Not a line of unsatisfied ambition marked his placid face. He had lived an humble, happy life, and sung for the sake of expression, not for the sake of praise. He had, after all, only gone to find the best publisher, and his mother could always hear him “singing in the dark.”