THE STIRRING-OFF
Time, 1850
Davis’sboys said to all the young men at singing-school, “Come over to’r sugar-camp Saturday night; we’re goin’ to stir off.”
The young men, sitting on the fence to which horses were tied in dusky rows, playfully imitated the preacher when he gave out appointments, and replied they would be there, no preventing Providence, at early candle-lighting.
Jane Davis, attended by her cousin, also circulated among the girls in the school-house during that interval in singing-school called recess, and invited them to the stirring-off.
The Davises, though by no means the richest, were the most hospitable family in the Swamp. They came from Virginia. Theirstable swarmed with fine horses, each son and daughter owning a colt; and the steeds of visiting neighbors often crowded the stalls until these looked like a horse-fair.
The Davises entertained every day in the year. Their house was unpretending even for those times, being of unpainted wood, with a bedroom at each side of the porch, a sitting-room where guns and powder-horns hung over the fireplace, a kitchen, and a loft. Yet here sojourned relations from other counties, and even from over the mountains. Here on Christmas and New Year’s days were made great turkey-roasts. Out of it issued Jane Davis to the dances and parties where she was a belle, and her brothers, ruddy, huge-limbed, black-eyed, and dignified as any young men in Fairfield County.
They kept bees, and raised what were called noble turnips. Their farm appeared to produce solely for the use of guests. In watermelon season they kept what might betermed open field. Their cookery was celebrated, and their cordiality as free as sunshine. No unwelcome guest could alight at Davis’s. The head of the family, Uncle Davis was a “general,” and this title carried as much social weight as that of judge. About their premises hung an atmosphere of unending good times. On Sunday afternoons late in November all the raw young men of the neighborhood drew in a circle to Davis’s fireplace, scraping turnips or apples. Now the steel knives moved in concert, and now they jarred; the hollow wall of a turnip protested against the scrape, and Aunt Davis passed the heaping pan again. Or cracked walnuts and hickory nuts were the offerings. Then every youth sat with an overflowing handkerchief on his lap, and the small blade of his knife busy with the kernels,—backlog and forestick being bombarded with shells which burned in blue and crimson.
So when the Davises were ready to stiroff in their sugar-camp, it was the most natural thing in the world for them to invite their neighbors to come and eat the sugar, and for their neighbors to come and do so.
The camp threw its shine far among leafless trees. Three or four iron kettles steamed on a pole over the fire. In a bark lodge near by, Aunt Davis had put a lunch of pies and cakes before she went home, to be handed around at the stirring-off. It was a clear starry night, the withered sod crisp underfoot with the stiffness of ice. Any group approaching silently could hear the tapped maples dripping a liquid nocturne into trough or pan.
But scarcely any groups approached silently. They were heard chatting in the open places, and their calls raised echoes.
John and Eck Davis had collected logs and chunks and spread robes and blankets until the seating capacity of the camp was nearly equal to that of George’s Chapel.Some of the girls took off their wraps and hung them in the bark house. One couple carried away a bucket for more sugar-water to cool a kettle, and other couples sauntered after them. There were races on the spongy dead leaves, and sudden squalls of remonstrance.
Jane Davis stood in the midst of her company, moving a long wooden stirrer in the kettle about to sugar-off. Though her beauty was neither brown nor white, nor, in fact, positive beauty of any kind, it cajoled everybody. Her hair was folded close to her cheeks. There was innocent audacity in the curving line of every motion she made. The young men were so taken by the spell of her grace that she was accused of being unrighteously engaged to three at once, and about to add her cousin Tom Randall to the list.
Tom Randall was a Virginian, spending the winter in Ohio. He was handsome, merry as Mercutio, and so easy in his mannersthat the Swamp youths watched him with varying emotions. He brought his songs over the mountains: one celebrated the swiftness of the electric telegraph in flashing news from Baltimore to Wheeling; another was about a Quaker courtship, and set all the Swamp girls to rattling the lady’s brisk response,—
“What care I for your rings or money,—Faddle-a-ding, a-ding, a-day;I want a man that will call me honey,—Faddle-a-ding, a-ding, a-day!”
“What care I for your rings or money,—Faddle-a-ding, a-ding, a-day;I want a man that will call me honey,—Faddle-a-ding, a-ding, a-day!”
“What care I for your rings or money,—
Faddle-a-ding, a-ding, a-day;
I want a man that will call me honey,—
Faddle-a-ding, a-ding, a-day!”
Tom Randall sat close to the fire, hanging his delicate hands, which had never done a day’s chopping, over his knees. He looked much of a gentleman, Nora Waddell remarked aside to Philip Welchammer. To all the girls he was a central figure, as Jane was a central figure to the young men.
But Philip claimed that Virginians were no nearer perfection than out-and-out Swamp fellows.
“I didn’t say he was a perfect gentleman,”said Nora, with cautious moderation, “for I wouldn’t say so of any man.”
“He ain’t proud,” admitted Philip. “He’s free to talk with everybody.”
“Humph!” remarked Mary Thompson, sitting at the other side of Philip; “he ought to be. Folks in Georger Chapel neighborhood is just as good as anybody.”
“Well, anyhow, I know he ain’t a prettier dancer than Jane,” sighed Nora, whose folks would not allow her to indulge in the godless motion which the music of a fiddle inspires. While Jane stirred and chatted, she was swaying and taking dance-steps, as if unable to refrain from spinning away through the trees. In this great woods drawing-room, where so many were gathered, it was impossible for her to hear any comment that went on.
“Jane makes a good appearance on the floor,” responded Philip, who, being male, could withstand the general denunciations of the preacher and his mother’s praying athim in meeting. “I like to lead her out to dance.”
“Uncle and Aunt Davis are just as easy with Jane as if they wasn’t perfessors of religion,” sighed Nora Waddell.
“And their boys thinks so much of her,” added Mary Thompson. “John can’t go anywhere unless she ties his neck-han’ketcher for him. I’ve knowed him, when Jane was sick, to come and lean over her to get it fixed.”
“If she’s to leave them,” said Philip, “I wonder how they’d do without her?”
“She’s goin’ to marry Cousin Jimmy Thompson, that I know,” said Mary.
“She’s engaged to Dr. Miller in Lancaster,” insisted Nora. “I’ve saw voluntines he’s sent her.”
“Dick Hanks thinks he’s goin’ to get her,” laughed Philip. “He told me she’s as good as promised him. And Dick’s a good feller, if he wasn’t such a coward.”
“I don’t believe Jane wants anybody,”said Nora Waddell. “She’s light-minded, and likes to enjoy herself.”
Dick Hanks stood by Jane and insisted on helping her to move the stirrer. His hair inclosed his head in the shape of a thatch, leaving but narrow eaves of forehead above his eyebrows, though his expression was open and amiable. He looked like one of Bewick’s cuts of an English carter. The Hankses, however, were a rich family, and, in spite of their eccentricities, a power in the county. Old Jimmy Hanks so dreaded the grave that he had a marble vault hewed, watching its progress for years, and getting himself ready to occupy it a few weeks after its completion. Lest he should be buried alive, his will decreed that the vault should be unlocked and the coffin examined at intervals. The sight of a face floating in alcohol and spotted with drops from the metal casket not proving grateful to his heirs, the key was soon conveniently lost.
His son Dick, hearty in love and friendshipand noble in brawn, so feared the dark that he would not go into an unlighted room. When left by himself at the parting of roads after a night’s frolic, he galloped his horse through brush and mire, and it was told that he had more than once reached home without a whole stitch to his back.
But in spite of the powers of darkness, Dick was anxious to take Jane Davis under his protection. The fire and the noisy company kept him from lifting his eyes to the treetops swaying slowly overhead, and the lonesome stars. All through the woods winter-night sounds and sudden twig cracklings could be heard. Dick, however, meant to take Jane Davis home, whether he could persuade one of the Davis boys to go home with him afterward or not.
In those days neighborhoods were intensely local. The people knew what historians have not yet learned about the value of isolated bits of human life. These young folks in the sugar-camp knew nothing ofthe events and complications of the great world, but they all felt more or less interested in the politics of Jane Davis’s entanglements.
Her brother kept dipping a long spoon into the kettle she stirred, and dropping the liquid into a tin cup of cold sugar-water. As long as the hot stuff twined about in ropy arms, it was syrup; but as soon as it settled to the bottom in a clear mass, it was wax, and the change from wax to the grain of sugar is a sudden one.
When Eck Davis announced, “It’s waxed,” the kettle was slung off in haste, and everybody left the tree which had propped his back, or the robe on which he had leaned, and the graining sugar was served in saucers and handed around. It could be eaten with spoons or “worked” into crackling ropes. Davis’s boys took off the syrup kettles and covered them up in the bark lodge. They would be emptied into stone jars when the more importantbusiness of entertaining company was over. The fire now shone redder. Jane was cutting up pies and cakes in the bark house, all this warm light focused on her lowered eyelids, when more of her suitors arrived.
“I knowed the entire posse would be out,” said Philip Welchammer in a laughing undertone to the girls sitting beside him. “Davises never misses invitin’ anybody.”
“You’re too late, Jimmy Thompson,” called Jane’s elder brother before he noticed the preacher was in the party. “Your sheer’s e’t.” When, however, Dr. Miller from Lancaster also came forward, John stood up stiffly and put on his company grandeur. He held the town-man in some awe, and was bound to be constrained by the preacher.
Jimmy Thompson, having met Jane with awkward heartiness, said he would make the young folks acquainted with Brother Gurley. They all knew Brother Gurley; but Jimmy was a wild young man, and his audacity in“brother”-ing the preacher was more delicious than home-made sugar. He afterward explained that the preacher had been turned onto the old folks for Sunday, and he asked him along to the frolic without suspicionin’ he’d come, but the preacher, he took a-holt as if that was the understandin’.
Jane met Brother Gurley and Dr. Miller with equal ease. A hush fell upon the company, and they ate and watched her serve the newcomers and appear to balance such formidable individuals in her hands. Affectation was in that region the deadliest sin a girl could commit against her own popularity, and Jane’s manner was always beautifully simple.
The preacher had a clean-shaven, large face, huge blue eyes, and laughing white teeth, and a sprinkling of fine, indefinitely tinted hair. His figure was vigorous, and well made to bear the hardships of a Methodist circuit-rider. His presence had the grasp of good-fellowship and power, andrather dwarfed Dr. Miller, whom all the girls thought a very pretty man. Dr. Miller wore side-whiskers, and a Lancaster suit of clothes finished by a fine round cloak hooked under his chin. When he took off his hat to bow, two curls fell over his forehead. The woman who would not take Dr. Miller if he wanted her must expect to have the pick of creation, and maybe she would miss it after all. He talked to Jane and ate maple sugar with the greatest of Lancaster ease, telling her he had put up with his cousin in Millersport and borrowed a horse to ride to camp. John Davis at once said the folks at home expected him to put up with them over Sunday, and the other young men resented the doctor’s prompt acceptance of Davis’s hospitality.
The preacher, holding his saucer of sugar in his left hand, was going around and giving the right hand of fellowship to every young person in camp. This was the proper and customary thing for him to do. Apreacher who went into company anywhere on the circuit without shaking hands and pushing and strengthening his acquaintance would be a worse stumbling-block than a backslider given up to superfluous clothing and all kinds of sinful levity, or a new convert with artificials in her bonnet. But there was a tingling quality in Brother Gurley’s grasp which stirred the blood; and his heavy voice was as prevailing in its ordinary tones as in the thunders of the pulpit.
“Did you bring your wife with you, Brother Gurley?” simpered Tabitha Gill, a dwarfish, dark old maid, devout in church and esteemed for her ability to make a good prayer.
Mary Thompson whispered behind her back, “Tabitha Gill’s always for findin’ out whether a preacher’s married or not before anybody else does.”
“Not this time,” replied Brother Gurley, warming Sister Gill’s heart with a broad,class-meeting smile. “But I expect to bring her with me when I come around again.”
“Do,” said Tabitha; “and stop at our house.”
“I’m obliged to you, Sister Gill,” replied the preacher. “You have a fine community of young people here.”
“But they ain’t none of ’em converted. There’s a good deal of levity in Georger Chapel neighborhood. Now, Jane, now,—Jane Davis,—she’s a girl nobody can help likin’, but many’s the night that she’s danced away in sinful amusement. I wish you’d do somethin’ for her soul, Brother Gurley.”
“I’ll try,” responded the preacher heartily. He looked with a tender and indulgent eye at Jane, who was dividing her company into two parts, to play one innocent play before the camp broke up.
“Come away from here,” whispered Philip Welchammer to the girl beside him, seceding from the preacher’s group and addinghimself to Jane’s. “Tabitha Gill will be haulin’ us all up to the mourners’ bench pretty soon.”
They played “clap-out,” the girls sitting in their wraps all ready to depart, and the young men turning up their collars and tying on their comforters while waiting a summons. Jane was leader, and with much tittering and secrecy each young lady imparted to Jane the name of the youth she wished to have sit beside her. Dick Hanks was called first, and he stood looking at the array from which he could take but one choice, his lips dropping apart and his expression like that he used to display under the dunce-cap at Gum College. During this interval of silence the drip of sugar-water into troughs played a musical phrase or two, and the stirring and whinnying of the horses could be heard where they were tied to saplings. No rural Ohioan ever walked a quarter of a mile if he had any kind of beast or conveyance to carry him.
Then Dick of course sat down by the wrong girl, and was clapped out, and Dr. Miller was called. Dr. Miller made a pleasing impression by hesitating all along the line, and when he sat down by Mary Thompson her murmur of assent was a tribute to his sagacity. Cousin Tom Randall was summoned, and sung two or three lines of the “Quaker’s Courtship” before throwing himself on the mercy of Nora Waddell. He was clapped out, and said he always expected it. West of the Alleghanies was no place for him; they were even goin’ to clap him out up at uncle’s. Then the preacher came smiling joyfully, and placed himself by Tabitha Gill, where he was tittered over and allowed to remain; and one by one the seats were filled, the less fortunate men making a second trial with more success when their range was narrowed.
Everybody rose up to go home. But a great many “good-nights,” and reproaches for social neglect, and promises of futuredevotion to each other, had first to be exchanged. Then Jimmy Thompson, who had driven in his buggy expressly to take Jane Davis home, and was wondering what he should do with the preacher, saw with astonishment that Brother Gurley had Jane upon his own arm and was tucking her shawl close to her chin. Her black eyes sparkled within a scarlet hood. She turned about with Brother Gurley, facing all the young associates of her life, and said, “We want you all to come to our house after preachin’ to-morrow. The presidin’ elder will be there.”
“I don’t care nothin’ about the presidin’ elder,” muttered Jimmy Thompson.
“Goin’ to be a weddin’, you know,” explained John Davis, turning from assisting his brother Eck to empty the syrup kettles, and beaming warmly over such a general occasion. “The folks at meeting will all be invited, but Jane said she wanted to ask the young people separate to-night.”
“And next time I come around the circuit,” said Brother Gurley, gathering Jane’s hand in his before the company, “I’ll bring my wife with me.”
They walked away from the campfire, Jane turning her head once or twice to call “Good-night, all,” as if she still clung to every companionable hand. The party watched her an instant in silence. Perhaps some were fanciful enough to see her walking away from the high estate of a doctor’s wife in Lancaster, from the Hanks money, and Jimmy Thompson’s thrift, into the constant change and unfailing hardships of Methodist itinerancy. The dancing motion would disappear from her gait, and she who had tittered irreverently at her good mother’s labors with backsliders at the mourners’ bench would come to feel an interest in such sinners herself.
“Dog’d if I thought Jane Davis would ever marry a preacher!” burst out Jimmy Thompson, in sudden and hot disapproval.
“Don’t it beat all!” murmured Tabitha Gill. “And her an unconverted woman in the error of her ways! Jane’s too young for a preacher’s wife.”
“Jane’s fooled us all,” owned Philip Welchammer heartily. To keep intended nuptials a family secret until a day or a few hours before the appointed time was as much a custom of the country as was prying into and spying out such affairs. Surprising her friends by her wedding was, therefore, adding to Jane’s social successes; but only Dr. Miller could perceive her true reason for assembling her suitors at the last moment. While discarding them all, her hospitable nature clung to their friendship; she wished to tell them in a group the change she contemplated, so that no one could accuse her of superior kindness to another. Her very cruelties were intended mercies.
“That’s the way the pretty girls go,” sighed Cousin Tom Randall, seizing hold of Jane’s younger brother: “the preachers get’em. Come on, Eck; I have to be helped home.”
“I don’t see when he courted her,” breathed Dick Hanks, closing his lips after many efforts.
“Preachers is chain-lightnin’,” laughed Jimmy Thompson. “He’s been around often enough, and always stoppin’ there.”
“To-morrow after preachin’,” said John impressively, as he came forward after hastily covering the jars. “We’re goin’ to have a turkey-dinner, and we want you all to be sure to come. And next time Brother Gurley and Jane makes the circuit, we’ll have the infair at our house, too.”
“That’s just like Davises,” exclaimed one of the dispersing group in the midst of their eager promises; “they wouldn’t be satisfied unless they give the weddin’ and the infair both, and invited all quarterly meetin’ to set down to the table. I thought there was doin’s over at their house; but then they’re always bakin’ and fussin’.”
They could all picture a turkey-roast at Davis’s: the crisp, brown turkeys rising from their own dripping, squares of pone as yellow as buttercups, and biscuits calculated to melt whitely with honey from glass dishes of sweet-smelling combs. There would be every kind of vegetable grown in the Swamp, and game from the banks of the Feeder and Reservoir, pies and cakes and coffee, and at least eight kinds of preserves. Jane Davis and the preacher would stand up in front of the fireplace, and after the ceremony there would be a constant rattle of jokes from the presiding elder and his assistants. And over the whole house would hang that happy atmosphere which makes one think of corn ripening on a sunny hillside in still September weather. A dozen times the long tables would be replenished and supplied with plates, all the usual features of a turkey-roast at Davis’s being exaggerated by the importance of the occasion; and Aunt Davis would now and then forget to urge a guest,while she hurriedly wiped her eyes and replied to some expression of neighborly sympathy, that they had to lose Jane sometime, and it was a good thing for a girl to get a religious man. Then about dusk the preachers and their congregation would start again to chapel, and Jane, in Millersport clothes, would shine on the front seats as a bride, certain of an ovation when the after-meeting handshaking came. It would be a spite if she sat where tallow candles could drip on her from one of the wooden chandeliers, but she would enjoy hearing her bridegroom exhort, and he would feel like exhorting with all his might.
“Well, Doc,” said John Davis, turning from the deserted camp and sinking fire to place himself by the bridle of the young man from Lancaster.
“No,” answered Dr. Miller, “I’m obliged to you, John; but I’ll ride back to Millersport to-night.”
“You don’t feel put out?” urged John,conscious of a pang because all the good fellows who courted Jane could not become his brothers-in-law.
“No; oh, no,” protested Dr. Miller with chagrin. “She’d a right to suit herself. I’ll be around some other day.”
“We’d take it hard if you didn’t,” said John.
“But just now,” concluded the doctor, “I feel what a body might call—stirred-off.”
Dick Hanks was riding up close to Jimmy Thompson, while Jimmy unblanketed his mare and prepared for a deliberate departure.
“John, now,” remarked Jimmy,—“he brothered the preacher right up, didn’t he? They’ll be makin’ a class-leader o’ John yet, if they can git him to quit racin’ horses.”
“Which way you goin’ home, Jimmy?” inquired Dick Hanks anxiously.
“The long way, round by Georger Chapel, where I can look at the tombstones for company.Want to go along? We can talk over the weddin’, and you’re only two mile from home at our woods’ gate.”
“I guess I’ll take the short cut through the brush,” said Dick.
Jimmy drove through the clearing and fence-gap, where John Davis was waiting to lay up the rails again.
“What’s that?” said John, and they both paused to listen.
It was a sound of crashing and scampering, of smothered exclamation and the rasping and tearing of garments. Dick Hanks was whipping his steed through the woods, against trees, logs, and branches, as if George’s Chapel graveyard, containing the ghastly vault of his father, and George’s Chapel preacher, waving Jane Davis in one victorious hand, were both in merciless pursuit of him.