by Graeme Davis
“We did everything we could for her, had the best doctor in the neighborhood, and nursed her day and night. Mr. Weaver was real kind, she being only a distant relation, but nothing could raise her up, and she died. We had a real nice funeral, Elder Fuller attending it, and we buried her in our own lot next to Mr. Bliven. It seemed dreadful quiet, and so queer to think at this time she’d gone for good and all, and that she’d got to stay now where she was, and not keep coming back in her restless, changing kind of way whether she was satisfied or not. I really did miss her, and I believe Mr. Weaver did, too, though he wouldn’t own it.
“And here she was, and here was I half crazy over making up a telegraph to tell John Nelson about it.
“She’d been gone just exactly three weeks to a day, she having died the 11th of March, and it being now the second day of April.
“I was sitting at the window about ten o’clock in the forenoon peeling potatoes for dinner. I’d brought them into the sitting-room because it had a better lookout and was lighter and pleasanter in the morning. It was an early spring that year, though it came out real wintry afterwards, and the grass was starting up, and the buds showing on the trees, and somehow I got thinking about Maria. She was always glad when it came round spring, and she could get about more and visit with folks, and I was thinking where she was, and how she could ever stand it with her changing ways, to stay put, as you might say. Just then I looked out from the window over towards the river and the bridge, and I saw a woman coming. The minute I saw her I says to myself, ‘She walks something like Maria Bliven.’ She was coming along pretty quick, though not exactly hurrying, and she had somehow a real Bliven way about her. She came straight on in the direction of our house, and the closer she came, the more she walked like Maria. I didn’t think it was her, of course, but it gave me a queer feeling to see anybody that favored her so much. The window was open, and I got nearer and nearer to it, and at last stretched my head out and stared down the street, a potato in one hand and the knife in the other. The sun was warm when you were out in it, exercising, and I saw the woman untying her bonnet-strings and throwing them back. Dear me! that was a real Bliven trick. I’d seen Maria do it herself fifty times. She was getting pretty nigh now, and the first thing I knew she looked up at the house and nodded her head just as Maria used to when she came home from visiting. Then in a minute I saw her plain as day. It was Maria Bliven, sure enough; there was no mistaking her.
“I see by your face what you are thinking about; it’s what strikes every soul I ever tell this to. You’re wondering why I take this so cool, as if it wasn’t anything so much out of the common.
“Well, first place, it all happened a good many years ago, and I’ve gone through a heap of things since then, good and bad both, enough to wear off some of the remembering. And again, somehow, I took it kind of cool even then. It appeared to come about so natural, just in the course of things, as you might say, and only what you might have expected from Maria with her fitty, unsatisfied ways. And then—well, you’ll see it yourself as I go on—there was something about Maria and the way she took it, and seemed to expect us to take it, that kept us from getting excited or scared or so dreadful amazed.
“Why, what do you think was the first and only single remark I made as she came in at the door just as she had come in fifty times before after visiting a spell? I says, ‘Why, good-morning, Maria, you’ve come back.’ And she says, ‘Good-morning, Lyddy; yes, I have.’
“That was all, outside, I mean, for I won’t deny there was a swimmy feeling in my head and a choky feeling down my throat, and a sort of trembly feeling all over as I see Maria drop into a chair and push her bonnet-strings a mite further back. She sat there a few minutes, I don’t recollect just how long, and I don’t seem to remember what either one of us said. Appears to me Maria made some remark about its being warm weather for the beginning of April, and that I said ’twas so. Then sometimes I seem to remember that I asked her if she’d walked all the way or got a lift any part of it. But it don’t hardly appear as if I could have said such a foolish thing as that, and anyways, I don’t recollect what she answered. But I know she got up pretty soon and said she guessed she’d go up and take off her things, and she went.
“There was one potato dished up that day for dinner with the skin on, and it must have been the one I was holding when I first caught sight of Maria down the road. So that goes to show I was a good deal flustered and upset, after all. The first thing was to tell Mr. Weaver. He was in the barn, and out I went. I didn’t stop to break the news then, but gave it to him whole, right out. ‘Polios,’ I says, all out of breath, ‘Maria Bliven’s come back. She’s in her bedroom this minute, taking off her things.’ I never can bring back to my mind what he said first. He took it kind of calm and cool, as he always took everything that ever happened since I first knew him. And in a minute he told me to go and telegraph to John Nelson. You see, besides John’s being Maria’s nearest relation, he had charge of the little property she’d left, and so ’t was pretty important he should know right off that she hadn’t left it for good.
“Now I’ve got back to where I begun about that telegraph. Well, I sent it, and John came over from Hanover next day. I can’t go on in a very regular, straightahead way with this account now, but I’ll tell what went on as things come into my head, or I’ll answer any questions you want to ask as you appear so interested. Everything went on natural and in the old way after the first. Of course, folks found out pretty quick. Bradford’s a small place now, and ’twas smaller then, and I don’t suppose there was a man, woman, or child there that didn’t know within twenty-four hours that Maria had come back. There was some talk naturally, but not as much as you’d think. Folks dropped in, and when they’d see her looking about as she did before she left, and we going on just the same, why, they got used to it themselves, and the talk most stopped.
“But though they thought she was the same as she used to be, I knew she wasn’t. It’s hard to put it into words to make you understand, but Maria hadn’t been many hours in the house before I saw she was dreadful changed. First place, she didn’t talk near so much. Before she left she was a great hand to tell about all her doings after she’d been on one of her visits. She’d go all over it to Mr. Weaver and me, and it was real interesting. But she never said one single word now about anything that had happened since we saw her last, where she’d been, what she’d done, or anything. She and me, we were together by ourselves a great deal, more than ever before, in fact, for somehow the neighbors didn’t come in as much as they used to. Maria was always pleasant to them, but though they said she was just the same as ever, with nothing queer or alarming about her, I saw they didn’t feel quite at home with her now, and didn’t drop in so often. But sit together, she and me, hours at a time as we might, never one word of what I couldn’t help hankering to know passed Maria’s lips. Why didn’t I ask her, you say? Well, I don’t know. Seems to me now, as I think it all over, that I would do it if I could only have the chance again. You wouldn’t hardly believe how I wish and wish now it’s too late that I had asked her things I’m just longing to know about, now I’m growing old and need to look ahead a little, and particular now Mr. Weaver’s gone, and I’m so hungry to know something about him, we having lived together most fifty years, you know. But there was something about Maria that kept me from asking. And sometimes I think there was something that kept her from telling. I feel sure she was on the point of making some statement sometimes, but she couldn’t; the words wouldn’t come; there didn’t seem to be any way of putting the information into words she knew, or that was used in our part of the country, anyway. Dear me, what lots of times I’ve heard her begin something this way, ‘When I first got there, I’—‘Before I come back, I’—Oh, how I’d prick up my ears, and most stop breathing to hear! But she’d just stop, seem to be a-thinking about something way, way off, and never, never finish her remarks. Yes, I know you wonder I didn’t question her about things. As I said
before, I can’t hardly explain why I didn’t. But there was something about her looks and her ways, something that, spite of her being the old Maria Bliven I had lived in and out with so many years, somehow made her most like a stranger that I couldn’t take liberties with.
“Mr. Weaver and me, of course, we talked about it when we were all by ourselves, mostly at night, when it was still and dark. It did seem real strange and out of the common someways. Neither one of us had ever had anything like it happen before to anybody we knew or heard of. Folks who’d died, generally—no, always, I guess, up to this time—died for good, and stayed dead. We were brought up Methodists; we were both professors, and knew our Bibles and the doctrines of the church pretty well. We knew about two futures for the soul—the joyful, happy one for the good and faithful, and the dreadful one for the wicked. And we’d always been learnt that to one of these localities the soul went the very minute, or second, it left the body. That there were folks that held different opinions, and thought there was a betwixt and between district where you stayed on the road, where even the good and faithful might rest and take breath before going into the wonderful glory prepared for them, and where the poor, mistaken, or ignorant, or careless souls would be allowed one more chance of choosing the right, we didn’t know that. I never’d heard of that doctrine then, though a spell after that I hardly heard anything else.
“I don’t know as I told you about Elder Janeway from down South somewhere coming on board with us one summer. He was writing a book called Probation and he had a way of reading out loud what he was writing in a preaching kind of way, so that you couldn’t help hearing it all, even if you wanted to. And all day long, while I sat sewing or knitting, or went about my work, baking and ironing and all, I’d hear that solemn, rumbling voice of his going on about the ‘place of departed spirits,’ the Scripture proofs of there being such a place, what it was like, how long folks stayed there, and I don’t know what all. That was just before I came down with the fever that I most died with, as I was telling you the other day, and they say this talk of the Elder’s appeared to run in my mind when I was light-headed and wandering, and I’d get dreadful excited about it.
“But at the time I was telling about I hadn’t heard this, so Mr. Weaver and I would talk it over and wonder and guess and suppose. ‘Oh, Polios,’ I whispered one night, ‘you don’t presume Maria is a—ghost?’ ‘No more than you be,’ says Mr. Weaver, trying to whisper, but not doing it very well, his voice naturally being a bass one. ‘Ghosts,’ he says, ‘are all in white, and go about in a creepy way, allowing there are any such things, which I don’t.’ ‘But what else can she be, Polios,’ I says, ‘she having died and been buried, and now back again? Where’s she, or her soul or spirit, been these three weeks, since that?’
“‘Well, come to that, I don’t know,’ Mr. Weaver would say. And he didn’t. No more did I.
“Where had she come from that morning when she appeared so unexpected as I sat peeling the potatoes? Not a single soul had seen her, as far as we could find out, before the very minute I catched sight of her at the turn of the road. Folks had been at their windows or doors, or in their yards all along that very road for miles back, and on the two different roads that come into the main one there were plenty of houses full of people, but nobody, not one of them, saw her go by. There was Almy Woolett, whose whole business in life was to know who passed her house, and what they did it for. She was at her front window every minute that forenoon, and it looked right out on the road, not fifteen foot back of where I first saw Maria, and she never saw her.
“Then, as to what clothes she came in, folks have asked me about that, and I can’t give them a mite of satisfaction. For the life of me I can’t remember what she had on before she went up to her room and took off her things. I’m certain sure she wasn’t wearing what she went away in, for that was a shroud. In those days, you know, bodies was laid out in regular appropriate burying things, made for the occasion, instead of being dressed all up like living beings, as they do nowadays. And Maria didn’t come back in that way, or I might have thought her a ghost sure enough. Sometimes I seem to recollect that she had on something sort of grayish, not black or white, but just about the color of those clouds out there, just over the mill, almost the color of nothing, you might say. But there, I ain’t sure, it’s so long ago. But I know she had on something I never’d seen her wear before, and she never wore again, for when she came downstairs she was dressed in her old blue gingham, with a white tie apron. I own up I did look about everywheres I could think of for the things she came in, but I couldn’t find them high nor low. Nor a sign of them was there in her bedroom, in the closet or chest of drawers, or her little leather trunk, and I’m certain sure they wasn’t anywheres in the house when I ransacked for them, and that wasn’t two hours after Maria came back.
“It’s only little specks of things I can tell you about that happened after this; anything, I mean, that had to do with her queer experience. I watched her close, and took notice of the least thing that seemed to bear on that. She complained a good deal of being lonesome, and when I recommended her going out more and visiting with the neighbors, she’d say so sorrowful and sad, ‘There ain’t anybody of my kind here, not a single one; I’m all alone in the world.’ And, take it one way, she was.
“One day she and me were sitting together in the kitchen, and one of Billy Lane’s boys came to the door to borrow some saleratus.* After he’d gone, I says to Maria, ‘I told you, didn’t I, that Billy Lane died last month? He died of lockjaw, and it came on so sudden and violent he wasn’t able to tell how he hurt himself. They found a wound on his foot, but don’t know how it came.’ ‘Oh,’ says Maria, as quiet and natural as you please, ‘he told me he stepped on a rusty nail down by the new fence.’ I was just going to speak up quick, and ask how in the world he could have told her that, when he didn’t die till a week after she did, when she started, put on one of her queer looks, and says, ‘There, I forgot to shut my blinds, and it’s real sunny,’ and went upstairs.
“The first death that we had in Bradford after her coming back was little Susan Garret. We’d heard she was sick, but didn’t know she was dangerous, and were dreadful surprised when Mr. Weaver came in to supper and told us she was dead. I felt sorry for Mrs. Garret, a widow with only one other child, and that a sickly boy, but I must say I was surprised to see how Maria took it to heart. She turned real white, kept twisting her hands together, and sort of moaning out, ‘Oh, I wish I’d knowed she was going, I wish I’d knowed. If she’d only wait just a minute for me,’ and crazy, nervy things like that. I had to get her upstairs and give her some camphor and make her lay down, she was so excited like. She didn’t calm down right away, and when I heard her say sort of to herself, ‘Oh, if I could only a seen her!’ I says, ‘Why, Maria, you can see her. We’ll run right over there now. I guess they’ve laid the poor child out by this time, and they’ll let us see the body.’ Such a look as Maria gave me, real scornful, as you might say, as she says, ‘That! See that! What good would it do to see that, I want to know.’ Why, I tell you it made me feel for a minute as if a body was of no account at all, leastways in Maria’s opinion. And yet she’d used hers to come back in anyways! ’Twas quite a spell before she cooled down, and she never explained why it worked her up so, and I’m sure I don’t know. Whether it was because she thought little Susan had gone to the place she herself had come away from, and wished she had known in time to go back along with her just for company, or again, whether she felt bad because she hadn’t had a chance to give the child some advice or directions that would have helped her along on the road that Maria knew and nobody else probably in all that county did know, why, I haven’t an idea.
“I believe I told you a ways back that after she got home Maria all the time had a kind of look and way as if she’d done something she hadn’t ought to done, or was somewhere she hadn’t any business to be, somehow as if she belonged somewhere else.
“In the old
days she wasn’t ever satisfied long at a time in any place, but she was always pleased to get back, leastways for a spell. But from the minute she came this time she was troubled and worried. And that grew on her. She was always sort of listening and watching, as if she expected something to happen, starting at the least bit of noise, and jumping if anybody knocked or even came by the gate. She got dreadful white, and so poor she didn’t weigh no more than a child, and such little trifling things worked her up. For instance, we had heard a spell before, Mr. Weaver and me, that Mr. Tewksbury over at South Newbury was dead, and we believed it, not knowing anything to the contrary. But one day Mr. Weaver came in and he says, ‘Lyddy, you recollect we heard the other day that Silas Tewksbury was dead? Well, I met him just now coming over the bridge.’ Maria was in the room, and first thing we knew she gave a kind of screech, and put her two hands together, and she says, ‘Oh no, no, no, not another of us! I thought ’t was only me. Oh, deary, deary me, that’s what they meant. They said it wouldn’t end with me; they begged me not to try; and now I’ve started it, and it won’t never stop. They’ll all come back, all, every single one of ’em,’ and she cried and moaned till we were at our wits’ ends what to do. It wasn’t till she found out that Mr. Tewksbury hadn’t ever died at all, but ’t was his brother at White River Junction that was taken off, that she got quiet.
“So it went on, Maria sort of wearing out with worrying and grieving about something she couldn’t seem to tell us about except by little hintings and such, and Mr. Weaver and me, we wondering and surmising and talking all alone nights in whispers. We didn’t understand it, of course, but we’d made up our minds on one or two points, and agreed on them. Maria had never been to heaven, we felt sure of that. There were lots of reasons for that belief, but one is enough. Nobody, even the most discontented and changeablest being ever made, would leave that place of perfect rest and peace for this lonesome, dying, changing world, now would they? And as for the other locality, why, I just know certain, certain sure she’d never been there. That would have showed in her face, and her talk, and her ways. If it is one little mite like what I’ve always been learnt it is, one minute, one second spent there would alter you so dreadfully you’d never be recognized again by your nighest and dearest. And Maria was a good woman, a Christian woman. Her biggest fault was only her fretting and finding fault, and wanting to change about and find something better. Oh no, no; wherever Maria Bliven had come from that morning in April it wasn’t from that place of punishment, we felt sure of that, Mr. Weaver and me. As I said once before, we hadn’t heard then that there was any other place for the dead to go to. But from things Maria let drop, and the way she behaved, and our own thinking and studying over it, we began to come to this, that maybe there was a stopping-place on the road before it forked—to put it into this world’s sort of talk—where folks could rest and straighten out their beliefs and learn what to expect, how to look at things, and try and be tried. Last summer I heard a new word, and it struck me hard. Mrs. Deacon Spinner told me her son had gone off to learn new ways of farming and gardening and such. She said they had places nowadays where they learnt boys all that and they called them ‘Experiment Stations.’ The minute I heard that I says to myself, ‘That’s the name! That’s what the place where Maria came back from, and that Elder Janeway knew so much about, had ought to be called, an Experiment Station.’ But at that time, in Maria’s day, I’d never heard of this name no more than I had of Elder Janeway, and the place or state he was always writing and talking about. But, after all, I don’t believe I care to go back on what ma and pa and all the good folks of old times held on those subjects. There wasn’t any mincing matters those days; ’twas the very best or the very worst for everybody as soon as they departed this life, and no complaints made. I’m certain sure any of those ancestors of mine, particular on the Wells side—that was pa’s, you know—would have taken the worst, and been cheerful about it, too, rather than have had the whole plan upset and a half-and-half place interduced. But then, if there ain’t such a locality, where in the world did Maria come from that time? I tell you, it beats me.
