She falls into my bed, her hands still tied. I whisper: if we get caught. Will she have to be tied to her bed? Our folks are fast asleep, but the straw tick of my bed rustles and crackles with our flouncing.
You can’t sleep with me, I tell her afterwards. Go back to your charmber. But she won’t. I have to lead her. I tuck her in. Now you go to sleep and don’t get up again. I kiss her goodnight, on her mouth.
I love Charity. Once I was her dollbaby, now I am her love. I understand this first fact about love, that there must be some part of pity in it, that love is not just passion but compassion. I love her because I weep for her, and I weep for her because I’m all she has for love.
I dream and scheme of taking her away.
Especially must I dream and scheme when her belly begins swelling. I’d thought I was always out in time; there must have been some left over one time.
All day my mother screams at her: Who was it?
I think my father guesses but he doesn’t say, and my mother would never think such a thing.
Night after night my mother conjectures: Ferrenzo Allyn? Reuben Temple? Maybe Seth came back in the middle of the night? A passing stranger? The Jenners’ hired man? And she keeps raging at Charity: Oh I wish you could talk! Who in Sam Hill was it did it?
Charity’s kept in her room all the time. I do the milking now, and while I milk I think: I will just take her and we will go far away, where we can’t be found, and nobody knows us, we will just escape to some other place where we can live and be happy evermore, and if the baby is an idiot….
If the baby is an idiot I would have to let it die.
In the middle of the night I will saddle the mare Mistress and snitch some victuals from the larder, and Charity and I will ride away and be in Massachusetts before morning.
But I sleep through the night, exhausted by my thoughts and held by my dreams, dreams of flight, of flying. Only the sun wakes me and then it is late. There is nobody in the house but me. I wait. Soon the wagon comes back, my father alone on the buckboard. “Had yer breakfust yet?” he asks me. “I guess you’ll have to fix yer own. Me and you’ll have to fend fer ourselfs a while.”
“Where’s Ma and Charity?”
“I jist put ’em on the train, down to The Bridge. They’re goin’ clear out to Illinoy, to stay with Emmeline a spell. Took ever blasted cent I had to my name to pay fer the fare. Guess me and you’ll have to look fer some job a work, or eat nought but beans.”
The sawmill has been closed for some time, the charcoal pits have been cold a long time, there isn’t much work. Trees for charcoal have to be at least twenty-five years old, and most of those are gone.
My father humbles himself to ask Enos Jenner if he’s got any work for us to do. Jenner at first says no, but then he bargains with my father and gets a good price for a new shingle roof. I’m taken out of school to help. There’s only three in the school now, and the school closes, the three left have to walk more than a mile to the school down at The Bridge. One of them is Violate, and I wish I were still going to school so I could walk her there and back.
Once, on Jenner’s roof, while we’re working, out of nowhere my father spits out his mouthful of nails and says to me, “You know, if ye wa’nt near ’bout big as me, I’d beat yer hide off.”
But that’s all he ever said about what I did to Charity. Living alone together, the two of us, hauls us closer together. We are good friends. I’m all he’s got left. I’ve always felt closer to my father than to anybody else, except Charity, we’re so alike. As he says, I’m near about big as him, and he is big.
He talks to me many a time and oft, he who is not a talking man, as if in this solitude without a carping wife to check his tongue he must say all that he has left unsaid. Although the charcoal pits have long been cold, sometimes he goes and lights one, and makes a small bit of charcoal because this was all he’d ever known to do and doesn’t know how to quit for good. Sometimes I go with him, and listen to him, and he says, once, “I’d train ye how to keep a good charcoal pit, jist as my dad trained me, but what good? Better ye learned a more timely trade.”
When he says he doubts that I will stay in Dudleytown, I protest that I’ll stay as long as he. Now he tells me of the ancient prognostication of Asenath Prenner, that the seventh child in a Montross family will be the last. But there were only six of us? I say. No, you had another sister who died young. But I don’t believe those superstitious things, I say. Well look, he says, already you’re the last.
Already I’m the last. I learn from him of this town and its past and its Curse. His grandfather, old Mountain Horse Montross, talked to him in his dotage of seeing and knowing, at the end of the last century, Abial Dudley, the last of the Dudleys. “Old Bial” in his nineties considered myself to be “Mayor of Dudleytown”; the dignity of this office helped him obscure the fact that he was penniless, that the town kept him alive by farming him out, each year, to the lowest bidder at the pauper auction. Some said, later, that it was Old Bial who brought down the Curse upon the town for this indignity. But the Curse had been there from the beginning, when Old Bial’s father and uncle had founded the town, in 1747. No, the Curse had come with them, from England, through generations of ill-fated Dudleys going all the way back, in some medieval time, to the very first, whose name was given him “from the dodder lea.” A lea is a meadow. A dodder is a parasitic vegetable. Old Bial was a parasitic vegetable in his last days, pretending he was a mayor guiding the town to greatness, for which the town owed him his existence.
The better sons of Dudleytown always left, and some found their way to prominence elsewhere, as soldiers, statesmen, judges, professors. Why don’t I leave? Because I’m not a better. Those who stayed were those who can work the land. Like my father. Like me. Oh, I have thoughts of being a soldier, I would like to be a statesman or a judge, I might even be a professor. No, I’m not in school more. I can’t even finish school. What would I like to be? I’d like to be mayor of Dudleytown and keep it from dying.
But its illness is already fatal. Two epidemics hit the town, in 1774 and again in 1813, and killed off large sections of the people. A town must grow to live, and this town has not grown since it was born. A blight has fallen on the land itself: the hardwoods have reclaimed these former pineries. The little pine still remaining is too little, and the hardwoods take its sun and water.
I brood on dodder lea: that dodder lea, that Dudley, that Dudleytown itself has been a parasite on this land, and this land has rejected it, with violence. We are not wanted here. It bothers me that my father goes so often to brood over the cold charcoal pits and to light small fires in them, out of memory.
The few of us who’re left ought best cleave together in our isolation and infirmity. But we do not. Shipwreck survivors on a sinking raft sing songs and hold hands. But we do not. We are all strangers here. These few families live on their islands and speak to no one, or speak sharply. Once, my father says, the men used to work together at cider making in the fall, and beer making in the spring. For the great beer making, one man would raise hops, another wintergreen, another would gather sassafras root and twigs, another prince’s pine, another birch and spicebush, and in the spring they would bring all this together and make their wonderful beer and have their great beer spree. I sampled it more than once myself. But now the men brew their own, each his own, a second-rate suds, and drink it all alone.
And they drink it faster than they can make it. There’s not a sober man around. That means my father too. That means me as well, more often than not. The gas in the beer highs the head and holds off the horrors of this life.
My father comes home with a nosebleed and drinks a pint to stanch the flow. I ask him how he got it. Ferrenzo Allyn, he says.
“Renz?” I say. “Renz hit you? Where is he? I’ll even the score for you, with more than just a nosebleed!”
“He’s down at the corners,” my father says. “But you’ll have ter wake him fust. He’s clobbered cold. Nothin’ wrong with me,
I jist tripped in the way of a lucky punch.”
“What’d he hit you for?”
“Aw, I hit ’im fust. Him and his mouth, scallionin’ me. Cal’late mebbe he’s miff ed on account a that gull Violate a his is still holdin’ a torch fer you, son. Mighty snide he says to me, ‘It ’pears yer family keeps gettin’ smaller, Mister Montross,’ says he. And says he, ‘Why’nt you’n Dan git out and make it smaller yet?’ So I says, ‘Whut’re ye so het up on the subjick fer? Whut business a yours is it?’ And then he says, ‘I hanker to see ye both gone. Dan aint good fer but mischief, and you aint good fer but nothing nowadays.’ ‘I aint, huh?’ says I. ‘Wal, mebbe I’m still good enough to learn the likes of Ferrenzo Allyn a mite of respeck fer his betters!’ And he snorts and says, ‘Haw. ’Twant fer ye bein’ sech a old codger, I’d make ye eat them wuds!’ So I says, ‘I aint so old as ye figure.’ And I hit him. Knocked ’im clean off his feet. He got up quick, and swung a few at me, but he missed ever time. So I knocked him off his feet again.”
My father pours himself another pint. I tingle at his telling, proud of him. His nose has stopped bleeding; he touches it lightly and says, “He’d a never got in that one good lick ’cept I tripped. Sort of fell into his fist. Made me mad as hops, then. So I really laid him out. Guess he’s still laying there, havin’ bad dreams.” My father laughs, a short one, an ironic one. “One thing about this town bein’ so small,” he says, “aint much traffic on the roads more. Guess he’ll lay there a good while before anybody stumbles on ’im to pick ’im up.”
“I’d like,” I say, “to go down there and wait till he wakes, then put him out again.”
“Naw,” my father says. “Guess the poor bastard’s had enough fer today. Have some beer.”
But I should have. Oh, I should have. I should have beaten him meek and unmanned that very day. I should have pounded him into the next county. Renz Allyn is a big bully who will come to no good, who will become the town’s rowdy, who will torture small animals, who will afflict old men, who will anguish old women, who will beat his wife, who will be Violate. He will beat her to death and be sent to jail, and then Dudleytown will be empty. But that is some years ahead yet. It is not what I know but what I dream.
Yet I dream this too: my father burning. How did I dream it? The terror of the dream wakes me. I wake, and rise, and search the house. I light a lantern. The Eli clock reads half past twelve. My father’s bed is empty. This is no dream now. But there is nothing burning. I call him. Perhaps he’s only out to the privy. I go there, and it is not burning, but he is not there. I call him loudly, I call him east and west. Only an owl answers. In the black night I see no smoke nor fire nor burning. My dream said, there are stones all around. Said my dream, the brook is near. My dream had it, a pit, a pit with coals. I run, the moon abreast and mocking me that I cannot outrun it. Down to the branch, and leaping, the lantern flying in my thrashing hand, across the branch, cloth ripping and I knowing I’m still in my nightshirt and not caring, up to the road, and down the road to the corner, and there into the mill road, the pit road, and down it, the soles of my feet scorning the sharp pebbles. Ahead in the road, out of reach of my lantern, a figure. “Pappa!” I call to the figure, but the figure scurries into the brush, and out of sight. Maybe only a deer. But on two legs? I run on, on my two legs, leaping. Past the Bardwell store, dark and boarded up. Past the Bardwell house, falling. Past the place where Zadock’s house stood until I took the nails out of it. The road levels, then drops again, steeply. Past the sawmill, its big blade broken and propped against a tree. Then I smell the smoke. The smoke which is not just smoke, not coals alone smouldering. Burning cloth, and hair, and something other, so foul I slow and pause and nearly stop, and nearly turn to run the other way. But I go on. To the pit. Leaving the road and crashing down to it through brush. There is no light, no light from it. Just smoke. I raise my lantern high. The smoke pours and rolls from a long loglump lying on the coals. A loglump with arms and legs. I set the lantern down. There is no way to climb down into the pit. Beside the pit is an oak bucket, old, which the pitkeepers drank from. Empty. I fill it in the brook. I pour it into the pit. I fill it again and pour it again. Steam hisses and sizzles and the smoke billows more. I fill the bucket again and pour it into the pit. I fill it again and pour it into the pit. Until the coals are out. Steam still rises from the figure, but the coals are out, out enough for me to walk on them with my bare feet, though still they burn. I grab the figure and roll it over. It is black as pitch but the very shape of it I can recognize, in my own image. Owls say Who. I answer them in screams. I hear laughter. Owls do not laugh. I rage against the dark. These stones have been here too long. Yell at the dark: I’ll get you for this. Owls say Who. Drag the figure out of the coals, into the cool grass, listen for a heartbeat, ear to hot scorched breast. Hear heartbeat, but is my own. The heat of the body chills me. I’m cold. I’m cold and all alone.
Where are you? Come out and show yourself and let me kill you. But only laughter. I run. I’ll race him home. I’ll beat him home, and then I’ll beat him. I can outrun anybody. I can outrun them all. His house is high up toward Dudleytown Hill, but I can run faster uphill than most can run down. But I am out of breath when I reach it. I pound on the door until his old mother comes with her lantern, but I can only pant at her. She stares at me and says my name and asks why I’m out of breath. I can only pant at her.
At last I grab my heaving chest with both hands and get enough air to say, but weakly, “Where’s Renz?”
“Fast asleep like every decent soul at such an hour,” she says.
“I don’t believe it,” I pant at her. “He’s not here.”
“What do ye want with him at this time a night, and you in your nightshirt at this time a year?”
“I want to see him. I don’t believe he’s here. He’s not here.”
“You tell me whut ye want ’im fer, and I’ll fetch him,” she says.
“I just want to see if he’s here,” I pant at her.
“Then come,” she says, “and see.” She with her lantern and I with mine go into the house and through the parlor to a chamber. There is a bed in the chamber, and someone beneath the covers. I pull back the covers. It is Renz. His eyes are closed, he seems fast asleep. But his brow is damp. Is that sweat on his brow? And isn’t his breathing hard? “See?” says Mrs. Allyn. “Now d’ye want to wake him?”
I stare a while longer. Is that sweat on his brow? Is he breathing hard? A bad dream? He could have run around the back of the house and come through the back door quietly while I was panting at his mother on the front stoop.
“Well?” says Mrs. Allyn. “Do ye want to wake him, or no?”
“No,” I say. “I’ll see him later.”
I go home. I despise myself. But there’s nothing I can do until the first light. The empty house haunts me. Father, why did you go to the pits so much? And did he club you over the head before he pushed you in? You did not trip and fall, did you? Or have a stroke? Or faint? You felt hands pushing you in, or you felt a stick breaking over the back of your head. I hope the stick blacked you out so that you did not feel the burning. I hope you did not feel the burning.
I talk to him until the first light. Then I hitch the wagon and drive to the pit for him. I back the horses and the wagon to where he lies in the early light, blackened and cold. I lift him, I lift my father up, up from the ground, and into the wagon. I take him home.
Then I search the house for any money. I have not a cent. In the burnt pocket of his jacket I find a burnt purse with a few pennies in it. Not enough. I search their chamber, the drawers of my mother’s bureau. Nothing. I could ask the Jenners for a loan, but I don’t. I unhitch the wagon and put the bridle on the mare Mistress and ride her at a trot, back down the road past the pits, on down the mountain to The Bridge. At the railway station, I say to the telegraph man, “My father’s died, and I must send for my mother in Illinois, but I have no money except this.” I show him the pennies. “No
other kin?” he asks. They are all gone too, I tell him. But my mother will pay you when she comes. “I’m not allowed to give credit,” he says. “Government law.” He looks at my pennies. “You’ve got enough there for postage, haven’t ye?” he says. I frown at him. “Wal, tell ye whut,” he says. “You could work it off. Sweep out the station, and dust everything. All right? Now what do ye want to say in the message?”
FATHER WAS BURNED IN THE CHARCOAL PITS LAST NIGHT AND DIED. DANIEL.
The morning I spend in sweeping the station until every bit of dirt and dust is up. Then with an oilrag I began dusting the benches and counters. The telegraph man stops me before noon. “That’s enough,” he says. “You can go.” Then he asks me, “Can you read?” I nod, and he hands me the slip of yellow paper. “Just came in,” he says.
BODY WONT KEEP TILL I GET THERE. SEE HE IS BURIED PROPER. MOTHER.
I go home. Father, do you want a box? You felled trees, Father, and you cut them up, and you burned them to make charcoal to make iron, and the charcoal burned you. Do you want a box of wood? The box will rot, and you will too. You don’t need a box of wood, do you, Father? I bury him on the hill behind our house, in a hole as deep as I can dig. Before I fill in the dirt, I fetch the family Bible from his chamber. On the family page, where it says Clendenin Murdock Montross, Born April 24, 1843, I write: Died March 30, 1895, and then I carry the Bible up to the grave on the hill, and open it, and try to find something in it that will do. I don’t know the Bible well. Most of the things I read in it make me feel like laughing. It takes me a long time to find something appropriate. But there is no hurry. I keep reading, until I find this, which is what Job said:
For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease. Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, and the stock thereof die in the ground; yet through the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant. But man dieth, and wasteth away: yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he? As the waters fail from the sea, and the flood decayeth and drieth up: so man lieth down, and riseth not: till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep. O that thou wouldest hide me in the grave, that thou wouldest keep me secret, until thy wrath be past, that thou wouldest appoint me a set time, and remember me! If a man die, shall he live again? All the days of my appointed time I wait, till my change come.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1 Page 42
