For a while she found it impossible to speak, and he seemed to understand this, and made no attempt to question her. But presently she felt her tears rise and flow down over her drawn cheeks; and he must have seen them too, for he laid his hand on hers, and said in a low voice: ‘Won’t you tell me what is troubling you?’
She shook her head, and he did not insist: but after a while he said, in the same low tone, so that they should not be overheard: ‘Charity, what do you know of your childhood, before you came down to North Dormer?’
She controlled herself, and answered: ‘Nothing, only what I heard Mr Royall say one day. He said he brought me down because my father went to prison.’
‘And you’ve never been up there since?’
‘Never.’
Mr Miles was silent again, then he said: ‘I’m glad you’re coming with me now. Perhaps we may find your mother alive, and she may know that you have come.’
They had reached Hamblin, where the snow-flurry had left white patches in the rough grass on the roadside, and in the angles of the roofs facing north. It was a poor bleak village under the granite flank of the Mountain, and as soon as they left it they began to climb. The road was steep and full of ruts, and the horse settled down to a walk while they mounted and mounted, the world dropping away below them in great mottled stretches of forest and field, and stormy dark blue distances.
Charity had often had visions of this ascent of the Mountain but she had not known it would reveal so wide a country, and the sight of those strange lands reaching away on every side gave her a new sense of Harney’s remoteness. She knew he must be miles and miles beyond the last range of hills that seemed to be the outmost verge of things, and she wondered how she had ever dreamed of going to New York to find him.…
As the road mounted the country grew bleaker, and they drove across fields of faded mountain grass bleached by long months beneath the snow. In the hollows a few white birches trembled, or a mountain ash lit its scarlet clusters; but only a scant growth of pines darkened the granite ledges. The wind was blowing fiercely across the open slopes; the horse faced it with bent head and straining flanks, and now and then the buggy swayed so that Charity had to clutch its side.
Mr Miles had not spoken again; he seemed to understand that she wanted to be left alone. After a while the track they were following forked, and he pulled up the horse, as if uncertain of the way. Liff Hyatt craned his head around from the back, and shouted against the wind: ‘Left—’ and they turned into a stunted pine-wood and began to drive down the other side of the Mountain.
A mile or two farther on they came out on a clearing where two or three low houses lay in stony fields, crouching among the rocks as if to brace themselves against the wind. They were hardly more than sheds, built of logs and rough boards, with tin stove-pipes sticking out of their roofs. The sun was setting, and dusk had already fallen on the lower world, but a yellow glare still lay on the lonely hillside and the crouching houses. The next moment it faded and left the landscape in dark autumn twilight.
‘Over there,’ Liff called out, stretching his long arm over Mr Miles’s shoulder. The clergyman turned to the left, across a bit of bare ground overgrown with docks and nettles, and stopped before the most ruinous of the sheds. A stove-pipe reached its crooked arm out of one window, and the broken panes of the other were stuffed with rags and paper. In contrast to such a dwelling the brown house in the swamp might have stood for the home of plenty.
As the buggy drew up two or three mongrel dogs jumped out of the twilight with a great barking, and a young man slouched to the door and stood there staring. In the twilight Charity saw that his face had the same sodden look as Bash Hyatt’s, the day she had seen him sleeping by the stove. He made no effort to silence the dogs, but leaned in the door, as if roused from a drunken lethargy, while Mr Miles got out of the buggy.
‘Is it here?’ the clergyman asked Liff in a low voice; and Liff nodded.
Mr Miles turned to Charity. ‘Just hold the horse a minute, my dear: I’ll go in first,’ he said, putting the reins in her hands. She took them passively, and sat staring straight ahead of her at the darkening scene while Mr Miles and Liff Hyatt went up to the house. They stood a few minutes talking with the man in the door, and then Mr Miles came back. As he came close, Charity saw that his smooth pink face wore a frightened solemn look.
‘Your mother is dead, Charity; you’d better come with me,’ he said.
She got down and followed him while Liff led the horse away. As she approached the door she said to herself: ‘This is where I was born … this is where I belong.…’ She had said it to herself often enough as she looked across the sunlit valleys at the Mountain; but it had meant nothing then, and now it had become a reality. Mr Miles took her gently by the arm, and they entered what appeared to be the only room in the house. It was so dark that she could just discern a group of a dozen people sitting or sprawling about a table made of boards laid across two barrels. They looked up listlessly as Mr Miles and Charity came in, and a woman’s thick voice said: ‘Here’s the preacher.’ But no one moved.
Mr Miles paused and looked about him; then he turned to the young man who had met them at the door.
‘Is the body here?’ he asked.
The young man, instead of answering, turned his head toward the group. ‘Where’s the candle? I tole yer to bring a candle,’ he said with sudden harshness to a girl who was lolling against the table. She did not answer, but another man got up and took from some corner a candle stuck into a bottle.
‘How’ll I light it? The stove’s out,’ the girl grumbled.
Mr Miles fumbled under his heavy wrappings and drew out a match-box. He held a match to the candle, and in a moment or two a faint circle of light fell on the pale aguish heads that started out of the shadow like the heads of nocturnal animals.
‘Mary’s over there,’ someone said; and Mr Miles, taking the bottle in his hand, passed behind the table. Charity followed him, and they stood before a mattress on the floor in a corner of the room. A woman lay on it, but she did not look like a dead woman; she seemed to have fallen across her squalid bed in a drunken sleep, and to have been left lying where she fell, in her ragged disordered clothes. One arm was flung above her head, one leg drawn up under a torn skirt that left the other bare to the knee: a swollen glistening leg with a ragged stocking rolled down about the ankle. The woman lay on her back, her eyes staring up unblinkingly at the candle that trembled in Mr Miles’s hand.
‘She jus’ dropped off,’ a woman said, over the shoulder of the others; and the young man added: ‘I jus’ come in and found her.’
An elderly man with lank hair and a feeble grin pushed between them. ‘It was like this: I says to her on’y the night before: if you don’t take and quit, I says to her …’
Someone pulled him back and sent him reeling against a bench along the wall, where he dropped down muttering his unheeded narrative.
There was a silence; then the young woman who had been lolling against the table suddenly parted the group, and stood in front of Charity. She was healthier and robuster looking than the others, and her weather-beaten face had a certain sullen beauty.
‘Who’s the girl? Who brought her here?’ she said, fixing her eyes mistrustfully on the young man who had rebuked her for not having a candle ready.
Mr Miles spoke. ‘I brought her; she is Mary Hyatt’s daughter.’
‘What? Her too?’ the girl sneered; and the young man turned on her with an oath. ‘Shut your mouth, damn you, or get out of here,’ he said; then he relapsed into his former apathy, and dropped down on the bench, leaning his head against the wall.
Mr Miles had set the candle on the floor and taken off his heavy coat. He turned to Charity. ‘Come and help me,’ he said.
He knelt down by the mattress, and pressed the lids over the dead woman’s eyes. Charity, trembling and sick, knelt beside him, and tried to compose her mother’s body. She drew the stocking over the dreadful gliste
ning leg, and pulled the skirt down to the battered upturned boots. As she did so, she looked at her mother’s face, thin yet swollen, with lips parted in a frozen gasp above the broken teeth. There was no sign in it of anything human: she lay there like a dead dog in a ditch. Charity’s hands grew cold as they touched her.
Mr Miles drew the woman’s arms across her breast and laid his coat over her. Then he covered her face with his handkerchief, and placed the bottle with the candle in it at her head. Having done this he stood up.
‘Is there no coffin?’ he asked, turning to the group behind him.
There was a moment of bewildered silence; then the fierce girl spoke up. ‘You’d oughter brought it with you. Where’d we get one here, I’d like ter know?’
Mr Miles, looking at the others, repeated: ‘Is it possible you have no coffin ready?’
‘That’s what I say: them that has it sleeps better,’ an old woman murmured. ‘But then she never had no bed.…’
‘And the stove warn’t hers,’ said the lank-haired man, on the defensive.
Mr Miles turned away from them and moved a few steps apart. He had drawn a book from his pocket, and after a pause he opened it and began to read, holding the book at arm’s length and low down, so that the pages caught the feeble light. Charity had remained on her knees by the mattress: now that her mother’s face was covered it was easier to stay near her, and avoid the sight of the living faces which too horribly showed by what stages hers had lapsed into death.
‘I am the Resurrection and the Life,’ Mr Miles began; ‘he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.… Though after my skin worms destroy my body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.…’
In my flesh shall I see God! Charity thought of the gaping mouth and stony eyes under the handkerchief, and of the glistening leg over which she had drawn the stocking.…
‘We brought nothing into this world and we shall take nothing out of it—’
There was a sudden muttering and a scuffle at the back of the group. ‘I brought the stove,’ said the elderly man with lank hair, pushing his way between the others. ‘I wen’ down to Creston’n bought it … n’ I got a right to take it outer here … n’ I’ll lick any feller says I ain’t.…’
‘Sit down, damn you!’ shouted the tall youth who had been drowsing on the bench against the wall.
‘For man walketh in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain; he heapeth up riches and cannot tell who shall gather them.…’
‘Well, it are his,’ a woman in the background interjected in a frightened whine.
The tall youth staggered to his feet. ‘If you don’t hold your mouths I’ll turn you all out o’ here, the whole lot of you,’ he cried with many oaths. ‘G’wan, minister … don’t let ’em faze you.…’
‘Now is Christ risen from the dead and become the first-fruits of them that slept.… Behold, I show you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump.… For this corruptible must put on incorruption and this mortal must put on immortality. So when this corruption shall have put on incorruption, and when this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in Victory.…’
One by one the mighty words fell on Charity’s bowed head, soothing the horror, subduing the tumult, mastering her as they mastered the drink-dazed creatures at her back. Mr Miles read to the last word, and then closed the book.
‘Is the grave ready?’ he asked.
Liff Hyatt, who had come in while he was reading, nodded a ‘Yes’, and pushed forward to the side of the mattress. The young man on the bench, who seemed to assert some sort of right of kinship with the dead woman, got to his feet again, and the proprietor of the stove joined him. Between them they raised up the mattress; but their movements were unsteady, and the coat slipped to the floor, revealing the poor body in its helpless misery. Charity, picking up the coat, covered her mother once more. Liff had brought a lantern, and the old woman who had already spoken took it up, and opened the door to let the little procession pass out. The wind had dropped, and the night was very dark and bitterly cold. The old woman walked ahead, the lantern shaking in her hand and spreading out before her a pale patch of dead grass and coarse-leaved weeds enclosed in an immensity of blackness.
Mr Miles took Charity by the arm, and side by side they walked behind the mattress. At length the old woman with the lantern stopped, and Charity saw the light fall on the stooping shoulders of the bearers and on a ridge of upheaved earth over which they were bending. Mr Miles released her arm and approached the hollow on the other side of the ridge; and while the men stooped down, lowering the mattress into the grave, he began to speak again.
‘Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live and is full of misery.… He cometh up and is cut down … he fleeth as it were a shadow.… Yet, O Lord God most holy, O Lord most mighty, O holy and merciful Saviour, deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death …’
‘Easy there … is she down?’ piped the claimant to the stove; and the young man called over his shoulder: ‘Lift the light there, can’t you?’
There was a pause, during which the light floated uncertainly over the open grave. Someone bent over and pulled out Mr Miles’s coat — (‘No, no – leave the handkerchief,’ he interposed) – and then Liff Hyatt, coming forward with a spade, began to shovel in the earth.
‘Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of His great mercy to take unto Himself the soul of our dear sister here departed, we therefore commit her body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust …’ Liff’s gaunt shoulders rose and bent in the lantern light as he dashed the clods of earth into the grave. ‘God – it’s froze a’ready,’ he muttered, spitting into his palm and passing his ragged shirt-sleeve across his perspiring face.
‘Through our Lord Jesus Christ, who shall change our vile body that it may be like unto His glorious body, according to the mighty working, whereby He is able to subdue all things unto Himself …’ The last spadeful of earth fell on the vile body of Mary Hyatt, and Liff rested on his spade, his shoulder blades still heaving with the effort.
‘Lord, have mercy upon us, Christ have mercy upon us, Lord have mercy upon us.…’
Mr Miles took the lantern from the old woman’s hand and swept its light across the circle of bleared faces. ‘Now kneel down, all of you,’ he commanded, in a voice of authority that Charity had never heard. She knelt down at the edge of the grave, and the others, stiffly and hesitatingly, got to their knees beside her. Mr Miles knelt, too. ‘And now pray with me – you know this prayer,’ he said, and he began: ‘Our Father which art in Heaven …’ One or two of the women falteringly took the words up, and when he ended, the lank-haired man flung himself on the neck of the tall youth. ‘It was this way,’ he said. ‘I tole her the night before, I says to her …’ The reminiscence ended in a sob.
Mr Miles had been getting into his coat again. He came up to Charity, who had remained passively kneeling by the rough mound of earth.
‘My child, you must come. It’s very late.’
She lifted her eyes to his face: he seemed to speak out of another world.
‘I ain’t coming: I’m going to stay here.’
‘Here? Where? What do you mean?’
‘These are my folks. I’m going to stay with them.’
Mr Miles lowered his voice. ‘But it’s not possible – you don’t know what you are doing. You can’t stay among these people: you must come with me.’
She shook her head and rose from her knees. The group about the grave had scattered in the darkness, but the old woman with the lantern stood waiting. Her mournful withered face was not unkind, and Charity went up to her.
‘Have you got a place where I can lie down for the night?’ she asked. Liff came up, leading the buggy out of the night. He looked from one to the other with his feeble smile. ‘She’s my mother.
She’ll take you home,’ he said; and he added, raising his voice to speak to the old woman: ‘It’s the girl from lawyer Royall’s – Mary’s girl … you remember.…’
The woman nodded and raised her sad old eyes to Charity’s. When Mr Miles and Liff clambered into the buggy she went ahead with the lantern to show them the track they were to follow; then she turned back, and in silence she and Charity walked away together through the night.
XVII
Charity lay on the floor on a mattress, as her dead mother’s body had lain. The room in which she lay was cold and dark and low-ceilinged, and even poorer and barer than the scene of Mary Hyatt’s earthly pilgrimage. On the other side of the fireless stove Liff Hyatt’s mother slept on a blanket, with two children – her grandchildren, she said – rolled up against her like sleeping puppies. They had their thin clothes spread over them, having given the only other blanket to their guest.
Through the small square of glass in the opposite wall Charity saw a deep funnel of sky, so black, so remote, so palpitating with frosty stars that her very soul seemed to be sucked up into it. Up there somewhere, she supposed, the God whom Mr Miles had invoked was waiting for Mary Hyatt to appear. What a long flight it was! And what would she have to say when she reached Him?
Charity’s bewildered brain laboured with the attempt to picture her mother’s past, and to relate it in any way to the designs of a just but merciful God; but it was impossible to imagine any link between them. She herself felt as remote from the poor creature she had seen lowered into her hastily dug grave as if the height of the heavens had divided them. She had seen poverty and misfortune in her life; but in a community where poor thrifty Mrs Hawes and the industrious Ally represented the nearest approach to destitution there was nothing to suggest the savage misery of the Mountain farmers.
Ethan Frome, Summer, Bunner Sisters Page 29
