The Eighth Day

by Thornton Wilder

  We did not choose the day of our birth nor may we choose the day of our death, yet choice is the sovereign faculty of the mind. We did not choose our parents, color, sex, health, or endowments. We were shaken into existence, like dice from a box. Barriers and prison walls surround us and those about us—everywhere, inner and outer impediments. These men and women with the aid of observation and memory early encompass a large landscape. They know themselves, but their self is not the only window through which they view their existence. They are certain that one small part of what is given us is free. They explore daily the exercise of freedom. Their eyes are on the future. When the evil hour comes, they hold. They save cities—or, having failed, their example saves other cities after their death. They confront injustice. They assemble and inspirit the despairing.

  But what do these men and women have faith in?

  They are slow to give words to the object of their faith. To them it is self-evident and the self-evident is not easily described. But men and women without faith, they are articulate. They are constantly and loudly expatiating on it: it is “faith in life,” in the “meaning of life,” in God, in progress, in humanity—all those whipped words, those twisted signposts, that borrowed finery, all that traitor’s eloquence.

  There is no creation without faith and hope.

  There is no faith and hope that does not express itself in creation. These men and women work. The spectacle that most discourages them is not error or ignorance or cruelty, but sloth. This work that they do may often seem to be all but imperceptible. That is characteristic of activity that never for a moment envisages an audience.

  John Ashley was of this breed. No historic demands were laid upon him and we do not know how he would have met them. He was late-maturing and little given to reflection. He was almost invisible. For a time many tried to catch a glimpse of him through his children. He was a link in a chain, a stitch in a tapestry, a planter of trees, a breaker of stones on an old road to a not yet clearly marked destination.

  Ashley had no idea who his rescuers were. Perhaps a miracle is like that—simple, natural, and unearthly. Their actions had been swift, precise, and silent. They had smashed the overhanging lamps. His guards had lunged about in the dark, shouting; they had fired a shot or two and then ceased. His handcuffs fell from his wrists. He had been led out of the car—more carried than led—into a grove. One of these friends had placed his hand upon the saddle of a horse. Another had given him a suit of worn blue overalls, a purse containing fifteen dollars, a small compass, a map, and a box of matches—all in silence and darkness. An old and shapeless hat had been placed on his head. Finally one of them lit a match and again he saw their faces. These railway porters did not look like Negroes, but like the grotesquely blackened performers in a minstrel show. The tallest of them pointed in a certain direction, then slowly his extended finger moved fifteen degrees to the right.

  Ashley said, “Thank you.”

  They disappeared. He heard no sound of horses’ hoofs.

  Simple, natural, and unearthly.

  Left alone, he lit a match and consulted his compass. The friend had first pointed to the southwest then to the west. Ashley knew that he was beside the railroad yard near the station at Fort Barry. Sixty miles to the west was the Mississippi River. He changed his clothes, rolling his prison garb into a bundle which he attached to the pommel. He found a bag of apples and a bag of oats hanging from the saddle.

  He was filled with wonder. He laughed softly. “Gee whillikers! Gee whillikers!”

  He had been prepared to die, but to John Ashley death is never now—there remains always a month, day, hour, even a minute to live. He had never known fear. Even when the sentence was read in court, even when he sat in the train on what the newspapers would certainly be calling his “last journey,” he had felt no fear. To a John Ashley worst never comes to worst.

  When the match was lit in the grove he had looked at the horse and the horse had looked at him. He now mounted her and waited. She moved forward slowly. Did she see a path through the thick undergrowth? Was she returning to her stall? After ten minutes he again lit a match and consulted his compass. They had been moving to the southwest. He split an apple and shared it with her. They rode on. At the end of an hour they came to a broad country road and turned right. Twice he heard riders coming from the east behind him. He had time to leave the road and conceal himself among the trees. He heard the reverberations of a wooden bridge beneath them; they went down the bank and drank from the stream. They resumed the journey at a brisker pace. Ashley felt younger hourly. He was filled with an indefensible, an impermissible, happiness. He was out of that jail where he had suffered more in body than in mind. From time to time he dismounted and walked beside the horse. He felt the need to talk. The horse seemed to like being talked to; in the diffused starlight he could see her ears rising and falling.

  “Bessie? . . . ? Molly? . . . ? Belinda? . . . ? Someone gave you to me. It’s not often one receives presents like that—a present as big as a whole life. Will I ever know why six men risked their lives to save mine? Will I die without knowing that?

  “No! Your name is Evangeline, bringer of good tidings. . . . ? It’s been strange, hasn’t it? No one knew when you were foaled that you would have a part in a mysterious adventure—in an act, like this, of generosity and courage. No one knew when you were broken—it must be a black and frightening thing to be broken, Evangeline!—that one day you would carry a man on your back and give him a chance to live. . . . ? You are a sign. We’ve both been marked for something.”

  After these conversations he felt even more buoyant. Not forgetting to listen for oncoming riders, he even sang fragments of his favorite songs, “’Nita, Juanita,” and “No gottee tickee, No gettee shirtee, At the Chinee laundryman’s,” and the song of his fraternity at engineering school, “We’ll be true until we die to the brothers in Kappa Psi.”

  The west began to brighten. Dawns are poor things in Coaltown. He was overwhelmed with the wonder of it. “Yes, that’s what they mean when they say a ‘new day’!” He came to a crossroad and read the signs; to the south, “Kenniston, 20 m.,” to the northeast, “Fort Barry, 14 m.,” to the west, “Tatum, 1 m.” He passed through Tatum, blank and pallid in the early light. Two miles beyond it he turned left into a deep wood, following a brook. He found seven yards of rope attached to his saddle and tethered Evangeline. He poured some oats into the crown of his hat (blew on it, sniffed it, took some into his mouth) and set it before her. In the bag of apples he found some baked potatoes. He glanced briefly from time to time at Evangeline.

  Ashley had ridden horses as a boy, spending his summer vacations on his grandmother’s farm. She—the old independent eccentric gray-eyed Marie-Louise Scolastique Dubois Ashley—was the person he most loved until his twenty-first year and the person who had most rigorously loved him. She was, besides many other things, an unlicensed veterinary doctor. The farmers brought their animals to her from far and wide. She infuriated many a farmer with her denunciation of his husbandry. She moved among horses like one knowing their language. Cattle, dogs and cats, birds, deer, even skunks exchanged intelligence with her. By day and often far into the night under a kerosene lamp John helped her with injections, boluses, cataplasms; together they had delivered colts and calves; they had put many an animal to sleep. He remembered some of her injunctions: “Never look a horse or a dog or a child in the eye for longer than a few seconds; it shames them. Don’t stroke a horse’s neck, slap it; and after you’ve slapped it, slap your own thigh. Don’t do anything sudden with your feet. Feet and teeth are what they use to attack their enemies and to defend themselves. Joe Dekker’s always closing his stall door with a kick of his foot; his horses hate him. If you’re going to have to use a whip, let the horse see you at a distance striking yourself with it. When you give him oats, sniff it first; blow it all over the place; eat some, and then give it to him as though you hated to part with it.” Ashley had owned a horse and b
uggy in Coaltown, having paid a bottom price for Bella, an unamiable beast. He had driven Bella for ten years in a friendship to which only a ballad could do justice. He now stole some glances at Evangeline. She was no longer young, but she had been well cared for and was soundly shod.

  He fell off to sleep, though he was tormented by fleas. He had written Beata daily from the jail, without mentioning the fleas. He had told her how he missed his bed and the sheets smelling of lavender. He awoke in the early afternoon. It was intensely hot, even in the deep forest. “Come on, Evangeline. Let’s follow the stream and find a pool. It’s time for a bath.”

  And there was a pool. He tethered Evangeline for the last time. He lay in the water and closed his eyes. “Beata knows now. Roger will have heard. Yes, Porky will have heard first. ‘Mama, Papa got away.’” He tried to imagine his own future and to plan for it, but he was deficient in that aspect of the imagination which has to do with taking shrewd care of oneself. He had little if any faculty for making plans; he had no experience of worry. People who are habitually anxious forge plans day and night. Serener natures are incomprehensible to them; they appear to drift and procrastinate. But John Ashley was laying plans without being aware of it. He spent eight days sleeping in the woods. Each evening he awoke with a project formed in his mind. Plans were the gifts of sleep. Waking on that first evening near Tatum, it was clear to him that he was a Canadian on his way to work in the mines of Chile. He was not a mining engineer, but he was an engineer with experience in mining. He knew very little about Chile, but the little he knew suited his situation. Chile was far. It was part of the folklore in engineering schools that no bright graduate went to Chile, if he could help it. The conditions of life and work there were massively difficult. You worked the nitrate mines in intolerable heat on a desert where no rain ever fell. The best copper mines in the Andes, with one famous exception, were located above eleven thousand feet. You couldn’t take a wife there. There was no entertainment. You couldn’t even drink above ten thousand feet—not what a man calls drinking. His goal was Chile. Not only was Ashley going to Chile, he would become a Chilean.

  The next morning he learned that he was to descend the Mississippi River on a lumber barge. Five years before he had borrowed a surrey and taken his family to see the river. The trip had been taken in the spirit of an outing, in preference to a train trip to Chicago, as being cheaper. The Ashleys had sat long on the bluffs above the stream, completely satisfied by the spectacle. They had taken a great interest in the various barges, short and squat or long and narrow, that floated down the river or laboriously chugged their way up it. A passerby informed them that the long thin ones were lumber barges from the north on their way to New Orleans. “Swedish fellas on ’em. Can’t speak twenty words of American.” Ashley had not been in swimming since his student days, but he thought he could swim to midstream.

  On the third evening it was revealed to him that he was crossing the country too quickly. When he reached the river he must walk boldly into some rural community—as primitive a one as possible—in order to purchase some food and to sell Evangeline. He could not expose himself to that danger until his hair and beard had grown. Each morning and evening he leaned over a pool and examined his reflection. His head had been shaved in jail on the night that his sentence was pronounced, five days before his train journey. Now each morning there was greater promise of a brown plush mat. A foolish honey-colored beard was forming. He needed this to cover a scar on his left jaw; he had fallen on a hay fork thirty years ago while working on his grandmother’s farm. He must remain hidden for a time in this thinly populated region. He now stayed two nights in each camping site. He massaged his scalp.

  Other projects became successively clear to him—ways of reaching the southern Pacific Coast, ways of earning money. There were some problems to which the counsels of sleep offered no solution: how, in time, he would write to his wife, how he would send her money, how he would learn what was passing at “The Elms.”

  In the meantime the land was swarming with John Ashleys. Colonel Stotz in Springfield began receiving the first of hundreds of letters and telegrams—within the year they were to arrive from Australia and Africa—telling him where Ashley had been seen; many of them demanded their reward (it had risen to four thousand dollars) by return post. Travelers between the ages of twenty and sixty were being pulled off their horses, dragged from their buggies, pursued across fields and their hats snatched off. Sheriffs became sick and tired of all the indignant and often terrified bald men who were brought before them. Newsboys cried “Extra! Extra!” Ashley had been found living on an Indian reservation in Minnesota, his face stained with walnut juice. Ashley had been found sequestered in an expensive private institution for the insane in Kentucky. Great wealth and important connections were increasingly associated with the fugitive.

  Ashley made nicks in his saddle to mark the days, but even so lost track of them. The oats and the bag of food came to an end. Berries were beginning to redden; he found watercress. A change came over horse and rider; they grew younger. When they took to the road, Evangeline picked up her heels smartly. Ashley became aware that her coat shone, even before he took to currying her with fistfuls of twigs and moss. He had the sensation that she had accompanied hunted men before, that she was no stranger to pursuit and secrecy. The traffic on the road increased. She heard the oncoming hoof beats before her master did and found hiding. When they aroused barking dogs she took to a gallop. When, for the third time, he dismounted to walk beside her she showed her displeasure and it came to him suddenly that hounds might have been put upon his scent. When his mood inclined toward dejection during the day she moved toward him and tried to distract him; she snorted into the water of the brook or she pawed the ground. When he was afflicted with diarrhea she gazed soberly into the distance; she counseled fortitude.

  Riding along after midnight he would occasionally see the light of a lamp from the second story of a farmhouse. To a family man the sight suggests sitting up beside an ailing child. The thought would fill him with a tumult of emotion. He learned that he must limit the occasions when he could permit himself to think of the past. Memories pressed upon him, uncalled, all but unendurable. He held in his arms for the first time—wonder of wonders—the newborn Lily. He surprised for the first time a look of fear directed toward him on the face of his son, Roger, three years old. (He had had to be severe; he had had to spank him. The boy had twice broken away from his mother’s hand and run toward the horses in Coaltown’s main street.) He returned from work and was met again by Constance’s clamorous welcome, and heard Lily rebuking her: “You don’t have to act like a pack of dogs when Papa comes home!” From time to time it had been necessary for him to spend the night, on the mines’ business, in Fort Barry—he heard Sophia saying, “When Papa’s not in the house I don’t sleep, really. The house is different.” And Beata, the good, the patient, the silent, the beautiful. “Evangeline, I’m a family man. That’s all. I have no talents. I’m not even an engineer. All I have to show, living and dying, is that I’m a family man. Girl, why did this meaningless, crazy thing happen to me?”

  At Coaltown, even in his home, Ashley had not been a talkative man, yet he now talked copiously to Evangeline.

  “I know why you’re looking so handsome. You’re thinking what I’m thinking. We can’t go on this way for five hundred miles. I must sell you and you want to fetch me a good price. Goodbyes are hard. They’re like death—like my grandmother’s death. The only thing to do about them is to know them, to take them completely into yourself, and then put them out of your mind. They’ll come back to you of their own accord when you need them. It’s no good to reach out after them. . . . ? I told you all about my grandmother who did so much for horses. I’ve been thinking about her more and more on this trip we’re making. She’s come back to me when I need her. She taught me how not to be afraid. Have you noticed that no hunters have shown up to disturb us, no farmers have come into these woods to m
ark their trees, no sheriffs have been sitting up all night waiting for us to pass by? It would be a pity, wouldn’t it, if this adventure of ours, that started out with such bravery and generosity—shucks, it would be a pity if it ended up with another little train ride to Joliet. But better men than you and I have been ambushed, greater hopes than ours have been brought down like a house of cards. Sure, Evangeline, if the spectacle of one defeat or of a hundred defeats discouraged a man, civilization wouldn’t have gone anywhere. There’d be no justice on earth, no hospitals, no homes, no friendships like yours and mine. There’d just be moaning people, creeping about. Let’s not do anything foolish.”

  Ashley had told her all about the trial.

  “There’s nothing awful about dying; the only awful thing about dying is the things you leave unfinished. Can you imagine it? I left no provision for the education of my children. How could I have been so stupid? Beata set aside a little money every week for Lily’s voice training; it was eaten up by the trial, of course. I suppose I assumed that the boy could fend for himself and that I could send the younger girls to better schools when the time came. If Beata had firmly called my attention to it, I could have done something about it. I could have hunted for another job, or insisted on a raise, or have really pushed those inventions of mine. . . . ? Mind you, I’m not blaming Beata. The fault’s mine. I was happy and stupid. Happy, asleep, and stupid.”