Chapter XXI

The coming of death to Tar Moorehead’s mother was without special dramatic intensity. She died in the night and only Doctor Reefy was in the room with her. There was no death-bed scene, the husband and children gathered about, a few last courageous words, weeping children, a struggle and then the soul taking flight. For a long time Doctor Reefy had been expecting her death and was not surprised. Having been summoned to the house, and the children having been sent upstairs to bed, he sat down to talk with the mother.

There were words said, that Tar, lying awake in a room above, could not hear. As he afterwards became a writer he often reconstructed in his imagination the scene in the room below. There was a scene in a story by Chekhov, the Russian. Readers will remember it--the scene in the Russian farmhouse, the anxious country doctor, the woman dying--wanting love before she died. Well, there had always been some kind of understanding between Doctor Reefy and his mother. The man never became his own friend, never talked intimately to him as Judge Blair did later, but he liked to think that the last talk of the man and woman in the little frame house in the Ohio town was full of significance to them both. Tar later found out it is in their closer relationships people live.

He wanted such relationships for his mother. She had seemed, in life, such an isolated figure. Perhaps he underestimated his father. The figure of his mother, as she lived later in his fancy, seemed so delicately poised, capable of quick flashing rushes of feeling. If you do not make quick and intimate connections with the life that goes on in others about you, you do not live at all. It is a difficult thing to do and causes most of the trouble in life, but you must keep trying. That is your job and if you shirk it you shirk life.

Later thoughts of that sort in Tar, concerning himself--often transferred to the figure of his mother.

Voices in a room downstairs in a small frame house. Dick Moorehead, the husband, was away in the country on a painting job. What do two grown people talk about at such a time? The man and woman in the room below laughed softly. After the Doctor had been there for some time Mary Moorehead went to sleep. She died in her sleep.

When she was dead the doctor did not awaken the children, but went out of the house and got a neighbor to drive off to the country for Dick and then, coming back, sat down. There were a few books about. At several times, during long winters, when Dick had no money he became a book agent--it enabled him to be abroad, going from house to house in the country, where he managed to make himself welcome though he sold but few books. As would be natural, the books he tried to sell were concerned mostly with the Civil War.

There would be a book about a character called “Corporal Si Klegg,” who enlisted in the war as a green country boy and became a corporal. Si was full of the naïveté of the free-born American country lad, never having taken orders before. He was, however, brave enough. The book delighted Dick and he read it aloud to the children.

There were other books, more technical, also concerned with the war. Was General Grant drunk during the first day of the battle of Shiloh? Why did not General Meade pursue Lee after the victory at Gettysburg? Did McClellan really want the south licked? Grant’s Memoirs.

Mark Twain, the writer, became a publisher and published Grant’s Memoirs. All of Mark Twain’s books were sold by agents who went from house to house. There was a special agent’s copy with blank ruled pages at the front. That was where Dick set down the names of people who agreed to take one of the books when it came out. Dick might have sold more books if he had not taken so much time for each sale. Often he would stop at some farmhouse several days. In the evening the family gathered about and Dick read aloud. He talked. It was fun to hear him if you weren’t depending on him for a living.

Doctor Reefy sat in the Moorehead house, with the dead woman in the next room, reading one of Dick’s books. Doctors see much of death at first hand. They know all people must die. The book in his hand, in plain cloth binding so much, in leather, half-Morocco--so much more. You do not sell many fancy bindings in a small town. Grant’s Memoirs was the easiest book to sell. Every family in the North thought they ought to have it. It was a moral duty, as Dick always pointed out.

Doctor Reefy sat reading one of the books and he had himself been in the war. Like Walt Whitman, he had been a nurse. He never shot any one, never shot at any one. What did the doctor think? Did he think of war, of Dick, of Mary Moorehead? He had married a young girl when he was himself almost an old man. There are some people you get to know a little when you are a child that you puzzle about all your life and you can’t quite make them out. Writers have a little trick. People think writers take their characters from life. They do not. What they do is to find some man or woman who, for some obscure reason, arouses their interest. Such a man or woman is invaluable to a writer. He takes the few facts he knows and tries to build a whole life. People are starting places for him and when he gets through, often enough, what results has little or nothing to do with the person he started with.

* * * * *

Mary Moorehead died during a night in the fall. Tar was then selling papers and John had gone to the factory. When Tar got home in the early evening, that day, his mother was not at the table and Margaret said she was not feeling well. It was raining outside. The children ate in silence, the depression that always came with one of the mother’s bad times hanging over the house. Depression is something on which the imagination feeds. When the meal was over Tar helped Margaret wash the dishes.

The children sat around. The mother had said she did not want anything to eat. John went off to bed and so also did Robert, Will and Joe. In the factory John was on piece work. Just when you have got your speed up and can make pretty good wages they change things on you. Instead of getting forty cents for polishing a bicycle frame they cut you down to thirty-two. What are you going to do? You’ve got to have a job.

Neither Tar nor Margaret was a bit sleepy. Margaret made the others go upstairs softly so as not to disturb mother--if she was asleep. The two children got their school lessons, then Margaret read a book. It was a new one the woman who worked in the postoffice had let her have. When you sit around like that it’s best to think of something outside the house. Only that afternoon Tar had been in a dispute with Jim Moore and another boy about baseball pitching. Jim said Ike Freer was the best pitcher in town because he had the most speed and the best curves and Tar said Harry Green was the best. Both being on the town team they did not of course pitch against each other so you couldn’t tell for sure. What you had to judge by was what you saw and felt. It was true Harry hadn’t as much speed but you felt, when he pitched, surer of something. Well, he had some brains. When he knew he wasn’t so good he said so and let Ike go in, but if Ike wasn’t so good he got bull-headed and if you took him out he got sore.

Tar thought of a lot of arguments with which to lay out Jim Moore when he saw him next day and then he went and got the dominoes.

The dominoes were slid silently across the boards of the table. Margaret had put her book aside. The two children were in the kitchen, that also served as a dining room, and there was an oil lamp on the table.

You can play a game like dominoes a long time and not think about anything much.

When Mary Moorehead was having one of her bad times she breathed irregularly. Her bedroom was right next the kitchen and at the front of the house was the parlor where the funeral was afterwards held. When you wanted to go upstairs to bed you had to go right through the mother’s bedroom, but there was an offset in the wall and if you were careful you could go up without being seen. Mary Moorehead’s bad times were coming more and more regularly. The children had almost got used to them. When Margaret had got home from school the mother was in bed and looked very pale and weak and Margaret wanted to send Robert off for the doctor but the mother said, “Not yet.”

A grown person like that and your mother.... When they say “no,” what are you going to do?

* * * * *

Tar kept pushing the dominoes across the table and now and then looked at his sister. Thoughts kept coming. “Harry Green may not have as much speed as Ike Freer, but he’s got a head. In the long run a good head will tell. I like a man to know what he’s doing. I guess there are ball players in the big league who are bone-heads all right, but that makes no difference. You take a fellow who can do a lot with what little he’s got. There’s a fellow I like.”

Dick was in the country, painting the inside of a new house Harry Fitzsimmons had built. He had taken the job on a contract. When Dick took a job on a contract he hardly ever made any money.

He couldn’t figure much.

Anyway, it kept him busy.

You sit in a house, playing dominoes with your sister, on a night like that. Who cares who wins?

Now and then either Margaret or Tar went to put a stick of wood in the stove. Outside the house it rained and the wind came in through a crack under the door. There were always holes like that in the houses the Mooreheads lived in. You could throw a cat through the cracks. In the winter the mother, Tar and John went around and nailed strips of wood and pieces of cloth over the cracks. It kept out some of the cold.

Time passed, perhaps an hour. It seemed longer. The fears Tar had been having for a year, John and Margaret also had. You go along thinking you are the only one who thinks and feels things, but if you do you’re a fool. Others are thinking the same thoughts. In General Grant’s Memoirs it tells how when a man asked him whether or not he was afraid when he was going into a battle he said, “Yes, but I know the other man is afraid, too.” Tar hadn’t remembered many things about General Grant, but he remembered that.

All of a sudden, that night when Mary Moorehead died, Margaret did something. As the two sat playing dominoes they could hear the mother breathing irregularly in the next room. The sound was soft and broken. Margaret got up in the middle of a game and tiptoed softly to the door. She stayed listening a while, hidden so the mother couldn’t see, then she came back into the kitchen and made a sign to Tar.

She had got all worked up just sitting there. That was it.

It was raining outside and her coat and hat were upstairs, but she did not try to get them. Tar wanted her to take his cap but she wouldn’t.

The two children got outside the house and Tar knew at once what was up. They went along the street to Doctor Reefy’s office, not saying a word to each other.

Doctor Reefy wasn’t there. There was a slate on the door and on it was written, “Back at 10 o’clock.” It might have been there for two or three days. A doctor like that, who hasn’t much practice and doesn’t want much, is pretty careless.

“He might be at Judge Blair’s,” Tar said, and they went there.

At a time like that, when you are afraid something is going to happen, what you do is to remember other times when you were scared and everything turned out all right. It is the best way.

Well, you are going for the doctor and your mother is going to die, although you don’t know it yet. Other people you meet in the street go along just as they always do. You can’t blame them.

Tar and Margaret walked to Judge Blair’s house, both getting sopping wet, Margaret without her coat and hat. There was a man buying something in Tiffany’s drug store. Another man went along with a shovel on his shoulder. What do you suppose he’s been digging, on a night like this? In the hallway of the City Hall two men were in an argument. They had got into the hallway to keep dry. “I said it was Easter when it happened. He denied it. He don’t read his Bible.”

What were they talking about?

“The reason Harry Green is a better baseball pitcher than Ike Freer is that he’s more of a man. Some men are just naturally born strong. There have been famous pitchers in the big leagues who didn’t have much speed or curves either. They just stood up there and used their noodle and they lasted a long time. They lasted twice as long as the ones who had nothing but strength.”

The best writers to be found in the newspapers Tar sold were the ones who wrote about ball players and sports. They had something to say. If you read them every day you learned something.

Margaret was getting soaking wet, through and through. If her mother knew she was out like that, without any coat or hat, she would be worried. People going along under umbrellas. It seemed long hours since Tar had come home from taking his papers. You get a feeling like that sometimes. Some days go by like a shot. Sometimes, in ten minutes, so many things happen it seems hours. It’s that way when two race horses are fighting it out down the stretch, at a ball game when some one is at bat, two men out, two men maybe on bases.

Margaret and Tar got to Judge Blair’s house and sure enough the doctor was there. It was warm and bright inside, but they didn’t go in. The Judge came to the door and Margaret said, “Tell the doctor, please, that mother’s sick,” and she had hardly got the words said when out the doctor came. He went right along with the two children and when they were leaving the Judge’s house the Judge came and patted Tar on the back. “You’re soaked,” he said. He never spoke to Margaret at all.

The children took the doctor home with them and then went upstairs. They wanted to pretend to the mother that the doctor had just come by accident--to make a call.

They went up the stairs as softly as they could, and when Tar got into the room where he slept with John and Robert he undressed and got into dry clothes. He put on his Sunday suit. It was the only one he had that was dry.

Downstairs he could hear his mother and the doctor talking. He did not know that the doctor was telling his mother about the trip in the rain. What happened was that Doctor Reefy came to the foot of the stairs and called him down. No doubt he intended to call both children. He made a little whistling sound and Margaret came out of her room dressed in dry clothes just as Tar was. She also had to put on her best clothes. None of the other children heard the doctor’s call.

They went down and stood by the bed and their mother talked, a little. “I’m all right. Nothing’s going to happen. Don’t worry,” she said. She meant it, too. She must have thought she was all right, up to the last. It was a good thing, if she had to go, that she could go like that, just slip off during her sleep.

She said she would not die, but she did. When she had spoken a few words to the children they went back upstairs, but for a long time Tar did not sleep. Neither did Margaret. Tar never asked her afterwards, but he knew she didn’t.

When you are like that you can’t sleep. What do you do? Some try one thing, some another. Tar had heard about the schemes of counting sheep and he tried it sometimes when he was too excited to sleep, but it wouldn’t work for him. He tried a lot of other things.

You can imagine you are grown up and that you have become something you would like to be. You can imagine you are a big league baseball pitcher or a railroad engineer or a race track driver. You are an engineer and it’s dark and rainy and your engine is swinging along the tracks. Best not to imagine yourself a hero in an accident or anything. Just fix your eyes on the rails in front. You are cutting right through a wall of darkness. Now you are among trees, now in an open country. Of course, when you are being an engineer like that, you are always driving a fast passenger train. You don’t want to fool around with a freight.

You think of that and other things. That night, now and then, Tar heard his mother and the doctor talking. Sometimes they seemed to be laughing. He couldn’t just tell. It might only have been the wind outside the house. Once he was quite sure he heard the doctor run across the kitchen floor. Then he thought he heard a door open and close softly.

It might have been he did not hear anything at all.

The worst of all for Tar and Margaret and John and all of them was the next day and the next and the next. A house full of people, a sermon to be preached, the man coming with the coffin, the trip to the graveyard. Margaret got out of it the best. She worked around the house. They couldn’t make her stop. A woman said, “No, let me do it,” but Margaret did not answer. She was white and kept her lips tightly closed together. She went and did it herself.

People came to the house Tar had never seen, worlds of people.