Chapter XI: Part 11

The little house was full of symbols of malice, indeed seemed to have been equipped with the properties of some sort of malicious magic. Chenille balls dangling from table covers. Jagged leaves of variously colored kid forming a penwiper. A framed garland on an easel--fat callas and asters of dyed cotton under glass. Vases in the form of crucibles, one deeply crimped along the violet edge. A box of butterflies on pins. Each taboret wore a mock wedding veil. The cabinet organ stood by the window, a miniature temple, all niches and balustrades and pillars; and on the stops were printed in Gothic letters the row of enigmatic words: TREMOLO, DOLCE, VOX HUMANA....

Many words were uttered in that house whose meaning was equally obscure. For Alwyn’s grandfather, who was known as “the greatest talker in the country,” used words which no one else understood, words which he did not understand, and words which do not exist, to swell a passionate theme, to confound his neighbors in an argument, and for their own sake. He would say, for example, “My farm was the very apocalypse of fertility, but the renter has rested on his oars till it is good for nothing,” or “Manifest the bounty to pass the salt shaker in my direction.” Something of the Bible, something of an Irish inheritance, something of a liar’s anxiety, made of his most ordinary remark a strange and wearisome oratory.

For he was a liar. Diligently he turned the poor past into a golden age in which he had stridden, triumphed, above all persuaded; and still in his old age he labored to persuade man, woman, and child. On summer evenings Alwyn would see him in the pale-green garden like a stage setting, urging upon a neighbor his version of his life, and acting out its rôles. Between the beds of beets and onions he would stagger a little with the bearlike motion of a large man when he is old, and speak louder and gesticulate weirdly as the gathering dusk hid him from his audience.

His wife, standing with her grandson by the window, would say very softly, very sharply, “Your grandpa tells that riffraff he’s so fond of up there in the garden a lot of lies.”

And through the shadows closing down as if to shut him up and answer his arguments, he would catch a glimpse of the little woman who, in his youth, had made him a respectable man (a man whom she alone refused to respect); and a genuine sigh would make more impressive his complaints and his anecdotes.

Her honesty, even without a word, wounded and dishonored him. Therefore, perhaps, he hated the plain truth and looked down upon it, and strode away from it as quickly as possible into the remote past of his preposterous stories and ridiculous pretensions, where he could not be contradicted. But no--she had known him for sixty years and could always contradict him. When he was alone, melancholy actually distorted his old, loose face, as he brooded on what he had last said and wondered if in fact his arguments had been unanswerable.

There had been disgraces in his life which he was determined to change into heroisms. In particular, he had refused to fight in the Civil War, out of worldly interest, pride, and timidity, buying exemption from the draft three times and mortgaging his farm to do so. The family hoped the story would be forgotten. But he continued to lead casual guests into corners and, with his haggard body bent over like a question mark, amaze them with an account of what he called his “relations with government.”

“Then by the great horned spoon who did I see?” one would hear. “None other but Ezra Winterbotham, the meanest man that ever walked up and down God’s green earth, though well circumstanced, displayed in the height of fashion of an officer’s uniform. Now he represented the authorities at Washington, the might of the law, the--” With his long thumb the old man drew in the air a word more impressive than any he could think of.

“Well, this here Winterbotham thundered and cursed God and swore that I’d be arrested simultaneously if I didn’t go south with Company B. I saw it was fate coming at me and so I bowed my head.”

He shook a twisted forefinger, now on one side of his listener, now on the other, to block the way of escape. “But no! No, said I to myself. So I rose in my wrath and denounced him. Gosh all firelocks! man, said I, you were intended by God to go to war, having made you so as you wasn’t good for anything else. The good Lord meant such men as me, your humble servant, to sing his praises in other ways by becoming prominent citizens in times of peace.”

Sitting by the window, his wife grew more and more stiff and courtly, as if all the world were looking at her.

“I’ll buy a man, by cracky! said I. I’m not so poor in this world’s goods that I’ve got to be ordered about by every cracker-box public speaker that gets delegated by hook or crook to Washington. I’ll buy a man to do my fighting for me. There’s aplenty as are waiting for such chances and that hain’t any other future and wouldn’t be man enough for it if they had. Men o’ your ilk, Winterbotham!”

The strident voice mounted until everyone in the room was obliged to listen. One after another, his wife fixed their relatives or guests with a glance which made them uneasy, even frightened some, the very timid or young.

“And will you believe it, sir, that fellow, that authority, went off with his tail between his legs, uniform and all, and let me alone!”

His wife said serenely to a woman beside her, “It is a blessing Ira didn’t go to the war. He’d have taken to drinking again, or worse. He wasn’t so pious when we married as he is nowadays.”

Or a new minister would make a pastoral call, and the old man would begin his history at once. The preacher, knowing that this was one of his most important parishioners, noted for severe sanctity, would try anxiously to understand. The old lady would look out of the window, and caress her full skirts, and pick dead leaves from the potted plants. But at last she would say, “Yes, it would be a very good story, if--it were true,” and rise and go out of the room, leaving her husband to face the astonished clergyman.

He took his revenge. When they left the farm, for example, he insisted upon doing the cooking, and would not permit her to go into the kitchen except to wash dishes. He represented this as a great burden, though he liked keeping small, crowded places in order, and was vain of the indigestible meals he prepared. Everyone smiled at his recipe for pancakes, because it was a recipe for his stories as well: “One half of wheat flour, one third of rye, one third of buckwheat, and copious milk....” Everyone smiled, but everyone pitied him--an old farmer with an able-bodied, sharp-tongued wife, so patiently doing the housework....

His malice was exercised only under cover of pity and affection. Long before her mind began to fail, he would draw a relative or a neighbor into a corner and confide in a stage whisper, “Don’t you forget it--my poor wife is doting in the decline of her powers.” He appealed even to strangers to sympathize with her failings, describing them incidentally in full detail; and referred with marked unction to the trials which it was his lot to bear in a Christian spirit.

When they were alone together, he would say with insulting simplicity, “I call it vicious, the way you behave,” or, “You’re a blamed fool, Ursula.” Perhaps the fact that he did not trouble to scold her personally with his usual abundance of rhetoric hurt her more than his blame itself, to which, in sixty years, she may have grown accustomed.

Their grandson wondered if it had been his deliberate policy, from the beginning, to discredit her. Could he, in ignorance of his own heart, have done his work so well? Relatives and friends, one by one, coming to have a horror of her sharp tongue, her bitter disposition becoming a by-word.... The old man complacently watching loneliness widen around her, watching the manias of her old age increase, accumulating in his mind the pity of others for himself as a miser stores away secret treasure, sighing and pitying himself.... Alwyn decided at last that he sincerely thought himself a good man, a patient husband, a martyr. Especially after he began to suffer from a disease of the intestines, it was obvious that he lived in constant fear of incredulity, even as those do who are too naïvely honest to be understood. This manifest fear had an air of innocence; whoever might not have believed his stories, he himself in his old age seemed to believe every one.

But, though it was she who wore the look of victory, almost everyone did believe him. Despair is less expressive than mere melancholy; she would have been ashamed of seeming to deserve pity. His malice was like an instrument in his hands, silent or sounding loudly as it suited his purpose best. But when she said intolerable things, in her distant, melodious voice, it was not merely against her will; she had at those moments no will, and as if she had been hypnotized, felt neither fear nor sadness nor pleasure.

All the relatives and neighbors had watched the restlessness of her anger increase, quietly, rhythmically, like that of a whip; and heard what she had to say when she could endure it no longer. Everyone, on the other hand, had seen his tears. Only her daughter and her grandson loved her; only the Towers admired her. Even those who had experienced his perfidy held her responsible, and praised God that they did not have such a wife or mother.

Her sons had not even pretended to pity her. Now the one who had contracted malaria in the South when he had run away--as he thought, from her--was dead. The other, Andrew, a building contractor in Chicago, as melancholy and clever as his father, but with his mother’s hardness, made life miserable for his wife and children, though he gave them everything that money could buy. He had no particular principles or faith, hating religion for its pretensions of peace on earth, its lack of power over hearts like his mother’s--for that matter, like his own. She said frankly that his dissipated habits were a shame to her. Her husband blamed her less for driving their sons away from home than for acknowledging their weaknesses; and improved Andrew’s character even as he had improved his own--by talking about it, hypocritically.

In the little house in Aaronsville a red-edged Bible lay on a special shelf over the kitchen table. Every morning of their old age (just as when their wayward children had been at home) after the breakfast of fried potatoes and sweet rolls, he drew himself up to his full height, took down the book, and read a chapter. Then they knelt on the floor, each in front of a chair, and he raised his harsh voice:

“Guard us, dear adorable father, and guide us into one of thy mansions. Though roamers and strangers to thy charity, set us not aside with those who defile the highways and the byways. For liars, money changers, ungrateful relatives, and strange women triumph. Wither up their fig trees and put the seal of thy abundance on our undertakings. Bless my health, and keep our scattered children out of the dens of mischief. And hold in the hollow of thy hand the dear wife of my bosom. Without ceasing for half a century, we have labored and sung thy praises and kept faithful to each other and to thy true religion--though our steps totter, we are still the same. Forgive us our transgressions of word and deed, and lead us not into trouble, but bring our aged limbs into thy kingdom. Amen.”

There followed a moment of silent prayer. When Alwyn knelt between them, more embarrassed by this posture of the love of God than the two sad ancient enemies whose knees bent with difficulty, he wondered if in that moment each prayed that the other might be punished, made sleepless by repentance, and have his heart divinely softened--that is, at their age, broken.... But when they rose, his grandfather’s cunning face was transfigured and haughty. Wandering away to one of the windows, his grandmother seemed to regret that prayer had come to an end, her eyes, in spite of their cold color and weary eyelids, like a child’s eyes blossoming with light. And when she glanced back at her husband, Alwyn realized that he was not only her enemy, but her priest.

She rarely spoke of religion, and had no reminiscences of its coming and going in men’s hearts. Evidently it had nothing to do with love, of which she spoke with pride and regret, as Alwyn’s other grandmother spoke of the old days--their glory, their poverty, their bravado. “My son,” she would say, “there were broken hearts and romances. But young women in my day covered their nakedness, every one was modest and genteel. But the menfolks were inclined to be rough--they mingled with animals all day, and had many hardships to undergo. Don’t ever be wild as your grandpa was.”

Alwyn remembered their wedding picture: the young man’s lips large and red, his eyes expressionless as eyes of crystal, his large hand closed on her arm as if it had often had its way with women; and beside him the little bride dressed in dark sacramental finery.

“Always behave like a gentleman,” she continued. “In all my life, I knew only one gentleman. That was Leander Tower. He was accounted a little crazy in those days by many who were his neighbors. My life would have been different if I had married him. But I was already married, so I didn’t love him. It was my duty to love your grandpa and I did it, hard and dishonest man that he was. As for Leander Tower, he loved nobody on earth but his relations.” Alwyn’s mother said that she had never before referred to that secret.

Another day she said, to his amazement: “I don’t regret a day of my life. Your grandpa is a virtuous man and God-fearing, though he was pretty unruly in his youth. Don’t you forget that, just because he tells awful lies and is mean. He never drank. He never swore. He never ran after women. Not after we married. He never failed at churchgoing, or giving testimony, or praying before the public--and there wasn’t a man in the township who could make such a fine prayer. There are few of whom I could say as much. Now I don’t regret that he was hard on me, and maintains that my mind is failing. It has taught me to fear God and value the kingdom of heaven. Don’t you ever think this world amounts to much.”

But as they approached that kingdom of heaven their conflict did not abate. Their old bodies grew weaker, their minds confused; but they seemed to breathe a bracing air of eternity. Warned by the gnawing pain in his bowels, his fear of not being believed rose to a pitiful fury; but the days in which he might still bring about her wifely submission were numbered; so at last his malice was not even restrained by consideration of what people would say. Her sorrow took on the special clarity and peace of madness when her second childhood began. During the last years it was as if they lay on one deathbed--the dying hands interlaced by habit, by hatred of each other and love of God, the dying mouths murmuring truths without pity and complaining still.

(It was during this period that Alwyn lived with them--afraid of their old age, often shedding tears before he fell asleep, trying to ignore hate and understand love, and for the first time falling in love.)

The embrace of their two spirits was closer than love ever is. They had lived together half a century; now they could not be parted. Marianne Tower took her mother out to the farm, but could not induce her to stay more than one night. She could not sleep in the country; hate had become a physical habit, as passionate as the habits of the young. “I must go back this afternoon. I must look after my house. I must see what your father is up to.”

When she returned to the little house, her husband’s face lit up with pleasure, but before that expression had had time to change he would say, in her presence, “I know, daughter, you’re inclined to see things your poor ma’s way, but she is a great problem to me. She steals my medicine and spirits it away, and even carries it so far as to hide her own things. And I swear before the Almighty, I believe she does it a-purpose.”

One afternoon during a school holiday, Alwyn and his mother drove to Aaronsville, intending to take her back with them. “No,” she said, “I reckon I’d better not go. I have to see to my affairs. And your father is not contented if I’m not here.”

Then she went upstairs, and came down presently, carrying in her hand the antlers of two stags, interlocked and covered with dust. She put them on the table. “I found these old things in the attic,” she said mysteriously. “I don’t understand what they’re for, and I don’t know where we got them. But I found them, anyway.”

The old man came out of the pantry. “Ursula,” he began, looking at his daughter as if this were a proof of all his contentions, “I pray to God that the day will come when you’ll let my things alone. Tarnation! I don’t blame you, but it’s a crucifixion to me, the way you go rummaging in my belongings.”

Marianne gazed beseechingly at her father. Her mother, ignoring him, gazed at the curio: the sharp horns harmless at last, spike wedged against spike, and a bit of the skull of each animal.

“I never saw that before,” Alwyn said. “What is it? Where did it come from?”

The old man said: “I discovered this phenomenon at the foot of an old stump I was rooting up in my thirty-fourth year. It bears witness to the death struggle of two ferocious animals. Beside themselves, they struck one blow too many and got their horns tangled and lay there by that stump, as you might say snared, until they died. And here you have their rage to get at each other immortalized, and I say it ought to be in a museum.”

His wife had not taken her eyes from the table. “Ira, Ira,” she murmured, “you’ve told that story too many times. It’s not yours, anyway. It’s mine. You gave it to me.”

He sighed and returned to the kitchen. She hunted a little piece of black crêpe and painstakingly, lovingly, dusted the antlers. There was nothing to say. Alwyn’s mother sat down and began to weep softly. The old woman took up the interlocked antlers and pressed them to her bosom, and started upstairs again. “No, Marianne, don’t ever cry,” she said, as if she were merely giving good advice.

Their son Andrew came from Chicago to see his father. Alwyn and his grandmother stood before the window, and in the garden the feeble old man gestured and talked to his son. “Who’s that man up there in the garden talking to your father?” she asked. “You better go up and find out if he means to stay to dinner.”

Her husband insisted that she recognized her son and pretended not to, out of spite. She often called Alwyn Andrew, even during her son’s visit. At other times she treated him with exquisite formality, as if he were a man she loved, half a stranger. One day she gave him a begonia leaf, saying, “You’re my sweetheart, you know.”

The following winter Alwyn went to live with his uncle Jim; and while he was gone the old man passed away.

15. Conclusion: Another Moving. His Grandmother Tower’s Deathbed.

Meanwhile his grandmother Tower was looking forward to a short but momentous journey; making ready, not in secret, but before her children and grandchildren, telling them again and again where she was going and that she was willing to go. To the least known of the lands over which, like a lantern, the new moon hung.... She sorted and packed her few belongings, not to take with her, but to leave behind; and wrote on the backs of daguerreotypes, on the flyleaf of the hair album, and on slips of paper attached to the most precious keepsakes, the little scattered clauses of her last will and testament: “This is to be for Alwyn, Grandma,” or, “To be sent to my son Evan, R. Tower....” She also searched her memory to see if there were any stories of the early days which she had not told; and of those which the family knew by heart, repeated the ones which she thought it most important to have remembered, though it made her heart palpitate now to talk long at a time.

But she liked best to be alone under the sugar maples or before an open door, and to gaze at the lanes which still seemed new to her though fenced before her grandchildren were born, the tall trees which were younger than she, the stubble land covered with stones, the weedy summer hay. Apparently it was going to cost her more to leave the farm, its particular horizon, its portion of sky overhead, than to leave her surviving relatives or to part with life itself.

At the same time the Towers, her son and his family, were also preparing for a journey, another of the migrations which had scattered such families over America: less heroic and shorter than in former times, because the continent had been tamed, and there was no reason to go far now--it was more or less alike from coast to coast. John Craig and James Tower having, at the former’s suggestion, given Ralph their shares of the farm, he and his mother had sold it to buy a smaller, more profitable one, without marsh or hills, about fifty miles away on the outskirts of the college town of Brighton.

The old woman had given her consent to this transaction because of her firm belief that the old should not be a burden to the young, above all when the latter were poor. And she had always maintained that people should be willing to leave the world after a certain age; now she would prove that she was willing, by going without a murmur away from the one valley which was all of it that she loved or knew. She would not be obliged nor even able to stay with them long, wherever they should go.

Ralph was glad to move. The four walls of the new home (in which no one of his blood had died, or been angry, frightened, or disappointed, or felt the pinch of poverty) seemed to promise to hold for him new prosperity, enthusiasm, rest.... The silver poplars standing all around it, like tall women dressed in leaves, seemed to beckon to him. His brothers’ generosity had put an end to his resentment at not having had a chance as a boy; and now it seemed that by merely moving fifty miles away he was to come, first of his family, into a promised land of prolific livestock, abundant crops, and soft, level furrows without stones.

The farm which Henry Tower, with his farsighted eyes, his ax and divining rod, had picked out in the wilderness, had not kept many of the promises which on those early mornings it had made, or seemed to make. Royally vast and fertile in large part, the Northwest Territory had been spread out for the newcomers to take what they pleased. To Henry Tower, unwisely aristocratic, beauty and prosperity had looked alike. Misled, perhaps, by the spirits of ancestors homesick for European meadows and hunting highlands, he had chosen merely the loveliest piece of land he had ever seen, and upon it had built his hopes.

It would not have been unworthy of a pleasure pavilion or manor house. In one corner in a tiny forest wild roses, wild grapes and strawberries, mandrake and belladonna, were heaped on the sweet, moldy soil under the trees. In front of it low fields were flooded in spring with water full of frogs, where wild birds of every sort gathered to paddle and flutter, to stalk and doze, hunching their shoulders. Beyond those fields there lay a swamp over which the horizon was draped with melancholy tamaracks. In another direction there was a brighter vista: interwoven slopes, white roads, dwelling places, and far away a lake, glittering in the daytime as a lighthouse glitters at night. The house and barns were protected by small, high hills standing in a half circle. The tallest of those six hills arm in arm wore a hawthorn on whose wiry boughs every spring a few blossoms shone like bits of pink crystal and every summer a few lumpy thorn apples hung--a small tree shaped like a coronet. But it was the only emblem of wealth and power which that property could have enabled its owners to afford, except their intangible crowns in heaven.

For half of the farm lay on those hilltops, and there half of the earth was stone. The slopes were so steep that the wagons carrying home the poor harvest had to have their wheels chained and be brought down like sledges. The rains descended in torrents, rolling down bowlders, digging in the good fields gullies deeper than a man is tall, washing the top soil off into the swamp. The only valuable piece was twenty acres which Rose Hamilton had brought into the family as her dowry; even it was covered with deep-rooted, perennial weeds and thistles to choke the corn and corrupt the grain. Perhaps the very instincts which had impelled Henry Tower to settle there had prevented him and his sons from working the farm as effectively as might have been done, though to the end of time it would be an ungrateful tract of land.

The sale of it to a German farmer for his newly-married, middle-aged son took place in midsummer. After harvest an auction of farm machinery, some of the livestock, worn furniture, and household goods, was held. All afternoon the neighbors drifted about the place, bidding indifferently on this or that, and their wives handled and carried off bit by bit the intimate miscellany. Alwyn’s grandmother wept at the abandonment of certain insignificant objects, the small children at the loss of others. Alwyn spent the night with his grandmother in the nearly empty rooms; she sat up in bed, her lips never at rest, and he could not be sure whether she was praying or whether people not actually there were keeping her company as well. The family slept in various neighboring houses.

The next day at dawn Alwyn and a hired man named Karl set out with two teams, the draft horses drawing a manure spreader loaded with crates, implements, tools, and small machinery, with a buggy and a corn planter hitched behind it; the driving horses a lumber wagon full of cages of poultry, cats and dogs in boxes, barrels of dishes and kitchen utensils, and trunks of clothes, behind which trailed the three-seated carriage that his grandmother cherished. Cattle and hogs had gone in a box car several days before. His father was to accompany the family and the old woman in an automobile. Thus, rather sadly, with less extravagant hopes, without canal boats or oxen or weapons, without cause for fear or singing--their modern migration was accomplished.

The east was covered with tiny clouds like the torn bits of paper which a newcomer finds in a dismantled house; the sun entered the sky like such a newcomer. Frost-bitten maples and ash covered the land with blotches of blood and rust; the débris of harvest lay in the fields. By the middle of the morning Alwyn and the hired man crossed the Iron Ridge and came to a new sort of countryside.

They ate dinner at the back of a dirty store in a town called Eden. Alwyn’s companion, a huge man of thirty who was like an adolescent, had had to work so hard as a child that he was stoop-shouldered. When he was not using his hands, which he did with difficulty on account of their size, they hung slightly in front of him. Long after he had been spoken to, a scarcely perceptible movement of understanding would pass upward across his brick-red face, from the heavy mouth to the heavy blue eyes. Alwyn was fond of this Karl because, as a giant, he was mysterious, because he was warm-hearted and happier than other people.

It occurred to Alwyn then that his had been the last of the pioneer families in the community from which he and the hired man were driving their belongings away, and that Karl was like the men who were left. The early settlers had lived and done their work for others, not quite as they had meant to; because of their blood in his veins, Alwyn thought of them with pity and of the others with resentment....

Most of the new people, Saxons and Bavarians, had come there without a penny. Then they had hired out to the settlers and put by more of their earnings than any Anglo-Saxons could. Steadily they had bought fields, farms, and at last groups of farms. These determined fathers made their women and children work like serfs--the healthy young ones hurried into the fields, the unhealthy allowed to die, and more begotten. Their sons were not permitted to marry until their late twenties, or later still; then, broken to harness, they were put upon adjoining farms. There was no talk among them of letting the young go their own way.

Meanwhile the original families seemed to be dying out; at any rate, they were being scattered. Delicate health, without any particular illness to cause it, began to be common among them; vague desires for an easier, less monotonous life arose. Money was spent on the education of children, thus lost to the family. Very few of the cleverer sons were willing to stay on the land; the daughters preferred not to marry farmers. Besides youngsters, certain fathers of families went further west; still more retired in middle life, discouraged and dependent on others, or content with just enough to live on.

The immigrants were glad to see them go. They believed that children should be envious of no one but their own elders; now there would be an end of the bad example of discontented Yankees going off to school or to town. And for their own comfort, no more interference with their primitive habits, such as beating their wives, animals and children, or their amusements, such as Sunday dancing and drinking....

That morning before Alwyn had left the farm he had seen, standing in a row on the cellar door, about a dozen of the Duffy’s whisky bottles which his grandfather had emptied while he was dying; during the auction someone must have gone into the cellar in search of just such traces of their private lives; and since all his family were eager prohibitionists, Alwyn supposed there had been complaints of their hypocrisy, and bad-tempered laughter....

At nightfall the two young men and the string of vehicles were far from their destination. They turned off the highway to make a short cut by a number of diagonal roads. These led through a forest in which there were dogs howling (probably about a carcass or a pile of bones) across a sour-smelling marsh, past only very small, dark houses, through no villages.... They began to believe that they had lost their way. The hungry horses hung back, pushed each other out of the road, and tried to turn up every lane; they at least could not go on much longer. His father, used to finding his way in the North like an Indian, had described the turnings for him, with a schoolhouse, a tree, a hill, by which to recognize each one; and Alwyn looked forward miserably to his criticism, if they did not arrive when they were expected. But for a few hours not himself but what looked in the dark like an utter wilderness, was in control of him and of what he could do: he was willing and in awe of it; he was stubbornly hopeful, resentfully proud.... Then it occurred to him that such must have been the emotions with which the first journeys there had been accomplished, of which, probably, every heart in the early days had been full.

Those days were at an end; they were dead. For a few hours, for him (for other hours, perhaps, for others) they were imitated by accident, or in imagination roused from the dead.... Mornings encircled with drab forest as if by a great hair wreath. Afternoons in which wild bouquets arranged according to the language of flowers were passed from one innocent, calloused hand to another--Alwyn, in that sense, did not have innocent hands. Evenings whose hilltop sunsets faded as funeral wreaths fade, on the mounds in which rest those who died in the heat of the day--of the heat of the day. Nights like that night....

“Hey!” Alwyn’s companion called back from the seat of the manure spreader, “my horses is balkin’ on me. What d’ya think?” The soft German voice....

Day after day, in which there had been only the dry voices of Americans continually expressing hope and disappointment, praying, bargaining, bearing witness to facts and to the Lord. Days linked at daybreak by the sun rolling over the horizon like a great ball over the boundary line of a game (that game had been played, everyone had played and everyone had lost, or perhaps everyone had won--in heaven at least). Linked at noon by the things which happened every day: the watering of badly fed horses (the younger of Alwyn’s team whinnied fiercely but was not answered); the feeding of cattle whose bags were black with muck from the swamps (his grandmother had told him how, during certain winters when the cattle had nothing to eat but the strawstack and were sick, his grandfather had slit open their tails and put in pepper and salt); hurried meals of salt pork, bread, and potatoes; horns of traveling venders of medicine and fish, drawing up before the door; childbirth; the return of hunters from the woods....

Suddenly, as if an instinct of his hunting ancestors had been waked in him, Alwyn thought he recognized a lightning-scarred tree of which his father had spoken, and shouted to Karl that there was a crossroads, and to turn to the right. He began to have hope and to dare to admit his fatigue.

Hope, hunting, quarrels with fathers, need, fatigue, and self-control--in those days there had been nothing but these emotions. He was determined that there should be other things for him at least.... Other things than mere body and soul kept together with determination, held together by hand, by inhuman-looking hands stained with sores.... No one had ever got enough sleep; night after night had been troubled by worry over the weather and the crops, by misunderstandings between husband and wife which there had not been time enough to settle, by the breakdown of women who had borne too much, some falling ill and welcoming death, some going mad and waking their distracted menfolk to talk nonsense....

Then Alwyn realized that his instinct about the road had been mistaken; they had taken a wrong turning. His heart sank. What were they going to do? He put off telling the hired man.

Perhaps if he had paid more attention, instead of thinking about things which did not matter in the least that night.... Nevertheless, hypnotized by the jolting of the wagon, he could not stop. His thought was like the sort of nightmare in which terrors do not frighten, nor pains hurt--they were not his terrors and pains, except the one of having lost the way. Dreamy composite pictures which could serve no purpose.... Then his memory, working ingeniously against his will, suggested to him instead this or that about his relatives, details of which they were made up.

His grandmother Tower called his grandfather Duff “a snake in the grass”; there was a negro song which began, “The devil is a snake in the grass.”...

He wondered if his father would go on doing taxidermy in the new home--killing, skinning, stuffing birds and animals.

His great-aunt Mary had driven like this all the way from Missouri to Wisconsin. A sort of migratory bird, with three husbands, beside her journeys which were like love affairs with various parts of the world.

Indeed, Alwyn thought, roads were to the Mississippi Valley what seas, wars, religions, had been to other places in history. Coming and going of men sick at their stomachs from the motion of their own feet, or saddle horses, or vehicles (as he was). In the beginning his hard boy-grandfather marking a trail on tree trunks with an ax--as if the thread through a labyrinth had slightly worn away its pillars here and there. Roads with no particular beginning or end had been the shifting foundations of life in the West--had been and still were. They gave a wretched monotony to one’s thought about it, and one could not speak of its inhabitants without repeating the word. That night Alwyn thought of this common fact with wonder, with sickness of heart, with rather selfish pity for the pioneers--race of religious, childish, energetic tramps that they were--because he himself had gone astray on a road that he did not know. He thought, It must be midnight, but did not dare ask the hired man, who had a watch.

Pathetically ambitious at that period of his life, he wondered if he could make any use of the scanty knowledge of such matters which he possessed. Did modern men and women in cities have any curiosity about old times, any interest in the way people lived or had lived in the country? Probably little or none. He knew that very soon he would be living in some city or another--not where his relatives had passed their uneasy lives and died, or got ready to die. He might try to write something about them....

It occurred to him discouragingly that he would then be doing no more than his father did with birds and animals: spreading out and cleaning the bones (the drier, the better they would keep); choosing a single attitude for each one and wiring it as firmly as possible; arranging them in groups as lifelike as groups of lifeless bodies could be. His father also gave them glass eyes, and painted their mouths and claws; the paint faded. But then, so did living colors--on beak and claw, and human face as well.

The biography which his grandfather Tower had sat down to write had turned out to be nothing but an account of the settlement of Wisconsin in his boyhood. Had he not dared to lift the reticence, like a winding sheet, which then hid or at any rate disguised the pity of his life? Perhaps, though he had been eighty years old at the time, to do so would have waked the pain of a man of twenty or thirty; probably it would have seemed to him a sacrilege beside. The name of Serena Cannon was not to be found on the pages which Alwyn had seen--she who had woven all the wreaths; “the whitest hands of anybody in those days,” according to Alwyn’s grandmother. He had heard his grandfather say, with a look of cruel exasperation, “She was too good for this world, and went straight to the Holy City.” Alwyn determined that his life should not be tragic, so that he should be able to tell about it if he wanted to....

Suddenly across the vacant fields he saw the lights of a town. Karl shouted. It was Brighton. That meant that his instinct about the crossroads had not been wrong; though of the third generation, a better pathfinder than he knew.... Lights, as in the Holy City to which all his people had wanted to go, soft and yellow. The tears came to his eyes and were gone at once. With a certain vanity, which meant that he was not so tired as he might have been, he told himself that he had never been so tired before. Miseries such as the jolting over the stony road, to which he had been trying not to pay attention for hours, took on a final intensity; the darkness, like a large animal, seeming to shake him, a small animal, between its teeth. He wondered if his long revery about the early days had not also been a sort of delirium. The last house before the entrance to the town was the new home.

He fell out of the high wagon as if asleep. There was a great excitement of the dogs barking in crates, of lanterns and his little sisters. His mother gave him a kiss. It was only a little past ten o’clock. He scarcely woke up until the next morning.

He was pleased at their having a new though ugly house to live in, but as he passed his grandmother’s bedroom door he realized that it was to have other uses than those of life. At breakfast he asked his mother if his grandmother had wept upon leaving the old home. She had not, and had been heard to say to herself with strange determination, “Not for long, I tell you.” Just before the start she had put her head out of the automobile, but her eyes had not seemed to be focused on anything in particular. Until nearly noon she had not said a word, her mouth, hands, and great body trembling a little from time to time.

Alwyn went in to see her in her new bedroom. Two of his sisters were there working for her. Sitting in an armchair, wrapped up in a red-and-white bedspread (quilted by her husband’s first wife), she was supervising the arrangement of her photographs and keepsakes in a chest of drawers. Then she said: “Get my bed ready so I can lie down. Make it up with the head toward the window. For I declare, it makes me tired to look out at this flat country.”

During the day she sent for her daughter-in-law. “Marianne,” she said, “I’m not going to be able to do for myself from now on. I’ll probably be sick ’most all the time until I die. You’ll have to call in a doctor--or the relatives will complain. But I won’t have a trained nurse. I want you to promise not to get one. It will make a lot of work for you and your children. Take it as easy as you can. I hope and pray it won’t be for long. I am ready to go, and I want you to let nature take its course. That’s all I have to say. Just let nature take its course.”

A few days later Alwyn went away to school in Chicago. When he returned the following year in June she was evidently dying, and someone would have to sit up with her regularly. Alwyn had been ill; there was no question of his working on the farm; so he did the work of a night nurse all summer, until his grandmother died. She was glad that it was he, and glad that his father and mother could get their sleep, lest they be unfitted for the more important work in the busy season. “I can’t tell any more stories,” she said to Alwyn. “I’m not good for much these days, and it tires me to be talked to--you were always a great talker. So you’ll just have to sit there.”

During the winter she had grown emaciated; her pure white skin had relaxed; her cheeks had fallen; the large and regular bones made up a new face without much expression. She was dying of heart failure, with a variety of consequent sufferings: cold and fever, fitful nervous pain, partial starvation. During the worst attacks her heart began to stop beating as soon as she fell asleep; but though she had said months before that she was ready to die, she could not permit it to stop. She would shake herself, summon up her strength of character, gasp resolutely, begin again--before she knew what she was doing. Furthermore, she did not want to die in her sleep--apparently the only way she could--but upright in her bed, in full possession of her faculties, even, if she had dared to demand it, with her children and grandchildren about her, as she had lived.

Thus her illness was a bitter struggle between the oldest habit of her will, life, and the comparatively recent decision to die. She was a creature of habit, and had never been governed by her intellect; so it was not to be wondered at that the accomplishment of her purpose took the greater part of a year.

Alwyn sat in the doorway, the light of a lamp shaded in such a way as to shine directly on his book and softly over her bed--for she wanted to be able to see--and watched the struggle night after night. He had been ill enough himself to have thought, with genuine if somewhat theoretical fear, of death; here was an object lesson in reality. At first he was surprised that he did not suffer at the sight of her suffering, nor feel the simple emotions which such an event called for. His active mind was quicker to examine than to be impressed, and he habitually fancied that everything and everyone resembled himself in some respect; so, full of a childish eagerness to be in awe, he was fascinated instead. It was as if he were writing his own experience (speculations and confused, self-conscious emotions) on one side of a page, now helped, now hindered by the half-legible characters on the other side, the side of death. Too soon, in any case, the page would have to be turned.

Meanwhile his grandmother Duff was also dying, her mind first. After her husband’s funeral, Marianne and her brother had arranged with their cousin Clara to care for the aged widow. Clara Peters, otherwise Mrs. Rudolph, a rough, poor woman, also lived in Aaronsville. The people who rented the little house down the street had complained because the old woman had kept coming there and trying the door. She would call over the hedge, “I-ra! I-ra!” and in a matter-of-fact way tell passers-by that her husband had locked her out; this had given rise to gossip. She would go up to mocking girls in the street and offer to rearrange their low-necked dresses with pins. Then her excursions had begun to be dangerous as well as embarrassing, for she would stop in the middle of the street to think, giving no heed to automobiles. Clara Peters’s husband was good for nothing, and she had to support the family by taking in boarders and doing washing; so at last, unable to keep watch over the old woman, who would not do as she was told, she had had to lock her in a room during the day. There, remembering and singing those Protestant hymns which most put the fear of God in one’s heart, she had not been unhappy--at least she had never wept; but she had been as headstrong as ever. Indeed, on certain occasions Clara Peters--exasperated by her obstinacy, tried beyond endurance by her own affairs--had been unable to keep from striking her, as lightly as possible of course; no one could altogether blame her.

This situation had not been unendurable to Alwyn’s mother only because there had been no help for it. Her mother-in-law had required all her care that winter. They could not have afforded to hire help. There were also her younger children to think of; she had not dared to put before their wondering eyes the spectacle of two aged women dying--one of them, the dearest, out of her mind. Fortunately her mother was not suffering in any ordinary way: invulnerable in her second childhood, forgetting her punishments the moment after, singing like a child.... So with her usual fortitude and peace of mind, Marianne had done her duty among the Towers. But not a day passed on which she did not weep at the thought of abandoning her own mother for her mother-in-law’s sake, and she had seemed to be growing older in honor of the former’s old age.

Now in the summer the end was not far off for them both. Alwyn’s mother waited most impatiently for her mother to be taken away. She went to see her nearly every afternoon; but the old woman called Clara Peters Marianne, taking pains, as courteously as ever, to hide her inability to remember who Marianne was.

Watching beside his grandmother Tower’s deathbed, Alwyn thought how his grandmother Duff would sometimes call him by the name of her eldest son, Andrew, and the next moment call him her sweetheart. His mother told him that throughout the winter, never realizing whose son he was, she had asked with young, fitful tenderness: “How is my sweetheart? Now, tell me the news of my young man. Is he getting on well out in the world?”

No one else had ever said that; no one, alive or dead, had thus made a place for him in the story. The avowal of old woman’s love was shameless because it was old. Her mind, wandering, darkened; and suddenly a few words, very clear and somehow in tune, though even less reasonable than the rest. Like the saying of an oracle, to be interpreted two ways; in a play on words, a menace or a promise. Alwyn felt that he ought to determine which it was, and take it into account in whatever he did. A sibyl on a tripod, though it was a far cry to Greece. Up had come once more a sort of intoxicating smoke of death, of the bitter hearths of its residence, and he himself, her grandson, spoken of as her only surviving son and sweetheart.... According to the habit of his mind, he began to read meanings into what she had said, hour after empty hour in the doorway of his other grandmother’s bedroom.

A law in the hearts of the savagest men forbidding them to love passionately their mothers, grandmothers. (It seemed that now the law usually forbade civilized or over-civilized men to love them in any way at all....) And Alwyn had heard at school of an obscure belief, indefinitely old and held by many races in common, that by the breaking of that particular law, heroes, men accorded divine honors, had been made of common men. A distorted, unacknowledged set of traditions, being by nature both sacrosanct and shameful.... The sea is our mother. The furrow, a womb for the harvest, and Adonis (the word Adonis means the Lord); the garden and the tomb in the garden; initiation nights; caves, fountainheads, and retreats, like what gives birth to men, giving birth to them anew. Baptism: “ye must be born again of water and the Spirit.” Twice-born, and the second time with a certain invulnerability and radiance, with certain unearthly abilities, or abnormal knowledge of what was coming.... There were a great many facts to interpret in this way which, sitting there to watch one of his grandmothers die, Alwyn could not remember.

Had this actually been believed, or was it merely a theory of professors with nothing better to do? It did not seem to matter. As soon as Alwyn thought of it, this tradition which rites and legends were supposed to represent, became in its turn a symbol of something else.

The word mother meant that which had produced one; therefore, not only a woman--wilderness, squalor, ideals, manias, regrets, sensuality, what consolations there had been.... Curiosity was a child’s love, a half-grown boy’s, even his own, not long before--excited, needy, ignorant, and afraid of what was going to happen. The desire to understand was, after all, desire.

So some of these feverish, reactionary ones (he himself, for example) went back, in imagination, to what had produced them; their hope, anxiety, and interest went back. Against the law. The weak stayed; the strong returned--returned once more to the place from which they had gone back, from which then they would have to go forward. Backward and forward, two continual motions of the imagination making up that of their lives. Forward finally--but with as definite a purpose as could be added to what men have in common, habits of blundering. “Fumble and success,” the rat in a cage of the psychology textbooks--the last and greatest success must be death....