Part 9

None of us had known the dead officer closely, owing to his advanced age. He was seven or eight years older than even Tom. But the more elderly among our group had seen him play base-ball in the academy nine, and our neighborhood was still alive with legends of his early audacity and skill in collecting barrels and dry-goods boxes at night for election bonfires. It was remembered that once he carried away a whole front-stoop from the house of a little German tailor on one of the back streets. As we stood around the heated cannon, in the great black solitude of the common, our fancies pictured this redoubtable young man once more among us—not in his blue uniform, with crimson sash and sword laid by his side, and the gauntlets drawn over his lifeless hands, but as a taller and glorified Tom, in a roundabout jacket and copper-toed boots, giving the law on this his play ground. The very cannon at our feet had once been his. The night air became peopled with ghosts of his contemporaries—handsome boys who had grown up before us, and had gone away to lay down their lives in far-off Virginia or Tennessee.

These heroic shades brought drowsiness in their train. We lapsed into long silences, punctuated by yawns, when it was not our turn to ram and touch off the cannon. Finally some of us stretched ourselves out on the grass, in the warm darkness, to wait comfortably for this turn to come.

What did come instead was daybreak—finding Billy Norris and myself alone constant to our all-night vow. We sat up and shivered as we rubbed our eyes. The morning air had a chilling freshness that went to my bones—and these, moreover, were filled with those novel aches and stiffnesses which beds were invented to prevent. We stood up, stretching out our arms, and gaping at the pearl-and-rose beginnings of the sunrise in the eastern sky. The other boys had all gone home, and taken the cannon with them. Only scraps of torn paper and tiny patches of burnt grass marked the site of our celebration.

My first weak impulse was to march home without delay, and get into bed as quickly as might be. But Billy Norris looked so finely resolute and resourceful that I hesitated to suggest this, and said nothing, leaving the initiative to him. One could see, by the most casual glance, that he was superior to mere considerations of unseasonableness in hours. I remembered now that he was one of that remarkable body of boys, the paper-carriers, who rose when all others were asleep in their warm nests, and trudged about long before breakfast distributing the _Clarion_ among the well-to-do households. This fact had given him his position in our neighborhood as quite the next in leadership to Tom Hemingway.

He presently outlined his plans to me, after having tried the centre of light on the horizon, where soon the sun would be, by an old brass compass he had in his pocket—a process which enabled him, he said, to tell pretty well what time it was. The paper wouldn't be out for nearly two hours yet—and if it were not for the fact of a great battle, there would have been no paper at all on this glorious anniversary—but he thought we would go down-town and see what was going on around about the newspaper office. Forthwith we started. He cheered my faint spirits by assuring me that I would soon cease to be sleepy, and would, in fact, feel better than usual. I dragged my feet along at his side, waiting for this revival to come, and meantime furtively yawning against my sleeve.

Billy seemed to have dreamed a good deal, during our nap on the common, about the De Witt C. Hemingway Fire Zouaves. At least he had now in his head a marvellously elaborated system of organization, which he unfolded as we went along. I felt that I had never before realized his greatness, his born genius for command. His scheme halted nowhere. He allotted offices with discriminating firmness; he treated the question of uniforms and guns as a trivial detail which would settle itself; he spoke with calm confidence of our offering our services to the Republic in the autumn; his clear vision was even the materials for a fife-and-drum corps among the German boys in the back streets. It was true that I appeared personally to play a meagre part in these great projects; the most that was said about me was that I might make a fair third-corporal. But Fate had thrown in my way such a wonderful chance of becoming intimate with Billy that I made sure I should swiftly advance in rank—the more so as I discerned in the background of his thoughts, as it were, a grim determination to make short work of Tom Hemingway's aristocratic pretensions, once the funeral was over.

We were forced to make a detour of the park on our way down, because Billy observed some half-dozen Irish boys at play with a cannon inside, whom he knew to be hostile. If there had been only four, he said, he would have gone in and routed them. He could whip any two of them, he added, with one hand tied behind his back. I listened with admiration. Billy was not tall, but he possessed great thickness of chest and length of arm. His skin was so dark that we canvassed the theory from time to time of his having Indian blood. He did not discourage this, and he admitted himself that he was double-jointed.

The streets of the business part of the town, into which we now made our way, were quite deserted. We went around into the yard behind the printing-office, where the carrier-boys were wont to wait for the press to get to work; and Billy displayed some impatience at discovering that here too there was no one. It was now broad daylight, but through the windows of the composing-room we could see some of the printers still setting type by kerosene lamps.

We seated ourselves at the end of the yard on a big, flat, smooth-faced stone, and Billy produced from his pocket a number of "em" quads, so he called them, and with which the carriers had learned from the printers' boys to play a very beautiful game. You shook the pieces of metal in your hands and threw them on the stone; your score depended upon the number of nicked sides that were turned uppermost. We played this game in the interest of good-fellowship for a little. Then Billy told me that the carriers always played it for pennies, and that it was unmanly for us to do otherwise. He had no pennies at that precise moment, but would pay at the end of the week what he had lost; in the meantime there was my twenty cents to go on with. After this Billy threw so many nicks uppermost that my courage gave way, and I made an attempt to stop the game; but a single remark from him as to the military destiny which he was reserving for me, if I only displayed true soldierly nerve and grit, sufficed to quiet me once more, and the play went on. I had now only five cents left.

Suddenly a shadow interposed itself between the sunlight and the stone. I looked up, to behold a small boy with bare arms and a blackened apron standing over me, watching our game. There was a great deal of ink on his face and hands, and a hardened, not to say rakish expression in his eye.

"Why don't you 'jeff' with somebody of your own size?" he demanded of Billy, after having looked me over critically.

He was not nearly-so big as Billy, and I expected to see the latter instantly rise and crush him, but Billy only laughed and said we were playing for fun; he was going to give me all my money back. I was rejoiced to hear this, but still felt surprised at the propitiatory manner Billy adopted toward this diminutive inky boy. It was not the demeanor befitting aside-captain—and what made it worse was that the strange boy loftily declined to be cajoled by it. He sniffed when Billy told him about the military company we were forming; he coldly shook his head, with a curt "Nixie!" when invited to join it; and he laughed aloud at hearing the name our organization was to bear.

"He ain't dead at all—that De Witt Hemingway," he said, with jeering contempt.

"Hain't he though!" exclaimed Billy. "The news come last night. Tom had to go home—his mother sent for him—on account of it!"

"I'll bet you a quarter he ain't dead," responded the practical inky boy. "Money up, though!"

"I've only got fifteen cents. I'll bet you that, though," rejoined Billy, producing my torn and dishevelled shinplasters.

"All right! Wait here!" said the boy, running off to the building and disappearing through the door. There was barely time for me to learn from my companion that this printer's apprentice was called "the devil," and could not only whistle between his teeth and crack his fingers, but chew tobacco, when he reappeared, with a long narrow strip of paper in his hand. This he held out for us to see, indicating with an ebon forefinger the special paragraph we were to read. Billy looked at it sharply, for several moments, in silence. Then he said to me: "What does it say there? I must' a' got some powder in my eyes last night."

I read this paragraph aloud, not without an unworthy feeling that the inky boy would now respect me deeply:

"CORRECTION. Lieutenant De Witt C. Hemingway, of Company A, ——th New York, reported in earlier despatches among the killed, is uninjured. The officer killed is Lieutenant Carl Heinninge, Company F, same regiment."

Billy's face visibly lengthened as I read this out, and he felt us both looking at him. He made a pretence of examining the slip of paper again, but in a half-hearted way. Then he ruefully handed over the fifteen cents and, rising from the stone, shook himself.

"Them Dutchmen never was no good!" was what he said.

The inky boy had put the money in the pocket under his apron, and grinned now with as much enjoyment as dignity would permit him to show. He did not seem to mind any longer the original source of his winnings, and it was apparent that I could not with decency recall it to him. Some odd impulse prompted me, however, to ask him if I might have the paper he had in his hand. He was magnanimous enough to present me with the proof-sheet on the spot. Then with another grin he turned and left us.

Billy stood sullenly kicking with his bare toes into a sand-heap by the stone. He would not answer me when I spoke to him. It flashed across my perceptive faculties that he was not such a great man, after all, as I had imagined. In another instant or two it had become quite clear to me that I had no admiration for him whatever. Without a word, I turned on my heel and walked determinedly out of the yard and into the street, homeward bent.

All at once I quickened my pace; something had occurred to me. The purpose thus conceived grew so swiftly that soon I found myself running. Up the hill I sped, and straight through the park. If the Irish boys shouted after me I knew it not, but dashed on heedless of all else save the one idea. I only halted, breathless and panting, when I stood on Dr. Stratford's doorstep, and heard the night-bell inside jangling shrilly in response to my excited pull.

As I waited, I pictured to myself the old doctor as he would presently come down, half-dressed and pulling on his coat as he advanced. He would ask, eagerly, "Who is sick? Where am I to go?" and I would calmly reply that he unduly alarmed himself, and that I had a message for his daughter. He would, of course, ask me what it was, and I, politely but firmly, would decline to explain to any one but the lady in person. Just what might ensue was not clear—but I beheld myself throughout commanding the situation, at once benevolent, polished, and inexorable.

The door opened with unlooked-for promptness, while my self-complacent vision still hung in mid-air. Instead of the bald and spectacled old doctor, there confronted me a white-faced, solemn-eyed lady in a black dress, whom I did not seem to know. I stared at her, tongue-tied, till she said, in a low, grave voice, "Well, Andrew, what is it?"

Then of course I saw that it was Miss Stratford, my teacher, the person whom I had come to see. Some vague sense of what the sleepless night had meant in this house came to me as I gazed confusedly at her mourning, and heard the echo of her sad tones in my ears.

"Is some one ill?" she asked again.

"No; some one—some one is very well!" I managed to reply, lifting my eyes again to her wan face. The spectacle of its drawn lines and pallor all at once assailed my wearied and overtaxed nerves with crushing weight. I felt myself beginning to whimper, and rushing tears scalded my eyes. Something inside my breast seemed to be dragging me down through the stoop.

I have now only the recollection of Miss Stratford's kneeling by my side, with a supporting arm around me, and of her thus unrolling and reading the proof-paper I had in my hand. We were in the hall now, instead of on the stoop, and there was a long silence. Then she put her head on my shoulder and wept. I could hear and feel her sobs as if they were my own.

"I—I didn't think you'd cry—that you'd be so sorry," I heard myself saying, at last, in despondent self-defence.

Miss Stratford lifted her head and, still kneeling as she was, put a finger under my chin to make me look her in her face. Lo! the eyes were laughing through their tears; the whole countenance was radiant once more with the light of happy youth and with that other glory which youth knows only once.

"Why, Andrew, boy," she said, trembling, smiling, sobbing, beaming all at once, "didn't you know that people cry for very joy sometimes?"

And as I shook my head she bent down and kissed me.

My Aunt Susan

MY AUNT SUSAN

I held the lamp, while Aunt Susan cut up the pig.

The whole day had been devoted, I remember, to preparations for this great event. Early in the morning I had been to the butcher's to set in train the annual negotiations for a loan of cleaver and meat-saw; and hours afterward had borne these implements proudly homeward through the village street. In the interval I had turned the grindstone, over at the Four Corners, while the grocer's hired man obligingly sharpened our carving-knife. Then there had been the even more back-aching task of clearing away the hard snow from the accustomed site of our wood-pile in the yard, and scraping together a frosted heap of chips and bark for the smudge in the smoke-barrel.

From time to time I sweetened this toil, and helped the laggard hours to a swifter pace, by paying visits to the woodshed to have still another look at the pig. He was frozen very stiff, and there were small icicles in the crevices whence his eyes had altogether disappeared. My emotions as I viewed his big, cold, pink carcass, with its extended legs, its bland and pasty countenance, and that awful emptiness underneath, were much mixed. Although I was his elder by seven or eight years, we had been close friends during all his life—or all except a very few weeks of his earliest sucking pighood, spent on his native farm. I had fed him daily; I had watched him grow week by week; more than once I had poked him with a stick as he ran around in his sty, to make him squeal for the edification of neighbors' boys who had come into our yard, and would now be sharply ordered out again by Aunt Susan.

As these kindly memories surged over me I could not but feel like a traitor to my old companion, as he lay thus hairless and pallid before my eyes. But then I would remember how good he was going to be to eat—and straightway return with a light heart to the work of kicking up more chips from the ice.

From the living-room in the rear of our little house came the monotonous incessant clatter of Aunt Susan's carpet loom. Through the window I could see the outlines of her figure and the back of her head as she sat on her high bench. It was to me the most familiar of all spectacles, this tireless woman bending resolutely over her work. She was there when I first cautiously ventured my nose out from under the warm blanket of a winter's morning. Very, very often I fell asleep at night in my bed in the recess, lulled off by the murmur of the diligent loom.

Presently I went in to warm myself, and stood with my red fingers over the stove top. She cast but one vague glance at me, through the open frame of the loom between us, and went on with her work. It was not our habit to talk much in that house. She was too busy a woman, for one thing, to have much time for conversation. The impression that she preferred not to talk was always present in my boyish mind. I call up the picture of her still as I saw her then under the top bar of the cumbrous old machine, sitting with lips tight together, and resolute, masterful eyes bent upon the twining intricacy of warp and woof before her. At her side were piled a dozen or more big balls of carpet rags, which the village wives and daughters cut up, sewed together and wound in the long winter evenings, while the men-folks sat with their stockinged feet on the stove hearth, and read out the latest "news from the front" in their _Weekly Tribune_.

I knew all these rag balls by the names of their owners. Not only did I often go to their houses for them, upon the strength of the general village rumor that they were ready, and always carry back the finished lengths of carpet; but I had long since unconsciously grown to watch all the varying garments and shifts of fashion in the raiment of our neighbors, with an eye single to the likelihood of their eventually turning up at Aunt Susan's loom. When Hiram Mabie's checkered butternut coat was cut down for his son Roswell, I noted the fact merely as a stage of its progress toward carpet rags. If Mrs. Wilkins concluded to turn her flowered delaine dress a third year, or Sarah Northrup had her bright saffron shawl dyed black, I was sensible of a wrong having been done our little household. I felt like crossing the street whenever I saw approaching the portly figure of Cyrus Husted's mother, the woman who dragged everybody into her house to show them the ingrain carpet she had bought at Tecumseh, and assured them that it was much cheaper in the long run than the products of my Aunt's industry. I tingled with indignation as she passed me on the sidewalk, puffing for breath and stepping mincingly because her shoes were too tight for her.

Nearly all the knowledge of our neighbors' sayings and doings which reached Aunt Susan came to her from me. She kept herself to herself with a vengeance, toiling early and late, rarely going beyond the confines of her yard save on Sunday mornings, when we went to church, and treating with frosty curtness the few people who ventured to come to our house on business or from social curiosity. For one thing, this Juno Mills in which we lived was not really our home. We had only been there for four or five years—a space which indeed spanned all my recollections of life—but left my Aunt more or less a stranger and new-comer. She spared no pains to maintain that condition. I can see now that there were good reasons for this stern aloofness. At the time I thought it was altogether due to the proud and unsociable nature of my Aunt.

In my child's mind I regarded her as distinctly an elderly person. People outside, I know, spoke of her as an old maid, sometimes winking furtively over my head as they did so. But she was not really old at all—was in truth just barely in the thirties. Doubtless the fact that she was tall and dark, with very black hair, and that years of steady concentration of sight, upon the strings and threads of the loom, had scored a scowling vertical wrinkle between her near-sighted eyes gave me my notion of her advanced maturity. And in all her ways and words, too, she was so far removed from any idea of youthful softness! I could not remember her having ever kissed me. My imagination never evolved the conceit of her kissing anybody. I had always had at her hands uniformly good treatment, good food, good clothes; after I had learned my letters from the old maroon plush label on the Babbitt's soap box which held the wood behind the stove, and expanded this knowledge by a study of street signs, she had herself taught me how to read, and later provided me with books for the village school. She was my only known relative—the only person in the world who had ever done anything for me. Yet it could not be said that I loved her. Indeed she no more raised the suggestion of tenderness in my mind than did the loom at which she spent her waking hours.

"The Perkinses asked me why you didn't get the butcher to cut up the pig," I remarked at last, rubbing my hands together over the hot stove griddles.

"It's none of their business!" said Aunt Susan, with laconic promptness.

"And Devillo Pollard's got a new overcoat," I added. "He hasn't worn the old army one now for upward of a week."

"If this war goes on much longer," commented my Aunt, "every carpet in Dearborn County 'll be as blue as a whetstone."

I think that must have been the entire conversation of the afternoon. I especially recall the remark about the overcoat. For two years now the balls of rags had contained an increasing proportion of pale blue woollen strips, as the men of the country round about came home from the South, or bought cheap garments from the second-hand dealers in Tecumseh. All other colors had died out. There was only this light blue, and the black of bombazine or worsted mourning into which the news in each week's papers forced one or another of the neighboring families. To obviate this monotony, some of the women dyed their white rags with butternut or even cochineal, but this was a mere drop in the bucket, so to speak. The loom spun out only long, depressing rolls of black and blue.

My memory leaps lightly forward now to the early evening, when I held the lamp in the woodshed, and Aunt Susan cut up the pig.

How joyfully I watched her every operation! Every now and again my interest grew so beyond proper bounds that I held the lamp sidewise, and the flame smoked the chimney. I was in mortal terror over this lamp, even when it was standing on the table quite by itself. We often read in the paper of explosions from this new kerosene by which people were instantly killed and houses wrapped in an unquenchable fire. Aunt Susan had stood out against the strange invention, long after most of the other homes of Juno Mills were familiar with the idea of the lamp. Even after she had yielded, and I went to the grocery for more oil and fresh chimneys and wicks, like other boys, she refused to believe that this inflammable fluid was really squeezed out of hard coal, as they said. And for years we lived in momentary belief that our lamp was about to explode.

My fears of sudden death could not, however, for a moment stand up against the delighted excitement with which I viewed the dismemberment of the pig. It was very cold in the shed, but neither of us noticed that. My Aunt attacked the job with skilful resolution and energy, as was her way, chopping small bones, sawing vehemently through big ones, hacking and slicing with the knife, like a strong man in a hurry.

For a long time no word was spoken. I gazed in silence as the head was detached, and then resolved itself slowly into souse—always tacitly set aside as my special portion. In prophecy I saw the big pan, filled with ears, cheeks, snout, feet, and tail, all boiled and allowed to grow cold in their own jelly—that pan to which I was free to repair any time of day until everything was gone. I thought of myself, too, with apron tied round my neck and the chopping-bowl on my knees, reducing what remained of the head into small bits, to be seasoned by my Aunt, and then fill other pans as head-cheese. The sage and summer savory hung in paper flour-bags from the rafters overhead. I looked up at them with rapture. It seemed as if my mouth already tasted them in head-cheese and sausage and in the hot gravy which basted the succulent spare-rib. Only the abiding menace of the lamp kept me from dancing with delight.