Part 2

The people came to the church on Sundays wearing rustling clothes, some of them riding in carriages that were harnessed to plow horses or to driving nags or gay well-bred roadsters. In the church the ladies taught lessons of the regeneration of the elect and the death in Adam, all men born in a state of sin, of Eve who had eaten the fruit and had given of it to Adam, that what God did foreknow that he did ordain. The words would be confused with drowsiness and weariness, and the foreknowledge of God would settle to the odors of the yarn carpet and the dry melancholy of the village Sabbath, sin being any want of conformity to or transgression of the law of God. A savory wooden tray would be passed about for the collection, a tray smelling of rich cedar wood and varnish. The savor of the tray being passed and done, the lady would draw the mind back again to the hard matter of Eden and sin, to the fearful definition which was heavy with meaningless wordings. Was it for this, these laborings with odorless words and long unregenerated sayings, that she, Luce Jarvis, that she, Theodosia Bell, had put on her new white dress and her silk sash? It was an impenetrable matter. The foreknowledge arose from the carpet in an aromatic stench, but the desire to cough would not follow. There was no relief. Want-of-conformity-to took Transgression-of into a great stale book and closed flat the covers, and in Adam all men were born in a state of sin. Eve was a woman and a terrible instigator of Want-of-conformity-to. The lady teacher was severe upon Eve. But Adam, said the lady, was equal with her in guilt.

Each Sunday came the gayety of putting on the favored dress, the best muslin. There would be the tying of the sash, an anxious ceremony, a flutter of petticoats brushing at the knees, the happiness of the Sunday hat. There would be the sprig of honeysuckle to wear at the breast, or a rosebud brought in from the garden for Theodosia, brought by her grandfather and presented, “A morning gift to a little lady, a posy to set off her pretties.” Then, in the church, the clatter of greetings and pleasure in one’s coming. “Here’s a seat. Sit here. Glad you came.... How sweet she looks.... How sweet we all look, all the little folks. This bright Sabbath morning....”

Then the business of getting settled, the text asked all around. The hour grew long and time was suppressed. Time lost all elasticity and became a fixed substance. The seat turned hard like the impenetrable words; the seat pressed with infinite woodenness at her flattened thighs and her pointed spine. Adam was equal. Moses had been given the law. Holy Men taught by the Holy Ghost had written the book. They were all undiscernible with age, older than the earth, Adam, Eve the woman. Would she be Mrs. Eve? Or Miss Eve? Who ever heard of a woman named Eve? She was rejected entirely. The whole hour was sunk, Adam, Moses, Eve, God, Want-of-conformity, Holy Men, sunk into unyielding time. Men far across the church were shaking hands, curious persons, playing at living, but in earnest about it. The foreknowledge continued to arise with Adam, who was in all equal, and through him we are all born in sin. Once into the hour flashed a meaning, a clear thought, a sum toward which all was momentarily moved, the relation never clear but the summary comprehended: To do good, to act right.

All the little girls were dressed in muslins and some of them were perfumed. The lady teacher wore tight kid gloves and smelled of some sweet stuff, her shining shoe just peeping from the edge of her dress. One little girl would tell of a sin she knew of. Somebody she would not name had said a book was hers when it was really her sister’s.

“That was very wrong,” the lady said. “That was a lie, and God looks into our hearts and knows when we lie. You can deceive another person but you cannot deceive God, for God knows all things.”

“And I knew a boy,” another child said, “and he found a ball and kept it for his own because he found it.”

“That was wrong too,” the lady said, a hard voice, “for he might have found the owner of the ball if he had tried. You cannot escape the eye of God. He sees all we do and looks into every heart. We can never deceive God, for He knows our inmost thoughts.”

* * * * *

Moll Peters was a friendly person, always kind to a child. She worked in a house where boarders were kept and where there were two other servants, a dark thin girl and a man named Berry. Other negroes would come to the kitchen, two or three men often, for Moll would slip them a bite of something to eat, a fresh hot pie or a cookie or a piece of bread dripping with rich hot gravy. They would laugh loud over their stories and carry forward their jokes from day to day. Or having been reticent because of the presence of a child, speaking in half-syllables and signs, they would suddenly flash quick fearful stories they knew.

Moll was trying to win over the young man, Berry, from the dark girl. He would eat her hot sops and pies and kiss her fat jaws, but in the end he would go when the dark girl called him, and the dark girl was not afraid. She would look at Berry with hard gathering eyes or hold out toward him briefly one dark thin hand whose palm was pale yellow-white, and she would treat Moll with friendly indifference, bragging on her pies and her sauces.

Berry would sing a song, throwing into the words an infinity of soft gliding modulations and quickly-breathed grace-notes, looking meltingly at Moll as he sang. His song,

I cannot stand to see my baby lose, I love her from her head down to her shoes,

would burst through the great laughter when he came down from the dining-room with a tray. The kitchen knew that Horace Bell was the father of Miss Tennie’s unborn infant. This fact was well known to the pans in the scullery closet under the sink, to the pans and skillets that were put away into the secret and ill-odored dark but would come clattering out in the hurry of their wanting.

“Ol’ big-mouthed devil!” Moll said once with a great laugh, after a great roll of laughter and a whispered comment. “Him and Miss Tennie! God knows!”

Known, these, to the pans and pots and skillets, to the spoons and dippers and colanders, but not to the sauces and syrups and gravies and roasts that went up to the boarders’ dining-room. A gravy could roll discreetly out from a skillet and leave all knowledge behind to flavor the rich scrapings which Moll spooned upon a bit of bread for her own mouth or for the mouth of some chosen friend.

Miss Nannie Poll and Mr. Trout flavored one of Moll’s sops, a sauce which was sweet with the grease of knowledge. A white man was the father of Letty’s youngone, and old Mr. Preacher Benton was, God knew, a feisty old cuss, after Mag. She, Moll, had nursed old Mrs. Putty in her deliriums and listened to her talk all night, and the men that woman had had in her time would fill a prayer-meeting, God knew, if half she said in her ravings was true. Old Jonas Beatty smelled like a billygoat, and Miss Jodie Whippleton tried to hide her dead brat in the calf lot but the hogs got in and rooted it up for her.

Coming down across the kitchen yard with a tilted tray and a burst of song, Berry would cast a melting, joyful glimmer of eyes toward Moll. Her poor fat would quiver with pleasure and pain. His lilted words,

I’m proud o’ my black Venus, No coon can come between us ...

would accent his quick coming steps and he would clatter the dishes from the tray with cunning small gestures.

“Aw Be’y,” Moll would plead, ready to cry.

My gal, she’s a high-born lady, She’s dark but not too shady. Down the line, oh, there we shine, Me an’ that high-born gal o’ mine....

“Aw, Be’y, go on,” a softly pled distress.

“I just likes to sing,” Berry said, “and someways I’m partial to that old song.”

“Oh, God knows, if I ain’t let Mr. Preacher Benton’s soft-boiled egg get as hard as a rock. God knows! Hard as nails!” A wail from a voice that was near its tears.

“Aw, put a little water in it and stir it up. The preacher, he’ll not never know the difference,” the dark girl said.

“I’ll not do so. I’m a fool, I am. I won’t send up no such egg to nobody. I’ll make another one. Poor old Moll. Hand me a egg outen the icebox, Be’y, whilst I make the water boil again. Poor old Moll.” She was weeping now.

From the icebox to the stove with the egg shuffled in his hand. The handsome yellow boy with his melting quiver of eyes and already broken promise, broken in its borning.

I’ll telegraph my baby, She’ll send ten or twenty maybe....

“Aw Be’y, go on,” Moll was pleading again, won again and rejected. “Aw, Be’y.”

* * * * *

At the Seminary, chapel service was held each morning in the chief assembly hall, the great and the little being required in attendance. The small children sat on the front seats, huddled together, fearful that some impossible thing might be demanded of them. On some mornings there were opening songs, or now and then a girl would walk to the platform and say a piece in a light, pretty voice, or a large boy would pronounce an oration. The song, all singing together, would roll out in a great shaking throb of noise and pain that beat upon sensitive ears and passed inward to become a pleasure, under the noise running the music.

Land where our fathers died, Land where the Pilgrims pried....

On the blackboard were the algebraic emblems and geometric designs belonging to the great boys and girls. Small children who had labored to keep their efforts at learnings distinct, who had used letters for spelling words and numbers for making sums, read upon the board of the assembly hall such dissipated and trivial statements as _a_ - _b_ = 6.

Beyond the lessons of the books and the precepts of the teachers the young moved in the great flow of the body of human knowledge, learning slowly from one another. The fruit of knowledge passed downward perpetually from the older groups, becoming more grotesque as it descended beyond the reach of its accompanying emotions. The bulging piano legs on the chapel platform were with child, pregnant. The Pilgrims were thought of as a prying lot; they were heard of around Thanksgiving Day. A child had once designated his navel as his birthplace. A small child in an upper back room, dressing for a pageant, whispered to another child, “That’s my birthplace.” Word of it was passed about in a whisper; it was doubtless true; there was such a word; it could be found in the spelling book. In the assembly a child looked hard at the pregnant piano leg, trying to distinguish a mark upon it. Another day, and the mark was there, the birthplace.

Luce had learned to read and was passing well into the body of knowledge. The games were a delight, and so too were the calisthenics when one marched on light toes, Theodosia walking first. One day a group gathered on the playground around a crying child that had fallen on the gravel. The teacher assured him that the mishap had not hurt him, that it was but a light scratch, nothing to cry for. The crowd began to spread about.

“What was the matter?” was asked.

“Fell down and scratched his cuticle a little,” the teacher said.

Did she have a cuticle? she wondered. She had never heard anyone say that she had scratched or bruised or torn or maimed her cuticle. She dared not ask.

Numbers became rich designs when they passed beyond the commonplace literalness of addition. A multiplication table was a poem and a song. The numbers, written and viewed, kept personalities within their shapes and evoked colors even after they became parts of tables, the number songs. One, written 1, was whimsical and comical, unserious, too easy to learn and to write. No child could ever take it heavily, for anyone could have invented it. 2 was beyond knowing in its infinity of curves and arcs that melted into an angle and stiffened into a straight line. It had caused tears in the beginning, and even after it became routine its forbidding resistance was not forgotten; it was a cruelty. Nine, uttered, was the cry of a bird. Written 9, it rolled easily from the hand and was a maker of joy. It was the consummation of numbers, the last of its kind, the end of the series. After it the numbers were patched together of those already learned, a poverty of ideas. Its multiplication table was the most beautiful in song with its receding scheme of backward-counting adornments that played through the forward-going lilt of rising quantities.

One day in the assembly the chief professor asked questions, preparing for a day of patriotism. Only the little children might answer.

“Where was the birthplace of Christopher Columbus?”

* * * * *

Mome is disposed now, it is not a place now, is an actual substance as it was in the beginning, is become entirely what it always was. It has lost its delusion. No one ever called it now by a name.

It is the four-arc’d clock of the seasons ticking its tick-tock around the year, and it is the mid-winter spring song of the joree bird, the Carolina wren, when he tee-teedle tee-teedle tee-deets on a high bare bough on a bright morning in January, spring not being here, not being there, not being anywhere.

It is the will to say, the power never being sufficient, the reach toward the last word—less than word, half-word, quarter-word, minimum of a word—that shrinks more inwardly and farthest toward its center when it is supplicated, that cries back, “Come,” or “Here, here I am,” when it is unsought. It is the act of looking when the mirror of the earth looks back into a creature, back into quickened nerves and raw sensitive feelers that run to the ends of a town, gray and white threads, living threads, knotted into a net and contrived to catch and to hold pleasure and pain, chiefly to hold pain.

It is the beauty of the thing itself welling up within itself continually in a constant rebirth, a resurrection. At any point it partakes of the whole nature of itself—like an onion.

It is nobody’s useless old cat, having been stoned three times to death and left by boys in a tin-can heap at the bottom of a gully in Dee Young’s pasture, arising, one eye hanging by a thread, to cry “meauw” on a woman’s kitchen doorstep and to drink warm milk from a brown saucer.

It is the wide-opened jaw of a hound blowing hot breath on a little field beast and crying a howled curse on the perfidy of escape. It is a wave of hard shadows running over dried grass and winter stubble under a vast warted sky, the rabbit having taken to the brush heap at the field’s end. It embraces the new food and the new hunger. It is in part a man, a farmer, walking across his pasture in mid-summer singing a song he himself is making as he goes kicking his work shoes through the grass, singing, “Loo loo lo lo hum bang fi oo,” singing “Old Whosoever Will is walken on the top of the meadow,” a cattle farmer, a breeder of Shorthorns, ten years hence or now, singing a mediæval altarpiece over the heads of his cows and tramping through a field of a here unnamed community of flowers out of which the great bee eats. It is a farmer, the same, Caleb Burns, a farmer of fine cattle, a cattle husbandman, walking among his barns or over his pastures making the beginnings of songs or butchering a young beef for food: he would, with his men to help, stab the young beast at the throat and hang it to bleed, one of his men catching the blood in a bucket, a bucket of blood running out of a young beef, warm stuff, sickening to the smell, stuff that nice people fear. Caleb Burns, son of George Burns and Rose Hamilton, an experienced husbandman knowing foolishness and loss, or a young man beginning his way, Caleb Burns singing a song.

* * * * *

Of the curbs and the streets, the lamp-posts and the street crossings, the drama of the court day, all the people kept a sense that these had been there a very long time, that these were the eternal marks of the earth and the ways by which man recognized himself in life. The town was but a little over a hundred years old, and back of that lay the wilderness; but few of the people knew how recently the town had begun. “Out of Virginia,” “Away back long ago,” were sayings in their vague accounts of themselves. The marks they had put upon the wilderness were older than any of the people could tell or the race remember and had been brought whole from some other life.

The roads ran out from the town toward other towns, roads known now as hard streamers of yellow earth and broken stones, inviting going, winding among the rolling farms and lost in remote regions where unfamiliar hills came down toward alien fences and gathered here and there a curious tree or made off toward a distant unmeasured horizon. In the farms Jersey cattle or Shorthorns grazed, the last the red of the old Patton stock, brought from Virginia. The farmers came to town and thus brought the roads back to the streets and the lanes, came driving wagons laden with tobacco or hay or wheat or corn, and the cattle-men brought steers along the roads or the traders drove in the sheep, the spring lambs crying all June through the streets as they were flocked from day to day at the commons around the shipping pens.

For the people of Hill Street, there was only one season and that was summer, warm, seasonable, lush with rain, the season of easy living and song. Against this was set an anti-season, a not-existence, negative, cruel, hard with poverty and cold and insufficient food—winter. Life then was suspended. Begetting and bearing went forward through this negative period because the law was established by which they progressed, but life which sustained these waited, dull, suffering, and monotonous.

One spring the negroes began to dig long trenches through the streets to lay water pipes through the town. The white people were having water hydrants put into their gardens and houses, the water to be pumped from a reservoir which was being made between two hills far up in the farms above the town. In the houses bathrooms were erected at the ends of back porches or upper hallways. There was work for every black laborer in the building of the dam and the digging of the trenches through the streets and roads. The negroes at the picks would sing now and then, not in unison, but each one would cry out his song, a phrase or a rhyme, timed to the regular throb of the body as it hammered with the tool upon the beaten earth, the song falling an instant behind the blow of the arm in half-humorous comment.

Whe-en I me-a-rry the-en I will Ma-ake my ho-ome in E-evansville....

The song was always heard to the steady fall of the pick or the rise of the shovel, syncopated so that it set the shovel apart from itself and but half-owned its rhythms, or rather as if it accepted its confines and then escaped from them by the witty loophole of a quarter-beat. The men who worked were the strong men of the town, brown men or yellow, men who worked as teamsters, handlers of stone, lumber, coal, brick. They were named Wade Spalding, Ben MacVeigh, Ross, Tom Rusty, and there was a man called Gluco. Joe Davis was among them, a man prodigious of strength. Ross was a large man, young at that time, brown-skinned and broad in shoulders. All of them were willing, if they were paid well and well watched, to do a day’s work. A song would cry out from beneath the throb of the picks, escaped from the hard rhythm of the labor.

Chicken in the tree Nobody there but me....

A wailing minor slurred through infinite intervals from tone to tone, sliding on the word “there” down four semitones of the scale by gradations unknown to established song. As a sequel to this some other voice would offer, after a space with the thud of the picks, the deeply intoned fatalism, swifter than the last, major, without wailing.

Hounds on my track Chicken on my back.

Ross was a tall broad young negro, not over-sized, but well-knit and strong, his weight about one hundred and sixty pounds. He maintained a rivalry with Wade Spalding at the business of the picks, neither of them deigning to outdo himself but each taking pride in what he could achieve, foot by foot, by using as little of his strength as he might. Each negro used but the cream of his vitality on the labor, working relaxed, saving himself for life and her uses. A song, called out quickly,

Nigga, nigga, what can you do? I can line a track, Pull a jack; I can pick and shovel too.

Water for bathing was being piped into all the better houses of the town, but few people would drink water from the pipes. Pump water, water from cisterns and wells, was better liked. The cisterns were not yet to be discarded. Wade had cleaned many a cistern and well. He would go down into the drained reservoir and dip up the sediments of mud to send it aloft in buckets. He would sop up the last of the water with cloths and rinse again with fresh water. No one sang at a lonely task such as this. Song flowed best when the men worked together in a long line, the picks and shovels rising and falling.

Look down that dirt-road, Far as I could see. Saw a jail door.... Look like home to me.

ONE

Frequently a well-used, high buggy was seen on the streets of the town, a vehicle of a slightly unfamiliar type, bought perhaps in some remote market. It would turn slowly around before the county offices and stand all afternoon under the shade of the tree at the doorway, a privileged conveyance. It was drawn by a well-conditioned horse, a tall bay that would step daintily along the stones of the street, and turn the wheels carefully. The owner, Mr. Tom Singleton, would buy easily at the stores, careless of bargains, asking for the best. Sometimes he would talk all afternoon with Anthony Bell, sitting on the gallery of the white house or under the elm tree. If Tom Singleton’s wife, Miss Doe, were present she would give great care to her leave-taking. She would mount to the buggy with ceremonious ease and seat herself, smiling at the accomplished act, scarcely belonging to the event, her smile lingering until the need for good-byes obliterated her inner vision of herself. She was a sister to Anthony Bell. Her name, Theodosia, had been shortened to Doe. The Singleton farm was ten miles from the town, northwest, down the valley.

Sometimes Mr. Tom would come to town in a carriage drawn by two fine brown mules. Then he would take Anthony Bell and the two girls, Theodosia and Annie, back to the farm for a visit.

The two mules trotted down the Quincy pike in the bright widely-spread glow of a late morning, the waves of heat rolling up from the macadam and turning about among the cooler undulations that flowed from the tall corn of the fields. Eight miles from the town and the carriage left the Quincy pike and entered a crossroad, and here the mules walked slowly under the roadside trees. The stone wall at the right was rich with moss and shadows. Two miles along this way, and Tom Singleton’s gate was set into the stone wall. Beyond, and the mules trotted evenly up a gravel road under American elms that were widely placed, the driveway leading to the farmhouse. Pines, lindens, locusts, tulip poplars and elms grew about the house in a pleasant confusion. The fox hounds, great mongrel beasts, walked in and out over the portico. From somewhere toward the rear a great jack, the breeding stallion, was braying at the arrivals.

“You can take the west room,” Miss Doe said, standing with her hands folded before her body when she welcomed her guests, when she had kissed each little girl as was her duty. “Anthony, he can take the east room. Lucas will carry up the valises.”