FullReads

But again I would not. Not yet was my Wandering Jew rightly construed for me. I trust that women may not be allowed a title to all the curiosity in the world. So when Montopolis’s oldest inhabitant (some ninety score years younger than Michob Ader) dropped in to acquire promulgation in print, I siphoned his perpetual trickle of reminiscence in the direction of the uninterpreted maker of shoes.

Uncle Abner was the Complete History of Montopolis, bound in butternut.

“O’Bader,” he quavered, “come here in ’69. He was the first shoemaker in the place. Folks generally considers him crazy at times now. But he don’t harm nobody. I s’pose drinkin’ upset his mind — yes, drinkin’ very likely done it. It’s a powerful bad thing, drinkin’. I’m an old, old man, sir, and I never see no good in drinkin’.”

I felt disappointment. I was willing to admit drink in the case of my shoemaker, but I preferred it as a recourse instead of a cause. Why had he pitched upon his perpetual, strange note of the Wandering Jew? Why his unutterable grief during his aberration? I could not yet accept whiskey as an explanation.

“Did Mike O’Bader ever have a great loss or trouble of any kind?” I asked.

“Lemme see! About thirty year ago there was somethin’ of the kind, I recollect. Montopolis, sir, in them days used to be a mighty strict place.

“Well, Mike O’Bader had a daughter then — a right pretty girl. She was too gay a sort for Montopolis so one day she slips off to another town and runs away with a circus. It was two years before she comes back, all fixed up in fine clothes and rings and jewellery, to see Mike. He wouldn’t have nothin’ to do with her, so she stays around town awhile, anyway. I reckon the men folks wouldn’t have raised no objections, but the women egged ’em on to order her to leave town. But she had plenty of spunk, and told ’em to mind their own business.

“So one night they decided to run her away. A crowd of men and women drove her out of her house, and chased her with sticks and stones. She run to her father’s door, callin’ for help. Mike opens it, and when he sees who it is he hits her with his fist and knocks her down and shuts the door.

“And then the crowd kept on chunkin’ her till she run clear out of town. And the next day they finds her drowned dead in Hunter’s mill pond. I mind it all now. That was thirty year ago.”

I leaned back in my non-rotary revolving chair and nodded gently, like a mandarin, at my paste-pot.

“When old Mike has a spell,” went on Uncle Abner, tepidly garrulous, “he thinks he’s the Wanderin’ Jew.”

“He is,” said I, nodding away.

And Uncle Abner cackled insinuatingly at the editor’s remark, for he was expecting at least a “stickful” in the “Personal Notes” of the Bugle.