FullReads

“I guess I’ll blaze a fire, Jonas,” said she. “You step out an’ git me a mite o’ kindlin’.”

The air of homely living enwrapped him once again, and mechanically, with the inertia of old habit, he obeyed. They had a “cup o’ tea” together; and then, when the dishes were washed, and the peaceful twilight began to settle down upon them like a sifting mist, she drew a little rocking chair to the window where he sat opposite, and spoke.

“Jonas,” said she, in that still voice which had been harmonized by the experiences of life, “arter dark, you jest go up an’ bring home them blue dishes. Mary’s got an awful lot o’ fun in her, an’ if she ain’t laughin’ over that, I’m beat. Now, Jonas, you do it! Do you s’pose she wants them nice blue pieces out there through wind an’ weather? She’d ruther by half see ’em on the parlor cluzzet shelves; an’ if you’ll fetch ’em home, I’ll scallop some white paper, jest as she liked, an’ we’ll set ’em up there.”

Jonas wakened a little from his mental swoon. Life seemed warmer, more tangible, again.

“Law, do go,” said the mother soothingly. “She don’t want the whole township tramplin’ up there to eye over her chiny. Make her as nervous as a witch. Here’s the ha’-bushel basket, an’ some paper to put between ’em. You go, Jonas, an’ I’ll clear off the shelves.”

So Jonas, whether he was tired of guiding the impulses of his own unquiet mind, or whether he had become a child again, glad to yield to the maternal, as we all do in our grief, took the basket and went. He stood by, still like a child, while this comfortable woman put the china on the shelves, speaking warmly, as she worked, of the pretty curving of the cups, and her belief that the pitcher was “one you could pour out of.” She stayed on at the house, and Jonas, through his sickness of the mind, lay back upon her soothing will as a baby lies in its mother’s arms. But the china was never used, even when he had come to his normal estate, and bought and sold as before. The mother’s prescience was too keen for that.

Here in this ground are the ambiguities of life carried over into that other state, its pathos and its small misunderstandings. This was a much-married man whose last spouse had been a triple widow. Even to him the situation proved mathematically complex, and the sumptuous stone to her memory bears the dizzying legend that “Enoch Nudd who erects this stone is her fourth husband and his fifth wife.” Perhaps it was the exigencies of space which brought about this amazing elision; but surely, in its very apparent intention, there is only a modest pride. For indubitably the much-married may plume themselves upon being also the widely sought. If it is the crown of sex to be desired, here you have it, under seal of the civil bond. No baseless, windy boasting that “I might an if I would!” Nay, here be the marriage ties to testify.

In this pleasant, weedy corner is a little white stone, not so long erected. “I shall arise in thine image,” runs the inscription; and reading it, you shall remember that the dust within belonged to a little hunchback, who played the fiddle divinely, and had beseeching eyes. With that cry he escaped from the marred conditions of the clay. Here, too (for this is a sort of bachelor nook), is the grave of a man whom we unconsciously thrust into a permanent masquerade. Years and years ago he broke into a house,–an unknown felony in our quiet limits,–and was incontinently shot. The burglar lost his arm, and went about at first under a cloud of disgrace and horror, which became, with healing of the public conscience, a veil of sympathy. After his brief imprisonment indoors, during the healing of the mutilated stump, he came forth among us again, a man sadder and wiser in that he had learned how slow and sure may be the road to wealth. He had sown his wild oats in one night’s foolish work, and now he settled down to doing such odd jobs as he might with one hand. We got accustomed to his loss. Those of us who were children when it happened never really discovered that it was disgrace at all; we called it misfortune, and no one said us nay. Then one day it occurred to us that he must have been shot “in the war,” and so, all unwittingly to himself, the silent man became a hero. We accepted him. He was part of our poetic time, and when he died, we held him still in remembrance among those who fell worthily. When Decoration Day was first observed in Tiverton, one of us thought of him, and dropped some apple blossoms on his grave; and so it had its posy like the rest, although it bore no flag. It was the doctor who set us right there. “I wouldn’t do that,” he said, withholding the hand of one unthinking child; and she took back her flag. But she left the blossoms, and, being fond of precedent, we still do the same; unless we stop to think, we know not why. You may say there is here some perfidy to the republic and the honored dead, or at least some laxity of morals. We are lax, indeed, but possibly that is why we are so kind. We are not willing to “hurt folks’ feelings” even when they have migrated to another star; and a flower more or less from the overplus given to men who made the greater choice will do no harm, tossed to one whose soul may be sitting, like Lazarus, at their riches’ gate.