Of Time and the River (43 page)

And for this reason, she now understood something about her father, this great gaunt figure of a stone-cutter that she had never understood or thought about before: she suddenly understood his order, sense of decency and dispatch; his love of cleanness, roaring fires, and rich abundance, his foul drunkenness, violence, and howling fury, his naked shame and trembling penitence, his good clothes of heavy monumental black that he always kept well pressed, his clean boiled shirts, wing collars, and his love of hotels, ships, and trains, his love of gardens, new lands, cities, voyages. She knew suddenly that he was unlike any other man that ever lived, and that every man that ever lived was like her father. And remembering the cold and mournful look in his shallow staring eyes of cold hard grey, she suddenly knew the reason for that look, as she had never known it before, and understood now why so few men had ever called him by his first name—why he was known to all the world as “Mr. Gant.”

Having joined this group of working men, Helen immediately felt an indefinable but powerful sense of comfort and physical well-being which the presence of such men as these always gave to her. And she did not know why; but immediately, once she had grasped Mr. Ramsay by the hand, and was aware of Mike Fogarty’s mountainous form and clear-blue eye above her, and Ollie Gant’s deep and lazy laugh, and the deliberate and sensual languor with which he raised his cigarette to his lips with his powerful plasterer’s hand, drawing the smoke deep into his strong lungs and letting it trickle slowly from his nostrils as he talked—she was conscious of a feeling of enormous security and relief which she had not known in years.

And this feeling, as with every person of strong sensuous perceptions, was literal, physical, chemical, astoundingly acute. She not only felt an enormous relief and joy to get back to these working people, it even seemed to her that everything they did—the way Mr. Duncan held his strong cheap cigar in his thick dry fingers, the immense satisfaction with which he drew on it, the languid and sensual trickling of cigarette smoke from Ollie Gant’s nostrils, his deep, good-natured, indolently lazy laugh, even the perceptible bulge of tobacco-quid in Alec Ramsay’s brick-red face, his barely perceptible rumination of it—all these things, though manlike in their nature, seemed wonderfully good and fresh and living to her—the whole plain priceless glory of the earth restored to her—and gave her a feeling of wonderful happiness and joy.

And later that night when all these men, her father’s friends, had gone into his room, filling it with their enormous and full-blooded vitality, as she saw him lying there, wax-pale, bloodless, motionless, yet with a faint grin at the edge of his thin mouth as he received them, as she heard their deep full-fibred voices, Mike Fogarty’s lilting Irish, Mr. Duncan’s thick Scotch burr, Ollie Gant’s deep and lazy laugh, and the humour of Alec Ramsay’s deep, gruff and matter-of-fact tone, relating old times—“God, Will!” he said, “at your worst, you weren’t in it compared to Wes! He was a holy terror when he drank! Do you remember the day he drove his fist through your plate-glass window right in the face of Jannadeau—and went home then and tore all the plumbing out of the house and pitched the bath-tub out of the second-storey window into Orchard Street—God! Will!—you weren’t in it compared to Wes”—as she heard all this, and saw Gant’s thin grin and heard his faint and rusty cackle, his almost inaudible “E’God! Poor Wes!”—she could not believe that he was going to die, the great full-blooded working men filled the room with the vitality of a life which had returned in all its rich and living flood, and seemed intolerably near and familiar—and she kept thinking with a feeling of wonderful happiness and disbelief: “Oh, but Papa’s not going to die! It’s not possible! He can’t! He can’t!”

XXXI

The dying man himself was no longer to be fooled and duped by hope; he knew that he was done for, and he no longer cared. Rather, as if that knowledge had brought him a new strength—the immense and measureless strength that comes from resignation and that has vanquished terror and despair—Gant had already consigned himself to death, and now was waiting for it, without weariness or anxiety, and with a perfect and peaceful acquiescence.

This complete resignation and tranquillity of a man whose life had been so full of violence, protest, and howling fury stunned and silenced them and left them helpless. It seemed that Gant, knowing that often he had lived badly, was now determined to die well. And in this he succeeded. He accepted every ministration, every visit, every stammering reassurance, or frenzied activity, with a passive gratefulness which he seemed to want everyone to know. On the evening of the day after his first hćmorrhage, he asked for food and Eliza, bustling out, pathetically eager to do something, killed a chicken and cooked it for him.

And as if, from that infinite depth of death and silence from which he looked at her, he had seen, behind the bridling brisk activity of her figure, for ever bustling back and forth, saying confusedly— “Why, yes! The very thing! This very minute, sir!”—had seen the white strained face, the stricken eyes of a proud and sensitive woman who had wanted affection all her life, had received for the most part injury and abuse, and who was ready to clutch at any crust of comfort that might console or justify her before he died— he ate part of the chicken with relish, and then, looking up at her, said quietly:

“I tell you what—that was a good chicken.”

And Helen, who had been sitting beside him on the bed, and feeding him, now cried out in a tone of bantering and good-humoured challenge:

“What! Is it better than the ones
I
cook for you? You’d better not say it is—I’ll beat you if you do.’”

And Gant, grinning feebly, shook his head, and answered:

“Ah-h! Your mother is a good cook, Helen. You’re a good cook, too—but there’s no one else can cook a chicken like your mother!”

And stretching out his great right hand, he patted Eliza’s worn fingers with his own.

And Eliza, suddenly touched by that word of unaccustomed praise and tenderness, turned and rushed blindly from the room at a clumsy bridling gait, clasping her hands together at the wrist, her weak eyes blind with tears—shaking her head in a strong convulsive movement, her mouth smiling a pale tremulous smile, ludicrous, touching, made unnatural by her false teeth, whispering over and over to herself, Poor fellow! Says, ‘There’s no one else can cook a chicken like your mother.’ Reached out and patted me on the hand, you know. Says ‘I tell you what, there’s no one who can cook a chicken like your mother.’ I reckon he wanted to let me know, to tell me, but says, ‘The rest of you have all been good to me, Helen’s a good cook, but there’s no one else can cook like your mother.’”

“Oh, here, here, here!” said Helen, who, laughing uncertainly had followed her mother from the room when Eliza had rushed out, and had seized her by the arms, and shook her gently, “good heavens! HERE! You mustn’t carry on like this! You mustn’t take it this way! Why, he’s all right!” she cried out heartily and shook Eliza again. “Papa’s going to be all right! Why, what are you crying for?” she laughed. “He’s going to get well now—don’t you know that?”

And Eliza could say nothing for a moment but kept smiling that false trembling and unnatural smile, shaking her head in a slight convulsive movement, her eyes blind with tears.

“I tell you what,” she whispered, smiling tremulously again and shaking her head, “there was something about it—you know, the way he said it—says, ‘There’s no one who can come up to your mother’— there was something in the way he said it! Poor fellow, says, ‘None of the rest of you can cook like her’—says, ‘I tell you what, that was certainly a good chicken’—Poor fellow! It wasn’t so much what he said as the way he said it—there was something about it that went through me like a knife—I tell you what it did!”

“Oh, here, here, here!” Helen cried again, laughing. But her own eyes were also wet, the bitter possessiveness that had dominated all her relations with her father, and that had thrust Eliza away from him, was suddenly vanquished. At that moment she began to feel an affection for her mother that she had never felt before, a deep and nameless pity and regret, and a sense of sombre satisfaction.

“Well,” she thought, “I guess it’s all she’s had, but I’m glad she’s got that much to remember. I’m glad he said it: she’ll always have that now to hang on to.”

And Gant lay looking up from that sunken depth of death and silence, his great hands of living power quiet with their immense and passive strength beside him on the bed.

XXXII

Towards one o’clock that night Gant fell asleep and dreamed that he was walking down the road that led to Spangler’s Run. And although he had not been along that road for fifty years everything was as fresh, as green, as living and familiar as it had ever been to him. He came out on the road from Schaefer’s farm, and on his left he passed by the little white frame church of the United Brethren, and the graveyard about the church where his friends and family had been buried. From the road he could see the line of family gravestones which he himself had carved and set up after he had returned from serving his apprenticeship in Baltimore. The stones were all alike: tall flat slabs of marble with plain rounded tops, and there was one for his sister Susan, who had died in infancy, and one for his sister Huldah, who had died in childbirth while the war was on, and one for Huldah’s husband, a young farmer named Jake Lentz who had been killed at Chancellorsville, and one for the husband of his oldest sister, Augusta, a man named Martin, who had been an itinerant photographer and had died soon after the war, and finally one for Gant’s own father. And since there were no stones for his brother George or for Elmer or for John, and none for his mother or Augusta, Gant knew that he was still a young man, and had just recently come home. The stones which he had put up were still white and new, and in the lower right-hand corner of each stone, he had carved his own name: W. O. Gant.

It was a fine morning in early May and everything was sweet and green and as familiar as it had always been. The graveyard was carpeted with thick green grass, and all around the graveyard and the church there was the incomparable green velvet of young wheat. And the thought came back to Gant, as it had come to him a thousand times, that the wheat around the graveyard looked greener and richer than any other wheat that he had ever seen. And beside him on his right were the great fields of the Schaefer farm, some richly carpeted with young green wheat, and some ploughed, showing great bronze-red strips of fertile nobly-swelling earth. And behind him on the great swell of the land, and commanding that sweet and casual scene with the majesty of its incomparable lay was Jacob Schaefer’s great red barn and to the right the neat brick house with the white trimming of its windows, the white picket fence, the green yard with its rich tapestry of flowers and lilac bushes and the massed leafy spread of its big maple trees. And behind the house the hill rose, and all its woods were just greening into May, still smoky, tender and unfledged, gold-yellow with the magic of young green. And before the woods began there was the apple orchard half-way up the hill; the trees were heavy with the blossoms and stood there in all their dense still bloom incredible.

And from the greening trees the bird-song rose, the grass was thick with the dense gold glory of the dandelions, and all about him were a thousand magic things that came and went and never could be captured. Below the church, he passed the old frame-house where Elly Spangler, who kept the church keys, lived, and there were apple trees behind the house, all dense with bloom, but the house was rickety, unpainted and dilapidated as it had always been, and he wondered if the kitchen was still buzzing with a million flies, and if Elly’s half-wit brothers, Jim and Willy, were inside. And even as he shook his head and thought, as he had thought so many times, “Poor Elly,” the back door opened and Willy Spangler, a man past thirty, wearing overalls and with a fond, foolish witless face, came galloping down across the yard toward him, flinging his arms out in exuberant greeting, and shouting to him the same welcome that he shouted out to everyone who passed, friends and strangers all alike—“I’ve been lookin’ fer ye! I’ve been lookin’ fer ye, Oll,” using, as was the custom of the friends and kinsmen of his Pennsylvania boyhood, his second name—and then, anxiously, pleadingly, again the same words that he spoke to everyone: “Ain’t ye goin’ to stay?”

And Gant, grinning, but touched by the indefinable sadness and pity which that kind and witless greeting had always stirred in him since his own childhood, shook his head, and said quietly:

“No, Willy. Not today. I’m meeting someone down the road”—and straightway felt, with thudding heart, a powerful and nameless excitement, the urgency of that impending meeting—why, where, with whom, he did not know—but all-compelling now, inevitable.

And Willy, still with wondering, foolish, kindly face followed along beside him now, saying eagerly, as he said to everyone:

“Did ye bring anythin’ fer me? Have ye got a chew?”

And Gant, starting to shake his head in refusal, stopped suddenly, seeing the look of disappointment on the idiot’s face, and putting his hand in the pocket of his coat, took out a plug of apple- tobacco, saying:

“Yes. Here you are, Willy. You can have this.”

And Willy, grinning with foolish joy, had clutched the plug of tobacco and, still kind and foolish, had followed on a few steps more, saying anxiously:

“Are ye comin’ back, Oll? Will ye be comin’ back real soon?”

And Gant, feeling a strange and nameless sorrow, answered:

“I don’t know, Willy”—for suddenly he saw that he might never come this way again.

But Willy, still happy, foolish, and contented, had turned and galloped away toward the house, flinging his arms out and shouting as he went:

“I’ll be waitin’ fer ye. I’ll be waitin’ fer ye, Oll.”

And Gant went on then, down the road, and there was a nameless sorrow in him that he could not understand and some of the brightness had gone out of the day.