The Man Who Loved Children (26 page)

In the morning the sun shone, and breakfast began merrily with smiling Uncle Dan and fretful Aunt Rose coming to the table after the children, Uncle Dan fixing his tie and saying, “Good morning, dear Louie! (Did you say good morning to your little cousin Louie who came to us again?) Louisa, I always say at breakfast the first text that I think of when I get out of bed in the morning,” and smiling, birdlike, on them all, he continued, “Children!” and when they had closed their eyes and folded their hands, he recited the text, “ ‘And one cried unto another, and said Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.’ ” Hereupon Dan had to recite the text he had learned before going to bed (his looking glass was stuck full of texts), which was from St. Matthew 5, and then they ate, though David first asked, impudently, “Can’t Louie say a text?” at which Uncle Dan asked, forever singing, if she would say one, and she replied that she did not know texts. No sooner did she say this than the children laughed (having discussed the marvelous atheism of Louie overnight) and asked if she was not a sinner and whether God was not angry with her. Dan scolded them and they easily subsided. After this household, they went to Uncle Reuben’s in Frederick. The young stout blond woman, plain and offhand, whom Louie resented under the name of Aunt Jeannette, came in for a moment to see them and then retreated to the front of the store with Aunt Beulah, leaving Louie with Reuben.

Reuben was over six feet, bowed with his chest trouble, with a pale face planted with large dark eyes, wide set, and dark spare curling hair. He was the handsomest man that Louie had ever seen, and the gentlest. Aunt Jeannette came in two or three times, with a contemptuous cranky voice, asking questions to which Reuben replied with infinite patience and understanding, if not love. Then he would go back to showing the few books he had,
The Pilgrim’s Progress, Paradise Lost,
and Redpath’s 1860 edition of
The Public Life of Captain John Brown,
all with steel engravings. “His leg is hurting him today,” Aunt Jeannette explained to Aunt Beulah in the passage after one of her sallies. Reuben did not show any suffering; he talked hesitatingly, telling her the story of
The Pilgrim’s Progress
again, his face serious; and occasionally he would pause, the eyes would be fixed on her, and suddenly he would smile with his long dark lips; the face would no longer be the face of a man dying of consumption, with its burning eyes, but the ravishment of love incarnate, speaking through voiceless but not secret signs to the child’s nature. He had no daughter of his own and loved the only child of his favorite sister. He thought that when he entered Heaven (if he was found worthy), he would first see his sister Rachel and give her the last news about the child she left in babyhood; so he now devoured the child with the eyes of death-to-be. Though the place was of the poorest, and the back room where the sick man sat, dark, untidy, and airless, and they could not even spare the broken biscuits from the dirty shop in the front, Louie did not want to go.

They completed the round of the four or five Baken men who had households (not counting the religious maniac and the poetic maniac) and, after six days, went back to the house in Harpers Ferry to find that Grandfather Israel had arrived with his soft, scuttling wife to stay two months. Israel was over eighty years old now. He had no money and lived on the circuit of his sons and daughters: and his arrival was always announced thus (in a whisper), “Father has come!” and his stay thus, “Father is still with me!” and the answer to this whisper was either a nod or an understanding glare of the eyes. Even at eleven or twenty-four miles’ distance, “Father has come” was said in a whisper. Israel had never spoken to Louisa, for she was the seed of a disobedient daughter and an atheist. Mary, diligent, delicate, would bring her in each year (this year, Louie was as tall as the old grandmother and broader) and say, “Israel, here is Louie, Rachel’s daughter,” and the black panther of a man, always pacing, always pacing, would not even cease in his pacing, but would brush them aside (if they stood in his way) and say nothing, only lift his small-boned head higher.

This year, Grandmother Mary said, pushing the child forward, and a little querulous, “Israel, here is Louisa; Israel, remember, we are old, who knows if we will see her again!” The old man paused for a moment and looked down at the girl, and she, looking up, and not so alien from him as on the other days, saw his black-streaked hair, the long nose, firm, bitten, mouth and broad square chin, the unequal eyebrows over straight-staring gray eyes, the broad, filled, low forehead, with animal determination constricting the temples and the set of the head—villainously vain, yes, proud, disappointed but unyielding, on the wiry, stiff shoulders. She felt bashful with most adults, but when she looked at this old man who disliked her and thought her hideous, revolting, Louisa stared coolly, and saw no force in the gray eyes passionate for self. The old woman watched them both eagerly, saying not a word. After a minute, the old man threw back his shoulders and began his walking up and down again, ignoring the girl completely; then he said, fretfully, “Mary, what is all that noise?” which made his wife leap and run to the kitchen, taking the child with her. Those were the only words that Louisa ever heard from Israel of the cast-iron face.

He lived with his sons and daughters, commanded them from the fastnesses of spare bedrooms, but he was not of them, whether he lived with Beulah, a freethinker, or praise-God Dan, or stern Simeon (Reuben was too poor to have him). He would not sit down with them, or talk, or walk with them. He would do nothing but sit with one of his wife’s shawls round him on the bed, dejected, staring at something, or pace up and down, looking intensely bitter, ready to bite, like a dog left in charge of some property. They knew his nature so well that they left him alone at all times, to preserve themselves, and so gave him no opportunity to rave, storm, and cry woe. He wanted to be angry, his mission was to be angry, and he had nothing to be angry about; the world would not let him rave, this was the great injustice he suffered from: he stalked up and down being angry, in futility; but this anger, little spent, had kept him young, blackhaired, and strenuous for over eighty years. For the rest, they all secretly sighed for his death. They did not think of Scripture’s injunctions in his regard, because to himself he was the Bible, the Bible was himself: what he willed was the Bible and so it had always been. He had built up an army against himself and liked hate and despised that army which was only his own children. He was a hearty despiser, hater, cynic, a surly, battling, sinewy creature. He lived a month in the house with his daughter Beulah while Louie was there and no one ever heard a living word out of him though they heard Mary hastily mumbling to him at all hours of the day; no doubt, on his side, he conversed by signs and glances. Then, because Beulah could not keep them any more, with Louie too, Beulah wrote a letter which was answered, and there was a tearful scene in which Beulah explained that Rose would have them. The poor old woman, crying, said that they were tossed about like a ball and no one wanted them, no, not even the daughters she had brought out of her bowels; not the women who should know what she had to put up with, no one would have her. Then Beulah cried, and Louie, sitting at the head of the table, cried too; and the three women, after crying, felt united in a love. But this did not stop the grandmother from going. Beulah, ashamed but firm, went to pack the things and then there were heard sounds from the old man, who was at last angry with cause; but what was said, and if anything was said in human words, Louie never knew, for all this was behind closed doors. When the old people went, Louisa was given their room. Dan’s children, young Rose and young Dan, would come to Harpers Ferry, once a week or so, to visit Louisa. There was plenty of room for them in the tree-shaded upstairs rooms. Louie did not care for Rose, a brown-haired, restless, thin little spitfire, but hung round with Dan and, when Rose was out of the way, would go for a walk with him, sheltered at first from the radiant, moist heat when the clouds bowled over, or the clear heat of midsummer, by the old trees of the back road, and then would come out into the old graveyard, all grass and long sights, like the house of the Lord on the mountaintops, like the mountain where Dan’s Lord of hosts would make unto all people a feast of fat things. Then they would either go down by the little path behind the Jefferson Rock, overhanging the river road, to sit down and stare across the water gap, or up the Shenandoah, or, sliding down by the other side of the weather-stained caretaker’s cottage, find a path looking out over the Potomac, that goes down from the heights by solemn shades and rusted gates, by the steps to the bottom of the hill, the street of little poplars and the flood-ruined houses, with jagged rents and sagging beams, by lush worthless gardens and back yards with fat, sun-struck pigs to the old armory emplacement and the rowboat ferry. Sometimes they went on from there, under the Jefferson Rock, whence they would climb perilously up and back to their starting point. Dan said little, but he liked what she liked; he was merry-hearted and would bubble out confidences, in his double-stopped voice. Aunt Beulah laughed, and Uncle Charlie called them Black and White, “Well, I see Black and White have been for another walk to look for the Cutpaper Tree.” He would pretend that no one could find the cut-paper tree, and then would tell them one of his tales.

One day, when they were building one of the houses on the hill, an old wooden house with carved wooden posts (it happened to be Christmas Eve), a man drove up in a carriage with two horses and said that if they would take the carriage and horses and take him in with them, he would help them build the house. He had no money and no home. They took him in. He carved for them the four posts of the veranda, and lived with the family a year, and on the Christmas morning of the following year, he took his hat, said good-by and went his way, saying that each had fulfilled his contract. There stands the house, dilapidated, but with its four posts: and that is the story. Uncle Charlie would ask them to tell him the names of the trees in his garden, English walnut, Japanese plumage cedar, and two Colorado blue spruces, one flour-powdered blue and one plain green, a catalpa, a persimmon; and then they would walk up slowly through the deeply green streets to the Negro college, with its splendid trees, and look far out into blue, chalky, smoky valleys. Dan sometimes put his arm round Louie’s waist, sometimes held her hand behind her waist, and what with the Baken strictness of speech (they were without circumlocutions), their directness of gospeling villagers, all to her, in this land, all, with the meeting of the waters, and the Southern sun pouring over the hills and their burning silky heads, John Brown’s Fort, the starry nights, skirlings downhill on skates from this haunted and embattled siege rock, the quiet, deserted streets, the frank worries about the death of the town and its real estate, made the Harpers Ferry of her summers a retort of revelation to Louie: the placid, high-minded heavens of Pollitry were rolled up and there was a landscape to the far end of the sky—an antique, fertile, yeoman’s country, where, in the shelter of other customs and tribal gods, people believing themselves to be the children of God stuck to their occupations, gave praise, and accompanied their humblest deeds with the thunder of mystic song.

The day came when Louie had to go home. Grandmother was there, separated from tyrannical Israel for a day or two, and there was much huffy muttering in the kitchen while Aunt Beulah and Grandmother wondered why Louie’s father and mother did not send the money for her fare, nor anything more than a letter asking for her. But Louie was fat and spoiled by two months of ease, she floated in a cloud, wreathed in smiles; and not noticing their complaints which were made, in fact, in a low tone of voice, she also begged them for money so that she could take home presents to all the children. She now looked forward eagerly to seeing the children and their excitement when they undid the wrapping papers: she never went home in her life without taking them something. The two women made grim faces, but said sharply, “You’ll get your money,” and then went on conversing low and crankily; but Louie wondered how much money she would get. She had no pocket money, except at these times.

Then the little journey through the bluffs to Point of Rocks, leaving Reuben, and Dan, and all Israel in the hills, and sulky Aunt Beulah mastering her feelings to greet a Henny all honey, and the children tumbling in; Louie rushing to her valise, the children pawing the ground, and Tommy asking, “Where did she go, Mother?” and hearing the traditional reply, “To her aunt’s in the country.” In the house of Pollit the people of the house of Baken remained unnamed.

The trees were turning in the gullies beyond, the day they came up by hired car along Cold Spring Lane, and, turning slowly into the rising drive, jumped out at the glassed-in porch of Monocacy. Henny’s family home was named not after the village but after Frederick’s serpentine stream. The two little girls, in new coats, were joyous: they loved the old home with its trees, lawns, wildernesses, old barnyards, old cow and horse paddocks, and dependencies; they loved the autumn, with its blotched valleys, the rivers of warm and cold temperature flowing in the air, the smell of burning leaves, the half-raked lawns, and the stilling brooks. A creek ran through the bottom of Monocacy’s grounds, and out along the railway. Opposite was an old mansion on a hill, surrounded by noble trees and a weather-beaten fence, existing from the early days of the district; and on farther hills, hidden from the road, were other old family places, dating from Henny’s childhood when this had been a distant plantation of wealthy Baltimore homes; now apartment houses and new dark-brick, gabled bungalows stepped down hill towards the creek, two-family houses opened gaping plackets on the unbuilt greens, and overdone artistic modern houses were stringing along the Lane.

In Monocacy’s gardens the standard roses were too heavy with flowers, the ornamental shrubs were untrimmed, the grass grew thick on the lawns, one door of the hothouse swung open, and the sun dropping spidery into the arboretum showed a jungle of weeds. “There’s no gardener,” cried Louie, shocked. The wind hissing in the tall grass sang abandonment; the sun smudged on unpolished windows placarded the big house with rooms vacant, dusty, and shut up. Henny, in her big fur coat, lent to her by Hassie, paid the taxi and turned into the house, biting her lips.
Everywhere money needed,
was what this spelled to her. She knew that since Hazel Moore had left Monocacy in July, to come to help her, during Sam’s absence, there had been no work done in the old house, except by a little reformatory schoolgirl from a Baltimore slum, “some love child of some horrible other Bert,” thought Henny, disgusted with everything, as she came into the dusty hall, “oh, what is the world all about?”