Read Ebook: The Open Window: Tales of the Months by Wright Mabel Osgood

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Ebook has 1161 lines and 91771 words, and 24 pages

Slowly the Markis passed the two saloons and nonchalantly entered the market, where he carefully selected a whole bologna and a ham! Crossing to the grocery he bought a month's provisions to be sent to "Van Camp's Boat House, for Capt'n Burney!" Then pulling on a fresh corn-cob pipe in leisurely fashion he stopped at the paint shop, from whence he took a sign board, that he carried, letters toward him; next he repassed the saloons and gradually gained the wooded lane that skirts the marsh meadows.

Once under cover he pulled off the new reefer, wrapped it around the board, and began to run, never pausing until he gained the boat house.

Throwing open the door he quickly stripped off the new stiff, confining garments, and slipped eel-like into loose trousers and the gray sweater that made him one with the seaweed and the sands. Then drawing the old soft hat well down to his very eyes he opened the tool chest that stood under the window and, taking therefrom gimlet, screw eyes, and hooks, he mounted an empty box, and proceeded to fasten the sign he had brought over the door. When it hung exactly even and to his liking, he walked backward, slowly surveying his handiwork, talking to the dog meanwhile. "What do you think of that, Maje? You and me hev got a business, we hev! employment with a name to it! Don't yer remember what she said? No, you wasn't the dog, though; 'twere old Dave, yer granddad! There'll be jest two o' us in the business, man and dog. You know the saying as two's a company. Onct maybe I'd chose a woman partner! when they're young wimmen's prettier, but fer age give me er dog! Dogs is more dependable, likewise they don't talk back, eh, Maje?"

On the swinging white board, edged with bright blue, in blue letters he read these words aloud, slowly, and with deep-drawn satisfaction:--

THE MARKIS AND THE MAJOR.

Decoys and Fishing Tackle to Rent. Sailing, Gunning, Fishing and Retrieving done with Neatness and Dispatch.

Cautiously the Major rose to his feet, looked about the room narrowly, sniffed the floor and then the air, shook his head and pawed persistently until the heavy new collar slipped over his ears and clattered to the floor. For a moment, minded to lie down again, he paused, sniffed the fresh air from the open window in the corner, then lifting the offending collar carefully in his mouth he gripped it firmly and crossed the room, jumped for the open sash, missed, tried again, and disappeared in the boat house shadows.

A loon laughed far out on the water, and the Major trembled guiltily. Gaining the beach crest he kept on to tide-water mark, where, digging deep, he buried the offending bit of leather, covering it well, kicking backward at it, dog fashion, with snorts of contemptuous satisfaction. Then trotting gaily back he entered by the window, and soon two rhythmic snores, added to the bubbling of the overboiling coffee-pot, told that the Markis and the Major slept the peaceful winter sleep, while the sharp crescent moon of January slipped past the window, lingering over still-water to cover the bedded wild-fowl with a silver sheet.

II THE STALLED TRAIN

He was no kin to the man of Whittier's eulogy, though he might well have been; Jim Bradley was only the conductor on the milk freight that fussed and fumed its way down the valley of the Moosatuck every evening, at intervals leaving the single track road of the Sky Line to rest upon the sidings while a passenger train or the through express took right of way.

To Miranda Banks, however, Bradley seemed a hero as he sprang from the caboose, swinging his lantern, when his train took the switch and halted on the side track below the calf pastures.

To be sure his claim to heroism had, so far, rested upon the fact that both he and his vocation moved. In Hattertown very few people or things had moved these ten years past; they had groped as being between daylight and dark. The beginning of this twilight period was when the trade that gave the town both its name and reason for being, owing to change of methods and market, vanished across the low gentian meadows of the Moosatuck to install itself anew in Bridgeton, fifteen miles away. The empty factory, long and vainly offered for sale, became a storage place for the hay that speculators bought on the field from the somnolent hillside farmers and held for the winter market. At the same time the hay gave the building a good reputation among the travelling brotherhood of the back roads, who work a week and tramp on again , and the factory became a wayfarers' lodging-house, until gradually the unpainted boards turned black and the building grew hollow-eyed as its window panes were shattered.

When man wholly forsook it, swallows and swifts brought primitive life to it again, the one nesting against its warped rafters, the others lining the chimney, now free from plaster and very hospitable, with their bracketed homes, until their flocks pouring forth from its mouth at dawn and swirling and settling at evening, seemed in the distance a curling column of smoke.

The row of cheap wooden houses where the factory hands had lived, had also mouldered away and joined the general ruin, only a starved grape-vine or rose-bush telling that they had once been homes; until, at the time I first saw the place, the most depressing of all palls seemed over it,--the shadow of a dead industry.

It was an October morning when Lavinia Cortright and I drove up into the hill country with father, who went to see a woman who had applied for a free bed in the Bridgeton hospital, an aunt of Miranda Banks, she afterward proved to be; and while father went into the little farm-house, that had bright geraniums in the windows and wore more of a general air of thrift than any of those we had passed in the last mile of our uphill ride, Lavinia and I sauntered along the road and finally settled ourselves on a tumble-down stone wall in the midst of a wild grape-vine whose fruit was black with sun-ripeness and bore the moist bloom of the first light frost.

As we gazed idly over the fields toward the river, that seemed, as we looked down upon it, to filter through the glowing branches of the swamp maples, washing their colours with it, rather than to flow between banks of earth, we sipped the pure wild grape wine where alone it may be found,--between the skin and pulp of the grape itself, a few drops to each globe,--and fell to moralizing.

"You like to find a reason for everything, Barbara," said Lavinia Cortright, after a long pause; "can you tell me exactly why the country hereabout seems so desolate and impossible? It has all the colour and atmosphere of the perfect autumn landscape, and yet the idea of living here would be appalling."

I had been thinking the same thing as Lavinia spoke; there was something in the very wind that blew over the ruined factory settlement that was deterrent; funerals might take place there, but how could enough impetus ever exist to cause weddings or christenings?

At this moment the door of a small building, the schoolhouse at the cross-roads immediately below, opened, and a dozen or more children rushed out pell-mell, followed by the slim form of a young woman, evidently the teacher, who closed the door and prepared to take a cross cut through the fields, the worn track leading up to the pasture bars close to where we were sitting. No bell, no whistle, no exodus of labourers from the fields to mark the noon hour, the impulsive rush of childhood breaking bounds was the only clock.

The woman disappeared in a dip of the land, and then presently her head emerged from it and the whole figure appeared again walking between the deep green bayberry bushes that make the dark patches in the waste hillside fields. She walked without either energy or fatigue, looking neither to the right nor left; the freckled face, tending to thinness, interested me from the first glance, for though it wore very little expression, it was in no wise vacant; the chin was firm, and there was a good space between the eyes, which opened wide and had none of the squinting shrewdness I have met with in my wanderings with father among remote rural communities. It was an unawakened face, and as I began to wonder what could ever come to give it the vital touch, she reached the bars and seeing us for the first time, paused, scrutinized us slowly, and then said with a tinge of irritation in the tone:--

"I wish you wouldn't spoil those grapes, I'm going to spice them on Saturday. I should have done it last week, but they are always better for a touch of frost."

I straightway disentangled myself from the vine with a guilty feeling, and murmured the usual apology of the roadside depredators; that is, when they deign to make excuses, about the grapes being wild and not knowing that they belonged to any one, but my words fell upon deaf ears.

"There were full ten pounds of grapes here this morning, but with what you've eaten and more that you've shaken off, there isn't more than six pounds left. How came you up here, anyhow? Nobody ever passes this way; even the mail-man turns 'round below at four corners. I'm Randy Banks."

This gave me my chance to explain father's errand. "Do you think Dr. Russell can get Aunt Lucy in?" she asked, eagerness bringing a pretty colour to her cheeks. "It isn't the care of her we mind, Ma and I," she added hastily, "but it's the loneliness for her of days in winter when I'm at school and Ma out nursing mebbe; being chair-tied at best, there's just nothing to break the time, for nothing ever happens."

"Now that you have the Rural Free Delivery, you get your mail and papers every day without having to go down to the Hattertown post-office," I said, trying to find a cheerful loophole.

"That's no advantage to us, rather the other way. When town was alive and we drove down to the post-office, even if we had no mail, and we never do except the newspaper, somebody else had and maybe opened it right there and told the news for the sake of talking it over with some one else. Then market and store were in the same building and chances were you'd be reminded of something you needed by seeing it, or maybe a bit of fresh meat would look tempting and be sold reasonable, too, if it was near week-end. But to go to that box at cross-roads, though it's only a step, and find it empty, it's as lonesome and strange as a draught coming from a shut-up room."

Then as she realized that she was in a way complaining of her lot to a stranger, a thing that the etiquette of the entire hill country quite forbade, she broke off, and turning toward the house, said in a perfectly unembarrassed way: "Won't you come in? Mother will have dinner ready. She'd be pleased to see you. I have to hurry back to school to-day, for the committee man is coming to see if the old stove can be mended or if we must have a new one, for it's never done well since Joel Fanton put a shotgun cartridge in it last winter." Then we went in, wondering if events would ever so shape themselves that she would become an active factor on a wider path than that between the corner school and the old farm-house.

It was three years before I saw Miranda again; meanwhile, a far-away city had thrown a lariat of steel across country, and it had encircled Hattertown; a railway that ran down the valley needed a southern outlet. The survey ran by the ruined factory, and rounding Nob Hill, crossed the river below the Banks' farm, and disappeared on trestles over "calf pastures," a name given strangely enough to many a bit of waste river meadow, as if calves did not need the best of material to become successful cows.

At the sound of the first locomotive whistle, announcing that the branch road was a thing accomplished and neither a scare nor a phantom boom, the Rip Van Winkles awoke and rubbed their eyes. They had slept a half-famished sleep. Rather than push and plan a way to sell their produce, they had ceased producing.

The Widow Banks had three cows. A dealer in Bridgeton had tried to buy them late in the autumn when fodder was at a premium, but she had withstood temptation and taken the risk of wintering them; if she had not, Miranda would never have met Jim Bradley during the negotiations for the transportation to the city of the polished tin can that cost the little teacher many days' pay, and was regarded by her as a speculation as wild and daring as any gambler staking his all on a throw of dice, nor would this story have found its way into father's note-book.

Jim Bradley came of good up-country stock, but the yeast of desire to see the world had led him upon the shining road, freight brakeman first and now conductor. Visiting New York every other day, he seemed a travelled man of the world to Miranda, whose outside life was bounded by two trips a year to Bridgeton and the paragraphs upon racial traits, habits and customs, exports and imports contained in the Geography which she had heard droned and mispronounced annually for the five seasons she had taught at the corners.

A year had passed, and now when Jim Bradley ran his train into the siding at Hattertown, he could not have told which light he saw first, the railway signal or the well-trimmed lamp in the Widow Banks' kitchen; this light, being always kept bright and clear, was lit at sunset with the regularity of a lighthouse beacon, the reflector improvised from a tin plate being turned so that the welcoming rays met the milk train as it rounded the hills and left solid ground for the trestles between eight and half-past every evening.

Widow Banks had long since announced to inquiries both of the really interested and maliciously curious order, that Randy and Jim Bradley were keeping company, though, at the same time, regretting with a sigh that his business didn't allow of evenings spent in the austere "fore room" where the one visible eye of the departed deacon's portrait done in air brush crayon, might witness the courting. Neither was it possible for Randy to exhibit him to the neighbours in a bright and shining buggy with a blue bow tied to the whip, of a Sunday afternoon, nor had they the chance for the same reason to judge of his capacity at prayer-meeting.

If either Randy or Jim had been questioned as to their relations to each other, they would have been speechless upon the subject. Neither had given the matter a thought, and therefore neither was worried by the mazes of material analysis.

Miranda simply obeyed a call that made the spot where Jim Bradley was the only possible place for her to be between eight and half past; but when the train left the siding, crossed the bridge over the Moosatuck and disappeared, she returned to the house and gave her mind up to the correction of the smeared papers whereon the youth of Hattertown were struggling along the Arithmetic road, and in striving to prepare for the puzzling questions that the school's bad boy might spring upon her on the morrow.

Jim regarded matters much in the same way, that is, all through that spring, summer, and autumn. When winter set in and the siding grew chilly, the tank shed with its little stove became the only shelter, for, without realizing why, it never occurred to the man that the caboose with its bunk and litter of flags and lanterns was the place for Randy.

One night she noticed that Jim had a heavy cold, and the next evening she brought with her a basket in which a little pot of hot coffee and a generous wedge of equally fresh-baked mince pie kept each other warm. Jim smiled at Randy with a glance in which feigned indifference and indulgence struggled, as by way of table-cloth she spread the napkin that covered the basket, on a barrel top and motioned for him to eat, saying as she handed him a paper of sugar, "I didn't know how you like your coffee sweetened, so I brought some sugar along."

In some way the steam from that tin kettle as he looked across it, altered the perspective of his existence and changed his terminal; for the first time he wished that Hattertown was at one end or the other of the route instead of a brief turnout in the middle.

Then as Randy under his guidance dropped the lumps of sugar in the pail , he suddenly formulated for the first time the fact of her refinement and the difference between her and the other women that he met along the route. A sudden vision of a home other than a caboose with meals taken at depot restaurants blazed comet-like across his firmament in a way that startled--no, fairly frightened him. That night the time passed so quickly that they were obliged to hurry up hill at a pace that left Miranda flushed and with no breath for speech as she opened the narrow storm door to the back porch and swinging her lantern on a peg, turned to take the basket.

Jim Bradley looked at the girl, whose cape hung about her neck by a single fastening, its hood that she had pulled up for her head covering, falling back so that the glorious hair that was usually plastered and twisted into the subjection fitting a schoolmarm, was loosed and fell into its natural curves and waves. Then he looked out into the dark to where one of his brakemen was waving the "time up" signal lantern furiously. Buttoning his short coat with the air of making all snug and fit that a man might have who was about to face some new and dangerous situation, he stepped into the porch so quickly that Miranda was caught betwixt him and the inner door at the moment when she had raised her arms to smooth her rumpled hair.

When Miranda returned to the kitchen this evening, she did not join her mother where she sat sewing by the reading lamp, but dropped on a bench before the open wood stove and began following the pictures the embers painted, with eyes that really took no note of outward happenings.

Widow Banks glanced at her daughter anxiously, then caught a glimpse of the smile that was hovering about her usually rather set lips, noticed the ruddy mane from which the hairpins rose in various attitudes of resentment, and glancing at the untouched task upon the table, gave a contented sigh and began to knit reminiscences of her own youth into the muffler she was fashioning for a missionary box. To be sure, she had planned a theological career for her only daughter. She was to have married a young theologue who had occupied the pulpit of the Pound Rock Church for a year and then gone to India, where by virtue of her experience as a teacher, Miranda was to help him convince the heathen, do credit to her religious training, and become a factor in the world. This plan belonged to seven years before when the girl was twenty, and it had not happened because the stubborn streak inherited from the deacon, stiffened Randy's neck and perverted her judgment to the extent of preferring Hattertown to India, and declaring to her suitor and mother in one breath that if she ever felt a hankering for the heathen she could find plenty without leaving home.

When February comes the romance of winter is over in the hill country, and this long short month brings only the reality. It is a betwixt and between month, fully as trying as its opposite, August, that time of general stuffiness, flies, and limp linen.

January had been a month of even snow and good sleighing, but a sleet storm had made the many downhill roads that converged at Hattertown well-nigh impassable with glittering ice; while in February, coughing and snuffling, as much a part of the month as St. Valentine's Day, sadly interfered with discipline at the Crossroads Schoolhouse. Miranda, under pressure, allowed herself to confess for the first time, that seven years was quite long enough for a woman to sit upon the selfsame wooden chair, or wrestle with the constitutional peculiarities of a sheet-iron stove. This stove, having been second-hand upon its arrival, was now wearing three patches through the ill-fitted rivets of which smoke and gas filtered, obscuring the wall map of North America that was at least three states behind the times.

The season and bad weather of course had some effect upon her point of view, for given June, open doors and windows, and a glimpse of the Moosatuck to draw the eye from the faded map, the most pressing of grievances would have vanished.

Somehow Miranda had never realized until now what an exasperating month February was; formerly she had used the evenings for her spring sewing and was really glad of the forced cessation of the small events that made Hattertown's social life, but now the ice crust upon the hill slope above calf pastures made walking impossible between the house and the station siding, so that two or three and in one week five evenings went by and only the greeting of lantern signals passed between Jim Bradley and Miranda.

The next afternoon on her return from school, Miranda found a letter in the box, directed in a round, bold, and unfamiliar hand; moreover, it was for her. Therefore, as it was a man's writing it must be from Jim. Instead of opening it as she walked along, half a dozen children struggling on before or at her side, she dropped it in her pocket and then smiled to find, a few minutes later, when she reached her gate and needed a hand to open it with that it had remained inside the pocket caressing the square of paper.

Widow Banks was then "accommodating" at the house of the new ticket agent and telegraph operator, who had pneumonia, as his wife was obliged to fill his place. The Banks' house was empty save for the cat who purred before the stove, there was no necessity for seeking privacy; yet Miranda went through the kitchen and shut herself into the little storm porch before she opened the envelope, and held the sheet close to the single diamond pane in the outer door that she might read.

"Yours with Compliments, "JIM BRADLEY."

The last Saturday morning of February did not really dawn, for the discouraged light merely struggled with a snowstorm so dense that the rays only penetrated by refraction. A little before noon the fall ceased, but the sky would not relax, and scowled dark and sullen as if with the pain of its recent effort, the snow lay heavy on hill and lowland, covering land and water alike; and, lodging on the ice, completely obliterated the boundary of the usually assertive Moosatuck.

A few crows, cawing dismally, straggled toward what had been down stream from their cedar roosts, but all other sounds were muffled. It was almost noon before the village, headed by the first selectman with two yokes of oxen and as many ploughs, dug itself out; and a great snow-plough bound north cleared the rails for the morning mail train, now hours late. Meanwhile Mr. Sweezy, the host of the "Depot Hotel," the wit of the reconstructed Hattertown, did a thriving trade with many usually abstemious citizens exhausted by the wielding of snow shovels, in beverages that did not bear the label "soft drinks," and the ticket agent's wife in the little booth struggled with and made more incoherent the reports that came over the snow-laden wires.

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