The Village Watch-Tower

“Wall, to go back to Dixie—I’ll be comin’ right along, boys.” (This to Brad Gibson, who was taking his farewell drink of ginger tea preparatory to beginning work.)

“I pity you, Steve!” exclaimed Brad, between deep swallows. “If you ‘d known when you was well off, you ‘d ‘a’ stayed in Boston. If Jabe hed a story started, he ‘d talk three days after he was dead.”

“Go ‘long; leave me be! Wall, as I was sayin’, Dixie brought Fiddy home (‘Dell,’ he called her), an’ they ‘peared bride ‘n’ groom at meetin’ next Sunday. The last hundred dollars he hed in the world hed gone into the weddin’ tower ‘n’ on to Fiddy’s back. He hed a new suit, ‘n’ he looked like a major. You ain’t got no idea what he was, ‘cause his eyes is dull now, ‘n’ he ‘s bowed all over, ‘n’ ain’t shaved nor combed, hardly; but they was the han’somest couple that ever walked up the broad aisle. She hed on a green silk dress, an’ a lace cape that was like a skeeter nettin’ over her neck an’ showed her bare skin through, an’ a hat like an apple orchard in full bloom, hummin’-bird an’ all. Dixie kerried himself as proud as Lucifer. He didn’t look at the minister ‘n’ he didn’t look at the congregation; his great eyes was glued on Fiddy, as if he couldn’t hardly keep from eatin’ of her up. An’ she behaved consid’able well for a few months, as long ‘s the novelty lasted an’ the silk dresses was new. Before Christmas, though, she began to peter out ‘n’ git slack-twisted. She allers hated housework as bad as a pig would a penwiper, an’ Dixie hed to git his own breakfast afore he went to work, or go off on an empty stomach. Many ‘s the time he ‘s got her meals for her ‘n’ took ‘em to her on a waiter. Them secesh fellers’ll wait on women folks long as they can stan’ up.

“Then bime bye the baby come along; but that made things wuss ‘stid o’ better. She didn’t pay no more ‘tention to it than if it hed belonged to the town. She ‘d go off to dances, an’ leave Dixie to home tendin’ cradle; but that wa’n’t no hardship to him for he was ‘bout as much wropped up in the child as he was in Fiddy. Wall, sir, ‘bout a month ago she up ‘n’ disappeared off the face o’ the airth ‘thout sayin’ a word or leavin’ a letter. She took her clo’es, but she never thought o’ takin’ the baby; one baby more or less didn’t make no odds to her s’ long ‘s she hed that skeeter-nettin’ cape. Dixie sarched fer her high an’ low fer a fortnight, but after that he give it up as a bad job. He found out enough, I guess, to keep him pretty busy thinkin’ what he ‘d do next. But day before yesterday the same circus that plays here this afternoon was playin’ to Wareham. A lot of us went over on the evenin’ train, an’ we coaxed Dixie into goin’, so ‘s to take his mind off his trouble. But land! he didn’t see nothin’. He ‘d walk right up the lions ‘n’ tigers in the menagerie as if they was cats ‘n’ chickens, an’ all the time the clown was singin’ he looked like a dumb animile that ‘s hed a bullet put in him. There was lots o’ side shows, mermaids ‘n’ six-legged calves ‘n’ spotted girls, ‘n’ one thing ‘n’ ‘nother, an’ there was one o’ them whirligig machines with a mess o’ rocking’-hosses goin’ round ‘n’ round, ‘n’ an organ in the middle playin’ like sixty. I wish we ‘d ‘a’ kept clear o’ the thing, but as bad luck would hev it, we stopped to look, an’ there on top o’ two high-steppin’ white wooden hosses, set Mis’ Fiddy an’ that dod-gasted light-complected baker-man! If ever she was suited to a dot, it was jest then ‘n’ there. She could ‘a’ gone prancin’ round that there ring forever ‘n’ forever, with the whoopin’ ‘n’ hollerin’ ‘n’ whizzin’ ‘n’ whirlin’ soundin’ in her ears, ‘n’ the music playin’ like mad, ‘n’ she with nothin’ to do but stick on ‘n’ let some feller foot the bills. Somebody must ‘a’ ben thinkin’ o’ Fiddy Maddox when the invented them whirl-a-go-rounds. She was laughin’ ‘n’ carryin’ on like the old Scratch; her apple-blossom hat dome off, ‘n’ the baker-man put it on, ‘n’ took consid’able time over it, ‘n’ pulled her ear ‘n’ pinched her cheek when he got through; an’ that was jest the blamed minute we ketched sight of ‘em. I pulled Dixie off, but I was too late. He give a groan I shall remember to my dyin’ day, ‘n’ then he plunged out o’ the crowd ‘n’ through the gate like a streak o’ lightnin’. We follered, but land! we couldn’t find him, an’ true as I set here, I never expected to see him alive agin. But I did; I forgot all about one thing, you see, ‘n’ that was the baby. If it wa’n’t no attraction to its mother, I guess he cal’lated it needed a father all the more. Anyhow, he turned up in the field yesterday mornin’, ready for work, but lookin’ as if he ‘d hed his heart cut out ‘n’ a piece o’ lead put in the place of it.”

“I don’t seem as if she ‘d ‘a’ ben brazen enough to come back so near him,” said Steve.

“Wall, I don’t s’pose she hed any idea o’ Dixie’s bein’ at a circus over Wareham jest then; an’ ten to one she didn’t care if the whole town seen her. She wanted to get rid of him, ‘n’ she didn’t mind how she did it. Dixie ain’t one of the shootin’ kinds, an’ anyhow, Fiddy Maddox wa’n’t one to look ahead; whatever she wanted to do, that she done, from the time she was knee high to a grasshopper. I’ve seen her set down by a peck basket of apples, ‘n’ take a couple o’ bites out o’ one, ‘n’ then heave it fur ‘s she could heave it ‘n’ start in on another, ‘n’ then another; ‘n’ ‘t wa’n’t a good apple year, neither. She’d everlastin’ly spile ‘bout a dozen of ‘em ‘n’ smaller ‘bout two mouthfuls. Doxy Morton, now, would eat an apple clean down to the core, ‘n’ then count the seeds ‘n’ put ‘em on the window-sill to dry, ‘n’ get up ‘n’ put the core in the stove, ‘n’ wipe her hands on the roller towel, ‘n’ take up her sewin’ agin; ‘n’ if you ‘ve got to be cuttin’ ‘nitials in tree bark an’ writin’ of ‘em in the grass with a stick like you ‘ve ben doin’ for the last half-hour, you ‘re blamed lucky to be doin’ D’s not F’s, like Dixie there!”

It was three o’clock in the afternoon. The men had dropped work and gone to the circus. The hay was pronounced to be in a condition where it could be left without much danger; but, for that matter, no man would have stayed in the field to attend to another man’s hay when there was a circus in the neighborhood.

Dixie was mowing on alone, listening as in a dream to that subtle something in the swish of the scythe that makes one seek to know the song it is singing to the grasses.

     “Hush, ah, hush, the scythes are saying,     Hush, and heed not, and fall asleep;     Hush, they say to the grasses swaying,     Hush, they sing to the clover deep;     Hush,—‘t is the lullaby Time is singing,—     Hush, and heed not, for all things pass.     Hush, ah, hush! and the scythes are swinging     Over the clover, over the grass.”

And now, spent with fatigue and watching and care and grief,—heart sick, mind sick, body sick, sick with past suspense and present certainty and future dread,—he sat under the cool shade of the nooning tree, and buried his face in his hands. He was glad to be left alone with his miseries,—glad that the other men, friendly as he felt them to be, had gone to the circus, where he would not see or hear them for hours to come.

How clearly he could conjure up the scene that they were enjoying with such keen relish! Only two days before, he had walked among the same tents, staring at horses and gay trappings and painted Amazons as one who noted nothing; yet the agony of the thing he now saw at last lit up all the rest as with a lightning flash, and burned the scene forever on his brain and heart. It was at Wareham, too,—Wareham, where she had promised to be his wife, where she had married him only a year before. How well he remembered the night! They left the parsonage; they had ten miles to drive in the moonlight before reaching their stopping-place,—ten miles of such joy as only a man could know, he thought, who had had the warm fruit of life hanging within full vision, but just out of reach,—just above his longing lips; and then, in an unlooked-for, gracious moment, his! He could swear she had loved him that night, if never again.

But this picture passed away, and he saw that maddening circle with the caracoling steeds. He head the discordant music, the monotonous creak of the machinery, the strident laughter of the excited riders. As first the thing was a blur, a kaleidoscope of whirling colors, into which there presently crept form and order. … A boy who had cried to get on, and was now crying to get off. … Old Rube Hobson and his young wife; Rube looking white and scared, partly by the whizzing motion, and partly by the prospect of paying out ten cents for the doubtful pleasure. … Pretty Hetty Dunnell with that young fellow from Portland; she too timid to mount one of the mettle-some chargers, and snuggling close to him in one of the circling seats. The, good Got!—Dell! sitting on a prancing white horse, with the man he knew, the man he feared, riding beside her; a man who kept holding on her hat with fingers that trembled,—the very hat she “‘peared bride in” a man who brushed a grasshopper from her shoulder with an air of ownership, and, when she slapped his hand coquettishly, even dared to pinch her pink cheek,—his wife’s cheek,—before that crowd of on-lookers! Merry-go-round, indeed! The horrible thing was well named; and life was just like it,—a whirl of happiness and misery, in which the music cannot play loud enough to drown the creak of the machinery, in which one soul cries out in pain, another in terror, and the rest laugh; but the prancing steeds gallop on, gallop on, and once mounted, there is no getting off, unless…

There were some things it was not possible for a mean to bear! The river! The river! He could hear it rippling over the sunny sands, swirling among the logs, dashing and roaring under the bridge, rushing to the sea’s embrace. Could it tell whither it was hurrying? NO; but it was escaping from its present bonds; it would never have to pass over these same jagged rocks again. “On, on to the unknown!” called the river. “I come! I come!” he roused himself to respond, when a faint, faint, helpless voice broke in upon the mad clatter in his brain, cleaving his torn heart in twain; not a real voice,—the half-forgotten memory of one; a tender wail that had added fresh misery to his night’s vigil,—the baby!

But the feeble pipe was borne down by the swirl of the water as it dashed between the rocky banks, still calling to him. If he could only close his ears to it! But it still called—called still—the river! And still the child’s voice pierced the rush of sound with its pitiful flute note, until the two resolved themselves into contesting strains, answering each other antiphonally. The river—the baby—the river—the baby; and in and through, and betwixt and between, there spun the whirling merry-go-round, with its curveting wooden horses, its discordant organ, and its creaking machinery.

But gradually the child’s voice gained in strength, and as he heard it more plainly the other sounds grew fainter, till at last, thank God! they were hushed. The din, the whirlwind, and the tempest in his brain were lulled into silence, as under a “Peace, be still!” and, worn out with the contest, the man from Tennessee fell asleep under the grateful shade of the nooning tree. So deep was the slumber that settled over exhausted body and troubled spirit that the gathering clouds, the sudden darkness, the distant muttering of thunder, the frightened twitter of the birds, passed unnoticed. A heavy drop of rain pierced the thick foliage and fell on his face, but the storm within had been too fierce for him to heed the storm without. He slept on.

Almost every man, woman, and child in the vicinity of Pleasant River was on the way to the circus,—Boomer’s Grand Six-in-One Universal Consolidated Show; Brilliant Constellations of Fixed Stars shining in the same Vast Firmament; Glittering Galaxies of World-Famous Equestrian Artists; the biggest elephants, the funniest clowns, the pluckiest riders, the stubbornest mules, the most amazing acrobats, the tallest man and the shortest man, the thinnest woman and the thickest woman, on the habitable globe; and no connection with any other show on earth, especially Sypher’s Two-in-One Show now devastating the same State.

If the advertisements setting forth these attractions were couched in language somewhat rosier than the facts would warrant, there were few persons calm enough to perceive it, when once the glamour of the village parade and the smell of the menagerie had intoxicated the senses.

The circus had been the sole topic of conversation for a fortnight. Jot Bascom could always be relied on for the latest and most authentic news of its triumphant progress from one town to another. Jot was a sort of town crier; and whenever the approach of a caravan was announced, he would go over on the Liberty road to find out just where it was and what were its immediate plans, for the thrilling pleasure of calling at every one of the neighbors’ on his way home, and delivering his budget of news. He was an attendant at every funeral, and as far as possible at every wedding, in the village; at every flag-raising and husking, and town and county fair. When more pressing duties did not hinder, he endeavored to meet the two daily trains that passed through Milliken’s Mills, a mile or two from Pleasant River. He accompanied the sheriff on all journeys entailing serving of papers and other embarrassing duties common to the law. On one occasion, when the two lawyers of the village held an investigation before Trial Justice Simeon Porter, they waited an hour because Jot Bascom did not come. They knew that something was amiss, but it was only on reflection that they remembered that Jot was not indispensable. He went with all paupers to the Poor Farm, and never missed a town meeting. He knew all the conditions attending any swapping of horses that occurred within a radius of twenty miles,—the terms of the trade and the amount paid to boot. He knew who owed the fish-man and who owed the meat-man, and who could not get trusted by either of them. In fact, so far as the divine attributes of omniscience and omnipresence could be vested in a faulty human creature, they were present in Jot Bascom. That he was quite unable to attend conscientiously to home duties, when overborne by press of public service, was true. When Diadema Bascom wanted kindling split, wood brought in, the cows milked, or the pigs fed, she commonly found her spouse serving humanity in bulk.

All the details of the approach of the Grand Six-in-One Show had, therefore, been heralded to those work-sodden and unambitious persons who tied themselves to their own wood-piles or haying-fields.

These were the bulletins issues:—

The men were making a circle in the Widow Buzzell’s field, in the same place where the old one had been,—the old one, viewed with awe for five years by all the village small boys.

The forerunners, outriders, proprietors, whatever they might be, had arrived and gone to the tavern.

An elephant was quartered in the tavern shed!

The elephant had stepped through the floor!!

The advance guard of performers and part of the show itself had come!

And the “Cheriot”!!

This far-famed vehicle had paused on top of Deacon Chute’s hill, to prepare for the street parade. Little Jim Chute had been gloating over the fact that it must pass by his house, and when it stopped short under the elms in the dooryard his heart almost broke for joy. He pinched the twenty-five-cent piece in his pocket to assure himself that he was alive and in his right mind. The precious coin had been the result of careful saving, and his hot, excited hands had almost worn it thin. But alas for the vanity of human hopes! When the magnificent red-and-gold “Cheriot” was uncovered, that its glories might shine upon the waiting world, the door opened, and a huddle of painted Indians tumbled out, ready to lead the procession, or, if so disposed, to scalp the neighborhood. Little Jim gave one panic-stricken look as they leaped over the chariot steps, and then fled to the barn chamber, whence he had to be dragged by his mother, and cuffed into willingness to attend the spectacle that had once so dazzled his imagination.

On the eventful afternoon of the performance the road was gay with teams. David and Samantha Milliken drove by in Miss Cummin’s neat carryall, two children on the back seat, a will-o’-the-wisp baby girl held down by a serious boy. Steve Webster was driving Doxy Morton in his mother’s buggy. Jabe Slocum, Pitt Packard, Brad Gibson, Cyse Higgins, and scores of others were riding “shank’s mare,” as they would have said.

It had been a close, warm day, and as the afternoon wore away it grew hotter and closer. There was a dead calm in the air, a threatening blackness in the west that made the farmers think anxiously of their hay. Presently the thunderheads ran together into big black clouds, which melted in turn into molten masses of smoky orange, so that the heavens were like burnished brass. Drivers whipped up their horses, and pedestrians hastened their steps. Steve Webster decided not to run even the smallest risk of injuring so precious a commodity as Doxy Morton by a shower of rain, so he drove into a friend’s yard, put up his horse, and waited till the storm should pass by. Brad Gibson stooped to drink at a wayside brook, and as he bent over the water he heard a low, murmuring, muttering sound that seemed to make the earth tremble.

Then from hill to hill “leapt the live thunder.” Even the distant mountains seemed to have “found a tongue.” A zigzag chain of lightning flashed in the lurid sky, and after an appreciable interval another peal, louder than the first, and nearer.

The rain began to fall, the forked flashes of flame darted hither and thither in the clouds, and the boom of heaven’s artillery grew heavier and heavier. The blinding sheets of light and the tumultuous roar of sound now followed each other so quickly that they seemed almost simultaneous. Flash—crash—flash—crash—flash—crash; blinding and deafening eye and ear at once. Everybody who could find a shelter of any sort hastened to it. The women at home set their children in the midst of feather beds, and some of them even huddled there themselves, their babies clinging to them in sympathetic fear, as the livid shafts of light illuminated the dark rooms with more than noonday glare.

The air was full of gloom; a nameless terror lurked within it; the elements seemed at war with each other. Horses whinnied in the stables, and colts dashed about the pastures. The cattle sought sheltered places; the cows ambling clumsily towards some refuge, their full bags dripping milk as they swung heavily to and fro. The birds flew towards the orchards and the deep woods; the swallows swooped restlessly round the barns, and hid themselves under the eaves or in the shadow of deserted nests.

The rain now fell in sheets.

“Hurry up ‘n’ git under cover, Jabe,” said Brad Gibson; “you’re jest the kind of a pole to draw lightnin’!”

“You hain’t, then!” retorted Jabe. “There ain’t enough o’ you fer lightnin’ to ketch holt of!”

Suddenly a ghastly streak of light leaped out of a cloud, and then another, till the sky seemed lit up by cataracts of flame. A breath of wind sprang into the still air. Then a deafening crash, clap, crack, roar, peal! and as Jabe Slocum looked out of a protecting shed door, he saw a fiery ball burst from the clouds, shooting brazen arrows as it fell. Within the instant the meeting-house steeple broke into a tongue of flame, and then, looking towards home, he fancied that the fireball dropped to earth in Squire Bean’s meadow.

The wind blew more fiercely now. There was a sudden crackling of wood, falling of old timers, and breaking of glass. The deadly fluid ran in a winding course down a great maple by the shed, leaving a narrow charred channel through the bark to tell how it passed to earth. A sombre pine stood up, black and burned, its heart gaping through a ghastly wound in the split trunk.

The rain now subsided; there was only an occasional faint rumbling of thunder, as if it were murmuring over the distant sea; the clouds broke away in the west; the sun peeped out, as if to see what had been going on in the world since he hid himself an hour before. A delicate rainbow bridge stretched from the blackened church steeple to the glittering weathercock on the squire’s barn; and there, in the centre of the fair green meadows from which it had risen in glorious strength and beauty for a century or more, lay the nooning tree.

The fireball, if ball of fire indeed there were, had struck in the very centre of its splendid dome, and ploughed its way from feather tip to sturdy root, riving the tree in twain, cleaving its great boughs left and right, laying one majestic half level with the earth, and bending the other till the proud head almost touched the grass.

The rainbow was reflected in the million drops glittering upon the bowed branches, turning each into a tear of liquid opal. The birds hopped on the prone magnificence, and eyed timorously a strange object underneath.

There had been one swift, pitiless, merciful stroke! The monarch of the meadow would never again feel the magic thrill of the sap in its veins, nor the bursting of brown bud into green leaf.

The birds would build their nests and sing their idyls in other boughs. The “time of pleasure and love” was over with the nooning tree; over too, with him who slept beneath; for under its fallen branches, with the light of a great peace in his upturned face, lay the man from Tennessee.

THE FORE-ROOM RUG

Diadema, wife of Jot Bascom, was sitting at the window of the village watch-tower, so called because it commanded a view of nearly everything that happened in Pleasant River; those details escaping the physical eye being supplied by faith and imagination working in the light of past experience. She sat in the chair of honor, the chair of choice, the high-backed rocker by the southern window, in which her husband’s mother, old Mrs. Bascom, had sat for thirty years, applying a still more powerful intellectual telescope to the doings of her neighbors. Diadema’s seat had formerly been on the less desirable side of the little light-stand, where Priscilla Hollis was now installed.

Mrs. Bascom was at work on a new fore-room rug, the former one having been transferred to Miss Hollis’s chamber; for, as the teacher at the brick schoolhouse, a graduate of a Massachusetts normal school, and the daughter of a deceased judge, she was a boarder of considerable consequence. It was a rainy Saturday afternoon, and the two women were alone. It was a pleasant, peaceful sitting-room, as neat as wax in every part. The floor was covered by a cheerful patriotic rag carpet woven entirely of red, white, and blue rags, and protected in various exposed localities by button rugs,—red, white, and blue disks superimposed one on the other.

Diadema Bascom was a person of some sentiment. When her old father, Captain Dennett, was dying, he drew a wallet from under his pillow, and handed her a twenty-dollar bill to get something to remember him by. This unwonted occurrence burned itself into the daughter’s imagination, and when she came as a bride to the Bascom house she refurnished the sitting-room as a kind of monument to the departed soldier, whose sword and musket were now tied to the wall with neatly hemmed bows of bright red cotton.

The chair cushions were of red-and-white glazed patch, the turkey wings that served as hearth brushes were hung against the white-painted chimney-piece with blue skirt braid, and the white shades were finished with home-made scarlet “tossels.” A little whatnot in one corner was laden with the trophies of battle. The warrior’s brass buttons were strung on a red picture cord and hung over his daguerreotype on the upper shelf; there was a tarnished shoulder strap, and a flattened bullet that the captain’s jealous contemporaries swore he never stopped, unless he got it in the rear when he was flying from the foe. There was also a little tin canister in which a charge of powder had been sacredly preserved. The scoffers, again, said that “the cap’n put it in his musket when he went into the war, and kep’ it there till he come out.” These objects were tastefully decorated with the national colors. In fact, no modern aesthete could have arranged a symbolic symphony of grief and glory with any more fidelity to an ideal than Diadema Bascom, in working out her scheme of red, white, and blue.

Rows of ripening tomatoes lay along the ledges of the windows, and a tortoise-shell cat snoozed on one of the broad sills. The tall clock in the corner ticked peacefully. Priscilla Hollis never tired of looking at the jolly red-cheeked moon, the group of stars on a blue ground, the trig little ship, the old house, and the jolly moon again, creeping one after another across the open space at the top.