Edith Summers Kelley, described as “an American writer of the naturalist school,” published only one book in her lifetime — a novel titled WEEDS, which appeared in 1923. The book was praised by Sinclair Lewis, Joseph Wood Krutch, Floyd Dell, and Upton Sinclair, but ignored by the reading public, and both the novel and its author were forgotten.
Nearly half a century later Professor Matthew J. Bruccoli of the University of South Carolina, a Professor of English and an authority on Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, found a copy of WEEDS, read it, and was tremendously impressed. He persuaded the Southern Illinois University Press to reissue the book, which the Press did in November 1972; and again the novel was acclaimed by a few and ignored by the many. But one of the author’s three children, Patrick Kelley, bought a copy of the new edition of WEEDS, got in touch with Professor Bruccoli, and informed him that there was a bundle of his mother’s unpublished manuscripts (in the attic? in the cellar?), including a second novel and some short stories.
Once again Professor Bruccoli became a literary midwife. The second novel, titled THE DEVIL’S HAND, is scheduled for publication by the Southern Illinois University Press this summer. We are grateful to Professor Bruccoli for sending us one of Mrs. Kelley’s unpublished short stories, and we are trying to synchronize its appearance in EQMM with the issuance of Mrs. Kelley’s second novel. Professor Bruccoli tells us that the short story was written “prior to 1925,” which means it has taken fate 50 years to bring about the publishing of this story.
We have made only minimal alterations in the text supplied by Professor Bruccoli — some corrections and changes in spelling and punctuation, some breaking up of extra-long paragraphs, and a change in the title (the original title, we thought, was too revealing). The story itself is truly in the naturalist school, full of realistic detail of its period and place; it illuminates Mrs. Kelley’s affinity for nature, and her precise ear for regional dialogue, in the Mark Twainian sense of dialect and speech patterns. Mrs. Kelley, in her autobiographical note discovered with the unpublished manuscripts, described this story as “grim.” Yes, as old age and poverty and vanishing dreams and life itself are grim...
Old Andy Van Anda was sitting in the kitchen of his farmhouse smoking his pipe and thinking about his daughter, Jenny, one golden autumn afternoon, when a shadow darkened the band of sunlight that fell obliquely from the open door. That shadow was destined to darken every day of life that remained to him. He raised his eyes and saw Joe Titman standing in the doorway.
Ever since his wife’s death, old Andy had lived alone in this blackened old farmhouse up against the mountain range that lifted its bristling spine between northern New Jersey and Pennsylvania. At first his other two daughters had taken turns at coming every day to “redd up.” Then Lena’s man got a chance to sell his place and moved to Upjohn, where there was work to be had in the brickyard.
After Lena moved away, Tillie, the other daughter, got to coming less and less often. And indeed one could hardly blame her, for her place was a good two miles from her father’s. His bed was now hardly ever made and the pillowslip grew browner and browner. His stove, the polished pride of his wife’s heart, grew caked with rust and spatterings. The old rag carpet, once kept so neat and clean, was greasy around the table and the stove, and so filled with dust that when Tillie did try to sweep it the broom thickened the air with a gray cloud.
The oilcloth on the table cracked and tore and grew smeary and sticky. Dust settled thickly on all the shelves, on the top of the eight-day clock, on the china slipper, on the flat vase with roses on the front and a piece broken out of the back. An old plate, chipped and crazed, a heavy cup and saucer, brown with coffee stains, and a wooden-handled knife and fork were the only dishes that the old man ever used. These he rinsed out after each meal and left turned upside down on the smeary oilcloth.
It was in the doorway of this house that Joe Titman stood on that fateful autumn afternoon.
Joe was a tall, bony vagabond, long since grown old in bachelorhood, who in his day had been a great fighter and hunter and a mighty woodsman. Even now, though his shaking hand spilled the coffee as he lifted the saucer to his lips, there was no one along the mountainside who could swing the broadaxe with such clean strokes, such fine precision.
Old Andy Van Anda had always disliked Joe Titman; but when he saw him standing there in the doorway he was glad to see him. For some time now he had been thinking of trying to get Joe to help him cut ties. His place of 160 acres was no good for farming any more. As he grew feebler and less ambitious he had worked the tillable fields less and less. The strength had gone out of his arms and out of the land and it had been left to grow up in weeds and brush and clumps of young birches.
There was scant pasture left for a team of horses and a few sheep. But in the rocky wood lots that skirted the base of the mountain there grew fine tall chestnuts and noble oaks. They had been growing there when the old man was a pink, satin-skinned baby. They had been big trees when he had brought his bride there more than 50 years ago. Nearly every winter he had cut down a few of them, hewed them into railroad ties, and hauled them to Branchville. But the prices had nearly always been poor; and for his load of ties that it had taken days to cut and hew and a fourteen-hour day to haul to Branchville, he would come back with little more than a sack of feed, a bag of flour, a few plugs of chewing tobacco, a couple of pounds of sugar, and perhaps a few drinks of whiskey in his belly.
Now, however, since everything else had gone up, he had heard that ties were bringing a better price. He had to do something to get money to pay his taxes and finish paying for his wife’s tombstone. So when Joe Titman shambled into his kitchen this autumn afternoon, with a few things tied in a bundle on the end of a stick, and asked for a drink of cider, Andy felt him out tentatively on the subject of their going into partnership.
“They say ties is like to fetch a fair price this winter,” he hazarded, as he poured Joe’s third glass of cider from a broken-nosed pitcher that had once been part of a bedroom set.
“Like enough. Everything else’s high enough,” said Joe and gulped the cider.
“I got a mighty good lot o’ oaks and chestnuts,” said Andy, as Joe was emptying his fifth glass. “They’re easy to git out too, an’ handy to the road, an’ they’d make prime, fust-class ties that ’ud fetch the top price.”
“Top price nuthin’,” grumbled his guest. “There ain’t no ties ever fetches the top price. The buyers does the gradin’ an’ they alius calls ’em seconds. The seller ain’t got no more chanct ’n a rabbit.”
When Joe had finished his seventh glass and the pitcher was empty, Andy suggested, “Anyway, we might walk out, Joe, an’ have a look at them trees.”
Joe continued to sit for a few deliberate moments, saying nothing, then slouched indifferently to his feet.
“Waal, I don’t mind havin’ a look at ’em afore I take to the road agin.”
Together they plodded out, two gray and tattered old scarecrows, into the glory of the autumn afternoon. As they passed through the calm, suffused beauty, grasshoppers sprang before their feet and bees buzzed drowsily about them. The wood lots were a blaze of color: gold of the oaks and chestnuts, scarlet of the maples, deep green of the singing pines. The great trees rose, stately and proud, against a deep blue sky. Over the lower lands that sloped to the swamps, the pale yellow and deep crimson of the dwarf poplars and sumachs shimmered in a thin gold mist.
None of these things was commented on by Andy Van Anda and his guest except the late grasshoppers.
“It’s a sign of a warm fall,” said Joe Titman, eyeing the little darting creatures.
“An’ makes good fattenin’ fer the hens,” added Andy.
Arrived among the big trees, they loitered about looking them over in appraisive silence.
“Some mighty fine trees there,” said Andy at last.
“Oh, purty fair,” answered Joe indifferently.
They turned and walked back to the house in silence.
Andy brought up another pitcher of cider. Joe poured himself a glass and gulped it with relish. It was more than commonly good cider. Andy spoke suddenly out of a dead silence.
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Joe. I’ll give you a straight half of what the ties fetches an’ pay half the haulin’. That’s as good a deal as anybody ever give a tie cutter, an’ you know it.” The old man puffed vigorously on his pipe, breathless and flustered over so long a speech and so definite a proposal.
“I ain’t much interested in tie cuttin’ these days,” confided Joe, as he poured himself another glass of cider.
There was a long and deep silence. When at last Andy spoke he had to clear his throat and his voice was husky.
“Well then, how’d it be if I paid three-fourths o’ the haulin?”
Nonchalantly Joe got to his feet. “It’s funny,” he said, “but somehow this fall I don’t seem to feel no itch to cut ties. I reckon I’ll be steppin’ along.” He reached for the stick with all his worldly possessions tied on the end.
An expression of pained surprise spread over the little old man’s wizened features. He had half expected this, yet it came as a disagreeable shock. There was just one card left for him to play, a card that he had been holding back in the hope that he would not have to use it. Now it must be laid face up on the table. How he shrank from using this last card. For years his privacy had been growing more and more dear to him.
“I say now, Joe,” he spoke rapidly, almost feverishly, as if arrived at a decision which he was afraid he might revoke if he thought it over, “you could stop right here at my place while you cut them ties, use one o’ my upstairs beds, my stove an’ sech an’ I wouldn’t charge you a cent.”
Joe paused with the stick already over his shoulder. “You do all the haulin’, Andy, an’ I’ll take you up on that,” he said at last. “Your cider allus was a bit better’n common.”
And that was how it came about that Joe Titman lived with Andy Van Anda.
The first load of ties was a decided success. Joe had taken the pick of the woods and they were straight as new nails, beautifully hewn and every one of them more than a full foot faced. And though the buyer at Branchville managed to rate a good half of them as seconds, still they brought a price that set a gleam of avaricious joy dancing in old Van Anda’s eyes and permitted Joe Titman to pay an unthinkable price for a gallon of whiskey. They dickered a good deal about the cost of the hauling. Old Van Anda tried to go back on his bargain and at last Joe humored him by agreeing to go fifty-fifty.
The trouble began after the hauling of the last load. Van Anda, excited by the high price that the ties had brought, wanted to begin bright and early next morning to saw down more trees. But Joe was lethargic, irritable, and moody and would not stir from the kitchen stove where he sat with his feet in the oven, chewing tobacco, whittling at a bit of stick and occasionally lifting the lid to spit into the blaze. Joe had drunk freely the day before and the old man put it down to a morning-after grouch and “left him set.”
The next day Joe, who had bought shells at Branchville, pulled out from beneath his straw tick the shotgun which was one of the few things he carried with him wherever he went, and began cleaning it. Old Van Anda watched him with narrowed, furtive eyes.
“Be we a-goin’ to the woods this mornin’, Joe?” he hazarded at last.
“I be,” answered Joe without hesitation. “I’m a-goin’huntin.”
There was a long silence
“But how about them ties?” asked old Andy, with sudden, querulous directness.
“I reckon they won’t spile for waitin’ a spell,” drawled Joe, squinting critically down one barrel of the gun. “They’ve stud there since long afore you an’ me was born. I figger they ain’t a-goin’ to rot away overnight.”
Old Andy felt himself trembling all over with a futile exasperation, like the frustrated irritability of a child. But he said nothing, only grunted slightly.
He was somewhat mollified when Joe returned that afternoon with three rabbits and several quail.
The days lengthened into weeks, and still Joe Titman could not be induced to take his end at the crosscut saw. When he felt so disposed, he sat all day by the kitchen stove, chewing, whittling, and spitting into the blaze. On other days he took his gun and went into the woods or paid visits to the neighbors whom he would help with the hog killing, the wood hauling, or whatever big job happened to be afoot.
“Aw hell, what’s the youst?” he would say, lifting one great shoulder in an indifferent shrug whenever old Van Anda mentioned ties.
The old man fretted and fumed, chafed and worried, but Joe went his way, composed, silent, and inscrutable. Toward dark he would stalk into the kitchen, open up the tin biscuit box in which he kept his loaf of bread, his coffee and sugar, and make himself some supper. If he had shot a rabbit or a woodchuck, or if somebody had given him a hog’s pluck for helping with the killing, he shared it generously with Andy.
But Andy never shared anything with him except the cider of his cellar, which is an unheard-of thing to withhold from anyone who is in your house. The two rarely ate at the same time, and each kept to his own end of the table and washed his own dishes, Joe using a tin plate and cup that he had carried about with him for years.
It was well into the winter when Joe, having no money left to buy bread and tobacco, went into the woods with Andy and cut and hewed another load of ties. The money that he earned by this spurt of energy lasted him until early spring.
Through the summer there were gardens from which one could always pilfer a few carrots and potatoes, there were dewberries and huckleberries, cherries and apples. Joe got along very nicely. When he ran out of money he helped some neighbor for a day or two with the haying or the potato digging. Of an evening he smoked his pipe in silent serenity on the shambling old kitchen porch, watched the sunset smolder into magenta and gray, heard after rain the pleasant singing of the frogs and in the dry days of late summer the shrill locust chorus. On the farthest end of the porch old Andy sat and smoked with short, irritable puffs. Scarcely ever did they exchange a word from dawn till dark.
Once, as they sat thus, Joe Titman spoke out of a dead silence.
“You ain’t heard from Jenny lately?”
The old man stirred, took his pipe out of his mouth.
“I ain’t heard from Jenny in over twenty year.”
There was nothing more said. When it grew dark Andy retired into the house and to bed. Joe sat a little longer, then creaked slowly and heavily up the attic stairs.
Andy had been thinking of Jenny when Joe spoke, as he nearly always did when he nursed his pipe of an evening. Over him there had swept a hot surge of fury against this man who seemed to have read his mind. Was nothing of his, not even his own thoughts, sacred from this prying presence? He had been thinking of Jenny, his youngest and favorite daughter, Jenny’s sunny curls and happy blue eyes, Jenny’s laughter and bubbling gaiety, Jenny’s endearing ways. When she was 17 she had gone to the city to find work. For the first months they had had a few letters from her. Then silence.
The fall passed and it was winter again, and not a word did Joe Titman say about ties. As before, when he was out of money he did a day’s work or so. To old Andy’s infinite exasperation, he even hewed some ties for Tom Biddle on the adjoining farm.
More and more it got on old Van Anda’s nerves. It was his first thought when he awoke in the pitch blackness of the early morning and the last that glimmered out of his mind at night. He dreamed about it too. Gradually he ceased to fret about the uncut ties and gave his whole thought to a daily growing resentment at the presence of this guest, which had grown to become an unspeakable violation of his cherished privacy and the sanctity of his home.
Every movement that the intruder made was an offense to him, every sound an insult. He loathed the sound of the coffee gurgling through Joe’s lips and clenched his hands in exasperated rage when he began to suck his teeth. The sight of his hat hanging on its nail was a personal affront.
More and more the old man nursed the thought of his home as a sacred place, sacred to himself and his memories. In the toil-filled and fretful days of his life as a husband and father he had not given much thought to his wife except to grumble at her if the meals were not ready or the milking was not done on time. Toward the two older girls, who had grown before his eyes into drab and hardened farm women, fatherly pride and affection had gradually ebbed away. Only Jenny had remained always next to his heart.
But of late years, now that he had much time to sit and think, the outcasts had crept back and sat once more with Jenny in the shrine of memory. He found his mind constantly slipping away to three cornsilk-haired little girls who had flitted in and out of the dooryard, played tag in the meadow, and gathered dandelions and daisies along the roadside. His wife he no longer saw as the wizened, shrill-voiced crone who, somewhat to his relief, had died full of years and ailments. He remembered her now as a young woman with brown curls clinging about her temples and sweet blue eyes. It was the sweetness of the deep blue eyes and the way the brown curls clung about her temples that had made him mad about her. He remembered it all so well. For years and years he had forgotten it as though it had never been. Now it all seemed like yesterday. And then would float before him the face of Jenny as he had last seen it, Jenny at 17.
Through the long winter evenings the two old men sat opposite each other, one on each side of the rusty stove, their heads sunk between their hunched shoulders. From time to time, old Van Anda, with the air of one who is master there, lifted the stove lid and put in more wood. As he did so, he glanced with narrowed eyes at the great bony frame that bulked in silence and took no notice, then sank into his chair with a sound that was half a mutter, half a sigh.
The air was hot and stale and heavy with tobacco smoke. The old, blackened cast-iron kettle purred and steamed. The clock ticked loudly into the silence. On moonless nights the uncurtained window was only a black oblong; but when the moon shone it showed the irregular fringe of icicles hanging from the eaves, showed Andy’s fields stretching away smooth and white under deep snow to the dark pines that lifted somber spires against the base of the mountain. The smoky glimmer of the little glass lamp lighted little more than the table upon which it stood. Mysterious curtains of shadow shrouded the comers of the room. The kettle purred and steamed. The clock ticked loudly into the silence.
As they sat thus night after night, old Andy’s thoughts traveled always in the same circle, dwelt upon his wife in her youth, his children as babies, Jenny as a lovely blossom of girlhood. Here in this very room his Nettie, the girl he had courted, had bustled about from stove to table making aromatic coffee, frying griddle cakes and bacon that tasted so good when the day’s work was done. On this floor his children had crawled as babies, run about as little girls. He could see their rosy faces now around the table. At this very door he had seen for the last time Jenny’s lovely flashing smile. How different it had all been in those days, how clean and bright and cheerful. And now—
If Joe had been a widower the situation would have been eased. The thoughts of each, like parallel tracks, could have gone on forever without touching. Andy could have felt secure and alone in his memories. But this old buzzard had done nothing all his life but fight and hunt and fish. What could he have to look back upon?
In the midst of his broodings the old man had a constant, uneasy feeling that those evil eyes were leering into his past, that those sinister lips were sneering at it. At the same time he felt a deep resentment that Joe could have no sympathy with his feelings. This filthy varmint that reeked of whiskey and sweat and worse, what could he know about the deep heartbreak of losing your children, seeing them grow old and cranky before your very eyes, having them snatched from you in the blossom time of youth?
By constantly dwelling upon it Andy came to think of Joe as the cause of all his vague regrets, his emptiness, his sense of loss and frustration. Each night his mind followed the same train of thought, each night it returned to the hulking mass on the other side of the stove with an intensified bitterness, rage, and hate. If he could only get rid of him. If he could only have his house to himself.
Sometimes, when he felt sure Joe Titman was far away from the house, he took the key from the nail where he had always kept it ever since his wife died, unlocked the door of the best room, and went inside to commune with the shadows that had once been his reality.
A heavy staleness weighted the air. When the old man partly raised the blind, the shaft of sunlight that came in showed the comers of the room hung with cobwebs. The chairs stood primly at right angles to the wall, tidies on their backs. The coarse lace curtains hung heavy with dust, tied back by tatters of ribbon that had once been pink.
On the stiff sofa were pillows covered with silk patchwork so thick with dust that the colors were scarcely visible. On the whatnot in the corner some little trinkets, a china boy in knee breeches, a tea cup and saucer, a child’s bank and a few shells and bits of flint arrowheads wore the universal dress of dust. On a crocheted tidy that was spread over a marble-topped table, the great embossed family Bible that had been handed down to him from his grandfather lay smothered in dust. In it was the record of his birth, of his marriage to Nettie, of the birth of his three girls. The knowledge that these events were inscribed there seemed to give them an importance, a solidity and permanence that was reassuring. It was somehow comforting to reflect that they stood there in black and white to show that it had not all been a dream.
It was at three photographs on the center table and a crayon enlargement on the wall that the old man stood and gazed, moving his eyes slowly from one to the other. One was a picture of his wife in her white wedding dress. She was sitting in a big plush chair, and he was standing beside her slightly to the rear with his hand on her shoulder. How well he remembered the day that picture had been taken. How had he managed to forget it all these years? There were photographs of Lena and Tillie when they were little tots, and there was a crayon enlargement of Jenny at 16. He had had the enlargement made just after she went away.
After he had looked the pictures over, it was always to this crayon enlargement that he returned, standing gazing at it fixedly. It was all that remained to him of Jenny. Jenny had not been like the other girls, quiet and gentle. Jenny had been like a rainbow, like a sunbeam, always laughing, always singing.
After she went away how empty and silent the old house had been. Dear God, how he had missed Jenny! On the face there was a charming smile, a merry, arch look in the eyes. The old man saw these, but mostly he saw the unutterably lovely line of the young cheek and chin, and there was something about this that tore his heart. Sometimes before the picture he would break into convulsive weeping. Jenny!
One evening at dark, when he came in from feeding the hogs, he was struck with amazement to see the door of the best room standing ajar. He was carrying an armful of stove wood which he had picked up as he passed the woodpile. The wood crashed from his relaxed arm and scattered over the floor. At the noise a light in the best room wavered and there was a slight sound of movement. The little man turned and went into the room.
Joe Titman was there standing before the center-table with the lamp in one hand and Nettie’s picture in the other. The stale air was full of the whiskey smell that came from his breath.
Old Andy, struck speechless, stood and glared at him, When at last he found breath he shrieked in a shrill, outraged tremolo of hate and fury the words that for so long he had been burning to say.
“Git outa my house!”
The great hulk that called itself Joe Titman lurched unsteadily and the lamp slanted over so far that the chimney almost fell off. The flame licked up and smoked, then settled again. Painstakingly, with numb and palsied fingers, he set the lamp on the table and turned and faced his host.
“Whatcha say, Andy?”
“Git outa my house!” The voice was shriller, more tremulous with seething rage. Joe Titman leered evilly.
“Git out, yuh say?” A sardonic chuckle came from somewhere deep down in his throat. “Let be, Andy. No youst fer you to git all het up. I was allus the best man of us two, Andy. No little pipin’ grasshopper like you is a-goin’ to make me git out if I ain’t got a mind to. I’m here till I’m ready to quit. Git that, Andy?”
He fixed the old man’s angry little eyes with a bleary, contemptuous stare.
Old Andy bristled like an enraged bantam cock challenging a bird three times his size. “You set down that pitcher, Joe Titman. That pitcher ain’t got nuthin’ to do with you. That’s my wife.”
Joe Titman made a strange sound that was mingled of a sneer, a hiccough, and a mocking laugh.
“Air yuh sure o’ that, Andy?” He peered fixedly at the little man. “Air yuh sure Nettie Waters wasn’t never nuthin’ to no mar. but you? There’s things a man can’t be too sure about, Andy. Yuh remember I was a heap better-lookin’ lad nor you, Andy, a heap taller, stronger, lavisher with money. All these nights while we been a-settin’ in there by the stove, I been thinkin’ it over, how much likelier a man I was nor you, Andy, how much better Nettie Waters liked me nor she did you. She married you outa spite. Andy, ’cause her an’ me had a failin’ out. Yuh didn’t know that afore, did yuh, Andy? Some things a man waits till he’s got one foot in the grave afore he knows the rights of ’em. An’ after she’d got over bein’ mad at me, she come back to me, Andy. Thai youngest girl, Jenny, in the big pitcher on the wall is my girl.”
With a terrible cry the little old man sprang. The strength of £ wildcat steeled his shrunken frame. A heavy walnut chair swung at the end of his arms. It crashed into Joe Titman’s temple. He tried to grasp the table, lurched against it, crumpled and fell in a limp heap on the floor.
The old man stood over the body, his passion slowly ebbing away, his strength slipping into a clammy weakness. He knell down, put his hand over the heart, and could feel no movement. An icy, paralyzing terror began to creep over him. He had killed a man! They would come and find the body here. The sheriff and the coroner would come and they would take him away and lock him up in jail and try him and hang him, an old man who had lived decent and law-abiding all his life. Already he felt the noose about his neck, saw himself swinging from the rope.
The full horror of it seemed to last for centuries, but it had passed in a few seconds. The terrible, paralyzing clutch relaxed and already his thoughts were growing fluid with the nimble guile of the cornered creature that must act or die. Stealthy as a panther he padded across the room, bent almost double, and pulled the blind closer.
Then he slunk back and closed the kitchen door, which in his moment of amazement he had left open. As he did so he peered out into the cold, black night. There was neither light nor sound, only a great pall of blackness. The house had grown very cold and he shivered. The fire had gone out.
Summoning what remained of his ebbing strength, he dragged the dead man’s body to the bottom of the narrow stairway that led up to the attic and placed it, face downward, in the position of one who has fallen down stairs. He worked feverishly, frantically. Thank God there was no blood. He scuttled up and fetched a pillow and stuffed it under Joe’s head, turning the head sidewise.
Then he went into the best room and straightened the furniture, set the photograph where it belonged, the chair in its place against the wall. As he was bringing out the lighted lamp, he heard a dog howl, and the lamp almost fell to the floor. As if dogs didn’t howl every night, he thought reassuringly, as he set the lamp shakily on the kitchen table. Then he closed and locked the door of the best room. In the kitchen he picked up the wood that he had spilled and threw it into the woodbox.
When everything was done, he went over it all again with minute care, unlocked the best room once more and made sure that everything was set in its place, that there was no drop of blood on the carpet. He blew at the dust on the center table so that it would re-distribute itself and cover finger marks. Once more he carefully closed and locked the door and hung the key on its nail.
In the narrow hallway below the stairs he looked critically at the form of the dead man, arranged an arm a little differently, looked again to make sure that there was no blood, then went out to the barn and hitched up to go and tell the nearest neighbor to fetch the doctor.
“Accidental death from falling down stairs while under the influence of liquor,” was the verdict brought in next day at the inquest.
That night old Andy Van Anda had his house to himself.