The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

BOW DOWN, ISAAC!

I made my first visit to Hackley Falls when I was twelve years old. My mother had died in that year, and my widowed father could think of no better thing to do with me in the school holidays than to send me to visit my two maiden aunts, Julia and Jenny (his elder sisters), who still lived on the family farm, where he himself had been born; and it was here that he had met and married my mother. It was natural enough that he should send me to “Witch Elms”; and I confess that, after a childhood almost all of which had been spent in New York, I looked upon the adventure as a treat. My father impressed upon me that I should have to be helpful—I was given a clear understanding, in strictest New England fashion, of my duties. I was to get the mail twice a day, to fetch the kindling, to go to the village for groceries whenever requested by Aunt Julia or Aunt Jenny, to help old Jim with the livestock—which merely meant chivying the one cow to and from the pasture, or feeding the two pigs which lived in the barn cellar—and to keep my room tidy. If I was very good I might be allowed to drive the horse now and then. And I could help Jim pump the water up to the tank in the attic, which was done by hand.

All of these things I did and, surprisingly enough, didn’t find them in the least like duties. I was happier than I’d ever been in my life. With a farm of two hundred acres to run over, with woods to explore, the Mill River to bathe in, and mountains to climb—and summer, too, just beginning—it may be assumed that I didn’t find things very irksome. “Witch Elms” stood in the midst of a green valley-meadow, about a quarter of a mile from the river, which we could see from the front porch. The road crossed the river just there by means of an old-fashioned covered bridge, which was painted a raw scarlet; some of the planking was gone from its floor, and I used to love to lie on my belly and look down at the shallow brawling water, in which one could see every pebble and minnow.

Beyond the bridge rose Hateful Mountain, covered with sugar-maples, and along the flank of this the road climbed steeply eastward, eventually, after a mile or so, passing the white farmhouse (perched quite high on a spur of Hateful) which belonged to Captain Phippen, who was a distant connection of ours, and our only frequent visitor. He had been a sea captain, in the coastwise trade, and now lived with his son and daughter-in-law. He could almost invariably be seen on his porch with a powerful spyglass in his hand—he used to tell me that with that spyglass he knew everything that was done in the valley. He knew just which orchard Jim was picking, and how many bushels he got, and even pretended (with a twinkle in his eye) to know the size of the apples. He once told me that in summer, if the light was right, and the church windows were open in Hackley Falls, he could tell whether the Crazy Willards put ten cents or a nickel into the offertory box; but this I knew was apocryphal. I had looked many times through the spyglass myself, and knew that all one could see of the little white town of Hackley Falls was the church steeple, with a golden fish for a weather vane, and the little red cupola of the grammar school, with a black bell in it. Elms and maples completely hid the rest of the town; and in fact, from Captain Phippen’s porch, as from our own, the only other human habitation which could be seen was the Crazy Willards’, which stood halfway between our house and Hackley Falls—about a mile and a half westward and (looking from “Witch Elms”) on the opposite side of the river. This was a low, square colonial farmhouse, which must at one time have been rather fine, but was now collapsing with neglect and old age, and black as pitch with rain-rot. Through Captain Phippen’s glass one could make out easily enough the untrimmed trumpet-vine, which covered the western gable with scarlet blossom, and the foul cow-yard which adjoined the house on the east. One could also see the horns of the cattle over the unpainted fence.… But I am getting ahead of my story, for this sinister house is really my theme.

With a small boy’s love of the abnormal—haunted houses, demon-murderers, crime, violence, and so on—it is not unnatural that the Willard farm should from the first have fascinated me. Nothing, for example, could have kindled my imagination about it more than the fact that I was from the outset warned against it. It was on my very first drive from Hackley Falls to “Witch Elms” that old Jim had first called my attention to the place—he pointed to it, sidelong, with his folded whip.

“See that?” And on my assenting, he added, “Keep away from there. That’s the Crazy Willards’. Old Crazy Willard.”

He chewed tobacco slowly, not turning his face toward the house. I looked at it, and it seemed then harmless enough.

“Who’s Crazy Willard?” I asked.

“He’s the very devil. The very devil himself in flesh! If you touched him with a wet finger, it would hiss.”

This metaphor so impressed me at the time that I made no further inquiry. Too much had been presented to me all at once; and it was some days before I myself, one evening at milking time, when Jim was squirting the warm white froth into a resonant pail, his knees under Lemon’s belly, again brought up the subject. I had passed the house daily—eying it across the little river, of course—but had only once seen any sign of life there. It had been a tall young woman, wearing a poke bonnet, who was rather fiercely raking the grass on the front lawn or yard and who, seeing me (I was taking home the mail), had turned for a moment, resting her hands on the rake handle, and shot at me a look of discomfiting intensity. I at once pretended that I was merely looking at the river.

“What does Old Crazy Willard look like?” I said. “And why is he crazy?”

Jim took so long to answer me that I thought he wasn’t going to answer me at all. His rusty old bowler hat was tilted back on his forehead by Lemon’s belly, and he chewed his cud of tobacco. The tiny white threads of milk shot into the pail on alternate sides, sping—spong—sping—spong, and Lemon now and then tossed her head to shake off flies.

“Why is he crazy?” Sping—spong—sping—spong. “Well, I guess because the Lord meant him to be. Him and his wife, and Lydia, too.”

“Who is Lydia?”

“Lydia? She’s his daughter.”

I reflected on this.

“But what does he look like?”

“Well, he’s tall and white-haired and kind of stringy, and he has a lot of teeth.”

“Does he do crazy things?”

“You leave your mind off him, Billy.”

“Well, but does he?”

“He’s crazy for religion. They all three are. They sing hymns, mornin’, noon, and night.”

“Oh.”

“You listen when you go by—you’d think they was having conniption fits. And sometimes they are.… He’s a powerful hand with a whip.”

“A whip?”

My puzzled question fell unanswered, except by the singsong of the milk in the pail.

My aunts were as nice as they could be. I think they didn’t know much about children—or small boys—and that I was a problem which very likely they discussed, sometimes, till late at night. What fantastic conclusions they reached, heaven only knows! They were very much alike—in fact, at first I couldn’t tell them apart. They both wore spectacles and both had thin, white, kindly faces; they dressed in black, with lace over their shoulders, parted their hair severely in the middle, and had bright blue eyes. It was a day or two before I knew that Aunt Julia was the one who had gray hair and usually folded her hands as she talked. She was very gentle. Aunt Jenny was plumper, stuck out in front a little more, had a loud sudden laugh like a man and an aggressive sense of humor. Except to church on Sundays, when Betsy the mare was harnessed to the old closed carriage, and Jim wore a special coat, not quite so green with age as his other, and once a month to tea at the Minister’s, and about as often to Captain Phippen’s, they never went out. They lived in the house and garden, only occasionally going to the barn for an official inspection. Now and then, if there happened to be a “special sunset,” they would take me with them to the upper orchard, from which one had a fine view right along the valley to the west, where one could see the notched mountains against the sun. But this was seldom; and they did it gravely, as if it were a kind of religious duty.

It was on such an occasion, as we stood by a fallen apple tree which, though half broken through at the ground, still continued annually to blossom and bear, and as we watched the sunset fading in the curves of the Mill River, that I first heard the Willards mentioned by my aunts. At that hour and in that light the Willard farm was unusually conspicuous. It stood very black and square and alone against the western light, and even at that distance it looked forlorn and deserted. From where we stood we could see also the little white footbridge which led across from it to the main road. And it was Aunt Julia who first noticed that someone was crossing the river.

“There he goes now,” she said.

“Who?”

“Old Isaac. I wish he’d fall in and drown.”

“He’d do well to drown in Mill River!”

I could just make out on the footbridge the figure of a man, who seemed to be carrying something in one hand.

“What’s he carrying, Aunt Jenny?”

“Keg of hard cider, most likely.”

“There’ll be hymn-singing tonight, I guess.”

“And more than that.”

“What does he do?” I asked.

Aunt Jenny gave Aunt Julia a quick look, not meant for me.

“He beats time,” she said. And then added, “With a razor strop.”

“Jim said it was a whip.”

“Well, I guess he isn’t particular. It might even be a broomstick. Anyway, you can hear it for miles around!” Aunt Jenny gave a quick laugh. “And then Lydia keeps out of sight for a while.”

I wanted to ask questions, feeling that something queer was behind all this, but at that moment, as the best of the sunset was over, my aunts, picking up their long skirts, began to retrace their steps toward the house, and nothing further was said. In fact, though the Crazy Willards were seldom far from my mind, and though I never went out without hoping, or half hoping, to meet Isaac, I made no further discoveries about them until several weeks later, when I had walked up to Captain Phippen’s to take him a present of gingerbread from Aunt Julia. Long before I had climbed the hill (it was a very hot day) I could see him in his usual rocking chair, with his feet against the porch-rail and his spyglass at his eye. He watched me climb, and when I arrived at last he told me that he had been counting the sweat-drops on my forehead.

“You look hot,” he said.

“I am!”

“Well, sit down on your hunkers and rest. Don’t tell me your Aunt Julia is sending me more gingerbread! That woman will be the death of me.”

I sat down and presently was allowed to look through the precious glass, and of course instantly turned it on the Willard farm.

“I’m looking at the Willard farm,” I said.

“Well, I’d be careful, if I was you.”

“I can see two great big seashells by the front door.”

“If that’s all you can see,” he said, chuckling, “you’re a lucky boy.”

“Does old Isaac beat Lydia?”

“What made you think that?”

“Something Aunt Jenny said.”

“Well, I dunno, I dunno, maybe he does.”

“Is she bad?”

“Maybe she was. She ran away once with some young feller.”

“Did she want to marry him?”

“Perhaps she did.”

“And what happened then?”

“Old Isaac went and brought her back again.… You’ll understand it when you’re older.”

“And did he beat her?”

“Yes, he beat her.”

Captain Phippen’s face had become grim.

“Your aunts happened to be driving by—I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t save her life! They went in with Jim and stopped him.”

“Oh!”

“And now we’ll talk about gingerbread.”

Of course, I didn’t dare ask my aunts about that scene, much as I burned with curiosity. The whole thing seemed to me such a queer mixture of things—the beatings and the hymn-singings and the drinking—that I couldn’t in the least fathom it. As a result of a few hints to Jim, while driving Lemon to and from the hill pasture, or passing the Willards on our way to Hackley Falls for supplies (when the subject could be brought up quite naturally with a “There’s the Willards’, isn’t it?”) I added a new small item or two, but nothing of great importance. Apparently they were very poor and made only a bare living by selling milk and butter. Old Isaac was a tyrant. He made his wife and Lydia do all the work, while he himself got drunk night after night, slept it off in the morning, and read the Bible all afternoon. He had a violent temper, and at such times went purple in the face. Once he had gone into the post office, and accused the postmaster, Mr. Greene (who also ran the general store), of reading his mail. The fight which ensued was of epic splendor. Isaac had jumped over the counter and grabbed Greene by the throat. They had catapulted all over the store, knocking down boxes of shoes, upsetting glass cases full of cheap candy, wrapping themselves in ladies’ muslin dresses, and finally had both rolled right through one of the front shop-windows. Mr. Greene had cut his right forearm so badly that it had to have seven stitches. Eye-witnesses said that Isaac’s face was the color of an eggplant. For some strange reason, there had been no arrest; and later on Isaac had walked in one afternoon (when sober, I suppose) and publicly apologized and walked out again. It was still considered the best fight Hackley Falls had ever seen. Isaac, although fifteen years older than Mr. Greene, had had all the best of it—everybody had marveled at his strength. I never went into the store for the mail without hoping that Mr. Greene might, by some chance, have his right sleeve rolled up, so that I could see the scar, but he never did. I imagine he wasn’t too proud of it.

Nevertheless, and not so long after my talk with Captain Phippen, it was thanks to Mr. Greene that I made the first of my only two actual visits to the Willard farm. I had walked down one afternoon to get a pound of coffee, and after I had got the tight fragrant paper bag under my arm and paid for it, Mr. Greene looked at me appraisingly over his glasses. He was holding a letter in his hand.

“Billy,” he said, “I guess you’d be a good messenger. I’ll give you ten cents to deliver this letter to Isaac Willard. What do you say?”

“Sure!”

“Are you going right back?”

“Sure!”

“All right.”

He gave me the letter and the ten cents, and I started out almost at a run. It was too good to be true. I had seen at once, by the long blue stamp with a picture of a messenger boy on it, that it was a special-delivery letter—though heaven knows why old Isaac should be getting a special delivery. It came from Bennington, Vermont, and there was a name in the upper left-hand corner of it, but I can’t remember what it was. Anyway, I was tremendously excited. What would be happening when I got there? Should I hear the whip or the razor strop going, or screams? It even occurred to me, naturally, that I might have to cut and run for it myself; it might be one of the days when the old man looked like an eggplant. And had Mr. Greene sent the letter by me because he was afraid to take it himself?

That was a disquieting thought and made me slow down my steps. It was quite possible. Nobody liked to go to the Willard farm, which was one of the reasons why their milk business had fallen away to almost nothing. As Jim had told me, if it weren’t for everybody’s feeling sorry for old Mrs. Willard and Lydia, nobody would have taken their dirty milk anyway. It was Mrs. Willard and Lydia who took the orders and delivered the milk (in an old blue wagon) and collected the bills. If it hadn’t been for Mrs. Willard, Jim said, they’d all have starved to death.

The footbridge fascinated me. It consisted of two wide planks, laid over a series of rotten piles, with a handrail at either side. The water under it was very shallow and littered with every kind of débris. There were innumerable tin cans, bottles, fragments of rusted iron, quantities of broken glass—even an old muskrat trap, with a piece of rusted chain still attached, which I thought a little of salvaging. I stood there for several minutes, looking down into the water, and out of the corner of my eye glancing also at the house. There was no sign of life, not a sound. I could see the half-dozen cows up on the hill—a spur of Hateful—a half mile above me. All the windows were shuttered, except one on the ground floor, to the right of the door; and this, despite the hot weather, was closed. As I walked up the brick path I saw two humming-birds dart out of the trumpet-vine and whizz round the corner; and I caught the strong, rank smell from the cow-yard at the other end. I went up the four steps to the shabby porch and knocked at the door. Standing there, I could see into the cow-yard, which was paved with cobbles. Or rather, it had been paved at one time; now, one merely saw the cobbles here and there, amid dung and water. An old tub and pump stood at the far end, and beyond that the dilapidated shed.

I waited for several minutes without hearing anything and then, somewhat timidly, knocked again. The door withdrew itself swiftly from my knock, and a white-haired woman stood before me. She was tall, and had the blackest and fiercest eyes I have ever seen. She was rubbing one red fist against her blue-checked apron.

“Well!” she said, snappishly. And then, before I could muster speech, “What is it?”

I felt guilty, and stammered something about a letter for Mr. Willard, holding it out toward her half-heartedly.

At that, she merely said “Isaac!” in a sharp voice, and turned her back on me. As she walked away, I had a glimpse into the room. It was large, with a huge fireplace, but almost entirely bare. There were no rugs on the unpainted floor, which looked spotlessly clean, and the furniture consisted of three or four ordinary kitchen chairs and a kitchen table. Isaac I saw at once—he was sitting at the table with a book open before him. If he had heard his wife, he gave no sign of it. He continued to read as if nothing whatever had occurred. And while I waited for him to move, I saw another woman—Lydia, I supposed—at the other end of the table. Her head was down on the table, her arms outstretched, her hands clasped. I thought I saw her shoulders moving. Then Isaac rose, put his hand flat on the page for a moment, as if for a kind of emphasis, and came toward the door. He wore red rubber boots which swished as he walked, and his steps were heavy. His face—as I saw when he stood before me, or rather above me—was narrow and high and flushed, with the gray suspicious eyes set very close together. His mouth, turned downwards at the corners, was curiously arched over his big teeth, and the effect was a mixture of ferocity and weakness.

“Well?” he said.

“It’s a letter for you,” I said.

“Why didn’t Mr. Greene bring it?”

“I don’t know, sir. He asked me to bring it.”

“Well, by Ephraim!…” He closed up his eyes to slits and glared. “Give it here. And don’t you ever do his dirty work again.”

He took hold of my shoulder so firmly with thumb and forefinger that it hurt me. “You hear?”

“Yes, sir!”

“And now, git!”

And with that he shut the door so quickly that I had to do a sort of skip to avoid having any feet caught against the jamb.

When my aunts and Jim heard of this expedition, they were unfeignedly horrified. I was told never to do such a thing again—never to go to the house, nor even on the Willard land. My Aunt Julia was especially alarmed. She seemed to feel that I had done well to escape with my life! Even Jim, I could see, was concerned; he shook his head and solemnly advised me to give old Isaac a wide berth.

“If you’d a’ struck him on one of his bad days,” he said, ruminating, “you might have got a hell of a licking, and a sermon thrown in. There was a kid in Hackley Falls got beaten black and blue once.”

“Who was it?”

“Well, I don’t remember.”

“What had he done?”

“Well, I don’t remember that either. But you keep away from there, Billy, and it won’t do you no harm. That’s what I say.”

All of this not unnaturally only whetted more keenly my appetite for further adventure, and it wasn’t long before I had discovered a new and thrilling pastime. Crossing the Mill River by the covered bridge, I would then turn westward, climb up what was called the Rock Pasture, one of those delightful New England hillsides of granite and cedar and juniper, and eventually come to the wood which covered the long spur of Hateful Mountain. This spur ran westward as far as Hackley Falls itself, roughly paralleling the river. It had occurred to me that if I were to scout through the edge of the woods, I should eventually come out at the upper end of Isaac’s cow-pasture. And from there, taking cover behind the firs or birches or rocks, it would be easy to get a view of the Willard house, and from no very great distance.

What profit I expected to get from this, heaven knows! The first time I did it I took elaborate precautions—climbed high into the maple and chestnut grove, and then, when I began to approach Willard’s farm, got down and crawled forward on my hands and knees. I crept through the fringe of white birches at the edge of the pasture and then found to my delight that I could make my way down the hill toward the house by crawling from rock to rock, at last taking up a position not more than three hundred yards from the back of the house. Here I had admirable shelter—a great granite boulder, covered with silvery lichens, beside which grew a cedar tree. There was a warm hollow of grass behind it and, looking between the rock and the tree, I could see perfectly without in the least being seen. Old Isaac’s cows grazed peacefully round me, not at all disturbed; and I could look straight down into the cow-yard to which they would eventually be driven.

The house itself was shuttered, at the back, as in front. There were two doors—one leading down into the cow-yard, from the side, and another at the back, from which occasionally Mrs. Willard would come out to hang her washing on the clothesline, or she and Lydia together to work in the small vegetable garden. On such occasions they both wore old-fashioned calico bonnets. They worked grimly and in silence, hoeing and digging like men. At the end of the patch nearer to me, they were scarcely a hundred yards away, and I could hear the regular clink of their hoes on the pebbles, and once in a long while a remark—usually made by old Mrs. Willard and usually very brief and sharp. They never looked at each other when they spoke. When, now and then, they paused for a rest, they would stand with their hands on their hoes and gaze down toward the house. There seemed to me something ominous in the way they did this—they never looked anywhere else and they were always perfectly silent. It gave me the shivers. As for the old man, I wondered what he was doing. I never heard him singing, as he was supposed to do every afternoon, and very seldom saw him. Once in a long while he would come out of the house and lurch across the cow-yard to the shed—what he went for, I don’t know—perhaps cider.

I made this expedition many times in my first three summers at Hackley Falls; and by degrees, as nothing spectacular ever happened, I was beginning to think myself a fool. Still, the rumors about the Willards grew in number and intensity—they were becoming almost legendary figures of heroic size—and it was easy enough, even for a boy, to see that all three of them were half crazy; one had only to watch the way they walked. Moreover, I had got into the habit of going to the Willard pasture—it was something to do. And in the fall there were the chestnut trees, the best of which were directly north of the field. I used to go there and club the trees and then carry my spoils down to my Tarpeian Rock, there to eat them at leisure while I kept an eye on the enemy.

I was clubbing my favorite tree one afternoon, in the third fall, when suddenly, from behind, a cold hand closed round my neck, and I felt myself being shaken. My heart fairly fell out of me when I looked up and saw that it was old Isaac who had hold of me. But to my astonishment—not that it by any means mitigated my terror—I saw that he was smiling, smiling in a horrible way which looked as if it might be meant to be playful or affectionate. He continued to hold me by the neck and to shake me gently.

“Whose tree is that?” he said.

“I don’t know, sir.”

“It’s mine. So you know, now—don’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Don’t you never read the Bible?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Ever learn the Ten Commandments?”

“Yes, sir.”

Keeping his hold on my neck, he turned me round, so that I faced him directly for the first time. He had on a dirty corduroy coat with a red lining. He was still smiling, and I was more frightened than ever. It seemed to me that he was drunk.

“Well, what’s the eighth?”

“I don’t remember, sir.”

He shook me playfully—but harshly—by the neck.

“‘Thou shalt not steal.’ Say it.”

“Thou shalt not steal.”

“Who’s your father?”

This question was shot at me so abruptly that I was confused. Did he mean—since we were talking of the Commandments—God? Or did he simply want to tell my father what I’d been doing?

“Mr. Walter Crapo, sir.”

“Say!… I knew your mother. She was a godfearing woman. Now give me that there club.”

I gave him the stick, which all this time I had been holding guiltily in my hand, and I trembled, thinking he was going to beat me with it. To my amazement, instead, he drew away, bent over backwards till the stick was touching the ground, all the while smiling at me with half-shut eyes (and I saw for the first time the thickness of his white eyebrows) and then with a whip of his long arm, let the club fly upward into the very top of the tall tree, where it went crashing among the thickest cluster of nuts. The burrs pattered heavily on the grass and sweetfern about us, and then the stick followed more slowly, rocking from branch to branch and sliding over the planes of nodding leaves. Old Isaac was delighted.

“That was good,” he said, breathing heavily. “And I ain’t done it for years, neither.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now fill your cap, boy, and git home, and then you cut those nuts in two and butter them with cheese. That’s Adamneve on a raft!”

“Yes, sir.”

“And don’t you go coming here any more like a thief! When you want my chestnuts, you come and ask for ’em.”

Before I had time to say a word in reply, he turned and went plunging down the hillside. He had on his red rubber boots as usual, and his mane of white hair looked very bright in the sunlight. I watched him until he had entered his cow-yard, and the shed, and then, reappearing, had stumbled into the house. Then I gathered the chestnuts and went home.

But I said nothing to Aunt Julia and Aunt Jenny.

It was two years before I visited “Witch Elms” again, and when I did I found that startling changes had occurred. In the first place, Jim met me at the station with a spick-and-span brand-new Ford touring car. I could hardly believe my eyes. Were my aunts being modernized? To tell the truth, I was feeling this year rather grown up and superior, and had somewhat reluctantly consented to be sent once more to Hackley Falls. And as I see it now, the Ford was a very cunning piece of foresight on the part of my Aunts Jenny and Julia. Possibly my father had conferred with them. At all events, the sight of the Ford cheered me up at once. The summer wouldn’t be so bad. And I felt still better when Jim told me that I was going to be taught to drive, after which I was to be the family chauffeur. I understood this further, when I saw that Jim himself was decidedly uncomfortable in the car. It was apparent that he missed his whip. He had also (I noticed with amusement) given up the old time-honored derby hat and substituted for it a tweed cap, in which he looked extraordinarily foolish. This too, I supposed, was a concession to modernity.

“Well, Jim,” I said, “what’s the news? I suppose the aunts are fine?”

“Well, yes, they been very well, Mr. Billy, they been very well this winter, except for Miss Jenny’s gout, which troubled her some. But I reckon she’ll be all right again, come hot weather.”

“And Captain Phippen?”

“Yep—same as ever.”

“I suppose he still sits there with that spyglass.”

“Oh, sure! It’s as good as a movie to him. Not much the old man misses with that glass!”

Jim drove very slowly, and it was some time before we passed the footbridge which led to the Willard farm. I turned and looked at the house, which was more incredibly dilapidated than ever. The shingles were beginning to curl with rot. A great poll of trumpet-vine had collapsed from the western gables and hung raggedly toward the ground, just as the wind had left it. The front fence of the cow-yard had fallen in, too, and lay where it had fallen. Otherwise, it was just as I remembered it, with all the windows shuttered except one. But there were no cows on the hillside at the back.

“Where are the cows?” I said.

“Didn’t you hear?”

“Hear what?”

“Why, the old man, old Isaac, he had a stroke.”

“A stroke? You mean he’s dead?”

“Oh, no—no such luck. Just paralyzed. Paralyzed from the waist down.”

“Good Lord. When did that happen?”

“Last year—year and a half ago. The judgment of God, too, that’s what they say. He was beating Miss Lydia when he was struck down.”

“You don’t say!”

“Yep! He laid unconscious like a log for two weeks, and they thought he was all through. But then he come to. He would! Now he reads his Bible in a wheel-chair, and I guess, from what I hear, he gets what’s coming to him from the women folks!”

“What do you mean, Jim?”

“Well, I guess it’s them that beats him nowadays. Anyways, that’s what young Hal Greene says. He said when he went there once he heard the old man screaming bloody murder. And serves him right! Hell will be too good for Isaac. Of all the mean sons of bees—”

I got no more out of Jim; but a week later, when for the first time I triumphantly drove the Ford up the hill to Captain Phippen’s, I began to feel something very sinister and dangerous in the situation. Captain Phippen was surprisingly serious about it.

“You know what I think, Bill?” he said.

“What?”

“I think those scarecrows’ll kill him. That’s what I think. I think they’ll kill him.”

“Why?”

“They’re crazy as bedbugs. To my mind, they should all have been locked up years ago. And Good Jumping Jupiter Almighty! look what the old devil has put them through! You couldn’t blame them.… Not that I’m in love with the old man, any more than with those she-fiends either. But just the same it kind of gives you the shivers to think of him sitting there in a wheel-chair with his Bible, and those two harpies just itching to cut his throat!… Doesn’t it?”

This was a new light on the situation.

“It does,” I said.

“You bet it does!”

“Couldn’t something be done?”

“Go and try it, my boy. Even Mr. Perkins, the minister, don’t dare go near the place.”

“Well, how do they live?”

“God knows. But they live, somehow.”

I returned home with a new sense of disaster impending; but neither I, nor anybody else, could possibly have foreseen what shape it was to take, or how horrible it was to be.

It was difficult at “Witch Elms,” however, to be for long concerned about remote possibilities of disaster; and as I settled down once more into the peaceful life with Aunt Julia and Aunt Jenny, I thought less and less about the Willards. To tell the truth, my boyish excitement about them had worn itself out. If indeed a tragedy was enacting itself in that forlorn old house, it no longer seemed to me of heroic proportions. My former terrors and wonder now seemed to me childish, and I drove past the house in the Ford twice a day with scarcely a glance at it. And, moreover, my aunts kept me busy. The car was a new toy, and they couldn’t have enough of it. What with that and the new telephone, and the phonograph, the tempo of life had changed at the farm; and the days went like minutes. Hardly a day passed, in fact, that we didn’t make a long expedition. My aunts had seldom been more than ten miles from Hackley Falls, and it was wildly exciting to them to be taken to Rutland, to Burlington, to Bellows Falls, or over the Mohawk Trail to Fitchburg. We even spent a night at Windsor, and I shall always remember with what girlish delight and flutter Aunt Jenny and Aunt Julia came down to dinner in the great gilt dining hall of the Green Mountain House. They were as pink as debutantes, and as coquettish, and they insisted on eating every item in an enormous table-d’hôte dinner. I even think they would have danced with me if I had suggested it—though Aunt Julia’s scorn of “these modern so-called dances” was outspoken.

Meanwhile, Hackley Falls was having a new excitement of its own. A revival had come to town—something the town had never had before. I first heard of it from Mr. Greene at the post office; he was surprised I hadn’t known. It had been there for three days already, and the whole countryside was wild about it. Farmers and their families were driving in from miles around. There were mourners’ benches and a sawdust trail and all the fixings, he said. And the Reverend something-or-other Boody, a Southerner, was a humdinger, a real old-fashioned artist in brimstone and hellfire. Fairly fried your liver in you, Mr. Greene said, and talked just like a nigger.… Mr. Perkins, the local minister (who got a salary of a thousand dollars a year) was furious. He had said something nasty about the Reverend Boody in his last Sunday’s sermon.… But the Reverend Boody continued to take in money.

It was that same afternoon, when I was bringing the aunts back from a drive to Manchester, that I first saw it. It was a circular tent, of about the size used in county fairs, with a little peak at the top, and it had been pitched in a field on the Hammond farm at the western end of the town, half a mile out. At the far end of the field, which had been churned and trampled brown with feet and hoofs and wheels, was a motley assemblage of cars, wagons and buggies, and tethered horses. I wondered what Cross-eyed Hammond got for it. The tent itself was emblazoned, all the way round, with flamboyant posters. In scarlet flaming letters we were adjured to Hit the Sawdust Trail, to Come to Jesus, Repent, Repent, Seek Salvation in the Lord, Cling to Jesus, and so on. I stopped the car and invited the aunts to go in. We could hear the somewhat dismal sound of a hymn. But they declined, and I drove on, resolving to come back myself later.

The next day brought a typical northeast gale and rain. At such times the clouds seemed to come right down into the valley, like fog, and sensible people stayed indoors. My aunts had no desire to use the car, so I decided I would use it myself. I went for the mail in the forenoon and then drove out to the revival and, as I might have foreseen, found that the weather had been too much for most of Mr. Boody’s audience. Only a half-dozen vehicles stood in the muddy field, and from the tent, though the wind was blowing toward me, I couldn’t hear a sound. However, I got out and crossed the field and entered the tent through a flap-door. At first when I entered my entire attention was taken up by the tent itself, which seemed to be on the point of collapse. It rocked like a tree in a storm. I had no sooner got in and seen the sawdust trail before me than a violent gust almost lifted the whole structure. With a series of sharp reports like cannon-shots, the segments of canvas on the lee side bellied outward, and then, as the pressure relaxed, clapped inward again. The ropes creaked, a damp wind assailed me across the sawdust, and in the roof of the tent there was a continuous low whistling. And, uplifted against the elements, I could hear the shrill voice of the Reverend Boody.

“Who’s a-goin’ to discountenance the Lord?” he cried. And then after a moment he answered himself, “No one!”

And just as I sneaked into a bench at the back, the rest of the tiny audience stood up and chanted:

“Amen!”

I rose hastily and sat down when they did.

“Who’s a-goin’ to flout the King of Justice?” he cried—and I saw him now, a small, knock-kneed, plump fellow, with a frock coat and moist eyes. And again he answered himself sternly, “No one!” And again the small audience rose and sang, “Amen,” drawling it out interminably.… “Who’s a-goin’ to fool the Lord of Hosts?… No one.”

“A-a-a-a-a … me-n-n-n-n!”

I was just beginning to think that this business of standing up and sitting down might soon become a nuisance, when Mr. Boody launched himself into what seemed to be a kind of sermon. He walked to and fro on his little muslin-draped platform, with his pudgy hands clasped behind his back, and began shouting disjointed phrases.

“Abraham! Abraham and Isaac on the mountain!… And Abraham rose up early in the morning and saddled his ass and went unto the place of which God had told him!”

He paused, glowering at his audience, and it was in that moment that I saw, for the first time, the Willards, Mrs. Willard and Lydia. They were at the extreme left-hand end of the second row, all by themselves, so that I could see them in profile. They were both in white, with black hats, and leaning intently forward. Their noses were exactly, preposterously, alike.

“And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it upon Isaac his son; and he took the fire in his hand, and a knife!…”

A series of loud reports from the flapping canvas interrupted him, and with hand uplifted he waited for quiet. In that instant Lydia Willard turned round, and, by accident, looked straight at me. She had her mother’s fierce black eyes, the same thin-lipped intensity and whiteness; but what most struck me about her face was its extraordinary smallness: it was almost a doll’s face, or a monkey’s, small, hard, and concentrated. It seemed to me there was nothing human in it whatever.

“And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son.… My brothers and sisters in Christ”—Mr. Boody paused again for effect, and glared from one to another of his audience—“what does this mean for us? What does this grand story tell us? Two things … two things! … The first, that we must trust in God. His will is our will. The second—” Again he paused dramatically. And then suddenly, pointing a quivering finger directly at Mrs. Willard, who gave a start and then sat rigid, “What is the second? That we must be prepared to offer up to God in holy sacrifice even those things that are dearest to us. What He asks, we must give. If He asks us for our children, we must give them to Him.… Why, is God less dear to us than our children? Is His word less than our law? Do we understand Him? Do we dare … do we dare to say that we know what His purpose is? No!”

He was beginning to work himself up. He paced rapidly to and fro on his little wooden platform, now and then stopping for a moment to thump his fist on the deal table. But I thought I had had enough; and a little later, seizing the opportunity afforded by another shuddering series of explosions from the tent, I sneaked out to the car and drove home. It seemed to me a pretty poor show.

The wind blew all afternoon, with sudden squalls of hard rain. At one time it was so dark that we had to light the lamp in the sitting room. Looking out of the front windows, we could at such moments see hardly farther than the red-covered bridge; Hateful Mountain had been engulfed in cloud. Then would come a sudden lifting of the flying rain, and a quick shaft of mild sunlight would show us the swollen river, brown with mud, rushing westward through the drenched valley. The dirt road was a solid sheet of water.

It was a little after five when the telephone rang. I heard Captain Phippen’s voice.

“That you, Bill?”

“Yes.”

“Hello, Bill?… There’s something queer down at the Willards’.”

His voice suddenly faded away.

“What’s that?” I said.

“Can you hear me?… I say, there’s something queer down at the Willard farm. Think you could come up here quick in your Ford, and fetch me?”

“Why, sure.… Sure, I’ll be right up!”

Aunt Jenny put down her magazine and looked at me sharply.

“What’s the Captain want?” she said.

“Oh, just company, I guess.”

“Well, bring him back to supper—he owes us a visit. And tell him there’s popovers.”

“I will, Aunt Jenny.”

I grabbed my hat and raincoat and ran to the barn for the car. It had almost stopped raining—there was a hole in the clouds overhead—but the northeast still looked black.

What on earth was happening?

I learned soon enough. Captain Phippen was waiting for me on his porch, in his oilskins. He had his spyglass in his hand.

“I didn’t mean to scare you, Bill,” he said, “but just take a look. It don’t look right.”

I ran up the wooden steps, took the glass from his hand, and directed it toward the Willard farm. I could see the house very clearly at that moment. A shaft of watery sunlight illuminated it brilliantly against the somber rain-colored country beyond. And it looked exactly as it always did. But when I swung the glass to the right, toward the cow-yard, what I saw amazed me. Above the fragment of board fence which still remained (where years before we used to watch the horns of cattle tossing) I could distinctly see the heads and shoulders of the two women. There was nothing so remarkable in that. What was remarkable was the way the heads and shoulders were behaving. They glided to and fro rapidly, now to the right and now to the left—and now and then it seemed to me that their arms were raised—but they always came back to the same spot. At this spot, the heads and shoulders would sometimes disappear entirely, only, the next instant, to leap high into the air again, exactly like puppets. It looked as if the two women were doing some idiotic sort of dance. In fact, it was so absurd that I laughed.

“It’s damned funny!” I said.

Captain Phippen made no answer. He took the glass from me and leveled it westward.

“What do you say we go down there, Bill?” He put the brass telescope on the porch-rail.

“Sure, if you like!”

“All right.”

“You think there’s something wrong?”

“Yeap, I do. D’you see that chair on the porch?”

“No.”

“Take another look.”

I did so, and sure enough, on the little side-porch, next to the cow-yard, I could make out the wheel-chair, lying on its back, with its wheels in the air.

“That’s queer,” I said.

“And not so funny!… Let’s go down there.”

It took us about ten minutes to get to the Willard footbridge. The flooded river was almost up to the level of the bridge; and as we walked cautiously along the slippery planks, we could hear crazy shouts from the cow-yard. For the moment, we could see nothing, because of the low, straggling lilac-hedge which ran across the front corner of the yard. But when we had passed this barrier we stood still in sheer astonishment.

The two women had gone completely mad.

I’m sure they had seen us approaching; but if they had, they paid no attention to us. Round and round the cow-yard, which was half mud and half water, they were dancing in a grotesque, hobbling circle, like a pair of scarecrow bacchantes. They were so drenched with rain and mud, from head to foot, as to be hardly recognizable. Raising and flapping their arms, they shouted incessantly and incoherently something that sounded like “Bow down, Isaac! Bow down, Isaac!”; and as we ran forward we could see that the huddled object in the mud, which now and then they paused in their dance to kick, was old Isaac, but scarcely distinguishable from the filth in which he lay. The red rubber boots pointed mutely toward the river. It was when he saw these, I think, that Captain Phippen shouted something harshly at the two women; and, suddenly quieted, they drew a little way off from us and stared at us with the dull, curious surprise of animals. Without protest or comment, almost without interest (standing on a corner of the porch), they then watched us pick up the lifeless body and carry it, dripping, into the house. At first I thought Isaac was dead. It seemed incredible that such a shapeless thing—covered with water and mud and blood—could be alive. The sight of his face—no longer recognizably human—sickened me. But Captain Phippen, hardier than I, opened the soaked waistcoat and discovered that Isaac’s heart was still beating.… I was only too glad to be sent for the doctor.

Two days later, nevertheless, old Isaac died, a sacrifice to the Lord. An embarrassed coroner and jury gave the cause of his death, officially, as “an apoplexy, induced by over-exertion.” During this time, and for a few days after, Mrs. Willard and Lydia, who had both become suddenly very meek, were left unmolested; the town authorities were uncertain what to do with them. Was it a murder? Or, if not, what was it?… The State authorities were more decided. A week later we heard that Lydia and her mother had been “spirited” away, as the papers put it, to the asylum.

And on the same day the Reverend Mr. Boody left town very hurriedly. Mr. Perkins had again mentioned him (it seemed) in the pulpit of the Congregational Church. “As a direct result of the maunderings of this primitive and predacious fanatic …” said Mr. Perkins, among other things …!

But was it only that? I hold no brief for poor Mr. Boody; but it seemed to me that the affair wasn’t quite so simple. Though it was true enough, apparently, that several people had seen the two women driving back from the revivalist meeting just before the tragedy, “as if hell possessed them.” And even then (Mr. Greene said) “They were singing!”