Читать книгу Before the Sun Goes Down - Elizabeth Metzger Howard - Страница 6

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Age forty-two, six feet three in his socks, weight one hundred and eighty stripped, with thick unruly brown hair, deep-set black eyes, a dead white skin that no amount of weather ever colored, and long thin white twitching hands—this pallor and twitching suggesting narcotics to some—thus stood Dr. Dan Field on an afternoon in the year 1880. He’d been delivering a farmer’s wife of child since the previous dawn. Now before entering his Willowspring, Pennsylvania, home he leaned wearily against one of the tall colonial pillars of the big brick house.

It was a late August afternoon and barely breathing, like every other sunny summer afternoon on Maple Street (excepting Saturdays when all of Willowspring hummed with country people and their rigs). Big houses and cottages seemed to be sleeping; trees hardly stirred. Only now and then came slow treads on the walks or soft thuds on the road or the laborious creak of an oxcart. Occasionally there were voices of children, perhaps the bark of a dog or the moo of a cow or the cackle of a hen. The town clock methodically marked the hours and the half hours; always the mesmeric tapping of hammers sounded somewhere or other. And the gentle buzzing of the bees might be the purr of a contented village heart, Dan Field thought.

His eyes moved across the street to the southeast corner of Maple and Linden. The tapping of the hammers was there today, and had been these many weeks. The new school would soon be finished. Public school, Dan Field meditated, and large enough to include the minute mortal excreta from the frayed fragment of existence called Mudtown, in other words the little Negroes and white scraps who lived across the creek. The old school hadn’t been able to accommodate adequately all the children of the town proper.

A small ragged and filthy boy, dragging a huge wash upon a homemade wagon, turned a corner and stopped before the school. Dan Field knew the boy as he knew every man, woman, and child throughout the countryside. He was Ray Stoddard, one of Mudtown’s own white scraps. Ray’s father, Lem, was a worthless drunk. His mother, Myrtle, expected another child—her ninth in twelve years—come December. Their home was a fetid shanty and their bellies were never full, except during the few summer months when their garden grew. Yet because of the new school Ray Stoddard would have the opportunity of acquiring an education. Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth? ... Ray might someday be mayor of Willowspring. He was smart as a whip.

Pleased with such a heretical possibility, Dan Field’s eyes wandered south, between the Norway maples edging the rolling brick walks, by the horsechestnut trees around the vacant corner lot, over Horsechestnut Street, past the Methodist Church and across Maple Street to where two great gray stone houses stood far back under the spreading branches of tall sugar maples. These were the homes of the Albrights and the Sargents, Willowspring’s leading families, one might actually say Willowspring’s royalty. For although many had tried, never since the town’s incorporation had anyone except an Albright or a Sargent held the mayoralty.

Upon the Albright lawn Dan Field saw the two little princesses of the blood, Lillian Albright and Prissy Sargent. He’d brought them both into the world, as he’d brought all the new generation of Albrights and Sargents. Every one of these children was dear to him, but his eyes rested upon Lillian. Miss Muffet, he thought tenderly, using his baby name for her. Jesus! he swore to himself. She grows more like her mother every day, golden skin and all.

“Darling, darling,” he whispered, thinking about both mother and child.

His glance shifted from the lovely little girl before the gray stone mansion back to the little scarecrow boy before the new school. Ray Stoddard, he spoke mentally, it’ll take more than can be learned in school to give you a Chinaman’s chance, smart as you may be. Suddenly he remembered the mad tramp with whom Daisy Tatem had eloped, and whose convictions had confounded Mudtown. Ray couldn’t have been more than seven years old at that time, but he’d listened to the tramp’s strange philosophy as if he understood every word. And there is probably more wisdom than madness in your theories, tramp, Dan Field thought. Right now at the new Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore certain professors were trying to read between the lines of textbooks.

Eventually everyone in Willowspring believed, as sincerely as the Albrights and Sargents believed, that the first George Albright and the first Rufus Sargent founded the town. Actually the site had been named, because of a spring which gurgled up from the roots and out of the trunk of a weeping willow tree, by a Robert Pierce who’d built a log cabin there in 1750 to trade with the Indians. In 1829, when the first George Albright and the first Rufus Sargent arrived, Willowspring already boasted a dozen homes, a school of sorts, a Lutheran Church and Jonathan Meigs’s store.

George and Rufus, lifelong friends, had been born and reared among Philadelphia’s aristocracy. Left orphans in their early twenties, with substantial patrimonies, the two young gentlemen decided to leave the city of their birth. Everybody knew, in 1829, that Philadelphia had reached the limit of population and all fields open to gentlemen were overcrowded.

One night in a tavern, considering what new region might be best for their great venture, they happened to overhear a stranger describe the utter beauty of the country around about Willowspring. On a fall morning shortly afterward George and Rufus stuffed saddlebags with Spanish gold dollars, straddled two fine mares, and rode forth along the Philadelphia-Pittsburgh pike. Some sunsets later they stopped the mares before Jonathan Meigs’s store.

There stood the weeping willow tree, the spring gurgling up from the roots and out of the trunk and then into a watering trough. The mares took their own heads and thrust feverish noses deep.

Afar George and Rufus saw the mountains with their burnished, dense forests; nearer, the farms on the hills, their houses and barns, their outlined fields, the fields of buckwheat stubble vermilion under the setting sun. Below the hills the thin line which was the blue Juniata was winding its way through the valley. Before them they saw, down the lane, a row of neat sturdy houses of frame or fieldstone and the log Lutheran Church. The lane was edged by Norway maples, crimson and gold then in October. In their ears was the cool tingle of the willow spring falling into the trough. And in their nostrils was the smell—that smell. Years later the grandchildren of George and Rufus, returning from the far corners of the earth, would say they could tell when they reached Willowspring with their eyes shut, by that smell—a mingling of clean air and rich sod and damp moss and sweet fern, with always something else floating through, lilacs or apple blossoms or locust trees in bloom, new-mown hay or buckwheat or clover, then in October spruce and burning leaves.

George spoke at last: “Here we might build us a kingdom.”

Rufus nodded. “I was thinking the same thing myself.”

George the First died in 1866 and Rufus the First less than a year later. Side by side they lie on the green hill, which is across the Juniata and a mile beyond Willowspring’s last street, Limestone Avenue. But upon a huge tomb is inscribed:

GEORGE ALBRIGHT AND RUFUS SARGENT

Founders of Willowspring, Pa.

For they had built them a kingdom. Because of their gold a small settlement became a thriving town. They had the village incorporated and later made the county seat. They established the Willowspring Savings Bank, paying for the original capital stock themselves. They loaned money at fair interest to merchants and farmers and for new homes and churches. They even loaned the Catholics money to build their church, overlooking personal opinions concerning papacy.

George and Rufus prided themselves upon their tolerance, although the tolerance was never extended socially. They and later their wives and children (excepting Tim Albright) didn’t even dream of mingling personally with a soul beneath their own status. However, the valley possessed many families of ancient lineage and there were any number of sizable estates and fortunes. And as time went on not a few of these “best families” moved into Willowspring, so that when, in 1839, George and Rufus brought brides back from Philadelphia, a local aristocracy was already established.

George married a Miss Lillian Sammal and Rufus married a Miss Priscilla Lane. And if the brides found some opposition, as George and Rufus surely did, the passing years established their social supremacy and they came to be regarded as queens of a sort, as George and Rufus were thought to be kings.

George the Second (addressed as Captain George after the Civil War) was born in 1840. A handsome, stalwart boy, he grew into a handsome, stalwart man, with yellow curls, round blue eyes, and fine white teeth, and he followed in his father’s footsteps. But Tim Albright, born in 1848, became the family black sheep. A thin dark sensitive wisp of a child, at eleven he began writing poetry and at fifteen left home.

Rufus’s first child was Priscilla (called Pris), born in 1843. From childhood she was a picture, slim, with straw-colored curls, a complexion the color of pale honey actually darker than her hair, and shadow-filled gray eyes. She had music in her finger tips, too, and had studied a year at the Boston Conservatory. Pris and Captain George were married the time he came home on furlough during ’63.

After Pris, the Sargents had a stillborn son and then in 1845 came Rufus the Second. His nose was always too big and his mouth too small, but he had brilliant black eyes under sweeping lashes. These eyes, however, were weak from his birth, and because of this affliction Rufus the Second could not join the army and spent the war years studying to follow in his father’s footsteps. During 1867 he married a Miss Lou Walton of Germantown, Pennsylvania, a pretty, tiny, strong-minded girl of Quaker descent.

But George the First and Rufus the First not only built a kingdom; they established a dynasty. After their deaths Captain George and Rufus the Second ruled the town from the bank on Broad Street. In the Albright home lived Gramma Lillian Albright, Captain George and Pris, and their three children, Rufe, Sammy, and Lillian. In the Sargent home lived Gramma Priscilla Sargent, Rufus the Second, and Lou, with their two children, Prissy and Bert.

By 1880 the spring had dried up and the weeping willow tree was dead, but the town of Willowspring had more than three thousand souls. Beside numerous lanes and alleys there were five long wide streets—Broad, Linden, Horsechestnut, Oak, and Maple—lined by brick walks and with lampposts on every corner. A good town to see, everybody thought, with great tree branches spreading over the staid, lovely mansions of the best families and the tidy, pretty cottages of the townspeople. A progressive town, with the steeples of the four Protestant churches, the cross upon the Catholic Church, the dome of the courthouse, and the flag topping the post office, all breaking through the leaves. And now the new public school. A clean town if one could forget that across the blue Juniata, across the “crick” in the section called Mudtown, lay Limestone Avenue. Cramped and cluttered, its days were brightened only by the sun and its nights were lightened only by the moon and stars or the headlight of an engine brushing by on the adjacent trestle.

And this August afternoon, contemplating Mudtown, Dan Field thought, One rotten apple ...

Captain George and Rufus the Second strolled along. Dan Field smiled. He’d reached Willowspring in time to know George the First and Rufus the First and it amused him to see their sons strolling along together, immaculately attired and holding their haughty heads high, so like their fathers before them.

“Hello, Dan,” George called.

He and Rufus stopped beside the gate and Rufus said, “Haven’t you anything better to do than let a pillar support you, Dan?”

Dan Field yawned. “Letting a bed support me might be a better idea. I’ve not closed my eyes since night before last.”

“Who’s your lady?” George joked.

“Farmer’s wife near Mount Pallas, nine-pound boy,” Dan Field said.

But he wondered what would happen if he’d up and tell George who his lady really was. He chuckled to himself: Thou hast ravaged my heart with one of thine eyes, with one chain of thy neck.

George the Second and Rufus the Second began their education under tutors and finished it at the University of Pennsylvania, where Dan Field was studying during part of George’s time. They met, however, through a Philadelphia girl named Viola Larsen. No one could tell what George really thought, he being a taciturn fellow. Yet obviously he’d fallen head over heels for Vi and seemed appreciative when Dan Field withdrew his attentions. And the very month the war ended George wrote Dan Field:

“Our one medico, Dr. Berkley, has just dropped dead. Here is a splendid opportunity.”

He met Dan Field at the depot and said, “I’m married.”

“Vi?”

George flushed to the roots of his yellow curls and his answer was the only time he made Dan Field a confidant until years later.

“Not Vi, Dan. It’s Pris Sargent, Rufus’ sister. Or didn’t you meet Rufus? Anyhow, Dan, the Albrights and Sargents are practically royalty. Both lines go away back, are indisputable, and my father and Uncle Rufus (he isn’t my real uncle—I simply call him that the way Pris and Rufus call my father Uncle George) they built a little kingdom here. Since we were born it’s been understood that Pris and I would marry. And she’s—well, wonderful, Dan. You couldn’t help seeing what I thought of Vi.... Pris is the right wife for me though, Dan.”

Before the war Dan Field had spent several summers traveling abroad. He meant to stay in Willowspring merely long enough to earn sufficient money so that he might return to Vienna and begin research work. The Field family lineage was also indisputable and the Field mansion had stood a hundred years on Rittenhouse Square. But the elder Field, who’d been a lawyer, was forced to retire because of a heart condition and the income left barely maintained his establishment. Yet after fifteen years Dan Field still lived in Willowspring.

He had never married and, what was more, he’d never seemed interested in any local girl or woman. Every spring he spent a week in Philadelphia and a week in New York. He went to Philadelphia to visit his parents, people knew, so the rumor was he had a girl in New York. The truth happened to be that Dan Field had been in love with George’s wife, Priscilla Sargent Albright, since the first moment he saw her. But this truth Dan Field had carefully concealed, not only from the world but from Pris herself.

There was a girl in New York, however, many girls, always a different one.

Once a year in New York Dan Field found a woman whose body was slim and whose hair was fair and whose eyes were gray and he took her to bed, and for an instant out of all time he let himself believe that her flesh was the color of ripe wheat.

Dan Field’s eyes followed Captain George and Rufus the Second along the street. On the vacant lot under the horsechestnut trees children played, Rufe and Sammy Albright among them.

As if it had all happened yesterday Dan Field remembered again the look in Pris’s eyes when he’d put the first baby, Rufe, in her arms. He remembered, too, when Baby George and Sammy and Lillian were born, and when Baby George died. How he’d fought to save the little fellow for Pris, and to save Lillian. She’d been a blue baby.

Rufe and Sammy and Lillian ... George Albright’s children. He was just Uncle Doc. Uncle Doc ...

Dan Field shrugged and brought his eyes back to the school. Ray Stoddard didn’t seem to have moved a muscle. The eight Stoddard children had survived and the ninth would probably live likewise. Maybe we’re supposed to exist like swine.... Then he recalled the vast strides the medicos had made during the last few years. The next generation, he concluded, will know definitely why babies of the Stoddard ilk can be born sound while Baby George Albright comes into the world with his lungs defective. Why Lillian Albright arrives looking like a little purple monkey, and Dolly Tatem ...

Dolly Tatem, whose mother had run off with the mad tramp, was another of the Mudtown scum. But Dolly happened to be the first Willowspring baby Dan Field had delivered. After he’d washed her he’d held her up in one hand. She had reminded him of a little plump white rosebud, a whiff of perfume in a dung heap. And Cal was another Mudtown scrap who looked like a tiny angel but whose mother was a whore. It wouldn’t be long, though, before Cal began spewing forth bloody bits of his lungs the way Baby George Albright had done. Dan Field shuddered.

He looked back toward the Albrights’. Prissy had disappeared and with Lillian now was Alexander Jennings—poor scared little Alexander whose mother kept telling him that if he trusted in God there was nothing to fear, when all the time her own poor scared heart stuck in her throat. Captain George entered the gate, said a few words to the children, and Alexander fled.

Rufus the Second moved toward his own gate. Another boy, Gregory Beamer, walked a few feet behind. Gregory never dreamed of catching up and walking beside him. When he reached the Sargents’ place, Gregory would go around back because he’d come to see their hired girl, Maggie. Maggie was supposedly Gregory’s sister; still, he always visited Maggie and not Nellie, the Albrights’ hired girl, who was also supposedly his sister.

Watching Gregory, Dan Field remembered Prissy Sargent: a little princess and a little bastard under the same roof. And Bert Sargent flashed through his mind—Bert, age nine, the small heir apparent who during the past year had spent most of his waking hours hobnobbing around Mudtown.

From the vacant lot came the voices of Rufe and Sammy Albright mingling with those of several town children—Mollie Reynard, a carpenter’s daughter; Helen Boyd, the little Jewish girl; Bertha Richards, a Catholic; Buzz Standing, son of the village seamstress; Walt Butler, the butcher’s son; Perse Hershberger, the blacksmith’s son. Again Dan Field smiled. Times certainly had changed. Captain George and Rufus the Second boasted that they’d never associated with any of the town children during their boyhoods.

Gabe (short for Gabriel) Williams, the Albrights’ colored hired man, stopped before Dan Field’s gate. “Mr. Doc, hear ’bout Old Man Mr. Meeker?”

Dan Field shook his head. “No.”

“Well, sir,” Gabe explained, “a little while back Old Man Mr. Meeker gits loosen his wife and daughter and gits right uptown and into the Grand Central Bar, blind as he is.”

“Did Old Man Meeker find what he sought?” Dan Field inquired.

Gabe shook his black head. “No, Mr. Doc, he didn’t. Mr. Leonard say it pretty nigh bust his heart not to of give Old Man Mr. Meeker a drink. But it’d been worth his license to of give him a drop. Mrs. Meeker and Mrs. Diggers couldn’t budge him out’n the bar, though. They had to git Mr. Williams. Sure caused a heap of excitement ’long Broad Street, Mr. Doc.”

Broad Street was the business mart. Along the north side ran Strock’s Market complete with meat counter, a rarity in 1880; Miss Gunther’s Ladies’ Emporium, carrying all the latest women’s accouterments; the Elite (usually pronounced “Elight”) Tonsorial Parlor; the Grand Central Hotel and Bar, with a wooden Indian at the steps and a watering trough on the curb; Carl’s Novelty Shop; and Heckshire’s Drugstore. Among changing medicinal jars, the drugstore window had for many years displayed another jar which contained the seemingly immortal carcass of a two-headed squirrel preserved in wood alcohol.

Along the south side of Broad Street ran the Willowspring Savings Bank; the Western Union Telegraph Company, and Smith’s Livery Stable, with the blacksmith shop, the iron pile, and the wheelwright shop behind. Across Oak was Hardy’s Office Building, the Willowspring Printing Office, where the Willowspring News was issued weekly; then Frazer’s Family Clothing Palace, and Morgan & Sons Hardware & Tool Company.

Other, no less important, places straggled here and there between vacant lots for more than a mile at both ends of Broad Street. The last one west was Fulton’s Flour, Seed, and Feed Warehouse, and the last two east were Perry’s Grist Mill and Strock’s Slaughterhouse.

Yes, Dan Field could readily imagine the excitement caused by Old Man Meeker’s escapade. This August afternoon Broad Street, even as Maple, would have been basking in lush lethargy. Maybe from the blacksmith shop an anvil rang; maybe footsteps sounded or the rattle of a wagon or the creak of an oxcart. An occasional shopper entered a store. Before his livery stable Jake Smith probably leaned back in his chair, half asleep, while Floyd Shires, his hack driver, dozed in the hack on the curb, as the horse, with its head almost touching ground, swished a trenchant tail over a fly-ravished rump. Perhaps Ralph Pettigrew stood before Hardy’s Office Building, wherein was his office, staring up and down the street, wondering what the hell else could be said or done to push those bastards George Albright and Rufus Sargent off the throne and make himself king of Willowspring. George and Rufus would be balancing the books, oblivious of Ralph Pettigrew. Likely against the bank’s front loitered the colored policeman, Mr. Williams, Gabe’s father, his red helmet pushed far back on his white wool and beads of sweat rolling down the deep dark furrows of his face. No doubt Tracy Whitlock, owner and editor of the Willowspring News, darted here and there, hoping to discover a spicy bit. Certainly Mr. Leonard (Nard to his friends), owner and proprietor of the Grand Central Hotel, lounged in the saloon, empty during the afternoon lull, talking to Shorty Clapp, the bartender.

And that would be all until Old Man Meeker groped his blind way along, or so Dan Field thought.

That was not all, however. Ralph Pettigrew had been standing before Hardy’s Office Building prior to Old Man Meeker’s appearance but his thoughts for the time being did not include George Albright nor Rufus Sargent.

Ralph Pettigrew had been a poor farm boy who’d worked his way through law school and come to Willowspring eight years ago, politically ambitious. And others beside himself believed that if George Albright’s henchmen had not bought votes last election Ralph Pettigrew instead of George Albright would have been elected mayor.

Next to George Albright and Rufus Sargent, Pettigrew’s detestation focused upon Judge Hart Martin, William Price, and Channing Taylor, heads of three other families who considered themselves equals of the Albrights and Sargents. The judge (known as Judge Hart because his father, who’d been a judge before him, still lived and was addressed as Judge Martin) had one son studying art in Paris, another attending Princeton, and a third at Lawrenceville. What Pettigrew particularly detested about Judge Hart was that, although he had three sons, he extended no clemency to boys brought before the bench. And William (Billy) Price! Thinking of him, Pettigrew usually sniffed. Old Man Price had made a fortune out of lumber and consequently the bank gave Billy a berth as cashier. He had one daughter about seven who looked like a frog and a pink-haired wife who looked like a tart. And Channing Taylor (who’d married Madge Kimbell and become president of the Kimbell Coal, Coke, and Iron Company) had two daughters, aged seventeen and sixteen, who knew no more about life than babies. And this afternoon these three men left the bank building in the order named and each one passed Pettigrew without recognition, as usual, which never failed to gripe his guts.

No sooner had Channing Taylor turned the corner of Oak Street than Pettigrew saw Margaret and Dorothy Taylor coming the other way. They were handsome girls, chestnut-haired, brown-eyed, and red-cheeked, with big breasts and thighs—the type Pettigrew admired. “Give me a woman you don’t have to shake the sheets to find,” he expressed it. He liked particularly the looks of the older one, Margaret, and every time he chanced to meet her he wished he was seventeen again and could get her in a haymow and show her what it was all about. He’d have to show her, of course. What could girls who’d been raised as in a convent, attending Old Maid Fisher’s school, ever know about boys or men?

Pettigrew always eyed these girls openly and today he eyed Margaret boldly, his gaze lingering over her thighs, then her breasts, lastly her face. She seemed oblivious of the attention until directly before him. Then she glanced up through her lashes and smiled.

Pettigrew watched Margaret Taylor until she turned the corner. If I could get that girl on her back ... He smacked his lips. Besides, it would be sweet revenge. A hurt to one of the best families would mean a hurt to all of them.

Suddenly Pettigrew forgot Margaret Taylor. He saw Old Man Meeker groping his blind way toward the Grand Central Bar.

“Yes,” Dan Field told Gabe Williams, “I can imagine the excitement on Broad Street.”

Gabe nodded. “Never did see a street fill up like that ’cept’n the night ’fore ’lection when Mr. Pettigrew says his speech. One minute, Mr. Doc, hardly nobody’s ’bout and next minute seems like the hull town, ’cepting the best families, buzzed ’round. Even Miss Fisher and her mama and Miss Aunt Tillie Whitlock.”

Gabe moved toward the Albrights’. Dan Field looked the other way, past the Catholic Church (on the northeast corner opposite the new school), up Maple Street to where Miss Fisher and her blind mother lived. Miss Fisher conducted the private school where the best-family children had gone since Pris and Tim Albright’s childhood. The phenomenal Miss Fisher, Dan Field thought. Since girlhood she’d been practically perfect physically and now, nearing fifty, she’d lost little of her animal allure. But Miss Fisher had never had a beau. She and her blind mother and Aunt Tillie Whitlock (maiden aunt of Tracy Whitlock of the Willowspring News and called Aunt Tillie by almost everyone) along with Mrs. Meeker and Mrs. Mame Diggers (wife and widowed daughter of Old Man Meeker) were the leaders of the town’s Women’s Christian Temperance Union.

Dan Field often thanked God that the town’s one other doctor, Brown Walsh, and not he, happened to be the Meekers’ physician.

In 1880 Mr. Meeker was well past seventy and had long been known as Old Man Meeker. He’d been a fixing fool. He could fix anything—watches, locks, guns, furniture, and what not. For almost fifty years Mr. Meeker had spent his days going around town from place to place fixing this and that, and always carrying a bottle out of which ever so often he’d take a nip. Yet truly no one ever remembered seeing Mr. Meeker really drunk, as truly no one ever remembered seeing Mr. Meeker really sober. During almost fifty years he had merely existed in a state of mellowness.

Strangely, this mellowness interfered not a whit with Mr. Meeker’s business progress. He was not only a clever fixer but an astute businessman. Besides earning enough to buy his drink he gave Mrs. Meeker a weekly amount sufficient to support the family, buy a house, and deposit tidy sums in the bank.

However, Mrs. Meeker and Mrs. Diggers considered themselves eternally disgraced by his drinking. Ably assisted by other members of the W.C.T.U., they had done everything possible to reform the culprit, from threatening Mr. Leonard with arrest if he ever sold Mr. Meeker another drop to continually entreating Mr. Meeker to sign the pledge.

All of which Mr. Meeker took good-naturedly. In fact he never took anything other than amiably. His round pink face, framed by snow-white hair, beamed upon whatever confronted him. Until one day during May 1879 a gun he was fixing exploded and blinded him and since that day his wife and daughter had seen that he’d not even smelled a cork. In fact two months later blind Mr. Meeker, Mrs. Meeker guiding his hand, signed the pledge. This was all well enough except that Dr. Walsh would sometimes be called to treat what Mrs. Meeker and Mrs. Diggers called “one of papa’s indigestion attacks.” And today Old Man Meeker, blind though he was, had been able to grope his way uptown and into the Grand Central Bar.

“Poor old desiccated devil,” Dan Field thought, out loud.

His eyes came back to the Catholic Church and he hoped fervently that no case of his would interrupt Father Callahan’s Sunday night call.

Ray Stoddard moved, pulling the wash-laden wagon along. I’d give a pretty penny to know what the little beggar’s been thinking, Dan Field meditated.

He called, “Think you’ll like going to the new school, Ray?”

Ray called back, “Yes sir, Mr. Doc.”

Dan Field turned at last and one of his hands lingered on the colonial pillar.

Practically every unmarried girl and woman around Willowspring had set her cap for Dan Field. When he built the big brick house, gossip had him married to ladies all the way from Willowspring via New York to Virginia. Why would a bachelor build a mansion? Why would he go to Virginia and buy pillars and furniture? There were plenty right on hand. Sometimes Dan Field, himself, wondered why he’d built such a big place. Maybe because he’d been born and raised in a large house. But he knew definitely why he’d gone back to Virginia and bought the pillars and furniture.

Dan Field had seen the destruction of the South but he had also perceived what he termed its “dead truth.” The Confederacy had admitted an aristocracy and acknowledged slavery, while, if the North admitted an aristocracy, it never had and probably never would acknowledge shackled labor.

Not that there was anything of the iconoclast about Dan Field. Only one night, marching through Virginia, his regiment came to a plantation where fire had left nothing of the mansion but two tall pillars standing straight and strong in the moonlight. They had seemed a monument to the South’s dead truth. And he liked having them before his house as he liked having the furniture and Ackley in it—Ackley, who’d been the slave of the Ackleys of Virginia from whom Dan Field had bought the furniture.

Dan Field’s hand left the pillar. And now for the golden bourbon, he was thinking, and food and a dream of you, my Pris. I’ll dream that all I have to do is open a door to see your golden body stretched upon the bed, the bride’s bed, the bed I’ve sworn to myself no one but you shall ever occupy again.

He stepped into the wide hall. On the right was his office with its outside door opening upon the drive.

Dan Field turned left into the parlor, calling, “Ackley.”

Almost immediately Ackley appeared. “Yes suh.”

“Anybody here this afternoon?”

Ackley wrinkled his black nose. “Mudtown scum.”

“Who?”

“Lem Stodda’d’s wife.”

“What did she want?”

Ackley shrugged. “She says next time you goes by huh place to bring moh’ tonic. Huh back’s bad liftin’ washtubs all day long, she says.”

Dan Field nodded. “All right.”

He reached a decanter and glass. Thank God for the golden bourbon, he was thinking. He chuckled once again to himself. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, ... how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!