Читать книгу Awake and Rehearse - Louis Bromfield - Страница 13

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Zenobia White is dead. This morning, as I came down to breakfast, I saw running up the lane from the highroad the breathless, dripping Jabez Smith, who lives on the next farm. When he saw me, he cried out, “Zenobia White is dead!” And then he fell silent, embarrassed, speechless, as if he understood at once how silly it was to be so excited over the death of a queer old woman who had lived for almost a century. I knew why he was excited, though Jabez did not. He stood there, freckled and awkward in the sun, waiting my questions.... He knew that this was exciting news, but he did not know why it seemed so important or why he was so excited.

“Zenobia White is dead!”

With the death of Zenobia White something had gone out of our world.... Who could say what it was? Something that had passed and gone forever.

She had been dead for three days, said Jabez. They only discovered it after Zenobia’s dogs had howled for hours on end until Jabez’ father had gone to discover the cause of their howling. He walked in through the thicket of lilacs and syringas and locusts surrounding her house. “Even the birds,” said Jabez, “were quiet.” He walked through the chickens and cats and mongrel dogs up to the door and knocked; but there was no answer. He went in, and there lay Zenobia, dressed in a wedding-gown of white silk, with a wedding-veil over her face. She was dead, and the stuff of the wedding-dress was so old that it had turned yellow. It must have been made seventy years before.

Thus something had gone out of our little world. I should never see Zenobia White again walking with her fantastic disordered dress of yellow taffeta and black lace, trailing its long train in the dust of the highway, a basket over one arm, her black lace mitts adjusted neatly ... walking down the highway, very tall and straight and proud, her black eyes flashing beneath the little veil of black lace that hung from the brim of her queer, bedraggled bonnet.... Zenobia White ... immensely old, more than a hundred perhaps, who had lived, as far back as any of us could remember, in a little house covered with vines that stood behind a great barrier of bushes down by the covered bridge. Zenobia White, immensely fierce and old, who dressed always in yellow taffeta like Sarah Bernhardt in the picture painted by Carolus-Duran.

Zenobia White, who had never married, was dead in her wedding-dress, a dress made seventy years ago, before I was born.

Jabez Smith, still puzzled, withdrew, and Zenobia White took possession of me. As far back as my father could remember, she had lived in the untidy old house. Animals came to her without fear. The very birds in her garden were tame. The thrushes and the cardinals abounded. In the cupola of her tiny house, there were whole colonies of martins. Stray dogs came to her ... the stray dogs, yellow and spotted, without name or breed, who had howled on the morning when Zenobia had not come out to feed them. And cats were there, great numbers of cats who lived in peace with the dogs and who followed her in a grotesque procession a little distance down the road when she set out in the morning in the trailing gown of yellow taffeta to do her marketing....

And the old white horse. For twenty years, the white horse had lived inside her fence, guarding her. No one could enter the little white gate without meeting the old white horse, his teeth bared savagely. He had never known harness or bit in twenty years. Only this morning, when Zenobia lay dead in her wedding-dress, he had not attacked Jabez’ father. He had stood sadly, waiting....

Within my own memory and the memory of my father, Zenobia White had always lived thus. To get at the roots of things it was necessary to go back, far back into the days of my grandfather. He had known Zenobia White when she was a beauty, tall and black-eyed, defiant and proud, who sat a horse like an Amazon. But even in those days, she had lived alone in the little cottage where her father had died. The mother of Zenobia White had been an Indian woman, an Iroquois princess, who died soon after she was born, and at twenty Zenobia was left an orphan.

In those days there were prowlers and sometimes an Indian running amuck murdered a settler and his family, but Zenobia had stayed defiantly in her little house by the mill, armed with her father’s pistols, scornful even of the talk which came of a young girl who had many admirers, living alone and unprotected. “But Zenobia,” my grandfather had said, “could look out for herself.” He knew, perhaps, because he had been among her admirers.

But he was not the favored one. Zenobia loved a young red-haired Scotch settler called Duncan McLeod, who was a man with as quick a temper as her own, a handsome man and the strongest runner in all the county. Zenobia had loved him with all the fierce passion of her nature. But their wild passion had not a smooth course. They had gone for a ride one night (so my grandfather said) and when they returned, Zenobia, sitting her horse proudly, rode a hundred paces ahead of him, for they had quarreled. And when they came to the little house (where Zenobia lay dead now in her wedding-dress) she turned in alone. They had quarreled though it was but a day or two before the wedding, and she told him she would never see him again.

And then (my grandfather said) Zenobia had gone in and, barring the doors and windows against intruders and renegade Indians, she had taken down her Bible to read for a time in order to chasten her fierce, proud spirit. She sat reading thus in the silent, lonely house until midnight. It is possible to imagine the scene ... a little house in a clearing in the woods where the owls cried out mournfully all through the night, and Zenobia alone there over her Bible, praying that the Lord might chasten her temper and bring her happiness. And then in the midst of this, the sound, faint and uncertain, of someone among the bushes of the garden, the sound of footsteps ... the footsteps of one or perhaps a dozen men, for in the blackness of the night and with the sound of the river it was impossible to tell. And Zenobia rising slowly to pick up her father’s pistol and go to the door and listen. Zenobia putting out the single mutton candle. Still the footsteps and the rustling ... perhaps of the rising wind among the bushes and the faint ghostly hooting of the owls. And at length Zenobia, raising her pistol, had fired through the door to frighten the intruders. The sound of a shot and then a silence while Zenobia stood there with the smoking pistol in her hand waiting ... in the silence. They had gone away.... There was nothing but the sighing of the wind and the hoot of the owls....

And in the morning (my grandfather said) she had been wakened by the sun streaming in at the window and the sound of the thrushes and cardinals in the garden. She woke to look at her wedding-dress, spread out on the chair near her bed. And when she had dressed and gone downstairs, she unbolted the doors and windows one by one until she came to the last, which opened into the garden.... And there on the path, face downward, lay Duncan McLeod, his red hair like flame in the sun ... dead with a bullet through his heart.

I looked up and saw the figure of Jabez Smith, sitting now under a catalpa tree. He had forgotten that the hay was cut and there were clouds in the west. I knew what he was doing. He was trying to puzzle out why he had been excited because Zenobia White was dead. I would never see Zenobia White with her yellow taffeta trailing in the dust and followed by her cats. Something had gone out of our little world.