In a Market-Wagon

IT was in a spirit of wayward adventure that I set out, one evening in early autumn, to walk from F—to the little town of L—. The night was gusty

and overcast, and before I had gone more than two miles, a chill and noiseless rain began to fall through the lugubrious darkness. I increased my pace to a run, as the road descended into the wooded hollow that lay before me, and pressed forward at a jog-trot through the moist lowland, under the overhanging masses of huge maples and chestnuts, and between solemn lines of silent pines. I think I might go through many regions, walk many nights, without encountering any scene or situation that should give a sense of solitude more complete and melancholy than that which here came over me. I was wet to the skin, but glowing from my long run, before I came upon the first house that had lain in my path for a mile; it broke in some measure the spell of solitude in which I had for a space been enveloped. After that, I encountered dwellings pretty frequently, and even passed through two villages (of which I did not know the names, for it was my first experience of the route, and I had not even consulted a map); but the air of weird remoteness still clung around me.

Much that I saw in passing has now escaped me; but, as I recall the road, under that dim illumination of the fleeting, watery sky, I see before me at one point a sudden bend, with white railings on either side, at the elbow; and hear again the hoarse rush of a falling stream. A house stood on the left; the stream, as I found on drawing nearer, made its fall on the right, and then shot beneath the road, where the white railings were. A slender current had been diverted into a high trough beyond the little bridge. I stopped there, and, hollowing my hand, dipped up a shallow draught from where the water trickled out of the duct into the trough. It was sweet, but at the same time warm and oppressive; — like the night, for it had now ceased raining. Indeed, I was in a mood to believe that it bore some deep affinity with the peculiar mood of the atmosphere, the curious circumstance of my adventurous presence in this spot, and the uncertainty as to whither I should extend my wandering, and how terminate it, before the sunrise of the following morning. I could have fancied it a stream not flowing from common springs, but a charmed distillation from some witch’s rock-hid still, sent hither for my especial need, to fortify me for adventures yet to come. The dusky brew smacked of home-made mystery.

Next, after a long interval, there was an episode of pretty villas by the roadside, with gardens trim-kept, so far as they could be seen, and a late light in a library-window, one of the drawn-up curtains of which admitted the hurrying pedestrian to a transient glimpse of the interior. After that, houses began to appear in groups here and there; gradually the rumbling of a wagon made itself heard on a neighboring road which presently converged with the one I was on; and at last I entered the town. It was silent; and hardly a light appeared in the whole place. Suddenly a slight wagon, containing a merry party, clashed toward me from the darkness of a winding street; deposited one of its company at a house, the door of which was shut with a loud clap, as he entered; and then rolled away again. I looked up at the church-steeple, but could not distinguish the hour; and it was too dark to see my watch-face. Then I stretched myself on a bench in the little green triangle in front of the church, and considered with myself the strange possibility of passing the night there.

In a little while, however, I walked on farther, and came to a large inn, which was close-shut and darkened. At this moment, a small wagon, creaking in a slow, dry manner, came up behind me, and halted by the tall and powerful pump placed by the roadside, between the house and its open stable-yard. A pair of sleepy men with a lantern were pottering about, and, on the owner of the wagon asking them whether many wagons had already passed, became a little livelier; so that I put some questions. Finding there was but little chance of securing a resting-place here, I determined to follow out what had all along formed a possible extension of my plan.

“ Can you take me to the city, if you ’re going that way ? ” I asked of the wagoner.

“ Well, I don’t know,” he said, giving his trousers a slight, slow tap with his stubby and lashless whip. “ I shan’t get there till daybreak.”

“Never mind,” I said, “I’m in no hurry. And I would just as lief pay you what I should have given for a lodging here, if you ’ll take me.”

The farmer went to his wagon, and worked at the seat he had arranged for himself.

“It don’t make any odds to me,” he said, presently. “ Though I don’t go very fast, and I don’t know whether you ’ll find anything very comfortable to sit on.”

So it was arranged. I jumped up, and established myself on the hard board laid across at the front, bracing my back against a barrel of early apples, and resting my feet on the traces in front. The horse was soon rested and refreshed, so far as the possibility lay open to him at all, and we started off, at a slow pace; the animal striking the broad, hard highway with heavy footfalls, and the wheels ever crackling wearily on their axles. For a time, our talk was but brief and immaterial. But at last we drew up by a little tavern in which a hospitable light was glowing, and from which came strains of a desultory fiddle. Being by this time well chilled from the previous rain, and my inactive state during the drive thus far, I followed the wagoner’s lead, through a dingy room in which some red-faced young men in black clothes were diverting themselves with a fiddle and a double-shuffle, executed by one more accomplished than the rest, into a smaller and brighter apartment beyond, where we were soon obsequiously attended, and served with warming liquor.

Here first I had an opportunity fully and distinctly to survey my companion. He was a short man, with a red face, a sort of blunted nose, and dusty, tired eyelids, and white hair—it was almost wholly white. When he mounted the wagon again, he was more disposed to conversation than before.

“ Yes, it’s hard,” he said, quietly, in answer to an observation of mine; “ it is a hard life. Three times a week, now, I get up at midnight, and come down to market. Well, I ’m getting old. Used to do it every morning; but I’m too old, now, for that. Get up, Robin.”

And he smote the horse with his ineffectual whip.

“ Hard on the horse,” pursued the wagoner, “working in the field, — I can’t spare him, — and then goin’ to market.” He gave a low grunt of luxurious fatigue, as if to relieve the unspeaking horse; and presently whipped him again.

We went on talking of the vicissitudes in his trade.

“ Well,” said he, “ I don’t know but I shall have to hire a man, next year, if I can get the money together. It don’t hardly pay, as it is. Just make the ends lap over, and no more. My son was with me one year, on the farm, and it was a great help. I ’ve felt it more, since.”

“ And he’s married, now, I suppose,” said I.

“ No,” the farmer answered, in a dull tone, “he’s dead.”

I cannot tell what passed immediately after that. It was no case for prompt response; and yet, I may have made one. The farmer had summed up, in his two syllables, the total result of life, so far as he was concerned in it. There was something in his whole tone which conveyed this; and his estimate of the calamity was beyond comment or correction, then. But some quality of the speechless night-hour helped us. The impulse of pity, and the suppressed yearning for fresh and ever-renewed sympathy, met, and in their meeting formed a bond between us for the time being, at,least. The darkness shielded this broken and sorrow-smitten soul, still decently proud and shy in the showing of its grief; he sought relief in speaking to me. And this was what I heard that night, moving slowly on the road, amid the petty clatter of our wagon, and interrupted from time to time by a flick of the whip, or an ejaculation to the horse.

“ It was his twenty-first birthday. I don’t know why it should have coine just then; but it did. That was the way the Almighty had fixed it, I suppose. And it was down at the pond near where you told me you live. There ’s where he was drowned.

“ Well, sir, it seems strange, now, to look back on ’em all, — those twentyone years! If you have n’t any children, you can’t tell what it is. But I say to you, sir, when the child has once come, you ain’t the same man, any more; you ’re that child, then, as much as anything else. If he dies, — you don’t exactly die, I know that; but it ain’t much better. Well, I saw that boy growing up from the little bit of a thing he was at first, all the way till he was a man, piece by piece, changing from a boy into a young man, so that you could n’t tell hardly where one left off and the other joined on;—and then, all at once, he goes off, brave and happy as ever, and that’s the end of it. Just a little pleasure party of three or four of his friends and himself going off to bathe; and he got drowned.

“I was twenty-one myself, when I got engaged to be married. Just his age! I was n’t married for several years after that, though. And then it was a good while before we had the baby. Well, I suppose you may say all my life, until he was born, was a sort of leading up to that. And now it seems a good many years to have lived, before I had a son. I did n’t use to think so.

I don’t think, any way, I ever thought of it at all, while he was alive. But things change; it seems, now, as if all those years had been wasted. Why, they only led up to his being born, and now he’s dead!

“ But it does me good, after all, to look back on my life, and see how I lived it up to then all for him, without hardly knowing it; and then, after he came, how I lived for him purposely, every day, and did n’t often have my thoughts off him. We was pretty careful of him, always. We never had but him. He was a good boy, from the start, — only just wild enough to show he had a spirit. But we was all the tenderer with him. Folks say a child is too good to live, sometimes. I don’t believe it, though. I don’t see why he could n’t have lived, why he would n’t have been liviug now, if he had n’t happened to have got drowned. You see, he did live twenty-one years. So that was n’t the reason. But, even if I was n’t particularly afraid of his dying, it was just the same as if I had been, as far as taking care of him goes. He was a good learner, and we sent him to school straight along; only I had to look out he did n’t work too hard. I don’t know what he’d have been, if he d lived. He was too full of real go, to keep on farmin’. He’d have done it, if I’d said so. But what I wanted, was to make money enough to let him go his own way. Somehow, money seemed to come easier in those days, when we wanted it for his bringing-up; though, of course, we had bad years, too. But that was before the war.

“ He went to the war, too. I don’t suppose it was any harder for us, than it was for lots of folks at the same time; but I tell you it was a terrible burden. There he was gone three full years, and only once he came hack on a furlough; and all that time not a thing his mother could do for him, except knit stockings and hem shirts, and once or twice she managed to get a box of good things for him. Now when I think of it, there have been plenty of times that I did n’t see him at all, — whole winters when he was off to school and academy, and I never saw him; and then those three years at the war. Fully one quarter of his life I did n’t see him, counting in odd days, I guess. And I suppose I ’d ought to have got used to it. But it ha’n’t made any difference; I miss him just the same. I pretty near gave him up, that while he was at the war. And it does seem strange he should n’t have got hurt, all the while. He was in a good many battles, too, and down in those places where they had the fever so bad; and yet he came home all right. Maybe that was what made it all the harder, when something did happen afterward.

“My wife, she says perhaps it was wrong to have been so rejoiced over his coming safe home; that we did n’t think enough of what others had suffered that had lost their children in the war. Perhaps it was a judgment on us; I don’t pretend to say it wa’n’t. What I do know is, it was harder than ever to lose him, when we’d just got him back. Somehow it’s strange he should have died just that way. It was a beautiful day; you would n’t have expected anything so sad was going to happen. The grass was as green, and the sky shon’ blue as ever any other summer day; but he got his death of it, for all that. Sometimes I see it all before me just that way as if I had been there when it happened; though I’ve never been to the pond since. Don’t think I ever shall go. But I see him a-goin’ into the bright, calm water, tall and slim,— though he had a good broad chest and a stout back,— just as full of life and fun as he could be; and then I remember how he looked when they brought him home. Nobody could tell just how it happened. The boys was so frightened, they could n’t tell it straight. Well, I don’t wonder. Who could tell how such a thing happened? It’s no use; it would n’t make it any better; he could n’t have come alive again.

“ Yes, it was a great help, as I was saying, to have him on the farm that one year. He was a good hand. That ’s what I was thinking of, when I began talking to you about it, just now. Most likely I shall have to get a hired man, next spring. I was thinking of having another horse; Robin ’s pretty stiff. I need a new one, pretty bad. But I guess I shall have to put the money into a hired hand. Go ’long, Robin; seems to me you ’re awful dull to-night.”

Before the first morning twilight crept along the highway, I had left the farmer. Our roads diverged; I leaped down from my rough seat beside him; I have never seen him since. For a little while, I heard the wooden rattling of his modest vehicle, as he drove on toward the city by another way from that which I followed. Then the sound died away. But when the sunrise appeared, floating in over the sea and crowded city, I thought of him still. It was a dawn fairer, as it chanced, than many fair dawns I have known. The sky in the east was set thick with clear-cut clouds of fresh crimson, drifting in long lines with their points against the wind, and separated each from each by slender rifts of gray. As yet, only an occasional vehicle of clumsy sort clattered over the pavements; and in the intervals of quiet, a dim and multitudinous whisper seemed to pervade the air, as of the ocean softly breathing in a dream. The farmer was by this time breakfasting in a dingy refreshment stand of low price, near the scene of his impending business. In an hour, market would begin.

G. P. Lathrop.