



Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Andrew Templeton, Tonya
Allen, and Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders.
HTML version by Al Haines.











TIVERTON TALES

BY

ALICE BROWN

1899




  CONTENTS


  DOORYARDS
  A MARCH WIND
  THE MORTUARY CHEST
  HORN-O'-THE-MOON
  A STOLEN FESTIVAL
  A LAST ASSEMBLING
  THE WAY OF PEACE
  THE EXPERIENCE OF HANNAH PRIME
  HONEY AND MYRRH
  A SECOND MARRIAGE
  THE FLAT-IRON LOT
  THE END OF ALL LIVING





DOORYARDS


Tiverton has breezy, upland roads, and damp, sweet valleys; but should
you tarry there a summer long, you might find it wasteful to take many
excursions abroad. For, having once received the freedom of family
living, you will own yourself disinclined to get beyond dooryards,
those outer courts of domesticity. Homely joys spill over into them,
and, when children are afoot, surge and riot there. In them do the
common occupations of life find niche and channel. While bright weather
holds, we wash out of doors on a Monday morning, the wash-bench in the
solid block of shadow thrown by the house. We churn there, also, at the
hour when Sweet-Breath, the cow, goes afield, modestly unconscious of
her own sovereignty over the time. There are all the varying fortunes
of butter-making recorded. Sometimes it comes merrily to the tune of

  "Come, butter, come!
  Peter stands a-waiting at the gate,
  Waiting for his butter-cake.
  Come, butter, come!"

chanted in time with the dasher; again it doth willfully refuse, and
then, lest it be too cool, we contribute a dash of hot water, or too
hot, and we lend it a dash of cold. Or we toss in a magical handful of
salt, to encourage it. Possibly, if we be not the thriftiest of
householders, we feed the hens here in the yard, and then "shoo" them
away, when they would fain take profligate dust-baths under the
syringa, leaving unsightly hollows. But however, and with what
complexion, our dooryards may face the later year, they begin it with
purification. Here are they an unfailing index of the severer virtues;
for, in Tiverton, there is no housewife who, in her spring cleaning,
omits to set in order this outer pale of the temple. Long before the
merry months are well under way, or the cows go kicking up their heels
to pasture, or plants are taken from the south window and clapped into
chilly ground, orderly passions begin to riot within us, and we "clear
up" our yards. We gather stray chips, and pieces of bone brought in by
the scavenger dog, who sits now with his tail tucked under him,
oblivious of such vagrom ways. We rake the grass, and then, gilding
refined gold, we sweep it. There is a tradition that Miss Lois May once
went to the length of trimming her grass about the doorstone and
clothes-pole with embroidery scissors; but that was a too-hasty
encomium bestowed by a widower whom she rejected next week, and who
qualified his statement by saying they were pruning-shears.

After this preliminary skirmishing arises much anxious inspection of
ancient shrubs and the faithful among old-fashioned plants, to see
whether they have "stood the winter." The fresh, brown "piny" heads are
brooded over with a motherly care; wormwood roots are loosened, and the
horse-radish plant is given a thrifty touch. There is more than the
delight of occupation in thus stirring the wheels of the year. We are
Nature's poor handmaidens, and our labor gives us joy.

But sweet as these homespun spots can make themselves, in their mixture
of thrift and prodigality, they are dearer than ever at the points
where they register family traits, and so touch the humanity of us all.
Here is imprinted the story of the man who owns the farm, that of the
father who inherited it, and; the grandfather who reclaimed it from
waste; here have they and their womenkind set the foot of daily living
and traced indelible paths. They have left here the marks of tragedy,
of pathos, or of joy. One yard has a level bit of grassless ground
between barn and pump, and you may call it a battlefield, if you will,
since famine and desire have striven there together. Or, if you choose
to read fine meanings into threadbare things, you may see in it a field
of the cloth of gold, where simple love of life and childlike pleasure
met and sparkled for no eye to see. It was a croquet ground, laid out
in the days when croquet first inundated the land, and laid out by a
woman. This was Della Smith, the mother of two grave children, and the
wife of a farmer who never learned to smile. Eben was duller than the
ox which ploughs all day long for his handful of hay at night and his
heavy slumber; but Della, though she carried her end of the yoke with a
gallant spirit, had dreams and desires forever bursting from brown
shells, only to live a moment in the air, and then, like bubbles, die.
She had a perpetual appetite for joy. When the circus came to town, she
walked miles to see the procession; and, in a dream of satisfied
delight, dropped potatoes all the afternoon, to make up. Once, a
hand-organ and monkey strayed that way, and it was she alone who
followed them; for the children were little, and all the saner
house-mothers contented themselves with leaning over the gates till the
wandering train had passed. But Della drained her draught of joy to the
dregs, and then tilted her cup anew. With croquet came her supremest
joy,--one that leavened her days till God took her, somewhere, we hope,
where there is playtime. Della had no money to buy a croquet set, but
she had something far better, an alert and undiscouraged mind. On one
dizzy afternoon, at a Fourth of July picnic, when wickets had been set
up near the wood, she had played with the minister, and beaten him. The
game opened before her an endless vista of delight. She saw herself
perpetually knocking red-striped balls through an eternity of wickets;
and she knew that here was the one pastime of which no soul could tire.
Afterwards, driving home with her husband and two children, still in a
daze of satisfied delight, she murmured absently:--

"Wonder how much they cost?"

"What?" asked Eben, and Della turned, flushed scarlet, and replied:--

"Oh, nothin'!"

That night, she lay awake for one rapt hour, and then she slept the
sleep of conquerors. In the morning, after Eben had gone safely off to
work, and the children were still asleep, she began singing, in a
monotonous, high voice, and took her way out of doors. She always sang
at moments when she purposed leaping the bounds of domestic custom.
Even Eben had learned that, dull as he was. If he heard that guilty
crooning from the buttery, he knew she might be breaking extra eggs, or
using more sugar than was conformable.

"What you doin' of?" he was accustomed to call. But Delia never
answered, and he did not interfere. The question was a necessary
concession to marital authority; he had no wish to curb her ways.

Della scudded about the yard like a willful wind. She gathered withes
from a waiting pile, and set them in that one level space for wickets.
Then she took a handsaw, and, pale about the lips, returned to the
house and to her bedroom. She had made her choice. She was sacrificing
old associations to her present need; and, one after another, she sawed
the ornamenting balls from her mother's high-post bedstead. Perhaps the
one element of tragedy lay in the fact that Della was no mechanician,
and she had not foreseen that, having one flat side, her balls might
decline to roll. But that dismay was brief. A weaker soul would have
flinched; to Della it was a futile check, a pebble under the wave. She
laid her balls calmly aside. Some day she would whittle them into
shape; for there were always coming to Della days full of roomy leisure
and large content. Meanwhile apples would serve her turn,--good alike
to draw a weary mind out of its channel or teach the shape of spheres.
And so, with two russets for balls and the clothes-slice for a mallet
(the heavy sledge-hammer having failed), Della serenely, yet in
triumph, played her first game against herself.

"Don't you drive over them wickets!" she called imperiously, when Eben
came up from the lot in his dingle cart.

"Them what?" returned he, and Della had to go out to explain. He looked
at them gravely; hers had been a ragged piece of work.

"What under the sun'd you do that for?" he inquired. "The young ones
wouldn't turn their hand over for't They ain't big enough."

"Well, I be," said Della briefly. "Don't you drive over 'em."

Eben looked at her and then at his path to the barn, and he turned his
horse aside.

Thereafter, until we got used to it, we found a vivid source of
interest in seeing Della playing croquet, and always playing alone.
That was a very busy summer, because the famous drought came then, and
water had to be carried for weary rods from spring and river. Sometimes
Della did not get her playtime till three in the afternoon, sometimes
not till after dark; but she was faithful to her joy. The croquet
ground suffered varying fortunes. It might happen that the balls were
potatoes, when apples failed to be in season; often her wickets broke,
and stood up in two ragged horns. Sometimes one fell away altogether,
and Della, like the planets, kept an unseen track. Once or twice, the
mistaken benevolence of others gave her real distress. The minister's
daughter, noting her solitary game, mistook it for forlornness, and, in
the warmth of her maiden heart, came to ask if she might share. It was
a timid though official benevolence; but Della's bright eyes grew dark.
She clung to her kitchen chair.

"I guess I won't," she said, and, in some dim way, everybody began to
understand that this was but an intimate and solitary joy. She had
grown so used to spreading her banquets for one alone that she was
frightened at the sight of other cups upon the board; for although
loneliness begins in pain, by and by, perhaps, it creates its own
species of sad and shy content.

Della did not have a long life; and that was some relief to us who were
not altogether satisfied with her outlook here. The place she left need
not be always desolate. There was a good maiden sister to keep the
house, and Eben and the children would be but briefly sorry. They could
recover their poise; he with the health of a simple mind, and they as
children will. Yet he was truly stunned by the blow; and I hoped, on
the day of the funeral, that he did not see what I did. When we went
out to get our horse and wagon, I caught my foot in something which at
once gave way. I looked down--at a broken wicket and a withered apple
by the stake.

Quite at the other end of the town is a dooryard which, in my own mind,
at least, I call the traveling garden. Miss Nancy, its presiding
mistress, is the victim of a love of change; and since she may not
wander herself, she transplants shrubs and herbs from nook to nook. No
sooner does a green thing get safely rooted than Miss Nancy snatches it
up and sets it elsewhere. Her yard is a varying pageant of plants in
all stages of misfortune. Here is a shrub, with faded leaves, torn from
the lap of prosperity in a well-sunned corner to languish under
different conditions. There stands a hardy bush, shrinking, one might
guess, under all its bravery of new spring green, from the premonition
that Miss Nancy may move it tomorrow. Even the ladies'-delights have
their months of garish prosperity, wherein they sicken like country
maids; for no sooner do they get their little feet settled in a dark,
still corner than they are summoned out of it, to sunlight bright and
strong. Miss Nancy lives with a bedridden father, who has grown peevish
through long patience; can it be that slow, senile decay which has
roused in her a fierce impatience against the sluggishness of life, and
that she hurries her plants into motion because she herself must halt?
Her father does not theorize about it. He says, "Nancy never has no
luck with plants." And that, indeed, is true.

There is another dooryard with its infallible index finger pointing to
tell a tale. You can scarcely thread your way through it for vehicles
of all sorts, congregated there to undergo slow decomposition at the
hands of wind and weather. This farmer is a tradesman by nature, and
though, for thrift's sake, his fields must be tilled, he is yet
inwardly constrained to keep on buying and selling, albeit to no
purpose. He is everlastingly swapping and bargaining, giving play to a
faculty which might, in its legitimate place, have worked out the
definite and tangible, but which now goes automatically clicking on
under vain conditions. The house, too, is overrun with useless
articles, presently to be exchanged for others as unavailing, and in
the farmer's pocket ticks a watch which to-morrow will replace with
another more problematic still. But in the yard are the undisputable
evidences of his wild unthrift. Old rusty mowing-machines, buggies with
torn and flapping canvas, sleighs ready to yawn at every crack, all are
here: poor relations in a broken-down family. But children love this
yard. They come, hand in hand, with a timid confidence in their right,
and ask at the back door for the privilege of playing in it. They take
long, entrancing journeys in the mouldy old chaise; they endure
Siberian nights of sleighing, and throw out their helpless dolls to the
pursuing wolves; or the more mercantile-minded among the boys mount a
three-wheeled express wagon, and drive noisily away to traffic upon the
road. This, in its dramatic possibilities, is not a yard to be
despised.

Not far away are two neighboring houses once held in affectionate
communion by a straight path through the clover and a gap in the wall.
This was the road to much friendly gossip, and there were few bright
days which did not find two matrons met at the wall, their heads
together over some amiable yarn; But now one house is closed, its
windows boarded up, like eyes shut down forever, and the grass has
grown over the little path: a line erased, perhaps never to be renewed.
It is easier to wipe out a story from nature than to wipe it from the
heart; and these mutilated pages of the outer life perpetually renew in
us the pangs of loss and grief.

But not all our dooryard reminiscences are instinct with pain. Do I not
remember one swept and garnished plot, never defiled by weed or
disordered with ornamental plants, where stood old Deacon Pitts, upon
an historic day, and woke the echoes with a herald's joy? Deacon Pitts
had the ghoulish delight of the ennuied country mind in funerals and
the mortality of man; and this morning the butcher had brought him news
of death in a neighboring town. The butcher had gone by, and I was
going; but Deacon Pitts stood there, dramatically intent upon his
mournful morsel. I judged that he was pondering on the possibility of
attending the funeral without the waste of too much precious time now
due the crops. Suddenly, as he turned back toward the house, bearing a
pan of liver, his pondering eye caught sight of his aged wife toiling
across the fields, laden with pennyroyal. He set the pan down
hastily--yea, even before the advancing cat!--and made a trumpet of his
hands.

"Sarah!" he called piercingly. "Sarah! Mr. Amasa Blake's passed away!
Died yesterday!"

I do not know whether he was present at that funeral, but it would be
strange if he were not; for time and tide both served him, and he was
always on the spot. Indeed, one day he reached a house of mourning in
such season that he found the rooms quite empty, and was forced to wait
until the bereaved family should assemble. There they sat, he and his
wife, a portentous couple in their dead black and anticipatory gloom,
until even their patience had well-nigh fled. And then an arriving
mourner overheard the deacon, as he bent forward and challenged his
wife in a suspicious and discouraged whisper:--

"Say, Sarah, ye don't s'pose it's all goin' to fush out, do ye?"

They had their funeral.

To the childish memory, so many of the yards are redolent now of wonder
and a strange, sweet fragrance of the fancy not to be described! One,
where lived a notable cook, had, in a quiet corner, a little grove of
caraway. It seemed mysteriously connected with the oak-leaf cookies,
which only she could make; and the child, brushing through the delicate
bushes grown above his head, used to feel vaguely that, on some
fortunate day, cookies would be found there, "a-blowin' and a-growin'."
That he had seen them stirred and mixed