Dominie Dean: A Novel. Butler Ellis Parker
about the farms in the back townships of the county, and drove on. There were plenty of farms to be had – rented on shares or bought with a mortgage – and he passed on his way, a silent, forbidding old man.
In the days that followed he sometimes drove into town to make such purchases as necessity required. Sometimes his wife – a faded, work-worn woman – came with him, and sometimes his daughter, but more often he came alone.
Old Hinch – “Copperhead Hinch,” he came to be called – was not beautiful. He seldom wore a hat, coming to town with his iron-gray hair matted on his head and his iron-gray beard tangled and tobacco-stained. Some long-past accident had left him with a scar above the left eyebrow, lowering it, and his eyebrows were like long, down-curving gray bristles, so that his left eye looked out through a bristly covert, giving him a leering scowl. The same accident had wrenched his left shoulder so that his left arm seemed to drag behind him and he walked bent forward with an ugly sidewise gait. At times he rested his left hand on his hip. He looked like a hard character, but, as David came to know, he was neither hard nor soft but a man like other men. Sun and rain and hard weather seemed to have turned his flesh to leather.
In those days the post office was in the Wiggett Building, some sixty feet off the main street, and it was there those who liked to talk of the war met, for on a bulletin board just outside the door the lists of dead and wounded were posted as they arrived, and there head-lined pages of the newspapers were pasted. To the post office old Hinch came on each trip to town, stopping there last before driving back to Griggs Township. Old Hinch issued from the post office one afternoon just as the postmaster was pasting the news of a Union victory on the board, and some jubilant reader, dancing and waving his cap, grasped old Hinch and shouted the news in his ear. The old man uttered an oath and with his elbow knocked his tormentor aside. He shouldered his way roughly through the crowd and clambered into his wagon.
“Yeh! you Copperhead!” the old man’s tormentor shouted after him.
The crowd turned and saw the old man and jeered at him. Hinch muttered and mumbled as he arranged the scrap of old blanket on his wagon seat. He gathered up his reins and, without looking back, drove down the street, around the corner into the main street and out of the town. After that old Hinch was “that Copperhead from Griggs Township.” Silent and surly always, he was left more completely alone than ever. When he came to town the storekeepers paid him scant courtesy; the manner in which they received him indicated that they did not want his trade, and would be better satisfied if he stayed away. The children on the street sometimes shouted at him.
Old Sam Wiggett, Mary’s father, was by that time known as the most bitter hater of the South in Riverbank. Later there were some who said he assumed the greater part of his virulent fanaticism to cover his speculations in the Union paper currency and his tax sale purchases of the property of dead or impoverished Union soldiers, but this was not so. Heavy-bodied and heavy-jowled, he was also heavy-minded. That which he was against he hated with all the bitterness his soul could command, and he was sincere in his desire that every captured Confederate be hanged. He considered Lincoln a soft-hearted namby-pamby and would have had every Confederate home burned to the ground and the women and children driven into Mexico. In business he had the same harsh but honest single-mindedness. Money was something to get and any honest way of getting it was right. There were but two or three men in Riverbank County who would bid in the property of the unfortunate soldiers at tax sale, but Sam Wiggett had no scruples. The South, and not he, killed and ruined the soldiers, and the county, not he, forced the property to tax sale. He bought with depreciated currency that he had bought at a discount. That was business.
It was not unnatural that Mary Wiggett should have absorbed some share of this ultraloyalism from her father. The women of Riverbank were not, as a rule, bitterly angry. They were staunch and true to their cause; they worked eagerly with their hands, scraping lint, making “housewives” and doing what they could for their soldiers; they were cheered by victories and depressed by defeats, and they wept over their slain and wounded, but their attitude was one of pity and love for their own rather than of hard hatred against the South. With Mary Wiggett patriotism was more militant. Could she have arranged it the lint she scraped would never have been used to dress the wounds of a captured Confederate soldier boy. ‘Thusia, even more intense, hated the South as a personal enemy.
David felt this without, at first, taking much notice of it. He was happy in his engagement and he liked Mary better each day. There was a wholesome, full-blooded womanliness in all she did and a frankness in her affection that satisfied him. The first shock to his evenly balanced mind came one day when he was walking through the main street with her.
The young dominie was swinging down the street at her side, his head high and his clear gray eyes looking straight ahead, when something whizzed past his face. They were near the corner of a street. Along the edge of the walk a half dozen farm wagons stood and in the nearest sat Mrs. Hinch, her sunbonnet thrown back and her Paisley shawl – her finest possession – over her shoulders. Old Hinch was clambering into the wagon and had his best foot on the hub of a wheel. The missile that whizzed past David’s face was an egg. It struck old Hinch on the temple and broke, scattering the yolk upon the waist of Mrs. Hinch’s calico dress and upon her shawl and her face. Some boy had grasped an egg from a box before a grocer’s window and had thrown it. The lad darted around the corner and old Hinch turned, grasping his whip and scowling through his bristly eyebrows. The corner loafers laughed.
What David did was not much. He drew his handkerchief from his pocket and gave it to the faded woman in the wagon, that she might remove the stain of egg. She wiped her face and began removing the egg from her garments and David and Mary moved on.
“Why did you do that!” Mary asked. “Don’t you know them! They’re Copperheads.”
“She was badly spattered. She seemed at a loss what to do.”
“Didn’t you know they were Copperheads!”
“I did not know. That would have made no difference. She was distressed.”
“Well, please, David, do not help any more distressed Copperheads when I am with you,” Mary said. “Everyone in front of the store saw you. Oh! I wouldn’t raise my little finger to help a Copperhead if she was dying! I hate them! They ought to be egged out of town, all of them.”
Some two weeks later old Hinch drove up to the little manse and knocked on David’s door. He had the handkerchief, washed, ironed and folded in a bit of white paper, and a dozen fresh-laid eggs in a small basket.
“Ma sent me ‘round with these,” old Hinch said. “Sort of a ‘thank you.’ She ‘minded me particular not to throw the eggs at you.”
There was almost a twinkle in his eyes as he repeated his wife’s little joke. He would not enter the manse but sidled himself back to his wagon and drove away.
It was from ‘Thusia Fragg that David had the next word of old Hinch. Even in those days David had acquired a great taste for a certain sugared bun made by Keller, the baker. Long years after the buns were still made by Riverbank bakers and known as “Keller buns” and the last sight many had of David was as an old man with a paper bag in his hand, trudging up the hill to his home for a little feast on “Keller buns.” He used to stop and offer his favorite pastry to little children. Sometimes the paper bag was quite empty by the time he reached home.
It was no great disgrace, in those days, to carry parcels, for many of the Riverbankers had come from St. Louis or Cincinnati, where the best housewives went to market with basket on arm, but David would have thought nothing of his paper parcel of buns in any event. The buns were at the baker’s and he liked them and wanted some at home, so he went to the baker’s and bought them and carried them home. He was coming out of Keller’s doorway when ‘Thusia, as gayly dressed as ever, hurrying by, saw him and stopped. She was frightened and agitated and she grasped David’s arm.
“Oh, Mr. Dean!” she cried. “Can’t you do something! They’re beating an old man! There!” she almost wept, pointing down the street toward the post office. David stood a moment, tense and breathing deeply.
“Who is it!” he asked.
“That Copperhead farmer,” said