In the Sixties. Frederic Harold
At the beginning, too, I suppose that his taking up Abolitionism made him enemies. Dearborn County gave Franklin Pierce a big majority in ’52, and the bulk of our farmers, I know, were in that majority. But I have already dwelt upon the way in which all this changed in the years just before the war. Naturally enough, Hagadorn’s position also changed. The rejected stone became the head of the corner. The tiresome fanatic of the ’fifties was the inspired prophet of the ’sixties. People still shrank from giving him undue credit for their conversion, but they felt themselves swept along under his influence none the less.
But just as his unpopularity kept him poor in the old days, it seemed that now the reversed condition was making him still poorer. The truth was, he was too excited to pay any attention to his business. He went off to Octavius three or four days a week to hear the news, and when he remained at home, he spent much more time standing out in the road discussing politics and the conduct of the war with passers-by, than he did over his staves and hoops. No wonder his place was run down.
The house was dark and silent, but there was some sort of a light in the cooper-shop beyond. My hope had been to see Esther rather than her wild old father, but there was nothing for it but to go over to the shop. I pushed the loosely fitting door back on its leathern hinges, and stepped over the threshold. The resinous scent of newly cut wood, and the rustle of the shavings under my feet, had the effect, somehow, of filling me with timidity. It required an effort to not turn and go out again.
The darkened; and crowded interior of the tiny work-place smelt as well, I noted now, of smoke. On the floor before me was crouched a shapeless figure—bending in front of the little furnace, made of a section of stove-pipe, which the cooper used to dry the insides of newly fashioned barrels. A fire in this, half-blaze, half-smudge—gave forth the light I had seen from without, and the smoke which was making my nostrils tingle. Then I had to sneeze, and the kneeling figure sprang on the instant from the floor.
It was Esther who stood before me, coughing a little from the smoke, and peering inquiringly at me. “Oh—is that you, Jimmy?” she asked, after a moment of puzzled inspection in the dark.
She went on, before I had time to speak, in a nervous, half-laughing way: “I’ve been trying to roast an ear of corn here, but it’s the worst kind of a failure. I’ve watched ’Ni’ do it a hundred times, but with me it always comes out half-scorched and half-smoked. I guess the corn is too old now, anyway. At all events, it’s tougher than Pharaoh’s heart.”
She held out to me, in proof of her words, a blackened and unseemly roasting-ear. I took it, and turned it slowly over, looking at it with the grave scrutiny of an expert. Several torn and opened sections showed where she had been testing it with her teeth. In obedience to her “See if you don’t think it’s too old,” I took a diffident bite, at a respectful distance from the marks of her experiments. It was the worst I had ever tasted.
“I came over to see if you’d heard anything—any news,” I said, desiring to get away from the corn subject.
“You mean about Tom?” she asked, moving so that she might see me more plainly.
I had stupidly forgotten about that transformation of names. “Our Jeff, I mean,” I made answer.
“His name is Thomas Jefferson. We call him Tom,” she explained; “that other name is too horrid. Did—did his people tell you to come and ask me?”
I shook my head. “Oh, no!” I replied with emphasis, implying by my tone, I dare say, that they would have had themselves cut up into sausage-meat first.
The girl walked past me to the door, and out to the road-side, looking down toward the bridge with a lingering, anxious gaze. Then she came back, slowly.
“No, we have no news!” she said, with an effort at calmness. “He wasn’t an officer, that’s why. All we know is that the brigade his regiment is in lost 141 killed, 560 wounded, and 38 missing. That’s all!” She stood in the doorway, her hands clasped tight, pressed against her bosom.
“That’s all!” she repeated, with a choking voice.
Suddenly she started forward, almost ran across the few yards of floor, and, throwing herself down in the darkest corner, where only dimly one could see an old buffalo-robe spread over a heap of staves, began sobbing as if her heart must break.
Her dress had brushed over the stove-pipe, and scattered some of the embers beyond the sheet of tin it stood on. I stamped these out, and carried the other remnants of the fire out doors. Then I returned, and stood about in the smoky little shop, quite helplessly listening to the moans and convulsive sobs which rose from the obscure corner. A bit of a candle in a bottle stood on the shelf by the window. I lighted this, but it hardly seemed to improve the situation. I could see her now, as well as hear her—huddled face downward upon the skin, her whole form shaking with the violence of her grief. I had never been so unhappy before in my life.
At last—it may not have been very long, but it seemed hours—there rose the sound of voices outside on the road. A wagon had stopped, and some words were being exchanged. One of the voices grew louder—came nearer; the other died off, ceased altogether, and the wagon could be heard driving away. On the instant the door was pushed sharply open, and “Jee” Hagadorn stood on the threshold, surveying the interior of his cooper-shop with gleaming eyes.
He looked at me; he looked at his daughter lying in the corner; he looked at the charred mess on the floor—yet seemed to see nothing of what he looked at. His face glowed with a strange excitement—which in another man I should have set down to drink.
“Glory be to God! Praise to the Most High! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!” he called out, stretching forth his hands in a rapturous sort of gesture I remembered from classmeeting days.
Esther had leaped to her feet with squirrel-like swiftness at the sound of his voice, and now stood before him, her hands nervously clutching at each other, her reddened, tear-stained face afire with eagerness.
“Has word come?—is he safe?—have you heard?” so her excited questions tumbled over one another, as she grasped “Jee’s” sleeve and shook it in feverish impatience.
“The day has come! The year of Jubilee is here!” he cried, brushing her hand aside, and staring with a fixed, ecstatic, open-mouthed smile straight ahead of him. “The words of the Prophet are fulfilled!”
“But Tom!—Tom!” pleaded the girl, piteously. “The list has come? You know he is safe?”
“Tom! Tom!” old “Jee” repeated after her, but with an emphasis contemptuous, not solicitous. “Perish a hundred Toms—yea—ten thousand! for one such day as this! ‘For the Scarlet Woman of Babylon is overthrown, and bound with chains and cast into the lake of fire. Therefore, in one day shall her plagues come, death, and mourning, and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire: for strong is the Lord God which judged her!’ ”
He declaimed these words in a shrill, high-pitched voice, his face upturned, and his eyes half-closed. Esther plucked despairingly at his sleeve once more.
“But have you seen?—is his name?—you must have seen!” she moaned, incoherently.
“Jee” descended for the moment from his plane of exaltation. “I didn’t see!” he said, almost peevishly. “Lincoln has signed a proclamation freeing all the slaves! What do you suppose I care for your Toms and Dicks and Harrys, on such a day as this? ‘Woe! woe! the great city of Babylon, the strong city! For in one hour is thy judgment come!’ ”
The girl tottered back to her corner, and threw herself limply down upon the buffalo-robe again, hiding her face in her hands.
I pushed my way past the cooper, and trudged cross-lots home in the dark, tired, disturbed, and very hungry, but thinking most of all that if I had been worth my salt, I would have hit “Jee” Hagadorn with the adze that stood up against the door-stile.