Glenway Wescott

“ For half of the farm lay on those hilltops, and there half of the earth was stone. The slopes were so steep that the wagons carrying home the poor harvest had to have their wheels chained and be brought down like sledges. The rains descended in torrents, rolling down bowlders, digging in the good fields gullies deeper than a man is tall, washing the top soil off into the swamp. ”

“ Watching beside his grandmother Tower's death-bed, Alwyn thought how his grandmother Duff would sometimes call him by the name of her eldest son, Andrew, and the next moment call him her sweetheart. His mother told him that throughout the winter, never realizing whose son he was, she had asked with young, fitful tenderness: "How is my sweetheart? Now, tell me the news of my young man. Is he getting on well out in the world?" ”

“ What then had the heroic efforts in the country come to? Shabby and gloomy farms, unserviceable virtues, broken hearts, large family reunions, grievances of those (like Alwyn himself) with ideas above their station, other grievances and old-time religion. . . . Where literal wilderness had been conquered, a wilderness still, overrun by peasant immigrants, but still ineffectually governed by the early settlers' wistful young, by their habits of poverty-stricken conquerors. There was this difference between Chicago and Wisconsin: in the country the avidity had never been assuaged. ”

“ The east was covered with tiny clouds like the torn bits of paper which a newcomer finds in a dismantled house; the sun entered the sky like such a newcomer. Frost-bitten maples and ash covered the land with blotches of blood and rust; the debris of harvest lay in the fields. By the middle of the morning Alwyn and the hired man crossed the Iron Ridge and came to a new sort of countryside.
They ate dinner at the back of a dirty store in a town called Eden. Alwyn's companion, a huge man of thirty who was like an adolescent, had had to work so hard as a child that he was stoop-shouldered. ”

“ As soon as Alwyn thought of it, this tradition which rites and legends were supposed to represent, became in its turn a symbol of something else.
The word mother meant that which had produced one; therefore, not only a woman—wilderness, squalor, ideals, manias, regrets, sensuality, what con-solations there had been. . . . Curiosity was a child's love, a half-grown boy's, even his own, not long before—excited, needy, ignorant, and afraid of what was going to happen. The desire to understand was, after all, desire. ”

“ Never be infatuated with nor try to interpret as an omen the poverty, the desperation, of the past; whoever remembers it will be punished, or punish himself; never remember. Upon pain of loneliness, upon pain of a sort of expatriation though at home. At home in a land of the future where all wish to be young; a land of duties well done, irresponsibly, of evil done without immorality, and good without virtue. Maturity, responsibility, immorality, virtue are offspring of memory ”

“ Indeed, Alwyn thought, roads were to the Mississippi Valley what seas, wars, religions, had been to other places in history. Coming and going of men sick at their stomachs from the motion of their own feet, or saddle horses, or vehicles (as he was) . In the beginning his hard boy-grandfather marking a trail on tree trunks with an ax—as if the thread through a labyrinth had slightly worn away its pillars here and there. ”

“ According to the habit of his mind, he began to read meanings into what she had said, hour after empty hour in the doorway of his other grandmother's bedroom.
A law in the hearts of the savagest men forbidding them to love passionately their mothers, grandmothers. (It seemed that now the law usually forbade civilized or over-civilized men to love them in any way at all. . . .) And Alwyn had heard at school of an obscure belief, indefinitely old and held by many races in common, that by the breaking of that particular law, heroes, men accorded divine honors, had been made of common men. ”

“ Alwyn realized that he would not have had the courage to appreciate the comfortless glory which the pioneers and (his uncle excepted) the first generation of their children, deserved, but for this personal emancipation from their destiny, this more agreeable prospect. . . .
The morning came. His father woke, sent the dogs after the cattle, and came in to hear how the dying woman had passed the night. She was lying quietly, her head thrown back on the pillow; the breath of her nostrils alone seemed alive, like a small, rising and falling, colorless flame at one end of a burned-out log. ”

“ So they set out through the garden and the melon patch, over a fence, and up a hill. Orfeo thought they should buy as many flowers as possible. Alwyn looked back at the small house, seeing another in its place, indeed several others, one of which, the earliest, had stood in a melon patch. And as they went on in the dusk, he whispered to himself good-by to them, those who were dead: his great, gaunt grandmother, and the other little one as well, who had called him her sweetheart in the madness of her old age. ”

“ She never lost consciousness in the slightest degree; and Alwyn was certain that whenever she could sit quietly with her eyes closed, her mind was clear and patiently occupied with what had gone before, or what according to her simple faith was still to come. Sometimes, usually during the day, she was able to speak with a certain ease, in her rough, still beautiful voice; then she would ask, "What are the men doing in the fields now?" or ask one of her grandchildren if he remembered some- thing she had told him long before. ”

“ The hungry horses hung back, pushed each other out of the road, and tried to turn up every lane; they at least could not go on much longer. His father, used to finding his way in the North like an Indian, had described the turnings for him, with a schoolhouse, a tree, a hill, by which to recognize each one; and Alwyn looked forward miserably to his criticism, if they did not arrive when they were expected. But for a few hours not himself but what looked in the dark like an utter wilderness, was in control of him and of what he could do: he was willing and in awe of it ”

“ And they might well be ready for any outlawry; ready to betray, for the work's sake, those whom they would continue to love even more than they ought; to betray the West to the East in the warfare between the two in order to gain for the former the advantages of defeat as well as victory; to betray their native land as a whole for love of some characteristically native land of their imagination. ”

“ Already moribund prosperity, abortive progress; men like Alwyn's uncle kept as close to the women as drones in a beehive, little or no posterity nevertheless. . . . Between them and the most brutish immigrants, the future, for its purposes, whatever they were, would find little to choose. Would it not have to fall back upon the past, upon the poor God of poverty and His remnant of pioneers, unchanged though dying out? Those who are best prepared for the second lap of a race are those who did not even get a start in the first. ”

“ Alwyn believed that it had not been. She and her, house had given him a history lesson.
Whenever he had come back from Chicago to the country he had looked about him with a half-willing, almost bitter enthusiasm. Neither Chicago nor Wisconsin had justified its existence. The city had surpassed all reasonable expectations, and no one who did not have something to gain by optimism was pleased with the result. It seemed able to do, more and more powerfully, only two things: grow rich, and complain. The country lives had been no more than self-supporting ”

“ He would have to make some sort of peace between the fruitless pride of the one and the creative vanity of the other.
There would also have to be a compromise between his talent for poverty and his love of wealth; not, he hoped, the one his uncle Jim had made. He wondered at the fact that he was most deeply indebted to that one of his relatives who conformed to his standards, appealed to his imagination, the least. He felt for his uncle at once a vaguely disdainful pity and that admiration which, even against one's better judgment, often follows gratitude. ”

“ For he understood that fear is the most impious of the emotions: disdain and suspicion of God, or the gods, no matter which. He remembered that in the most frightened period of his childhood, his sixth or seventh year, there had been a pen like a cave inside the strawstack where the old sows crawled away to have their litters, with a hole through the straw a little higher than his head, to pour in their corn and swill. ”

“ In front of it low fields were flooded in spring with water full of frogs, where wild birds of every sort gathered to paddle and flutter, to stalk and doze, hunching their shoulders. Beyond those fields there lay a swamp over which the horizon was draped with melancholy tamaracks. In another direction there was a brighter vista: interwoven slopes, white roads, dwelling places, and far away a lake, glittering in the daytime as a lighthouse glitters at night. The house and barns were protected by small, high hills standing in a half circle. ”

“ His thought was like the sort of nightmare in which terrors do not frighten, nor pains hurt—they were not his terrors and pains, except the one of having lost the way. Dreamy composite pictures which could serve no purpose. Then his memory, working ingeniously against his will, suggested to him instead this or that about his relatives, details of which they were made up.
His grandmother Tower called his grandfather Duff "a snake in the grass"; there was a negro song which began, "The devil is a snake in the grass." ”

“ Stronger than their fathers, because they would have less fear of God; more desperate because, lacking a God of resignation and forgiveness, failure would be even more intolerable. The future of America, if it was to be worth troubling about, depended on them.
Flattering and terrifying himself by his thought, according to his family's habit of mind, Alwyn shrank from this responsibility of being the hope of his native land. ”

“ That morning before Alwyn had left the farm he had seen, standing in a row on the cellar door, about a dozen of the Duffy's whisky bottles which his grandfather had emptied while he was dying; during the auction someone must have gone into the cellar in search of just such traces of their private lives; and since all his family were eager prohibitionists, Alwyn supposed there had been complaints of their hypocrisy, and bad-tempered laughter. ”

“ John Craig and James Tower having, at the former's suggestion, given Ralph their shares of the farm, he and his mother had sold it to buy a smaller, more profitable one, without marsh or hills, about fifty miles away on the outskirts of the college town of Brighton.
The old woman had given her consent to this transaction because of her firm belief that the old should not be a burden to the young, above all when the latter were poor. And she had always maintained that people should be willing to leave the world after a certain age ”

“ Knowledge gained by breaking the law. . . . Alwyn thought with rather unreasonable pride that he had become a man in as nearly as possible the way that men had become heroes or gods.
His grandmother Tower was tossing very feebly, very slowly, from side to side of her pillow. ”

“ There were modern inventions for warming the heart, and certain fires with too bitter smoke had been allowed to go out—except upon old-fashioned, unattractive hearths. And perhaps, if America was to justify its existence, to be justified for the massacre of redskins, the broken white hearts, the destruction of the city called Tenochtitlan or something of the sort—the children of those hearths, reared in, embittered and half-intoxicated by the smoke, would have to do the work. ”

“ You'd better come along with us, West. Or come soon, anyway. I spoke to your mother, and she's willing to try to spare you for a while," he added with a suggestion of affectionate mockery. "Mothers usually have to, whether they're willing or not, more's the pity."
Alwyn's grandmother lost ground during the day; the periodical failing of her heart began again, but much less extremely. Her body had no longer the force either to produce or to endure the former sufferings. The doctor thought that most of her suffering and nearly all of her life were over. ”

“ It will make a lot of work for you and your children. Take it as easy as you can. I hope and pray it won't be for long. I am ready to go, and I want you to let nature take its course. That's all I have to say. Just let nature take its course."
A few days later Alwyn went away to school in Chicago. When he returned the following year in June she was evidently dying, and someone would have to sit up with her regularly. Alwyn had been ill; there was no question of his working on the farm; so he did the work of a night nurse all summer, until his grandmother died. ”

“ In imagination, as adolescent boys, night after night and one indoor afternoon after another, suffer the enjoyment of those whom they have never touched or never even seen—he also had exhausted his boyhood to master an abstraction, a wilderness in the abstract, and to wring from its hypocritically rich body—what? ”

“ The little girls, enchanted to have a part in the formalities, fluttered across the room to the chest of drawers and took them out—three daguerreotypes in cases, some tintypes in an album, two yellow photographs mounted on worn pieces of cardboard: a girl, a young wife, a woman aging but not less strong. ”

“ They believed that children should be envious of no one but their own elders; now there would be an end of the bad example of discontented Yankees going off to school or to town. And for their own comfort, no more interference with their primitive habits, such as beating their wives, animals and children, or their amusements, such as Sunday dancing and drinking. ”