my father's death, which occurred the march following, came suddenly, wholly fortuitous to the outward eye, and i have heard my mother say, in its inconsequence, its failure to line up with any conceivable moral occasion, did much to shake her faith in a controlling providence; but affects me still as then, as the most incontrovertible of evidences of powers moving at large among men, occupied with other affairs than ours. a little while ago, as i sat writing here on my veranda, looking riverward, an ant ran across my paper, which i blew out with my breath into space, and i did not look to see what disaster. it reminded me suddenly of the way i felt about my father's taking off. he was, he must have been, in the way of some god that march morning; that is one of the evidences by which you know that there are gods at all. you play happily about their knees, sometimes they play with you, then you stumble against a foot thrust out, or the clamour of your iniquity disturbs their proper meditations, and suddenly you are silenced. my mother was doubtless right; it would have been better if he had stayed with her and the children, certainly happier, but he got in the way of the powers.
it is curious that until i began just now to reconstruct the circumstances in which the news of his death came to me, i never realized that i might have been looking on, but high above it, at the very instant and occasion, for, from the window of my room in the second story of the taylorville grammar school i could see the unfinished walls of the zimmern block aglimmer with the light which the wind heaped up and shattered against their raw pink surfaces, and a loose board of the scaffolding allowed to remain up all winter, flacking like a torn leaf in the mighty current in which the school building, all the buildings, shook with the steady tremor of reeds in a freshet. between them the tops of the maples, level like a shorn hedge, kept up an immensity of tormented motion that invaded even the schoolroom with a sense of its insupportable fatigues. i remember there were few at their desks that day, and all the discipline relaxed by the confusion of the wind. at the morning recess there had been some debate about dismissing the session, and one of the young teachers on the third floor had grown hysterical and been reprimanded by the principal.
it must have been about eleven of the clock, while i was watching the little puffs of dust that rose between the planks of the flooring whenever the building shuddered and ground its teeth, divided between an affectation of timorousness which seemed to grow in favour as a suitable frame of behaviour, and the rapid rise of every tingling sense to the spacious movement of the weather and my private dramatization of the demolition of the building, from which only such occupants as i favoured should be rescued by my signal behaviour. already several children had been abstracted by anxious parents, so that i failed to be even startled by another knocking until my attention was attracted by the teacher opening the door, and opening it wide upon my uncle alva.
i saw him step back with a motion of his head sidewise, to draw her after him, but it took all the suggestive nods and winks that, as she drew it shut behind her, were focussed on my desk, to pull me up to the realization that his visit must have something to do with me. it was not, in fact, until i was halfway down the aisle after miss jessel called me, that i recovered my surprise sufficiently to assume the mysteriously important air that was proper to the fifth grade on being privileged to answer the door.
there was not, i am sure, in the brief information that i was wanted at home, one betraying syllable; nothing sufficiently unusual in the way miss jessel tied me into my hood, nor in finding effie tied into hers on the first floor, nor in the way her teacher kissed her—everybody kissed effie who was allowed—nothing in forester's having already cleared out without waiting for us. we got into the town in the wake of uncle alva and between the business blocks where the tall buildings abated the wind. there was no traffic in the streets that day. here and there a foot passenger with his hat held down by both hands and his coat tails between his legs, staggered into doorways which were snapped to behind him, and from the glass of which faces looked out featureless in the blur of the wind. as we passed the side door of a men's clothing establishment one of these pale human orbs approached to the pane, exhibited a peering movement, rapped on the glass and beckoned. i know now this must have been the working of an instinct to which taylorville was so habituated that it seemed natural to uncle alva—he was only my mother's half brother, not my father's—to send us on with a word about overtaking us, while he crossed the street at the instance of that beckoning finger to be chaffered with in the matter of my father's grave clothes. all this time there was not a word spoken that could convey to us children the import of our unexpected release. we drifted down the street, effie and i, sidling against the blasts that drove furiously in the crossways, and finally as we caught our breath under a long red sandstone building, i recall being taken violently, as it were, by knowledge, and crying out that my father was dead, that he was dead and i should never see him again. i do not know how i knew, but i knew, and effie accepted it; she came cuddling up to me in the smother of the wind, trying to comfort me as if, as i think did not occur to her, he had been my father only and not hers at all. i do not recall very well how we got across the town between the shut houses, high shouldered with the cold, except that uncle alva did not come up with us, and the vast lapping of the wind that swirled us together at intervals in a community of breathlessness, seemed somehow to have grown out of the occasion and be naturally commensurate with its desolating quality. i do not think it occurred to us as strange that we should have been left so to come to the knowledge that grew until, as we came in sight of our home, we were fairly taken aback to find it so little altered from what it had been when we left it three hours before. it had never been an attractive house: yellow painted, with chocolate trimmings and unshuttered windows against which the wind contrived. it cowered in a wide yard full of unpruned maples that now held up their limbs protestingly, that shook off from their stretched boughs, disclaimers of responsibility; the very smoke wrenched itself from the chimney and escaped, hurryingly upon the wind; the shrubbery wrung itself; whole flights of fallen leaves that had settled soddenly beside the borders all the winter, having at last got a plain sight of it, whirled up aghast and fled along the road. the blinds were down at the front windows, and no one came in or out.
i remember our hanging there on the opposite side of the street for an appreciable interval before trusting ourselves to a usualness which every moment began to appear more frightening, and being snatched back from the brink of panic by the rattle of wheels in the road behind us as a light buggy, all aglitter from point to point of its natty furnishings, drew up at our gate and discharged from the seat beside the driver a youngish man, all of a piece with the turnout, in the trim and shining blackness of his exterior, who, with a kind of subdued tripping, ran up the walk and entered at the door without a knock. i am not sure that effie identified him as the man who had taken away the babies, indeed, the two who came after effie were so close together and went so soon, that i have heard her say that she has no recollection of anything except a house enlivened by continuous baby; but she had the knowledge common to every taylorville child of the undertaker as the only man who was let softly in at unknocked doors, with his frock coat buttoned tight and the rim of his black hat held against his freshly shaven chin. we snatched the knowledge from one another as we caught hands together and fairly dove into the side entrance that opened on the living room.
the first thing i was aware of was the sound of forester blubbering, and then of the place being full of neighbours and my mother sitting by the fire in a chair out of the best room, crying heartily. we flung ourselves upon her, crying too, and were gathered up in a violence of grief and rocking, through which i could hear a great many voices in a kind of frightened and extenuating remonstrance, "come now, mrs. lattimore. now sally—there, there——" at every word of which my mother's sobbing broke out afresh. i remember getting done with my crying first and being very hot and uncomfortable and thinking of nothing but how i should wriggle out of her embrace and get away, anywhere to escape from the burden of having to seem to care; and then, but whether it was immediately after i am not sure, going rather heavily upstairs and being overtaken in the middle of it by the dramatic suggestion of myself as an orphan child toiling through the world—i dare say i had read something like that recently—and carrying out the suggestion with an immense effect on uncle alva, who happened to be coming down at that moment. and then the insidious spread through all my soul of cold disaster, out of which i found myself unable to rise even to the appearance of how much i cared.
of all that time my father lay dead in the best room, for by the usual taylorville procedure the funeral could not take place until the afternoon of the second day, i have only snatches of remembrance: of my being taken in to look at him as he lay in the coffin in a very nice coat which i had never seen him wear, and the sudden conviction i had of its somehow being connected with that mysterious summons which had taken uncle alva away from us that morning in the street; of the "sitting up," which was done both nights by groups of neighbours, mostly young; and the festive air it had with the table spread with the best cloth and notable delicacies; and mine and forester's reprisals against one another as to the impropriety of squabbling over the remains of a layer cake. and particularly of cousin judd.
he came about dusk from the farm—he had been sent for—looking shocked, and yet with a kind of enjoyable solemnity, i thought; and the first thing he wished to do was to pray with my poor mother.
"we must submit ourselves to the will of god, sally," he urged.
"o god! god!" said my mother, walking up and down. "i'm not so sure god had anything to do with it."
"it's a wrong spirit, sally, a wrong spirit—a spirit of rebellion." my mother began to cry.
"why couldn't god have left him alone? what had he done that he should be taken away? what have i done——"
"you mustn't take it like this, sally. think of your duty to your children. 'the lord giveth'——"
"go tell him to give me back my husband, then——"
effie and i cowered in our corner between the base burner and the sewing machine; it was terrible to hear them so, quarrelling about god. my mother had her hands to her head as she walked; her figure touched by the firelight, not quite spoiled by childbearing, looked young to me.
"oh! oh! oh!" she cried with every step.
"you mustn't, sally; you'll be punished for it——"
cousin judd shook with excitement; he was bullying her about her christian submission. i went up to him suddenly and struck him on the arm with my fist.
"you let her alone!" i cried. "let her alone!"
somebody spoke out sharply, i think; a hand plucked me from behind—to my amazement my mother's.
"olivia, olivia may! i am surprised ... and your father not out of the house yet. go up to your room and see if you can't learn to control yourself!"
after all there was some excuse for cousin judd. there was, in the general estimate, something more than fortuitous circumstance that went to my father's taking off. early in the winter, when work had been stopped on the zimmern building, there had been a good deal of talk about some local regulations as to the removal of scaffolding and the security of foot passengers. that the contractors had not been brought to book about it was thought to be due to official connivance; my father had written to the paper about it. but the scaffolding had remained until that morning of the high wind, when it came down all together and a bit of the wall with it. that my father should have been passing on his way to the courthouse at the moment, was a leaping together of circumstances that seemed somehow to have raised it to the plane of a moral instance. it provided just that element of the dramatic in human affairs, which somehow wakens the conviction of having always expected it; though it hardly appeared why my father, rather than the contractor or the convincing city official, should have been the victim. if it wasn't an act of providence, it was so like one that it contributed to bring out to the funeral more people than might otherwise have ventured themselves in such weather.
it was also thought that if anything of that nature could have made up to her, my mother should have found much to console her in the funeral. the masons took part in it, as also the g. a. r. and the republican club, though they might have made a more imposing show of numbers if all the societies had not been so largely composed of the same members. in addition to all this, my mother's crape came quite to the hem of her dress and effie and i had new hats. i remember those hats very well; they had very tall crowns and narrow brims and velvet trimmings, and we tried them on for pauline allingham after we had gone up to bed the night before the funeral. mrs. allingham had called and pauline had been allowed to come up to us. i remember her asking how we felt, and effie's being as much impressed by the way in which i carried off the situation as if she had not been in the least concerned in it. and then we sat up in bed in our nightgowns and tried on the hats while pauline walked about to get the effect from both sides, and refrained, in respect to the occasion, from offering any criticism.
it was the evening after the funeral and everybody had gone away but one good neighbour. the room had been set in order while we were away at the cemetery; the lamp was lit and there was a red glow on everything from the deep heart of the base burner. the woman went about softly to set a meal for us, and under the lamp there was a great bowl of quince marmalade which she had brought over neighbourly from her own stores; the colour of it played through the clear glass like a stain upon the white cloth. it happened to have been a favourite dish of my father's.
for the last year it had been a family use, he being delicate in his appetite, to make a point of saving for him anything which he might possibly eat, and taking the greatest satisfaction in his enjoyment. therefore it came quite natural for me to get a small dish from the cupboard and begin to serve out a portion of mrs. mason's preserves for my father. all at once it came over me ... the meaning of bereavement; that there was nobody to be done for tenderly; the loss of it ... the need of the heart for all its offices of loving ... and the unavailing pain.
