An Ignoble Martyr
Davis, Rebecca Harding
Page 604
AN IGNOBLE MARTYR.
BY REBECCA HARDING DAVIS.
OLD Aaron Pettit, who had tried to live for ten years with half of his body dead from paralysis, had given up at last. He was altogether dead now, and laid away out of sight in the three-cornered lot where the Pettits had been buried since colonial days. The graveyard was a triangle cut out of the wheat field by a certain Osee Pettit in 1695. Many a time had Aaron, while ploughing, stopped to lean over the fence and calculate how many bushels of grain the land thus given up to the dead men would have yielded.
"They can keep it. not plough it up," he would mumble to himself with conscious virtue. "But land was to be hed for the fencin' then, evidently, or no Pettit would have put corpses in it that might as well have lain in the churchyard."
Now Aaron himself was in the wasted triangle, and as his daughter Jane saw his coffin lowered into it she felt a wrench of pity for him, because he never again could see the wheat grow in the lot around him, nor count how many dollars profit it would yield that year to pay the interest on the mortgage. It was natural that she should feel that he was really dead in just that way, for the wheat lot was the only field owned by the Pettits, and that mortgage their only active interest in life.
When the funeral was over, the neighbors, as is the custom in South Leedom, came back to the house, and sat in silence for half an hour in the little parlor. The undertaker had given the silver plate from the coffin lid to Jane, as the oldest child, and she hung it up now with a sad pride over the mantel-shelf. There were six other coffin plates there, the only decorations on the parlor wall.
Her younger brother, who had left "the mourners" and was in the kitchen, called her out impatiently. "Are you going to leave that horrible thing up there, Jenny?" he said.
"Horrible!" said Jane, aghast. "It is very handsome, Bowles. It cost three dollars and sixty-three cents. And why should I show disrespect to father?"
"Oh, if it is counted disrespect! -- Jane, can't we give these people a cup of tea? There are the Waces, they have come ten miles, and they have to go back without any dinner. And the Fords. Some tea and dough-nuts." He looked anxiously into her face.
The heat rose into Jane's cheeks, and her eyes shone. There was something delightful to her in this bold proposal, for she had, unknown to herself, a hospitable soul. She had never seen a stranger break bread under their roof. But on such an occasion as this --
"What would mother say?" she whispered. "Oh, no, no, Bowles! I can't do it. There are ten of them" -- peering into the parlor -- "ten. It would take a quarter of a pound of tea; and then the sugar. Oh no, we couldn't afford it!" and she went back and sat down again with the mourners, comforting herself that nobody would expect to be fed. In North Leedom the folks did not eat in each others' houses. It would have been thought a wicked waste to "treat to victuals," as, it was reported, was the common custom in larger towns.
This was no time, Jane felt, for her to appear eccentric or extravagant; and it would have been extravagant. Tea and cakes for ten would have made a big break in the money to be saved for the fall payment on the mortgage.
The Pettits during the next week took up the thread of their daily life unbroken. The little four-roomed house had, of course, a thorough cleaning. Undertakers and neighbors had left dust behind them. Mrs. Pettit had prayed for grace to help her bear the pains which death had left; but dirt she would not put up with. The furniture was all taken out in the yard to be sunned; the stair carpet, with its hundred neat patches was washed, dried, and tacked down again. The furniture in the house was of the cheapest kind, but it had belonged to Mrs. Pettit's grandmother, and had always been cared for with a tender reverence, not because of its associations, but for its money value. Indeed, so much of the lives of the Pettit women for generations had gone into the care of these speckless chairs and tables that one might suspect a likeness between the condition of their souls and that of the filthy Feejeean who worships the string of bones which he polishes incessantly.
Page 605
Bowles despised the tables and chairs. But the mortgage! That was another thing -- a thing so serious that it seemed to overshadow, to choke his whole life. John Pettit, his grandfather, in some great emergency, had put the house under a mortgage, had worked for thirty years to clear it off, and died, leaving the task to Aaron. Aaron had accepted it as a sacred trust; every penny he could save had gone to it. Now he was dead, and there was still a thousand dollars due on it.
Mrs. Pettit was too nearly blind to work. Jane sewed on men's seersucker coats for a factory in Boston. She was paid sixty cents a dozen for them. This paid the taxes and bought their clothes.
Bowles knew that his mother and sister and all of the village expected him to take up the payment of this mortgage as the work of his life.
The minister, old Mr. Himms, had said as much to him after the funeral.
"It is a noble ambition, my boy," he said, "for a man to own the home of his fathers free of debt. In our New England towns there are thousands of men and women struggling in dire poverty all their lives with this aim before them."
"This aim!" What aim?
Bowles, sitting one Sunday evening under the old elm-tree as the sun was going down, looked at the ugly, bare little house and hated it. Had life nothing more for him than that?
He looked about him. North Leedom was made up of just such ugly, clean, bare houses. There were no trees on the sidewalks, no flowers in the yards. The people were poor, and they had reduced economy to an art so hard and cruel that it dominated them now in body and soul. To save was no longer a disagreeable necessity for them; it had become the highest of duties.
The Pettits had always crept along in the same rut with their neighbors. They would not buy food sufficient to satisfy their craving stomachs. With each generation they grew leaner and weaker; the sallow skin clung more tightly to their bones; the men became victims of dyspepsia, the women of nervous prostration.
Each generation, too, carried the niggard economy a little farther. They "could not afford time" for flowers nor for music; they could not afford to buy books nor newspapers. They came at last in their fierce zeal for saving to begrudge smiles and welcomes to each other or kisses and hugs to their children. They stripped their lives of all the little kindly amenities, the generosities of feeling and word which make life elsewhere cheerful and tender.
Bowles Pettit, thinking over the lives of his neighbors and family, tried to judge fairly of his own. But he was ashamed to find that he could scarcely think at all, he was so hungry. He was a big, raw-boned, growing boy; the nervous strain of the last week had been severe on him. He needed food, and he knew he would not have enough to-day. He could not remember the day when he had had enough. He knew how it would be. Presently the cracked tea bell would ring, and he would go in to eat a small slice of cold, soggy pie, washed down with a glass of cold water. To-morrow morning for breakfast more cold pie and a dough-nut. For dinner, potatoes and cold milk only. On Mondays, when Jane had to make a fire for the washing, a pound of cheap meat was boiled, which furnished dinner for three days.
Bowles had no trade. He was what was called in North Leedom "a helper." He could do a bit of carpenter or mason work, or paint a door, or plough a field when called upon, for which he received a few pennies. There was no opening in the dead village for any regular business. It was out of these occasional few pennies that he must support the family and save the thousand dollars for the mortgage.
There was a slight quiver on the boys cleft chin as he sat staring at the mortgaged ...
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Go to the beginning of the document
Go to previous page
Go to next page
Go to the end of document
