soon the fine weather was at an end. one day it was soft and warm, with a tender blue haze over the distant woods and a sun like a blood-orange in the tranquil sky, and birds twittering about among the elders and sumac along the rail-fences. and the next day everything was gray and lifeless and desolate, with fierce winds sweeping over the bare fields, and driving the cold rain in sheets before them.
some people—among them hurley—said it was the equinoctial that was upon us. abner beech ridiculed this, and proved by the dictionary that the equinoctial meant september 22d, whereas it was now well-nigh the end of october. the irishman conceded that in books this might be so, but stuck wilfully to it that in practice the equinoctial came just before winter set in. after so long a period of saddened silence brooding over our household, it was quite a relief to hear the men argue this question of the weather.
down at the corners old farmers had wrangled over the identity of the equinoctial ever since i could remember. it was pretty generally agreed that each year along some time during the fall, there came a storm which was properly entitled to that name, but at this point harmony ended. some insisted that it came before indian summer, some that it followed that season, and this was further complicated by the fact that no one was ever quite sure when it was indian summer. there were all sorts of rules for recognizing this delectable time of year, rules connected, i recall, with the opening of the chestnut burrs, the movement of birds, and various other incidents in nature’s great processional, but these rules rarely came right in our rough latitude, and sometimes never came at all—at least did not bring with them anything remotely resembling indian summer, but made our autumn one prolonged and miserable succession of storms. and then it was an especially trying trick to pick out the equinoctial from the lot—and even harder still to prove to sceptical neighbors that you were right.
whatever this particular storm may have been it came too soon. being so short-handed on the farm, we were much behind in the matter of drawing our produce to market. and now, after the first day or two of rain, the roads were things to shudder at. it was not so bad getting to and from the corners, for agrippa hill had a gravel formation, but beyond the corners, whichever way one went over the bottom lands of the nedahma valley, it was a matter of lashing the panting teams through seas of mud punctuated by abysmal pitch-holes, into which the wheels slumped over their hubs, and quite generally stuck till they were pried out with fence-rails.
abner beech was exceptionally tender in his treatment of live-stock. the only occasion i ever heard of on which he was tempted into using his big fists upon a fellow-creature, was once, long before my time, when one of his hired men struck a refractory cow over its haunches with a shovel. he knocked this man clear through the stanchions. often jeff and i used to feel that he carried his solicitude for horse-flesh too far—particularly when we wanted to drive down to the creek for a summer evening swim, and he thought the teams were too tired.
so now he would not let us hitch up and drive into octavius with even the lightest loads, on account of the horses. it would be better to wait, he said, until there was sledding; then we could slip in in no time. he pretended that all the signs this year pointed to an early winter.
the result was that we were more than ever shut off from news of the outer world. the weekly paper which came to us was full, i remember, of political arguments and speeches—for a congress and governor were to be elected a few weeks hence—but there were next to no tidings from the front. the war, in fact, seemed to have almost stopped altogether, and this paper spoke of it as a confessed failure. farmer beech and hurley, of course, took the same view, and their remarks quite prepared me from day to day to hear that peace had been concluded.
but down at the corners a strikingly different spirit reigned. it quite surprised me, i know, when i went down on occasion for odds and ends of groceries which the bad roads prevented us from getting in town, to discover that the talk there was all in favor of having a great deal more war than ever.
this store at the corners was also the post-office, and, more important still, it served as a general rallying place for the men-folks of the neighborhood after supper. lee watkins, who kept it, would rather have missed a meal of victuals any day than not to have the “boys” come in of an evening, and sit or lounge around discussing the situation. many of them were very old boys now, garrulous seniors who remembered “matty” van buren, as they called him, and told weird stories of the anti-masonry days.
these had the well-worn arm-chairs nearest the stove, in cold weather, and spat tobacco-juice on its hottest parts with a precision born of long-time experience. the younger fellows accommodated themselves about the outer circle, squatting on boxes, or with one leg over a barrel, sampling the sugar and crackers and raisins in an absent-minded way each evening, till mrs. watkins came out and put the covers on. she was a stout, peevish woman in bloomers, and they said that her husband, lee, couldn’t have run the post-office for twenty-four hours if it hadn’t been for her. we understood that she was a woman’s rights’ woman, which some held was much the same as believing in free love. all that was certain, however, was that she did not believe in free lunches out of her husband’s barrels and cases.
the chief flaw in this village parliament was the absence of an opposition. among all the accustomed assemblage of men who sat about, their hats well back on their heads, their mouths full of strong language and tobacco, there was none to disagree upon any essential feature of the situation with the others. to secure even the merest semblance of variety, those whose instincts were cross-grained had to go out of their way to pick up trifling points of difference, and the arguments over these had to be spun out with the greatest possible care, to be kept going at all. i should fancy, however, that this apparent concord only served to keep before their minds, with added persistency, the fact that there was an opposition, nursing its heretical wrath in solitude up on the beech farm. at all events, i seemed never to go into the grocery of a night without hearing bitter remarks, or even curses, levelled at our household.
it was from these casual visits—standing about on the outskirts of the gathering, beyond the feeble ring of light thrown out by the kerosene lamp on the counter—that i learned how deeply the corners were opposed to peace. it appeared from the talk here that there was something very like treason at the front. the victory at antietam—so dearly bought with the blood of our own people—had been, they said, of worse than no use at all. the defeated rebels had been allowed to take their own time in crossing the potomac comfortably. they had not been pursued or molested since, and the corners could only account for this on the theory of treachery at union headquarters. some only hinted guardedly at this. others declared openly that the north was being sold out by its own generals. as for old “jee” hagadorn, who came in almost every night, and monopolized the talking all the while he was present, he made no bones of denouncing mcclellan and porter as traitors who must be hanged.
quivering with excitement, the red stubbly hair standing up all round his drawn and livid face, his knuckles rapping out one fierce point after another on the candle-box, as he filled the little hot room with angry declamation. “go it, jee!”
“give ’em hell!”
“hangin’s too good for ’em!” his auditors used to exclaim in encouragement, whenever he paused for breath, and then he would start off again still more furiously, till he had to gasp after every word, and screamed “lincoln-ah!” “lee-ah!” “antietam-ah!” and so on, into our perturbed ears. then i would go home, recalling how he had formerly shouted about “adam-ah!” and “eve-ah!” in church, and marvelling that he had never worked himself into a fit, or broken a bloodvessel.
so between what abner and hurley said on the farm, and what was proclaimed at the corners, it was pretty hard to figure out whether the war was going to stop, or go on much worse than ever.
things were still in this doubtful state, when election tuesday came round. i had not known or thought about it, until at the breakfast-table abner said that he guessed he and hurley would go down and vote before dinner. he had some days before.
he comes before me as i write—this thin form secured a package of ballots from the organization of his party at octavius, and these he now took from one of the bookcase drawers, and divided between himself and hurley.
“they won’t be much use, i dessay, peddlin’ ’em at the polls,” he said, with a grim momentary smile, “but, by the eternal, we’ll vote ’em!”
“as many of ’em as they’ll be allowin’ us,” added hurley, in chuckling qualification.
they were very pretty tickets in those days, with marbled and plaided backs in brilliant colors, and spreading eagles in front, over the printed captions. in other years i had shared with the urchins of the neighborhood the excitement of scrambling for a share of these ballots, after they had been counted, and tossed out of the boxes. the conditions did not seem to be favorable for a repetition of that this year, and apparently this occurred to abner, for of his own accord he handed me over some dozen of the little packets, each tied with a thread, and labelled, “state,” “congressional,” “judiciary,” and the like. he, moreover, consented—the morning chores being out of the way—that i should accompany them to the corners. the ground had frozen stiff overnight, and the road lay in hard uncompromising ridges between the tracks of yesterday’s wheels. the two men swung along down the hill ahead of me, with resolute strides and their heads proudly thrown back, as if they had been going into battle. i shuffled, on behind in my new boots, also much excited. the day was cold and raw.
the polls were fixed up in a little building next to the post-office—a one-story frame structure where lee watkins kept his bob-sleigh and oil barrels, as a rule. these had been cleared out into the yard, and a table and some chairs put in in their place. a pane of glass had been taken out of the window. through this aperture the voters, each in his turn, passed their ballots, to be placed by the inspectors in the several boxes ranged along the window-sill inside. a dozen or more men, mainly in army overcoats, stood about on the sidewalk or in the road outside, stamping their feet for warmth, and slapping their shoulders with their hands, between the fingers of which they held little packets of tickets like mine—that is to say, they were like mine in form and brilliancy of color, but i knew well enough that there the resemblance ended abruptly. a yard or so from the window two posts had been driven into the ground, with a board nailed across to prevent undue crowding.
abner and hurley marched up to the polls without a word to any one, or any sign of recognition from the bystanders. their appearance, however, visibly awakened the interest of the corners, and several young fellows who were standing on the grocery steps sauntered over in their wake to see what was going on. these, with the ticket-peddlers, crowded up close to the window now, behind our two men.
“abner beech!” called the farmer through the open pane, in a defiant voice. standing on tiptoe, i could just see the heads of some men inside, apparently looking through the election books. no questions were asked, and in a minute or so abner had voted and stood aside a little, to make room for his companion.
“timothy joseph hurley!” shouted our hired man, standing on his toes to make himself taller, and squaring his weazened shoulders.
“got your naturalization papers?” came out a sharp, gruff inquiry through the window-sash.
“that i have!” said the irishman, wagging his head in satisfaction at having foreseen this trick, and winking blandly into the wall of stolid, hostile faces encircling him. “that i have!”
he drew forth an old and crumpled envelope, from his breast-pocket, and extracted some papers from its ragged folds, which he passed through to the inspector. the latter just cast his eye over the documents and handed them back.
“them ain’t no good!” he said, curtly.
“what’s that you’re saying?” cried the irishman. “sure i’ve voted on thim same papers every year since 1856, an’ niver a man gainsaid me. no good, is it? huh!”
“why ain’t they no good?” boomed in abner beech’s deep, angry voice. he had moved back to the window.
“because they ain’t, that’s enough!” returned the inspector. “don’t block up the window, there! others want to vote!”
“i’ll have the law on yez!” shouted hurley. “i’ll swear me vote in! i’ll—i’ll—”
“aw, shut up, you mick!” some one called out close by, and then there rose another voice farther back in the group: “don’t let him vote! one copperhead’s enough in agrippa!”
“i’ll have the law—” i heard hurley begin again, at the top of his voice, and abner roared out something i could not catch. then as in a flash the whole cluster of men became one confused whirling tangle of arms and legs, sprawling and wrestling on the ground, and from it rising the repellent sound of blows upon flesh, and a discordant chorus of grunts and curses. big chunks of icy mud flew through the air, kicked up by the boots of the men as they struggled. i saw the two posts with the board weave under the strain, then give way, some of the embattled group tumbling over them as they fell. it was wholly impossible to guess who was who in this writhing and tossing mass of fighters. i danced up and down in a frenzy of excitement, watching this wild spectacle, and, so i was told years afterward, screaming with all my might and main.
then all at once there was a mighty upheaval, and a big man half-scrambled, half-hurled himself to his feet. it was abner, who had wrenched one of the posts bodily from under the others, and swung it now high in air. some one clutched it, and for the moment stayed its descent, yelling, meanwhile, “look out! look out!” as though life itself depended on the volume of his voice.
the ground cleared itself as if by magic. on the instant there was only abner standing there with the post in his hands, and little hurley beside him, the lower part of his face covered with blood, and his coat torn half from his back. the others had drawn off, and formed a semicircle just out of reach of the stake, like farm-dogs round a wounded bear at bay. two or three of them had blood about their heads and necks.
there were cries of “kill him!” and it was said afterward that roselle upman drew a pistol, but if he did others dissuaded him from using it. abner stood with his back to the building, breathing hard, and a good deal covered with mud, but eyeing the crowd with a masterful ferocity, and from time to time shifting his hands to get a new grip on that tremendous weapon of his. he said not a word.
the irishman, after a moment’s hesitation, wiped some of the blood from his mouth and jaw, and turned to the window again. “timothy joseph hurley!” he shouted in, defiantly.
this time another inspector came to the front—the owner of the tanyard over on the dutch road, and a man of importance in the district. evidently there had been a discussion inside.
“we will take your vote if you want to swear it in,” he said, in a pacific tone, and though there were some dissenting cries from the crowd without, he read the oath, and hurley mumbled it after him.
then, with some difficulty, he sorted out from his pocket some torn and mud-stained packets of tickets, picked the cleanest out from each, and voted them—all with a fine air of unconcern.
abner beech marched out behind him now with a resolute clutch on the stake. the crowd made reluctant way for them, not without a good many truculent remarks, but with no offer of actual violence. some of the more boisterous ones, led by roselle upman, were for following them, and renewing the encounter beyond the corners. but this, too, came to nothing, and when i at last ventured to cross the road and join abner and hurley, even the cries of “copperhead” had died away.
the sun had come out, and the frosty ruts had softened to stickiness. the men’s heavy boots picked up whole sections of plastic earth as they walked in the middle of the road up the hill.
“what’s the matter with your mouth?” asked abner at last, casting a sidelong glance at his companion. “it’s be’n a-bleedin’.”
hurley passed an investigating hand carefully over the lower part of his face, looked at his reddened fingers, and laughed aloud. “i’d a fine grand bite at the ear of one of them,” he said, in explanation. “‘tis no blood o’ mine.” abner knitted his brows. “that ain’t the way we fight in this country,” he said, in tones of displeasure. “bitin’ men’s ears ain’t no civilized way of behavin’.”
“’twas not much of a day for civilization,” remarked hurley, lightly; and there was no further conversation on our homeward tramp.
