it wasn’t an easy matter for even a member of the family like myself to keep clearly and untangled in his head all the relationships which existed under this patriarchal turnbull roof.
old arphaxed had been married twice. his first wife was the mother of two children, who grew up, and the older of these was my father, wilbur turnbull. he never liked farm-life, and left home early, not without some hard feeling, which neither father nor son ever quite forgot. my father made a certain success of it as a business man in albany until, in the thirties, his health broke down. he died when i was seven and, although he left some property, my mother was forced to supplement this help by herself going to work as forewoman in a large store. she was too busy to have much time for visiting, and i don’t think there was any great love lost between her and the people on the farm; but it was a good healthy place for me to be sent to when the summer vacation came, and withal inexpensive, and so the first of july each year generally found me out at the homestead, where, indeed, nobody pretended to be heatedly fond of me, but where i was still treated well and enjoyed myself. this year it was understood that my mother was coming out to bring me home later on.
the other child of that first marriage was a girl who was spoken of in youth as emmeline, but whom i knew now as aunt em. she was a silent, tough-fibred, hard-working creature, not at all goodlooking, but relentlessly neat, and the best cook i ever knew. even when the house was filled with extra hired men, no one ever thought of getting in any female help, so tireless and so resourceful was em. she did all the housework there was to do, from cellar to garret, was continually lending a hand in the men’s chores, made more butter than the household could eat up, managed a large kitchen-garden, and still had a good deal of spare time, which she spent in sitting out in the piazza in a starched pink calico gown, knitting the while she watched who went up and down the road. when you knew her, you understood how it was that the original turnbulls had come into that part of the country just after the revolution, and in a few years chopped down all the forests, dug up all the stumps, drained the swale-lands, and turned the entire place from a wilderness into a flourishing and fertile home for civilized people. i used to feel, when i looked at her, that she would have been quite equal to doing the whole thing herself.
all at once, when she was something over thirty, em had up and married a mowing-machine agent named abel jones, whom no one knew anything about, and who, indeed, had only been in the neighborhood for a week or so. the family was struck dumb with amazement. the idea of em’s dallying with the notion of matrimony had never crossed anybody’s mind. as a girl she had never had any patience with husking-bees or dances or sleigh-ride parties. no young man had ever seen her home from anywhere, or had had the remotest encouragement to hang around the house. she had never been pretty—so my mother told me—and as she got along in years grew dumpy and thick in figure, with a plain, fat face, a rather scowling brow, and an abrupt, ungracious manner. she had no conversational gifts whatever, and, through years of increasing taciturnity and confirmed unsociability, built up in everybody’s mind the conviction that, if there could be a man so wild and unsettled in intellect as to suggest a tender thought to em, he would get his ears cuffed off his head for his pains.
judge, then, how like a thunderbolt the episode of the mowing-machine agent fell upon the family. to bewildered astonishment there soon enough succeeded rage. this jones was a curly-headed man, with a crinkly black beard like those of joseph’s brethren in the bible picture. he had no home and no property, and didn’t seem to amount to much even as a salesman of other people’s goods. his machine was quite the worst then in the market, and it could not be learned that he had sold a single one in the county. but he had married em, and it was calmly proposed that he should henceforth regard the farm as his home. after this point had been sullenly conceded, it turned out that jones was a widower, and had a boy nine or ten years old, named marcellus, who was in a sort of orphan asylum in vermont. there were more angry scenes between father and daughter, and a good deal more bad blood, before it was finally agreed that the boy also should come and live on the farm.
all this had happened in 1860 or 1861. jones had somewhat improved on acquaintance. he knew about lightning-rods, and had been able to fit out all the farm buildings with them at cost price. he had turned a little money now and again in trades with hop-poles, butter-firkins, shingles, and the like, and he was very ingenious in mending and fixing up odds and ends. he made shelves and painted the woodwork, and put a tar roof on the summer kitchen. even martha, the second mrs. turnbull, came finally to admit that he was handy about a house.
this martha became the head of the household while em was still a little girl. she was a heavy woman, mentally as well as bodily, rather prone to a peevish view of things, and greatly given to pride in herself and her position, but honest, charitable in her way, and not unkindly at heart. on the whole she was a good stepmother, and em probably got on quite as well with her as she would have done with her own mother—even in the matter of the mowing-machine agent.
to martha three sons were born. the two younger ones, myron and warren, have already been seen. the eldest boy, alva, was the pride of the family, and, for that matter, of the whole section.
alva was the first turnbull to go to college. from his smallest boyhood it had been manifest that he had great things before him, so handsome and clever and winning a lad was he. through each of his schooling years he was the honor man of his class, and he finished in a blaze of glory by taking the clark prize, and practically everything else within reach in the way of academic distinctions. he studied law at octavius, in the office of judge schermerhorn, and in a little time was not only that distinguished man’s partner, but distinctly the more important figure in the firm. at the age of twenty-five he was sent to the assembly. the next year they made him district attorney, and it was quite understood that it rested with him whether he should be sent to congress later on, or be presented by the dearborn county bar for the next vacancy on the supreme court bench.
at this point in his brilliant career he married miss serena wadsworth, of wadsworth’s falls. the wedding was one of the most imposing social events the county had known, so it was said, since the visit of lafayette. the wadsworths were an older family, even, than the fairchilds, and infinitely more fastidious and refined. the daughters of the household, indeed, carried their refinement to such a pitch that they lived an almost solitary life, and grew to the parlous verge of old-maidhood simply because there was nobody good enough to marry them. alva turnbull was, however, up to the standard. it could not be said, of course, that his home surroundings quite matched those of his bride; but, on the other hand, she was nearly two years his senior, and this was held to make matters about even.
in a year or so came the war, and nowhere in the north did patriotic excitement run higher than in this old abolition stronghold of upper dearborn. public meetings were held, and nearly a whole regiment was raised in octavius and the surrounding towns alone. alva turnbull made the most stirring and important speech at the first big gathering, and sent a thrill through the whole country-side by claiming the privilege of heading the list of volunteers. he was made a captain by general acclaim, and went off with his company in time to get chased from the field of bull run. when he came home on a furlough in 1863 he was a major, and later on he rose to be lieutenant-colonel. we understood vaguely that he might have climbed vastly higher in promotion but for the fact that he was too moral and conscientious to get on very well with his immediate superior, general boyce, of thessaly, who was notoriously a drinking man.
it was glory enough to have him at the farm, on that visit of his, even as a major. his old parents literally abased themselves at his feet, quite tremulous in their awed pride at his greatness. it made it almost too much to have serena there also, this fair, thin-faced, prim-spoken daughter of the wadsworths, and actually to call her by her first name. it was haying time, i remember, but the hired men that year did not eat their meals with the family, and there was even a question whether marcellus and i were socially advanced enough to come to the table, where serena and her husband were feeding themselves in state with a novel kind of silver implement called a four-tined fork. if em hadn’t put her foot down, out to the kitchen we should both have gone, i fancy. as it was, we sat decorously at the far end of the table, and asked with great politeness to have things passed to us, which by standing up we could have reached as well as not. it was slow, but it made us feel immensely respectable, almost as if we had been born wadsworths ourselves.
we agreed that serena was “stuck up,” and mar-cellus reported aunt em as feeling that her bringing along with her a nursemaid to be waited on hand and foot, just to take care of a baby, was an imposition bordering upon the intolerable. he said that that was the sort of thing the english did until george washington rose and drove them out. but we both felt that alva was splendid.
he was a fine creature physically—taller even than old arphaxed, with huge square shoulders and a mighty frame. i could recall him as without whiskers, but now he had a waving lustrous brown beard, the longest and biggest i ever saw. he didn’t pay much attention to us boys, it was true; but he was affable when we came in his way, and he gave myron and warren each a dollar bill when they went to octavius to see the fourth of july doings. in the evening some of the more important neighbors would drop in, and then alva would talk about the war, and patriotism, and saving the union, till it was like listening to congress itself. he had a rich, big voice which filled the whole room, so that the hired men could hear every word out in the kitchen; but it was even more affecting to see him walking with his father down under the poplars, with his hands making orator’s gestures as he spoke, and old arphaxed looking at him and listening with shining eyes.
well, then, he and his wife went away to visit her folks, and then we heard he had left to join his regiment. from time to time he wrote to his father—letters full of high and loyal sentiments, which were printed next week in the octavius transcript, and the week after in the thessaly banner of liberty. whenever any of us thought about the war—and who thought much of anything else?—it was always with alva as the predominant figure in every picture.
sometimes the arrival of a letter for aunt em, or a chance remark about a broken chair or a clock hopelessly out of kilter, would recall for the moment the fact that abel jones was also at the seat of war. he had enlisted on that very night when alva headed the roll of honor, and he marched away in alva’s company. somehow he got no promotion, but remained in the ranks. not even the members of the family were shown the letters aunt em received, much less the printers of the newspapers. they were indeed poor misspelled scrawls, about which no one displayed any interest or questioned aunt em. even marcellus rarely spoke of his father, and seemed to share to the full the family’s concentration of thought upon alva.
thus matters stood when spring began to play at being summer in the year of ‘64. the birds came and the trees burst forth into green, the sun grew hotter and the days longer, the strawberries hidden under the big leaves in our yard started into shape, where the blossoms had been, quite in the ordinary, annual way, with us up north. but down where that dread thing they called “the war” was going on, this coming of warm weather meant more awful massacre, more tortured hearts, and desolated homes, than ever before. i can’t be at all sure how much later reading and associations have helped out and patched up what seem to be my boyish recollections of this period; but it is, at all events, much clearer in my mind than are the occurrences of the week before last.
we heard a good deal about how deep the mud was in virginia that spring. all the photographs and tin-types of officers which found their way to relatives at home, now, showed them in boots that came up to their thighs. everybody understood that as soon as this mud dried up a little, there was to be most terrific doings. the two great lines of armies lay scowling at each other, still on that blood-soaked fighting ground between washington and richmond where they were three years before. only now things were to go differently. a new general was at the head of affairs, and he was going in, with jaws set and nerves of steel, to smash, kill, burn, annihilate, sparing nothing, looking not to right or left, till the red road had been hewed through to richmond. in the first week of may this thing began—a push forward all along the line—and the north, with scared eyes and fluttering heart, held its breath.
my chief personal recollection of these historic forty days is that one morning i was awakened early by a noise in my bedroom, and saw my mother looking over the contents of the big chest of drawers which stood against the wall. she was getting out some black articles of apparel. when she discovered that i was awake, she told me in a low voice that my uncle alva had been killed. then a few weeks later my school closed, and i was packed off to the farm for the vacation. it will be better to tell what had happened as i learned it there from marcellus and the others.
along about the middle of may, the weekly paper came up from octavius, and old arphaxed turnbull, as was his wont, read it over out on the piazza before supper. presently he called his wife to him, and showed her something in it. martha went out into the kitchen, where aunt em was getting the meal ready, and told her, as gently as she could, that there was very bad news for her; in fact, her husband, abel jones, had been killed in the first day’s battle in the wilderness, something like a week before. aunt em said she didn’t believe it, and martha brought in the paper and pointed out the fatal line to her. it was not quite clear whether this convinced aunt em or not. she finished getting supper, and sat silently through the meal, afterwards, but she went upstairs to her room before family prayers. the next day she was about as usual, doing the work and saying nothing. marcellus told me that to the best of his belief no one had said anything to her on the subject. the old people were a shade more ceremonious in their manner toward her, and “the boys” and the hired men were on the lookout to bring in water for her from the well, and to spare her as much as possible in the routine of chores, but no one talked about jones. aunt em did not put on mourning. she made a black necktie for marcellus to wear to church, but stayed away from meeting herself.
a little more than a fortnight afterwards, myron was walking down the road from the meadows one afternoon, when he saw a man on horseback coming up from the poplars, galloping like mad in a cloud of dust. the two met at the gate. the man was one of the hired helps of the wadsworths, and he had ridden as hard as he could pelt from the falls, fifteen miles away, with a message, which now he gave myron to read. both man and beast dripped sweat, and trembled with fatigued excitement. the youngster eyed them, and then gazed meditatively at the sealed envelope in his hand.
“i s’pose you know what’s inside?” he asked, looking up at last.
the man in the saddle nodded, with a tell-tale look on his face, and breathing heavily.
myron handed the letter back, and pushed the gate open. “you’d better go up and give it to father yourself,” he said. “i ain’t got the heart to face him—jest now, at any rate.”
marcellus was fishing that afternoon, over in the creek which ran through the woods. just as at last he was making up his mind that it must be about time to go after the cows, he saw myron sitting on a log beside the forest path, whittling mechanically, and staring at the foliage before him, in an obvious brown study. marcellus went up to him, and had to speak twice before myron turned his head and looked up.
“oh! it’s you, eh, bubb?” he remarked dreamily, and began gazing once more into the thicket.
“what’s the matter?” asked the puzzled boy.
“i guess alvy’s dead,” replied myron. to the lad’s comments and questions he made small answer. “no,” he said at last, “i don’t feel much like goin’ home jest now. lea’ me alone here; i’ll prob’ly turn up later on.” and marcellus went alone to the pasture, and thence, at the tail of his bovine procession, home.
when he arrived he regretted not having remained with myron in the woods. it was like coming into something which was prison, hospital, and tomb in one. the household was paralyzed with horror and fright. martha had gone to bed, or rather had been put there by em, and all through the night, when he woke up, he heard her broken and hysterical voice in moans and screams. the men had hitched up the grays, and arphaxed turnbull was getting into the buggy to drive to octavius for news when the boy came up. he looked twenty years older than he had at noon—all at once turned into a chalkfaced, trembling, infirm old man—and could hardly see to put his foot on the carriage-step. his son warren had offered to go with him, and had been rebuffed almost with fierceness. warren and the others silently bowed their heads before this mood; instinct told them that nothing but arphaxed’s show of temper held him from collapse—from falling at their feet and grovelling on the grass with cries and sobs of anguish, perhaps even dying in a fit. after he had driven off they forbore to talk to one another, but went about a chalkfaced, trembling, infirm old man—and could hardly see to put his foot on the carriage-step. his son warren had offered to go with him, and had been rebuffed almost with fierceness. warren and the others silently bowed their heads before this mood; instinct told them that nothing but arphaxed’s show of temper held him from collapse—from falling at their feet and grovelling on the grass with cries and sobs of anguish, perhaps even dying in a fit. after he had driven off they forbore to talk to one another, but went about noiselessly with drooping chins and knotted brows.
“it jest took the tuck out of everything,” said marcellus, relating these tragic events to me. there was not much else to tell. martha had had what they call brain fever, and had emerged from this some weeks afterward a pallid and dim-eyed ghost of her former self, sitting for hours together in her rocking-chair in the unused parlor, her hands idly in her lap, her poor thoughts glued ceaselessly to that vague, far-off virginia which folks told about as hot and sunny, but which her mind’s eye saw under the gloom of an endless and dreadful night. arphaxed had gone south, still defiantly alone, to bring back the body of his boy. an acquaintance wrote to them of his being down sick in washington, prostrated by the heat and strange water; but even from his sick-bed he had sent on orders to an undertaking firm out at the front, along with a hundred dollars, their price in advance for embalming. then, recovering, he had himself pushed down to headquarters, or as near them as civilians might approach, only to learn that he had passed the precious freight on the way. he posted back again, besieging the railroad officials at every point with inquiries, scolding, arguing, beseeching in turn, until at last he overtook his quest at juno mills junction, only a score of miles from home.
then only he wrote, telling people his plans. he came first to octavius, where a funeral service was held in the forenoon, with military honors, the wadsworths as the principal mourners, and a memorable turnout of distinguished citizens. the town-hall was draped with mourning, and so was alva’s pew in the episcopal church, which he had deserted his ancestral methodism to join after his marriage. old arphaxed listened to the novel burial service of his son’s communion, and watched the clergyman in his curious white and black vestments, with sombre pride. he himself needed and desired only a plain and homely religion, but it was fitting that his boy should have organ music and flowers and a ritual.
dana pillsbury had arrived in town early in the morning with the grays, and a neighbor’s boy had brought in the buggy. immediately after dinner arphaxed had gathered up alva’s widow and little daughter, and started the funeral cort猫ge upon its final homeward stage.
and so i saw them arrive on that july afternoon.
