Conrad Aiken - The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

“And did he beat her?”

“Yes, he beat her.”

Captain Phippen’s face had become grim.

“Your aunts happened to be driving by—I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t save her life! They went in with Jim and stopped him.”

“Oh!”

“And now we’ll talk about gingerbread.”

Of course, I didn’t dare ask my aunts about that scene, much as I burned with curiosity. The whole thing seemed to me such a queer mixture of things—the beatings and the hymn-singings and the drinking—that I couldn’t in the least fathom it. As a result of a few hints to Jim, while driving Lemon to and from the hill pasture, or passing the Willards on our way to Hackley Falls for supplies (when the subject could be brought up quite naturally with a “There’s the Willards’, isn’t it?”) I added a new small item or two, but nothing of great importance. Apparently they were very poor and made only a bare living by selling milk and butter. Old Isaac was a tyrant. He made his wife and Lydia do all the work, while he himself got drunk night after night, slept it off in the morning, and read the Bible all afternoon. He had a violent temper, and at such times went purple in the face. Once he had gone into the post office, and accused the postmaster, Mr. Greene (who also ran the general store), of reading his mail. The fight which ensued was of epic splendor. Isaac had jumped over the counter and grabbed Greene by the throat. They had catapulted all over the store, knocking down boxes of shoes, upsetting glass cases full of cheap candy, wrapping themselves in ladies’ muslin dresses, and finally had both rolled right through one of the front shop-windows. Mr. Greene had cut his right forearm so badly that it had to have seven stitches. Eye-witnesses said that Isaac’s face was the color of an eggplant. For some strange reason, there had been no arrest; and later on Isaac had walked in one afternoon (when sober, I suppose) and publicly apologized and walked out again. It was still considered the best fight Hackley Falls had ever seen. Isaac, although fifteen years older than Mr. Greene, had had all the best of it—everybody had marveled at his strength. I never went into the store for the mail without hoping that Mr. Greene might, by some chance, have his right sleeve rolled up, so that I could see the scar, but he never did. I imagine he wasn’t too proud of it.

Nevertheless, and not so long after my talk with Captain Phippen, it was thanks to Mr. Greene that I made the first of my only two actual visits to the Willard farm. I had walked down one afternoon to get a pound of coffee, and after I had got the tight fragrant paper bag under my arm and paid for it, Mr. Greene looked at me appraisingly over his glasses. He was holding a letter in his hand.

“Billy,” he said, “I guess you’d be a good messenger. I’ll give you ten cents to deliver this letter to Isaac Willard. What do you say?”

“Sure!”

“Are you going right back?”

“Sure!”

“All right.”

He gave me the letter and the ten cents, and I started out almost at a run. It was too good to be true. I had seen at once, by the long blue stamp with a picture of a messenger boy on it, that it was a special-delivery letter—though heaven knows why old Isaac should be getting a special delivery. It came from Bennington, Vermont, and there was a name in the upper left-hand corner of it, but I can’t remember what it was. Anyway, I was tremendously excited. What would be happening when I got there? Should I hear the whip or the razor strop going, or screams? It even occurred to me, naturally, that I might have to cut and run for it myself; it might be one of the days when the old man looked like an eggplant. And had Mr. Greene sent the letter by me because he was afraid to take it himself?

That was a disquieting thought and made me slow down my steps. It was quite possible. Nobody liked to go to the Willard farm, which was one of the reasons why their milk business had fallen away to almost nothing. As Jim had told me, if it weren’t for everybody’s feeling sorry for old Mrs. Willard and Lydia, nobody would have taken their dirty milk anyway. It was Mrs. Willard and Lydia who took the orders and delivered the milk (in an old blue wagon) and collected the bills. If it hadn’t been for Mrs. Willard, Jim said, they’d all have starved to death.

The footbridge fascinated me. It consisted of two wide planks, laid over a series of rotten piles, with a handrail at either side. The water under it was very shallow and littered with every kind of débris. There were innumerable tin cans, bottles, fragments of rusted iron, quantities of broken glass—even an old muskrat trap, with a piece of rusted chain still attached, which I thought a little of salvaging. I stood there for several minutes, looking down into the water, and out of the corner of my eye glancing also at the house. There was no sign of life, not a sound. I could see the half-dozen cows up on the hill—a spur of Hateful—a half mile above me. All the windows were shuttered, except one on the ground floor, to the right of the door; and this, despite the hot weather, was closed. As I walked up the brick path I saw two humming-birds dart out of the trumpet-vine and whizz round the corner; and I caught the strong, rank smell from the cow-yard at the other end. I went up the four steps to the shabby porch and knocked at the door. Standing there, I could see into the cow-yard, which was paved with cobbles. Or rather, it had been paved at one time; now, one merely saw the cobbles here and there, amid dung and water. An old tub and pump stood at the far end, and beyond that the dilapidated shed.

I waited for several minutes without hearing anything and then, somewhat timidly, knocked again. The door withdrew itself swiftly from my knock, and a white-haired woman stood before me. She was tall, and had the blackest and fiercest eyes I have ever seen. She was rubbing one red fist against her blue-checked apron.

“Well!” she said, snappishly. And then, before I could muster speech, “ What is it?”

I felt guilty, and stammered something about a letter for Mr. Willard, holding it out toward her half-heartedly.

At that, she merely said “Isaac!” in a sharp voice, and turned her back on me. As she walked away, I had a glimpse into the room. It was large, with a huge fireplace, but almost entirely bare. There were no rugs on the unpainted floor, which looked spotlessly clean, and the furniture consisted of three or four ordinary kitchen chairs and a kitchen table. Isaac I saw at once—he was sitting at the table with a book open before him. If he had heard his wife, he gave no sign of it. He continued to read as if nothing whatever had occurred. And while I waited for him to move, I saw another woman—Lydia, I supposed—at the other end of the table. Her head was down on the table, her arms outstretched, her hands clasped. I thought I saw her shoulders moving. Then Isaac rose, put his hand flat on the page for a moment, as if for a kind of emphasis, and came toward the door. He wore red rubber boots which swished as he walked, and his steps were heavy. His face—as I saw when he stood before me, or rather above me—was narrow and high and flushed, with the gray suspicious eyes set very close together. His mouth, turned downwards at the corners, was curiously arched over his big teeth, and the effect was a mixture of ferocity and weakness.

“Well?” he said.

“It’s a letter for you,” I said.

“Why didn’t Mr. Greene bring it?”

“I don’t know, sir. He asked me to bring it.”

“Well, by Ephraim!…” He closed up his eyes to slits and glared. “Give it here. And don’t you ever do his dirty work again.”

He took hold of my shoulder so firmly with thumb and forefinger that it hurt me. “You hear?”