Conrad Aiken - The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

“Yes, sir!”

“And now, git!”

And with that he shut the door so quickly that I had to do a sort of skip to avoid having any feet caught against the jamb.

When my aunts and Jim heard of this expedition, they were unfeignedly horrified. I was told never to do such a thing again—never to go to the house, nor even on the Willard land. My Aunt Julia was especially alarmed. She seemed to feel that I had done well to escape with my life! Even Jim, I could see, was concerned; he shook his head and solemnly advised me to give old Isaac a wide berth.

“If you’d a’ struck him on one of his bad days,” he said, ruminating, “you might have got a hell of a licking, and a sermon thrown in. There was a kid in Hackley Falls got beaten black and blue once.”

“Who was it?”

“Well, I don’t remember.”

“What had he done?”

“Well, I don’t remember that either. But you keep away from there, Billy, and it won’t do you no harm. That’s what I say.”

All of this not unnaturally only whetted more keenly my appetite for further adventure, and it wasn’t long before I had discovered a new and thrilling pastime. Crossing the Mill River by the covered bridge, I would then turn westward, climb up what was called the Rock Pasture, one of those delightful New England hillsides of granite and cedar and juniper, and eventually come to the wood which covered the long spur of Hateful Mountain. This spur ran westward as far as Hackley Falls itself, roughly paralleling the river. It had occurred to me that if I were to scout through the edge of the woods, I should eventually come out at the upper end of Isaac’s cow-pasture. And from there, taking cover behind the firs or birches or rocks, it would be easy to get a view of the Willard house, and from no very great distance.

What profit I expected to get from this, heaven knows! The first time I did it I took elaborate precautions—climbed high into the maple and chestnut grove, and then, when I began to approach Willard’s farm, got down and crawled forward on my hands and knees. I crept through the fringe of white birches at the edge of the pasture and then found to my delight that I could make my way down the hill toward the house by crawling from rock to rock, at last taking up a position not more than three hundred yards from the back of the house. Here I had admirable shelter—a great granite boulder, covered with silvery lichens, beside which grew a cedar tree. There was a warm hollow of grass behind it and, looking between the rock and the tree, I could see perfectly without in the least being seen. Old Isaac’s cows grazed peacefully round me, not at all disturbed; and I could look straight down into the cow-yard to which they would eventually be driven.

The house itself was shuttered, at the back, as in front. There were two doors—one leading down into the cow-yard, from the side, and another at the back, from which occasionally Mrs. Willard would come out to hang her washing on the clothesline, or she and Lydia together to work in the small vegetable garden. On such occasions they both wore old-fashioned calico bonnets. They worked grimly and in silence, hoeing and digging like men. At the end of the patch nearer to me, they were scarcely a hundred yards away, and I could hear the regular clink of their hoes on the pebbles, and once in a long while a remark—usually made by old Mrs. Willard and usually very brief and sharp. They never looked at each other when they spoke. When, now and then, they paused for a rest, they would stand with their hands on their hoes and gaze down toward the house. There seemed to me something ominous in the way they did this—they never looked anywhere else and they were always perfectly silent. It gave me the shivers. As for the old man, I wondered what he was doing. I never heard him singing, as he was supposed to do every afternoon, and very seldom saw him. Once in a long while he would come out of the house and lurch across the cow-yard to the shed—what he went for, I don’t know—perhaps cider.

I made this expedition many times in my first three summers at Hackley Falls; and by degrees, as nothing spectacular ever happened, I was beginning to think myself a fool. Still, the rumors about the Willards grew in number and intensity—they were becoming almost legendary figures of heroic size—and it was easy enough, even for a boy, to see that all three of them were half crazy; one had only to watch the way they walked. Moreover, I had got into the habit of going to the Willard pasture—it was something to do. And in the fall there were the chestnut trees, the best of which were directly north of the field. I used to go there and club the trees and then carry my spoils down to my Tarpeian Rock, there to eat them at leisure while I kept an eye on the enemy.

I was clubbing my favorite tree one afternoon, in the third fall, when suddenly, from behind, a cold hand closed round my neck, and I felt myself being shaken. My heart fairly fell out of me when I looked up and saw that it was old Isaac who had hold of me. But to my astonishment—not that it by any means mitigated my terror—I saw that he was smiling, smiling in a horrible way which looked as if it might be meant to be playful or affectionate. He continued to hold me by the neck and to shake me gently.

“Whose tree is that?” he said.

“I don’t know, sir.”

“It’s mine. So you know, now—don’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Don’t you never read the Bible?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Ever learn the Ten Commandments?”

“Yes, sir.”

Keeping his hold on my neck, he turned me round, so that I faced him directly for the first time. He had on a dirty corduroy coat with a red lining. He was still smiling, and I was more frightened than ever. It seemed to me that he was drunk.

“Well, what’s the eighth?”

“I don’t remember, sir.”

He shook me playfully—but harshly—by the neck.

“‘Thou shalt not steal.’ Say it.”

“Thou shalt not steal.”

“Who’s your father?”

This question was shot at me so abruptly that I was confused. Did he mean—since we were talking of the Commandments—God? Or did he simply want to tell my father what I’d been doing?

“Mr. Walter Crapo, sir.”

“Say!… I knew your mother. She was a godfearing woman. Now give me that there club.”

I gave him the stick, which all this time I had been holding guiltily in my hand, and I trembled, thinking he was going to beat me with it. To my amazement, instead, he drew away, bent over backwards till the stick was touching the ground, all the while smiling at me with half-shut eyes (and I saw for the first time the thickness of his white eyebrows) and then with a whip of his long arm, let the club fly upward into the very top of the tall tree, where it went crashing among the thickest cluster of nuts. The burrs pattered heavily on the grass and sweetfern about us, and then the stick followed more slowly, rocking from branch to branch and sliding over the planes of nodding leaves. Old Isaac was delighted.

“That was good,” he said, breathing heavily. “And I ain’t done it for years, neither.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now fill your cap, boy, and git home, and then you cut those nuts in two and butter them with cheese. That’s Adamneve on a raft!”

“Yes, sir.”

“And don’t you go coming here any more like a thief! When you want my chestnuts, you come and ask for ’em.”

Before I had time to say a word in reply, he turned and went plunging down the hillside. He had on his red rubber boots as usual, and his mane of white hair looked very bright in the sunlight. I watched him until he had entered his cow-yard, and the shed, and then, reappearing, had stumbled into the house. Then I gathered the chestnuts and went home.