Conrad Aiken - The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

But I said nothing to Aunt Julia and Aunt Jenny.

It was two years before I visited “Witch Elms” again, and when I did I found that startling changes had occurred. In the first place, Jim met me at the station with a spick-and-span brand-new Ford touring car. I could hardly believe my eyes. Were my aunts being modernized? To tell the truth, I was feeling this year rather grown up and superior, and had somewhat reluctantly consented to be sent once more to Hackley Falls. And as I see it now, the Ford was a very cunning piece of foresight on the part of my Aunts Jenny and Julia. Possibly my father had conferred with them. At all events, the sight of the Ford cheered me up at once. The summer wouldn’t be so bad. And I felt still better when Jim told me that I was going to be taught to drive, after which I was to be the family chauffeur. I understood this further, when I saw that Jim himself was decidedly uncomfortable in the car. It was apparent that he missed his whip. He had also (I noticed with amusement) given up the old time-honored derby hat and substituted for it a tweed cap, in which he looked extraordinarily foolish. This too, I supposed, was a concession to modernity.

“Well, Jim,” I said, “what’s the news? I suppose the aunts are fine?”

“Well, yes, they been very well, Mr. Billy, they been very well this winter, except for Miss Jenny’s gout, which troubled her some. But I reckon she’ll be all right again, come hot weather.”

“And Captain Phippen?”

“Yep—same as ever.”

“I suppose he still sits there with that spyglass.”

“Oh, sure! It’s as good as a movie to him. Not much the old man misses with that glass!”

Jim drove very slowly, and it was some time before we passed the footbridge which led to the Willard farm. I turned and looked at the house, which was more incredibly dilapidated than ever. The shingles were beginning to curl with rot. A great poll of trumpet-vine had collapsed from the western gables and hung raggedly toward the ground, just as the wind had left it. The front fence of the cow-yard had fallen in, too, and lay where it had fallen. Otherwise, it was just as I remembered it, with all the windows shuttered except one. But there were no cows on the hillside at the back.

“Where are the cows?” I said.

“Didn’t you hear?”

“Hear what?”

“Why, the old man, old Isaac, he had a stroke.”

“A stroke? You mean he’s dead?”

“Oh, no—no such luck. Just paralyzed. Paralyzed from the waist down.”

“Good Lord. When did that happen?”

“Last year—year and a half ago. The judgment of God, too, that’s what they say. He was beating Miss Lydia when he was struck down.”

“You don’t say!”

“Yep! He laid unconscious like a log for two weeks, and they thought he was all through. But then he come to. He would! Now he reads his Bible in a wheel-chair, and I guess, from what I hear, he gets what’s coming to him from the women folks!”

“What do you mean, Jim?”

“Well, I guess it’s them that beats him nowadays. Anyways, that’s what young Hal Greene says. He said when he went there once he heard the old man screaming bloody murder. And serves him right! Hell will be too good for Isaac. Of all the mean sons of bees—”

I got no more out of Jim; but a week later, when for the first time I triumphantly drove the Ford up the hill to Captain Phippen’s, I began to feel something very sinister and dangerous in the situation. Captain Phippen was surprisingly serious about it.

“You know what I think, Bill?” he said.

“What?”

“I think those scarecrows’ll kill him. That’s what I think. I think they’ll kill him.”

“Why?”

“They’re crazy as bedbugs. To my mind, they should all have been locked up years ago. And Good Jumping Jupiter Almighty! look what the old devil has put them through! You couldn’t blame them.… Not that I’m in love with the old man, any more than with those she-fiends either. But just the same it kind of gives you the shivers to think of him sitting there in a wheel-chair with his Bible, and those two harpies just itching to cut his throat!… Doesn’t it?”

This was a new light on the situation.

“It does,” I said.

“You bet it does!”

“Couldn’t something be done?”

“Go and try it, my boy. Even Mr. Perkins, the minister, don’t dare go near the place.”

“Well, how do they live?”

“God knows. But they live, somehow.”

I returned home with a new sense of disaster impending; but neither I, nor anybody else, could possibly have foreseen what shape it was to take, or how horrible it was to be.

It was difficult at “Witch Elms,” however, to be for long concerned about remote possibilities of disaster; and as I settled down once more into the peaceful life with Aunt Julia and Aunt Jenny, I thought less and less about the Willards. To tell the truth, my boyish excitement about them had worn itself out. If indeed a tragedy was enacting itself in that forlorn old house, it no longer seemed to me of heroic proportions. My former terrors and wonder now seemed to me childish, and I drove past the house in the Ford twice a day with scarcely a glance at it. And, moreover, my aunts kept me busy. The car was a new toy, and they couldn’t have enough of it. What with that and the new telephone, and the phonograph, the tempo of life had changed at the farm; and the days went like minutes. Hardly a day passed, in fact, that we didn’t make a long expedition. My aunts had seldom been more than ten miles from Hackley Falls, and it was wildly exciting to them to be taken to Rutland, to Burlington, to Bellows Falls, or over the Mohawk Trail to Fitchburg. We even spent a night at Windsor, and I shall always remember with what girlish delight and flutter Aunt Jenny and Aunt Julia came down to dinner in the great gilt dining hall of the Green Mountain House. They were as pink as debutantes, and as coquettish, and they insisted on eating every item in an enormous table-d’hôte dinner. I even think they would have danced with me if I had suggested it—though Aunt Julia’s scorn of “these modern so-called dances” was outspoken.

Meanwhile, Hackley Falls was having a new excitement of its own. A revival had come to town—something the town had never had before. I first heard of it from Mr. Greene at the post office; he was surprised I hadn’t known. It had been there for three days already, and the whole countryside was wild about it. Farmers and their families were driving in from miles around. There were mourners’ benches and a sawdust trail and all the fixings, he said. And the Reverend something-or-other Boody, a Southerner, was a humdinger, a real old-fashioned artist in brimstone and hellfire. Fairly fried your liver in you, Mr. Greene said, and talked just like a nigger.… Mr. Perkins, the local minister (who got a salary of a thousand dollars a year) was furious. He had said something nasty about the Reverend Boody in his last Sunday’s sermon.… But the Reverend Boody continued to take in money.

It was that same afternoon, when I was bringing the aunts back from a drive to Manchester, that I first saw it. It was a circular tent, of about the size used in county fairs, with a little peak at the top, and it had been pitched in a field on the Hammond farm at the western end of the town, half a mile out. At the far end of the field, which had been churned and trampled brown with feet and hoofs and wheels, was a motley assemblage of cars, wagons and buggies, and tethered horses. I wondered what Cross-eyed Hammond got for it. The tent itself was emblazoned, all the way round, with flamboyant posters. In scarlet flaming letters we were adjured to Hit the Sawdust Trail, to Come to Jesus, Repent, Repent, Seek Salvation in the Lord, Cling to Jesus, and so on. I stopped the car and invited the aunts to go in. We could hear the somewhat dismal sound of a hymn. But they declined, and I drove on, resolving to come back myself later.