Mary Austin - A Woman of Genius

Of all that time my father lay dead in the best room, for by the usual Taylorville procedure the funeral could not take place until the afternoon of the second day, I have only snatches of remembrance: of my being taken in to look at him as he lay in the coffin in a very nice coat which I had never seen him wear, and the sudden conviction I had of its somehow being connected with that mysterious summons which had taken Uncle Alva away from us that morning in the street; of the "sitting up," which was done both nights by groups of neighbours, mostly young; and the festive air it had with the table spread with the best cloth and notable delicacies; and mine and Forester's reprisals against one another as to the impropriety of squabbling over the remains of a layer cake. And particularly of Cousin Judd.

He came about dusk from the farm – he had been sent for – looking shocked, and yet with a kind of enjoyable solemnity, I thought; and the first thing he wished to do was to pray with my poor mother.

"We must submit ourselves to the will of God, Sally," he urged.

"O God! God! " said my mother, walking up and down. "I'm not so sure God had anything to do with it."

"It's a wrong spirit, Sally, a wrong spirit – a spirit of rebellion." My mother began to cry.

"Why couldn't God have left him alone? What had he done that he should be taken away? What have I done – "

"You mustn't take it like this, Sally. Think of your duty to your children. 'The Lord giveth' – "

"Go tell Him to give me back my husband, then – "

Effie and I cowered in our corner between the base burner and the sewing machine; it was terrible to hear them so, quarrelling about God. My mother had her hands to her head as she walked; her figure touched by the firelight, not quite spoiled by childbearing, looked young to me.

"Oh! Oh! Oh!" she cried with every step.

"You mustn't, Sally; you'll be punished for it – "

Cousin Judd shook with excitement; he was bullying her about her Christian submission. I went up to him suddenly and struck him on the arm with my fist.

"You let her alone!" I cried. "Let her alone!"

Somebody spoke out sharply, I think; a hand plucked me from behind – to my amazement my mother's.

"Olivia, Olivia May! I am surprised … and your father not out of the house yet. Go up to your room and see if you can't learn to control yourself!"

After all there was some excuse for Cousin Judd. There was, in the general estimate, something more than fortuitous circumstance that went to my father's taking off. Early in the winter, when work had been stopped on the Zimmern building, there had been a good deal of talk about some local regulations as to the removal of scaffolding and the security of foot passengers. That the contractors had not been brought to book about it was thought to be due to official connivance; my father had written to the paper about it. But the scaffolding had remained until that morning of the high wind, when it came down all together and a bit of the wall with it. That my father should have been passing on his way to the courthouse at the moment, was a leaping together of circumstances that seemed somehow to have raised it to the plane of a moral instance. It provided just that element of the dramatic in human affairs, which somehow wakens the conviction of having always expected it; though it hardly appeared why my father, rather than the contractor or the convincing city official, should have been the victim. If it wasn't an act of Providence, it was so like one that it contributed to bring out to the funeral more people than might otherwise have ventured themselves in such weather.

It was also thought that if anything of that nature could have made up to her, my mother should have found much to console her in the funeral. The Masons took part in it, as also the G. A. R. and the Republican Club, though they might have made a more imposing show of numbers if all the societies had not been so largely composed of the same members. In addition to all this, my mother's crape came quite to the hem of her dress and Effie and I had new hats. I remember those hats very well; they had very tall crowns and narrow brims and velvet trimmings, and we tried them on for Pauline Allingham after we had gone up to bed the night before the funeral. Mrs. Allingham had called and Pauline had been allowed to come up to us. I remember her asking how we felt, and Effie's being as much impressed by the way in which I carried off the situation as if she had not been in the least concerned in it. And then we sat up in bed in our nightgowns and tried on the hats while Pauline walked about to get the effect from both sides, and refrained, in respect to the occasion, from offering any criticism.

It was the evening after the funeral and everybody had gone away but one good neighbour. The room had been set in order while we were away at the cemetery; the lamp was lit and there was a red glow on everything from the deep heart of the base burner. The woman went about softly to set a meal for us, and under the lamp there was a great bowl of quince marmalade which she had brought over neighbourly from her own stores; the colour of it played through the clear glass like a stain upon the white cloth. It happened to have been a favourite dish of my father's.

For the last year it had been a family use, he being delicate in his appetite, to make a point of saving for him anything which he might possibly eat, and taking the greatest satisfaction in his enjoyment. Therefore it came quite natural for me to get a small dish from the cupboard and begin to serve out a portion of Mrs. Mason's preserves for my father. All at once it came over me … the meaning of bereavement; that there was nobody to be done for tenderly; the loss of it … the need of the heart for all its offices of loving … and the unavailing pain.

It followed soon on my father's death that we gave up the yellow house with the chocolate trimmings and took another near the high school, and that very summer my mother lengthened my skirts halfway to my shoe tops and began to find fault with my behaviour "for a girl of your age." We saw no more of the McGees after that except as Ellen managed to keep on in the same class at school with me; and Pauline and I found ourselves with a bosom friendship on our hands.

I went on missing my father terribly, but in a child's inarticulate fashion, and it is only lately that I have realized how much of my life went at loose ends for the loss out of it of a man's point of view and the appreciable standards which grow out of his relation to the community. Ever since the Snockerty episode there had been glimmers on my horizon of the sort of rightness owing from a daughter of Henry Lattimore, but now that I had no longer the use of the personal instance, I lost all notion of what those things might be; for though I have often heard my mother spoken of as one of the best women in the world, she was the last to have provided me with a definite pattern of behaviour.

Pauline had struck out a sort of social balance for herself grounded on the fear of what was "common." Her mother had a day at home, from which seemed to flow an orderly perspective of social observances, for which my mother, never having arrived at the pitch of visiting cards, afforded me no criterion whatever.

She had been a farmer's daughter in another part of the state, and had done something for herself in the way of school teaching before she married my father. My grandparents I never saw, but I seem to recall at such public occasions as county fairs and soldiers' reunions, certain tall, farmer-looking men and their badly dressed wives, who called her cousin and were answered by their Christian names, whom I understand to be my mother's relatives without accepting them as mine. They were all soldiers though, the men of our family; you saw it at once in the odd stiffness sitting on their farmer carriage like the firm strokes of a master on a pupil's smudged drawing. I think I got my first notion of the quality of experience in the way they exalted themselves in the memories of marches and battles. There had been a station of the underground railway not ten miles from Taylorville, and there had gone out from the town at the first call, a volunteer company with so many Judds and Wilsons and Lattimores on the roster that it read like the record of a family Bible. They had gone out from, they had come back to, a life as little relieved by adventure as the flat horizon of their corn lands, but in the interim they had stretched themselves, endured, conquered. I have heard political economists of the cross roads account variously for the prosperity of Ohianna in the decade following the civil outbreak, but I have never heard it laid to the revitalizing of our common stock by the shock of its moral strenuosities.