Heritage
I
NOT long ago I received a fat envelope from an attorney down in the country. The envelope contained a blue folder — it was a copy of a deed — and a covering letter. I looked first at the deed. After a lengthy preamble, it described a frame house on the southwest bank of the Shrewsbury River, ‘ together with a messuage and plantation of two acres, be it more or less.’ The owner of that property, it appeared, could do as he pleased with it — could do anything, that is, except build a smithy there, or run a tanyard.
The attorney’s letter was brief. Everything, he said, stood as it had been left. The house was in reasonable repair, the acreage was nearer four than two. Control was in my hands. Would I come down at my convenience, look over the premises, and say what should be done?
I acknowledged the letter and asked that keys to the house be sent me. Always, or so it now seemed, there had slumbered in the back of my mind the recognition that some day that plot of shrunken acreage, that great rectilinear house with its wide command of glittering water and its little grove full of singing birds, would be mine to dispose of. But fifteen years of wandering scholarship and footloose journalism are not, perhaps, ideal preparation for assuming a responsibility of that sort. I put off the visit of inspection as long as I could. Late in April, though, there came a spell of June-like weather that left me no reason for more delay; so down I went to spend a day in the country.
The train journey is a matter of fifty miles or so — it used to be considerably less, by boat — and I was surprised to find how far around the bay the city now reaches. At Belford, within six miles of my destination, I saw a factory standing in the tidal meadows where my forefathers used to gather their salt hay. In that factory, as I did not need to be told, fish are ground and squeezed to make oil for paint. Even as late as my childhood, however, those menhaden were put to a different use. They were scattered in shoals over the upland fields, where in the spring the virtue yielded by every fish would be traced in separate patches of bluegreen among the winter wheat.
The station taxi was so long and shiny that I doubted whether it would be able to make the narrow carriage turn among the shrubbery of the side yard. I knew it would not when I saw how carefully the driver, a stranger to me, nursed his way around bends after we had left the concrete. I paid him off at the gate, told him when to call for me, and brushed through the misty green of lilacs that seemed bent on closing the serpentine pathway altogether.
The brick terrace by the front steps was slippery from disuse, and the steps themselves rang hollow. But when I had turned the key the upper half of the Dutch door sprang inward just as it always did — as though hospitable generations had unfitted it to stay closed. And then too, just as always, there greeted me the farmhouse smell that never, apparently, can be got rid of. Stockbrokers, a portrait painter, an editor, old ladies with their companions, — a whole procession of assorted tenantry, — have tried to air out that paneled hall, with the clear sweep of sea breeze blowing through it. Sixty years or better have passed since pans of cream were set to curdle in the whitewashed cellar, and the root bins down there were full. Yet that homely smell persists.
A house that has stood empty is like a horse too long on the tether: it sweats. I opened all the doors and as many windows as I could, and left the house to dry while I strolled around the boundary fences.
II
It was a forenoon of luminous radiance, heightened by occasional flaws of sea mist; a spring day of such breathtaking loveliness that the fashionable poet of our Aprils, had she been by, would doubtless have complained of it. There, however, only the mourning dove complained, where his mate was already nesting among willows by the river bank.
In the tall spruce beyond the perennial garden a cardinal whanged away at his bar of silver. Below the bank, where there was a woodpile for cover, the Carolina wren called ‘Chickory-chickory-chickory,’ clearer than any street hawker could cry it; and then, after a decent interval, he would get his faint answer from among the cedars across the stream. As I came near the woodpile he quit his song and bustled angrily among last autumn’s leaves, making a rumpus that would have done credit to a large domestic fowl. Presently he ran out on the far side. He was no bigger than my thumb.
I made my circuit and sat down near the spruce, on a garden bench, facing the house with my back to the sun. Perhaps, I thought to myself, it would have been better if I had come down before the season was so well advanced. Then, chilled and perfunctory, I should have had eyes for nothing but the inroads of mice, dry rot, and fallen trees. March is the time to mend fence: April is ploughing weather.
Faced with that old house, the strict utility of which no remodeling had been able to conceal, and with the traces of past industry all around me, I felt ill at ease. What would William Johnson have said if he could have seen a greatgrandson of his sitting stark idle in the sun on an April weekday?
I never knew old William, or his wife Sarah, either; they had died long before my time; but their memory was like a physical presence still, in my childhood. Together they had dominated that house from end to end. As I looked now at the kitchen door, I smiled to think how often I had seen my great-uncle Mortimer sneak in there, furtively clutching his umbrella. He was an old man by then, who had been the youngest of Sarah’s eleven children; the spoiled black sheep, whose mother finally had found out — among other things — that he once lit his cigar with a ten-dollar bill. Sarah, of course, had been dead for years before I knew Mort Johnson. But even so he would only come into the kitchen, no farther.
Not that the life of those old days had been frugal; not a bit of it. A willful waste, so it was said then, made a woeful want. Frugality, however, ran counter to the spirit of that time, when it was still supposed that children would grow up, as their fathers had grown up before them, prepared to live well but to live financially and otherwise within their means, under an economy of limited expectations well defined — an economy in which there was little ready coin, much free hospitality, small prospect of sudden wealth for any, but a competence within reach of all save the shiftless or the drunkard.
The sun had gone round behind the spruce, and there was a sea chill in the shade, so I started toward the house. On my way I crossed the quarter acre of flat turf that now grew where Sarah, who never held much with patent medicines and preferred to concoct her own, had tended her herb garden and her flower beds. She always gardened with gloves and parasol for the sake of gentility, and powdered her face with cornstarch against the sun. And there by the side door, looking south, she had made a little pavement of large flat stones screened about with Rose of Sharon, where she bleached her fine linens. One of the bushes was there yet,
I found, and a few of the stones could still be seen, tilting edgewise out of the grass. Sarah must have had a passion for those stones. She found them on her walks through the fields, and used to bring them home one at a time. No one ever understood how she could have done it, for she was very slight and frail.
The house was aired enough for comfort. I wandered through the echoing rooms, swung doors to and fro, peered into cupboards, and admired once more the pervasive grace of sash frame and moulding, panel and mantelpiece. All of that, so I had heard, was improvised on the spot by the local joiner, following the few designs he had learned in his apprenticeship. Although he did not know it, his designs were original with the brothers Adam.
William Johnson, of course, knew nothing about that either. What he was after was space and warmth. He had set up housekeeping in a modest eighteenth-century cottage, which his family soon outgrew. In 1838 he expanded it to sixteen rooms. His prime specification was that he should be able to reach up and put the flat of his hand on any of the ceilings. If a man could do that, William said, he would know he had come indoors. A mere six-footer can barely brush those ceilings with his fingertips.
By all accounts, William Johnson must have been more taken for granted than he was beloved. This seems strange, for he was clearly a man of bold fancy and commanding presence. Yet when I came now to recall what I had heard about him from such of his children as I had known, he might as well have been a sort of cornucopia — an undemanding source of seasonable benefits. To his wife, that is, and to all his children but one.
III
That one child was William’s youngest daughter, my great-aunt Emma. She was always simply Aunt Emma to me. Until she died, when I was about twelve, I doubt whether it ever occurred to me that she was old enough to be my grandmother. She seemed, indeed, little older than myself, but with a longer memory. And there in the second-best front parlor where she had been married, and where she always liked to sit when she used to come calling, I found it pleasant to pause a moment, remembering her — pleasant, and somehow inspiriting.
Aunt Emma’s life must have been full of chagrin. I knew that, even in those days. But only once, and then half in jest, did I know her to mention her tragic disappointment. ‘Try not to break anybody’s heart,’ she had said to me, ‘and try to remember that I told you. But a lot of good my telling you will do. You’re young — and heartbreaking is young people’s business. At least, that’s the one business young people never neglect.’
Her face, with its skin of a withered rose, was placid when she said that, and her hazel eyes were calm. Momentarily, though, her voice had had the knife edge, impersonal, parrotlike, that one associates with the eighteenth century. All the Johnsons had that quality of voice if you stirred their emotions.
In my boyhood, however, it was not Aunt Emma’s fortitude that drew me to her. It was a quality less astringent than fortitude, though perhaps related to it — what I have learned since then to call the historical sense. All during her mature years, circumstance had compelled Aunt Emma to live strictly from day to day. Yet she possessed to a remarkable degree that quality of which I speak — that sense of the living past as a source of sustaining power. Moreover, she could communicate that power as if by contagion to anyone who was able to receive it. In particular she gave me three glimpses of William Johnson—trifling enough in themselves, no doubt — that grew in time to have almost the character of shared experience.
One autumn in her early childhood, when she had been visiting cousins in New York, William brought her home down the bay in his sloop Seaflower. He had come in to market the night before with a deckload of Shrewsbury oysters, and he hoped to make the thirty-mile run back, empty, before dark. However, the wind failed after they had passed the Narrows. They lay drifting for hours in the hazy October sunshine off Sandy Hook. Emma had been up since dawn, and presently she went to sleep on the deck, wrapped in her father’s peajacket.
She awakened tense and frightened. It was bright moonlight. There was a chill wind blowing and the sail was full, yet they did not move. Though driven now by a stiff following breeze, they were caught in the narrow mouth of the river with the ebb tide running full against them. William bent to the tiller, singing at the top of his lungs as he held the Seaflower head-on against the choppy rush of deep water. The mast swayed and groaned in its chocks like a live thing, and underfoot the deck quivered from the strain, but they might as well have been anchored. Emma could see the lights of home, and she burst into tears.
Disappointment was mingled with her terror. William had a lockerful of presents for the older girls, and his pocket was heavy with coppers for the small fry. There would be a tumbling scramble for pennies scattered across the big kitchen floor, — squeals and delighted laughter when bundles were opened, — but after her exposure to the night air she would be hustled off to bed, deserted and forgotten. She crept as close to William as she dared, and was miserable behind a heap of tarpaulins.
Then it was morning. She was back in her own bed once more, and clutched in her hand was a knotted twist of rag. Inside it she found a shiny new ‘fishscale’ — a silver three-cent piece.
As the boys and girls grew up, William did his best to keep them near him. First and last there were six daughters to be married off. Every one of them, following the family custom, brought her husband home to live for a year or so, until Sarah had seen her through her first confinement. And after all of them were gone William still kept their swings and playhouses in repair, under the branchy white oaks that overhung the cove.
When some of his grandchildren had come to supper, very quiet and suppressed beneath Sarah’s eye, William would take them out under the oak trees afterward and let them romp in the cool of the evening, while he dozed in his hammock. If they fell silent for a moment, he would wake instantly and encourage them to shout. There was an echo from across the stream. William liked to listen to it sending back their voices, and he would laugh till he cried to hear the echo of their laughter.
Until the assault of his last illness halted him, William went on tilling the land. He need not have done so. He was well-to-do, considering the time and place, and he might have retired. But there lay the fields, which none of his sons had cared to take over. Long habit made William restless when he thought of those fields running to grass, and so he carried on the chores of his youth as a kind of hobby. Occasionally toward the end, when someone had reproached him for toiling longer than was needful, he would confide in Emma, letting her glimpse the pleasure that his hobby gave him.
What he told her in his old age was the recollection of how, in his prime, he had often been solitary but never alone. Solitary labor used to please him then, for the air was full of familiar noises, all of which he noted and found companionable. When he was at work in the upland fields, the rattle of carts and the voices of children and the ring of scythes or axes came up to him full of meaning. He labored the earth and was content. And he told her that sometimes back in those days, when the passenger pigeons went north at harrowing time, he would throw down his reins to watch, filled with exaltation and the sense of being surrounded by a cloud of witnesses, while the sun was darkened behind a multitude of wings and the spring of the year itself seemed to be moving northward visibly, showing by a sign in the heavens the return of seeding and harvest to the fields. Those, he said, were the best years.
My mood of reverie was broken by pulsating cries from out over the cove. Sea gulls were flocking there as the sun declined, and the fog of late afternoon was creeping into the river from beyond Seabright. It was time for me to go. It seemed odd, though, to be going away hungry from that house, where visitors who came before dinner had always been expected to stay through supper as well, and where a week’s visit had been known to last out the summer.
When should I return again? It would be fruitless to speculate about that. I pocketed my notebook with its little budget of needful repairs, locked up, and went out through the lilacs to wait by the roadside for my taxi.