Herbs and apples

Front matter

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Foreword

THE Sunday morning accommodation train puffed slowly up the river valley. It was very hot and very dirty; dust blew in at the open windows and hung visible in the aisles. I turned my back on the almost empty car and through the flying smoke watched the countryside: the green, wooded hills, the squalid hamlets tucked at their feet on the river-bank. It was strange to me, a city child, as if I had belonged at the other end of the continent instead of at the opposite corner of the State; it was rather wild and dreadful...it seemed to me quite uncivilized, despite the fact that all the hills were under cultivation. At least, they were under cultivation where there were no trees, no thick lines of bushes, no underbrush ...lt was as if here a man must struggle, not to make his crops grow, but to keep the rank native vegetation from growing too fast, from choking his corn, encroaching on his pastures. Even the tumbledown farmhouses were threatened by the thick, heavy vines that had clambered over them.

‘It’s a pity,’ said my father, peering out of the window across my lap, ‘that Dick Thornton had to bury himself in a little country town. He might have been as great a surgeon as any in the country.’

We were to stop in Tecumseh for the day as we returned to Cleveland from a doctors’ convention in Cincinnati. My father and Dr. Thornton had gone to medical school together, but had seen each other only semi-occasionally since. I did not look forward to the visit with pleasure: I supposed that Tecumseh would be like the little river towns we had passed, and the thought of a whole day spent in one of them, in the cruel heat, the choking dust, made my head ache, my eyes Ura. . ys

Before we reached our station, the train left the river, the country flattened out, and became a wide panorama of undulating, gentle hills...but the heat increased rather than diminished, and there was still the threat of the crowding vegetation: weeds higher than a man’s head along the railroad track, and trees everywhere: in wide, shady groves cleared of underbrush, in brief stretches of untouched forest, dense and impenetrable, and even in the fields, singly or in groups. The fields were larger here than they had been a few miles farther south: there were long stretches of open country, and the eye could see for unimaginable distances across the succession of low hills, but on no horizon did earth and air meet in a clear, unbroken line: always, between, there was a dark mass of trees, whether so close that the sky could be seen in brief flashes between their trunks, or so distant that they were a blue gray in the August haze of heat and dust.

As the train stopped in the dingy Tecumseh station, my father took my hand and drew me down the aisle.

‘I think the oldest of the Thorntons is just your age. You must be nice to her.’

Somehow, he gave me the impression that the ‘buried’ doctor and his family could be little more than half-civilized, dwellers _ in a remote and half-civilized country.

On that hot Sunday morning, Tecumseh was a town of deserted squares, shuttered windows, and empty streets. These wide, brick streets had been taken from limitless countryside, in the faith that the little settlement would one day be a metropolis; now, not a human being stirred in all their length and breadth. A merciless sun blazed upon them, waves of heat rose shimmering from unshaded cement sidewalks. The light and glare centered on the court-house, and on the bony sycamores and dust-laden elms that lined the curb around it. From this square one passed with relief to a neighborhood where the houses were so surrounded with lawns and shaded by lowbranching maple trees that they hardly seemed to be touched by the sun.

The Thornton house was not far from the center of town; it stood on a corner, and directly at the pavement’s edge, so that all the yard lay at one side and behind it. In its plan it was like the old farmhouses we had passed in the river valley: long, high, and narrow, with two wings, and between them square-pillared porches, upstairs and down; it was built of yellowish-gray brick, and hung with vines — a tangle of honeysuckle, trumpet-vines, and clematis. The end of the house faced the main street, and white stone steps, with a curved iron railing, led from the sidewalk to the front door. Even this railing was covered with clematis. To the right of the steps a gate in the iron fence gave entrance to the side yard; once beyond the hedge and shrubbery that lined the fence, you could see, beneath the high branches of great black-boughed tulip-trees, a wide stretch of lawn, ending in a green lattice, and, beyond the lattice, the tops of fruit trees; you could see the side of the house that looked out on the cool shadows and into the boughs of trees, the set-in porch, with the vine-covered railing upstairs and the slim, white pillars, and the small, fan-shaped terrace that extended from the edge of the porch into the lawn. Around this terrace there was a retaining wall of brick, and on that a low iron fence; both wall and fence were smothered in honeysuckle. A path descended from the terrace by three shallow brick steps and crossed to the opposite side of the lawn, where, beneath the trees, stood a mouldy fountain: a moss-grown faun playing in the silvery water. A fountain, where the birds splashed and the shadows of leaves quivered on the pool, and the sun made rainbows....I was enchanted, and forgot all that I had thought about this wild back country. To my knowledge, fountains existed only in parks and fairy tales. Yet my father felt sorry for a man who had one in his own side yard!

Derrick Thornton sat on the terrace step, chin on her fists, elbows on her knees, and looked at me speculatively out of her imperturbable, heavy-lidded eyes.

‘What would you like to do now? Mother says I must entertain you nicely.’ She smiled a little, deprecatingly, as though to say that she would not intentionally deceive me: she was polite of necessity, and not from choice. I felt lumpish and stupid ...and my father had told me to be nice to her!

‘Let’s not do anything,’ I said sullenly. ‘It’s too hot. Let’s just talk.’

‘All right. Talk.’ She leaned back and smiled at me again, mockingly.

‘T’d rather you’d talk,’ I stammered. I wanted to ask about the fountain, but I did not dare — at least, not at once. ‘Tell me about your house. Why did they build the houses ’round here like that — with the porches in-between instead of sticking out?’

She stared at me, and her brilliant hazel eyes darkened a little. She leaned forward.

‘Indians!’ she assured me solemnly. ‘You see — on a porch like that they couldn’t take you by surprise. Couldn’t sneak up on you, from behind.’ I gaped at her, but she stared me down. ‘I can tell you all about the Indians, if that’s what you want to talk about.’

Before I could stop her, she drew a long breath and plunged headlong into a vivid, if highly impossible, narrative... and I, listening, forgot the house and shadowed lawn, and even the fountain.

From the court-house square the main street of Tecumseh drops slowly down a dusty hill; trees lined the walks at one time, but were cut down long ago to give the town a more business-like appearance. At the foot of the hill, the railroad crosses the street, and the tracks stretch away between the weeds around ‘Nigger Curve.’ Beyond the crossing, the street climbs uphill again between the shaded curbstones, where, on that first Sunday when I walked there, stone carriage steps stood before every iron gate; it comes to an end abruptly before a high hedge and a brick house on the crest of the hill. There is no gate, but a break in the hedge leads from the dust in the street to the dusty path across the lawn.

The air that day was saturated with dust; a film of it hung in the street and settled on the trees; the sun was reflected through it by the railroad tracks; the waste ground alongside them was a jungle of dust-colored goldenrod. In the heat and dust, the silence and torpor of Sunday afternoon, my father and I walked with all the Thorntons in solemn procession down this street and toward the square old brick house on the hill. Derrick and I were together; she was as silent now as she had been loquacious before dinner. I listened to the doctor and my father behind us; they were the only ones in the group who made any attempt at conversation — the former was explaining the necessity of this Sunday afternoon visit to his grandmother, who lived with her daughters Sophia and Ursula in the old house.

‘The Old Place’ was, according to tradition, a duplicate of the house of the Fergusons in Ulster, built of bricks made in a kiln set up for the purpose in a clearing in the forest. The first Dr. Ferguson had come to America early in the century and had lived to be an old, old man, dying not until after the close of the Civil War. The only son had been killed in the war, and the house had gone to his widow and daughters. One of the latter had married, but had died after a few years, and her children, Dr. Thornton and his sisters, had been sent back to the old home to grow up there; they, in their turn, had married and departed, but on Sunday afternoons still assembled with their families to have supper with the three old women who were left. Dr. Thornton explained all this, then added that he would have spared his children the rigors of the Scotch Sabbath, as it was still observed by his grandmother, had he not owed her too much to neglect paying her this one slight attention.

While I listened to this, I watched Mrs. Thornton, who walked in front of us with the boys, Billy and Hunter: to apply my father’s adjective ‘buried’ to her was an impossibility. I had supposed that all mothers were like my own and the mothers of my friends: comfortable and invaluable as mothers, but imposing and dignified women of affairs, who took their world of committees seriously, and who seemed as old as the hills and as unchangeable. Mrs. Thornton was young and slight and graceful; she moved swiftly and lightly, on winged feet; her hair was black and lustrous, and her eyes were black and brimming with mirth and love of life. She wore a wide flower-wreathed hat and one of the ruffled dimity dresses of that era with a long, flowing skirt that continually tripped up the eager small boys who clung one to each hand and looked up into her face as they talked.

Derrick, beside me, pushed the go-cart in which her sister Margaret rode. She was the least ‘buried’ member of the family. I was ill at ease in her company, yet fascinated. She confessed, long afterward, that she had not liked me that day either, because our coming had made her mother unhappy....‘She asked Father if he was sorry he had stayed in Tecumseh — if he had gone to the city he might have been Great, too’— Derrick had always an exaggerated idea of my father’s greatness; ‘but she had insisted on staying in Tecumseh when they were married, because a small town is the place to bring up children.’...On that afternoon, I watched her from the corner of my eye as we walked. She was a quaint-looking child: her dress was a straight, box-plaited white piqué, with a scarlet belt and a round collar; her nondescript-colored hair hung in a braid down her back and was tied with scarlet ribbons, and there was a thin ‘bang’ cut straight across her forehead. Bangs were not being worn that summer ...I asked her why she had had it cut that way.

‘I did it myself. It got in my eyes. Father thinks it looks funny.’ Her direct gaze defied me to think, too, that it was funny. Then the corner of her mouth lifted in an aloof, humorous little smile. ‘But Mother says it will never show on a galloping horse.’

Her next remark may have been prompted by a desire to make up in my eyes for her father’s lack of greatness.

‘What are you going to be when you grow up?’

‘Married, I suppose.’

‘I’m not. I’m going to write books.’

I said nothing: I was too surprised, and at any rate we had reached the gap in the untrimmed hedge of osage-orange that led to the Ferguson house. It was grim, austere, unmellowed, unadorned except by small, square, austere porches, one on each side....

I stared down the length of the vast, dusky drawing-room where the great-grandmother received her family, and was filled with awe. At the end of the room beside the carved white marble mantelpiece, Mrs. Ferguson sat in a high-backed rocking-chair, her heavily veined hands, splotched with the pale-brown marks of old age, folded in her lap. She wore a stiff black silk dress with a lace shawl and a bit of white lace on her head. In the midst of her family she sat apart, and seemingly as little attended to as the furniture, yet occasionally she caught up a word from the conversation and developed from it an anecdote, to which the family listened with grave politeness, however inapropos it might be.

When we entered, she sat gazing into the mighty fireplace, while the great-aunts gossiped with the relatives scattered about the room. We were presented with due formality; the children kissed the white cheek of their great-grandmother, and told her the Golden Text of the Sunday-school lesson before she could ask for it. The boys then joined a tiptoe game of hide-the-thimble with their cousins in the rooms across the hall, and Derrick drew me to a window halfway between the groups of grown-ups, where the thick wall of the house made a sill a foot or so wide; we could sit there unseen when we had pulled the heavy, musty-smelling curtains around us,

At first we sat in silence: I would not speak, because I could see that I amused Derrick; and she stared intently out across the cornfields. Finally she turned around.

‘Do you like the country? I don’t in winter, much, but when things are growing in the fields I do. Especially now, when the corn is high, and looks as if the trees were wading in it, knee-deep.’

If her remark was a test of my mind, I was measured and found wanting, for I could only look at her blankly. Ina moment she began again abruptly on a different subject.

‘Aren’t you going to be great when you grow up?’

‘Great?’

‘I mean, don’t you want to be great?’

‘I don’t know. Do you?’

“Yes — write books.’

‘Oh — can you?’

‘I’m going to.’

‘But how do you know you can?’

She looked at me as if she wondered whether or not I could understand if told, then — ‘I don’t know,’ she said, and turned to the window again. I looked, too, across the lawn to the hedge, through the hedge to the cornfield, and listened to the gossip of those in the room behind us.

‘Nell looks thin, Sophie. She’s had her children almost too fast, hasn’t she?’

‘She was always thin. There’s several years between ’em all.’

‘Really? Well—they say a doctor has to have a big family as an advertisement. Derrick must be small for her age —’

‘Well, yes—but her mother was always a skinny little tning.’/ 73)

‘And harum-scarum, too. Into everything. But Derrick hasn’t that something-or-other that made you like Nell even when she was such a little demon...’

‘Remember the stories they used to tell about Nell when she went to Art School? Such goings-on...’

‘Sophie, did you know that your grandmother was a drunkard?’ Mrs. Ferguson’s thin, high voice silenced them all. “Yes, she was. A tea-drunkard. My father-in-law was the only doctor for miles around in those days — doctor and surgeon he was—took him eight years to get both, at the University of Edinburgh. And he used to ride all over the country on horseback, when there was nothing but a clearing here and there in the woods, and whatever hour of the night he came in, Mother Ferguson had a cup of tea ready for him —and for herself, too—so that’s what she was—a tea-drunkard.’

The voice wavered, cracked, and then went on again.

‘He was a little bit of a man, bow-legged, a fiery abolitionist, and for years before the war he rode with loaded pistols in his holster. When he went into a tavern, he took the pistols and laid ’em on the table in front of him, then, if there were arguments, folks had to agree with him... yes — don’t breed men like him nowadays. When first I knew him, you couldn’t hardly tell him for Irish — Ulster, he came from — but the older he got, the thicker was his brogue, so that, when he died, there couldn’t any of us hardly understand him.’

Mrs. Ferguson sighed and lapsed again into silence. Derrick turned to me again.

‘Didn’t you ever write poetry?’

I shook my head. ‘Did you?’

“Yes. The other day I said to Father that writing poetry seemed to me an easy way to earn a living, and he said, “Humph! I'll give you a dollar for every poem you write”; so I said, “‘Humph! Ill write one.”’

‘Did you?’

Yes.’

Silence. |

‘I just happen to have it with me.’

‘Have you?’

Silence.

“Well — do you want to see it?’

I did, but assumed indifference; she had, of course, brought it with the sole purpose of showing it to me, but now she pretended to be reluctant. It was several minutes before we arrived at an understanding, and I was given it to read, I was stricken dumb with admiration.

‘Like it?’

‘M-hm.’ I shoved the precious paper back to her across the window-sill with properly reverent fingers.

‘Then,’ she said, with the easy gesture of a queen bestowing duchies, ‘you can have it to keep.’

I folded it and tucked it in the low neck of my dress; it dropped to the waistband, where it rested and tickled me mercilessly the rest of the day. I have it still: a soiled page torn from a five-cent ‘composition’ book:

‘There is rain sweeping over the swamp land: It is gray,-it is heavy and harsh,

And winter-browned reeds that have stood there Lie flattened and wet in the marsh.

But the rain is the rain of the springtime, And the smell of it drifts on the wind,

While the swaying wet blades of the swamp grass With the old weeds are entwined.

‘There is rain sweeping over the swamp land, And it splashes and drips from the trees,

But the marsh lies all hushed in the dampness, And the brook only sighs in the breeze,

Like the wrath of the dread Lord of Hosts. When he knows that repentance is nigh,

Is the rain on the tangle of cat-tails Breathing “Spring” as the wind hurries by.’

‘Did your father like it?’ I asked.

‘He gave me the dollar.’

‘Did your mother?’

She smiled again, that humorous, cool smile. ‘She laughed, an’ said she guessed it was all right. But the next one I write will be one she’ll like.’

In the pause that followed we caught another sentence of the talk behind us.

‘Derrick is almost as bad as her mother used to be. Mose — you know — nigger Mose, who digs my garden — calls her an “orn’ry brat’’.’

‘I know. Nell is too easy on her, I think.’

Derrick nudged me.

‘Are you a tom-boy?’

I admitted that I was not. There is little opportunity to be a tom-boy in a city back yard.

‘Tam; and ain’t it lucky?— because, you know, I think that people that turn out to be great always were tom-boys. It’s lucky that I was, anyway, before I decided about writing books, and now I can be, more than ever. Of course, Father an’ no one will like it, but some day they won’t mind.’

Derrick was the subject of one more bit of the conversation. Her Great-Aunt Ursula assured Dr. Thornton solemnly that the child was thin and languid.

(‘She thinks it’s unladylike to be healthy,’ Derrick whispered in my ear; ‘an’ look at ’er — round as a balloon!’)

‘Aren’t you giving her cod-liver oil or something, Dick?’

‘T don’t think she’s sick, Aunt Sue,’ Mrs. Thornton laughed. ‘It’s just a phase. She’s just beginning to realize the existence of the universe and to be afraid of it. She read in some paper that a comet was going to hit us, and worried herself sick until the day was past.’

‘It wasn’t the comet,’ Derrick muttered. ‘It was what I kept dreaming about the end of the world. Do you know that dream? You are trying to run to school, because you are tardy, but, however you try, you can’t budge an inch — then suddenly the clock strikes, and you know that the world is coming to an end. The sun begins to rush toward the earth, and you can’t run away, but have to stand and watch it. It moves nearer and nearer, until you see that it isn’t the sun, after all, but the face of God, very angry. Then just at the instant when It would happen, you wake up. It’s a horrible dream.’

A moment later all conversation was interrupted by the entrance of the Ferguson cook, who stood bobbing curtsies in the door, wiping her hands on her checked gingham apron.

‘Y'all kin come along now. All whut we’s gwine hab is on de table.’

The doctor helped his grandmother from her chair and walked behind her to the dining-room, a hand at each elbow, while the mothers called their children from across the hall and hastily examined their hands for possible grime. Derrick and I followed from behind the curtain.

When we left the house, after supper, the sun had almost reached the horizon behind the pasture hill; it floated like a fiery balloon in the dust-dimmed air. The shadows of the walnut trees beside the house stretched across the lawn and over the hedge to the street. The Sabbath silence weighted the air, but to leave the house’ brought us all a sense of relief. The two boys raced over the grass, kicking through yellow poplar leaves that already had fallen. Their mother sighed as she watched them.

‘Here it is, only August, and it looks like fall already. And school in a couple of weeks...’

She took the baby-carriage, and Derrick and I walked one on each side of her, back again up Main Street, which stretched ahead of us, still deserted, wide, desolate, and empty. But the Thornton house, around the corner, and the two streets that met where it stood, were dim and cool beneath the maple trees.

That evening we spent on the porch that faces out across the terrace to the fountain. I was overwhelmed by the beauty so strange to a city child: the moonlight on a giant tulip-tree, the pungent scent of the clematis on the pillars, the shrill insistence of the katydids, and the never-ceasing sound of running water, which rose into the moonlight, and fell, and rose again....Also, I was desperately weary, exhausted in part by the great number of strangers I had met, and in part by my bewilderment at Derrick. She was contemptuous, derisive, mocking...and yet...I remembered the Indians, and wished desperately that she lived next door to me.... Throughout the evening she sat on the edge of the porch against one of the pillars and said nothing. I pretended not to notice her, but was never for an instant unaware of her presence. When we departed to catch the night train home, the Thorntons assembled in the front door to watch us drive away with the doctor in his buggy. Only Derrick did not wave, but drooped languidly across the railing of the front steps.

When, long afterward, Derrick told stories of herself and of her childhood, I looked back to that day, and I came, in time, to know the strange child with the straight bangs and the brilliant hazel eyes better than I knew the fat little girl that had been myself. Derrick’s spoken narrative was more vivid and more effective than that of any one else I have known.

In a perfectly cool and detached fashion she recounted an experience of her own with such immediacy that it became for her hearers forever a thing of the present, as timeless as though printed in enduring ink. It might be an encounter she had had an hour before, or a place she had seen the previous year, or an emotion known five or ten or twenty years ago: whatever it was, she had forgotten not the slightest detail, and you saw it as she saw it, and felt what she had felt; there was a power in the quiet voice, the quick phrase, capable of stirring you so that you were glad to be listening in the dark, with your face decently hidden. You learned of her exultations and agonies when they had slipped so far into the past that she could laugh at them, yet even as you laughed with her, you ached for the passionate child, and rejoiced that she had grown so aloof and indifferent. Then, if you had ever seen her as a child, you remembered that even at that time she had seemed contemptuous and cold, so that you had hated her ...she had built her defenses early ... while she told you of tempests long past, you realized that there were no doubt present storms that you might hear of some ten years hence. Inscrutable, imperturbable ...I found her so the first time we were together, and so she remained; not once, but many times, I was bewildered.

At any rate, there is proof enough of her power in the fact that more clear in my mind than the recollection of all that happened afterward, in the years when I knew Derrick and was with her, are the stories of her childhood that she told us. I have only to string them together, with the aid of a little imagination ...and, as I write, I think of her, not as she was when I listened to her anecdotes, but as she was on that moonlit August night, when she leaned against the pillar beside me and stared indifferently at the fountain and the tree-tops.

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Part I Morning Wishes I

Any story that would chronicle genius must begin with the revelation of that attribute to its unhappy possessor.

Derrick sat alone on the terrace steps and stared with unseeing eyes across the dusky lawn at trees and fountain. Her heart thumped in her breast, in her ears, and she breathed heavily; the world rocked beneath her. A revelation had come to her from the last pages of the book she had been reading: ‘The Life, Letters, and Journals of Louisa May Alcott.’ The veil had been lifted, she had Known. She would be a Great Writer when she grew up.

The evening had begun as one of the most'ordinary in that summer of ordinary evenings. She had left the dinner-table before her family had finished the gossip that accompanies dessert and coffee, and had gone through the dining-room door to the porch, where she had dropped her book reluctantly at Cassie’s summons. She picked it up, noted how few pages she had to read, and, loath to have it finished and done with, she tucked it under her arm, sauntered to the front gate, and leaned on it, dreaming...

She liked Duane Street: the deep, green shadows, the intense quiet — there was no sound except the harsh chatter of the blackbirds in the tops of the elms around the court-house a block away. Next to the Thorntons lived Tecumseh’s leading manufacturer, Mr. Devlin, in an ugly house of white frame with porches, towers, and bay windows—a house which achieved pleasantness somehow: helped to it, perhaps, by the dolls and toys on the porch, and the rope swing which hung crookedly from the largest maple tree. Beyond the Devlins’ was a white cottage, hidden by the trees, and next to it the