CHAPTER V
"JEE'S" TIDINGS
Time was when I had known the Hagadorn house, from the outside atleast, as well as any other in the whole township. But I had avoidedthat road so long now, that when I came up to the place it seemed quitestrange to my eyes.
For one thing, the flower garden was much bigger than it had formerlybeen. To state it differently, Miss Esther's marigolds and columbines,hollyhocks and peonies, had been allowed to usurp a lot of space wheresweet-corn, potatoes and other table-truck used to be raised. This notonly greatly altered the aspect of the place, but it lowered my idea ofthe practical good-sense of its owners.
What was more striking still, was the general air of decrepitude anddecay about the house itself. An eaves-trough had fallen down; halfthe cellar door was off its hinges, standing up against the wall; thechimney was ragged and broken at the top; the clap-boards had neverbeen painted, and now were almost black with weather-stain and dry rot.It positively appeared to me as if the house was tipping sideways, overagainst the little cooper-shop adjoining it--but perhaps that was atrick of the waning evening light. I said to myself that if we were notprospering on the Beech farm, at least our foe "Jee" Hagadorn did notseem to be doing much better himself.
In truth, Hagadorn had always been among the poorest members of ourcommunity, though this by no means involves what people in cities thinkof as poverty. He had a little place of nearly two acres, and thenhe had his coopering business; with the two he ought to have got oncomfortably enough. But a certain contrariness in his nature seemed tobe continually interfering with this.
This strain of conscientious perversity ran through all we knew of hislife before he came to us, just as it dominated the remainder of hiscareer. He had been a well-to-do man some ten years before, in a cityin the western part of the State, with a big cooper-shop, and a lotof men under him, making the barrels for a large brewery. (It was inthese days, I fancy, that Esther took on that urban polish which theyounger Benaiah missed.) Then he got the notion in his head that it waswrong to make barrels for beer, and threw the whole thing up. He movedinto our neighborhood with only money enough to buy the old Andrewsplace, and build a little shop.
It was a good opening for a cooper, and Hagadorn might have flourishedif he had been able to mind his own business. The very first thinghe did was to offend a number of our biggest butter-makers by taxingthem with sinfulness in also raising hops, which went to make beer.For a long time they would buy no firkins of him. Then, too, hemade an unpleasant impression at church. As has been said, ourmeeting-house was a union affair; that is to say, no one denominationbeing numerous enough to have an edifice of its own, all the farmersroundabout--Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and so on--joinedin paying the expenses. The travelling preachers who came to usrepresented these great sects, with lots of minute shadings off intoHard-shell, Soft-shell, Freewill, and other subdivided mysteries whichI never understood. Hagadorn had a denomination all to himself, asmight have been expected from the man. What the name of it was I seemnever to have heard; perhaps it had no name at all. People used to say,though, that he behaved like a Shouting Methodist.
This was another way of saying that he made a nuisance of himself inchurch. At prayer meetings, in the slack seasons of the year, he wouldpray so long, and with such tremendous shouting and fury of gestures,that he had regularly to be asked to stop, so that those who had takenthe trouble to learn and practise new hymns might have a chance to beheard. And then he would out-sing all the others, not knowing the tunein the least, and cause added confusion by yelling out shrill "Amens!"between the bars. At one time quite a number of the leading peopleceased attending church at all, on account of his conduct.
He added heavily to his theological unpopularity, too, by his action inanother matter. There was a wealthy and important farmer living over onthe west side of Agrippa Hill, who was a Universalist. The expenses ofour union meeting-house were felt to be a good deal of a burden, andour elders, conferring together, decided that it would be a good thingto waive ordinary prejudices, and let the Universalists come in, andhave their share of the preaching. It would be more neighborly, theyfelt, and they would get a subscription from the Agrippa Hill farmer.He assented to the project, and came over four or five Sundays with hisfamily and hired help, listened unflinchingly to orthodox sermons fullof sulphur and blue flames, and put money on the plate every time. Thena Universalist preacher occupied the pulpit one Sunday, and preacheda highly inoffensive and non-committal sermon, and "Jee" Hagadornstood up in his pew and violently denounced him as an infidel, beforehe had descended the pulpit steps. This created a painful scandal.The Universalist farmer, of course, never darkened that church dooragain. Some of our young men went so far as to discuss the duckingof the obnoxious cooper in the duck-pond. But he himself was neitherfrightened nor ashamed.
At the beginning, too, I suppose that his taking up Abolitionism madehim enemies. Dearborn County gave Franklin Pierce a big majority in'52, and the bulk of our farmers, I know, were in that majority. ButI have already dwelt upon the way in which all this changed in theyears just before the war. Naturally enough, Hagadorn's position alsochanged. The rejected stone became the head of the corner. The tiresomefanatic of the 'fifties was the inspired prophet of the 'sixties.People still shrank from giving him undue credit for their conversion,but they felt themselves swept along under his influence none the less.
But just as his unpopularity kept him poor in the old days, it seemedthat now the reversed condition was making him still poorer. The truthwas, he was too excited to pay any attention to his business. He wentoff to Octavius three or four days a week to hear the news, and whenhe remained at home, he spent much more time standing out in the roaddiscussing politics and the conduct of the war with passers-by, than hedid over his staves and hoops. No wonder his place was run down.
The house was dark and silent, but there was some sort of a light inthe cooper-shop beyond. My hope had been to see Esther rather than herwild old father, but there was nothing for it but to go over to theshop. I pushed the loosely fitting door back on its leathern hinges,and stepped over the threshold. The resinous scent of newly cut wood,and the rustle of the shavings under my feet, had the effect, somehow,of filling me with timidity. It required an effort to not turn and goout again.
The darkened and crowded interior of the tiny work-place smelt as well,I noted now, of smoke. On the floor before me was crouched a shapelessfigure--bending in front of the little furnace, made of a section ofstove-pipe, which the cooper used to dry the insides of newly fashionedbarrels. A fire in this, half-blaze, half-smudge--gave forth the lightI had seen from without, and the smoke which was making my nostrilstingle. Then I had to sneeze, and the kneeling figure sprang on theinstant from the floor.
It was Esther who stood before me, coughing a little from the smoke,and peering inquiringly at me. "Oh--is that you, Jimmy?" she asked,after a moment of puzzled inspection in the dark.
She went on, before I had time to speak, in a nervous, half-laughingway: "I've been trying to roast an ear of corn here, but it's the worstkind of a failure. I've watched 'Ni' do it a hundred times, but with meit always comes out half-scorched and half-smoked. I guess the corn istoo old now, any way. At all events, it's tougher than Pharaoh's heart."
She held out to me, in proof of her words, a blackened and unseemlyroasting-ear. I took it, and turned it slowly over, looking at it withthe grave scrutiny of an expert. Several torn and opened sectionsshowed where she had been testing it with her teeth. In obedience toher "See if you don't think it's too old," I took a diffident bite, ata respectful distance from the marks of her experiments. It was theworst I had ever tasted.
"I came over to see if you'd heard anything--any news," I said, desiringto get away from the corn subject.
"You mean about Tom?" she asked, moving so that she might see me moreplainly.
I had stupidly forgotten about that transformation of names. "OurJeff, I mean," I made answer.
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p; "His name is Thomas Jefferson. _We_ call him Tom," she explained; "thatother name is too horrid. Did--did his people tell you to come and ask_me_?"
I shook my head. "Oh no!" I replied with emphasis, implying by mytone, I dare say, that they would have had themselves cut up intosausage-meat first.
The girl walked past me to the door, and out to the road-side, lookingdown toward the bridge with a lingering, anxious gaze. Then she cameback, slowly.
"No, we have no news!" she said, with an effort at calmness. "He wasn'tan officer, that's why. All we know is that the brigade his regiment isin lost 141 killed, 560 wounded, and 38 missing. That's all!" She stoodin the doorway, her hands clasped tight, pressed against her bosom."_That's all!_" she repeated, with a choking voice.
Suddenly she started forward, almost ran across the few yards of floor,and, throwing herself down in the darkest corner, where only dimlyone could see an old buffalo-robe spread over a heap of staves, begansobbing as if her heart must break.
Her dress had brushed over the stove-pipe, and scattered some of theembers beyond the sheet of tin it stood on. I stamped these out, andcarried the other remnants of the fire out doors. Then I returned, andstood about in the smoky little shop, quite helplessly listening to themoans and convulsive sobs which rose from the obscure corner. A bit ofa candle in a bottle stood on the shelf by the window. I lighted this,but it hardly seemed to improve the situation. I could see her now, aswell as hear her--huddled face downward upon the skin, her whole formshaking with the violence of her grief. I had never been so unhappybefore in my life.
At last--it may not have been very long, but it seemed hours--there rosethe sound of voices outside on the road. A wagon had stopped, and somewords were being exchanged. One of the voices grew louder--came nearer;the other died off, ceased altogether, and the wagon could be hearddriving away. On the instant the door was pushed sharply open, and"Jee" Hagadorn stood on the threshold, surveying the interior of hiscooper-shop with gleaming eyes.
He looked at me; he looked at his daughter lying in the corner; helooked at the charred mess on the floor--yet seemed to see nothing ofwhat he looked at. His face glowed with a strange excitement--which inanother man I should have set down to drink.
"Glory be to God! Praise to the Most High! Mine eyes have seen theglory of the coming of the Lord!" he called out, stretching forth hishands in a rapturous sort of gesture I remembered from class-meetingdays.
Esther had leaped to her feet with squirrel-like swiftness at the soundof his voice, and now stood before him, her hands nervously clutchingat each other, her reddened, tear-stained face a-fire with eagerness.
"Has word come?--is he safe?--have you heard?" so her excited questionstumbled over one another, as she grasped "Jee's" sleeve and shook it infeverish impatience.
"The day has come! The year of Jubilee is here!" he cried, brushingher hand aside, and staring with a fixed, ecstatic, open-mouthed smilestraight ahead of him. "The words of the Prophet are fulfilled!"
"But Tom!--_Tom!_" pleaded the girl, piteously. "The list has come? Youknow he is safe?"
"Tom! _Tom!_" old "Jee" repeated after her, but with an emphasiscontemptuous, not solicitous. "Perish a hundred Toms--yea--ten thousand!for one such day as this! 'For the Scarlet Woman of Babylon isoverthrown, and bound with chains and cast into the lake of fire.Therefore, in one day shall her plagues come, death, and mourning, andfamine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire: for strong is theLord God which judged her!'"
He declaimed these words in a shrill, high-pitched voice, his faceupturned, and his eyes half-closed. Esther plucked despairingly at hissleeve once more.
"But have you seen?--is _his_ name?--you must have seen!" she moaned,incoherently.
"Jee" descended for the moment from his plane of exaltation. "I_didn't_ see!" he said, almost peevishly. "Lincoln has signed aproclamation freeing all the slaves! What do you suppose I care foryour Toms and Dicks and Harrys, on such a day as this? 'Woe! woe! thegreat city Babylon, the strong city! For in one hour is thy judgmentcome!'"
The girl tottered back to her corner, and threw herself limply downupon the buffalo-robe again, hiding her face in her hands.
I pushed my way past the cooper, and trudged cross-lots home in thedark, tired, disturbed, and very hungry, but thinking most of all thatif I had been worth my salt, I would have hit "Jee" Hagadorn with theadze that stood up against the door-still.