Our eyes began to glaze, not from boredom but because after an hour of talk our minds were foundering like horses fed too much grain. It was like a dam had given way and all the world we’d barely heard of and all its history we didn’t know had flooded in upon us. There was no way to take in so much of it at once and finally we sat dazed, Dr. Barcroft’s stories buzzing in our ears like a swarm of midges on an August afternoon.
We were roused from our trance when Teensy Lafferty stepped out onto the porch and started clanging an iron bar that hung above the porch railing. She kept at it for three vigorous minutes and when she laid down the horseshoe that served as a beater and when the ringing of our ears had subsided, we heard shouts and giggles and whispers. Then younguns of every size, gender, and demeanor poured onto the porch, bustling, jostling, and tussling as they crowded to the washstand with its four tin basins and three buckets of cold water and six bars of yellow soap. There were towels enough, but the boys wiped their wet hands on their pants legs or ran them through their hair. Dogs accompanied the younguns onto the porch and had to be shoved off lest they sneak into the house. A tiny black-and-white fice overturned one of Dr. Barcroft’s rubber boots—he had taken them off to sit in his leather slippers—and burrowed as if it had found a groundhog’s lair. It was all chatter and chaff, furtive punches and pinches, blushes and fleeting tears—and then as quickly as the space had filled with youth, it emptied and the three of us made our way to the washstand. As we were finishing, Dolly Lafferty came out with two fresh towels and then nipped back inside again.
At the long table, the younguns were already seated, watching in keen expectation as we entered together. Quigley stood at his customary position at table head while Dr. Barcroft commanded the other end.
“Whippets,” said Quigley, “this here is Dr. Barcroft, who comes to visit us from Scotland, across the seas. I want you all to take notice of him as an important man who has been around the world. Now Dr. Barcroft will ask our blessing for us.”
The Scotsman nodded and, taking note of the eager appetites on every side, responded with the shortest table prayer ever heard in the Lafferty household. Then the father sat, we all sat, and the destruction began. Platters of biscuits and corn bread were passed and pitchers of cold fresh milk made the round. Yellow butter from wheat-sheaf molds was hacked into lumps. And then the food began to arrive from the kitchen.
Qualley reserved for herself the honor of serving the first dish to Dr. Barcroft and she chose the one that was her particular pride, those sausage patties that she ground from lean pork shoulder and seasoned with sage and savory and a pretty long list of other herbs, including a shaving or two of sassafras root.
* * *
“Oh, I was never supposed to tell that,” my grandmother said. “That was her special secret I was not to give away.”
“But it was so long ago,” my mother said. “She’s dead now, of course. Sometimes it seems all the really good people are gone.”
* * *
Then the rest of the food was brought in, great steaming heaps of it. Everything was devoured, but not in reverent silence. Quigley asked the professor to tell of his sojourn in Haiti, and so he did, omitting from the account given earlier on the porch only the detail of an agreeable cinnamon-colored lass with a captivating dimple.
“Now tell ’em about those cowboys you trailed with, Dr. Barcroft,” Quigley said, and as the professor told of journeying from the plains of West Texas to the railroad in central Kansas, his listeners foraged through green beans and baked onions, stewed chicken and trout fried in cornmeal, boiled potatoes and salad greens, pickled beets and applesauce. We went through those victuals like we were famine itself.
When the desserts appeared, four pies as well as a plate of fresh biscuits and several jars of preserves, the younguns began unpacking their questions again and Dr. Barcroft was rather put to his mettle in explaining how it was possible for Eskimos to build houses out of nothing but snow, why Mexicans confect human skulls of sugar for children to gnaw, and who made up the first song that was ever sung. When they asked him about his native land, he told the dear story of the poet Burns and ended his legend by reciting some lines:
“As fair art thou, my bonny love,
So deep in love am I;
And I will love thee still, my dear,
Till a’ the seas gang dry.
“Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi’ the sun:
O I will love thee still, my dear,
While the sands o’ life shall run.”
“Well then,” said his host, “that’s well spoken. I believe that’s a good old song we already know, don’t we, Marilee Lafferty?” He spoke to a whippet of nine years or so who blushed and hung her head at being so fondly singled out. “Why don’t you sing it for us? Don’t be bashful. We’ll all be proud to hear it.”
She would not disfavor her father’s request. Marilee rose and sang in a voice as pure and silver as a spring that spouts from a ferny stone:
“And fare thee well, my only love,
And fare thee well awhile.
And I will come again, my love,
Though it he ten thousand mile.”
The silence that fell upon us was brief but laden. We all recognized a benediction when we heard it, and we rose to carry our soiled tableware to the kitchen, where Qualley and four kitchen-duty ladymisses would scrub all up before they sat themselves down to take a bite or two in peace and talk over the things they’d heard Dr. Barcroft tell about.
After that the table had to be cleared and the dishes washed and the room swept and dusted, for everything was to commence all over again in preparation for the dance that evening in the house. The ladymisses would be mighty busy and would brook no mischievous or lazy buck-os underfoot. Four of the latter prevailed upon Dr. Barcroft to go for a horseback ride up the mountain. There was a white mare just right for him, they said, strong and tall and silver.
So off they cantered for the long, sweet afternoon, and what they did on Baldpate Ridge is a mystery, though it is likely that the professor regaled the boys with spicier tales of tribes and islands than ever the ladymisses would hear.
* * *
“But we stayed behind to help in the house and the kitchen, didn’t we, daughter?”
“Yes, we did. There was plenty enough work to keep us all busy.”
“‘Little hands help bigger hands and all whip up together.’ That was one of Qualley’s sayings. Do you remember?”
“Yes I do,” my mother replied.
* * *
Dr. Barcroft and his crew of buck-os returned when the hill shadow was long and cool. After milking time, people began to show up for the square dance held in honor of the professor. By twilight there were new faces all about. Men stood talking in small groups and two impromptu string trios had formed there in the yard; a number of visitors had brought their own banjos, fiddles, guitars, and mandolins. The Lafferty barn supplied a couple of holey washtubs for basses and these were given to aspiring whippets to thump. And there were plenty of stone jugs to aid in keeping rhythm, and there were Jew’s harps and harmonicas.
Females were mostly inside the house, in the clamoring kitchen, but some were out on the porches, arranging the long tables. These had been covered with yellow oilcloth, and to them dishes and tinware and cutlery had been brought. Guests were to wander to the porches to eat and drink at their convenience. There was no place to feed inside, for the dining room had been emptied, the furniture of the living room had been pushed against the walls, and the two downstairs bedrooms had been cleared as much as possible—all to make room for dancing. The floors were swept and polished, the gleam of them bright as brass. This farmhouse had been recently wired for electricity, but the Laffertys put small trust in the newer inventions of mankind and so also kept kerosene lamps burning in their old accustomed places.
In the backyard, whippets were turbulent. Some of the small boys were practicing clo
g styles while girls looked on or practiced making figures among themselves. Others jumped rope or played hand-clapping games. Some, excited by the crowd, by the onset of twilight, by the prospect of the dance, only ran hither and yon in a state of fevered bewilderment.
It was difficult to say when the dance actually took shape. One quartet of musicians came together in the dining room and started toying with a reel, “White Cockade” it might have been, or “Miss Brown.” A few buck-os and ladymisses gathered round and shuffled through maneuvers casually, gossiping and laughing as they joined in for a turn or two and then wandered off as if having lost interest. On the side porch a brother and sister from Sugar Camp had struck up with mandolin and guitar and were singing “The Old Oaken Bucket.” They drew a circle of pleased elders and a changeable minnow school of curious whippets who gave ear to a few bars and then scurried off.
As more and more guests arrived, more and more Laffertys came in from the fields and from evening chores at the barns and stock lots. The volume of sound from house and yard increased in loudness and excitement until there occurred a certain moment of the light.
In the valleys after the sun rolls behind the hills, and just before the sky turns gray and the little brown birds seek their bushes, there is a period of violet light eerie in its effects. The jonquil’s yellow and the dogwood’s whiteness become almost vocal in the intensities of their colors and the sides of hills and buildings lose definition of surface and become softer in aspect. You feel that if you put your hand against the ground or against an outside wall, you would touch not hardness but cloudiness; it would be as if you had discovered the world as it underwent change, all things shaping differently as they readied themselves to receive the nighttime.
* * *
“That’s what he said,” my grandmother mused. “Dr. Barcroft often made observations like that. He was a long-thoughted man.”
“I don’t understand exactly what he meant,” my mother replied, “but I’ve seen twilights like that sometimes. I just never knew how to talk about them.”
* * *
The light had assumed that certain strange mood as the professor came up from the barn, having left his borrowed mount, Sophie, to the care of Bingo Lafferty. And as the light took on its eerie aspect, a silence fell upon the valley. Everyone had stopped talking at the same time, even the whippets, and from the kitchen came no clink and clatter and from the barns no sounds of cow and horse. The dogs had fallen silent, including the fices.
Then a single note sounded on a fiddle, the tuning A, and Dr. Barcroft recognized it at once as Quigley Lafferty’s tone: pure, clear, confident, easy, and lyric, but full of calm strength. He had never heard Quigley play, but the authority he recognized in that single note was unmistakable. He knew immediately why his host was reckoned the best square dance fiddle in the county and he felt he also knew why the life of the man and his family and his acres seemed so happy and complete.
By the time the professor reached the great turkey oak in the yard, Quigley’s fiddle had been joined by a rhythm guitar, a mandolin, and a banjo, and a tune was in progress: not a hell-for-leather breakdown but an easygoing stately quadrille, the rhythm well marked but not faster than a steady allegro, and the phrasing melodic rather than driving. The tune was “Prince of Good Fellows” and the quartet played four choruses without embellishment before Quigley called the simplest of figures.
“On your heel and on your toe
All join hands and round you go
Other way back you’re going along
Listen to the music of the old-time song.”
The rhythm of the dancing, too, was subdued; the clogging sounded like a far-off drum and the girls’ sliding steps like the whisper of wind. We could not see the dancers, but we could tell that they were slipping along smoothly, not breaking a sweat and not grinning, but smiling gravely at one another. The crowd parted for Dr. Barcroft as he went up the steps and looked through the window into the living room. Dignity was the character of this first old-fashioned quadrille, and we were surprised. Quigley’s reputation was for lightning figures and diabolical tempo.
“Dos a do your corners all
Do the same with your own best doll.”
The musicians were ranged on the stairway and the dancers swept round on the living room floor, twirling in the bright light, their motion soft and dreamlike. Quigley stood above the other musicians, halfway up the stairs, and he looked down at the dancers—there were only twelve of them at this point—with an expression of dazed benevolence. Sometimes when he called, he kept playing through, sometimes he simply held his fiddle and swayed slightly to the melody the banjo or guitar had picked up when he passed it on to them.
“Right hands to your partners all
Right and left around the hall
When you meet her pass her by
Kiss the next one on the sly.”
As the dancers formed their squares and took them apart and went round and round to re-form them, they stirred a pleasant breeze that Dr. Barcroft felt on his face through the open window. The girls’ gingham skirts swept by slowly and kept the air lively.
Now Quigley began to play more softly and the other players followed suit; his calls became softer, too. A diminuendo was unique, Dr. Barcroft told us later, as the music and the call and the sound of dancing sank to a mutter, a murmur, and finally to a silken susurrus, tender and almost regretful in its close.
“Bring on home the one that’s odd
Bring her back and promenade
All stand where you used to do
Bow to your partners and so adieu.”
The final figure was this formal leave-taking. After the bow, the squares came apart like snowflakes melting and in the brief silence that followed there was a feeling of both completion and expectancy, and then the first rustle of night wind was heard in the trees in the yard and the long glass curtains in all the downstairs windows began to waft in and out like the skirts of lady dancers a long time gone in a valley barely remembered.
Dr. Barcroft straightened from his stand at the window and went around and through into the living room, where Quigley hailed him. “There you are,” he said. “There you are, Dr. Barcroft. We were wondering where you’d got to. Grab you a ladymiss for the next number. I expect they’re all mighty anxious to dance a step with you.”
“If you don’t mind,” he replied, “I’d rather look on. That way, I can see a little better what I need to be seeing.”
“Then come up the steps and take your place on the landing. There you’ll have a better look-see. We’re about to kick her off again, ain’t we, Claudie?”
The banjo player, his face expressionless as a bedsheet, nodded agreement.
So they began “Darling Nellie Gray,” taking it much faster than the first quadrille, but now a good two dozen dancers were on the living room floor and Dr. Barcroft could see through the doors and windows that impromptu squares had formed on the porch and in the other rooms. The figures Qualley called were a little more complicated this time, the first couple coming down the center to cast off six, all balancing then, and allemande and grand, and down the center again to cast off four, allemande left till the break of day and swing your darling Nellie Gray, when the blackbird flies to his home in the west ladies to the right and gents to the left.
The professor was charmed by the fluid power of the dance; the lines knotted and untied as smoothly as if the dancers did nothing but rehearse day long and night long for months on end. He saw the kaleidoscope patterns they made as evidence of strength in reserve and he was reminded—because of this seeming effortlessness—of the symmetries and geometries that nature takes: the sharp constellations of stars in wintertime, ice crystals on the edge of a spring, a stalk of fern with its leaves opposed, the inward whorl of the snail’s shell, the circles that spread on a pool when a dewdrop falls from an alder leaf, the echoes in a narrow cove when an outcry rings from rock to rock.
Dr. Barcroft had the impre
ssion—and not for the first time that evening—that he was involved with a place and a people, with a time and circumstance, that was not only human in all its affections and interests but linked also with nonhuman nature, with sky and stream and mountain, in its reverences. He felt that he was standing near the origins of a strength that helped to animate the world, a power that joined all things together in a pattern that lay just barely beyond the edge of comprehension. He felt that an individual personality would feel itself conformably and joyfully a part of this pattern simply by giving in to the current of the dance, this small current being but a streamlet of the larger current that poured through the world and everything that was in the world and beyond it.
* * *
“Jess, I don’t know what he was talking about, but these were the things he told us as we drove back home over the mountain,” my grandmother said. “He was a highly learned man. He knew Latin and Greek and French and I don’t know how many other languages. He had traveled everywhere. So when he talked about what he felt and thought, I paid attention. You can learn things, you know, that you don’t completely understand. I was just thrilled he opened his mind. How many men like Dr. Barcroft, known around the world for his books and adventures, would talk so freely to a mother and her daughter like he expected the both of us to keep up with him step for step? Mostly in that day and time women weren’t acknowledged to have an interest in such things.”
“Did he write down what he told you in any of his books?” I asked.
“I don’t know if he ever put these same thoughts on paper or not. I’ll have to admit I’ve never read any of Dr. Barcroft’s books and I’m a little ashamed of myself for not.… Well, it’s a disgrace to my name, isn’t it? But it’s so hard to find time to read.”
* * *