The Village Watch-Tower

THE VILLAGE WATCH-TOWER

Dear old apple-tree, under whose gnarled branches these stories were written, to you I dedicate the book. My head was so close to you, who can tell from whence the thoughts came? I only know that when all the other trees in the orchard were barren, there were always stories to be found under your branches, and so it is our joint book, dear apple-tree. Your pink blossoms have fallen on the page as I wrote; your ruddy fruit has dropped into my lap; the sunshine streamed through your leaves and tipped my pencil with gold. The birds singing in your boughs may have lent a sweet note here and there; and do you remember the day when the gentle shower came? We just curled the closer, and you and I and the sky all cried together while we wrote “The Fore-Room Rug.”

It should be a lovely book, dear apple-tree, but alas! it is not altogether that, because I am not so simple as you, and because I have strayed farther away from the heart of Mother Nature.

KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN

“Quillcote,” Hollis, Maine, August 12, 1895.

THE VILLAGE WATCH-TOWER

It stood on the gentle slope of a hill, the old gray house, with its weather-beaten clapboards and its roof of ragged shingles. It was in the very lap of the road, so that the stage-driver could almost knock on the window pane without getting down from his seat, on those rare occasions when he brought “old Mis’ Bascom” a parcel from Saco.

Humble and dilapidated as it was, it was almost beautiful in the springtime, when the dandelion-dotted turf grew close to the great stone steps; or in the summer, when the famous Bascom elm cast its graceful shadow over the front door. The elm, indeed, was the only object that ever did cast its shadow there. Lucinda Bascom said her “front door ‘n’ entry never hed ben used except for fun’rals, ‘n’ she was goin’ to keep it nice for that purpose, ‘n’ not get it all tracked up.”

She was sitting now where she had sat for thirty years. Her high-backed rocker, with its cushion of copperplate patch and its crocheted tidy, stood always by a southern window that looked out on the river. The river was a sheet of crystal, as it poured over the dam; a rushing, roaring torrent of foaming white, as it swept under the bridge and fought its way between the rocky cliffs beyond, sweeping swirling, eddying, in its narrow channel, pulsing restlessly into the ragged fissures of its shores, and leaping with a tempestuous roar into the Witches’ Eel-pot, a deep wooded gorge cleft in the very heart of the granite bank.

But Lucinda Bascom could see more than the river from her favorite window. It was a much-traveled road, the road that ran past the house on its way from Liberty Village to Milliken’s Mills. A tottering old sign-board, on a verdant triangle of turf, directed you over Deacon Chute’s hill to the “Flag Medder Road,” and from thence to Liberty Centre; the little post-office and store, where the stage stopped twice a day, was quite within eyeshot; so were the public watering-trough, Brigadier Hill, and, behind the ruins of an old mill, the wooded path that led to the Witches’ Eel-pot, a favorite walk for village lovers. This was all on her side of the river. As for the bridge which knit together the two tiny villages, nobody could pass over that without being seen from the Bascoms’. The rumble of wheels generally brought a family party to the window,—Jot Bascom’s wife (she that was Diadema Dennett), Jot himself, if he were in the house, little Jot, and grandpa Bascom, who looked at the passers-by with a vacant smile parting his thin lips. Old Mrs. Bascom herself did not need the rumble of wheels to tell her that a vehicle was coming, for she could see it fully ten minutes before it reached the bridge,—at the very moment it appeared at the crest of Saco Hill, where strangers pulled up their horses, on a clear day, and paused to look at Mount Washington, miles away in the distance. Tory Hill and Saco Hill met at the bridge, and just there, too, the river road began its shady course along the east side of the stream: in view of all which “old Mis’ Bascom’s settin’-room winder” might well be called the “Village Watch-Tower,” when you consider further that she had moved only from her high-backed rocker to her bed, and from her bed to her rocker, for more than thirty years,—ever since that july day when her husband had had a sun-stroke while painting the meeting-house steeple, and her baby Jonathan had been thereby hastened into a world not in the least ready to receive him.

She could not have lived without that window, she would have told you, nor without the river, which had lulled her to sleep ever since she could remember. It was in the south chamber upstairs that she had been born. Her mother had lain there and listened to the swirl of the water, in that year when the river was higher than the oldest inhabitant had ever seen it,—the year when the covered bridge at the Mills had been carried away, and when the one at the Falls was in hourly danger of succumbing to the force of the freshet.

All the men in both villages were working on the river, strengthening the dam, bracing the bridge, and breaking the jams of logs; and with the parting of the boom, the snapping of the bridge timbers, the crashing of the logs against the rocks, and the shouts of the river-drivers, the little Lucinda had come into the world. Some one had gone for the father, and had found him on the river, where he had been since day-break, drenched with the storm, blown fro his dangerous footing time after time, but still battling with the great heaped-up masses of logs, wrenching them from one another’s grasp, and sending them down the swollen stream.

Finally the jam broke; and a cheer of triumph burst from the excited men, as the logs, freed from their bondage, swept down the raging flood, on and ever on in joyous liberty, faster and faster, till they encountered some new obstacle, when they heaped themselves together again, like puppets of Fate, and were beaten by the waves into another helpless surrender.

With the breaking of the jam, one dead monarch of the forest leaped into the air as if it had been shot from a cannon’s mouth, and lodged between two jutting peaks of rock high on the river bank. Presently another log was dashed against it, but rolled off and hurried down the stream; then another, and still another; but no force seemed enough to drive the giant from its intrenched position.

“Hurry on down to the next jam, Raish, and let it alone,” cried the men. “Mebbe it’ll git washed off in the night, and anyhow you can’t budge it with no kind of a tool we’ve got here.”

Then from the shore came a boy’s voice calling, “There’s a baby up to your house!” And the men repeated in stentorian tones, “Baby up to your house, Raish! Leggo the log; you’re wanted!”

“Boy or girl?” shouted the young father.

“Girl!” came back the answer above the roar of the river.

Whereupon Raish Dunnell steadied himself with his pick and taking a hatchet from his belt, cut a rude letter “L” on the side of the stranded log.

“L’s for Lucindy,” he laughed. “Now you log if you git’s fur as Saco, drop in to my wife’s folks and tell ‘em the baby’s name.”

There had not been such a freshet for years before, and there had never been one since; so, as the quiet seasons went by, “Lucindy’s log” was left in peace, the columbines blooming all about it, the harebells hanging their heads of delicate blue among the rocks that held it in place, the birds building their nests in the knot-holes of its withered side.

Seventy years had passed, and on each birthday, from the time when she was only “Raish Dunnell’s little Lou,” to the years when she was Lucinda Bascom, wife and mother, she had wandered down by the river side, and gazed, a little superstitiously perhaps, on the log that had been marked with an “L” on the morning she was born. It had stood the wear and tear of the elements bravely, but now it was beginning, like Lucinda, to show its age. Its back was bent, like hers; its face was seamed and wrinkled, like her own; and the village lovers who looked at it from the opposite bank wondered if, after all, it would hold out as long as “old Mis’ Bascom.”

She held out bravely, old Mrs. Bascom, though she was “all skin, bones, and tongue,” as the neighbors said; for nobody needed to go into the Bascoms’ to brighten up aunt Lucinda a bit, or take her the news; one went in to get a bit of brightness, and to hear the news.

“I should get lonesome, I s’pose,” she was wont to say, “if it wa’n’t for the way this house is set, and this chair, and this winder, ‘n’ all. Men folks used to build some o’ the houses up in a lane, or turn ‘em back or side to the road, so the women folks couldn’t see anythin’ to keep their minds off their churnin’ or dish-washin’; but Aaron Dunnell hed somethin’ else to think about, ‘n’ that was himself, first, last, and all the time. His store was down to bottom of the hill, ‘n’ when he come up to his meals, he used to set where he could see the door; ‘n’ if any cust’mer come, he could call to ‘em to wait a spell till he got through eatin’. Land! I can hear him now, yellin’ to ‘em, with his mouth full of victuals! They hed to wait till he got good ‘n’ ready, too. There wa’n’t so much comp’tition in business then as there is now, or he’d ‘a’ hed to give up eatin’ or hire a clerk. … I’ve always felt to be thankful that the house was on this rise o’ ground. The teams hev to slow up on ‘count o’ the hill, ‘n’ it gives me consid’ble chance to see folks ‘n’ what they’ve got in the back of the wagon, ‘n’ one thing ‘n’ other. … The neighbors is continually comin’ in here to talk about things that’s goin’ on in the village. I like to hear ‘em, but land! they can’t tell me nothing’! They often say, ‘For massy sakes, Lucindy Bascom, how d’ you know that?’ ‘Why,’ says I to them, ‘I don’t ask no questions, ‘n’ folks don’t tell me no lies; I just set in my winder, ‘n’ put two ‘n’ two together,—that’s all I do.’ I ain’t never ben in a playhouse, but I don’t suppose the play-actors git down off the platform on t’ the main floor to explain to the folks what they’ve ben doin’, do they? I expect, if folks can’t understand their draymas when the’re actin’ of ‘em out, they have to go ignorant, don’t they? Well, what do I want with explainin’, when everythin’ is acted out right in the road?”

There was quite a gathering of neighbors at the Bascoms’ on this particular July afternoon. No invitations had been sent out, and none were needed. A common excitement had made it vital that people should drop in somewhere, and speculate about certain interesting matters well known to be going on in the community, but going on in such an underhand and secretive fashion that it well-nigh destroyed one’s faith in human nature.

The sitting-room door was open into the entry, so that whatever breeze there was might come in, and an unusual glimpse of the new foreroom rug was afforded the spectators. Everything was as neat as wax, for Diadema was a housekeeper of the type fast passing away. The great coal stove was enveloped in its usual summer wrapper of purple calico, which, tied neatly about its ebony neck and portly waist, gave it the appearance of a buxom colored lady presiding over the assembly. The kerosene lamps stood in a row on the high, narrow mantelpiece, each chimney protected from the flies by a brown paper bag inverted over its head. Two plaster Samuels praying under the pink mosquito netting adorned the ends of the shelf. There were screens at all the windows, and Diadema fidgeted nervously when a visitor came in the mosquito netting door, for fear a fly should sneak in with her.

On the wall were certificates of membership in the Missionary Society; a picture of Maidens welcoming Washington in the Streets of Alexandria, in a frame of cucumber seeds; and an interesting document setting forth the claims of the Dunnell family as old settlers long before the separation of Maine from Massachusetts,—the fact bein’ established by an obituary notice reading, “In Saco, December 1791, Dorcas, daughter of Abiathar Dunnell, two months old of Fits unbaptized.”

“He may be goin’ to marry Eunice, and he may not,” observed Almira Berry; “though what she wants of Reuben Hobson is more ‘n I can make out. I never see a widower straighten up as he has this last year. I guess he’s been lookin’ round pretty lively, but couldn’t find anybody that was fool enough to give him any encouragement.”

“Mebbe she wants to get married,” said Hannah Sophia, in a tone that spoke volumes. “When Parson Perkins come to this parish, one of his first calls was on Eunice Emery. He always talked like the book o’ Revelation; so says he, ‘have you got your weddin’ garment on, Miss Emery?’ says he. ‘No,’ says she, ‘but I ben tryin’ to these twenty years.’ She was always full of her jokes, Eunice was!”

“The Emerys was always a humorous family,” remarked Diadema, as she annihilated a fly with a newspaper. “Old Silas Emery was an awful humorous man. He used to live up on the island; and there come a freshet one year, and he said he got his sofy ‘n’ chairs off, anyhow!” That was just his jokin’. He hadn’t a sign of a sofy in the house; ‘t was his wife Sophy he meant, she that was Sophy Swett. Then another time, when I was a little mite of a thin runnin’ in ‘n’ out o’ his yard, he caught holt o’ me, and says he, ‘You’d better take care, sissy; when I kill you and two more, thet’ll be three children I’ve killed!’ Land! you couldn’t drag me inside that yard for years afterwards. … There! she’s got a fire in the cook-stove; there’s a stream o’ smoke comin’ out o’ the kitchen chimbley. I’m willin’ to bet my new rug she’s goin’ to be married tonight!’

“Mebbe she’s makin’ jell’,” suggested Hannah Sophia.

“Jell’!” ejaculated Mrs. Jot scornfully. “Do you s’pose Eunice Emery would build up a fire in the middle o’ the afternoon ‘n’ go to makin’ a jell’, this hot day? Besides, there ain’t a currant gone into her house this week, as I happen to know.”

“It’s a dretful thick year for fol’age,” mumbled grandpa Bascom, appearing in the door with his vacant smile. “I declare some o’ the maples looks like balls in the air.”

“That’s the twentieth time he’s hed that over since mornin’,” said Diadema. “Here, father, take your hat off ‘n’ set in the kitchen door ‘n’ shell me this mess o’ peas. Now think smart, ‘n’ put the pods in the basket ‘n’ the peas in the pan; don’t you mix ‘em.”

The old man hung his hat on the back of the chair, took the pan in his trembling hands, and began aimlessly to open the pods, while he chuckled at the hens that gathered round the doorstep when they heard the peas rattling in the pan.

“Reuben needs a wife bad enough, if that’s all,” remarked the Widow Buzzell, as one who had given the matter some consideration.

“I should think he did,” rejoined old Mrs. Bascom. “Those children ‘bout git their livin’ off the road in summer, from the time the dand’lion greens is ready for diggin’ till the blackb’ries ‘n’ choke-cherries is gone. Diademy calls ‘em in ‘n’ gives ‘em a cooky every time they go past, ‘n’ they eat as if they was famished. Rube Hobson never was any kind of a pervider, ‘n’ he’s consid’able snug besides.”

“He ain’t goin’ to better himself much,” said Almira. “Eunice Emery ain’t fit to housekeep for a cat. The pie she took to the pie supper at the church was so tough that even Deacon Dyer couldn’t eat it; and the boys got holt of her doughnuts, and declared they was goin’ fishin’ next day ‘n’ use ‘em for sinkers. She lives from hand to mouth Eunice Emery does. She’s about as much of a doshy as Rube is. She’ll make tea that’s strong enough to bear up an egg, most, and eat her doughnuts with it three times a day rather than take the trouble to walk out to the meat or the fish cart. I know for a fact she don’t make riz bread once a year.”

“Mebbe her folks likes buttermilk bread best; some do,” said the Widow Buzzell. “My husband always said, give him buttermilk bread to work on. He used to say my riz bread was so light he’d hev to tread on it to keep it anywheres; but when you’d eat buttermilk bread he said you’d got somethin’ that stayed by you; you knew where it was every time. … For massy sake! there’s the stage stoppin’ at the Hobson’s door. I wonder if Rube’s first wife’s mother has come from Moderation? If ‘t is, they must ‘a’ made up their quarrel, for there was a time she wouldn’t step foot over that doorsill. She must be goin’ to stay some time, for there’s a trunk on the back o’ the stage. … No, there ain’t nobody gettin’ out. Land, Hannah Sophia, don’t push me clean through the glass! It beats me why they make winders so small that three people can’t look out of ‘em without crowdin’. Ain’t that a wash-boiler he’s handin’ down? Well, it’s a mercy; he’s ben borrowin’ long enough!”

“What goes on after dark I ain’t responsible for,” commented old Mrs. Bascom, “but no new wash-boiler has gone into Rube Hobson’s door in the daytime for many a year, and I’ll be bound it means somethin’. There goes a broom, too. Much sweepin’ he’ll get out o’ Eunice; it’s a slick ‘n’ a promise with her!”

“When did you begin to suspicion this, Diademy?” asked Almira Berry. “I’ve got as much faculty as the next one, but anybody that lives on the river road has just got to give up knowin’ anything. You can’t keep runnin’ to the store every day, and if you could you don’t find out much nowadays. Bill Peters don’t take no more interest in his neighbors than a cow does in election.”

“I can’t get mother Bascom to see it as I do,” said Diadema, “but for one thing she’s ben carryin’ home bundles ‘bout every other night for a month, though she’s ben too smart to buy anythin’ here at this store. She had Packard’s horse to go to Saco last week. When she got home, jest at dusk, she drove int’ the barn, ‘n’ bimeby Pitt Packard come to git his horse,—‘t was her own buggy she went with. She looked over here when she went int’ the house, ‘n’ she ketched my eye, though ‘t was half a mile away, so she never took a thing in with her, but soon as’t was dark she made three trips out to the barn with a lantern, ‘n’ any fool could tell ‘t her arms was full o’ pa’cels by the way she carried the lantern. The Hobsons and the Emerys have married one another more ‘n once, as fur as that goes. I declare if I was goin’ to get married I should want to be relation to somebody besides my own folks.”

“The reason I can hardly credit it,” said Hannah Sophia, “is because Eunice never had a beau in her life, that I can remember of. Cyse Higgins set up with her for a spell, but it never amounted to nothin’. It seems queer, too, for she was always so fond o’ seein’ men folks round that when Pitt Packard was shinglin’ her barn she used to go out nights ‘n’ rip some o’ the shingles off, so ‘t he’d hev more days’ work on it.”

“I always said ‘t was she that begun on Rube Hobson, not him on her,” remarked the Widow Buzzell. “Their land joinin’ made courtin’ come dretful handy. His critters used to git in her field ‘bout every other day (I always suspicioned she broke the fence down herself), and then she’d hev to go over and git him to drive ‘em out. She’s wed his onion bed for him two summers, as I happen to know, for I’ve been ou’ doors more ‘n common this summer, tryin’ to fetch my constitution up. Diademy, don’t you want to look out the back way ‘n’ see if Rube’s come home yet?”

“He ain’t,” said old Mrs. Bascom, “so you needn’t look; can’t you see the curtains is all down? He’s gone up to the Mills, ‘n’ it’s my opinion he’s gone to speak to the minister.”

“He hed somethin’ in the back o’ the wagon covered up with an old linen lap robe; ‘t ain’t at all likely he ‘d ‘a’ hed that if he’d ben goin’ to the minister’s,” objected Mrs. Jot.

“Anybody’d think you was born yesterday, to hear you talk, Diademy,” retorted her mother-in-law. “When you ‘ve set in one spot’s long’s I hev, p’raps you’ll hev the use o’ your faculties! Men folks has more ‘n one way o’ gettin’ married, ‘specially when they ‘re ashamed of it. … Well, I vow, there’s the little Hobson girls comin’ out o’ the door this minute, ‘n’ they ‘re all dressed up, and Mote don’t seem to be with ‘em.”

Every woman in the room rose to her feet, and Diadema removed her murderous eye from a fly which she had been endeavoring to locate for some moments.

“I guess they ‘re goin’ up to the church to meet their father ‘n’ Eunice, poor little things,” ventured the Widow Buzzell.

“P’raps they be,” said old Mrs. Bascom sarcastically; “p’raps they be goin’ to church, takin’ a three-quart tin pail ‘n’ a brown paper bundle along with ‘em. … They ‘re comin’ over the bridge, just as I s’posed. … Now, if they come past this house, you head ‘em off, Almiry, ‘n’ see if you can git some satisfaction out of ‘em. … They ain’t hardly old enough to hold their tongues.”

An exciting interview soon took place in the middle of the road, and Almira reentered the room with the expression of one who had penetrated the inscrutable and solved the riddle of the Sphinx. She had been vouch-safed one of those gleams of light in darkness which almost dazzle the beholder.

“That’s about the confirmingest thing I’ve heern yet!” she ejaculated, as she took off her shaker bonnet. “They say they’re goin’ up to their aunt Hitty’s to stay two days. They’re dressed in their best, clean to the skin, for I looked; ‘n’ it’s their night gownds they’ve got in the bundle. They say little Mote has gone to Union to stop all night with his uncle Abijah, ‘n’ that leaves Rube all alone, for the smith girl that does his chores is home sick with the hives. And what do you s’pose is in the pail? Fruit cake,—that’s what ‘t is, no more ‘n’ no less! I knowed that Smith girl didn’t bake it, ‘n’ so I asked ‘em, ‘n’ they said Miss Emery give it to ‘em. There was two little round try-cakes, baked in muffin-rings. Eunice hed took some o’ the batter out of a big loaf ‘n’ baked it to se how it was goin’ to turn out. That means wedding-cake, or I’m mistaken!”

“There ain’t no gittin’ round that,” agreed the assembled company, “now is there, Mis’ Bascom?”

Old Mrs. Bascom wet her finger, smoothed the parting of her false front, and looked inscrutable.

“I don’t see why you’re so secret,” objected Diadema.

“I’ve got my opinions, and I’ve had ‘em some time,” observed the good lady. “I don’t know ‘s I’m bound to tell ‘em and have ‘em held up to ridicule. Let the veal hang, I say. If any one of us is right, we’ll all know to-morrow.”

“Well, all any of us has got to judge from is appearances,” said Diadema, “and how you can twist ‘em one way, and us another, stumps me!”

“Perhaps I see more appearances than you do,” retorted her mother-in-law. “Some folks mistakes all they see for all there is. I was reading a detective story last week. It seems there was an awful murder in Schenectady, and a mother and her two children was found dead in one bed, with bullet holes in their heads. The husband was away on business, and there wasn’t any near neighbors to hear her screech. Well, the detectives come from far and from near, and begun to work up the case. One of ‘em thought ‘t was the husband,—though he set such store by his wife he went ravin’ crazy when he heard she was dead,—one of ‘em laid it on the children,—though they was both under six years old; and one decided it was suicide,—though the woman was a church member and didn’t know how to fire a gun off, besides. And then there come along a detective younger and smarter than all the rest, and says he, ‘If all you bats have seen everything you can see, I guess I’ll take a look around,’ says he. Sure enough, there was a rug with ‘Welcome’ on it layin’ in front of the washstand, and when he turned it up he found an elegant diamond stud with a man’s full name and address on the gold part. He took a train and went right to the man’s house. He was so taken by surprise (he hadn’t missed the stud, for he had a full set of ‘em) that he owned right up and confessed the murder.”

“I don’t see as that’s got anything to do with this case,” said Diadema.

“It’s got this much to do with it,” replied old Mrs. Bascom, “that perhaps you’ve looked all round the room and seen everything you had eyes to see, and perhaps I’ve had wit enough to turn up the rug in front o’ the washstand.”

“Whoever he marries now, Mis’ Bascom’ll have to say ‘t was the one she meant,” laughed the Widow Buzzell.