Chapter 4

My father’s death, which occurred the March following, came suddenly, wholly fortuitous to the outward eye, and I have heard my mother say, in its inconsequence, its failure to line up with any conceivable moral occasion, did much to shake her faith in a controlling Providence; but affects me still as then, as the most incontrovertible of evidences of Powers moving at large among men, occupied with other affairs than ours. A little while ago, as I sat writing here on my veranda, looking riverward, an ant ran across my paper, which I blew out with my breath into space, and I did not look to see what disaster. It reminded me suddenly of the way I felt about my father’s taking off. He was, he must have been, in the way of some god that March morning; that is one of the evidences by which you know that there are gods at all. You play happily about their knees, sometimes they play with you, then you stumble against a foot thrust out, or the clamour of your iniquity disturbs their proper meditations, and suddenly you are silenced. My mother was doubtless right; it would have been better if he had stayed with her and the children, certainly happier, but he got in the way of the Powers.

It is curious that until I began just now to reconstruct the circumstances in which the news of his death came to me, I never realized that I might have been looking on, but high above it, at the very instant and occasion, for, from the window of my room in the second story of the Taylorville grammar school I could see the unfinished walls of the Zimmern block aglimmer with the light which the wind heaped up and shattered against their raw pink surfaces, and a loose board of the scaffolding allowed to remain up all winter, flacking like a torn leaf in the mighty current in which the school building, all the buildings, shook with the steady tremor of reeds in a freshet. Between them the tops of the maples, level like a shorn hedge, kept up an immensity of tormented motion that invaded even the schoolroom with a sense of its insupportable fatigues. I remember there were few at their desks that day, and all the discipline relaxed by the confusion of the wind. At the morning recess there had been some debate about dismissing the session, and one of the young teachers on the third floor had grown hysterical and been reprimanded by the principal.

It must have been about eleven of the clock, while I was watching the little puffs of dust that rose between the planks of the flooring whenever the building shuddered and ground its teeth, divided between an affectation of timorousness which seemed to grow in favour as a suitable frame of behaviour, and the rapid rise of every tingling sense to the spacious movement of the weather and my private dramatization of the demolition of the building, from which only such occupants as I favoured should be rescued by my signal behaviour. Already several children had been abstracted by anxious parents, so that I failed to be even startled by another knocking until my attention was attracted by the teacher opening the door, and opening it wide upon my Uncle Alva.

I saw him step back with a motion of his head sidewise, to draw her after him, but it took all the suggestive nods and winks that, as she drew it shut behind her, were focussed on my desk, to pull me up to the realization that his visit must have something to do with me. It was not, in fact, until I was halfway down the aisle after Miss Jessel called me, that I recovered my surprise sufficiently to assume the mysteriously important air that was proper to the fifth grade on being privileged to answer the door.

There was not, I am sure, in the brief information that I was wanted at home, one betraying syllable; nothing sufficiently unusual in the way Miss Jessel tied me into my hood, nor in finding Effie tied into hers on the first floor, nor in the way her teacher kissed her—everybody kissed Effie who was allowed—nothing in Forester’s having already cleared out without waiting for us. We got into the town in the wake of Uncle Alva and between the business blocks where the tall buildings abated the wind. There was no traffic in the streets that day. Here and there a foot passenger with his hat held down by both hands and his coat tails between his legs, staggered into doorways which were snapped to behind him, and from the glass of which faces looked out featureless in the blur of the wind. As we passed the side door of a men’s clothing establishment one of these pale human orbs approached to the pane, exhibited a peering movement, rapped on the glass and beckoned. I know now this must have been the working of an instinct to which Taylorville was so habituated that it seemed natural to Uncle Alva—he was only my mother’s half brother, not my father’s—to send us on with a word about overtaking us, while he crossed the street at the instance of that beckoning finger to be chaffered with in the matter of my father’s grave clothes. All this time there was not a word spoken that could convey to us children the import of our unexpected release. We drifted down the street, Effie and I, sidling against the blasts that drove furiously in the crossways, and finally as we caught our breath under a long red sandstone building, I recall being taken violently, as it were, by knowledge, and crying out that my father was dead, that he was dead and I should never see him again. I do not know how I knew, but I knew, and Effie accepted it; she came cuddling up to me in the smother of the wind, trying to comfort me as if, as I think did not occur to her, he had been my father only and not hers at all. I do not recall very well how we got across the town between the shut houses, high shouldered with the cold, except that Uncle Alva did not come up with us, and the vast lapping of the wind that swirled us together at intervals in a community of breathlessness, seemed somehow to have grown out of the occasion and be naturally commensurate with its desolating quality. I do not think it occurred to us as strange that we should have been left so to come to the knowledge that grew until, as we came in sight of our home, we were fairly taken aback to find it so little altered from what it had been when we left it three hours before. It had never been an attractive house: yellow painted, with chocolate trimmings and unshuttered windows against which the wind contrived. It cowered in a wide yard full of unpruned maples that now held up their limbs protestingly, that shook off from their stretched boughs, disclaimers of responsibility; the very smoke wrenched itself from the chimney and escaped, hurryingly upon the wind; the shrubbery wrung itself; whole flights of fallen leaves that had settled soddenly beside the borders all the winter, having at last got a plain sight of it, whirled up aghast and fled along the road. The blinds were down at the front windows, and no one came in or out.