The Devil and Tom Walker
By Washington Irving
A few miles from Boston, in Massachusetts, there is a deep inlet winding several miles into the
interior of the country from Charles Bay, and terminating in a thickly wooded swamp, or morass.
On one side of this inlet is a beautiful dark grove; on the opposite side the land rises abruptly
from the water's edge, into a high ridge on which grow a few scattered oaks of great age and
immense size. Under one of these gigantic trees, according to old stories, there was a great
amount of treasure buried by Kidd the pirate. The inlet allowed a facility to bring the money in a
boat secretly and at night to the very foot of the hill. The elevation of the place permitted a good
look out to be kept that no one was at hand, while the remarkable trees formed good landmarks
by which the place might easily be found again. The old stories add, moreover, that the devil
presided at the hiding of the money, and took it under his guardianship; but this, it is well known,
he always does with buried treasure, particularly when it has been ill gotten. Be that as it may,
Kidd never returned to recover his wealth; being shortly after seized at Boston, sent out to
England, and there hanged for a pirate.
About the year 1727, just at the time when earthquakes were prevalent in New England, and
shook many tall sinners down upon their knees, there lived near this place a meagre miserly
fellow of the name of Tom Walker. He had a wife as miserly as himself; they were so miserly that
they even conspired to cheat each other. Whatever the woman could lay hands on she hid away: a
hen could not cackle but she was on the alert to secure the new-laid egg. Her husband was
continually prying about to detect her secret hoards, and many and fierce were the conflicts that
took place about what ought to have been common property. They lived in a forlorn looking
house, that stood alone and had an air of starvation. A few straggling savin trees, emblems of
sterility, grew near it; no smoke ever curled from its chimney; no traveller stopped at its door. A
miserable horse, whose ribs were as articulate as the bars of a gridiron, stalked about a field
where a thin carpet of moss, scarcely covering the ragged beds of pudding stone, tantalized and
balked his hunger; and sometimes he would lean his head over the fence, look piteously at the
passer by, and seem to petition deliverance from this land of famine. The house and its inmates
had altogether a bad name. Tom's wife was a tall termagant, fierce of temper, loud of tongue, and
strong of arm. Her voice was often heard in wordy warfare with her husband; and his face
sometimes showed signs that their conflicts were not confined to words. No one ventured,
however, to interfere between them; the lonely wayfarer shrunk within himself at the horrid
clamour and clapper clawing; eyed the den of discord askance, and hurried on his way, rejoicing,
if a bachelor, in his celibacy.
One day that Tom Walker had been to a distant part of the neighbourhood, he took what he
considered a short cut homewards through the swamp. Like most short cuts, it was an ill chosen
route. The swamp was thickly grown with great gloomy pines and hemlocks, some of them ninety
feet high; which made it dark at noonday, and a retreat for all the owls of the neighbourhood. It
was full of pits and quagmires, partly covered with weeds and mosses; where the green surface
often betrayed the traveller into a gulf of black smothering mud; there were also dark and
stagnant pools, the abodes of the tadpole, the bull-frog, and the water snake, and where trunks of
pines and hemlocks lay half drowned, half rotting, looking like alligators, sleeping in the mire.
Tom had long been picking his way cautiously through this treacherous forest; stepping from tuft
to tuft of rushes and roots which afforded precarious footholds among deep sloughs; or pacing
carefully, like a cat, along the prostrate trunks of trees; startled now and then by the sudden
screaming of the bittern, or the quacking of a wild duck, rising on the wing from some solitary
pool. At length he arrived at a piece of firm ground, which ran out like a peninsula into the deep
bosom of the swamp. It had been one of the strong holds of the Indians during their wars with the
first colonists. Here they had thrown up a kind of fort which they had looked upon as almost
impregnable, and had used as a place of refuge for their squaws and children. Nothing remained
of the Indian fort but a few embankments gradually sinking to the level of the surrounding earth,
and already overgrown in part by oaks and other forest trees, the foliage of which formed a
contrast to the dark pines and hemlocks of the swamp.
It was late in the dusk of evening that Tom Walker reached the old fort, and he paused there for a
while to rest himself. Any one but he would have felt unwilling to linger in this lonely
melancholy place, for the common people had a bad opinion of it from the stories handed down
from the time of the Indian wars; when it was asserted that the savages held incantations here and
made sacrifices to the evil spirit. Tom Walker, however, was not a man to be troubled with any
fears of the kind.
He reposed himself for some time on the trunk of a fallen hemlock, listening to the boding cry of
the tree toad, and delving with his walking staff into a mound of black mould at his feet. As he
turned up the soil unconsciously, his staff struck against something hard. He raked it out of the
vegetable mould, and lo! a cloven skull with an Indian tomahawk buried deep in it, lay before
him. The rust on the weapon showed the time that had elapsed since this death blow had been
given. It was a dreary memento of the fierce struggle that had taken place in this last foothold of
the Indian warriors.
"Humph!" said Tom Walker, as he gave the skull a kick to shake the dirt from it.
"Let that skull alone!" said a gruff voice.
Tom lifted up his eyes and beheld a great black man, seated directly opposite him on the stump of
a tree. He was exceedingly surprised, having neither seen nor heard any one approach, and he was
still more perplexed on observing, as well as the gathering gloom would permit, that the stranger
was neither negro nor Indian. It is true, he was dressed in a rude, half Indian garb, and had a red
belt or sash swathed round his body, but his face was neither black nor copper colour, but swarthy
and dingy and begrimed with soot, as if he had been accustomed to toil among fires and forges.
He had a shock of coarse black hair, that stood out from his head in all directions; and bore an axe
on his shoulder.
He scowled for a moment at Tom with a pair of great red eyes.
"What are you doing in my grounds?" said the black man, with a hoarse growling voice.
"Your grounds?" said Tom, with a sneer; "no more your grounds than mine: they belong to
Deacon Peabody."
"Deacon Peabody be d--d," said the stranger, "as I flatter myself he will be, if he does not look
more to his own sins and less to his neighbour's. Look yonder, and see how Deacon Peabody is
faring."
Tom looked in the direction that the stranger pointed, and beheld one of the great trees, fair and
flourishing without, but rotten at the core, and saw that it had been nearly hewn through, so that
the first high wind was likely to below it down. On the bark of the tree was scored the name of
Deacon Peabody. He now looked round and found most of the tall trees marked with the name of
some great men of the colony, and all more or less scored by the axe. The one on which he had
been seated, and which had evidently just been hewn down, bore the name of Crowninshield; and
he recollected a mighty rich man of that name, who made a vulgar display of wealth, which it was
whispered he had acquired by buccaneering.
"He's just ready for burning!" said the black man, with a growl of triumph. "You see I am likely
to have a good stock of firewood for winter."
"But what right have you," said Tom, "to cut down Deacon Peabody's timber?"
"The right of prior claim," said the other. "This woodland belonged to me long before one of your
white faced race put foot upon the soil."
"And pray, who are you, if I may be so bold?" said Tom. "Oh, I go by various names. I am the
Wild Huntsman in some countries; the Black Miner in others. In this neighbourhood I am known
by the name of the Black Woodsman. I am he to whom the red men devoted this spot, and now
and then roasted a white man by way of sweet smelling sacrifice. Since the red men have been
exterminated by you white savages, I amuse myself by presiding at the persecutions of quakers
and anabaptists; I am the great patron and prompter of slave dealers, and the grand master of the
Salem witches."
"The upshot of all which is, that, if I mistake not," said Tom, sturdily, "you are he commonly
called Old Scratch."
"The same at your service!" replied the black man, with a half civil nod.
Such was the opening of this interview, according to the old story, though it has almost too
familiar an air to be credited. One would think that to meet with such a singular personage in this
wild lonely place, would have shaken any man's nerves: but Tom was a hard-minded fellow, not
easily daunted, and he had lived so long with a termagant wife, that he did not even fear the devil.
It is said that after this commencement, they had a long and earnest conversation together, as Tom
returned homewards. The black man told him of great sums of money which had been buried by
Kidd the pirate, under the oak trees on the high ridge not far from the morass. All these were
under his command and protected by his power, so that none could find them but such as
propitiated his favour. These he offered to place within Tom Walker's reach, having conceived an
especial kindness for him: but they were to be had only on certain conditions. What these
conditions were, may easily be surmised, though Tom never disclosed them publicly. They must
have been very hard, for he required time to think of them, and he was not a man to stick at trifles
where money was in view. When they had reached the edge of the swamp the stranger paused.
"What proof have I that all you have been telling me is true?" said Tom.
"There is my signature," said the black man, pressing his finger on Tom's forehead. So saying, he
turned off among the thickets of the swamp, and seemed, as Tom said, to go down, down, down,
into the earth, until nothing but his head and shoulders could be seen, and so on until he totally
disappeared.
When Tom reached home he found the black print of a finger burnt, as it were, into his forehead,
which nothing could obliterate.
The first news his wife had to tell him was the sudden death of Absalom Crowninshield the rich
buccaneer. It was announced in the papers with the usual flourish, that "a great man had fallen in
Israel."
Tom recollected the tree which his black friend had just hewn down, and which was ready for
burning. "Let the freebooter roast," said Tom, "who cares!" He now felt convinced that all he had
heard and seen was no illusion.
He was not prone to let his wife into his confidence; but as this was an uneasy secret, he willingly
shared it with her. All her avarice was awakened at the mention of hidden gold, and she urged her
husband to comply with the black man's terms and secure what would make them wealthy for
life. However Tom might have felt disposed to sell himself to the devil, he was determined not to
do so to oblige his wife; so he flatly refused out of the mere spirit of contradiction. Many and
bitter were the quarrels they had on the subject, but the more she talked the more resolute was
Tom not to be damned to please her. At length she determined to drive the bargain on her own
account, and if she succeeded, to keep all the gain to herself.
Being of the same fearless temper as her husband, she set off for the old Indian fort towards the
close of a summer's day. She was many hours absent. When she came back she was reserved and
sullen in her replies. She spoke something of a black man whom she had met about twilight,
hewing at the root of a tall tree. He was sulky, however, and would not come to terms; she was to
go again with a propitiatory offering, but what it was she forebore to say.
The next evening she set off again for the swamp, with her apron heavily laden. Tom waited and
waited for her, but in vain: midnight came, but she did not make her appearance; morning, noon,
night returned, but still she did not come. Tom now grew uneasy for her safety; especially as he
found she had carried off in her apron the silver teapot and spoons and every portable article of
value. Another night elapsed, another morning came; but no wife. In a word, she was never heard
of more.
What was her real fate nobody knows, in consequence of so many pretending to know. It is one of
those facts that have become confounded by a variety of historians. Some asserted that she lost
her way among the tangled mazes of the swamp and sunk into some pit or slough; others, more
uncharitable, hinted that she had eloped with the household booty, and made off to some other
province; while others assert that the tempter had decoyed her into a dismal quagmire on top of
which her hat was found lying. In confirmation of this, it was said a great black man with an axe
on his shoulder was seen late that very evening coming out of the swamp, carrying a bundle tied
in a check apron, with an air of surly triumph.
The most current and probable story, however, observes that Tom Walker grew so anxious about
the fate of his wife and his property that he sat out at length to seek them both at the Indian fort.
During a long summer's afternoon he searched about the gloomy place, but no wife was to be
seen. He called her name repeatedly, but she was no where to be heard. The bittern alone
responded to his voice, as he flew screaming by; or the bull frog croaked dolefully from a
neighbouring pool. At length, it is said, just in the brown hour of twilight, when the owls began to
hoot and the bats to flit about, his attention was attracted by the clamour of carrion crows that
were hovering about a cypress tree. He looked and beheld a bundle tied in a check apron and
hanging in the branches of the tree; with a great vulture perched hard by, as if keeping watch
upon it. He leaped with joy, for he recognized his wife's apron, and supposed it to contain the
household valuables.
"Let us get hold of the property," said he, consolingly to himself, "and we will endeavour to do
without the woman."
As he scrambled up the tree the vulture spread its wide wings, and sailed off screaming into the
deep shadows of the forest. Tom seized the check apron, but, woful sight! found nothing but a
heart and liver tied up in it.
Such, according to the most authentic old story, was all that was to be found of Tom's wife. She
had probably attempted to deal with the black man as she had been accustomed to deal with her
husband; but though a female scold is generally considered a match for the devil, yet in this
instance she appears to have had the worst of it. She must have died game however; for it is said
Tom noticed many prints of cloven feet deeply stamped about the tree, and several handsful of
hair, that looked as if they had been plucked from the coarse black shock of the woodsman. Tom
knew his wife's prowess by experience. He shrugged his shoulders as he looked at the signs of a
fierce clapper clawing. "Egad," said he to himself, "Old Scratch must have had a tough time of
it!"
Tom consoled himself for the loss of his property with the loss of his wife; for he was a man of
fortitude. He even felt something like gratitude towards the black woodsman, who he considered
had done him a kindness. He sought, therefore, to cultivate a farther acquaintance with him, but
for some time without success; the old black legs played shy, for whatever people may think, he
is not always to be had for calling for; he knows how to play his cards when pretty sure of his
game.
At length, it is said, when delay had whetted Tom's eagerness to the quick, and prepared him to
agree to any thing rather than not gain the promised treasure, he met the black man one evening
in his usual woodman dress, with his axe on his shoulder, sauntering along the edge of the
swamp, and humming a tune. He affected to receive Tom's advance with great indifference, made
brief replies, and went on humming his tune.
By degrees, however, Tom brought him to business, and they began to haggle about the terms on
which the former was to have the pirate's treasure. There was one condition which need not be
mentioned, being generally understood in all cases where the devil grants favours; but there were
others about which, though of less importance, he was inflexibly obstinate. He insisted that the
money found through his means should be employed in his service. He proposed, therefore, that
Tom should employ it in the black traffick; that is to say, that he should fit out a slave ship. This,
however, Tom resolutely refused; he was bad enough in all conscience; but the devil himself
could not tempt him to turn slave dealer.
Finding Tom so squeamish on this point, he did not insist upon it, but proposed instead that he
should turn usurer; the devil being extremely anxious for the increase of usurers, looking upon
them as his peculiar people.
To this no objections were made, for it was just to Tom's taste.
"You shall open a broker's shop in Boston next month," said the black man.
"I'll do it to-morrow, if you wish," said Tom Walker.
"You shall lend money at two per cent. a month."
"Egad, I'll charge four!" replied Tom Walker.
"You shall extort bonds, foreclose mortgages, drive the merchant to bankruptcy-"
"I'll drive him to the d--l," cried Tom Walker, eagerly.
"You are the usurer for my money!" said the black legs, with delight. "When will you want the
rhino?"
"This very night."
"Done!" said the devil.
"Done!" said Tom Walker. -So they shook hands, and struck a bargain.
A few days' time saw Tom Walker seated behind his desk in a counting house in Boston. His
reputation for a ready moneyed man, who would lend money out for a good consideration, soon
spread abroad. Every body remembers the days of Governor Belcher, when money was
particularly scarce. It was a time of paper credit. The country had been deluged with government
bills; the famous Land Bank had been established; there had been a rage for speculating; the
people had run mad with schemes for new settlements; for building cities in the wilderness; land
jobbers went about with maps of grants, and townships, and Eldorados, lying nobody knew
where, but which every body was ready to purchase. In a word, the great speculating fever which
breaks out every now and then in the country, had raged to an alarming degree, and every body
was dreaming of making sudden fortunes from nothing. As usual the fever had subsided; the
dream had gone off, and the imaginary fortunes with it; the patients were left in doleful plight,
and the whole country resounded with the consequent cry of "hard times."
At this propitious time of public distress did Tom Walker set up as a usurer in Boston. His door
was soon thronged by customers. The needy and the adventurous; the gambling speculator; the
dreaming land jobber; the thriftless tradesman; the merchant with cracked credit; in short, every
one driven to raise money by desperate means and desperate sacrifices, hurried to Tom Walker.
Thus Tom was the universal friend of the needy, and he acted like a "friend in need;" that is to
say, he always exacted good pay and good security. In proportion to the distress of the applicant
was the hardness of his terms. He accumulated bonds and mortgages; gradually squeezed his
customers closer and closer; and sent them at length, dry as a sponge from his door.
In this way he made money hand over hand; became a rich and mighty man, and exalted his
cocked hat upon change. He built himself, as usual, a vast house, out of ostentation; but left the
greater part of it unfinished and unfurnished out of parsimony. He even set up a carriage in the
fullness of his vain glory, though he nearly starved the horses which drew it; and as the ungreased
wheels groaned and screeched on the axle trees, you would have thought you heard the souls of
the poor debtors he was squeezing.
As Tom waxed old, however, he grew thoughtful. Having secured the good things of this world,
he began to feel anxious about those of the next. He thought with regret on the bargain he had
made with his black friend, and set his wits to work to cheat him out of the conditions. He
became, therefore, all of a sudden, a violent church goer. He prayed loudly and strenuously as if
heaven were to be taken by force of lungs. Indeed, one might always tell when he had sinned
most during the week, by the clamour of his Sunday devotion. The quiet christians who had been
modestly and steadfastly travelling Zionward, were struck with self reproach at seeing themselves
so suddenly outstripped in their career by this new-made convert. Tom was as rigid in religious,
as in money matters; he was a stern supervisor and censurer of his neighbours, and seemed to
think every sin entered up to their account became a credit on his own side of the page. He even
talked of the expediency of reviving the persecution of quakers and anabaptists. In a word, Tom's
zeal became as notorious as his riches.
Still, in spite of all this strenuous attention to forms, Tom had a lurking dread that the devil, after
all, would have his due. That he might not be taken unawares, therefore, it is said he always
carried a small bible in his coat pocket. He had also a great folio bible on his counting house
desk, and would frequently be found reading it when people called on business; on such
occasions he would lay his green spectacles on the book, to mark the place, while he turned round
to drive some usurious bargain.
Some say that Tom grew a little crack brained in his old days, and that fancying his end
approaching, he had his horse new shod, saddled and bridled, and buried with his feet uppermost;
because he supposed that at the last day the world would be turned upside down; in which case he
should find his horse standing ready for mounting, and he was determined at the worst to give his
old friend a run for it. This, however, is probably a mere old wives fable. If he really did take
such a precaution it was totally superfluous; at least so says the authentic old legend which closes
his story in the following manner.
On one hot afternoon in the dog days, just as a terrible black thundergust was coming up, Tom sat
in his counting house in his white linen cap and India silk morning gown. He was on the point of
foreclosing a mortgage, by which he would complete the ruin of an unlucky land speculator for
whom he had professed the greatest friendship. The poor land jobber begged him to grant a few
months indulgence. Tom had grown testy and irritated and refused another day.
"My family will be ruined and brought upon the parish," said the land jobber. "Charity begins at
home," replied Tom, "I must take care of myself in these hard times."
"You have made so much money out of me," said the speculator.
Tom lost his patience and his piety-"The devil take me," said he, "if I have made a farthing!"
Just then there were three loud knocks at the street door. He stepped out to see who was there. A
black man was holding a black horse which neighed and stamped with impatience.
"Tom, you're come for!" said the black fellow, gruffly. Tom shrunk back, but too late. He had left
his little bible at the bottom of his coat pocket, and his big bible on the desk buried under the
mortgage he was about to forclose: never was sinner taken more unawares. The black man
whisked him like a child astride the horse and away he galloped in the midst of a thunder storm.
The clerks stuck their pens behind their ears and stared after him from the windows. Away went
Tom Walker, dashing down the streets; his white cap bobbing up and down; his morning gown
fluttering in the wind, and his steed striking fire out of the pavement at every bound. When the
clerks turned to look for the black man he had disappeared.
Tom Walker never returned to foreclose the mortgage. A countryman who lived on the borders of
the swamp, reported that in the height of the thunder gust he had heard a great clattering of hoofs
and a howling along the road, and that when he ran to the window he just caught sight of a figure,
such as I have described, on a horse that galloped like mad across the fields, over the hills and
down into the black hemlock swamp towards the old Indian fort; and that shortly after a
thunderbolt fell in that direction which seemed to set the whole forest in a blaze.
The good people of Boston shook their heads and shrugged their shoulders, but had been so much
accustomed to witches and goblins and tricks of the devil in all kinds of shapes from the first
settlement of the colony, that they were not so much horror struck as might have been expected.
Trustees were appointed to take charge of Tom's effects. There was nothing, however, to
administer upon. On searching his coffers all his bonds and mortgages were found reduced to
cinders. In place of gold and silver his iron chest was filled with chips and shavings; two
skeletons lay in his stable instead of his half starved horses, and the very next day his great house
took fire and was burnt to the ground.
Such was the end of Tom Walker and his ill gotten wealth. Let all griping money brokers lay this
story to heart. The truth of it is not to be doubted. The very hole under the oak trees, from whence
he dug Kidd's money is to be seen to this day; and the neighbouring swamp and old Indian fort is
often haunted in stormy nights by a figure on horseback, in a morning gown and white cap, which
is doubtless the troubled spirit of the usurer. In fact, the story has resolved itself into a proverb,
and is the origin of that popular saying, prevalent throughout New-England, of "The Devil and
Tom Walker."
THE END
The Pit and the Pendulum
Edgar Allan Poe
retold by Sam Waring
The death sentence was the last thing I heard. I saw the lips of the judges move, but
heard no sound. Then my senses left me, and silence and darkness were all I knew.
Tall figures carried me in silence down—down—still down—into a flat, damp
place. After a time, I opened my eyes. My worst fears were confirmed; darkness
surrounded me. I struggled for breath. Those sentenced to death were usually executed
publicly. When would the next time be?
I felt my way around the cell. The walls were made of stone, slimy and cold. As
I started to cross the floor, my robe tangled in my legs and I fell. I put forward my arm,
and shuddered to find that I had fallen at the edge of a deep pit.
I realized my captors had meant me to fall into this pit in the darkness and die. A quick
and easy death was no part of their horrible plan.
At last I slept. Upon waking, a dim blue light from somewhere showed me the
prison was roughly square, and far smaller than I had first thought. The walls seemed to
me now to be some kind of huge metal plates. These were painted with horrible things—
demons, skeletons, and worse images. In the center yawned the round pit which I had
avoided.
I now lay stretched on a low wooden rack. A long strap wound many times
around my body, leaving only my left arm free enough that I could feed myself from a
dish which lay by my side. It seemed my tormentors meant to torture me with thirst—for
the food in the dish was very peppery meat.
The ceiling was thirty feet overhead, and made in the same way as the walls. A strange
figure painted there caught my attention, a picture of Time holding what I thought was a
huge pendulum. But while I gazed straight upward at the pendulum, I saw it swung
slowly back and forth.
Perhaps an hour passed before I looked upward again. What I then saw amazed
me. The swing of the pendulum and its speed had both increased. But what mainly
disturbed me was that it was lower. I now saw that its weight was a curved steel blade,
with an edge as sharp as a razor. Since I had not fallen into the pit as they hoped, the
torturers had made a new and different death for me: I should be slowly sliced in two as
the pendulum inched down. For hours, the sharp blade lowered itself toward me!
Then a vague hope came into my mind. As the pendulum swung across my body;
I saw it would cross over the heart. I now realized that the strap which bound me was
continuous. The blade’s first stroke on any part of the band would cut it so I might
unwind myself with my free left hand. I lifted my head just enough to see my chest. The
strap tied my body tightly in all directions—except in the path of the destroying blade. It
was I that it would slice, and not my fetters.
Then another idea of rescue came to me. For many hours the area round the low
framework upon which I lay had been swarming with rats. They were wild, bold—their
red eyes glaring at me, waiting only for me to lie still before they began to feast upon
me. With the remaining bits of the oily food, I rubbed the ties wherever I could reach
them; then, raising my hand from the floor, I lay perfectly still. Perhaps now they could
be tempted to gnaw me loose.
Eventually, one or two of the boldest rats leaped upon the framework and smelled at the
belt. Behind them many more swarmed upon me in heaps and gnawed on the greasy
loops. I felt the ties loosen; I knew that it must be already cut in several places. With a
more than human courage I lay still.
At last I felt that I was free. The belt hung in ribbons from my body. But the
pendulum already pressed upon me. It had slit the fibers of the robe. But my moment of
escape had arrived. With a cautious, slow, steady movement I slid from the bonds and
beyond the reach of the blade. For the moment, at least, I was free.
Free!—yet still in the grasp of the Inquisition! I had barely moved from my
wooden bed of horror when the motion of the hellish blade stopped, and I saw it pulled
up through the ceiling. I had only exchanged one form of agony for another, maybe
worse than death. But now something else had taken place in the dungeon which I could
not understand. For many minutes I sat thinking about it.
Then the nature of the chamber’s change came to me all at once. The colored
figures on the walls had now taken on an intense gleam. Demon eyes, wildly alive,
glared at me from every side, and shone with the luster of fire.
As I breathed, I smelled the odor of heated iron! The wall itself began to glow! There
could be no doubt what my tormentors meant to do—they were firing the iron walls,
meaning to roast me to death!
I shrank back from the glowing metal to the center of the cell. Amid the thought
of the fiery death now coming, the idea of the well’s coolness came over me. I rushed to
its deadly edge, straining to see below. The glare from the burning roof lit its deepest
parts. At last I grasped the meaning of what I saw—the bones and rotten flesh, the rats
still gnawing on them—oh! any horror but this! With a shriek, I rushed from the edge
and buried my face in my hands—weeping bitterly.
The heat rapidly increased, and once again I looked up. There had been a second
change in the cell—a change in its shape. The Inquisitors’ revenge had been hurried up,
and there was to be no more playing games. The room had been square, but now the cell
shifted into a diamond shape, with a low rumble of machinery.
But I neither hoped for nor wanted the change to stop. I could have hugged the
red walls to my breast, giving myself to the fire as a path toward eternal peace. “Death,”
I said, “any death except that of the pit!” Fool! Could I not see that the burning iron was
meant to urge me into the pit?
I shrank back—but the closing walls pressed me onward. Finally, for my
scorched and writhing body, there was no longer an inch on the floor to stand. I
struggled no more, but my agony was released in one loud, long scream of despair. I felt
that I tottered upon the edge—I closed my eyes—
There was a noise of human voices, a loud blast as of many trumpets! There was a harsh
grating as of a thousand thunders! The fiery walls rushed back! An outstretched arm
caught my own as I fell, fainting. The French army had entered Toledo. The Inquisition
was in the hands of its enemies.
AN OCCURRENCE AT OWL CREEK BRIDGE
by Ambrose Bierce
A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down
into the swift water twenty feet below. The man's hands were behind
his back, the wrists bound with a cord. A rope closely encircled his
neck. It was attached to a stout cross-timber above his head and the
slack fell to the level of his knees. Some loose boards laid upon the
ties supporting the rails of the railway supplied a footing for him
and his executioners--two private soldiers of the Federal army,
directed by a sergeant who in civil life may have been a deputy
sheriff. At a short remove upon the same temporary platform was an
officer in the uniform of his rank, armed. He was a captain. A
sentinel at each end of the bridge stood with his rifle in the
position known as "support," that is to say, vertical in front of the
left shoulder, the hammer resting on the forearm thrown straight
across the chest--a formal and unnatural position, enforcing an erect
carriage of the body. It did not appear to be the duty of these two
men to know what was occurring at the center of the bridge; they
merely blockaded the two ends of the foot planking that traversed it.
Beyond one of the sentinels nobody was in sight; the railroad ran
straight away into a forest for a hundred yards, then, curving, was
lost to view. Doubtless there was an outpost farther along. The
other bank of the stream was open ground--a gentle slope topped with
a stockade of vertical tree trunks, loopholed for rifles, with a
single embrasure through which protruded the muzzle of a brass cannon
commanding the bridge. Midway up the slope between the bridge and
fort were the spectators--a single company of infantry in line, at
"parade rest," the butts of their rifles on the ground, the barrels
inclining slightly backward against the right shoulder, the hands
crossed upon the stock. A lieutenant stood at the right of the line,
the point of his sword upon the ground, his left hand resting upon his
right. Excepting the group of four at the center of the bridge, not a
man moved. The company faced the bridge, staring stonily, motionless.
The sentinels, facing the banks of the stream, might have been statues
to adorn the bridge. The captain stood with folded arms, silent,
observing the work of his subordinates, but making no sign. Death is a
dignitary who when he comes announced is to be received with formal
manifestations of respect, even by those most familiar with him. In
the code of military etiquette silence and fixity are forms of
deference.
The man who was engaged in being hanged was apparently about
thirty-five years of age. He was a civilian, if one might judge from
his habit, which was that of a planter. His features were good--a
straight nose, firm mouth, broad forehead, from which his long, dark
hair was combed straight back, falling behind his ears to the collar
of his well fitting frock coat. He wore a moustache and pointed
beard, but no whiskers; his eyes were large and dark gray, and had a
kindly expression which one would hardly have expected in one whose
neck was in the hemp. Evidently this was no vulgar assassin. The
liberal military code makes provision for hanging many kinds of
persons, and gentlemen are not excluded.
The preparations being complete, the two private soldiers stepped
aside and each drew away the plank upon which he had been standing.
The sergeant turned to the captain, saluted and placed himself
immediately behind that officer, who in turn moved apart one pace.
These movements left the condemned man and the sergeant standing on
the two ends of the same plank, which spanned three of the cross-ties
of the bridge. The end upon which the civilian stood almost, but not
quite, reached a fourth. This plank had been held in place by the
weight of the captain; it was now held by that of the sergeant. At a
signal from the former the latter would step aside, the plank would
tilt and the condemned man go down between two ties. The arrangement
commended itself to his judgement as simple and effective. His face
had not been covered nor his eyes bandaged. He looked a moment at his
"unsteadfast footing," then let his gaze wander to the swirling water
of the stream racing madly beneath his feet. A piece of dancing
driftwood caught his attention and his eyes followed it down the
current. How slowly it appeared to move! What a sluggish stream!
He closed his eyes in order to fix his last thoughts upon his wife and
children. The water, touched to gold by the early sun, the brooding
mists under the banks at some distance down the stream, the fort, the
soldiers, the piece of drift--all had distracted him. And now he
became conscious of a new disturbance. Striking through the thought
of his dear ones was sound which he could neither ignore nor
understand, a sharp, distinct, metallic percussion like the stroke of
a blacksmith's hammer upon the anvil; it had the same ringing quality.
He wondered what it was, and whether immeasurably distant or near by-it seemed both. Its recurrence was regular, but as slow as the
tolling of a death knell. He awaited each new stroke with impatience
and--he knew not why--apprehension. The intervals of silence grew
progressively longer; the delays became maddening. With their greater
infrequency the sounds increased in strength and sharpness. They hurt
his ear like the trust of a knife; he feared he would shriek. What he
heard was the ticking of his watch.
He unclosed his eyes and saw again the water below him. "If I could
free my hands," he thought, "I might throw off the noose and spring
into the stream. By diving I could evade the bullets and, swimming
vigorously, reach the bank, take to the woods and get away home. My
home, thank God, is as yet outside their lines; my wife and little
ones are still beyond the invader's farthest advance."
As these thoughts, which have here to be set down in words, were
flashed into the doomed man's brain rather than evolved from it the
captain nodded to the sergeant. The sergeant stepped aside.
II
Peyton Farquhar was a well to do planter, of an old and highly
respected Alabama family. Being a slave owner and like other slave
owners a politician, he was naturally an original secessionist and
ardently devoted to the Southern cause. Circumstances of an imperious
nature, which it is unnecessary to relate here, had prevented him from
taking service with that gallant army which had fought the disastrous
campaigns ending with the fall of Corinth, and he chafed under the
inglorious restraint, longing for the release of his energies, the
larger life of the soldier, the opportunity for distinction. That
opportunity, he felt, would come, as it comes to all in wartime.
Meanwhile he did what he could. No service was too humble for him to
perform in the aid of the South, no adventure to perilous for him to
undertake if consistent with the character of a civilian who was at
heart a soldier, and who in good faith and without too much
qualification assented to at least a part of the frankly villainous
dictum that all is fair in love and war.
One evening while Farquhar and his wife were sitting on a rustic bench
near the entrance to his grounds, a gray-clad soldier rode up to the
gate and asked for a drink of water. Mrs. Farquhar was only too happy
to serve him with her own white hands. While she was fetching the
water her husband approached the dusty horseman and inquired eagerly
for news from the front.
"The Yanks are repairing the railroads," said the man, "and are
getting ready for another advance. They have reached the Owl Creek
bridge, put it in order and built a stockade on the north bank. The
commandant has issued an order, which is posted everywhere, declaring
that any civilian caught interfering with the railroad, its bridges,
tunnels, or trains will be summarily hanged. I saw the order."
"How far is it to the Owl Creek bridge?" Farquhar asked.
"About thirty miles."
"Is there no force on this side of the creek?"
"Only a picket post half a mile out, on the railroad, and a single
sentinel at this end of the bridge."
"Suppose a man--a civilian and student of hanging--should elude the
picket post and perhaps get the better of the sentinel," said
Farquhar, smiling, "what could he accomplish?"
The soldier reflected. "I was there a month ago," he replied. "I
observed that the flood of last winter had lodged a great quantity of
driftwood against the wooden pier at this end of the bridge. It is
now dry and would burn like tinder."
The lady had now brought the water, which the soldier drank. He
thanked her ceremoniously, bowed to her husband and rode away. An
hour later, after nightfall, he repassed the plantation, going
northward in the direction from which he had come. He was a Federal
scout.
III
As Peyton Farquhar fell straight downward through the bridge he lost
consciousness and was as one already dead. From this state he was
awakened--ages later, it seemed to him--by the pain of a sharp
pressure upon his throat, followed by a sense of suffocation. Keen,
poignant agonies seemed to shoot from his neck downward through every
fiber of his body and limbs. These pains appeared to flash along well
defined lines of ramification and to beat with an inconceivably rapid
periodicity. They seemed like streams of pulsating fire heating him
to an intolerable temperature. As to his head, he was conscious of
nothing but a feeling of fullness--of congestion. These sensations
were unaccompanied by thought. The intellectual part of his nature
was already effaced; he had power only to feel, and feeling was
torment. He was conscious of motion. Encompassed in a luminous cloud,
of which he was now merely the fiery heart, without material
substance, he swung through unthinkable arcs of oscillation, like a
vast pendulum. Then all at once, with terrible suddenness, the light
about him shot upward with the noise of a loud splash; a frightful
roaring was in his ears, and all was cold and dark. The power of
thought was restored; he knew that the rope had broken and he had
fallen into the stream. There was no additional strangulation; the
noose about his neck was already suffocating him and kept the water
from his lungs. To die of hanging at the bottom of a river!--the idea
seemed to him ludicrous. He opened his eyes in the darkness and saw
above him a gleam of light, but how distant, how inaccessible! He was
still sinking, for the light became fainter and fainter until it was a
mere glimmer. Then it began to grow and brighten, and he knew that he
was rising toward the surface--knew it with reluctance, for he was now
very comfortable. "To be hanged and drowned," he thought, "that is
not so bad; but I do not wish to be shot. No; I will not be shot;
that is not fair."
He was not conscious of an effort, but a sharp pain in his wrist
apprised him that he was trying to free his hands. He gave the
struggle his attention, as an idler might observe the feat of a
juggler, without interest in the outcome. What splendid effort!--what
magnificent, what superhuman strength! Ah, that was a fine endeavor!
Bravo! The cord fell away; his arms parted and floated upward, the
hands dimly seen on each side in the growing light. He watched them
with a new interest as first one and then the other pounced upon the
noose at his neck. They tore it away and thrust it fiercely aside,
its undulations resembling those of a water snake. "Put it back, put
it back!" He thought he shouted these words to his hands, for the
undoing of the noose had been succeeded by the direst pang that he had
yet experienced. His neck ached horribly; his brain was on fire, his
heart, which had been fluttering faintly, gave a great leap, trying to
force itself out at his mouth. His whole body was racked and wrenched
with an insupportable anguish! But his disobedient hands gave no heed
to the command. They beat the water vigorously with quick, downward
strokes, forcing him to the surface. He felt his head emerge; his
eyes were blinded by the sunlight; his chest expanded convulsively,
and with a supreme and crowning agony his lungs engulfed a great
draught of air, which instantly he expelled in a shriek!
He was now in full possession of his physical senses. They were,
indeed, preternaturally keen and alert. Something in the awful
disturbance of his organic system had so exalted and refined them that
they made record of things never before perceived. He felt the
ripples upon his face and heard their separate sounds as they struck.
He looked at the forest on the bank of the stream, saw the individual
trees, the leaves and the veining of each leaf--he saw the very
insects upon them: the locusts, the brilliant bodied flies, the gray
spiders stretching their webs from twig to twig. He noted the
prismatic colors in all the dewdrops upon a million blades of grass.
The humming of the gnats that danced above the eddies of the stream,
the beating of the dragon flies' wings, the strokes of the water
spiders' legs, like oars which had lifted their boat--all these made
audible music. A fish slid along beneath his eyes and he heard the
rush of its body parting the water.
He had come to the surface facing down the stream; in a moment the
visible world seemed to wheel slowly round, himself the pivotal point,
and he saw the bridge, the fort, the soldiers upon the bridge, the
captain, the sergeant, the two privates, his executioners. They were
in silhouette against the blue sky. They shouted and gesticulated,
pointing at him. The captain had drawn his pistol, but did not fire;
the others were unarmed. Their movements were grotesque and horrible,
their forms gigantic.
Suddenly he heard a sharp report and something struck the water
smartly within a few inches of his head, spattering his face with
spray. He heard a second report, and saw one of the sentinels with
his rifle at his shoulder, a light cloud of blue smoke rising from the
muzzle. The man in the water saw the eye of the man on the bridge
gazing into his own through the sights of the rifle. He observed that
it was a gray eye and remembered having read that gray eyes were
keenest, and that all famous marksmen had them. Nevertheless, this one
had missed.
A counter-swirl had caught Farquhar and turned him half round; he was
again looking at the forest on the bank opposite the fort. The sound
of a clear, high voice in a monotonous singsong now rang out behind
him and came across the water with a distinctness that pierced and
subdued all other sounds, even the beating of the ripples in his ears.
Although no soldier, he had frequented camps enough to know the dread
significance of that deliberate, drawling, aspirated chant; the
lieutenant on shore was taking a part in the morning's work. How
coldly and pitilessly--with what an even, calm intonation, presaging,
and enforcing tranquility in the men--with what accurately measured
interval fell those cruel words:
"Company! . . . Attention! . . . Shoulder arms! . . . Ready!. . .
Aim! . . . Fire!"
Farquhar dived--dived as deeply as he could. The water roared in his
ears like the voice of Niagara, yet he heard the dull thunder of the
volley and, rising again toward the surface, met shining bits of
metal, singularly flattened, oscillating slowly downward. Some of
them touched him on the face and hands, then fell away, continuing
their descent. One lodged between his collar and neck; it was
uncomfortably warm and he snatched it out.
As he rose to the surface, gasping for breath, he saw that he had been
a long time under water; he was perceptibly farther downstream--nearer
to safety. The soldiers had almost finished reloading; the metal
ramrods flashed all at once in the sunshine as they were drawn from
the barrels, turned in the air, and thrust into their sockets. The
two sentinels fired again, independently and ineffectually.
The hunted man saw all this over his shoulder; he was now swimming
vigorously with the current. His brain was as energetic as his arms
and legs; he thought with the rapidity of lightning:
"The officer," he reasoned, "will not make that martinet's error a
second time. It is as easy to dodge a volley as a single shot. He
has probably already given the command to fire at will. God help me,
I cannot dodge them all!"
An appalling splash within two yards of him was followed by a loud,
rushing sound, DIMINUENDO, which seemed to travel back through the air
to the fort and died in an explosion which stirred the very river to
its deeps! A rising sheet of water curved over him, fell down upon
him, blinded him, strangled him! The cannon had taken an hand in the
game. As he shook his head free from the commotion of the smitten
water he heard the deflected shot humming through the air ahead, and
in an instant it was cracking and smashing the branches in the forest
beyond.
"They will not do that again," he thought; "the next time they will
use a charge of grape. I must keep my eye upon the gun; the smoke
will apprise me--the report arrives too late; it lags behind the
missile. That is a good gun."
Suddenly he felt himself whirled round and round--spinning like a top.
The water, the banks, the forests, the now distant bridge, fort and
men, all were commingled and blurred. Objects were represented by
their colors only; circular horizontal streaks of color--that was all
he saw. He had been caught in a vortex and was being whirled on with a
velocity of advance and gyration that made him giddy and sick. In few
moments he was flung upon the gravel at the foot of the left bank of
the stream--the southern bank--and behind a projecting point which
concealed him from his enemies. The sudden arrest of his motion, the
abrasion of one of his hands on the gravel, restored him, and he wept
with delight. He dug his fingers into the sand, threw it over himself
in handfuls and audibly blessed it. It looked like diamonds, rubies,
emeralds; he could think of nothing beautiful which it did not
resemble. The trees upon the bank were giant garden plants; he noted
a definite order in their arrangement, inhaled the fragrance of their
blooms. A strange roseate light shone through the spaces among their
trunks and the wind made in their branches the music of AEolian harps.
He had not wish to perfect his escape--he was content to remain in
that enchanting spot until retaken.
A whiz and a rattle of grapeshot among the branches high above his
head roused him from his dream. The baffled cannoneer had fired him a
random farewell. He sprang to his feet, rushed up the sloping bank,
and plunged into the forest.
All that day he traveled, laying his course by the rounding sun. The
forest seemed interminable; nowhere did he discover a break in it, not
even a woodman's road. He had not known that he lived in so wild a
region. There was something uncanny in the revelation.
By nightfall he was fatigued, footsore, famished. The thought of his
wife and children urged him on. At last he found a road which led him
in what he knew to be the right direction. It was as wide and
straight as a city street, yet it seemed untraveled. No fields
bordered it, no dwelling anywhere. Not so much as the barking of a
dog suggested human habitation. The black bodies of the trees formed
a straight wall on both sides, terminating on the horizon in a point,
like a diagram in a lesson in perspective. Overhead, as he looked up
through this rift in the wood, shone great golden stars looking
unfamiliar and grouped in strange constellations. He was sure they
were arranged in some order which had a secret and malign
significance. The wood on either side was full of singular noises,
among which--once, twice, and again--he distinctly heard whispers in
an unknown tongue.
His neck was in pain and lifting his hand to it found it horribly
swollen. He knew that it had a circle of black where the rope had
bruised it. His eyes felt congested; he could no longer close them.
His tongue was swollen with thirst; he relieved its fever by thrusting
it forward from between his teeth into the cold air. How softly the
turf had carpeted the untraveled avenue--he could no longer feel the
roadway beneath his feet!
Doubtless, despite his suffering, he had fallen asleep while walking,
for now he sees another scene--perhaps he has merely recovered from a
delirium. He stands at the gate of his own home. All is as he left
it, and all bright and beautiful in the morning sunshine. He must
have traveled the entire night. As he pushes open the gate and passes
up the wide white walk, he sees a flutter of female garments; his
wife, looking fresh and cool and sweet, steps down from the veranda to
meet him. At the bottom of the steps she stands waiting, with a smile
of ineffable joy, an attitude of matchless grace and dignity. Ah, how
beautiful she is! He springs forwards with extended arms. As he is
about to clasp her he feels a stunning blow upon the back of the neck;
a blinding white light blazes all about him with a sound like the
shock of a cannon--then all is darkness and silence!
Peyton Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently
from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper (1899)
It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for
the summer.
A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of
romantic felicity--but that would be asking too much of fate!
Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it.
Else, why should it be let so cheaply? And why have stood so long untenanted?
John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.
John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of
superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in
figures.
John is a physician, and perhaps--(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is
dead paper and a great relief to my mind)--perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster.
You see he does not believe I am sick!
And what can one do?
If a physician of high standing, and one's own husband, assures friends and relatives that
there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression--a slight hysterical
tendency-- what is one to do?
My brother is also a physician, and also of high standing, and he says the same thing.
So I take phosphates or phosphites--whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and
exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to "work" until I am well again.
Personally, I disagree with their ideas.
Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.
But what is one to do?
I did write for a while in spite of them; but it does exhaust me a good deal--having to be so
sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition.
I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more society and
stimulus--but John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess
it always makes me feel bad.
So I will let it alone and talk about the house.
The most beautiful place! It is quite alone standing well back from the road, quite three
miles from the village. It makes me think of English places that you read about, for there are
hedges and walls and gates that lock, and lots of separate little houses for the gardeners and
people.
There is a delicious garden! I never saw such a garden--large and shady, full of box-bordered
paths, and lined with long grape-covered arbors with seats under them.
There were greenhouses, too, but they are all broken now.
There was some legal trouble, I believe, something about the heirs and coheirs; anyhow, the
place has been empty for years.
That spoils my ghostliness, I am afraid, but I don't care--there is something strange about the
house--I can feel it.
I even said so to John one moonlight evening but he said what I felt was a draught, and shut
the window.
I get unreasonably angry with John sometimes I'm sure I never used to be so sensitive. I
think it is due to this nervous condition.
But John says if I feel so, I shall neglect proper self-control; so I take pains to control
myself-- before him, at least, and that makes me very tired.
I don't like our room a bit. I wanted one downstairs that opened on the piazza and had roses
all over the window, and such pretty old-fashioned chintz hangings! but John would not hear of it.
He said there was only one window and not room for two beds, and no near room for him if
he took another.
He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction.
I have a schedule prescription for each hour in the day; he takes all care from me, and so I
feel basely ungrateful not to value it more.
He said we came here solely on my account, that I was to have perfect rest and all the air I
could get. "Your exercise depends on your strength, my dear," said he, "and your food somewhat
on your appetite; but air you can absorb all the time. ' So we took the nursery at the top of the
house.
It is a big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look all ways, and air and
sunshine galore. It was nursery first and then playroom and gymnasium, I should judge; for the
windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls.
The paint and paper look as if a boys' school had used it. It is stripped off--the paper in great
patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the
other side of the room low down. I never saw a worse paper in my life.
One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.
It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate
and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they
suddenly commit suicide--plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of
contradictions.
The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by
the slow-turning sunlight.
It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.
No wonder the children hated it! I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room long.
There comes John, and I must put this away,--he hates to have me write a word.
---------We have been here two weeks, and I haven't felt like writing before, since that first day.
I am sitting by the window now, up in this atrocious nursery, and there is nothing to hinder
my writing as much as I please, save lack of strength.
John is away all day, and even some nights when his cases are serious.
I am glad my case is not serious!
But these nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing.
John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that
satisfies him.
Of course it is only nervousness. It does weigh on me so not to do my duty in any way!
I meant to be such a help to John, such a real rest and comfort, and here I am a comparative
burden already!
Nobody would believe what an effort it is to do what little I am able,--to dress and entertain,
and order things.
It is fortunate Mary is so good with the baby. Such a dear baby!
And yet I cannot be with him, it makes me so nervous.
I suppose John never was nervous in his life. He laughs at me so about this wall-paper!
At first he meant to repaper the room, but afterwards he said that I was letting it get the
better of me, and that nothing was worse for a nervous patient than to give way to such fancies.
He said that after the wall-paper was changed it would be the heavy bedstead, and then the
barred windows, and then that gate at the head of the stairs, and so on.
"You know the place is doing you good," he said, "and really, dear, I don't care to renovate
the house just for a three months' rental."
"Then do let us go downstairs," I said, "there are such pretty rooms there."
Then he took me in his arms and called me a blessed little goose, and said he would go down
to the cellar, if I wished, and have it whitewashed into the bargain.
But he is right enough about the beds and windows and things.
It is an airy and comfortable room as any one need wish, and, of course, I would not be so
silly as to make him uncomfortable just for a whim.
I'm really getting quite fond of the big room, all but that horrid paper.
Out of one window I can see the garden, those mysterious deepshaded arbors, the riotous
old-fashioned flowers, and bushes and gnarly trees.
Out of another I get a lovely view of the bay and a little private wharf belonging to the
estate. There is a beautiful shaded lane that runs down there from the house. I always fancy I see
people walking in these numerous paths and arbors, but John has cautioned me not to give way to
fancy in the least. He says that with my imaginative power and habit of story-making, a nervous
weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies, and that I ought to use my will
and good sense to check the tendency. So I try.
I think sometimes that if I were only well enough to write a little it would relieve the press of
ideas and rest me.
But I find I get pretty tired when I try.
It is so discouraging not to have any advice and companionship about my work. When I get
really well, John says we will ask Cousin Henry and Julia down for a long visit; but he says he
would as soon put fireworks in my pillow-case as to let me have those stimulating people about
now.
I wish I could get well faster.
But I must not think about that. This paper looks to me as if it knew what a vicious influence
it had!
There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes
stare at you upside down.
I get positively angry with the impertinence of it and the everlastingness. Up and down and
sideways they crawl, and those absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere There is one place where
two breaths didn't match, and the eyes go all up and down the line, one a little higher than the
other.
I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before, and we all know how much
expression they have! I used to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment and terror out of
blank walls and plain furniture than most children could find in a toy-store.
I remember what a kindly wink the knobs of our big, old bureau used to have, and there was
one chair that always seemed like a strong friend.
I used to feel that if any of the other things looked too fierce I could always hop into that
chair and be safe.
The furniture in this room is no worse than inharmonious, however, for we had to bring it all
from downstairs. I suppose when this was used as a playroom they had to take the nursery things
out, and no wonder! I never saw such ravages as the children have made here.
The wall-paper, as I said before, is torn off in spots, and it sticketh closer than a brother-they must have had perseverance as well as hatred.
Then the floor is scratched and gouged and splintered, the plaster itself is dug out here and
there, and this great heavy bed which is all we found in the room, looks as if it had been through
the wars.
But I don't mind it a bit--only the paper.
There comes John's sister. Such a dear girl as she is, and so careful of me! I must not let her
find me writing.
She is a perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper, and hopes for no better profession. I verily
believe she thinks it is the writing which made me sick!
But I can write when she is out, and see her a long way off from these windows.
There is one that commands the road, a lovely shaded winding road, and one that just looks
off over the country. A lovely country, too, full of great elms and velvet meadows.
This wall-paper has a kind of sub-pattern in a, different shade, a particularly irritating one,
for you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then.
But in the places where it isn't faded and where the sun is just so--I can see a strange,
provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous
front design.
There's sister on the stairs!
---------Well, the Fourth of July is over! The people are all gone and I am tired out. John thought it
might do me good to see a little company, so we just had mother and Nellie and the children
down for a week.
Of course I didn't do a thing. Jennie sees to everything now.
But it tired me all the same.
John says if I don't pick up faster he shall send me to Weir Mitchell in the fall.
But I don't want to go there at all. I had a friend who was in his hands once, and she says he
is just like John and my brother, only more so!
Besides, it is such an undertaking to go so far.
I don't feel as if it was worth while to turn my hand over for anything, and I'm getting
dreadfully fretful and querulous.
I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time.
Of course I don't when John is here, or anybody else, but when I am alone.
And I am alone a good deal just now. John is kept in town very often by serious cases, and
Jennie is good and lets me alone when I want her to.
So I walk a little in the garden or down that lovely lane, sit on the porch under the roses, and
lie down up here a good deal.
I'm getting really fond of the room in spite of the wall-paper. Perhaps because of the wallpaper.
It dwells in my mind so!
I lie here on this great immovable bed--it is nailed down, I believe--and follow that pattern
about by the hour. It is as good as gymnastics, I assure you. I start, we'll say, at the bottom, down
in the corner over there where it has not been touched, and I determine for the thousandth time
that I will follow that pointless pattern to some sort of a conclusion.
I know a little of the principle of design, and I know this thing was not arranged on any laws
of radiation, or alternation, or repetition, or symmetry, or anything else that I ever heard of.
It is repeated, of course, by the breadths, but not otherwise.
Looked at in one way each breadth stands alone, the bloated curves and flourishes--a kind of
"debased Romanesque" with delirium tremens--go waddling up and down in isolated columns of
fatuity.
But, on the other hand, they connect diagonally, and the sprawling outlines run off in great
slanting waves of optic horror, like a lot of wallowing seaweeds in full chase.
The whole thing goes horizontally, too, at least it seems so, and I exhaust myself in trying to
distinguish the order of its going in that direction.
They have used a horizontal breadth for a frieze, and that adds wonderfully to the confusion.
There is one end of the room where it is almost intact, and there, when the crosslights fade
and the low sun shines directly upon it, I can almost fancy radiation after all,--the interminable
grotesques seem to form around a common centre and rush off in headlong plunges of equal
distraction.
It makes me tired to follow it. I will take a nap I guess.
---------I don't know why I should write this.
I don't want to.
I don't feel able. And I know John would think it absurd. But I must say what I feel and think
in some way--it is such a relief!
But the effort is getting to be greater than the relief.
Half the time now I am awfully lazy, and lie down ever so much.
John says I mustn't lose my strength, and has me take cod liver oil and lots of tonics and
things, to say nothing of ale and wine and rare meat.
Dear John! He loves me very dearly, and hates to have me sick. I tried to have a real earnest
reasonable talk with him the other day, and tell him how I wish he would let me go and make a
visit to Cousin Henry and Julia.
But he said I wasn't able to go, nor able to stand it after I got there; and I did not make out a
very good case for myself, for I was crying before I had finished .
It is getting to be a great effort for me to think straight. Just this nervous weakness I suppose.
And dear John gathered me up in his arms, and just carried me upstairs and laid me on the
bed, and sat by me and read to me till it tired my head.
He said I was his darling and his comfort and all he had, and that I must take care of myself
for his sake, and keep well.
He says no one but myself can help me out of it, that I must use my will and self-control and
not let any silly fancies run away with me.
There's one comfort, the baby is well and happy, and does not have to occupy this nursery
with the horrid wall-paper.
If we had not used it, that blessed child would have! What a fortunate escape! Why, I
wouldn't have a child of mine, an impressionable little thing, live in such a room for worlds.
I never thought of it before, but it is lucky that John kept me here after all, I can stand it so
much easier than a baby, you see.
Of course I never mention it to them any more--I am too wise,--but I keep watch of it all the
same.
There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will.
Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day.
It is always the same shape, only very numerous.
And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don't like it a
bit. I wonder--I begin to think--I wish John would take me away from here!
---------It is so hard to talk with John about my case, because he is so wise, and because he loves me
so.
But I tried it last night.
It was moonlight. The moon shines in all around just as the sun does.
I hate to see it sometimes, it creeps so slowly, and always comes in by one window or
another.
John was asleep and I hated to waken him, so I kept still and watched the moonlight on that
undulating wall-paper till I felt creepy.
The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out.
I got up softly and went to feel and see if the paper did move, and when I came back John
was awake.
"What is it, little girl?" he said. "Don't go walking about like that--you'll get cold."
I thought it was a good time to talk, so I told him that I really was not gaining here, and that I
wished he would take me away.
"Why darling!" said he, "our lease will be up in three weeks, and I can't see how to leave
before.
"The repairs are not done at home, and I cannot possibly leave town just now. Of course if
you were in any danger, I could and would, but you really are better, dear, whether you can see it
or not. I am a doctor, dear, and I know. You are gaining flesh and color, your appetite is better, I
feel really much easier about you."
"I don't weigh a bit more," said 1, "nor as much; and my appetite may be better in the
evening when you are here, but it is worse in the morning when you are away!"
"Bless her little heart!" said he with a big hug, "she shall be as sick as she pleases! But now
let's improve the shining hours by going to sleep, and talk about it in the morning!"
"And you won't go away?" I asked gloomily.
"Why, how can 1, dear? It is only three weeks more and then we will take a nice little trip of
a few days while Jennie is getting the house ready. Really dear you are better!"
"Better in body perhaps--" I began, and stopped short, for he sat up straight and looked at me
with such a stern, reproachful look that I could not say another word.
"My darling," said he, "I beg of you, for my sake and for our child's sake, as well as for your
own, that you will never for one instant let that idea enter your mind! There is nothing so
dangerous, so fascinating, to a temperament like yours. It is a false and foolish fancy. Can you not
trust me as a physician when I tell you so?"
So of course I said no more on that score, and we went to sleep before long. He thought I
was asleep first, but I wasn't, and lay there for hours trying to decide whether that front pattern
and the back pattern really did move together or separately.
---------On a pattern like this, by daylight, there is a lack of sequence, a defiance of law, that is a
constant irritant to a normal mind.
The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern
is torturing.
You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns a
back somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon
you. It is like a bad dream.
The outside pattern is a florid arabesque, reminding one of a fungus. If you can imagine a
toadstool in joints, an interminable string of toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless
convolutions--why, that is something like it.
That is, sometimes!
There is one marked peculiarity about this paper, a thing nobody seems to notice but myself,
and that is that it changes as the light changes.
When the sun shoots in through the east window--I always watch for that first long, straight
ray--it changes so quickly that I never can quite believe it.
That is why I watch it always.
By moonlight--the moon shines in all night when there is a moon--I wouldn't know it was
the same paper.
At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by
moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as
can be.
I didn't realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind, that dim sub-pattern,
but now I am quite sure it is a woman.
By daylight she is subdued, quiet. I fancy it is the pattern that keeps her so still. It is so
puzzling. It keeps me quiet by the hour.
I lie down ever so much now. John says it is good for me, and to sleep all I can.
Indeed he started the habit by making me lie down for an hour after each meal.
It is a very bad habit I am convinced, for you see I don't sleep.
And that cultivates deceit, for I don't tell them I'm awake--O no!
The fact is I am getting a little afraid of John.
He seems very queer sometimes, and even Jennie has an inexplicable look.
It strikes me occasionally, just as a scientific hypothesis,--that perhaps it is the paper!
I have watched John when he did not know I was looking, and come into the room suddenly
on the most innocent excuses, and I've caught him several times looking at the paper! And Jennie
too. I caught Jennie with her hand on it once.
She didn't know I was in the room, and when I asked her in a quiet, a very quiet voice, with
the most restrained manner possible, what she was doing with the paper--she turned around as if
she had been caught stealing, and looked quite angry-- asked me why I should frighten her so!
Then she said that the paper stained everything it touched, that she had found yellow
smooches on all my clothes and John's, and she wished we would be more careful!
Did not that sound innocent? But I know she was studying that pattern, and I am determined
that nobody shall find it out but myself!
---------Life is very much more exciting now than it used to be. You see I have something more to
expect, to look forward to, to watch. I really do eat better, and am more quiet than I was.
John is so pleased to see me improve ! He laughed a little the other day, and said I seemed to be
flourishing in spite of my wall-paper.
I turned it off with a laugh. I had no intention of telling him it was because of the wall-paper-he would make fun of me. He might even want to take me away.
I don't want to leave now until I have found it out. There is a week more, and I think that
will be enough.
---------I'm feeling ever so much better! I don't sleep much at night, for it is so interesting to watch
developments; but I sleep a good deal in the daytime.
In the daytime it is tiresome and perplexing.
There are always new shoots on the fungus, and new shades of yellow all over it. I cannot
keep count of them, though I have tried conscientiously.
It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever
saw--not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things.
But there is something else about that paper-- the smell! I noticed it the moment we came
into the room, but with so much air and sun it was not bad. Now we have had a week of fog and
rain, and whether the windows are open or not, the smell is here.
It creeps all over the house.
I find it hovering in the dining-room, skulking in the parlor, hiding in the hall, lying in wait
for me on the stairs.
It gets into my hair.
Even when I go to ride, if I turn my head suddenly and surprise it--there is that smell!
Such a peculiar odor, too! I have spent hours in trying to analyze it, to find what it smelled
like.
It is not bad--at first, and very gentle, but quite the subtlest, most enduring odor I ever met.
In this damp weather it is awful, I wake up in the night and find it hanging over me.
It used to disturb me at first. I thought seriously of burning the house--to reach the smell.
But now I am used to it. The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper!
A yellow smell.
There is a very funny mark on this wall, low down, near the mopboard. A streak that runs
round the room. It goes behind every piece of furniture, except the bed, a long, straight, even
smooch, as if it had been rubbed over and over.
I wonder how it was done and who did it, and what they did it for. Round and round and
round--round and round and round--it makes me dizzy!
---------I really have discovered something at last.
Through watching so much at night, when it changes so, I have finally found out.
The front pattern does move--and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!
Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she
crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over.
Then in the very bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold
of the bars and shakes them hard.
And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern-it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads.
They get through, and then the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and
makes their eyes white!
If those heads were covered or taken off it would not be half so bad.
---------I think that woman gets out in the daytime!
And I'll tell you why--privately--I've seen her!
I can see her out of every one of my windows!
It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women do not creep by
daylight.
I see her on that long road under the trees, creeping along, and when a carriage comes she
hides under the blackberry vines.
I don't blame her a bit. It must be very humiliating to be caught creeping by daylight!
I always lock the door when I creep by daylight. I can't do it at night, for I know John would
suspect something at once.
And John is so queer now, that I don't want to irritate him. I wish he would take another
room! Besides, I don't want anybody to get that woman out at night but myself.
I often wonder if I could see her out of all the windows at once.
But, turn as fast as I can, I can only see out of one at one time.
And though I always see her, she may be able to creep faster than I can turn!
I have watched her sometimes away off in the open country, creeping as fast as a cloud
shadow in a high wind.
---------If only that top pattern could be gotten off from the under one! I mean to try it, little by little.
I have found out another funny thing, but I shan't tell it this time! It does not do to trust
people too much.
There are only two more days to get this paper off, and I believe John is beginning to notice.
I don't like the look in his eyes.
And I heard him ask Jennie a lot of professional questions about me. She had a very good
report to give.
She said I slept a good deal in the daytime.
John knows I don't sleep very well at night, for all I'm so quiet!
He asked me all sorts of questions, too, and pretended to be very loving and kind.
As if I couldn't see through him!
Still, I don't wonder he acts so, sleeping under this paper for three months.
It only interests me, but I feel sure John and Jennie are secretly affected by it.
---------Hurrah! This is the last day, but it is enough. John to stay in town over night, and won't be
out until this evening.
Jennie wanted to sleep with me--the sly thing! but I told her I should undoubtedly rest better
for a night all alone.
That was clever, for really I wasn't alone a bit! As soon as it was moonlight and that poor
thing began to crawl and shake the pattern, I got up and ran to help her.
I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards
of that paper.
A strip about as high as my head and half around the room.
And then when the sun came and that awful pattern began to laugh at me, I declared I would
finish it to-day!
We go away to-morrow, and they are moving all my furniture down again to leave things as
they were before.
Jennie looked at the wall in amazement, but I told her merrily that I did it out of pure spite at
the vicious thing.
She laughed and said she wouldn't mind doing it herself, but I must not get tired.
How she betrayed herself that time!
But I am here, and no person touches this paper but me,--not alive !
She tried to get me out of the room--it was too patent! But I said it was so quiet and empty
and clean now that I believed I would lie down again and sleep all I could; and not to wake me
even for dinner--I would call when I woke.
So now she is gone, and the servants are gone, and the things are gone, and there is nothing
left but that great bedstead nailed down, with the canvas mattress we found on it.
We shall sleep downstairs to-night, and take the boat home to-morrow.
I quite enjoy the room, now it is bare again.
How those children did tear about here!
This bedstead is fairly gnawed!
But I must get to work.
I have locked the door and thrown the key down into the front path.
I don't want to go out, and I don't want to have anybody come in, till John comes.
I want to astonish him.
I've got a rope up here that even Jennie did not find. If that woman does get out, and tries to
get away, I can tie her!
But I forgot I could not reach far without anything to stand on!
This bed will not move!
I tried to lift and push it until I was lame, and then I got so angry I bit off a little piece at one
corner--but it hurt my teeth.
Then I peeled off all the paper I could reach standing on the floor. It sticks horribly and the
pattern just enjoys it! All those strangled heads and bulbous eyes and waddling fungus growths
just shriek with derision!
I am getting angry enough to do something desperate. To jump out of the window would be
admirable exercise, but the bars are too strong even to try.
Besides I wouldn't do it. Of course not. I know well enough that a step like that is improper
and might be misconstrued.
I don't like to look out of the windows even-- there are so many of those creeping women,
and they creep so fast.
I wonder if they all come out of that wall-paper as I did?
But I am securely fastened now by my well-hidden rope--you don't get me out in the road
there !
I suppose I shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes night, and that is hard!
It is so pleasant to be out in this great room and creep around as I please!
I don't want to go outside. I won't, even if Jennie asks me to.
For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow.
But here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch
around the wall, so I cannot lose my way.
Why there's John at the door!
It is no use, young man, you can't open it!
How he does call and pound!
Now he's crying for an axe.
It would be a shame to break down that beautiful door!
"John dear!" said I in the gentlest voice, "the key is down by the front steps, under a plantain
leaf!"
That silenced him for a few moments.
Then he said--very quietly indeed, "Open the door, my darling!"
"I can't," said I. "The key is down by the front door under a plantain leaf!"
And then I said it again, several times, very gently and slowly, and said it so often that he
had to go and see, and he got it of course, and came in. He stopped short by the door.
"What is the matter?" he cried. "For God's sake, what are you doing!"
I kept on creeping just the same, but I looked at him over my shoulder.
"I've got out at last," said I, "in spite of you and Jane. And I've pulled off most of the paper,
so you can't put me back!"
Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so
that I had to creep over him every time!
To Build a Fire
Jack London
Day had broken cold and grey, exceedingly cold and grey, when the man turned aside from the
main Yukon trail and climbed the high earth-bank, where a dim and little-travelled trail led
eastward through the fat spruce timberland. It was a steep bank, and he paused for breath at the
top, excusing the act to himself by looking at his watch. It was nine o'clock. There was no sun nor
hint of sun, though there was not a cloud in the sky. It was a clear day, and yet there seemed an
intangible pall over the face of things, a subtle gloom that made the day dark, and that was due to
the absence of sun. This fact did not worry the man. He was used to the lack of sun. It had been
days since he had seen the sun, and he knew that a few more days must pass before that cheerful
orb, due south, would just peep above the sky-line and dip immediately from view.
The man flung a look back along the way he had come. The Yukon lay a mile wide and hidden
under three feet of ice. On top of this ice were as many feet of snow. It was all pure white, rolling
in gentle undulations where the ice-jams of the freeze-up had formed. North and south, as far as
his eye could see, it was unbroken white, save for a dark hair-line that curved and twisted from
around the spruce-covered island to the south, and that curved and twisted away into the north,
where it disappeared behind another spruce-covered island. This dark hair-line was the trail - the
main trail - that led south five hundred miles to the Chilcoot Pass, Dyea, and salt water; and that
led north seventy miles to Dawson, and still on to the north a thousand miles to Nulato, and
finally to St. Michael on Bering Sea, a thousand miles and half a thousand more.
But all this - the mysterious, far-reaching hairline trail, the absence of sun from the sky, the
tremendous cold, and the strangeness and weirdness of it all - made no impression on the man. It
was not because he was long used to it. He was a new-comer in the land, a _chechaquo_, and this
was his first winter. The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and
alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances. Fifty degrees below
zero meant eighty odd degrees of frost. Such fact impressed him as being cold and
uncomfortable, and that was all. It did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of
temperature, and upon man's frailty in general, able only to live within certain narrow limits of
heat and cold; and from there on it did not lead him to the conjectural field of immortality and
man's place in the universe. Fifty degrees below zero stood for a bite of frost that hurt and that
must be guarded against by the use of mittens, ear-flaps, warm moccasins, and thick socks. Fifty
degrees below zero was to him just precisely fifty degrees below zero. That there should be
anything more to it than that was a thought that never entered his head.
As he turned to go on, he spat speculatively. There was a sharp, explosive crackle that startled
him. He spat again. And again, in the air, before it could fall to the snow, the spittle crackled. He
knew that at fifty below spittle crackled on the snow, but this spittle had crackled in the air.
Undoubtedly it was colder than fifty below - how much colder he did not know. But the
temperature did not matter. He was bound for the old claim on the left fork of Henderson Creek,
where the boys were already. They had come over across the divide from the Indian Creek
country, while he had come the roundabout way to take a look at the possibilities of getting out
logs in the spring from the islands in the Yukon. He would be in to camp by six o'clock; a bit
after dark, it was true, but the boys would be there, a fire would be going, and a hot supper would
be ready. As for lunch, he pressed his hand against the protruding bundle under his jacket. It was
also under his shirt, wrapped up in a handkerchief and lying against the naked skin. It was the
only way to keep the biscuits from freezing. He smiled agreeably to himself as he thought of
those biscuits, each cut open and sopped in bacon grease, and each enclosing a generous slice of
fried bacon.
He plunged in among the big spruce trees. The trail was faint. A foot of snow had fallen since the
last sled had passed over, and he was glad he was without a sled, travelling light. In fact, he
carried nothing but the lunch wrapped in the handkerchief. He was surprised, however, at the
cold. It certainly was cold, he concluded, as he rubbed his numbed nose and cheek-bones with his
mittened hand. He was a warm-whiskered man, but the hair on his face did not protect the high
cheek-bones and the eager nose that thrust itself aggressively into the frosty air.
At the man's heels trotted a dog, a big native husky, the proper wolf- dog, grey-coated and
without any visible or temperamental difference from its brother, the wild wolf. The animal was
depressed by the tremendous cold. It knew that it was no time for travelling. Its instinct told it a
truer tale than was told to the man by the man's judgment. In reality, it was not merely colder than
fifty below zero; it was colder than sixty below, than seventy below. It was seventy-five below
zero. Since the freezing-point is thirty-two above zero, it meant that one hundred and seven
degrees of frost obtained. The dog did not know anything about thermometers. Possibly in its
brain there was no sharp consciousness of a condition of very cold such as was in the man's brain.
But the brute had its instinct. It experienced a vague but menacing apprehension that subdued it
and made it slink along at the man's heels, and that made it question eagerly every unwonted
movement of the man as if expecting him to go into camp or to seek shelter somewhere and build
a fire. The dog had learned fire, and it wanted fire, or else to burrow under the snow and cuddle
its warmth away from the air.
The frozen moisture of its breathing had settled on its fur in a fine powder of frost, and especially
were its jowls, muzzle, and eyelashes whitened by its crystalled breath. The man's red beard and
moustache were likewise frosted, but more solidly, the deposit taking the form of ice and
increasing with every warm, moist breath he exhaled. Also, the man was chewing tobacco, and
the muzzle of ice held his lips so rigidly that he was unable to clear his chin when he expelled the
juice. The result was that a crystal beard of the colour and solidity of amber was increasing its
length on his chin. If he fell down it would shatter itself, like glass, into brittle fragments. But he
did not mind the appendage. It was the penalty all tobacco-chewers paid in that country, and he
had been out before in two cold snaps. They had not been so cold as this, he knew, but by the
spirit thermometer at Sixty Mile he knew they had been registered at fifty below and at fifty-five.
He held on through the level stretch of woods for several miles, crossed a wide flat of niggerheads, and dropped down a bank to the frozen bed of a small stream. This was Henderson Creek,
and he knew he was ten miles from the forks. He looked at his watch. It was ten o'clock. He was
making four miles an hour, and he calculated that he would arrive at the forks at half-past twelve.
He decided to celebrate that event by eating his lunch there.
The dog dropped in again at his heels, with a tail drooping discouragement, as the man swung
along the creek-bed. The furrow of the old sled-trail was plainly visible, but a dozen inches of
snow covered the marks of the last runners. In a month no man had come up or down that silent
creek. The man held steadily on. He was not much given to thinking, and just then particularly he
had nothing to think about save that he would eat lunch at the forks and that at six o'clock he
would be in camp with the boys. There was nobody to talk to and, had there been, speech would
have been impossible because of the ice-muzzle on his mouth. So he continued monotonously to
chew tobacco and to increase the length of his amber beard.
Once in a while the thought reiterated itself that it was very cold and that he had never
experienced such cold. As he walked along he rubbed his cheek-bones and nose with the back of
his mittened hand. He did this automatically, now and again changing hands. But rub as he
would, the instant he stopped his cheek-bones went numb, and the following instant the end of his
nose went numb. He was sure to frost his cheeks; he knew that, and experienced a pang of regret
that he had not devised a nose- strap of the sort Bud wore in cold snaps. Such a strap passed
across the cheeks, as well, and saved them. But it didn't matter much, after all. What were frosted
cheeks? A bit painful, that was all; they were never serious.
Empty as the man's mind was of thoughts, he was keenly observant, and he noticed the changes in
the creek, the curves and bends and timber-jams, and always he sharply noted where he placed his
feet. Once, coming around a bend, he shied abruptly, like a startled horse, curved away from the
place where he had been walking, and retreated several paces back along the trail. The creek he
knew was frozen clear to the bottom - no creek could contain water in that arctic winter - but he
knew also that there were springs that bubbled out from the hillsides and ran along under the
snow and on top the ice of the creek. He knew that the coldest snaps never froze these springs,
and he knew likewise their danger. They were traps. They hid pools of water under the snow that
might be three inches deep, or three feet. Sometimes a skin of ice half an inch thick covered them,
and in turn was covered by the snow. Sometimes there were alternate layers of water and ice-skin,
so that when one broke through he kept on breaking through for a while, sometimes wetting
himself to the waist.
That was why he had shied in such panic. He had felt the give under his feet and heard the crackle
of a snow-hidden ice-skin. And to get his feet wet in such a temperature meant trouble and
danger. At the very least it meant delay, for he would be forced to stop and build a fire, and under
its protection to bare his feet while he dried his socks and moccasins. He stood and studied the
creek-bed and its banks, and decided that the flow of water came from the right. He reflected
awhile, rubbing his nose and cheeks, then skirted to the left, stepping gingerly and testing the
footing for each step. Once clear of the danger, he took a fresh chew of tobacco and swung along
at his four-mile gait.
In the course of the next two hours he came upon several similar traps. Usually the snow above
the hidden pools had a sunken, candied appearance that advertised the danger. Once again,
however, he had a close call; and once, suspecting danger, he compelled the dog to go on in front.
The dog did not want to go. It hung back until the man shoved it forward, and then it went
quickly across the white, unbroken surface. Suddenly it broke through, floundered to one side,
and got away to firmer footing. It had wet its forefeet and legs, and almost immediately the water
that clung to it turned to ice. It made quick efforts to lick the ice off its legs, then dropped down
in the snow and began to bite out the ice that had formed between the toes. This was a matter of
instinct. To permit the ice to remain would mean sore feet. It did not know this. It merely obeyed
the mysterious prompting that arose from the deep crypts of its being. But the man knew, having
achieved a judgment on the subject, and he removed the mitten from his right hand and helped
tear out the ice- particles. He did not expose his fingers more than a minute, and was astonished at
the swift numbness that smote them. It certainly was cold. He pulled on the mitten hastily, and
beat the hand savagely across his chest.
At twelve o'clock the day was at its brightest. Yet the sun was too far south on its winter journey
to clear the horizon. The bulge of the earth intervened between it and Henderson Creek, where the
man walked under a clear sky at noon and cast no shadow. At half-past twelve, to the minute, he
arrived at the forks of the creek. He was pleased at the speed he had made. If he kept it up, he
would certainly be with the boys by six. He unbuttoned his jacket and shirt and drew forth his
lunch. The action consumed no more than a quarter of a minute, yet in that brief moment the
numbness laid hold of the exposed fingers. He did not put the mitten on, but, instead, struck the
fingers a dozen sharp smashes against his leg. Then he sat down on a snow-covered log to eat.
The sting that followed upon the striking of his fingers against his leg ceased so quickly that he
was startled, he had had no chance to take a bite of biscuit. He struck the fingers repeatedly and
returned them to the mitten, baring the other hand for the purpose of eating. He tried to take a
mouthful, but the ice-muzzle prevented. He had forgotten to build a fire and thaw out. He
chuckled at his foolishness, and as he chuckled he noted the numbness creeping into the exposed
fingers. Also, he noted that the stinging which had first come to his toes when he sat down was
already passing away. He wondered whether the toes were warm or numbed. He moved them
inside the moccasins and decided that they were numbed.
He pulled the mitten on hurriedly and stood up. He was a bit frightened. He stamped up and down
until the stinging returned into the feet. It certainly was cold, was his thought. That man from
Sulphur Creek had spoken the truth when telling how cold it sometimes got in the country. And
he had laughed at him at the time! That showed one must not be too sure of things. There was no
mistake about it, it was cold. He strode up and down, stamping his feet and threshing his arms,
until reassured by the returning warmth. Then he got out matches and proceeded to make a fire.
From the undergrowth, where high water of the previous spring had lodged a supply of seasoned
twigs, he got his firewood. Working carefully from a small beginning, he soon had a roaring fire,
over which he thawed the ice from his face and in the protection of which he ate his biscuits. For
the moment the cold of space was outwitted. The dog took satisfaction in the fire, stretching out
close enough for warmth and far enough away to escape being singed.
When the man had finished, he filled his pipe and took his comfortable time over a smoke. Then
he pulled on his mittens, settled the ear-flaps of his cap firmly about his ears, and took the creek
trail up the left fork. The dog was disappointed and yearned back toward the fire. This man did
not know cold. Possibly all the generations of his ancestry had been ignorant of cold, of real cold,
of cold one hundred and seven degrees below freezing-point. But the dog knew; all its ancestry
knew, and it had inherited the knowledge. And it knew that it was not good to walk abroad in
such fearful cold. It was the time to lie snug in a hole in the snow and wait for a curtain of cloud
to be drawn across the face of outer space whence this cold came. On the other hand, there was
no keen intimacy between the dog and the man. The one was the toil-slave of the other, and the
only caresses it had ever received were the caresses of the whip-lash and of harsh and menacing
throat-sounds that threatened the whip-lash. So the dog made no effort to communicate its
apprehension to the man. It was not concerned in the welfare of the man; it was for its own sake
that it yearned back toward the fire. But the man whistled, and spoke to it with the sound of whiplashes, and the dog swung in at the man's heels and followed after.
The man took a chew of tobacco and proceeded to start a new amber beard. Also, his moist breath
quickly powdered with white his moustache, eyebrows, and lashes. There did not seem to be so
many springs on the left fork of the Henderson, and for half an hour the man saw no signs of any.
And then it happened. At a place where there were no signs, where the soft, unbroken snow
seemed to advertise solidity beneath, the man broke through. It was not deep. He wetted himself
half-way to the knees before he floundered out to the firm crust.
He was angry, and cursed his luck aloud. He had hoped to get into camp with the boys at six
o'clock, and this would delay him an hour, for he would have to build a fire and dry out his footgear. This was imperative at that low temperature - he knew that much; and he turned aside to the
bank, which he climbed. On top, tangled in the underbrush about the trunks of several small
spruce trees, was a high-water deposit of dry firewood - sticks and twigs principally, but also
larger portions of seasoned branches and fine, dry, last-year's grasses. He threw down several
large pieces on top of the snow. This served for a foundation and prevented the young flame from
drowning itself in the snow it otherwise would melt. The flame he got by touching a match to a
small shred of birch-bark that he took from his pocket. This burned even more readily than paper.
Placing it on the foundation, he fed the young flame with wisps of dry grass and with the tiniest
dry twigs.
He worked slowly and carefully, keenly aware of his danger. Gradually, as the flame grew
stronger, he increased the size of the twigs with which he fed it. He squatted in the snow, pulling
the twigs out from their entanglement in the brush and feeding directly to the flame. He knew
there must be no failure. When it is seventy-five below zero, a man must not fail in his first
attempt to build a fire - that is, if his feet are wet. If his feet are dry, and he fails, he can run along
the trail for half a mile and restore his circulation. But the circulation of wet and freezing feet
cannot be restored by running when it is seventy-five below. No matter how fast he runs, the wet
feet will freeze the harder.
All this the man knew. The old-timer on Sulphur Creek had told him about it the previous fall,
and now he was appreciating the advice. Already all sensation had gone out of his feet. To build
the fire he had been forced to remove his mittens, and the fingers had quickly gone numb. His
pace of four miles an hour had kept his heart pumping blood to the surface of his body and to all
the extremities. But the instant he stopped, the action of the pump eased down. The cold of space
smote the unprotected tip of the planet, and he, being on that unprotected tip, received the full
force of the blow. The blood of his body recoiled before it. The blood was alive, like the dog, and
like the dog it wanted to hide away and cover itself up from the fearful cold. So long as he walked
four miles an hour, he pumped that blood, willy-nilly, to the surface; but now it ebbed away and
sank down into the recesses of his body. The extremities were the first to feel its absence. His wet
feet froze the faster, and his exposed fingers numbed the faster, though they had not yet begun to
freeze. Nose and cheeks were already freezing, while the skin of all his body chilled as it lost its
blood.
But he was safe. Toes and nose and cheeks would be only touched by the frost, for the fire was
beginning to burn with strength. He was feeding it with twigs the size of his finger. In another
minute he would be able to feed it with branches the size of his wrist, and then he could remove
his wet foot-gear, and, while it dried, he could keep his naked feet warm by the fire, rubbing them
at first, of course, with snow. The fire was a success. He was safe. He remembered the advice of
the old-timer on Sulphur Creek, and smiled. The old-timer had been very serious in laying down
the law that no man must travel alone in the Klondike after fifty below. Well, here he was; he had
had the accident; he was alone; and he had saved himself. Those old-timers were rather
womanish, some of them, he thought. All a man had to do was to keep his head, and he was all
right. Any man who was a man could travel alone. But it was surprising, the rapidity with which
his cheeks and nose were freezing. And he had not thought his fingers could go lifeless in so short
a time. Lifeless they were, for he could scarcely make them move together to grip a twig, and
they seemed remote from his body and from him. When he touched a twig, he had to look and see
whether or not he had hold of it. The wires were pretty well down between him and his fingerends.
All of which counted for little. There was the fire, snapping and crackling and promising life with
every dancing flame. He started to untie his moccasins. They were coated with ice; the thick
German socks were like sheaths of iron half-way to the knees; and the mocassin strings were like
rods of steel all twisted and knotted as by some conflagration. For a moment he tugged with his
numbed fingers, then, realizing the folly of it, he drew his sheath-knife.
But before he could cut the strings, it happened. It was his own fault or, rather, his mistake. He
should not have built the fire under the spruce tree. He should have built it in the open. But it had
been easier to pull the twigs from the brush and drop them directly on the fire. Now the tree under
which he had done this carried a weight of snow on its boughs. No wind had blown for weeks,
and each bough was fully freighted. Each time he had pulled a twig he had communicated a slight
agitation to the tree - an imperceptible agitation, so far as he was concerned, but an agitation
sufficient to bring about the disaster. High up in the tree one bough capsized its load of snow.
This fell on the boughs beneath, capsizing them. This process continued, spreading out and
involving the whole tree. It grew like an avalanche, and it descended without warning upon the
man and the fire, and the fire was blotted out! Where it had burned was a mantle of fresh and
disordered snow.
The man was shocked. It was as though he had just heard his own sentence of death. For a
moment he sat and stared at the spot where the fire had been. Then he grew very calm. Perhaps
the old-timer on Sulphur Creek was right. If he had only had a trail-mate he would have been in
no danger now. The trail-mate could have built the fire. Well, it was up to him to build the fire
over again, and this second time there must be no failure. Even if he succeeded, he would most
likely lose some toes. His feet must be badly frozen by now, and there would be some time before
the second fire was ready.
Such were his thoughts, but he did not sit and think them. He was busy all the time they were
passing through his mind, he made a new foundation for a fire, this time in the open; where no
treacherous tree could blot it out. Next, he gathered dry grasses and tiny twigs from the highwater flotsam. He could not bring his fingers together to pull them out, but he was able to gather
them by the handful. In this way he got many rotten twigs and bits of green moss that were
undesirable, but it was the best he could do. He worked methodically, even collecting an armful
of the larger branches to be used later when the fire gathered strength. And all the while the dog
sat and watched him, a certain yearning wistfulness in its eyes, for it looked upon him as the fireprovider, and the fire was slow in coming.
When all was ready, the man reached in his pocket for a second piece of birch-bark. He knew the
bark was there, and, though he could not feel it with his fingers, he could hear its crisp rustling as
he fumbled for it. Try as he would, he could not clutch hold of it. And all the time, in his
consciousness, was the knowledge that each instant his feet were freezing. This thought tended to
put him in a panic, but he fought against it and kept calm. He pulled on his mittens with his teeth,
and threshed his arms back and forth, beating his hands with all his might against his sides. He
did this sitting down, and he stood up to do it; and all the while the dog sat in the snow, its wolfbrush of a tail curled around warmly over its forefeet, its sharp wolf-ears pricked forward intently
as it watched the man. And the man as he beat and threshed with his arms and hands, felt a great
surge of envy as he regarded the creature that was warm and secure in its natural covering.
After a time he was aware of the first far-away signals of sensation in his beaten fingers. The faint
tingling grew stronger till it evolved into a stinging ache that was excruciating, but which the man
hailed with satisfaction. He stripped the mitten from his right hand and fetched forth the birchbark. The exposed fingers were quickly going numb again. Next he brought out his bunch of
sulphur matches. But the tremendous cold had already driven the life out of his fingers. In his
effort to separate one match from the others, the whole bunch fell in the snow. He tried to pick it
out of the snow, but failed. The dead fingers could neither touch nor clutch. He was very careful.
He drove the thought of his freezing feet; and nose, and cheeks, out of his mind, devoting his
whole soul to the matches. He watched, using the sense of vision in place of that of touch, and
when he saw his fingers on each side the bunch, he closed them - that is, he willed to close them,
for the wires were drawn, and the fingers did not obey. He pulled the mitten on the right hand,
and beat it fiercely against his knee. Then, with both mittened hands, he scooped the bunch of
matches, along with much snow, into his lap. Yet he was no better off.
After some manipulation he managed to get the bunch between the heels of his mittened hands. In
this fashion he carried it to his mouth. The ice crackled and snapped when by a violent effort he
opened his mouth. He drew the lower jaw in, curled the upper lip out of the way, and scraped the
bunch with his upper teeth in order to separate a match. He succeeded in getting one, which he
dropped on his lap. He was no better off. He could not pick it up. Then he devised a way. He
picked it up in his teeth and scratched it on his leg. Twenty times he scratched before he
succeeded in lighting it. As it flamed he held it with his teeth to the birch-bark. But the burning
brimstone went up his nostrils and into his lungs, causing him to cough spasmodically. The match
fell into the snow and went out.
The old-timer on Sulphur Creek was right, he thought in the moment of controlled despair that
ensued: after fifty below, a man should travel with a partner. He beat his hands, but failed in
exciting any sensation. Suddenly he bared both hands, removing the mittens with his teeth. He
caught the whole bunch between the heels of his hands. His arm-muscles not being frozen
enabled him to press the hand-heels tightly against the matches. Then he scratched the bunch
along his leg. It flared into flame, seventy sulphur matches at once! There was no wind to blow
them out. He kept his head to one side to escape the strangling fumes, and held the blazing bunch
to the birch-bark. As he so held it, he became aware of sensation in his hand. His flesh was
burning. He could smell it. Deep down below the surface he could feel it. The sensation
developed into pain that grew acute. And still he endured it, holding the flame of the matches
clumsily to the bark that would not light readily because his own burning hands were in the way,
absorbing most of the flame.
At last, when he could endure no more, he jerked his hands apart. The blazing matches fell
sizzling into the snow, but the birch-bark was alight. He began laying dry grasses and the tiniest
twigs on the flame. He could not pick and choose, for he had to lift the fuel between the heels of
his hands. Small pieces of rotten wood and green moss clung to the twigs, and he bit them off as
well as he could with his teeth. He cherished the flame carefully and awkwardly. It meant life,
and it must not perish. The withdrawal of blood from the surface of his body now made him
begin to shiver, and he grew more awkward. A large piece of green moss fell squarely on the little
fire. He tried to poke it out with his fingers, but his shivering frame made him poke too far, and
he disrupted the nucleus of the little fire, the burning grasses and tiny twigs separating and
scattering. He tried to poke them together again, but in spite of the tenseness of the effort, his
shivering got away with him, and the twigs were hopelessly scattered. Each twig gushed a puff of
smoke and went out. The fire-provider had failed. As he looked apathetically about him, his eyes
chanced on the dog, sitting across the ruins of the fire from him, in the snow, making restless,
hunching movements, slightly lifting one forefoot and then the other, shifting its weight back and
forth on them with wistful eagerness.
The sight of the dog put a wild idea into his head. He remembered the tale of the man, caught in a
blizzard, who killed a steer and crawled inside the carcass, and so was saved. He would kill the
dog and bury his hands in the warm body until the numbness went out of them. Then he could
build another fire. He spoke to the dog, calling it to him; but in his voice was a strange note of
fear that frightened the animal, who had never known the man to speak in such way before.
Something was the matter, and its suspicious nature sensed danger, - it knew not what danger but
somewhere, somehow, in its brain arose an apprehension of the man. It flattened its ears down at
the sound of the man's voice, and its restless, hunching movements and the liftings and shiftings
of its forefeet became more pronounced but it would not come to the man. He got on his hands
and knees and crawled toward the dog. This unusual posture again excited suspicion, and the
animal sidled mincingly away.
The man sat up in the snow for a moment and struggled for calmness. Then he pulled on his
mittens, by means of his teeth, and got upon his feet. He glanced down at first in order to assure
himself that he was really standing up, for the absence of sensation in his feet left him unrelated
to the earth. His erect position in itself started to drive the webs of suspicion from the dog's mind;
and when he spoke peremptorily, with the sound of whip-lashes in his voice, the dog rendered its
customary allegiance and came to him. As it came within reaching distance, the man lost his
control. His arms flashed out to the dog, and he experienced genuine surprise when he discovered
that his hands could not clutch, that there was neither bend nor feeling in the lingers. He had
forgotten for the moment that they were frozen and that they were freezing more and more. All
this happened quickly, and before the animal could get away, he encircled its body with his arms.
He sat down in the snow, and in this fashion held the dog, while it snarled and whined and
struggled.
But it was all he could do, hold its body encircled in his arms and sit there. He realized that he
could not kill the dog. There was no way to do it. With his helpless hands he could neither draw
nor hold his sheath- knife nor throttle the animal. He released it, and it plunged wildly away, with
tail between its legs, and still snarling. It halted forty feet away and surveyed him curiously, with
ears sharply pricked forward. The man looked down at his hands in order to locate them, and
found them hanging on the ends of his arms. It struck him as curious that one should have to use
his eyes in order to find out where his hands were. He began threshing his arms back and forth,
beating the mittened hands against his sides. He did this for five minutes, violently, and his heart
pumped enough blood up to the surface to put a stop to his shivering. But no sensation was
aroused in the hands. He had an impression that they hung like weights on the ends of his arms,
but when he tried to run the impression down, he could not find it.
A certain fear of death, dull and oppressive, came to him. This fear quickly became poignant as
he realized that it was no longer a mere matter of freezing his fingers and toes, or of losing his
hands and feet, but that it was a matter of life and death with the chances against him. This threw
him into a panic, and he turned and ran up the creek-bed along the old, dim trail. The dog joined
in behind and kept up with him. He ran blindly, without intention, in fear such as he had never
known in his life. Slowly, as he ploughed and floundered through the snow, he began to see
things again - the banks of the creek, the old timber-jams, the leafless aspens, and the sky. The
running made him feel better. He did not shiver. Maybe, if he ran on, his feet would thaw out;
and, anyway, if he ran far enough, he would reach camp and the boys. Without doubt he would
lose some fingers and toes and some of his face; but the boys would take care of him, and save
the rest of him when he got there. And at the same time there was another thought in his mind
that said he would never get to the camp and the boys; that it was too many miles away, that the
freezing had too great a start on him, and that he would soon be stiff and dead. This thought he
kept in the background and refused to consider. Sometimes it pushed itself forward and
demanded to be heard, but he thrust it back and strove to think of other things.
It struck him as curious that he could run at all on feet so frozen that he could not feel them when
they struck the earth and took the weight of his body. He seemed to himself to skim along above
the surface and to have no connection with the earth. Somewhere he had once seen a winged
Mercury, and he wondered if Mercury felt as he felt when skimming over the earth.
His theory of running until he reached camp and the boys had one flaw in it: he lacked the
endurance. Several times he stumbled, and finally he tottered, crumpled up, and fell. When he
tried to rise, he failed. He must sit and rest, he decided, and next time he would merely walk and
keep on going. As he sat and regained his breath, he noted that he was feeling quite warm and
comfortable. He was not shivering, and it even seemed that a warm glow had come to his chest
and trunk. And yet, when he touched his nose or cheeks, there was no sensation. Running would
not thaw them out. Nor would it thaw out his hands and feet. Then the thought came to him that
the frozen portions of his body must be extending. He tried to keep this thought down, to forget it,
to think of something else; he was aware of the panicky feeling that it caused, and he was afraid
of the panic. But the thought asserted itself, and persisted, until it produced a vision of his body
totally frozen. This was too much, and he made another wild run along the trail. Once he slowed
down to a walk, but the thought of the freezing extending itself made him run again.
And all the time the dog ran with him, at his heels. When he fell down a second time, it curled its
tail over its forefeet and sat in front of him facing him curiously eager and intent. The warmth and
security of the animal angered him, and he cursed it till it flattened down its ears appeasingly.
This time the shivering came more quickly upon the man. He was losing in his battle with the
frost. It was creeping into his body from all sides. The thought of it drove him on, but he ran no
more than a hundred feet, when he staggered and pitched headlong. It was his last panic. When he
had recovered his breath and control, he sat up and entertained in his mind the conception of
meeting death with dignity. However, the conception did not come to him in such terms. His idea
of it was that he had been making a fool of himself, running around like a chicken with its head
cut off - such was the simile that occurred to him. Well, he was bound to freeze anyway, and he
might as well take it decently. With this new-found peace of mind came the first glimmerings of
drowsiness. A good idea, he thought, to sleep off to death. It was like taking an anaesthetic.
Freezing was not so bad as people thought. There were lots worse ways to die.
He pictured the boys finding his body next day. Suddenly he found himself with them, coming
along the trail and looking for himself. And, still with them, he came around a turn in the trail and
found himself lying in the snow. He did not belong with himself any more, for even then he was
out of himself, standing with the boys and looking at himself in the snow. It certainly was cold,
was his thought. When he got back to the States he could tell the folks what real cold was. He
drifted on from this to a vision of the old-timer on Sulphur Creek. He could see him quite clearly,
warm and comfortable, and smoking a pipe.
"You were right, old hoss; you were right," the man mumbled to the old- timer of Sulphur Creek.
Then the man drowsed off into what seemed to him the most comfortable and satisfying sleep he
had ever known. The dog sat facing him and waiting. The brief day drew to a close in a long,
slow twilight. There were no signs of a fire to be made, and, besides, never in the dog's
experience had it known a man to sit like that in the snow and make no fire. As the twilight drew
on, its eager yearning for the fire mastered it, and with a great lifting and shifting of forefeet, it
whined softly, then flattened its ears down in anticipation of being chidden by the man. But the
man remained silent. Later, the dog whined loudly. And still later it crept close to the man and
caught the scent of death. This made the animal bristle and back away. A little longer it delayed,
howling under the stars that leaped and danced and shone brightly in the cold sky. Then it turned
and trotted up the trail in the direction of the camp it knew, where were the other food-providers
and fire-providers.
A Rose for Emily
by William Faulkner
I
WHEN Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of
respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of
her house, which no one save an old man-servant--a combined gardener and cook--had seen in at
least ten years.
It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires
and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been
our most select street. But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august
names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish
decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps-an eyesore among eyesores. And now
Miss Emily had gone to join the representatives of those august names where they lay in the
cedar-bemused cemetery among the ranked and anonymous graves of Union and Confederate
soldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferson.
Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the
town, dating from that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor--he who fathered the edict
that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron-remitted her taxes, the
dispensation dating from the death of her father on into perpetuity. Not that Miss Emily would
have accepted charity. Colonel Sartoris invented an involved tale to the effect that Miss Emily's
father had loaned money to the town, which the town, as a matter of business, preferred this way
of repaying. Only a man of Colonel Sartoris' generation and thought could have invented it, and
only a woman could have believed it.
When the next generation, with its more modern ideas, became mayors and aldermen, this
arrangement created some little dissatisfaction. On the first of the year they mailed her a tax
notice. February came, and there was no reply. They wrote her a formal letter, asking her to call
at the sheriff's office at her convenience. A week later the mayor wrote her himself, offering to
call or to send his car for her, and received in reply a note on paper of an archaic shape, in a thin,
flowing calligraphy in faded ink, to the effect that she no longer went out at all. The tax notice
was also enclosed, without comment.
They called a special meeting of the Board of Aldermen. A deputation waited upon her, knocked
at the door through which no visitor had passed since she ceased giving china-painting lessons
eight or ten years earlier. They were admitted by the old Negro into a dim hall from which a
stairway mounted into still more shadow. It smelled of dust and disuse--a close, dank smell. The
Negro led them into the parlor. It was furnished in heavy, leather-covered furniture. When the
Negro opened the blinds of one window, they could see that the leather was cracked; and when
they sat down, a faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning with slow motes in the
single sun-ray. On a tarnished gilt easel before the fireplace stood a crayon portrait of Miss
Emily's father.
They rose when she entered--a small, fat woman in black, with a thin gold chain descending to
her waist and vanishing into her belt, leaning on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head. Her
skeleton was small and spare; perhaps that was why what would have been merely plumpness in
another was obesity in her. She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water,
and of that pallid hue. Her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of
coal pressed into a lump of dough as they moved from one face to another while the visitors
stated their errand.
She did not ask them to sit. She just stood in the door and listened quietly until the spokesman
came to a stumbling halt. Then they could hear the invisible watch ticking at the end of the gold
chain.
Her voice was dry and cold. "I have no taxes in Jefferson. Colonel Sartoris explained it to me.
Perhaps one of you can gain access to the city records and satisfy yourselves."
"But we have. We are the city authorities, Miss Emily. Didn't you get a notice from the sheriff,
signed by him?"
"I received a paper, yes," Miss Emily said. "Perhaps he considers himself the sheriff . . . I have no
taxes in Jefferson."
"But there is nothing on the books to show that, you see We must go by the--"
"See Colonel Sartoris. I have no taxes in Jefferson."
"But, Miss Emily--"
"See Colonel Sartoris." (Colonel Sartoris had been dead almost ten years.) "I have no taxes in
Jefferson. Tobe!" The Negro appeared. "Show these gentlemen out."
II
So SHE vanquished them, horse and foot, just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years
before about the smell.
That was two years after her father's death and a short time after her sweetheart--the one we
believed would marry her --had deserted her. After her father's death she went out very little; after
her sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her at all. A few of the ladies had the temerity to
call, but were not received, and the only sign of life about the place was the Negro man--a young
man then--going in and out with a market basket.
"Just as if a man--any man--could keep a kitchen properly, "the ladies said; so they were not
surprised when the smell developed. It was another link between the gross, teeming world and the
high and mighty Griersons.
A neighbor, a woman, complained to the mayor, Judge Stevens, eighty years old.
"But what will you have me do about it, madam?" he said.
"Why, send her word to stop it," the woman said. "Isn't there a law? "
"I'm sure that won't be necessary," Judge Stevens said. "It's probably just a snake or a rat that
nigger of hers killed in the yard. I'll speak to him about it."
The next day he received two more complaints, one from a man who came in diffident
deprecation. "We really must do something about it, Judge. I'd be the last one in the world to
bother Miss Emily, but we've got to do something." That night the Board of Aldermen met--three
graybeards and one younger man, a member of the rising generation.
"It's simple enough," he said. "Send her word to have her place cleaned up. Give her a certain
time to do it in, and if she don't. .."
"Dammit, sir," Judge Stevens said, "will you accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad?"
So the next night, after midnight, four men crossed Miss Emily's lawn and slunk about the house
like burglars, sniffing along the base of the brickwork and at the cellar openings while one of
them performed a regular sowing motion with his hand out of a sack slung from his shoulder.
They broke open the cellar door and sprinkled lime there, and in all the outbuildings. As they
recrossed the lawn, a window that had been dark was lighted and Miss Emily sat in it, the light
behind her, and her upright torso motionless as that of an idol. They crept quietly across the lawn
and into the shadow of the locusts that lined the street. After a week or two the smell went away.
That was when people had begun to feel really sorry for her. People in our town, remembering
how old lady Wyatt, her great-aunt, had gone completely crazy at last, believed that the Griersons
held themselves a little too high for what they really were. None of the young men were quite
good enough for Miss Emily and such. We had long thought of them as a tableau, Miss Emily a
slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his
back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door. So
when she got to be thirty and was still single, we were not pleased exactly, but vindicated; even
with insanity in the family she wouldn't have turned down all of her chances if they had really
materialized.
When her father died, it got about that the house was all that was left to her; and in a way, people
were glad. At last they could pity Miss Emily. Being left alone, and a pauper, she had become
humanized. Now she too would know the old thrill and the old despair of a penny more or less.
The day after his death all the ladies prepared to call at the house and offer condolence and aid, as
is our custom Miss Emily met them at the door, dressed as usual and with no trace of grief on her
face. She told them that her father was not dead. She did that for three days, with the ministers
calling on her, and the doctors, trying to persuade her to let them dispose of the body. Just as they
were about to resort to law and force, she broke down, and they buried her father quickly.
We did not say she was crazy then. We believed she had to do that. We remembered all the young
men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to
that which had robbed her, as people will.
III
SHE WAS SICK for a long time. When we saw her again, her hair was cut short, making her look
like a girl, with a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows--sort of tragic
and serene.
The town had just let the contracts for paving the sidewalks, and in the summer after her father's
death they began the work. The construction company came with riggers and mules and
machinery, and a foreman named Homer Barron, a Yankee--a big, dark, ready man, with a big
voice and eyes lighter than his face. The little boys would follow in groups to hear him cuss the
riggers, and the riggers singing in time to the rise and fall of picks. Pretty soon he knew
everybody in town. Whenever you heard a lot of laughing anywhere about the square, Homer
Barron would be in the center of the group. Presently we began to see him and Miss Emily on
Sunday afternoons driving in the yellow-wheeled buggy and the matched team of bays from the
livery stable.
At first we were glad that Miss Emily would have an interest, because the ladies all said, "Of
course a Grierson would not think seriously of a Northerner, a day laborer." But there were still
others, older people, who said that even grief could not cause a real lady to forget noblesse
oblige- without calling it noblesse oblige. They just said, "Poor Emily. Her kinsfolk should come to her."
She had some kin in Alabama; but years ago her father had fallen out with them over the estate of
old lady Wyatt, the crazy woman, and there was no communication between the two families.
They had not even been represented at the funeral.
And as soon as the old people said, "Poor Emily," the whispering began. "Do you suppose it's
really so?" they said to one another. "Of course it is. What else could . . ." This behind their
hands; rustling of craned silk and satin behind jalousies closed upon the sun of Sunday afternoon
as the thin, swift clop-clop-clop of the matched team passed: "Poor Emily."
She carried her head high enough--even when we believed that she was fallen. It was as if she
demanded more than ever the recognition of her dignity as the last Grierson; as if it had wanted
that touch of earthiness to reaffirm her imperviousness. Like when she bought the rat poison, the
arsenic. That was over a year after they had begun to say "Poor Emily," and while the two female
cousins were visiting her.
"I want some poison," she said to the druggist. She was over thirty then, still a slight woman,
though thinner than usual, with cold, haughty black eyes in a face the flesh of which was strained
across the temples and about the eyesockets as you imagine a lighthouse-keeper's face ought to
look. "I want some poison," she said.
"Yes, Miss Emily. What kind? For rats and such? I'd recom--"
"I want the best you have. I don't care what kind."
The druggist named several. "They'll kill anything up to an elephant. But what you want is--"
"Arsenic," Miss Emily said. "Is that a good one?"
"Is . . . arsenic? Yes, ma'am. But what you want--"
"I want arsenic."
The druggist looked down at her. She looked back at him, erect, her face like a strained flag.
"Why, of course," the druggist said. "If that's what you want. But the law requires you to tell what
you are going to use it for."
Miss Emily just stared at him, her head tilted back in order to look him eye for eye, until he
looked away and went and got the arsenic and wrapped it up. The Negro delivery boy brought her
the package; the druggist didn't come back. When she opened the package at home there was
written on the box, under the skull and bones: "For rats."
IV
So THE NEXT day we all said, "She will kill herself"; and we said it would be the best thing.
When she had first begun to be seen with Homer Barron, we had said, "She will marry him."
Then we said, "She will persuade him yet," because Homer himself had remarked--he liked men,
and it was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elks' Club--that he was not a
marrying man. Later we said, "Poor Emily" behind the jalousies as they passed on Sunday
afternoon in the glittering buggy, Miss Emily with her head high and Homer Barron with his hat
cocked and a cigar in his teeth, reins and whip in a yellow glove.
Then some of the ladies began to say that it was a disgrace to the town and a bad example to the
young people. The men did not want to interfere, but at last the ladies forced the Baptist minister-Miss Emily's people were Episcopal-- to call upon her. He would never divulge what happened
during that interview, but he refused to go back again. The next Sunday they again drove about
the streets, and the following day the minister's wife wrote to Miss Emily's relations in Alabama.
So she had blood-kin under her roof again and we sat back to watch developments. At first
nothing happened. Then we were sure that they were to be married. We learned that Miss Emily
had been to the jeweler's and ordered a man's toilet set in silver, with the letters H. B. on each
piece. Two days later we learned that she had bought a complete outfit of men's clothing,
including a nightshirt, and we said, "They are married." We were really glad. We were glad
because the two female cousins were even more Grierson than Miss Emily had ever been.
So we were not surprised when Homer Barron--the streets had been finished some time since-was gone. We were a little disappointed that there was not a public blowing-off, but we believed
that he had gone on to prepare for Miss Emily's coming, or to give her a chance to get rid of the
cousins. (By that time it was a cabal, and we were all Miss Emily's allies to help circumvent the
cousins.) Sure enough, after another week they departed. And, as we had expected all along,
within three days Homer Barron was back in town. A neighbor saw the Negro man admit him at
the kitchen door at dusk one evening.
And that was the last we saw of Homer Barron. And of Miss Emily for some time. The Negro
man went in and out with the market basket, but the front door remained closed. Now and then
we would see her at a window for a moment, as the men did that night when they sprinkled the
lime, but for almost six months she did not appear on the streets. Then we knew that this was to
be expected too; as if that quality of her father which had thwarted her woman's life so many
times had been too virulent and too furious to die.
When we next saw Miss Emily, she had grown fat and her hair was turning gray. During the next
few years it grew grayer and grayer until it attained an even pepper-and-salt iron-gray, when it
ceased turning. Up to the day of her death at seventy-four it was still that vigorous iron-gray, like
the hair of an active man.
From that time on her front door remained closed, save for a period of six or seven years, when
she was about forty, during which she gave lessons in china-painting. She fitted up a studio in one
of the downstairs rooms, where the daughters and granddaughters of Colonel Sartoris'
contemporaries were sent to her with the same regularity and in the same spirit that they were
sent to church on Sundays with a twenty-five-cent piece for the collection plate. Meanwhile her
taxes had been remitted.
Then the newer generation became the backbone and the spirit of the town, and the painting
pupils grew up and fell away and did not send their children to her with boxes of color and
tedious brushes and pictures cut from the ladies' magazines. The front door closed upon the last
one and remained closed for good. When the town got free postal delivery, Miss Emily alone
refused to let them fasten the metal numbers above her door and attach a mailbox to it. She would
not listen to them.
Daily, monthly, yearly we watched the Negro grow grayer and more stooped, going in and out
with the market basket. Each December we sent her a tax notice, which would be returned by the
post office a week later, unclaimed. Now and then we would see her in one of the downstairs
windows--she had evidently shut up the top floor of the house--like the carven torso of an idol in
a niche, looking or not looking at us, we could never tell which. Thus she passed from generation
to generation--dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse.
And so she died. Fell ill in the house filled with dust and shadows, with only a doddering Negro
man to wait on her. We did not even know she was sick; we had long since given up trying to get
any information from the Negro
He talked to no one, probably not even to her, for his voice had grown harsh and rusty, as if from
disuse.
She died in one of the downstairs rooms, in a heavy walnut bed with a curtain, her gray head
propped on a pillow yellow and moldy with age and lack of sunlight.
V
THE NEGRO met the first of the ladies at the front door and let them in, with their hushed,
sibilant voices and their quick, curious glances, and then he disappeared. He walked right through
the house and out the back and was not seen again.
The two female cousins came at once. They held the funeral on the second day, with the town
coming to look at Miss Emily beneath a mass of bought flowers, with the crayon face of her
father musing profoundly above the bier and the ladies sibilant and macabre; and the very old
men --some in their brushed Confederate uniforms--on the porch and the lawn, talking of Miss
Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and
courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all
the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite
touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years.
Already we knew that there was one room in that region above stairs which no one had seen in
forty years, and which would have to be forced. They waited until Miss Emily was decently in the
ground before they opened it.
The violence of breaking down the door seemed to fill this room with pervading dust. A thin,
acrid pall as of the tomb seemed to lie everywhere upon this room decked and furnished as for a
bridal: upon the valance curtains of faded rose color, upon the rose-shaded lights, upon the
dressing table, upon the delicate array of crystal and the man's toilet things backed with tarnished
silver, silver so tarnished that the monogram was obscured. Among them lay a collar and tie, as if
they had just been removed, which, lifted, left upon the surface a pale crescent in the dust. Upon a
chair hung the suit, carefully folded; beneath it the two mute shoes and the discarded socks.
The man himself lay in the bed.
For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin. The body
had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love,
that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him. What was left of him, rotted beneath
what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay; and upon
him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and biding dust.
Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted
something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils,
we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair.
A Good Man Is Hard To Find
Flannery O’Connor
The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east
Tennes- see and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey's mind. Bailey was the son she
lived with, her only boy. He was sitting on the edge of his chair at the table, bent over the orange
sports section of the Journal. "Now look here, Bailey," she said, "see here, read this," and she
stood with one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling the newspaper at his bald head. "Here
this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida
and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn't take my children
in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn't answer to my conscience if I did."
Bailey didn't look up from his reading so she wheeled around then and faced the children's
mother, a young woman in slacks, whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage and was
tied around with a green head-kerchief that had two points on the top like rabbit's ears. She was
sitting on the sofa, feeding the baby his apricots out of a jar. "The children have been to Florida
before," the old lady said. "You all ought to take them somewhere else for a change so they
would see different parts of the world and be broad. They never have been to east Tennessee."
The children's mother didn't seem to hear her but the eight-year-old boy, John Wesley, a stocky
child with glasses, said, "If you don't want to go to Florida, why dontcha stay at home?" He and
the little girl, June Star, were reading the funny papers on the floor.
"She wouldn't stay at home to be queen for a day," June Star said without raising her yellow head.
"Yes and what would you do if this fellow, The Misfit, caught you?" the grandmother asked.
"I'd smack his face," John Wesley said.
"She wouldn't stay at home for a million bucks," June Star said. "Afraid she'd miss something.
She has to go everywhere we go."
"All right, Miss," the grandmother said. "Just re- member that the next time you want me to curl
your hair."
June Star said her hair was naturally curly.
The next morning the grandmother was the first one in the car, ready to go. She had her big black
valise that looked like the head of a hippopotamus in one corner, and underneath it she was hiding
a basket with Pitty Sing, the cat, in it. She didn't intend for the cat to be left alone in the house for
three days because he would miss her too much and she was afraid he might brush against one of
her gas burners and accidentally asphyxiate himself. Her son, Bailey, didn't like to arrive at a
motel with a cat.
She sat in the middle of the back seat with John Wesley and June Star on either side of her.
Bailey and the children's mother and the baby sat in front and they left Atlanta at eight forty-five
with the mileage on the car at 55890. The grandmother wrote this down because she thought it
would be interesting to say how many miles they had been when they got back. It took them
twenty minutes to reach the outskirts of the city.
The old lady settled herself comfortably, removing her white cotton gloves and putting them up
with her purse on the shelf in front of the back window. The children's mother still had on slacks
and still had her head tied up in a green kerchief, but the grandmother had on a navy blue straw
sailor hat with a bunch of white violets on the brim and a navy blue dress with a small white dot
in the print. Her collars and cuffs were white organdy trimmed with lace and at her neckline she
had pinned a purple spray of cloth violets containing a sachet. In case of an accident, anyone
seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady.
She said she thought it was going to be a good day for driving, neither too hot nor too cold, and
she cautioned Bailey that the speed limit was fifty-five miles an hour and that the patrolmen hid
themselves behind billboards and small clumps of trees and sped out after you before you had a
chance to slow down. She pointed out interesting details of the scenery: Stone Mountain; the blue
granite that in some places came up to both sides of the highway; the brilliant red clay banks
slightly streaked with purple; and the various crops that made rows of green lace-work on the
ground. The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled. The
children were reading comic magazines and their mother and gone back to sleep.
"Let's go through Georgia fast so we won't have to look at it much," John Wesley said.
"If I were a little boy," said the grandmother, "I wouldn't talk about my native state that way.
Tennessee has the mountains and Georgia has the hills."
"Tennessee is just a hillbilly dumping ground," John Wesley said, "and Georgia is a lousy state
too."
"You said it," June Star said.
"In my time," said the grandmother, folding her thin veined fingers, "children were more
respectful of their native states and their parents and everything else. People did right then. Oh
look at the cute little pickaninny!" she said and pointed to a Negro child standing in the door of a
shack. "Wouldn't that make a picture, now?" she asked and they all turned and looked at the little
Negro out of the back window. He waved
"He didn't have any britches on," June Star said.
"He probably didn't have any," the grandmother explained. "Little riggers in the country don't
have things like we do. If I could paint, I'd paint that picture," she said.
The children exchanged comic books.
The grandmother offered to hold the baby and the children's mother passed him over the front
seat to her. She set him on her knee and bounced him and told him about the things they were
passing. She rolled her eyes and screwed up her mouth and stuck her leathery thin face into his
smooth bland one. Occasionally he gave her a faraway smile. They passed a large cotton field
with five or fix graves fenced in the middle of it, like a small island. "Look at the graveyard!" the
grandmother said, pointing it out. "That was the old family burying ground. That belonged to the
plantation."
"Where's the plantation?" John Wesley asked.
"Gone With the Wind" said the grandmother. "Ha. Ha."
When the children finished all the comic books they had brought, they opened the lunch and ate
it. The grandmother ate a peanut butter sandwich and an olive and would not let the children
throw the box and the paper napkins out the window. When there was nothing else to do they
played a game by choosing a cloud and making the other two guess what shape it suggested. John
Wesley took one the shape of a cow and June Star guessed a cow and John Wesley said, no, an
automobile, and June Star said he didn't play fair, and they began to slap each other over the
grandmother.
The grandmother said she would tell them a story if they would keep quiet. When she told a story,
she rolled her eyes and waved her head and was very dramatic. She said once when she was a
maiden lady she had been courted by a Mr. Edgar Atkins Teagarden from Jasper, Georgia. She
said he was a very good-looking man and a gentleman and that he brought her a watermelon
every Saturday afternoon with his initials cut in it, E. A. T. Well, one Saturday, she said, Mr.
Teagarden brought the watermelon and there was nobody at home and he left it on the front porch
and returned in his buggy to Jasper, but she never got the watermelon, she said, because a nigger
boy ate it when he saw the initials, E. A. T. ! This story tickled John Wesley's funny bone and he
giggled and giggled but June Star didn't think it was any good. She said she wouldn't marry a man
that just brought her a watermelon on Saturday. The grandmother said she would have done well
to marry Mr. Teagarden because he was a gentle man and had bought Coca-Cola stock when it
first came out and that he had died only a few years ago, a very wealthy man.
They stopped at The Tower for barbecued sand- wiches. The Tower was a part stucco and part
wood filling station and dance hall set in a clearing outside of Timothy. A fat man named Red
Sammy Butts ran it and there were signs stuck here and there on the building and for miles up and
down the highway saying, TRY RED SAMMY'S FAMOUS BARBECUE. NONE LIKE
FAMOUS RED SAMMY'S! RED SAM! THE FAT BOY WITH THE HAPPY LAUGH. A
VETERAN! RED SAMMY'S YOUR MAN!
Red Sammy was lying on the bare ground outside The Tower with his head under a truck while a
gray monkey about a foot high, chained to a small chinaberry tree, chattered nearby. The monkey
sprang back into the tree and got on the highest limb as soon as he saw the children jump out of
the car and run toward him.
Inside, The Tower was a long dark room with a counter at one end and tables at the other and
dancing space in the middle. They all sat down at a board table next to the nickelodeon and Red
Sam's wife, a tall burnt-brown woman with hair and eyes lighter than her skin, came and took
their order. The children's mother put a dime in the machine and played "The Tennessee Waltz,"
and the grandmother said that tune always made her want to dance. She asked Bailey if he would
like to dance but he only glared at her. He didn't have a naturally sunny disposition like she did
and trips made him nervous. The grandmother's brown eyes were very bright. She swayed her
head from side to side and pretended she was dancing in her chair. June Star said play something
she could tap to so the children's mother put in another dime and played a fast number and June
Star stepped out onto the dance floor and did her tap routine.
"Ain't she cute?" Red Sam's wife said, leaning over the counter. "Would you like to come be my
little girl?"
"No I certainly wouldn't," June Star said. "I wouldn't live in a broken-down place like this for a
million bucks!" and she ran back to the table.
"Ain't she cute?" the woman repeated, stretching her mouth politely.
"Arn't you ashamed?" hissed the grandmother.
Red Sam came in and told his wife to quit lounging on the counter and hurry up with these
people's order. His khaki trousers reached just to his hip bones and his stomach hung over them
like a sack of meal swaying under his shirt. He came over and sat down at a table nearby and let
out a combination sigh and yodel. "You can't win," he said. "You can't win," and he wiped his
sweating red face off with a gray handkerchief. "These days you don't know who to trust," he
said. "Ain't that the truth?"
"People are certainly not nice like they used to be," said the grandmother.
"Two fellers come in here last week," Red Sammy said, "driving a Chrysler. It was a old beat-up
car but it was a good one and these boys looked all right to me. Said they worked at the mill and
you know I let them fellers charge the gas they bought? Now why did I do that?"
"Because you're a good man!" the grandmother said at once.
"Yes'm, I suppose so," Red Sam said as if he were struck with this answer.
His wife brought the orders, carrying the five plates all at once without a tray, two in each hand
and one balanced on her arm. "It isn't a soul in this green world of God's that you can trust," she
said. "And I don't count nobody out of that, not nobody," she repeated, looking at Red Sammy.
"Did you read about that criminal, The Misfit, that's escaped?" asked the grandmother.
"I wouldn't be a bit surprised if he didn't attack this place right here," said the woman. "If he hears
about it being here, I wouldn't be none surprised to see him. If he hears it's two cent in the cash
register, I wouldn't be a tall surprised if he . . ."
"That'll do," Red Sam said. "Go bring these people their Co'-Colas," and the woman went off to
get the rest of the order.
"A good man is hard to find," Red Sammy said. "Everything is getting terrible. I remember the
day you could go off and leave your screen door unlatched. Not no more."
He and the grandmother discussed better times. The old lady said that in her opinion Europe was
entirely to blame for the way things were now. She said the way Europe acted you would think
we were made of money and Red Sam said it was no use talking about it, she was exactly right.
The children ran outside into the white sunlight and looked at the monkey in the lacy chinaberry
tree. He was busy catching fleas on himself and biting each one carefully between his teeth as if it
were a delicacy.
They drove off again into the hot afternoon. The grandmother took cat naps and woke up every
few minutes with her own snoring. Outside of Toombsboro she woke up and recalled an old
plantation that she had visited in this neighborhood once when she was a young lady. She said the
house had six white columns across the front and that there was an avenue of oaks leading up to it
and two little wooden trellis arbors on either side in front where you sat down with your suitor
after a stroll in the garden. She recalled exactly which road to turn off to get to it. She knew that
Bailey would not be willing to lose any time looking at an old house, but the more she talked
about it, the more she wanted to see it once again and find out if the little twin arbors were still
standing. "There was a secret:-panel in this house," she said craftily, not telling the truth but
wishing that she were, "and the story went that all the family silver was hidden in it when
Sherman came through but it was never found . . ."
"Hey!" John Wesley said. "Let's go see it! We'll find it! We'll poke all the woodwork and find it!
Who lives there? Where do you turn off at? Hey Pop, can't we turn off there?"
"We never have seen a house with a secret panel!" June Star shrieked. "Let's go to the house with
the secret panel! Hey Pop, can't we go see the house with the secret panel!"
"It's not far from here, I know," the grandmother said. "It wouldn't take over twenty minutes."
Bailey was looking straight ahead. His jaw was as rigid as a horseshoe. "No," he said.
The children began to yell and scream that they wanted to see the house with the secret panel.
John Wesley kicked the back of the front seat and June Star hung over her mother's shoulder and
whined desperately into her ear that they never had any fun even on their vacation, that they could
never do what THEY wanted to do. The baby began to scream and John Wesley kicked the back
of the seat so hard that his father could feel the blows in his kidney.
"All right!" he shouted and drew the car to a stop at the side of the road. "Will you all shut up?
Will you all just shut up for one second? If you don't shut up, we won't go anywhere."
"It would be very educational for them," the grandmother murmured.
"All right," Bailey said, "but get this: this is the only time we're going to stop for anything like
this. This is the one and only time."
"The dirt road that you have to turn down is about a mile back," the grandmother directed. "I
marked it when we passed."
"A dirt road," Bailey groaned.
After they had turned around and were headed toward the dirt road, the grandmother recalled
other points about the house, the beautiful glass over the front doorway and the candle-lamp in
the hall. John Wesley said that the secret panel was probably in the fireplace.
"You can't go inside this house," Bailey said. "You don't know who lives there."
"While you all talk to the people in front, I'll run around behind and get in a window," John
Wesley suggested.
"We'll all stay in the car," his mother said.
They turned onto the dirt road and the car raced roughly along in a swirl of pink dust. The
grandmother recalled the times when there were no paved roads and thirty miles was a day's
journey. The dirt road was hilly and there were sudden washes in it and sharp curves on
dangerous embankments. All at once they would be on a hill, looking down over the blue tops of
trees for miles around, then the next minute, they would be in a red depression with the dustcoated trees looking down on them.
"This place had better turn up in a minute," Bailey said, "or I'm going to turn around."
The road looked as if no one had traveled on it in months.
"It's not much farther," the grandmother said and just as she said it, a horrible thought came to
her. The thought was so embarrassing that she turned red in the face and her eyes dilated and her
feet jumped up, upsetting her valise in the corner. The instant the valise moved, the newspaper
top she had over the basket under it rose with a snarl and Pitty Sing, the cat, sprang onto Bailey's
shoulder.
The children were thrown to the floor and their mother, clutching the baby, was thrown out the
door onto the ground; the old lady was thrown into the front seat. The car turned over once and
landed right-side-up in a gulch off the side of the road. Bailey remained in the driver's seat with
the cat gray-striped with a broad white face and an orange nose clinging to his neck like a
caterpillar.
As soon as the children saw they could move their arms and legs, they scrambled out of the car,
shouting, "We've had an ACCIDENT!" The grandmother was curled up under the dashboard,
hoping she was injured so that Bailey's wrath would not come down on her all at once. The
horrible thought she had had before the accident was that the house she had remembered so
vividly was not in Georgia but in Tennessee.
Bailey removed the cat from his neck with both hands and flung it out the window against the
side of a pine tree. Then he got out of the car and started looking for the children's mother. She
was sitting against the side of the red gutted ditch, holding the screaming baby, but she only had a
cut down her face and a broken shoulder. "We've had an ACCIDENT!" the children screamed in
a frenzy of delight.
"But nobody's killed," June Star said with disappointment as the grandmother limped out of the
car, her hat still pinned to her head but the broken front brim standing up at a jaunty angle and the
violet spray hanging off the side. They all sat down in the ditch, except the children, to recover
from the shock. They were all shaking.
"Maybe a car will come along," said the children's mother hoarsely.
"I believe I have injured an organ," said the grandmother, pressing her side, but no one answered
her. Bailey's teeth were clattering. He had on a yellow sport shirt with bright blue parrots
designed in it and his face was as yellow as the shirt. The grandmother decided that she would not
mention that the house was in Tennessee.
The road was about ten feet above and they could see only the tops of the trees on the other side
of it. Behind the ditch they were sitting in there were more woods, tall and dark and deep. In a
few minutes they saw a car some distance away on top of a hill, coming slowly as if the
occupants were watching them. The grandmother stood up and waved both arms dramatically to
attract their attention. The car continued to come on slowly, disappeared around a bend and
appeared again, moving even slower, on top of the hill they had gone over. It was a big black
battered hearselike automobile. There were three men in it.
It came to a stop just over them and for some minutes, the driver looked down with a steady
expressionless gaze to where they were sitting, and didn't speak. Then he turned his head and
muttered something to the other two and they got out. One was a fat boy in black trousers and a
red sweat shirt with a silver stallion embossed on the front of it. He moved around on the right
side of them and stood staring, his mouth partly open in a kind of loose grin. The other had on
khaki pants and a blue striped coat and a gray hat pulled down very low, hiding most of his face.
He came around slowly on the left side. Neither spoke.
The driver got out of the car and stood by the side of it, looking down at them. He was an older
man than the other two. His hair was just beginning to gray and he wore silver-rimmed spectacles
that gave him a scholarly look. He had a long creased face and didn't have on any shirt or
undershirt. He had on blue jeans that were too tight for him and was holding a black hat and a
gun. The two boys also had guns.
"We've had an ACCIDENT!" the children screamed.
The grandmother had the peculiar feeling that the bespectacled man was someone she knew. His
face was as familiar to her as if she had known him all her life but she could not recall who he
was. He moved away from the car and began to come down the embankment, placing his feet
carefully so that he wouldn't slip. He had on tan and white shoes and no socks, and his ankles
were red and thin. "Good afternoon," he said. "I see you all had you a little spill."
"We turned over twice!" said the grandmother.
"Once", he corrected. "We seen it happen. Try their car and see will it run, Hiram," he said
quietly to the boy with the gray hat.
"What you got that gun for?" John Wesley asked. "Whatcha gonna do with that gun?"
"Lady," the man said to the children's mother, "would you mind calling them children to sit down
by you? Children make me nervous. I want all you all to sit down right together there where
you're at."
"What are you telling US what to do for?" June Star asked.
Behind them the line of woods gaped like a dark open mouth. "Come here," said their mother.
"Look here now," Bailey began suddenly, "we're in a predicament! We're in . . ."
The grandmother shrieked. She scrambled to her feet and stood staring. "You're The Misfit!" she
said. "I recognized you at once!"
"Yes'm," the man said, smiling slightly as if he were pleased in spite of himself to be known, "but
it would have been better for all of you, lady, if you hadn't of reckernized me."
Bailey turned his head sharply and said something to his mother that shocked even the children.
The old lady began to cry and The Misfit reddened.
"Lady," he said, "don't you get upset. Sometimes a man says things he don't mean. I don't reckon
he meant to talk to you thataway."
"You wouldn't shoot a lady, would you?" the grandmother said and removed a clean handkerchief
from her cuff and began to slap at her eyes with it.
The Misfit pointed the toe of his shoe into the ground and made a little hole and then covered it
up again. "I would hate to have to," he said.
"Listen," the grandmother almost screamed, "I know you're a good man. You don't look a bit like
you have common blood. I know you must come from nice people!"
"Yes mam," he said, "finest people in the world." When he smiled he showed a row of strong
white teeth. "God never made a finer woman than my mother and my daddy's heart was pure
gold," he said. The boy with the red sweat shirt had come around behind them and was standing
with his gun at his hip. The Misfit squatted down on the ground. "Watch them children, Bobby
Lee," he said. "You know they make me nervous." He looked at the six of them huddled together
in front of him and he seemed to be embarrassed as if he couldn't think of anything to say. "Ain't
a cloud in the sky," he remarked, looking up at it. "Don't see no sun but don't see no cloud
neither."
"Yes, it's a beautiful day," said the grandmother. "Listen," she said, "you shouldn't call yourself
The Misfit because I know you're a good man at heart. I can just look at you and tell."
"Hush!" Bailey yelled. "Hush! Everybody shut up and let me handle this!" He was squatting in
the position of a runner about to sprint forward but he didn't move.
"I pre-chate that, lady," The Misfit said and drew a little circle in the ground with the butt of his
gun.
"It'll take a half a hour to fix this here car," Hiram called, looking over the raised hood of it.
"Well, first you and Bobby Lee get him and that little boy to step over yonder with you," The
Misfit said, pointing to Bailey and John Wesley. "The boys want to ast you something," he said to
Bailey. "Would you mind stepping back in them woods there with them?"
"Listen," Bailey began, "we're in a terrible predicament! Nobody realizes what this is," and his
voice cracked. His eyes were as blue and intense as the parrots in his shirt and he remained
perfectly still.
The grandmother reached up to adjust her hat brim as if she were going to the woods with him
but it came off in her hand. She stood staring at it and after a second she let it fall on the ground.
Hiram pulled Bailey up by the arm as if he were assisting an old man. John Wesley caught hold
of his father's hand and Bobby I,ee followed. They went off toward the woods and just as they
reached the dark edge, Bailey turned and supporting himself against a gray naked pine trunk, he
shouted, "I'll be back in a minute, Mamma, wait on me!"
"Come back this instant!" his mother shrilled but they all disappeared into the woods.
"Bailey Boy!" the grandmother called in a tragic voice but she found she was looking at The
Misfit squatting on the ground in front of her. "I just know you're a good man," she said
desperately. "You're not a bit common!"
"Nome, I ain't a good man," The Misfit said after a second ah if he had considered her statement
carefully, "but I ain't the worst in the world neither. My daddy said I was a different breed of dog
from my brothers and sisters. 'You know,' Daddy said, 'it's some that can live their whole life out
without asking about it and it's others has to know why it is, and this boy is one of the latters. He's
going to be into everything!"' He put on his black hat and looked up suddenly and then away deep
into the woods as if he were embarrassed again. "I'm sorry I don't have on a shirt before you
ladies," he said, hunching his shoulders slightly. "We buried our clothes that we had on when we
escaped and we're just making do until we can get better. We borrowed these from some folks we
met," he explained.
"That's perfectly all right," the grandmother said. "Maybe Bailey has an extra shirt in his
suitcase."
"I'll look and see terrectly," The Misfit said.
"Where are they taking him?" the children's mother screamed.
"Daddy was a card himself," The Misfit said. "You couldn't put anything over on him. He never
got in trouble with the Authorities though. Just had the knack of handling them."
"You could be honest too if you'd only try," said the grandmother. "Think how wonderful it
would be to settle down and live a comfortable life and not have to think about somebody chasing
you all the time."
The Misfit kept scratching in the ground with the butt of his gun as if he were thinking about it.
"Yestm, somebody is always after you," he murmured.
The grandmother noticed how thin his shoulder blades were just behind his hat because she was
standing up looking down on him. "Do you every pray?" she asked.
He shook his head. All she saw was the black hat wiggle between his shoulder blades. "Nome,"
he said.
There was a pistol shot from the woods, followed closely by another. Then silence. The old lady's
head jerked around. She could hear the wind move through the tree tops like a long satisfied
insuck of breath. "Bailey Boy!" she called.
"I was a gospel singer for a while," The Misfit said. "I been most everything. Been in the arm
service both land and sea, at home and abroad, been twict married, been an undertaker, been with
the railroads, plowed Mother Earth, been in a tornado, seen a man burnt alive oncet," and he
looked up at the children's mother and the little girl who were sitting close together, their faces
white and their eyes glassy; "I even seen a woman flogged," he said.
"Pray, pray," the grandmother began, "pray, pray . . ."
I never was a bad boy that I remember of," The Misfit said in an almost dreamy voice, "but
somewheres along the line I done something wrong and got sent to the penitentiary. I was buried
alive," and he looked up and held her attention to him by a steady stare.
"That's when you should have started to pray," she said. "What did you do to get sent to the
penitentiary that first time?"
"Turn to the right, it was a wall," The Misfit said, looking up again at the cloudless sky. "Turn to
the left, it was a wall. Look up it was a ceiling, look down it was a floor. I forget what I done,
lady. I set there and set there, trying to remember what it was I done and I ain't recalled it to this
day. Oncet in a while, I would think it was coming to me, but it never come."
"Maybe they put you in by mistake," the old lady said vaguely.
"Nome," he said. "It wasn't no mistake. They had the papers on me."
"You must have stolen something," she said.
The Misfit sneered slightly. "Nobody had nothing I wanted," he said. "It was a head-doctor at the
penitentiary said what I had done was kill my daddy but I known that for a lie. My daddy died in
nineteen ought nineteen of the epidemic flu and I never had a thing to do with it. He was buried in
the Mount Hopewell Baptist churchyard and you can go there and see for yourself."
"If you would pray," the old lady said, "Jesus would help you."
"That's right," The Misfit said.
"Well then, why don't you pray?" she asked trembling with delight suddenly.
"I don't want no hep," he said. "I'm doing all right by myself."
Bobby Lee and Hiram came ambling back from the woods. Bobby Lee was dragging a yellow
shirt with bright blue parrots in it.
"Thow me that shirt, Bobby Lee," The Misfit said. The shirt came flying at him and landed on his
shoulder and he put it on. The grandmother couldn't name what the shirt reminded her of. "No,
lady," The Misfit said while he was buttoning it up, "I found out the crime don't matter. You can
do one thing or you can do another, kill a man or take a tire off his car, because sooner or later
you're going to forget what it was you done and just be punished for it."
The children's mother had begun to make heaving noises as if she couldn't get her breath. "Lady,"
he asked, "would you and that little girl like to step off yonder with Bobby Lee and Hiram and
join your husband?"
"Yes, thank you," the mother said faintly. Her left arm dangled helplessly and she was holding
the baby, who had gone to sleep, in the other. "Hep that lady up, Hiram," The Misfit said as she
struggled to climb out of the ditch, "and Bobby Lee, you hold onto that little girl's hand."
"I don't want to hold hands with him," June Star said. "He reminds me of a pig."
The fat boy blushed and laughed and caught her by the arm and pulled her off into the woods
after Hiram and her mother.
Alone with The Misfit, the grandmother found that she had lost her voice. There was not a cloud
in the sky nor any sun. There was nothing around her but woods. She wanted to tell him that he
must pray. She opened and closed her mouth several times before anything came out. Finally she
found herself saying, "Jesus. Jesus," meaning, Jesus will help you, but the way she was saying it,
it sounded as if she might be cursing.
"Yes'm, The Misfit said as if he agreed. "Jesus shown everything off balance. It was the same
case with Him as with me except He hadn't committed any crime and they could prove I had
committed one because they had the papers on me. Of course," he said, "they never shown me my
papers. That's why I sign myself now. I said long ago, you get you a signature and sign
everything you do and keep a copy of it. Then you'll know what you done and you can hold up
the crime to the punishment and see do they match and in the end you'll have something to prove
you ain't been treated right. I call myself The Misfit," he said, "because I can't make what all I
done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment."
There was a piercing scream from the woods, followed closely by a pistol report. "Does it seem
right to you, lady, that one is punished a heap and another ain't punished at all?"
"Jesus!" the old lady cried. "You've got good blood! I know you wouldn't shoot a lady! I know
you come from nice people! Pray! Jesus, you ought not to shoot a lady. I'll give you all the money
I've got!"
"Lady," The Misfit said, looking beyond her far into the woods, "there never was a body that give
the undertaker a tip."
There were two more pistol reports and the grandmother raised her head like a parched old turkey
hen crying for water and called, "Bailey Boy, Bailey Boy!" as if her heart would break.
"Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead," The Misfit continued, "and He shouldn't have
done it. He shown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it's nothing for you to do
but thow away everything and follow Him, and if He didn't, then it's nothing for you to do but
enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can by killing somebody or burning down his
house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness," he said and his voice
had become almost a snarl.
"Maybe He didn't raise the dead," the old lady mumbled, not knowing what she was saying and
feeling so dizzy that she sank down in the ditch with her legs twisted under her.
"I wasn't there so I can't say He didn't," The Misfit said. "I wisht I had of been there," he said,
hitting the ground with his fist. "It ain't right I wasn't there because if I had of been there I would
of known. Listen lady," he said in a high voice, "if I had of been there I would of known and I
wouldn't be like I am now." His voice seemed about to crack and the grandmother's head cleared
for an instant. She saw the man's face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she
murmured, "Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children !" She reached out and
touched him on the shoulder. The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her
three times through the chest. Then he put his gun down on the ground and took off his glasses
and began to clean them.
Hiram and Bobby Lee returned from the woods and stood over the ditch, looking down at the
grandmother who half sat and half lay in a puddle of blood with her legs crossed under her like a
child's and her face smiling up at the cloudless sky.
Without his glasses, The Misfit's eyes were red-rimmed and pale and defenseless-looking. "Take
her off and thow her where you thown the others," he said, picking up the cat that was rubbing
itself against his leg.
"She was a talker, wasn't she?" Bobby Lee said, sliding down the ditch with a yodel.
"She would of been a good woman," The Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her
every minute of her life."
"Some fun!" Bobby Lee said.
"Shut up, Bobby Lee," The Misfit said. "It's no real pleasure in life."
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
by James Thurber
"WE'RE going through!" The Commander's voice was like thin ice breaking. He
wore his full-dress uniform, with the heavily braided white cap pulled down
rakishly over one cold gray eye. "We can't make it, sir. It's spoiling for a
hurricane, if you ask me." "I'm not asking you, Lieutenant Berg," said the
Commander. "Throw on the power lights! Rev her up to 8500! We're going
through!" The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketapocketa-pocketa. The Commander stared at the ice forming on the pilot window.
He walked over and twisted a row of complicated dials. "Switch on No. 8
auxiliary!" he shouted. "Switch on No. 8 auxiliary!" repeated Lieutenant Berg.
"Full strength in No. 3 turret!" shouted the Commander. "Full strength in No. 3
turret!" The crew, bending to their various tasks in the huge, hurtling eightengined Navy hydroplane, looked at each other and grinned. "The Old Man'll get
us through," they said to one another. "The Old Man ain't afraid of hell!" . . .
"Not so fast! You're driving too fast!" said Mrs. Mitty. "What are you driving so
fast for?"
"Hmm?" said Walter Mitty. He looked at his wife, in the seat beside him, with
shocked astonishment. She seemed grossly unfamiliar, like a strange woman who
had yelled at him in a crowd. "You were up to fifty-five," she said. "You know I
don't like to go more than forty. You were up to fifty-five." Walter Mitty drove
on toward Waterbury in silence, the roaring of the SN202 through the worst
storm in twenty years of Navy flying fading in the remote, intimate airways of
his mind. "You're tensed up again," said Mrs. Mitty. "It's one of your days. I wish
you'd let Dr. Renshaw look you over."
Walter Mitty stopped the car in front of the building where his wife went to have
her hair done. "Remember to get those overshoes while I'm having my hair
done," she said. "I don't need overshoes," said Mitty. She put her mirror back into
her bag. "We've been all through that," she said, getting out of the car. "You're
not a young man any longer." He raced the engine a little. "Why don't you wear
your gloves? Have you lost your gloves?" Walter Mitty reached in a pocket and
brought out the gloves. He put them on, but after she had turned and gone into
the building and he had driven on to a red light, he took them off again. "Pick it
up, brother!" snapped a cop as the light changed, and Mitty hastily pulled on his
gloves and lurched ahead. He drove around the streets aimlessly for a time, and
then he drove past the hospital on his way to the parking lot.
. . . "It's the millionaire banker, Wellington McMillan," said the pretty nurse.
"Yes?" said Walter Mitty, removing his gloves slowly. "Who has the case?" "Dr.
Renshaw and Dr. Benbow, but there are two specialists here, Dr. Remington
from New York and Dr. Pritchard-Mitford from London. He flew over." A door
opened down a long, cool corridor and Dr. Renshaw came out. He looked
distraught and haggard. "Hello, Mitty," he said. `'We're having the devil's own
time with McMillan, the millionaire banker and close personal friend of
Roosevelt. Obstreosis of the ductal tract. Tertiary. Wish you'd take a look at
him." "Glad to," said Mitty.
In the operating room there were whispered introductions: "Dr. Remington, Dr.
Mitty. Dr. Pritchard-Mitford, Dr. Mitty." "I've read your book on
streptothricosis," said Pritchard-Mitford, shaking hands. "A brilliant
performance, sir." "Thank you," said Walter Mitty. "Didn't know you were in the
States, Mitty," grumbled Remington. "Coals to Newcastle, bringing Mitford and
me up here for a tertiary." "You are very kind," said Mitty. A huge, complicated
machine, connected to the operating table, with many tubes and wires, began at
this moment to go pocketa-pocketa-pocketa. "The new anesthetizer is giving
away!" shouted an intern. "There is no one in the East who knows how to fix it!"
"Quiet, man!" said Mitty, in a low, cool voice. He sprang to the machine, which
was now going pocketa-pocketa-queep-pocketa-queep . He began fingering
delicately a row of glistening dials. "Give me a fountain pen!" he snapped.
Someone handed him a fountain pen. He pulled a faulty piston out of the
machine and inserted the pen in its place. "That will hold for ten minutes," he
said. "Get on with the operation. A nurse hurried over and whispered to
Renshaw, and Mitty saw the man turn pale. "Coreopsis has set in," said Renshaw
nervously. "If you would take over, Mitty?" Mitty looked at him and at the
craven figure of Benbow, who drank, and at the grave, uncertain faces of the two
great specialists. "If you wish," he said. They slipped a white gown on him, he
adjusted a mask and drew on thin gloves; nurses handed him shining . . .
"Back it up, Mac!! Look out for that Buick!" Walter Mitty jammed on the brakes.
"Wrong lane, Mac," said the parking-lot attendant, looking at Mitty closely.
"Gee. Yeh," muttered Mitty. He began cautiously to back out of the lane marked
"Exit Only." "Leave her sit there," said the attendant. "I'll put her away." Mitty
got out of the car. "Hey, better leave the key." "Oh," said Mitty, handing the man
the ignition key. The attendant vaulted into the car, backed it up with insolent
skill, and put it where it belonged.
They're so damn cocky, thought Walter Mitty, walking along Main Street; they
think they know everything. Once he had tried to take his chains off, outside New
Milford, and he had got them wound around the axles. A man had had to come
out in a wrecking car and unwind them, a young, grinning garageman. Since then
Mrs. Mitty always made him drive to a garage to have the chains taken off. The
next time, he thought, I'll wear my right arm in a sling; they won't grin at me
then. I'll have my right arm in a sling and they'll see I couldn't possibly take the
chains off myself. He kicked at the slush on the sidewalk. "Overshoes," he said to
himself, and he began looking for a shoe store.
When he came out into the street again, with the overshoes in a box under his
arm, Walter Mitty began to wonder what the other thing was his wife had told
him to get. She had told him, twice before they set out from their house for
Waterbury. In a way he hated these weekly trips to town--he was always getting
something wrong. Kleenex, he thought, Squibb's, razor blades? No. Tooth paste,
toothbrush, bicarbonate, Carborundum, initiative and referendum? He gave it up.
But she would remember it. "Where's the what's-its- name?" she would ask.
"Don't tell me you forgot the what's-its-name." A newsboy went by shouting
something about the Waterbury trial.
. . . "Perhaps this will refresh your memory." The District Attorney suddenly
thrust a heavy automatic at the quiet figure on the witness stand. "Have you ever
seen this before?'' Walter Mitty took the gun and examined it expertly. "This is
my Webley-Vickers 50.80," ho said calmly. An excited buzz ran around the
courtroom. The Judge rapped for order. "You are a crack shot with any sort of
firearms, I believe?" said the District Attorney, insinuatingly. "Objection!"
shouted Mitty's attorney. "We have shown that the defendant could not have fired
the shot. We have shown that he wore his right arm in a sling on the night of the
fourteenth of July." Walter Mitty raised his hand briefly and the bickering
attorneys were stilled. "With any known make of gun," he said evenly, "I could
have killed Gregory Fitzhurst at three hundred feet with my left hand."
Pandemonium broke loose in the courtroom. A woman's scream rose above the
bedlam and suddenly a lovely, dark-haired girl was in Walter Mitty's arms. The
District Attorney struck at her savagely. Without rising from his chair, Mitty let
the man have it on the point of the chin. "You miserable cur!" . . .
"Puppy biscuit," said Walter Mitty. He stopped walking and the buildings of
Waterbury rose up out of the misty courtroom and surrounded him again. A
woman who was passing laughed. "He said 'Puppy biscuit,'" she said to her
companion. "That man said 'Puppy biscuit' to himself." Walter Mitty hurried on.
He went into an A. P., not the first one he came to but a smaller one farther up
the street. "I want some biscuit for small, young dogs," he said to the clerk. "Any
special brand, sir?" The greatest pistol shot in the world thought a moment. "It
says 'Puppies Bark for It' on the box," said Walter Mitty.
His wife would be through at the hairdresser's in fifteen minutes' Mitty saw in
looking at his watch, unless they had trouble drying it; sometimes they had
trouble drying it. She didn't like to get to the hotel first, she would want him to be
there waiting for her as usual. He found a big leather chair in the lobby, facing a
window, and he put the overshoes and the puppy biscuit on the floor beside it. He
picked up an old copy of Liberty and sank down into the chair. "Can Germany
Conquer the World Through the Air?" Walter Mitty looked at the pictures of
bombing planes and of ruined streets.
. . . "The cannonading has got the wind up in young Raleigh, sir," said the
sergeant. Captain Mitty looked up at him through tousled hair. "Get him to bed,"
he said wearily, "with the others. I'll fly alone." "But you can't, sir," said the
sergeant anxiously. "It takes two men to handle that bomber and the Archies are
pounding hell out of the air. Von Richtman's circus is between here and Saulier."
"Somebody's got to get that ammunition dump," said Mitty. "I'm going over. Spot
of brandy?" He poured a drink for the sergeant and one for himself. War
thundered and whined around the dugout and battered at the door. There was a
rending of wood and splinters flew through the room. "A bit of a near thing," said
Captain Mitty carelessly. 'The box barrage is closing in," said the sergeant. "We
only live once, Sergeant," said Mitty, with his faint, fleeting smile. "Or do we?"
He poured another brandy and tossed it off. "I never see a man could hold his
brandy like you, sir," said the sergeant. "Begging your pardon, sir." Captain
Mitty stood up and strapped on his huge Webley-Vickers automatic. "It's forty
kilometers through hell, sir," said the sergeant. Mitty finished one last brandy.
"After all," he said softly, "what isn't?" The pounding of the cannon increased;
there was the rat-tat-tatting of machine guns, and from somewhere came the
menacing pocketa-pocketa-pocketa of the new flame-throwers. Walter Mitty
walked to the door of the dugout humming "Aupres de Ma Blonde." He turned
and waved to the sergeant. "Cheerio!" he said. . . .
Something struck his shoulder. "I've been looking all over this hotel for you,"
said Mrs. Mitty. "Why do you have to hide in this old chair? How did you expect
me to find you?" "Things close in," said Walter Mitty vaguely. "What?" Mrs.
Mitty said. "Did you get the what's-its-name? The puppy biscuit? What's in that
box?" "Overshoes," said Mitty. "Couldn't you have put them on in the store?" 'I
was thinking," said Walter Mitty. "Does it ever occur to you that I am sometimes
thinking?" She looked at him. "I'm going to take your temperature when I get you
home," she said.
They went out through the revolving doors that made a faintly derisive whistling
sound when you pushed them. It was two blocks to the parking lot. At the
drugstore on the corner she said, "Wait here for me. I forgot something. I won't
be a minute." She was more than a minute. Walter Mitty lighted a cigarette. It
began to rain, rain with sleet in it. He stood up against the wall of the drugstore,
smoking. . . . He put his shoulders back and his heels together. "To hell with the
handkerchief," said Waker Mitty scornfully. He took one last drag on his
cigarette and snapped it away. Then, with that faint, fleeting smile playing about
his lips, he faced the firing squad; erect and motionless, proud and disdainful,
Walter Mitty the Undefeated, inscrutable to the last.
How to Tell a True War Story
Tim O’Brien
This is true.
I had a buddy in Vietnam. His name was Bob Kiley, but everybody called him Rat.
A friend of his gets killed, so about a week later Rat sits down and writes a letter to the guy's
sister. Rat tells her what a great brother she had, how together the guy was, a number one pal and
comrade. A real soldier's soldier, Rat says. Then he tells a few stories to make the point, how her
brother would always volunteer for stuff nobody else would volunteer for in a million years,
dangerous stuff, like doing recon or going out on these really badass night patrols. Stainless steel
balls, Rat tells her. The guy was a little crazy, for sure, but crazy in a good way, a real daredevil,
because he liked the challenge of it, he liked testing himself, just man against gook. A great, great
guy, Rat says.
Anyway, it's a terrific letter, very personal and touching. Rat almost bawls writing it. He gets all
teary telling about the good times they had together, how her brother made the war seem almost
fun, always raising hell and lighting up villes and bringing smoke to bear every which way. A
great sense of humor, too. Like the time at this river when he went fishing with a whole damn
crate of hand grenades. Probably the funniest thing in world history, Rat says, all that gore, about
twenty zillion dead gook fish. Her brother, he had the right attitude. He knew how to have a good
time. On Halloween, this real hot spooky night, the dude paints up his body all different colors
and puts on this weird mask and hikes over to a ville and goes trick-or-treating almost stark
naked, just boots and balls and an M-16. A tremendous human being, Rat says. Pretty nutso
sometimes, but you could trust him with your life.
And then the letter gets very sad and serious. Rat pours his heart out. He says he loved the guy.
He says the guy was his best friend in the world. They were like soul mates, he says, like twins or
something, they had a whole lot in common. He tells the guy's sister he'll look her up when the
war's over.
So what happens?
Rat mails the letter. He waits two months. The dumb cooze never writes back.
A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of
proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story
seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that
some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the
victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first
rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising
allegiance to obscenity and evil. Listen to Rat Kiley. Cooze, he says. He does not say bitch. He
certainly does not say woman, or girl. He says cooze. Then he spits and stares. He's nineteen
years old—it's too much for him—so he looks at you with those big sad gentle killer eyes and
says cooze, because his friend is dead, and because it's so incredibly sad and true: she never wrote
back.
You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care
for the truth; if you don't care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come
home talking dirty.
Listen to Rat: "Jesus Christ, man, I write this beautiful fuckin' letter, I slave over it, and what
happens? The dumb cooze never writes back."
The dead guy's name was Curt Lemon. What happened was, we crossed a muddy river and
marched west into the mountains, and on the third day we took a break along a trail junction in
deep jungle. Right away, Lemon and Rat Kiley started goofing. They didn't understand about the
spookiness. They were kids; they just didn't know. A nature hike, they thought, not even a war, so
they went off into the shade of some giant trees—quadruple canopy, no sunlight at all—and they
were giggling and calling each other yellow mother and playing a silly game they'd invented. The
game involved smoke grenades, which were harmless unless you did stupid things, and what they
did was pull out the pin and stand a few feet apart and play catch under the shade of those huge
trees. Whoever chickened out was a yellow mother. And if nobody chickened out, the grenade
would make a light popping sound and they'd be covered with smoke and they'd laugh and dance
around and then do it again.
It's all exactly true.
It happened, to me, nearly twenty years ago, and I still remember that trail junction and those
giant trees and a soft dripping sound somewhere beyond the trees. I remember the smell of moss.
Up in the canopy there were tiny white blossoms, but no sunlight at all, and I remember the
shadows spreading out under the trees where Curt Lemon and Rat Kiley were playing catch with
smoke grenades. Mitchell Sanders sat flipping his yo-yo. Norman Bowker and Kiowa and Dave
Jensen were dozing, or half dozing, and all around us were those ragged green mountains.
Except for the laughter things were quiet.
At one point, I remember, Mitchell Sanders turned and looked at me, not quite nodding, as if to
warn me about something, as if he already knew, then after a while he rolled up his yo-yo and
moved away.
It's hard to tell you what happened next.
They were just goofing. There was a noise, I suppose, which must've been the detonator, so I
glanced behind me and watched Lemon step from the shade into bright sunlight. His face was
suddenly brown and shining. A handsome kid, really. Sharp gray eyes, lean and narrow-waisted,
and when he died it was almost beautiful, the way the sunlight came around him and lifted him up
and sucked him high into a tree full of moss and vines and white blossoms.
In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what
seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way.
The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and
float outside yourself. When a guy dies, like Curt Lemon, you look away and then look back for a
moment and then look away again. The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot. And then
afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the
story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.
In many cases a true war story cannot be believed. If you believe it, be skeptical. It's a question of
credibility. Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn't, because the normal stuff is
necessary to make you believe the truly incredible craziness.
In other cases you can't even tell a true war story. Sometimes it's just beyond telling.
I heard this one, for example, from Mitchell Sanders. It was near dusk and we were sitting at my
foxhole along a wide muddy river north of Quang Ngai. I remember how peaceful the twilight
was. A deep pinkish red spilled out on the river, which moved without sound, and in the morning
we would cross the river and march west into the mountains. The occasion was right for a good
story.
"God's truth," Mitchell Sanders said. "A six-man patrol goes up into the mountains on a basic
listening-post operation. The idea's to spend a week up there, just lie low and listen for enemy
movement. They've got a radio along, so if they hear anything suspicious—anything—they're
supposed to call in artillery or gunships, whatever it takes. Otherwise they keep strict field
discipline. Absolute silence. They just listen."
Sanders glanced at me to make sure I had the scenario. He was playing with his yo-yo, dancing it
with short, tight little strokes of the wrist.
His face was blank in the dusk.
"We're talking regulation, by-the-book LP. These six guys, they don't say boo for a solid week.
They don't got tongues. All ears."
"Right," I said.
"Understand me?"
"Invisible."
Sanders nodded.
"Affirm," he said. "Invisible. So what happens is, these guys get themselves deep in the bush, all
camouflaged up, and they lie down and wait and that's all they do, nothing else, they lie there for
seven straight days and just listen. And man, I'll tell you—it's spooky. This is mountains. You
don't know spooky till you been there. Jungle, sort of, except it's way up in the clouds and there's
always this fog—like rain, except it's not raining—everything's all wet and swirly and tangled up
and you can't see jack, you can't find your own pecker to piss with. Like you don't even have a
body. Serious spooky. You just go with the vapors—the fog sort of takes you in ... And the
sounds, man. The sounds carry forever. You hear stuff nobody should overhear."
Sanders was quiet for a second, just working the yo-yo, then he smiled at me.
"So after a couple days the guys start hearing this real soft, kind of wacked-out music. Weird
echoes and stuff. Like a radio or something, but it's not a radio, it's this strange gook music that
comes right out of the rocks. Faraway, sort of, but right up close, too. They try to ignore it. But
it's a listening post, right? So they listen. And every night they keep hearing that crazyass gook
concert. All kinds of chimes and xylophones. I mean, this is wilderness—no way, it can't be
real—but there it is, like the mountains are tuned in to Radio fucking Hanoi. Naturally they get
nervous. One guy sticks Juicy Fruit in his ears. Another guy almost flips. Thing is, though, they
can't report music. They can't get on the horn and call back to base and say, 'Hey, listen, we need
some firepower, we got to blow away this weirdo gook rock band.' They can't do that. It wouldn't
go down. So they lie there in the fog and keep their mouths shut. And what makes it extra bad,
see, is the poor dudes can't horse around like normal. Can't joke it away. Can't even talk to each
other except maybe in whispers, all hush-hush, and that just revs up the willies. All they do is
listen."
Again there was some silence as Mitchell Sanders looked out on the river. The dark was coming
on hard now, and off to the west I could see the mountains rising in silhouette, all the mysteries
and unknowns.
"This next part," Sanders said quietly, "you won't believe."
"Probably not," I said.
"You won't. And you know why?" He gave me a long, tired smile. "Because it happened.
Because every word is absolutely dead-on true."
Sanders made a sound in his throat, like a sigh, as if to say he didn't care if I believed him or not.
But he did care. He wanted me to feel the truth, to believe by the raw force of feeling. He seemed
sad, in a way.
"These six guys," he said, "they're pretty fried out by now, and one night they start hearing
voices. Like at a cocktail party. That's what it sounds like, this big swank gook cocktail party
somewhere out there in the fog. Music and chitchat and stuff. It's crazy, I know, but they hear the
champagne corks. They hear the actual martini glasses. Real hoity-toity, all very civilized, except
this isn't civilization. This is Nam.
"Anyway, the guys try to be cool. They just lie there and groove, but after a while they start
hearing—you won't believe this—they hear chamber music. They hear violins and cellos. They
hear this terrific mama-san soprano. Then after a while they hear gook opera and a glee club and
the Haiphong Boys Choir and a barbershop quartet and all kinds of weird chanting and BuddhaBuddha stuff. And the whole time, in the background, there's still that cocktail party going on. All
these different voices. Not human voices, though. Because it's the mountains. Follow me? The
rock—it's talking. And the fog, too, and the grass and the goddamn mongooses. Everything talks.
The trees talk politics, the monkeys talk religion. The whole country. Vietnam. The place talks. It
talks. Understand? Nam—it truly talks.
"The guys can't cope. They lose it. They get on the radio and report enemy movement—a whole
army, they say—and they order up the firepower. They get arty and gunships. They call in air
strikes. And I'll tell you, they fuckin' crash that cocktail party. All night long, they just smoke
those mountains. They make jungle juice. They blow away trees and glee clubs and whatever else
there is to blow away. Scorch time. They walk napalm up and down the ridges. They bring in the
Cobras and F-4s, they use Willie Peter and HE and incendiaries. It's all fire. They make those
mountains burn.
"Around dawn things finally get quiet. Like you never even heard quiet before. One of those real
thick, real misty days—just clouds and fog, they're off in this special zone—and the mountains
are absolutely dead-flat silent. Like Brigadoon—pure vapor, you know? Everything's all sucked
up inside the fog. Not a single sound, except they still hear it.
"So they pack up and start humping. They head down the mountain, back to base camp, and when
they get there they don't say diddly. They don't talk. Not a word, like they're deaf and dumb. Later
on this fat bird colonel comes up and asks what the hell happened out there. What'd they hear?
Why all the ordnance? The man's ragged out, he gets down tight on their case. I mean, they spent
six trillion dollars on firepower, and this fatass colonel wants answers, he wants to know what the
fuckin' story is.
"But the guys don't say zip. They just look at him for a while, sort of funny like, sort of amazed,
and the whole war is right there in that stare. It says everything you can't ever say. It says, man,
you got wax in your ears. It says, poor bastard, you'll never know—wrong frequency—you don't
even want to hear this. Then they salute the fucker and walk away, because certain stories you
don't ever tell."
You can tell a true war story by the way it never seems to end. Not then, not ever. Not when
Mitchell Sanders stood up and moved off into the dark.
It all happened.
Even now, at this instant, I remember that yo-yo. In a way, I suppose, you had to be there, you
had to hear it, but I could tell how desperately Sanders wanted me to believe him, his frustration
at not quite getting the details right, not quite pinning down the final and definitive truth.
And I remember sitting at my foxhole that night, watching the shadows of Quang Ngai, thinking
about the coming day and how we would cross the river and march west into the mountains, all
the ways I might die, all the things I did not understand.
Late in the night Mitchell Sanders touched my shoulder. "Just came to me," he whispered. "The
moral, I mean. Nobody listens. Nobody hears nothin'. Like that fatass colonel. The politicians, all
the civilian types. Your girlfriend. My girlfriend. Everybody's sweet little virgin girlfriend. What
they need is to go out on LP. The vapors, man. Trees and rocks—you got to listen to your
enemy."
And then again, in the morning, Sanders came up to me. The platoon was preparing to move out,
checking weapons, going through all the little rituals that preceded a day's march. Already the
lead squad had crossed the river and was filing off toward the west.
"I got a confession to make," Sanders said. "Last night, man, I had to make up a few things."
"I know that."
"The glee club. There wasn't any glee club."
"Right."
"No opera."
"Forget it, I understand."
"Yeah, but listen, it's still true. Those six guys, they heard wicked sound out there. They heard
sound you just plain won't believe."
Sanders pulled on his rucksack, closed his eyes for a moment, then almost smiled at me. I knew
what was coming.
"All right," I said, "what's the moral?"
"Forget it."
"No, go ahead."
For a long while he was quiet, looking away, and the silence kept stretching out until it was
almost embarrassing. Then he shrugged and gave me a stare that lasted all day.
"Hear that quiet, man?" he said. "That quiet—just listen. There's your moral."
In a true war story, if there's a moral at all, it's like the thread that makes the cloth. You can't tease
it out. You can't extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning. And in the end,
really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe "Oh."
True war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis.
For example: War is hell. As a moral declaration the old truism seems perfectly true, and yet
because it abstracts, because it generalizes, I can't believe it with my stomach. Nothing turns
inside.
It comes down to gut instinct. A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe.
This one does it for me. I've told it before—many times, many versions—but here's what actually
happened.
We crossed that river and marched west into the mountains. On the third day, Curt Lemon
stepped on a booby-trapped 105 round. He was playing catch with Rat Kiley, laughing, and then
he was dead. The trees were thick; it took nearly an hour to cut an LZ for the dustoff.
Later, higher in the mountains, we came across a baby VC water buffalo. What it was doing there
I don't know—no farms or paddies—but we chased it down and got a rope around it and led it
along to a deserted village where we set up for the night. After supper Rat Kiley went over and
stroked its nose.
He opened up a can of C rations, pork and beans, but the baby buffalo wasn't interested.
Rat shrugged.
He stepped back and shot it through the right front knee. The animal did not make a sound. It
went down hard, then got up again, and Rat took careful aim and shot off an ear. He shot it in the
hindquarters and in the little hump at its back. He shot it twice in the flanks. It wasn't to kill; it
was to hurt. He put the rifle muzzle up against the mouth and shot the mouth away. Nobody said
much. The whole platoon stood there watching, feeling all kinds of things, but there wasn't a great
deal of pity for the baby water buffalo. Curt Lemon was dead. Rat Kiley had lost his best friend in
the world. Later in the week he would write a long personal letter to the guy's sister, who would
not write back, but for now it was a question of pain. He shot off the tail. He shot away chunks of
meat below the ribs. All around us there was the smell of smoke and filth and deep greenery, and
the evening was humid and very hot. Rat went to automatic. He shot randomly, almost casually,
quick little spurts in the belly and butt. Then he reloaded, squatted down, and shot it in the left
front knee. Again the animal fell hard and tried to get up, but this time it couldn't quite make it. It
wobbled and went down sideways. Rat shot it in the nose. He bent forward and whispered
something, as if talking to a pet, then he shot it in the throat. All the while the baby buffalo was
silent, or almost silent, just a light bubbling sound where the nose had been. It lay very still.
Nothing moved except the eyes, which were enormous, the pupils shiny black and dumb.
Rat Kiley was crying. He tried to say something, but then cradled his rifle and went off by
himself.
The rest of us stood in a ragged circle around the baby buffalo. For a time no one spoke. We had
witnessed something essential, something brand-new and profound, a piece of the world so
startling there was not yet a name for it.
Somebody kicked the baby buffalo.
It was still alive, though just barely, just in the eyes.
"Amazing," Dave Jensen said. "My whole life, I never seen anything like it."
"Never?"
"Not hardly. Not once."
Kiowa and Mitchell Sanders picked up the baby buffalo. They hauled it across the open square,
hoisted it up, and dumped it in the village well.
Afterward, we sat waiting for Rat to get himself together.
"Amazing," Dave Jensen kept saying. "A new wrinkle. I never seen it before."
Mitchell Sanders took out his yo-yo. "Well, that's Nam," he said. "Garden of Evil. Over here,
man, every sin's real fresh and original."
How do you generalize?
War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and
courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war
is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.
The truths are contradictory. It can be argued, for instance, that war is grotesque. But in truth war
is also beauty. For all its horror, you can't help but gape at the awful majesty of combat. You stare
out at tracer rounds unwinding through the dark like brilliant red ribbons. You crouch in ambush
as a cool, impassive moon rises over the nighttime paddies. You admire the fluid symmetries of
troops on the move, the harmonies of sound and shape and proportion, the great sheets of metalfire streaming down from a gunship, the illumination rounds, the white phosphorus, the purply
orange glow of napalm, the rocket's red glare. It's not pretty, exactly. It's astonishing. It fills the
eye. It commands you. You hate it, yes, but your eyes do not. Like a killer forest fire, like cancer
under a microscope, any battle or bombing raid or artillery barrage has the aesthetic purity of
absolute moral indifference—a powerful, implacable beauty—and a true war story will tell the
truth about this, though the truth is ugly.
To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost
nothing is true. At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will
tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to
life. After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. The
grass, the soil—everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the
aliveness makes you tremble. You feel an intense, out-of-the-skin awareness of your living self—
your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become by the force of wanting it. In
the midst of evil you want to be a good man. You want decency. You want justice and courtesy
and human concord, things you never knew you wanted. There is a kind of largeness to it, a kind
of godliness. Though it's odd, you're never more alive than when you're almost dead. You
recognize what's valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what's best in yourself and in
the world, all that might be lost. At the hour of dusk you sit at your foxhole and look out on a
wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond, and although in the morning you
must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible things and maybe die, even so, you
find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the
sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be,
but now is not.
Mitchell Sanders was right. For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel—the spiritual
texture—of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The
old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order
blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery.
The vapors suck you in. You can't tell where you are, or why you're there, and the only certainty
is overwhelming ambiguity.
In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe
to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true.
Often in a true war story there is not even a point, or else the point doesn't hit you until twenty
years later, in your sleep, and you wake up and shake your wife and start telling the story to her,
except when you get to the end you've forgotten the point again. And then for a long time you lie
there watching the story happen in your head. You listen to your wife's breathing. The war's over.
You close your eyes. You smile and think, Christ, what's the point?
This one wakes me up.
In the mountains that day, I watched Lemon turn sideways. He laughed and said something to Rat
Kiley. Then he took a peculiar half step, moving from shade into bright sunlight, and the boobytrapped 105 round blew him into a tree. The parts were just hanging there, so Dave Jensen and I
were ordered to shinny up and peel him off. I remember the white bone of an arm. I remember
pieces of skin and something wet and yellow that must've been the intestines. The gore was
horrible, and stays with me. But what wakes me up twenty years later is Dave Jensen singing
"Lemon Tree" as we threw down the parts.
You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let's say, and
afterward you ask, "Is it true?" and if the answer matters, you've got your answer.
For example, we've all heard this one. Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy
jumps on it and takes the blast and saves his three buddies.
Is it true?
The answer matters.
You'd feel cheated if it never happened. Without the grounding reality, it's just a trite bit of
puffery, pure Hollywood, untrue in the way all such stories are untrue. Yet even if it did
happen—and maybe it did, anything's possible—even then you know it can't be true, because a
true war story does not depend upon that kind of truth. Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing
may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. For
example: Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast,
but it's a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway. Before they die, though, one of the dead guys
says, "The fuck you do that for?" and the jumper says, "Story of my life, man," and the other guy
starts to smile but he's dead. That's a true story that never happened.
Twenty years later, I can still see the sunlight on Lemon's face. I can see him turning, looking
back at Rat Kiley, then he laughed and took that curious half step from shade into sunlight, his
face suddenly brown and shining, and when his foot touched down, in that instant, he must've
thought it was the sunlight that was killing him. It was not the sunlight. It was a rigged 105 round.
But if I could ever get the story right, how the sun seemed to gather around him and pick him up
and lift him high into a tree, if I could somehow re-create the fatal whiteness of that light, the
quick glare, the obvious cause and effect, then you would believe the last thing Curt Lemon
believed, which for him must've been the final truth.
Now and then, when I tell this story, someone will come up to me afterward and say she liked it.
It's always a woman. Usually it's an older woman of kindly temperament and humane politics.
She'll explain that as a rule she hates war stories; she can't understand why people want to wallow
in all the blood and gore. But this one she liked. The poor baby buffalo, it made her sad.
Sometimes, even, there are little tears. What I should do, she'll say, is put it all behind me. Find
new stories to tell.
I won't say it but I'll think it.
I'll picture Rat Kiley's face, his grief, and I'll think, You dumb cooze.
Because she wasn't listening.
It wasn't a war story. It was a love story.
But you can't say that. All you can do is tell it one more time, patiently, adding and subtracting,
making up a few things to get at the real truth. No Mitchell Sanders, you tell her. No Lemon, no
Rat Kiley. No trail junction. No baby buffalo. No vines or moss or white blossoms. Beginning to
end, you tell her, it's all made up. Every goddamn detail—the mountains and the river and
especially that poor dumb baby buffalo. None of it happened. None of it. And even if it did
happen, it didn't happen in the mountains, it happened in this little village on the Batangan
Peninsula, and it was raining like crazy, and one night a guy named Stink Harris woke up
screaming with a leech on his tongue. You can tell a true war story if you just keep on telling it.
And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the
special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march
into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It's about love and memory. It's about
sorrow. It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.