A MAN FROM THE SPANISH WAR
A conversation in Egypt, which is an undefined region of Southern Illinois
Time, 1898
Miss Lucy Mills waited with three early arrivals in her sitting-room. The rest of the people would not gather for half an hour. Her wide house, venerable for the region in which it stood, hugged by vines and mossy roofed, was in perfect order; and sheaves of flowers exhaled fragrance around an object placed in the centre of her parlor. Neighbors no longer trod about on tiptoe, for everything was ready, and the minister might arrive at any moment.
Miss Lucy sat a dignified spinster, whose sympathies ramified through the entire human race. She was so homely that strangers turned to look at her as at a beauty. Mr. Sammy Blade was in his thirties, but she considered him a youth, having helped his mother to nurse him through measles and whooping-cough. Mr. Sammy had a protruding pointed beard and rolled his silly bald head on his shoulders when he talked. He had studied medicine but, failing of practice, was turning his attention to the peddling of fruit-trees. Coming home and hearing the news, he hastened to appear at Miss Lucy’s house.
Mr. and Mrs. Plankson had returned to the neighborhood to visit. The husband was a frisky gray little man, and his wife was a jimp woman in stiff black silk with large lips and shifty eyes.
All three of Miss Lucy’s callers coughed and made the unconscious grimaces of plain people who have not learned the art of expression. They sat with their hands piled on their stomachs. Yet while they longed to get at facts which only Miss Lucy knew, they approached these facts roundabout, bringing newsy bits of their own, and avoiding by common instinct the subject of war with Spain.
“Have you heard that Emeline Smith’s oldest girl has experienced religion?” inquired Mr. Sammy solemnly, breaking the silence of the down-sitting after greetings.
“No, I hadn’t heard it,” responded Miss Lucy, in the soft slow drawl which her candid speech made its vehicle.
“Law me!” exclaimed Mrs. Plankson, “Emeline Smith was always a great hand for revivals. If she had went less to meetings and had saw more to do in her own house, her children would be better brung up.”
“Seem-me-like there is some spite-work against Emeline Smith amongst the women,” observed Mr. Plankson. “I was a beau of Emeline’s onct. I went to see her the other day, and she laughed, and waved the broom, and acted so glad Jane can’t get over it.”
“You orto married her,” said Mrs. Plankson crisply. “You’d be richer than you are. Her mother was the savin’est person I ever heard of. She give a tea-party one time, and the milk floated in lumps on top the cups. She said she didn’t see how it could be sour, when she had put saleratus in it and boiled it twice! Them Smiths got their money from a rich old aunt, that used to cut up squares of tissue paper to make handkerchiefs. I seen her one time myself, when she was a-visiting the Smiths, come to meeting with a wreath of live geranium leaves around her bonnet, in winter, and them leaves all bit black with the cold! We’ve heard she would set before the parlor fire in city hotels where she boarded, with her dress turned up on her knees, showing her little sticks of legs in narrow pantalets and white stockings, just to save fire in her room—and young ladies obliged to receive young men, with her a-setting there!”
Mr. Sammy coughed gently, for Mrs. Plankson had overlooked his presence in her wrath against Emeline Smith’s relations.
To cover the situation her husband directly inquired, “What’s become of them Ellison girls, seven sisters, that all dressed alike and carried umberellas the same color? They used to walk into church in Indian file. I never in my life seen them go two or three abreast.”
“They all live where they used to and look like they always did. For they was born old-like. Carline,” said Miss Lucy, “took to herb doctorin’. Along about the time that President Garfield was shot, Carline got very dissatisfied. ‘I know just what would fetch that bullet out,’ she used to say, ‘and the only thing that would fetch it out.’”
“And what was that?” inquired Mr. Sammy, rounding his lips and stretching his short neck forward.
“Spearmint tea!”
Mrs. Plankson beat her right palm softly on her left forearm and leaned over, shaking. It would not have been decorous to cackle out loud. The American flag and its Cuban little sister, draped together around the wide doorway of the parlor, swayed in the air. She glanced through the open portal, her oblique eyes slanting up to Miss Lucy’s hanging lamp decorated with feathery asparagus.
“Carline told my niece,” Mrs. Plankson added to the Ellison subject, “why she never got married.”
“Did she have a disappointment?” inquired Mr. Sammy, as one of the younger generation, who fully sensed a woman’s loss in not obtaining a companion like himself.
“No. ‘Do you know,’ says she to my niece, ‘why I never got married?’ ‘No,’ says my niece, ‘I don’t.’—‘Tew skittish!’ says Carline.”
“I never seen such a neighborhood as this is for old maids!” exclaimed Mr. Plankson.
Miss Lucy regarded him with a virgin’s pitying tolerance. Homely as she was, she thought it would have been impossible for her to have taken up with the likes of William Plankson in his best days.
“There has been too much marryin’ and givin’ in marriage in this neighborhood,” she declared with her soft drawl.
“Seem-me-like you ain’t no good judge of that, Lucy,” bantered Mr. Plankson.
“It’s Emeline Smith that’s the judge,” thrust in his wife.
Miss Lucy contemplated silently.
“I was thinkin’ of Jaw-awn and Sue Emma,” she said; and the other three composed themselves to hear the facts concerning the man from the Spanish war. With a rustle like that of a congregation settling to the sermon after preliminaries, they moved their feet and hands and waited on Miss Lucy.
“I was against the match, for Sue Emma had been married, and was through with it. Her man died and left her with a farm and two children; and a widow well fixed is a sight better off than a married woman.”
Mrs. Plankson gave involuntary assent and then glanced with oblique apprehension at her husband, whose will was made in her favor.
“But Sue Emma wasn’t of Yankee stock like the Ellison girls. She felt pestered to get along by herself.”
“Seem-me-like a man always is needed on a farm,” put in Mr. Plankson.
“Sue Emma thought that-a-way. But I talked reel plain to her when she took up with Jaw-awn. I hadn’t nothing against Jaw-awn, except he was a man. He was without property, but he was mighty good to Sue Emma and the children. Seem-like he thought as much of the children as he did of her. And when they had been married a couple of years and the new baby come, Jaw-awn would have been tickled to death if it hadn’t been for losin’ it and Sue Emma. Now that woman might have been livin’ to-day if she had let men alone. But Jaw-awn was a great hand for his folks. I thought he would go crazy. Seem-like he could neither lay nor set when he come home from buryin’ Sue Emma and the baby; but just wandered around, Lolly Loo and the little boy holdin’ one onto each of his hands.”
“Lolly Loo?” challenged Mrs. Plankson. “What-for name is that?”
“Laura Louise; but they called her Lolly Loo. Jaw-awn nacherly had to have folks to do for. I believe he would have got along reel well with the children, if he had been let alone; for he was a good manager.
“But Sue Emma’s father and mother moved right onto the place after the funeral, and the first thing they done was to turn Jaw-awn out. I suppose he had rights in law, but he didn’t make no stand for rights; what he seemed to want was folks. He’d been an orphan-like, without father or mother, and knocked around the world and got kind of homesick clean through. Gettin’ Sue Emma and her children was the same to him as comin’ into a fortune, and when he was throwed out of them he give up.
“The children, they felt terrible, for they thought so much of Jaw-awn; and cried and begged.
“‘Jaw-awn won’t be no trouble, grammaw,’ says Lolly Loo. ‘I can cook enough for Jaw-awn to eat, if you let him stay.’
“But the old couple, they up and throwed him out. And when he stopped here on his way to Springfield I could see the man was clean broke down.
“The very next thing, along come this excitement about war with Spain, and I seen Jaw-awn’s name among the volunteers. I knowed he wouldn’t ever get through the war. Sure enough, word come—. I telegraphed to have him sent here. I knowed the children’s grandpaw and grandmaw wouldn’t do it. And I sent them word, but they don’t want to excite the children, so none of that family will come.
“I don’t say nothing about the expense: I have some means. But when I think of them children that he was a father to—him being so wrapped up in his folks—and them slippin’ to the bars like they do to see if Jaw-awn is comin’ back and not even knowin’ that he lays a soldier in his coffin in that parlor—without any folks to drop a tear on him—I feel like as if things was wrong!”
Miss Lucy arose and entered the parlor. She rearranged the American and Cuban flags which draped the plain casket, and touched the flowers and a huge wreath bearing the initials G. A. R.
Her three guests followed her in silent awe. She had wiped her eyes and was ready to add,—
“The minister has took for his text, ‘He setteth the solitary in families.’ I hope everybody will turn out. The weather is nice. Some will come because he is the first soldier buried here from the Spanish war, and the Grand Army Post has took it up and will march and fire a salute over his grave. I don’t know as the dead care anything about it, but I’d kind of like to see Jaw-awn have as nice a funeral as if he had folks.”
ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED
BY H. O. HOUGHTON AND CO.
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE, MASS., U. S. A.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.