CHAPTER II The Roof-tree
If my father had married a certain sweetheart of his early youth, and Mother a suitor to whom she almost became engaged, what would have become of me?
Should I be I, or would it be
One-tenth another to nine-tenths me?
I often asked myself this question. But after each of my parents had had a preliminary romance, they met at a Methodist prayer-meeting, and each knew from the start what the outcome would be.
Mother was then a school-teacher, Father a dry-goods clerk. Both were born in log houses; both reared in the frugal way of their times; the snow often blew in on their coverlids through chinks in the logs; they slept in trundle beds; wore homespun clothes and calf-skin shoes, and had their education at the district schools to which they walked through the woods following marked trees. Born amid the drumlins less than fifty miles apart, all their married lives—more than fifty years together—have been spent in the little village where they met.
In the early years of their marriage Father had a travelling wagon called a “Yankee Notion and Boot and Shoe Store.” Brother, several years my senior, would tell with pride of Papa’s big wagon and the iron-gray horses. In girlhood I spent hours upstairs, when supposed to be putting the large closet to rights at the spring housecleaning, sitting on the floor poring over Father’s letters to Mother, written during those years. How like a romance to find those letters so full of solicitude and love!—comments on Brother’s baby ways; admonitions to the adopted brother; words of love to Mother—strange to get this glimpse of my parents; to see the young father’s pride in his boy; and to read these unrestrained expressions of devotion! For the father I knew, though affectionate and kind, was a more staid, reserved person than the one in the letters. Now the baby boy was grown up, the adopted brother scarcely a memory, and the girl who was not born when the letters were written was reading eagerly the ardent words that had gladdened her mother’s young heart!
The circumstances of my brother’s birth strongly appealed to my imagination: My parents had given up hopes of a child some years before he came. Father’s health had long been precarious—a persistent cough and exhausting night sweats were wasting him rapidly. Mother, at his side day and night, facing his approaching death, was facing a hidden dread as well—the fear that she was now to become a mother. As the weeks passed and the fear became a certainty, she determined to spare Father the knowledge, thinking it would kill him outright. She almost prayed for his release before the truth must be apparent. How she dreaded the scrutiny of the Doctor, and Father’s questioning eyes! How she resorted to evasion, artifice, and concealment! But one day, suddenly changing her mind, trusting in God to help him bear it, she told Father that the child they had hoped for so long was actually to come.
Instantly he became electrified with the glad tidings. Summoning unknown funds of strength he cried, “I must live, I will live!” It was a greatly improved patient that the Doctor found the next day, and recovery, though slow, dated from that time. (It was probably arrested tuberculosis.)
Many years later Father’s health again seemed precarious—dizziness, and numbness of the arms, caused the physician to prophesy approaching paralysis. I remember this as my first sorrow. I was perhaps fourteen years old. When Mother told me what the Doctor had said I flung myself on the bed in a paroxysm of grief. My Father was going to leave me! The utter helplessness and wretchedness of us all without him! It was an hour of agony. But there stood Mother with her own grief, and mine. This calmed me. I must help and comfort her, instead of giving way like this. The storm passed; but the days, weeks, and months that followed were shadowed by this dread, which, however, proved less well-founded than it had seemed; or else Father’s change in his mode of life effected a decided change in his condition. Closing out his boot-and-shoe store, and travelling again for the same firm for which he had travelled as a young man, he recuperated markedly. Now, in his seventy-second year, he is in fair health, alert, enduring, and with keen intellectual vigour—a man of undaunted courage and unconquerable optimism.