Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches

by Constance Fenimore Woolson

The saw-mill was on the one point of solid mainland which ran down into the water cleanly and boldly, without any fringe of marsh; the river-channel was narrow here, and a row-boat brought the saw-miller across to the Manning cottage opposite three times each day. His name was Cranch, Ambrose Cranch, but everybody called him "Bro." He took his meals at the cottage, and had taken them there for years. New-comers at Wilbarger, and those persons who never have anything straight in their minds, supposed he was a relative; but he was not—only a friend. Mrs. Manning was a widow, fat, inefficient, and amiable. Her daughter Marion was a slender, erect young person of twenty-five years of age, with straight eyebrows, gray eyes, a clearly cut, delicate profile, and the calmness of perfect but unobtrusive health. She was often spoken of as an unmoved sort of girl, and certainly there were few surface-ripples; but there is a proverb about still waters which sometimes came to the minds of those who noticed physiognomy when they looked at her, although it is but fair to add that those who noticed anything in particular were rare in Wilbarger, where people were either too indolent or too good-natured to make those conscientious studies of their neighbors which are demanded by the code of morals prevailing on the coast farther north.

Port Wilbarger was a very small seaport, situated on the inland side of a narrow island; the coastwise steamers going north and south touched there, coming in around the water-corner, passing the Old Town, the mile-long foot-bridge, and stopping at the New Town for a few moments; then backing around with floundering and splashing, and going away again. The small inside steamers, which came down from the last city in the line of sea-cities south of New York by an anomalous route advertised as "strictly inland all the way," also touched there, as if to take a free breath before plunging again into the narrow, grassy channels, and turning curves by the process of climbing the bank with the bow and letting the stern swing round, while men with poles pushed off again. It was the channel of this inside route which the railroad-drawbridge crossed in the midst of a broad, sea-green prairie below the town. As there was but one locomotive, and, when it had gone down the road in the morning, nothing could cross again until it came back at night, one would suppose that the keeper might have left the bridge turned for the steamers all day. But no: the superintendent was a man of spirit, and conducted his railroad on the principle of what it should be rather than what it was. He had a hand-car of his own, and came rolling along the track at all hours, sitting with dignity in an arm-chair while two red-shirted negroes worked at the crank. There were several drawbridges on his route, and it was his pleasure that they should all be exactly in place, save when a steamer was actually passing through; he would not even allow the keepers to turn the bridges a moment before it was necessary, and timed himself sometimes so as to pass over on his hand-car when the bow of the incoming boat was not ten yards distant.

But, even with its steamers, its railroad, and railroad superintendent of the spirit above described, Port Wilbarger was but a sleepy, half-alive little town. Over toward the sea it had a lighthouse and a broad, hard, silver-white beach, which would have made the fortune of a Northern village; but when a Northern visitor once exclaimed, enthusiastically, "Why, I understand that you can walk for twenty miles down that beach!" a Wilbarger citizen looked at him slowly, and answered, "Yes, you can—if you want to." There was, in fact, a kind of cold, creeping east wind, which did not rise high enough to stir the tops of the trees to and fro, but which, nevertheless, counted for a good deal over on that beach.

Mrs. Manning was poor; but everybody was poor at Wilbarger, and nobody minded it much. Marion was the housekeeper and house-provider, and everything went on like clock-work. Marion was like her father, it was said; but nobody remembered him very clearly. He was a Northerner, who had come southward seeking health, and finding none. But he found Miss Forsythe instead, and married her. How it happened that Ambrose Cranch, not a relative but a nondescript, should be living in a household presided over by Forsythe blood, was as follows: First, he had put out years before a fire in Mrs. Manning's kitchen which would otherwise have burned the wooden house to the ground; that began the acquaintance. Second, learning that her small property was in danger of being swept away entirely, owing to unpaid taxes and mismanagement, he made a journey to the capital of the State in her behalf, and succeeded after much trouble in saving a part of it for her. It was pure kindness on his part in a time of general distress, and from another man would have been called remarkable; but nothing could be called remarkable in Ambrose Cranch: he had never been of any consequence in Wilbarger or his life. Mrs. Manning liked him, and, after a while, asked him to come and take his meals at the cottage: the saw-mill was directly opposite, and it would be neighborly. Ambrose, who had always eaten his dinners at the old Wilbarger Hotel, in the dark, crooked dining-room, which had an air of mystery not borne out by anything, unless it might be its soups, gladly accepted, and transferred his life to the mainland point and the cottage opposite, with the row-boat as a ferry between. He was so inoffensive and willing, and so skillful with his hands, that he was soon as much a part of the household as old Dinah herself; he mended and repaired, praised the good dishes, watered the flowers, and was an excellent listener. It would be amusing to know how much the fact of being, or securing, a good listener has to do with our lives. Mrs. Manning, fond of reminiscence and long narratives which were apt to run off at random, so that, whereas you began with the Browns, you ended with something about the Smiths, and never heard the Brown story at all, actually retained Ambrose Cranch at her table for eleven years because he listened well. But she did not realize it; neither did he. A simpler, more unplotting soul never existed than that in the saw-miller's body. A word now as to that body: it had a good deal to do with its owner's life, and our story. (O brothers and sisters, if Justice holds the balance, how handsome some of us are going to be in the next life!) Ambrose Cranch was tall and thin, what is called rawboned; all his joints were large and prominent, from his knuckles to his ankles. He had large, long feet and hands, and large, long ears; his feet shambled when he walked, his arms dangled from the shoulders like the arms of a wooden doll, and he had a long, sinewed throat, which no cravat or collar could hide, though he wore them up to his ears. Not that he did so wear them, however: he had no idea that his throat was ugly; he never thought about it at all. He had a long face, small, mild blue eyes, thin, lank brown hair, a large mouth, and long, narrow nose; he was, also, the most awkward man in the world. Was there no redeeming point? Hardly. His fingers were nicely finished at the ends, and sometimes he had rather a sweet smile. But in the contemplation of his joints, shoulders, elbows, wrists, and knuckles, even the student of anatomy hardly got as far as his finger-ends; and as to the smile, nobody saw it but the Mannings, who did not care about it. In origin he was, as before mentioned, a nondescript, having come from the up-country, where Southern ways shade off into mountain roughness; which again gives place to the river-people, and they, farther on, to the Hoosiers and Buckeyes, who are felicitously designated by the expressive title of "Western Yankees." He had inherited the saw-mill from an uncle, who had tried to make something of it, failed, and died. Ambrose, being a patient man, and one of smallest possible personal expenditure, managed to live, and even to save a little money—but only a little. He had been there twelve years, and was now thirty-eight years old. All this the whole town of Wilbarger knew, or might have known; it was no secret. But the saw-mill had a secret of its own, besides. Up stairs, in the back part, was a small room with a lock on the door, and windows with red cloth nailed over them in place of glass. Here Ambrose spent many moments of his day, and all of his evenings, quite alone. His red lights shone across the marsh, and could be seen from Vickery Island and the drawbridge; but they were not visible on the Wilbarger side, and attracted, therefore, no attention. However, it is doubtful whether they would have attracted attention anyway. Wilbarger people did not throw away their somewhat rarely excited interest upon Ambrose Cranch, who represented to them the flattest commonplace. They knew when his logs came, they knew the quantity and quality of his boards, they saw him superintending the loading of the schooner that bore them away, and that was all. Even the two negroes who worked in the mill—one bright, young, and yellow; the other old, slow, and black—felt no curiosity about the locked room and Cranch's absences; it was but a part of his way.

What was in this room, then? Nothing finished as yet, save dreams. Cranch had that strong and singular bias of mind which makes, whether successful or unsuccessful, the inventor.

It was a part of his unconsequence in every way that all persons called him "Bro"—even his negro helpers at the mill. When he first came to live with Mrs. Manning, she had tried hard to speak of him as "Mr. Cranch," and had taught her daughter to use the title; but, as time wore on, she had dropped into Bro again, and so had Marion. But, now that Marion was twenty-five and her own mistress, she had taken up the custom of calling him "Ambrose," the only person in the whole of Wilbarger who used, or indeed knew, the name. This she did, not on his account at all, but on her own; she disliked nicknames, and did not consider it dignified to use them. Cranch enjoyed her "Ambrose" greatly, and felt an inward pride every time she spoke it; but he said nothing.

There was a seminary at Wilbarger—a forlorn, ill-supported institution, under the charge of the Episcopal Church of the diocese. But the Episcopal Church of the diocese was, for the time being, extremely poor, and its missions and schools were founded more in a spirit of hope than in any certainty of support; with much the same faith, indeed, which its young deacons show when they enter (as they all do at the earliest possible moment) into the responsibilities of matrimony. But in this seminary was, by chance, an excellent though melancholy-minded teacher—a Miss Drough, equally given to tears and arithmetic. Miss Drough was an adept at figures, and, taking a fancy to Marion Manning, she taught her all she knew up to trigonometry, with chess problems and some astronomy thrown in. Marion had no especial liking for mathematics in the beginning, but her clear mind had followed her ardent teacher willingly: at twenty-five she was a skilled arithmetician, passably well educated in ordinary branches, well read in strictly old-fashioned literature, and not very pious, because she had never liked the reverend gentleman in charge of the seminary and the small church—a thin man who called himself "a worm," and always ate all the best bits of meat, pressing, meanwhile, with great cordiality, the pale, watery sweet-potatoes upon the hungry schoolgirls. She was also exceedingly contemptuous in manner as to anything approaching flirtation with the few cavaliers of Wilbarger. It is rather hard to call them cavaliers, since they no longer had any good horses; but they came from a race of cavaliers, the true "armed horsemen" of America, if ever we had any. The old-time Southerners went about on horseback much more than on foot or in carriages; and they went armed.

"Bro, will you mend the gate-latch?" said Mrs. Manning at the breakfast-table. They did not breakfast early; Mrs. Manning had never been accustomed to early breakfasts: the work at the saw-mill began and went on for three hours before the saw-miller broke his fast. Bro mended the latch, and then, after a survey of the garden, went up to the open window of the dining-room and said:

"Shall I water the flowers, Miss Marion? They look sadly this morning."

"Yes, if you please, Ambrose," replied the erect young person within, who was washing the cups, and the few old spoons and forks she called "the silver." The flowers were a link between them; they would not grow, and everybody told her they would not save Bro, who believed in them to the last, and watched even their dying struggles with unfailing hope. The trouble was that she set her mind upon flowers not suited to the soil; she sent regularly for seeds and slips, and would have it that they must grow whether they wished to or not. Whatever their wishes were, floral intentions necessarily escaping our grosser senses, one thing was certain—grow they did not, in spite of Bro's care. He now watered the consumptives of the day tenderly; he coaxed straggling branches and gently tied up weak ones, saw with concern that the latest balsam was gone, and, after looking at it for a while, thought it his duty to tell its mistress.