Hillsboro People

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

She had been an undisciplined girl, called a tomboy in those days, whose farmer forbears had given to her a pagan passion for the soil and the open sky. Although brought up with a rigid training in theology, religion had never meant more to her than a certainty of hell as a punishment for misdeeds which neither she nor any of the valley people were likely to commit—murder, suicide, false swearing, and the like. Of definite religious feeling, she had none, although the discipline of a hard if happy life had brought her spiritual life in an unconsciously profound form. She had shrunk from that discipline with all the force of her nature, and in her girl's heart had vowed that she would never marry and lead the slave's life of a New England farmer's wife. But then had arrived Nathaniel, the big, handsome lad who had taken her wild, shy heart and lost his own when they first met.

So, half rebellious, she had begun the life of a wife in the old house from which her mother had just gone to the churchyard next door, and which was yet filled with her brave and gentle spirit. The old woman, looking miserably about her, remembered how at every crisis of her life the old house had spoken to her of the line of submissive wives and mothers which lay back of her, and had tamed her to a happy resignation in the common fate of women. On her mother's bed she had borne the agony of childbirth without a murmur, she whose strong young body had never known pain of any kind. She had been a joyful prisoner to her little children, she who had always roamed so foot-free in her girlhood, and with a patience inspired by the thought of her place in the pilgrimage of her race, she had turned the great strength of her love for her husband toward a contented acceptance of the narrow life which was all he could give her.

Each smallest detail in the room had a significance running back over years. The ragged cuts in the window-sill moved her to a sudden recollection of how naughty little Hiram had cut them with his first knife. With what a repressed intensity she had loved the child while she had reproved him! How could she go away and leave every reminder of her children! With a quick and characteristic turn she caught herself in the flagrant contradiction involved in her reluctance to leave behind her mere senseless reminders of her son when she was going to his actual self. And then, with the despairing clear sight of one in a crisis of life, she knew that, in very fact, Hiram was no longer the boy who had left them years ago. Away from all that made up her life, under influences utterly foreign and alien, he had spent almost twice as many years as he had with her. Not only had the reaction from his severe training carried him to another extreme of laxness, but as result of his continued absence he had lost all contact with her world. He no longer consciously repudiated it, he had crossed the deeper gulf of forgetting it. He was a stranger to her.

Always before the memories which clung about every corner of the dark old house had helped her, but now she was forced to face a crisis which none of her people had known. It was not one of the hardships of life which were to be accepted, and the hot rebellion of her girlhood burned in her aching old heart. She thought resentfully of the doctor's blind and stony lack of understanding. His last ironic sentence came to her mind and she flamed at the recollection. Yes, it did take the whole valley to hold her, the valley which was as much a part of her as her eyes which beheld it. There were moments when she stood under the hazy autumn sky, so acutely conscious of every line and color of the great wall of mountains surrounding her that she grew in very fact to be an indivisible portion of the whole—felt herself as actually rooted to that soil and as permanent under that sky as the great elm before the door.

She made no more outcries against fate to her husband, partly because of the anguish which came upon his gentle old face at the sight of her suffering, and partly because she felt herself to have no tangible reason for rebellion. During the last years they had gone drearily around and around the circle which they felt closing so inexorably upon them, and there was no longer any use to wear themselves out in futile discussions of impossible plans. They had both been trained to regard reasonableness as one of the cardinal virtues, and to the mild nature of the old man it was a natural one, so they tried conscientiously to force themselves not only to act, but to feel, "like sensible folks," as they put it bravely to themselves.

"Other folks have gone to live with their children, and not near such good sons as Hiram either, and they didn't make such a fuss about it," said Mr. Prentiss one evening, out of a long silence, as they sat in front of the hearth. He looked at his wife, hoping for a cheerful response, but her lips were set in a quivering line of pain, and the flickering light showed her fair broad face glistening with tears. "Oh, mother!" he cried, in a helpless misery of sympathy. "Oh, mother, don't! I can't stand it! If I could only do it for you! But we can't stay, you know."

The other nodded dumbly, although after a moment she said, "Every day I live all my life over again, and my mother's, and all my folks. It has never seemed as though they really died as long as we lived here same as they did. It's like killing them all again to go away and sell the house to strangers."

There was a silence and then, "Oh, Nathaniel, what was that?" she cried, her voice rising in a quaver of apprehension.

"The wind," said her husband, stirring the fire.

"I know. But what wind? It sounds like the first beginning of the wind over Eagle Rock, and that means snow!"