Hillsboro People

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

When the games were over and the children sat about soberly, eating their ice-cream and cake, she looked over her shoulder into the big empty room and shivered. The children went away and she and Miss Molly put out the lights in silence. When they came out into the moonlight and looked up and down the deserted street, lined with darkened houses, the face of the younger woman was frankly tear-stained. "Oh, Miss Abigail," she said; "let's give it up!"

Miss Abigail waited an instant, perceptible instant before answering, but, when she did, her voice was full and harsh with its usual vigor. "Fiddlesticks! You must ha' been losing your sleep. Go tuck yourself up and get a good night's rest and you won't talk such kind of talk!"

But she herself sat up late into the night with a pencil and paper, figuring out sums that had impossible answers.

That March she had a slight stroke of paralysis, and was in an agony of apprehension lest she should not recover enough to plant the flowers for the summer's market. By May, flatly against the doctor's orders, she was dragging herself around the garden on crutches, and she stuck to her post, smiling and making prearranged rustic speeches all the summer. She earned enough to pay the school-teacher another winter and to buy the fuel for the schoolhouse, and again the Martins and the Allens stayed over; though they announced with a callous indifference to Miss Abigail's ideas that they were going down to Johnsonville at Christmas to visit their relatives there, and have the children go to the tree the ex-Greenfordites always trimmed.

When she heard this Miss Abigail set off to the Allen farm on the lower slope of Hemlock Mountain. "Wa'n't our tree good enough?" she demanded hotly.

"The tree was all right," they answered, "but the children were so mortal lonesome. Little Katie Ann came home crying."

Miss Abigail turned away without answering and hobbled off up the road toward the mountain. Things were black before her eyes and in her heart as she went blindly forward where the road led her. She still fought off any acknowledgment of the bitterness that filled her, but when the road, after dwindling to a wood trail and then to a path, finally stopped, she sat down with a great swelling breath. "Well, I guess this is the end," she said aloud, instantly thereafter making a pretense to herself that she meant the road. She looked about her with a brave show of interest in the bare November woods, unroofed and open to the sunlight, and was rewarded by a throb of real interest to observe that she was where she had not been for forty years, when she used to clamber over the spur of Hemlock Mountain to hunt for lady's-slippers in the marshy ground at the head of the gorge. A few steps more and she would be on her own property, a steep, rocky tract of brushland left her by her great-uncle. She had a throb as she realized that, besides her house and garden, this unsalable bit of the mountainside was her only remaining possession. She had indeed come to the end.

With the thought came her old dogged defiance to despair. She shut her hands on her crutches, pulled herself heavily up to her feet, and toiled forward through some brush. She would not allow herself to think if thoughts were like that. Soon she came out into a little clearing beside the Winthrop Branch, swirling and fumbling in its headlong descent. The remains of a stone wall and a blackened beam or two showed her that she had hit upon the ruins of the old sawmill her great-grandfather had owned. This forgotten and abandoned decay, a symbol of the future of the whole region, struck a last blow at the remnants of her courage. She sank down on the wall and set herself to a losing struggle with the blackness that was closing in about her. All her effort had been in vain. The fight was over. She had not a weapon left.

A last spark of valor flickered into flame within her. She stood up, lifting her head high, and summoning with a loudly beating heart every scattered energy. She was alive; her fight could not be over while she still breathed.

For an instant she stood, self-hypnotized by the intensity of her resolution. Then there burst upon her ear, as though she had not heard it before, the roar of the water rushing past her. It sounded like a loud voice calling to her. She shivered and turned a little giddy as though passing into a trance, and then, with one bound, the gigantic forces of subconscious self, wrought by her long struggle to a white heat of concentration on one aim, arose and mastered her. For a time—hours perhaps—she never knew how long, old Miss Abigail was a genius, with the brain of an engineer and the prophetic vision of a seer.