The Story of a Country Town

by E. W. Howe

As I stepped behind him to stir the fire, and looked at him curiously, I became aware that it was my father. His beard was gray, and his face wrapped for walking in the storm, but I knew him. The wanderer had returned at last, but too late! He continued to shiver and tremble, the result of agitation and the extreme cold through which he had come, and sat for a long time trying to warm himself, while I walked up and down the room in nervous agitation.

After stirring the fire, I closed the door leading into the hall, and stood by his side, and when he removed the wrappings from his neck and face, and looked curiously about, I saw that he was poorly clad, and that he was old and broken. He was timid in his manner, and looked at me as though he expected I would denounce him, and drive him out of the house, and when he moved, it was with difficulty, from which I thought he had walked a long distance. His shoes were wrapped in coarse bagging, which was tied to his feet with cords, and when he held out his hands to warm them, I saw that they were bruised and cracked, and I was sure he had been working as a laborer during his long absence.

“It is after midnight,” he said at length, in a hesitating voice, as though he were afraid to speak. “Why are you here alone?”

Then he did not know! He had come back, as my mother always thought he would, at night, repentant and old, to ask forgiveness, but the one who could forgive him was dead. I did not know what to say or do, and walked up and down the room thinking how to answer. He followed my movements curiously for a time, and then suddenly cowered down into his chair again, as if to meditate over one of the old problems. While I was wondering how to break the news to him, he turned toward me, and said:—

“I saw the lights in the front room as I came up, but hoped it was a sign of welcome rather than of death; but I know now why you are alone. You need not explain.”

The tears came into his eyes, but he tried to brush them away with his rough sleeve, as though he were a child and had been warned not to cry. I think he realized in a moment, while wondering why I was so much agitated, that she was dead, though he had cheerfully imagined, when approaching the house, that the lower rooms were lit up on purpose to receive him.

“She died this morning just after midnight,” I said to him, coming over to his side, and placing my hand on his shoulder, “but I know she always believed you would come back. She sat in this room every night waiting, and her last words were a blessing on your name.”

He did not look up, but I thought this assurance cheered him, though he remained motionless so long that I think he must have reviewed his entire life, from his boyhood in the backwoods to his manhood on the prairie, where the forbidden processions were always passing, and from his career in Twin Mounds through all his hard wanderings as an outcast; a long record of discontent, sorrow, and disgrace, with nothing to excuse it save the natural unrest with which his life had been beset like a hell. Inexplicable and monstrous as it was, I knew it was real, and that a devil had possession of him for whose acts he was unjustly held accountable. A hundred times since then I have thought of John Westlock as a worthy man driven by a fiend with whip and lash, always sullenly protesting, but never able to resist the evil which was bred against his nature, and against which he had struggled all his life.

I tried to decide in my own mind, as he was thinking, whether I knew him any better, and whether I was less afraid of him now than the day he went away, but I could not help concluding that he was the same mysterious man he had always been.

“If you will let me, I should like to look at her,” he said, when he looked up again, in the voice of a suppliant asking a favor of a hard master, and so unlike him that I shuddered to think of the sorrow necessary to make such a change in a man of his disposition.