The Queen of the Swamp, and other plain Americans

by Mary Hartwell Catherwood

Time, 1881

Tragedy, which is never far from the most prosperous lives, continually trod upon the tenderest-hearted woman in Fairfield. She hated Fairfield as a background to her existence, but there had fate nailed her for life. It was the forlornest of Indiana railroad stations, looking like a scar on the face of a beautifully wooded country, peopled by the descendants of poor white Carolinians and Tennesseeans. The male portion of the community sat on the railroad platform in yellow jeans, sprawling their naked toes to the sun, whittling, and jetting with the regularity of fountains upon the meerschaum-colored boards. The women might have lived lives of primitive simplicity, dignified by child-bearing and neighborly sympathy with one another; but they stained their human kindness with trivial disagreements.

This one among them all felt the progress of the age tearing her heartstrings out while her circumstances kept her at a standstill. I do not say her life would have been more symmetrical or her experience richer if she had lived in the whirl. She was a plain, ground-loving woman who enjoyed the companionship of her fruit-trees and flowers, and worked with her hands. Indeed, crowds annoyed her, and she was undecided what toilets ought to be made for a large public. The striped silk dresses of her prosperous days, the fringed crape shawls and gimp-edged mantillas, agreed ill with bonnets of the passing season, and she had more respect for what was rich and old than for new inventions. But she was fiercely ambitious for her children, especially her eldest son, and for him in spite of his misfortune. The younger boy and girl were still leaping like colts upon their few remaining acres, sound in limb and wind, with the hopes of a future sheathed in their healthy present, when Willie was tall as a man, and far up in his teens.

His mother had a picture of him taken when he was going to school in Cincinnati, under his uncle’s care. At that time his auburn curls were unshorn, and he was beautiful.

A few days before cottons took their terrific rise during the civil war, Mr. Harbison had stocked in thousands of yards. Those were Fairfield’s best days, and he kept a general store, making money so rapidly that the lazy people around him felt helplessly injured. He began his fine brick house, building on a generous and artistic plan, at the edge of Fairfield, where he could surround himself with fruit-trees, and have fields for his cattle. Whether it is a more distinct misery to build the temple of your home and see someone else inhabit it, or to shelter yourself for years in a house you have not the power of finishing, the latter fate was reserved for the Harbisons. With a crash they came down from what had been Fairfield’s opulence nearly to a level with Fairfield’s poverty. They kept the house and grounds and a meadow, but under such weight of mortgages that it was comparatively no grief at all to see the ornamental cornices lying around the partly plastered parlors, balustrades and newel-post standing on end beside the skeleton stairway, and to find the bathroom useless except as a rubbish closet. The man who had employed half of Fairfield was now obliged to become himself an employee, and the general verdict of the world against those who fail was emphasized by communistic envy.

But the habit of being a woman of consideration is not easily forgotten. Mrs. Harbison still made the village respect her. She had something to give to the poorest. She was the wife of a man who had made a fortune before he lost it, and sat in the state Senate. More than all, she had her children, the eldest of them a continual surprise to her. He seemed born to stir her pride and tenderness to their depths. He was tall, fair, and Roman-featured, shy as a girl toward every one but his mother, and so ravenous in mind that he was partly through college when his father’s reverses brought him home.

Then he was seized with a spotted fever, and approached the next world so close that he left part of his faculties there, and was never the same Willie he had been before. He could hear nothing, and seldom spoke an audible word—Mrs. Harbison’s boy, who was made to take the world by storm—and what had been the shyness of a country-bred youth became the set-apart seclusion of a hoofed and goat-eared faun. Willie Harbison was to be seen whirring as noiseless as a bat upon his bicycle across the open ground at dusk. He was met coming from the woods, silent as an Indian, and his eyes were on everything in earth or sky except the human beings just before him.

Whatever were the faults of Fairfield, it loved and respected Willie Harbison, and humored his self-withdrawal. And he loved Fairfield with a partiality which saw mere picturesqueness in the row of whittling men, and various forms of motherhood or sisterhood in the women. He would dismount from his wheel to let the boys tilt with it at the old warehouse. He loved the woods; he loved Wild-cat and Kitten creeks, which ploughed rock-bedded channels through the woods; and what joy in life he fished out of those waters only Willie himself knew. He loved to watch from the mill, on a clear morning, that plume of steam the south-bound train sent around the curve, to watch another plume roll over the first, and finally to see the train stand suddenly on the summit of the grade, sharp-cut against the sky. All common life was pleasant to him. Who but his mother could be witness that a double nature dwelt under his floury mill clothes?

Willie worked in the mill with his father, where the roar of grinding and bolting and the whir of belts made silent liveliness around him. This had been bitterness to his mother—her Willie should work with his head alone; but she accepted it as the result of his physical misfortune.

The parlors were Willie’s workshop, in which he sawed, hammered, and glued, or put noiseless inventions together. A carpenter’s bench was set before two uncased windows, and his father’s old store desk had fallen to his unmercantile use. Its lock was never opened unless Willie had something which he could force himself to show to his mother. That ripe instant arriving, he sought her in her kitchen, her garden, or at her spinning-wheel upstairs, and seized her by the hand. She went with him to the parlors, they fastened the doors, Willie undid his desk, and placed his paper in her fingers. The paper itself was sometimes brown, sometimes the blue cap left from the store, sometimes gilt-edged note having penciled landscapes along the margins, or the flowers he rhymed of done in water-colors; for his hand was as skillful as his eye was discerning. The poems were usually short, and sensitive in rhyme and rhythm. Willie’s themes were the common sights and the common pathos or humor of the situations in which he found the people around him: his interpretation of the flicker’s feelings; his delight in certain thick fleeces of grass; the panorama of sky and field as it marched across his eye; the grotesque though heartily human family party made by old man Persons and his wife, where half of their descendants, unable to get into the small house, sat on the fence while the rest ate dinner. Willie was deaf, but he had inward music. Every smooth and liquid stanza was like wine to his mother. She compared his poems to Burns’s, and could not find the “Mountain Daisy” a whit better than her poet’s song about the woods in frost.