Oldfield: A Kentucky Tale of the Last Century

by Nancy Huston Banks

To have seen Miss Judy doing this must have been a sight well worth seeing. She was so very pretty, so small, so slight, so exquisite altogether. Old as she was, she had still the movements of a bird. Her sweet old face was as fair as any girl's, and as ready with its delicate blushes. Her soft hair, white as falling snowflakes and as curly as a child's, was burnished by a silver gloss lovelier than the sheen of youth. And her beautiful eyes were still the blue of the flax flowers.

Lifting her shining, curly head on that sunny morning, Miss Judy cast a glance of dismay at the ruthless sunbeams lying on the carpet, and she could not help a slight start. Then she held her breath for a moment, turning her blue eyes on the back of Miss Sophia's nightcap, in a look of anxious love. It always gave Miss Sophia a headache to be aroused suddenly. Miss Judy was afraid that the involuntary movement might have startled her. They were very tender of each other, these two poor little sisters. And they were very, very polite to one another; more polite to one another than they were to others, if that were possible. Miss Sophia, who could not always remember the smaller matters of fine breeding where other people were concerned, never forgot the smallest courtesy toward her sister. Miss Judy, who was ever the pink—the sweetest, old-fashioned clovepink—of politeness to everybody, always treated Miss Sophia with such distinguished consideration as was a lesson in manners to see. And no one ever smiled: it was too lovely to be laughed at—too sincere to be absurd. Lying down side by side every night of their long and blameless lives, they formally wished each other pleasant dreams, and bade one another a ceremonious good night. Rising every morning—separately, with delicate regard for the simple mysteries of one another's toilet—they greeted each other at breakfast as two high-bred strangers might meet in some grand drawing-room.

Leaning upon her elbow, Miss Judy now listened for a space to her sister's breathing. She could always tell when all was well with Miss Sophia's slumbers, by a mild little puffing sound, which did no harm, but which nothing would ever have induced Miss Judy to mention to Miss Sophia or to any one. The puffs continuing peacefully, Miss Judy smiled lovingly and, laying the cover back with no more noise than a mouse makes, she flitted birdlike from the mound of feathers to the chair and thence to the home-made rug. She was always careful to stand on the rug while dressing, in order to save the carpet. Miss Sophia also always meant to stand on it, but she sometimes forgot that as she did many other things. The carpet was long past saving, as it was long past further fading; but neither Miss Judy nor Miss Sophia had begun to suspect the fact. To them it was still the elegant all-wool three-ply which their mother had spun and woven and sewed with her own hands. Accordingly, Miss Judy now hastened to spread a strip of rag carpet in the sun's path, before commencing to dress. The big, bare room was cold, the handful of chips, which had made a cheerful blaze at bedtime, having died out during the night. But Miss Judy did not know that she was shivering. She was not in the habit of thinking of her own comfort, and it did not occur to her to kindle a fire with the chips which were in the basket beside the hearth, until such time as Miss Sophia should need the warmth. She merely dressed as fast as she could, lingering only over the last look in the mirror lying along the top of the tall chest of drawers. Such a queer old mirror! Long and narrow in its frame of tarnished gilt, with a faded landscape painted on each dim end, which was divided from the rest of the glass by a solemn little column. The chest stood so high and Miss Judy was so small that it was not easy for her to get a good look at her straight little back. But there was no other way of making sure that the point of her white muslin kerchief was precisely on a line with the bow of her black silk apron strings. And any irregularity in this matter would have shocked Miss Judy as being positively immodest. She managed, however, by standing on the very tips of her toes, to see that all was as it should be. Settling her cap, she bent down, and noiselessly taking the basket of chips, kindled a fire in one corner of the wide, empty fireplace, thinking with a loving glance at the bed that the room would be comfortably warm when Miss Sophia got up. Finally, she went into the passage to open the front door.

All the Oldfield front doors were set open in the morning and left open all day, whenever the weather was reasonably mild; except during the summer, when very few of them were closed at any time, either night or day. Miss Judy alone, of the whole village, always closed hers at bedtime all the year round. And she did not do it because she was afraid, though everybody knew how timid she was. It never occurred to her, during the whole of her gentle, innocent life, that there could be in the world a living creature who would wish to do her any harm. There was really nothing for the most timid to fear in that quiet, peaceful, pastoral country. To be sure, Alvarado, The Terrible, sometimes dashed into the village—unexpected, dazzling, fascinating, bewildering—and out again like a lightning flash. Then most of the men did indeed disappear as suddenly as though the earth had opened and swallowed them up. But Alvarado never noticed the women, and he never came at night. That is, no one ever claimed to have seen him galloping by after nightfall. Late watchers with the sick, who were the only late watchers in Oldfield, sometimes told fearsome tales of thunderous hoofs at midnight and of sparks that flew blue through the darkness. But Miss Judy had never seen or heard anything of the kind. She had never seen Alvarado at all, except in the distance and surrounded as he always was by a cloud of dust and mystery. She was ever slow to believe evil of any one and she rather leaned to Alvarado's side. It was unchristian, she thought, to ascribe all sorts of wickedness to a man about whom no one actually knew anything beyond the fact that he was a stranger and a foreigner and had been most unfortunate. Moreover, he had been and was still very unhappy, and the unfortunate and the unhappy had always a friend in Miss Judy. Then the romance of his marriage appealed strongly to her imagination. It was, of course, very wrong, and even very wicked, for him to have tricked and frightened poor Alice Fielding into marrying him, but he could hardly have known that she loved another man. Nobody seemed to have known it until too late,—not even John Stanley whom she loved,—and Alvarado also had loved her. There was never any doubt of that. He had not been quite in his right mind since her death, many years before. In Miss Judy's tender judgment he was much more to be pitied than to be feared. No, Alvarado had nothing to do with Miss Judy's closing her door at bedtime. She had closed it long before he had ever been heard of in that country. She closed it simply and solely because she considered it the proper thing to do, on account of there being no men-folks about the house. The other lone women of Oldfield closed theirs too—when they remembered to do it—without a murmur, no matter how hot the nights were, simply and solely because Miss Judy closed hers; for no right-minded member of the whole community ever needed a better reason for doing, or not doing anything, than to know that Miss Judy deemed it proper or improper.

This quality of leadership is always interesting, wherever found, and it is nearly always hard to explain. In Miss Judy's case it was even harder to make out than it commonly is. The singularity of her supremacy had nothing to do with her poverty. Neither poverty nor riches would appear ever to have anything to do with the quality of leadership in any part of the earth, and none of Miss Judy's neighbors could be considered either very poor or more than well-to-do. The most utterly incomprehensible feature of Miss Judy's long and absolute reign was, perhaps, her total lack of every personal characteristic of the autocrat. It is certainly not the usual qualification for autocracy to be as gentle and shy as Miss Judy was—or as distrustful of self and as trustful of others—or as self-forgetful and as thoughtful of every one else. The little lady was far too timid and soft of spirit knowingly to lay down laws for any one: she was only strong and firm enough to cling timidly to her own gentle convictions through a hard life of privation, as a dove clings to its nest through the fiercest storms.

She never dreamt that she was an autocrat. When she noticed the universal and marked deference with which she was always treated, she thought it was because her father had been greatly respected, and her mother much beloved. It was quite natural that they should have been, Miss Judy thought in justification of her own shining by a reflected light. They had been justly prominent among the earliest settlers of the Pennyroyal Region, coming with their two infant daughters when Virginia—like a rich and generous queen—first began giving away the county of Kentucky, to the sons who had served her in the Revolution. Those were glorious days! To tell about them now sounds like a fairy tale. And yet they were sad days as well. For, great though the honor was and dazzling as was the reward, the officers so honored and rewarded must have known that the claiming of these lands meant lifelong exile for their families and for themselves. It would appear so, at all events, since few came who could stay nearer to civilization. The more fortunate ones stayed on in the old Virginia homes, content with holding cloudy titles to vast estates lying in this unknown wilderness of Kentucky; and with rearing there splendid castles in the air. So very cloudy, indeed, were many of these titles sent to Virginia by irresponsible agents, that litigation over them has only recently ceased in the local courts. Other officers were too poor to employ agents either good or bad, and these were consequently compelled to go in person, or to lose the grant of land. Among those reduced to this sore strait was Major John Bramwell, Miss Judy's father, who had won distinction as a captain of horse in the War for Independence. The home-coming found him utterly stranded. His small patrimony was long since spent, and his wife's ample fortune had shrunk to a mere pittance. He knew no means of earning a livelihood, knowing even less of the business of peace than most soldiers know. Hopelessly in debt, he knew not where to turn for relief; he knew not how to find bare bread for his family. The new home and the fresh start in the far-off county of Kentucky offered the only refuge. The young wife consented to go, as she would have consented to anything he wished or thought best; for she was the gentlest of women, and her faith in her husband was absolute. Thus it was that they gathered up the few fragments of the old happy life, and, taking their two little ones, rode sadly away into exile.

Sad indeed and heavy-hearted must have been all those first gentle-people who thus rode away from their old homes in Virginia over the Alleghanies into the wilderness of Kentucky, bearing tender little children in their arms. Miss Judy was much too young to remember that terrible journey, and Miss Sophia was only a baby, but they both knew all about it as soon as they were old enough to understand. They always wept when they heard how tired the delicate little mother was before the awful mountains were crossed—no matter how often they heard the story. They always smiled when they heard how glad all the weary pilgrims were to find a broad-horn waiting to bear the little band down the Ohio—though they heard the story over and over again. And they always followed the broad-horn with ever new interest, on and on down that long, long river through the primeval forest growing to the water's edge. Forest, forest, forest everywhere for hundreds of miles, till they came—with the travellers—almost to the vast mouth of the mighty river near which the Pennyroyal Region lies.

Miss Judy was not sure that it was called so when she entered it, an infant in her father's arms. She always thought it more likely that the whole of Kentucky may still have been known as The Dark and Bloody Ground, so great were still the sufferings of the brave men and braver women who were still giving their lives to redeem it from darkness and blood. But there never was the slightest doubt in Miss Judy's mind that these gentle-people coming now were braver than any who had come before—the bravest because they were the gentlest. It always made her own gentle heart beat, as if to strains of martial music, to be told in the little mother's soft voice of the leaving of the broad-horn's frail protection, and of the undaunted plunge into the depths of the wilderness. Yet there were dangers there to be met which courage itself must flee from. These fearless Virginians who did not shrink from facing savages, nor from encountering wild beasts, shrank and fled appalled before the more frightful dangers then lurking all along the banks of the lower Ohio. There, hidden under the beauty of the almost tropical vegetation, was the hideous rack of the fever and ague, waiting ready to torture the strength out of the men, the heart out of the women, and the very lives out of the children. There, beneath the noble trees and above the wide open spaces, rolling like gentle prairies—sunlit, flower filled, so richly covered with wild strawberries that the horses' hoofs were dyed rosy-red—there the deadly mystery of "the milk-sickness" was already spreading its invisible shroud over the whole beautiful land.

Fleeing from these perils more to be feared than the cruelest savages, and more to be dreaded than the fiercest wild beasts, the travellers went further into the heart of the wilderness, seeking the safety of higher ground; on and on, following the buffalo tracks which still traversed the country from end to end like broad, hard-beaten highways. One of these led them along a range of hills and into a fertile little valley, and it was here that the Virginians finally found a resting-place. It was here in this vale of rest, folded between these quiet hills, that the village of Oldfield grew out of that settlement, and here that it stands to-day scarcely altered from its beginning. Over the hills—there on the east where tender green of the crowning trees melts into the tenderer blue of the arching clouds—there still lies the untouched strip of broad brown earth, which the people of to-day call the Wilderness Road, just as those wandering Virginians called it when they first found it.

The forest crowded close to the valley, but the sun shone bright where the giant trees stood farther apart. Then the skies of Kentucky were as blue as the skies of Italy, just as they are now, so that the sunshine and the peace of the spot, and the pure air of the wooded hills, gave the wayfarers heart to believe themselves safe from the terrors of the Ohio. The homes which they built were all humble enough, the merest cabins of rough logs, since they had nothing else wherewith to build. Major Bramwell's house was no better than the rest. Like most of the settlers' cabins it had two low, large rooms with a closed passage between and a loft above. But it is the mistress who makes the real home,—wherever reared; the mere building of it has little to do with its making. And the softest little woman, who is neither very brilliant nor very wise, can work miracles for her husband and her children, no matter where her wings may rest upon the earth. This one, softer and less wise than many, not only made a real home of perfect refinement out of that log hut in the wilderness, but she reared her daughters—amongst white men rougher than the wild beasts, and near red men infinitely fiercer—as gently as any royal princesses were ever trained in any old palace for the gracing of courts.