In Our Town

by William Allen White

A year ago a new reporter brought in this item: "Joseph Nevison, of South McAlester, I. T., is visiting his mother, Mrs. Julia Nevison, at 234 South Fifth Street."

We sent the reporter out for more about Joe Nevison and at noon George Kirwin hurried down to the little home below the tracks. From these two searchers after truth we learned that Joe Nevison's mother had brought him home from the Indian Territory mortally sick. Half-a-dozen of us who had played with him as boys went to see him that evening, and found a wan, haggard man with burned-out black eyes, lying in a clean white bed. He seemed to know each of us for a moment and spoke to us through his delirium in a tired, piping voice—like the voice of the little boy who had been our leader. He called us by forgotten nicknames, and he hummed at a tune that we had not heard for a score of years. Then he piped out "While the Landlubbers Lie Down Below, Below, Below," and followed that with "Green Grass Growing all Around, all Around," and that with the song about the "Tonga Islands," his voice growing into a clearer alto as he sang. His mother tried to quiet him, but he smiled his dead smile at her through his cindery eyes, shook his head and went on. When he had lain quiet for a moment, he turned to one of us and said: "Dock, I'm goin' up and dive off that stump—a back flip-flop—you dassent!" Pretty soon he seemed to come up snuffing and blowing and grinning and said, "Last man dressed got to chaw beef." Then he cried: "Dock's it—Dock's it; catch 'im, hold him—there he goes—duck him, strip him. O well, let him go if he's go'n' to cry. Say, boys, I wish you fellers'd come over t' my stick horse livery stable—honest I got the best hickory horse you ever see. Whoa, there—whoa now, I tell you. You Pilliken Dunlevy let me harness you; there, put it under your arm, and back of your neck—no I ain't go'n' to let you hold it—I'll jerk the tar out of you if you don't go. Whe-e-e that's the way to go, hol—hold on, whoa there. Back up. Let's go over to Jim's and run on his track. Say, Jim, I got the best little pacer in the country here—get up there, Pilliken," and he clucked and sawed his arms, and cracked an imaginary whip. When George came in, the face on the bed brightened and the treble voice said: "Hello Fatty—we've been waitin' for you. Now let's go on. What you got in your wagon—humph—bet it's a pumpkin. Did old Boswell chase you?" and then he laughed, and turned away from us. His trembling hands seemed to be fighting something from his face. "Bushes," whispered Enoch Haver, and then added, "Now he's climbing up the bank of the ravine." And we saw the lean hands on the bed clutch up the wall, and then the voice broke forth: "Me first—first up—get away from here, Dock—I said first," and we could see his hands climbing an imaginary tree.

His face glowed with the excitement of his delirium as he climbed, and then apparently catching his breath he rested before he called out: "I'm comin' down, clear the track for old Dan Tucker," and from the convulsive gripping of his hands and arms and the hysterical intake of his breath we who had seen Joe Nevison dive from the top of the old tree, from limb to limb to the bottom, knew what he was doing. His heart was thumping audibly when he finished, and we tried to calm him. For a while we all sat about him in silence—forgetting the walls that shut us in, and living with him in the open, Slaves of the Magic Tree. Then one by one we left and only George Kirwin stayed with the sick man.

Joe Nevison had lived a wicked life. He had been the friend and companion of vile men and the women whom such men choose, and they had lived lives such as we in our little town only read about—and do not understand. Yet all that night Joe Nevison roamed through the woods by the creek, a little child, and no word passed his lips that could have brought a hint of the vicious life that his manhood had known.

In that long night, while George Kirwin sat by his dying friend, listening to his babble, two men were in the genii's hands. They put off their years as a garment. Together they ran over the roofs of buildings on Main Street that have been torn down for thirty years; they played in barns and corncribs burned down so long ago that their very site is in doubt; they romped over prairies where now are elm-covered streets; and they played with boys and girls who have lain forgotten in little sunken graves for a quarter of a century, out on the hill; or they called from the four winds of heaven playmates who left our town at a time so remote that to the watcher by the bed it seemed ages ago. The games they played were of another day than this. When Joe began crying "Barbaree," he summoned a troop of ghosts, and the pack went scampering through the spectre town in the starlight; and when that game had tired him the voice began to chatter of "Slap-and-a-kick," and "Foot-and-a-half," and of "Rolly-poley," and of the ball games—"Scrub," and "Town-ball," and "Anteover," each old game conjuring up spirits from its own vasty deep until the room was full of phantoms and the watcher's memory ached with the sweet sorrow of old joys.

George Kirwin says that long after midnight Joe awakened from a doze, fumbling through the bedclothes, looking for something. Finally he complained that he could not find his mouth-harp. They tried to make him forget it, but when they failed, his mother went to the bureau and pulling open the lower drawer found a little varnished box; under the shaded lamp she brought out a sack of marbles, a broken bean-shooter, with whittled prongs, a Barlow knife, a tintype picture of a boy, and the mouth-organ. This she gave to the hands that fluttered about the face on the pillow. He began to play "The Mocking Bird," opening and shutting his bony hands to let the music rise and fall. When he closed that tune he played "O the Mistletoe Bough," and after that over and over again he played "Tenting on the Old Camp Ground." When he dropped the mouth-harp, he lay very still for a time, though his lips moved incessantly. The morning was coming, and he was growing weak. But when his voice came back they knew that he was far afield again; for he said, "Come on, fellers, let's set down here under the hill and rest. It's a long ways back." When he had rested he spoke up again, "Say, fellers, what'll we sing?" George tried him with a gospel hymn, but Joe would have none of it, and reviled the song and the singer after the fashion of boys. In a moment he exclaimed: "Here—listen to me. Let's sing this," and his alto voice came out uncertainly and faintly: "Wrap Me up in My Tarpaulin Jacket."

George Kirwin's rough voice joined the song and the mother listened and wept. Other old songs followed, but Joe Nevison, the man, never woke up. It was the little boy full of the poetry and sweetness of a child at play, the boy who had turned the poetry of his boyish soul into a life of adventure unchecked by moral restraint, whose eyes they closed that morning.

And George Kirwin explained to us when he came down to work that afternoon, that maybe the bad part of Joe Nevison's soul had shrivelled away during his sickness, instead of waiting for death. George told us that what made him sad was that a soul in which there was so much that might have been good had been stunted by life and was entering eternity with so little to show for its earthly journey.

When one considers it, one finds that Joe Nevison wasted his life most miserably. There was nothing to his credit to say in his obituary—no good deed to recount and there were many, many bad ones. Moreover, the sorrow and bitterness that he brought into his father's last days, and the shame that he put upon his mother, who lived to see his end, made it impossible for our paper to say of him any kind thing that would not have seemed maudlin.

Yet at Joe Nevison's funeral the old settlers, many of them broken in years and by trouble, gathered at the little wooden church in the hollow below the track, to see the last of him, though certainly not to pay him a tribute of respect. They remembered him as the little boy who had trudged up the hill to school when the old stone schoolhouse was the only stone building in town; they remembered him as he was in the days when he began to turn Marshal Furgeson's hair grey with wild pranks. They remembered the boy's childish virtues, and could feel the remorse that must at times have gnawed his heart. Also these old men and women knew of the devil of unbridled passion that the child's father had put into Joe's blood. And when he started down the broad road they had seen his track beyond him. So as the little gathering of old people filed through the church door and lined up on the sidewalk waiting for the mourners to come out, we heard through the crowd white haired men sighing: "Poor Joe; poor fellow." Can one hope that God's forgiveness will be fuller than that!