SOON the fine weather was at an end. One day it was soft and warm, with a tender blue haze over the distant woods and a sun like a blood-orange in the tranquil sky, and birds twittering about among the elders and sumac along the rail-fences. And the next day everything was gray and lifeless and desolate, with fierce winds sweeping over the bare fields, and driving the cold rain in sheets before them.
Some people—among them Hurley—said it was the equinoctial that was upon us. Abner Beech ridiculed this, and proved by the dictionary that the equinoctial meant September 22d, whereas it was now well-nigh the end of October. The Irishman conceded that in books this might be so, but stuck wilfully to it that in practice the equinoctial came just before winter set in. After so long a period of saddened silence brooding over our household, it was quite a relief to hear the men argue this question of the weather.
Down at the Corners old farmers had wrangled over the identity of the equinoctial ever since I could remember. It was pretty generally agreed that each year along some time during the fall, there came a storm which was properly entitled to that name, but at this point harmony ended. Some insisted that it came before Indian Summer, some that it followed that season, and this was further complicated by the fact that no one was ever quite sure when it was Indian Summer. There were all sorts of rules for recognizing this delectable time of year, rules connected, I recall, with the opening of the chestnut burrs, the movement of birds, and various other incidents in nature’s great processional, but these rules rarely came right in our rough latitude, and sometimes never came at all—at least did not bring with them anything remotely resembling Indian Summer, but made our autumn one prolonged and miserable succession of storms. And then it was an especially trying trick to pick out the equinoctial from the lot—and even harder still to prove to sceptical neighbors that you were right.
Whatever this particular storm may have been it came too soon. Being so short-handed on the farm, we were much behind in the matter of drawing our produce to market. And now, after the first day or two of rain, the roads were things to shudder at. It was not so bad getting to and from the Corners, for Agrippa Hill had a gravel formation, but beyond the Corners, whichever way one went over the bottom lands of the Nedahma Valley, it was a matter of lashing the panting teams through seas of mud punctuated by abysmal pitch-holes, into which the wheels slumped over their hubs, and quite generally stuck till they were pried out with fence-rails.
Abner Beech was exceptionally tender in his treatment of live-stock. The only occasion I ever heard of on which he was tempted into using his big fists upon a fellow-creature, was once, long before my time, when one of his hired men struck a refractory cow over its haunches with a shovel. He knocked this man clear through the stanchions. Often Jeff and I used to feel that he carried his solicitude for horse-flesh too far—particularly when we wanted to drive down to the creek for a summer evening swim, and he thought the teams were too tired.
So now he would not let us hitch up and drive into Octavius with even the lightest loads, on account of the horses. It would be better to wait, he said, until there was sledding; then we could slip in in no time. He pretended that all the signs this year pointed to an early winter.
The result was that we were more than ever shut off from news of the outer world. The weekly paper which came to us was full, I remember, of political arguments and speeches—for a Congress and Governor were to be elected a few weeks hence—but there were next to no tidings from the front. The war, in fact, seemed to have almost stopped altogether, and this paper spoke of it as a confessed failure. Farmer Beech and Hurley, of course, took the same view, and their remarks quite prepared me from day to day to hear that peace had been concluded.
But down at the Corners a strikingly different spirit reigned. It quite surprised me, I know, when I went down on occasion for odds and ends of groceries which the bad roads prevented us from getting in town, to discover that the talk there was all in favor of having a great deal more war than ever.
This store at the Corners was also the post-office, and, more important still, it served as a general rallying place for the men-folks of the neighborhood after supper. Lee Watkins, who kept it, would rather have missed a meal of victuals any day than not to have the “boys” come in of an evening, and sit or lounge around discussing the situation. Many of them were very old boys now, garrulous seniors who remembered “Matty” Van Buren, as they called him, and told weird stories of the Anti-Masonry days.
These had the well-worn arm-chairs nearest the stove, in cold weather, and spat tobacco-juice on its hottest parts with a precision born of long-time experience. The younger fellows accommodated themselves about the outer circle, squatting on boxes, or with one leg over a barrel, sampling the sugar and crackers and raisins in an absent-minded way each evening, till Mrs. Watkins came out and put the covers on. She was a stout, peevish woman in bloomers, and they said that her husband, Lee, couldn’t have run the post-office for twenty-four hours if it hadn’t been for her. We understood that she was a Woman’s Rights’ woman, which some held was much the same as believing in Free Love. All that was certain, however, was that she did not believe in free lunches out of her husband’s barrels and cases.
The chief flaw in this village parliament was the absence of an opposition. Among all the accustomed assemblage of men who sat about, their hats well back on their heads, their mouths full of strong language and tobacco, there was none to disagree upon any essential feature of the situation with the others. To secure even the merest semblance of variety, those whose instincts were cross-grained had to go out of their way to pick up trifling points of difference, and the arguments over these had to be spun out with the greatest possible care, to be kept going at all. I should fancy, however, that this apparent concord only served to keep before their minds, with added persistency, the fact that there was an opposition, nursing its heretical wrath in solitude up on the Beech farm. At all events, I seemed never to go into the grocery of a night without hearing bitter remarks, or even curses, levelled at our household.
It was from these casual visits—standing about on the outskirts of the gathering, beyond the feeble ring of light thrown out by the kerosene lamp on the counter—that I learned how deeply the Corners were opposed to peace. It appeared from the talk here that there was something very like treason at the front. The victory at Antietam—so dearly bought with the blood of our own people—had been, they said, of worse than no use at all. The defeated Rebels had been allowed to take their own time in crossing the Potomac comfortably. They had not been pursued or molested since, and the Corners could only account for this on the theory of treachery at union headquarters. Some only hinted guardedly at this. Others declared openly that the North was being sold out by its own generals. As for old “Jee” Hagadorn, who came in almost every night, and monopolized the talking all the while he was present, he made no bones of denouncing McClellan and Porter as traitors who must be hanged.
Quivering with excitement, the red stubbly hair standing up all round his drawn and livid face, his knuckles rapping out one fierce point after another on the candle-box, as he filled the little hot room with angry declamation. “Go it, Jee!”
“Give ’em Hell!”
“Hangin’s too good for ’em!” his auditors used to exclaim in encouragement, whenever he paused for breath, and then he would start off again still more furiously, till he had to gasp after every word, and screamed “Lincoln-ah!” “Lee-ah!” “Antietam-ah!” and so on, into our perturbed ears. Then I would go home, recalling how he had formerly shouted about “Adam-ah!” and “Eve-ah!” in church, and marvelling that he had never worked himself into a fit, or broken a bloodvessel.
So between what Abner and Hurley said on the farm, and what was proclaimed at the Corners, it was pretty hard to figure out whether the war was going to stop, or go on much worse than ever.
Things were still in this doubtful state, when election Tuesday came round. I had not known or thought about it, until at the breakfast-table Abner said that he guessed he and Hurley would go down and vote before dinner. He had some days before.
He comes before me as I write—this thin form secured a package of ballots from the organization of his party at Octavius, and these he now took from one of the bookcase drawers, and divided between himself and Hurley.
“They won’t be much use, I d............