One August evening in 1869 a number of Damascenes were gathered as usual at the railroad station to witness and audit the arrival and departure of the seven o’clock train. This was an event still miraculous and unbelievable, requiring verification of the senses. A young man swung off before the train had quite stopped, walked forward, and stood watching the small freight unload. When the last of it was off, one of the heavers, leaning from the car door, called to the station agent, Andy Weir: “Give us an extra hand here. There’s a flat passenger.”
Weir came and looked in.
“Them’s rawkis words you use,” he said admonishingly. “Suppose it was somebody we knew.”
“Come on,” said the heaver. “Give us a hand. This ain’t a hearse. It’s a railroad train.”
Weir beckoned. Several men stepped out of the crowd to help. With a hollow grating sound the end of a long pine box was pushed into view. It came out slowly. Weir felt for handles. There weren’t any. It was a plain coffin case.
“Shoulder it,” he said to his volunteers.
They walked with it to the far end of the platform and stopped.
“Might rain,” said Weir, changing his mind. “Over[83] there,” he added, after looking around. “Under the overhang.”
They turned back. Awkwardly, with scraping feet and gruntings, they put it down against the station wall under the projecting eave, and then stood looking at it, all a little red from the exertion and stooping.
“Tain’t yours, is it?” said Weir, turning suddenly on the young man who had followed the box to and fro.
“Yes,” he said.
“Who are you?”
“John Breakspeare.”
The station agent bent down and read the card tacked to the top of the box. The name was Aaron Breakspeare.
“I knew him,” he said, now gazing at the young man. “Knew him well, I might say. Everybody around here did. You ain’t his boy?”
“He was my father,” said the young man. “Will it be all right to——?”
“And he’s sent himself home,” said Weir. “Sent himself home to be buried. You all alone?”
“I’m the whole family,” said the young man with a smile that made Weir look away. “Will it be all right,” he began to ask again, and hesitated before the pronoun. For nearly a week he had been travelling with this freight and the dilemma was new each time. How should one refer to one’s father in a pine box? Corpse was a sodden, gruesome word. Body was too cold and distant. Remains,—no. There were left only the pronouns—it, this, that—and they were disrespectful.
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“It’s all right there,” said the station agent, seeing what the young man meant. “But if you want to leave it all night we’ll take it in.”
“Only for a few minutes,” said the young man. “I’m coming right back.”
The idlers about the station waited until he was out of sight and then gathered around the box, staring at it, reading the card, looking away, commenting—
“So that’s poor old Aaron.... As the fellow said, we’re all alike at the end of the lane.... He wasn’t so oldan, I ought t’know because wasn’t I born—?... The young one brought him back.... Where’d he come from, does it say?... Likely looking boy.... What’s his name?... Wonder what old Gib’l say.... This here one stole his sweetheart away back there in....”
To John Breakspeare, son of Esther, great grandson of the founder, now turning his twentieth year, New Damascus was a legend. He had never been there. Yet without asking his way he walked straight to the inn that was his grandfather’s, since named Lycoming House, and wrote two names in the register thus:
{ John Breakspeare.
Aaron ditto } Denver, Colo.
They meant nothing to the clerk, who was new in the place. He blotted the writing, looked at it, and asked:
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“Is your party all here?”
“Not yet,” said the young man. “We want two parlor rooms on the ground floor.”
“Connecting rooms?”
“Yes.”
“You are John Breakspeare?” the clerk guessed.
“Yes.”
“The other member of your party will be coming tonight?”
“He is waiting at the station,” said the young man. “We shall want the rooms only for tonight and tomorrow. I’ll pay now, please.”
“We can send a rig to the station,” said the clerk.
“No, thank you,” said the young man.
He looked at the rooms. In the large one he set two chairs six feet apart, facing. Then lighting all the gas, he went out, locked the door, and carried the key away in his pocket.
One hour later an undertaker’s wagon, followed by a hack, pulled up in front of Lycoming House. The young man got out of the hack and stood in the main doorway waiting. Four men drew the pine box out of the wagon, shouldered it, and started in.
There was a crash from end to end of the long front veranda overhanging the street, as twenty men sitting there in tilted chairs, their feet on the railing, smoking, all with one impulse dropped their legs and sat up straight to look. A rigid hotel custom forbids hospitality to Mr. Death. There is only one way for a corpse to pass through a hotel door. That is out. If[86] you die inside that can’t be helped. You must go out. But if you die outside you can’t come in.
The clerk ran out to defend the threshold.
“What’s this?” he shouted. “You can’t do this. You can’t rent a mortuary chapel in a hotel.”
His words were futile. The young man turned his back, beckoned the undertaker to follow, and led the way through the door and down the hall to the big parlor room, the door of which he unlocked and threw open. They put the pine box on the floor, opened it, raised the coffin to rest on the chairs. The young man followed the empty box to the street and returned with two high candlesticks and candles. These he set at the head of the coffin and lighted. Then, locking the door behind him, he joined the undertaker outside and drove away with him.
The clerk, outraged in both his authority and his traditions, meanwhile had fallen downstairs and was shaking a red, tissue-logged hulk that dozed in a hickory chair at the end of the bar. This was Thaddeus Crawford, the proprietor. He never opened his eyes but to eat and speak and look at the books. The sign he gave of listening, or of waking when addressed, was to open his mouth,—a small, cherubic orifice,—and roll the tip of his tongue round and round it. When he closed his mouth that was a sign he was no longer interested. When he opened his eyes and spoke it was a shock to discover that he could speak distinctly, that his senses were alert, that the triumph of matter was incomplete.
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During the clerk’s recital of what was taking place upstairs he rolled his tongue excitedly without opening his eyes. Then he heaved himself, achieved locomotion, and went up to look at the names on the register. He looked at them hard and long, dozed a bit, looked at them again, then returned inarticulate to the hickory chair downstairs and fell into it panting.
“What shall we do?” asked the clerk, who had followed him up and down again.
“Do the dishes,&r............