April Morning (2 page)

“You said yourself that age doesn't teach most folks a blessed thing.”

“Don't tell me what I said. If you propose to remain as narrow and opinionated as you are now all the years of your life—well, that's your choice.
Most
folks are one thing. I should hope that my grandson would be something else.”

At that moment, Mother called from below that supper was ready, and I gave Granny my arm and helped her down the stairs. Her rheumatism was getting worse and worse. As we went down the staircase, myself a little in front of her because the staircase was so narrow, she said to me:

“Don't ever talk
most
to me, Adam.
Most
folks are not Coopers, and
most
folks do not live in this village or in this county either.
Most
folks are not dissenters, and
most
folks would just as soon find a chain to put around their necks, considering one wasn't there already. Coopers have been teachers and pastors and free yeomen farmers and ship captains and merchants for a hundred and fifty years on this soil, and I don't recall one of them who couldn't write a sermon and deliver it too, if the need ever arose.”

“Well, maybe you're leaning on the first one, Granny,” I said.

On weekdays, we ate our meals in the kitchen. On the Sabbath, we ate dinner in the dining room, and Mother set the table with china and silver. We weren't rich, but Granny's mother had been rich enough for china and silver. On weekdays, we ate with plainware.

Although there were only five of us in the immediate family, our table was always set with places for six, Mother at one end, Father at the other, Granny facing the two boys. The empty chair was next to Granny. My father claimed that the empty chair was, as he put it, a manifesto of hospitality, an invitation to anyone who crossed our threshold at mealtime; and I must admit that many a guest sat there, knowing that the welcome was ready at the Coopers', the food good and the cooking beyond compare. But my father's real purpose was an audience, and if possible an argument. There wasn't anyone in his own family whom he considered really worth arguing with, and as far as plain discourse was concerned, although we were a disciplined and trained audience, he could never be wholly sure that we were listening, and if listening, comprehending.

My own opinion was that Granny could win hands down in any argument, but she would not argue with her son in front of his own children. She also felt that one of her sex tended to be unladylike and pushy when she ventured on the finer points of the divine, ordinary, and inherent rights of man—which was mainly the subject.

Tonight, however, we had no guest at the beginning of the meal, and the five of us sat down and four of us bent our heads while Father said grace. He didn't hold with bending his head, at grace or any other time, and when Granny once raised this point with him, he replied that one of the many differences between ourselves and Papists and High Church people—who were a shade worse than Papists—was that whereas the latter two sects cringed and groveled before the clay and plaster images they worshiped, we stood face to face with our God, as befitting what He had created in His own image. Granny said that there was possibly some difference between cringing and groveling and a polite bending of the head from the neck, but Father wasn't moved. The difference was quantitative not qualitative, and therefore only a matter of degree. To him it was a principle. In two minutes, my father could lead any argument or discussion around to being a principle.

So he said grace glaring across the table at the imaginary point where he placed God, and I always felt that God had the worst of it. My father couldn't just begin a meal with something direct and ordinary, like “Thank Thee, O Lord, for Thy daily bread and the fruit of the harvest.” Oh, no—no, he had to embellish it. If there was no guest at the meal, God was always present, and tonight my father said sternly:

“We thank thee, O Lord, for the bread we eat, but we are also conscious of seed we have planted, of the hands that guided the plow and the back bent in toil. The ground is dry as dust, and I will take the liberty of asking for a little rain. I know that Thou givest with one hand and Thou takest away with the other, but sometimes it seems to me to go beyond the bounds of reason. Amen!”

Then he turned to his soup. Granny lifted her head and stared at him, and finally said, “Moses?”

“Yes, Mother?”

She sighed, and we all began to eat.

“Yes, Mother?”

“Nothing,” Granny said. “Nothing at all.”

“Whatever is on your mind, Mother, I would appreciate your coming out with it and saying it.”

“Eat your soup, Moses,” she sighed.

He was inordinately fond of soup, and during the soup he left conversation to the women and children. I did not have much to say to Levi, being occupied with my own thoughts, some of them about Ruth Simmons and also some thoughts about going to sea. If you had respectable kin in Boston, it was generally understood that one of the younger sons would go to sea and learn the trade, since there was no better way to end up with a fine house and a wife in silks and laces, and good, imported furniture as well as some standing in the community. I was not a younger son, but one day in Boston, Captain Ishmael Jamison, my uncle on my mother's side, had felt my muscles, asked me a number of questions, and finished by wondering how I would like to sign on with him as bottom junior on a voyage to the Indies. I was remembering this, contemplating it, and speculating on whether there weren't more interesting girls in the world than Ruth Simmons, whom I had seen at least every day of my life. I also kept in back of my mind a picture of my father's rage if I came out with so much as a hint about going to sea.

At the same time, Mother and Granny talked about the quilt competition. There were those in the village who held that any sort of competition was vain and sinful, and no better than another form of pride. Granny put out that it was pure nonsense that the acknowledgment that one person did something better than another was sinful. She made the best and most colorful quilts in town, and had been quietly pumping for a competition for years.

“It's not for the sake of a prize or money,” Granny said. “I do suppose that if there was something to be won or gained, it might be likened to a form of gambling.”

“What's this about gambling?” my father demanded. He had finished his soup.

“If Sarah Livingston could win, not likely, since she can't sew three stitches straight, we'd have the contest, she being married to the elder, be sure of that,” Mother said.

“Gambling?”

“Eat your supper,” Granny told Father. “What is a turkey shoot but gambling and sin? What is the lottery they hold each year in Boston?—and don't tell me that only High Church buys the tickets.”

“Did I say that?”

I helped Mother take the empty dishes off and bring on the platters of meat cakes and potatoes and parsnips and boiled pudding.

“You were about to, Moses.”

“What is all this talk about gambling?”

“It's woman talk. Pass me your plate.”

It did me good to see Granny treating my father as if he was half grown. She has an instinct about when he is preparing to bear down on me, and she figured that a little humility would lessen the blows. But he also saw where the wind was blowing and didn't waste another minute. No sooner had he swallowed his first mouthful of donker than he said to me:

“How big are you, Adam?”

“Tall?”

“Do you know other ways of being big?”

I could have managed a clever answer to that one, but I saw the glint in his eyes and decided to accept the sameness of big and tall and not promote an argument. It has always been a wonder to me that anyone could work up a rancor toward anything while eating my mother's cooking, but when something was on Father's mind, it couldn't wait.

“No, sir,” I agreed.

“Then what is your height, Adam?”

My mother knew that my father was most ominous when he indulged in innocent and obvious questions, and she pressed him to take more boiled pudding. He cut the ground from under her by accepting another helping, but Granny said:

“Whatever this is, Moses, it can wait until the meal is over. Adam won't be any taller then than he is right now.”

Levi was too silent and expectant. I began to get the drift of things.

“Let me decide that,” Father said, “and suppose you answer the question, Adam.” He went on with the boiled pudding, and I decided that if we could get this all out while we were eating it would be less painful to everyone. I told him, very seriously, that I stood somewhere between twenty-three and twenty-four hands, most likely closer to twenty-four, since I was at least two inches taller than Ebenezer Coult, who claimed he just topped twenty-three.

“Tall as a man,” my father nodded.

“Some men,” I agreed, and did not think it wise to add that I was taller than most.

“And strong as a man. Then one would think that a man's mind would go along with all that. Don't you think so, Adam?”

“Yes, sir. I mean it appears to make sense.”

“Only appears so, Adam?” Father asked softly.

“Oh, have some donkers,” Granny said. “All this is going to interfere with your digestion. You know that, Moses.”

“I asked Adam a question.”

“Yes, sir,” I nodded.

“How long is a man supposed to watch his son and wonder?”

“I don't know, sir.”

“Do you expect me to take you out and birch you?”

“No, sir. I'm a little large for that,” I whispered. “It wouldn't be dignified. It wouldn't do me any good either. It would get around.”

“I'm not sparing you for the sake of your reputation among your cronies.”

I nodded. “I know that, sir.”

“Just as you know why I am angry?”

“Yes, sir. Levi couldn't keep his mouth shut.”

My father accepted a donker from Granny and took a large bite of the boiled pudding, and I knew that the worst was over and that for the moment I was saved. He had put punishment aside for the moment and would employ reason as his weapon. I don't know which made me feel worse, and the only compensation was some speculation on what I would do to Levi. My father must have read my mind, because he said:

“I don't want you to turn this on Levi, Adam. He did what was right. Don't you agree with me?”

I nodded, not trusting myself to look at Levi; and my father, now enjoying his food and digestion and the soft whip hand he had established over me, continued:

“Why am I angry, Adam? Is it because you repeated some foolish childish doggerel when you drew the water from the well? Hardly. I hate and despise superstition, not because it is blasphemous but because it is a display of ignorance.” He let the food go as he warmed up to this; my father was a fine talker, and I guess he derived more pure pleasure from it than from any other habit. “We are plain people,” he continued, “not poor—for we are blessed with more than a necessary share of the world's goods, and we have a good house with good furniture and good food on our table, for which we thank the Lord in His mercy—but plain and thrifty people. Yet we, your mother, myself, my father, and my grandfather—we have always prided ourselves that we are in a sense the people of the Book. My brothers and I were raised, and I make every effort to raise my own children, not as blackguards and loafers, not as soldiers or tavern sots, but as thoughtful and reasoning creatures, men who honor the written word, who respect intelligent writing, and who, like the ancient philosophers, look upon argumentation and disputation as avenues toward the deepest truth. I am a farmer who tills the soil to earn his daily bread, but there are three hundred and odd books in this house, well thumbed, well read. Nor are my neighbors unlike me. This is why, Adam, we are what we are. We came to this land in the beginning because savagery and superstition were an abomination to us; and in the midst of a new savagery, we planted our own seed of culture and civilization. Do you understand me?” he finished.

“Well, he may but I don't,” Granny put in decisively, and I could see that she had decided to take the bit in her teeth. “To make a fuss like that over the foolishness of a fifteen-year-old just passes my understanding, it does. Why, believe me, I never did see a man to sit at his own supper table and be faced with the kind of food Sarah Cooper puts down in front of you, Moses Cooper, and be that ill-tempered.”

“Now, please, Mother—”

“Don't stop me in the middle of a sentence, Moses Cooper.”

“I didn't stop you in the middle of a sentence.”

“Not to mention pride,” Granny went on. “It goeth before a fall, or doesn't it? And if that wasn't the most prideful statement I ever listened to, then I don't know what was. A spell may be un-Christian and ignorant, but let me remind you what the Testament says about pride—”

“I know what the Testament says about pride, Mother.”

We were interrupted at that point, or I don't know where it would have gone on to. My mother was nervous and upset over the whole thing; Levi was sunk in gloom, brooding on what I might do to him later, and very disturbed that Granny had gone after Father the way she had; but I was enjoying it the way you enjoy running on the edge of a high stone cliff. It's exhilarating while it lasts. It finished because Joseph Simmons, our neighbor and kin, came in and gave his greetings, and said that he would just sit down in the empty chair and watch us while we finished our evening bread.

But he wouldn't have a thing to eat. A mouthful would be too much, as he had just finished his own supper. But then he saw that we were having donkers, and he admitted that he might try one, he was so inordinately fond of them, and since it didn't go alone, he'd have a mouthful of boiled pudding on the plate. Mother gave him hot meat from the fire, and it was a pleasure to see his face when he took the first bite. He was a big, heavy-set man, and I never saw anyone to match him for straightforward pleasure in food.