Up a Road Slowly (7 page)

I turned toward the bed with agony in my throat. If I could have kept Aggie from dying by ignoring the stench and the ugliness, it would have been such an easy thing to do; it would have been a privilege to put my cheek next to hers and to tell her that yes, I was her friend. But Aggie would not look at me, and her mother's look held only sullen hatred for me.

“I know that sometimes I've been mean to Aggie. I'm sorry, Mrs. Kilpin; I wish that you'd believe me. I'm really sorry.”

“I said that you'd best be gittin' on,” Mrs. Kilpin said, without looking at me. She pointed toward the door.

When I was out of the house, I ran to the cart where Carlotta was waiting. “Hurry, Julie,” she said, her doll-like face pink with anticipation. “We're going to go north at the corner. The boys just went that way, and I almost know they're hiding to surprise us. We won't even speak to them,” she added, the instincts of the born coquette asserting themselves more strongly by the minute.

“Take me home, Lottie,” I said desperately, as I climbed into the seat beside her. “Please. Just take me home—then you can do whatever you like.”

“Don't be silly, Julie. For goodness sake, was it
that
bad? I didn't know you liked Aggie so much.”

“Will you take me home?” I asked her once again, my voice sharp because of the tumult inside me.

“No, I won't. Your old aunt had to spoil things by making us come up here. My mother didn't say that I had to come and see Aggie, but I just brought you up here because I supposed that Miss Cordelia would have a fit if I didn't. Now, I'm going to go wherever I please, and I just don't please to take you home.”

It wasn't the first time we had quarreled. Lottie and I were at swords' points as often as we were bound together in friendship. And beside the fact that our friendship was not very deep, the day was ghastly hot and beyond the discomfort of heat I was sickened by the glimpse I'd had of “something terribly wrong in this world.” I jumped from the seat into the dusty road.

“Go right ahead,” I told her. “I'll walk.”

“Very well, Miss Trelling,” Carlotta said loftily, and off she drove, her pony and cart, her blonde curls and organdy dress as beautiful as a picture.

There were two miles before me, and I was already tired. The thick yellow dust felt hot through my thin slippers, and the half-burned weeds stung when they swished about my bare ankles. It would have been a long and wretched walk if Danny hadn't rescued me, but he did, and there wasn't a trace of the taunts he had yelled at Carlotta and me hardly a half hour earlier.

“What's the matter, Julie?” he asked as he stopped his bicycle at my side. “What did Lottie do to you?”

“Nothing. She just won't take me home.” I looked at Danny bleakly. “I think Aggie is going to die, Danny, and her mother almost hates me. I can't ride around the country in a pony cart after I've seen Aggie and her mother.”

Danny looked down at the ground. Somehow the subject of death embarrassed us both. I wondered about it later.

I rode for the remainder of the two miles home on the handlebars of Danny's bicycle. We didn't talk much, and Aunt Cordelia didn't say much either when I told her briefly what had happened. Some grease from the spokes of a wheel had soiled my white dress, but she didn't scold; she made cold lemonade for Danny and me and the three of us sat together on the wide porch, all of us grave and thoughtful.

Mrs. Kilpin had been right; we heard of Aggie's death the next morning, and Aunt Cordelia again drove up to the bare, wretched home where she and Mrs. Trevort and Mrs. Peters got Aggie ready for a decent burial.

The three women looked pale and tired when they came back from the Kilpins' that night. Aunt Cordelia and I sat together in the high-ceilinged library where a crosscurrent of air made the room cool and pleasant.

“She's clean, at last, poor little creature.” Aunt Cordelia shuddered involuntarily when she spoke. “I washed her hair. It was a task the like of which I hope never to have to do again. But do you know, Julia, the child had pretty hair. When it was clean I was able to press two big waves in it above her forehead, and when it dried it was a deep brown color with bright lights in it.”

Aggie's hair clean. Not only clean, but pretty. It seemed impossible, but I knew that it was true or Aunt Cordelia would not have said so. I wished that Aggie could have known. It seemed such a terrible waste—ugliness all one's life, and something pretty discovered only after one was dead.

I had never attended a funeral; Aunt Cordelia had always excused me from going with her for one reason or another. But four of us, Elsie Devers, Margaret Moore, Carlotta, and I, were pressed into attending Aggie's funeral. We carried big armfuls of flowers and followed Aggie's casket to the altar of the little country church.

When I looked at Aggie lying in her coffin that afternoon, I was filled with wonder as I saw that she was gently, almost gracefully pretty in death. She was clean, so beautifully clean in the soft ivory-colored dress that my aunt and other neighbors had bought for her, a dress that would have sent Aggie into ecstasies if she could have had it while she lived. I noticed that her hair was, indeed, bright with copper lights in it, lights that sparkled when the afternoon sunlight, channeled in through the church windows, touched Aggie's head and face. It had been the filth and the stench and the silly grimaces, the garbled speech and the stupid responses that had made Aggie revolting. And now she was pretty.

But it was a prettiness touched with a cold aloofness that reproached and tormented me. I knew with a terrible certainty that I might beg her forgiveness until I was exhausted, that I might kneel before her as we had done in mockery when we first made her queen of the lunch hour, and that she would remain as coldly indifferent to me as I had once been to her.

There was a poem of Sara Teasdale's that I had heard Aunt Cordelia read many times. It hadn't meant much to me until that afternoon when I found, to my surprise, that I was able to recall every word of it. I whispered the lines to myself:

When we walked home after the funeral, Carlotta said, “You were saying poetry to yourself in the church, Julie. I think that's very bad manners, with poor Aggie lying there dead—and all that.”

At twilight that evening I wandered out to the carriage house, where Uncle Haskell sat on his porch enjoying the light breeze that stirred the leaves of our surrounding wooded acres. He laughed lightly as I seated myself on the steps at his feet.

“Your face, my treasure, has a funereal aspect this evening. Are you responding to our popular stereotype—the proper mourner who must tense his muscles for the correct number of days before he can cheerfully thank Heaven that it was the other fellow and not he who had succumbed?”

I didn't answer immediately. Sometimes Uncle Haskell seemed like a bad-mannered child, someone who deserved to be ignored.

“Do you know what it means to feel guilty, Uncle Haskell?” I asked after a minute.

“No. I thank whatever gods may be that no such emotion has ever disrupted my equanimity.” He toyed for a while with the pipe which he always carried but never smoked. “Now, why should you feel guilty, my little Julie? You know very well that if this Kilpin girl could approach you again, as moronic and distasteful as she was a month ago, that you'd feel the same revulsion for her. You couldn't help it.”

He was right, of course. I thought how awkward it would be to have to say, “Oh, Aggie, you were so nice when you were dead, and now here you are—the same old mess again.” That wouldn't do, naturally; one couldn't say
that
, even to Aggie.

Uncle Haskell was speaking again. “Hadn't you rather thank Heaven that she has escaped what life had to offer her? And isn't it a blessing that society escaped a multiplication of her kind? Come, Julie, death may be the great equalizer; let's not give in to the hypocrisy that it is the great glorifier.”

We sat in silence after that, and I listened to the sounds of night around us. Uncle Haskell's words beat in upon me as I sat there; I knew that he expressed something that was true, but I knew as well that he was missing something. In Aggie's life and death there was something more than a distasteful little unfortunate's few barren years and her fever-driven death. But what it was I could not put into words; it was strange that I should have sought out a cynic such as Uncle Haskell with the hope of finding an answer.

Finally I rose, the need for action of some sort strong within me. “I think I'll saddle Peter the Great and ride for a while,” I said.

Then, for some reason, I suddenly felt very sorry for Uncle Haskell. Obeying an impulse which I did not understand, I mounted the five steps up to the porch, and standing beside his chair, I bent and kissed him on his forehead. It was the first time in my life that I had ever done anything of the kind.

He didn't move. He muttered, “Don't ride too far,” and that was all. I ran out to the barn, saddled the big old horse who was much gentler than his namesake, and rode away through the woods, pondering for the first time over the mysteries of life and death.

Uncle Haskell's light was on when I returned, and I could see that he was working at his typewriter. That was unusual. His writings never seemed to reach his typewriter; one supposed, innocently at first and then in mocking derision, that his magnum opus was being done in longhand.

I slept rather late the next morning and when I opened my eyes, I saw the folded white paper which had been slipped underneath my door. I jumped out of bed to pick it up and then propped myself comfortably against the pillows in order to enjoy whatever it was that I was about to read.

The letter read as follows:

I read his letter several times and then secreted it in the little leather box where I hid other treasures. Hopefully, I half expected to find a changed Uncle Haskell that morning, a man who had given up lying and drinking and had awakened to his responsibilities to society. But he hadn't changed; he did not show by a single glance that he remembered the note he had written to me.

 

 

 

U
ncle Haskell had mentioned the name of Jonathan Eltwing once or twice; Mrs. Peters had also spoken of him in a mysterious way as if she didn't want Aunt Cordelia to overhear her. Once I had grown bold enough to say quite casually, “Do you know a man named Jonathan Eltwing, Aunt Cordelia?”

She hadn't blinked an eye. She said very smoothly, “I knew him a number of years ago, Julia. Why do you ask?”

I was embarrassed then and ill at ease. “I just wondered,” I said.

“Then it was an idle question, wasn't it?”

“Yes, ma'am,” I answered and resolved never to get myself out on such a limb again.

But when I went to help Laura out the fall little Julie was born, I remembered to ask her what she knew about this character, Jonathan Eltwing. Mother had long ago told Laura all about the man who, she suspected, had once been Aunt Cordelia's sweetheart. I listened, agog with interest, as Laura repeated the story to me.

Jonathan Eltwing was about Aunt Cordelia's age, which meant that he must have been eighteen the fall she commenced teaching in the country school. She was still teaching in the same school thirty-five years later, when Chris and I with all the others sat at the wooden desks and watched her firm hand write out instructions and examples on the blackboard.

He had come to school that fall, this awkward, earnest boy who towered above the young teacher, and he confided in her the hope that someday he might be able to go to college, although the hope was dim for he had neither money nor the prerequisite high school training. The father of the Eltwing children had little use for higher learning, and was unwilling either to pay for their schooling or to allow himself to be deprived of the benefits of their labor on his farm. However, he had made one foolish mistake: he had married a woman who had a hunger for learning, and every one of their six children was born with her intelligence and was later stimulated by her to seek an education. Jonathan was the first; encouraged by his mother and Aunt Cordelia, he broke with his father and started the climb which was to lead to the finest universities of the country and to the highest academic honors. The other five, one by one, followed him.

Aunt Cordelia had been immediately fired by anger against the father and sympathy for the son. She had family problems of her own, even at eighteen, but she turned them aside that winter and gave herself up fully to the project of getting Jonathan Eltwing ready for his college entrance examinations.