The Heyday of
the Blood by Dorothy Canfield
Fisher
The older professor looked up at the assistant,
fumbling fretfully with a pile of papers.
“Farrar, what’s the matter
with you lately?” he said sharply.
The younger man started, “Why...why...” The sudden brusqueness of the other’s
manner shocked him suddenly into confession. “I’ve lost my nerve, Professor Mallory, that’s what’s the
matter with me. I’m frightened to
death,” he said melodramatically.
“What of?” asked
Mallory, with a little challenge in his tone.]
The floodgates were open. The younger man burst out in
exclamations, waving his thin, nervous, knotted finger, his face twitching as
he spoke. “Of myself…no, not myself,
but my body! I’m not well… I’m
getting worse all the time. The doctors
don’t make out what is the matter… I don’t sleep… I worry… I forget things, I
take no interest in life… the doctors intimate a nervous breakdown ahead of me…
and yet I rest… I rest… more than I can afford to! I never go out. Every evening I’m in bed by nine
o’clock. I take no part in college
life beyond my work, for fear of the nervous strain. I’ve refused to take charge of that summer school in New
York, you know, that would be such an opportunity for me…If I could only
sleep! But though I never do
anything exciting in the evening…heavens!
What nights I have. Black
hours of seeing myself in a sanitarium,1 dependent on my
brother! I never… why, I’m in
hell… that’s what’s the matter with me, a perfect hell of ignoble terror!”
He sat silent, his drawn face turned to the
window. The older man looked at
him speculatively. When he spoke
it was with a cheerful, casual quality in his voice which made the other look
up at him surprised.
“You don’t suppose those great friends of
yours, the nerve specialists, would object to my telling you a story, do
you? It’s very quiet and
unexciting. You’re not too busy?”
“Busy!
I’ve forgotten the meaning of the word! I don’t dare to be!”
“Very well, then; I mean to carry you back to
stony little farm in the Green Mountains, where I had the extreme good luck to
be born and raised. You’ve heard
me speak of Hillsboro; and the story is all about my great-grandfather,
______________________
sanitarium: institution for the care of
invalids.
who came to live with us when I
was a little boy,”
“Your
great-grandfather?” said the other incredulously. “People don’t remember their great-grandfathers!”
“Oh,
yes they do, in Vermont. There was
my father on one farm, and my grandfather on another, without a thought that he
was no longer young, and there was ‘Gran’ther’ as we called him, eighty-eight
years old and just persuaded to settle back, let his descendants take care of
him, and consent to be an old man.
He had been in the War of 18122 - think of that, you mushroom-and
had lost an arm and a good deal of his health there. He had lately begun to get a pension of twelve dollars a
month, so that for an old man he was quite independent financially, as poor
Vermont farmers look at things; and he was a most extraordinary character, so
that his arrival in our family was quite and event.
“He
took precedence at once of the oldest man in the township, who was only
eighty-four and not very bright. I can remember bragging at school about
Gran’ther Pendleton, who’d be eighty-nine come next Woodchuck Day, and could
see to read without glasses. He
had been ailing all his life, ever since the fever he took in the war. He used to remark triumphantly that he
had now outlived six doctors who had each given him but a year to life; ‘and
the seventh is going downhill fast, so I hear!’ This last was his never-failing answer to the attempts of my
conscientious mother and anxious, dutiful father to check the old man’s
reckless indifference to any of the rules of hygiene.
“They
were good disciplinarians with their children, and this naughty old man who
would give his weak stomach frightful attacks of indigestion by stealing out to
the pantry and devouring a whole mince pie because he had been refused two
pieces at the table - this rebellious, unreasonable, whimsical old madcap3
was an electric element in our quiet, orderly life. He insisted on going to every picnic and church sociable,
where he ate recklessly of all the indigestible dainties he could lay his hands
on, stood in drafts, tired himself to the verge of fainting away by playing
games with the children, and returned home, exhausted, animated, and quite
ready to pay the price of a day in bed, groaning and screaming out with pain as
heartily and unaffectedly as he had laughed with the pretty girls the evening
before.
“The
climax came, however, in the middle of August, when he announced his desire to
go to the county fair, held some fourteen miles down the valley from our
farm. Father never dared let
Gran’ther go anywhere without himself accompanying the old man, but he was
perfectly sincere in saying that it was not because he could not spare a day
from the haying that he refused point-blank to consider it. The doctor who had been taking care of
Gran’ther since he came to live with us said that it would be crazy to think of
such a thing. He added that the
wonder was that Gran’ther lived at all, for his heart was all wrong, his asthma
was enough to kill a young man, and he had no digestion; in short, if Father
wished to kill his old grandfather, there was no surer way than to drive
fourteen miles in the heat of August to the noisy excitement of a county fair.
“So father for once said ‘No,’ in the
tone that we children had come to recognize as final. Gran’ther grimly tied a knot in his empty sleeve, a curious,
enigmatic mode of his to express strong emotion - put his one hand on his came,
and his chin on his hand, and withdrew himself into that incalculable distance
from the life about him where very old people spend so many hours.
“He did not emerge from this
until one morning toward the middle of fair-week, when all the
______________________________________________________________________________
2. War of
1812: war between England and the United States. 3. madcap: impulsive, reckless person
rest of the family were away -
Father and the bigger boys on the far-off upland meadows haying, and Mother and
the girls off blackberrying. I was
too little to be of any help, so I had been left to wait on Gran’ther, and to
set out our lunch of bread and milk and huckleberries. We had not been alone
half and hour when Gran’ther sent me to extract, from under the mattress of the
bed, the wallet in which he kept his pension money. There was six dollars and forty-three cents-he counted it
over carefully, sticking out his tongue like a schoolboy doing a sum, and when
he had finished he began to laugh and snap his fingers and sing out in his
high, cracked old voice:
“
‘We’re goin’ to go a skylarkin’!
Little Jo Mallory is going to the county fair with his Gran’ther
Pendleton, an’ he’s goin’ to have more fun than ever was in the world, and he-’
“ ‘But, Gran’ther,
father said we mustn’t!’ I protested horrified.”
“
‘But I say we shall! I was your
gre’t-gran’ther long before he was your feyther, and anyway I’m here and he’s not-so
march! Out to the barn!’
“He
took me by the collar, and, executing a shuffling fandango4 of
triumph, he pushed me ahead of him to the stable, where old white Peggy, the
only horse left at home, looked at us amazed.
“
‘But it’ll be twenty-eight miles, and Peg’s never driven over eight!’ I cried,
my old-established world of rules and orders reeling before my eyes.
“
‘Eight–and–twenty eight!
But I-am-eighty-eight!’
“Gran’ther
improvised a sort of whooping chant of scorn as he pulled the harness from the
peg. ‘It’ll do her good to drink some pink lemonade-old Peggy! An’ if she gits tired comin’ home, I’ll
git out and carry her part way myself!’
“His
adventurous spirit was irresistible.
I made no further objection, and we hitched up together, I standing on a
char to fix the checkrein,5 and Gran’ther doing wonders with his one
hand. Then, just as were-Gran’ther
in a hickory shirt, and with an old hat flapping over his wizened face, I
barelegged, in ragged old clothes-so we drove out of the grassy yard, down the
steep, stony hill that led to the main valley road, and along the hot, white
turnpike, deep with the dust which had been stirred up by the teams on their
way to the fair. Gran’ther sniffed
the air jubilantly, and exchanged hilarious greetings with the people who
constantly overtook old Peg’s jogging trot. Between times he regaled me with spicy stories of the
hundreds of thousands-they seemed no less numerous to me then-of county fairs
he had attended in his youth. He
was horrified to find that I had never been even to one.
“
‘Why, Joey, how old be ye? ’Most eight, ain’t it? When I was your age I had run away and been to two fairs an’
a hangin’.’
“
‘But didn’t they lick you when you got home?’ I asked shudderingly.
“
‘You bet they did!’ cried Gran’ther with gusto.
“I
felt the world changing into an infinitely larger place with every word he
said.
“
‘Now, this is somethin’ like!’ he
exclaimed, as we drew near to Granville and fell into a procession of wagons
all filled with country people in their best clothes, who looked with friendly
curiosity at the little, shriveled cripple, his face shining with perspiring
animation, and at the little boy beside him, his bare feet dangling high above
the floor of the battered buckboard, overcome with the responsibility of
driving a horse for the first time in his life, and filled with such a flood of
new emotions and ideas that he must have been quite pale.”
Professor Mallory leaned back and laughed
__________________________________________________________________________
4. fandango: lively Spanish dance 5. checkrein: short strap attached to
the bridle to keep a horse from lowering its head
aloud at the vision he had been
evoking - laughed with so joyous a relish in his reminiscences that the drawn,
impatient face of his listener relaxed a little absently.
“Oh, that was a day!” went on the
professor, still laughing and wiping his eyes. “Never will I have such another! At the entrance to the grounds Gran’ther stopped me while he
solemnly untied the knot in his empty sleeve. I don’t know what kind of harebrained vow he had tied up in
it, but with the little ceremony disappeared every trace of restraint, and we
plunged head over ears into the saturnalia6 of delights that was an
old-time county fair.
“People
had little cash in those days, and Gran’ther’s six dollars and forty-three
cents lasted like the widow’s curse of oil.7 We went to see the fat
lady, who, if she was really as big as she looked to me then, must have weighed
at least a ton. My admiration for
Gran’ther’s daredevil qualities rose to infinity when he entered into
free-an–easy talk with her, about how much she ate, and could she raise her
arms enough to do up her own hair, and how many yards of velvet it took to make
her gorgeous, gold-trimmed robe.
She laughed a great deal at us, but she was evidently touched by his
human interest, for she confided to him that it was not velvet at all but furniture
covering; and when we went away she pressed on us a bag of peanuts. She said she had more peanuts than she
could eat - a state of unbridled opulence which fitted in for me with all the
other superlatives of that day.
“We
saw the dog faced boy, whom we did not like at all; Gran’ther expressing, with
a candidly outspoken cynicism, his belief that ‘them whiskers was glued to
him.’ We wandered about the stock
exhibit, gazing at the monstrous oxen, and hanging over the railings where the
prize pigs lived to scratch their backs.
In order to miss nothing, we even conscientiously passed through the
Woman’s Building, where we were very much bored by the serried8
ranks of preserve jars.
“
‘Sufferin’ Hezekiah!’ cried Gran’ther irritably. ‘Who cares how gooseberry jel looks. If they’d give a felly a taste, now-’
“This
reminded him that we were hungry, and we went to a restaurant under a tent,
where after taking stock of the wealth that yet remained of Gran’ther’s hoard,
he ordered the most expensive things on the bill of fare.”
Professor
Mallory suddenly laughed out again.
“Perhaps in heaven, but certainly not until then, shall I ever taste
anything so ambrosial9 as that fried chicken and coffee ice
cream! I have not lived in vain
that I have such a memory back of me!”
This
time the younger man laughed with the narrator, settling back in his chair as
the professor went on:
“After
lunch we rode on the merry-go round, both of us, Gran’ther clinging desperately
with his one hand to his red camel’s wooden hump, and crying out shrilly to me
to be sure and not lose his cane.
The merry-go-round had just come in at that time, and Gran’ther had
never experienced it before. After
the first giddy flight we retired to a lemonade stand to exchange impressions,
and finding that we both alike had fallen completely under the spell of the new
sensation, Gran’ther said that we ‘sh’d keep on a-ridin’ till we’d had
enough! King Solomon couldn’t tell
when we’d ever git a chance again!’ So we returned to the charge, and rode and
rode and rode, through blinding clouds of happy excite-
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6. saturnalia: festival characterized by
unrestrained merrymaking. 9.
ambrosial: delicious, worthy of being tasted
7. The widow’s
cruse of oil: a
cruse is an earthen jug. by the
gods.
The phrase implies that a poor woman would use oil 10. King
Solomon: Biblical king of Israel known
sparingly to make it last. for his wisdom.
8. serried: tightly packed.
ment, so it
seems to me now, such as I was never to know again. The sweat was pouring off from us, and we had tried all the
different animals on the machine before we could tear ourselves away to follow
the crowd to the race track.
“We
took reserved seats, which cost a quarter apiece, instead of the unshaded
ten-cent benches, and Gran’ther began at once to pour out to me a flood of
horse talk and knowing race-track aphorisms,11 which finally made a
young fellow sitting next to us laugh superciliously. Gran’ther turned on him heatedly.
“ ‘I bet-che fifty cents I pick the winner in
the next race!’ He said sportily.
“ ‘Done!’ said the other, still laughing.
“Gran’ther picked a big black mare, who came in
almost last, but he did not flinch.
As he paid over the half dollar he said: ‘Everybody’s likely to make
mistakes about some things; King Solomon was a fool in the head about
women-folks! I bet-che a dollar I pick the winner in this race!’ and ’Done!’ said the disagreeable young man, still
laughing. I gasped, for I knew we
had only eighty-seven cents left, but Gran’ther shot
_______________________________________________
11. aphorisms: proverbs
me a command to silence out of
the corner of his eyes, and announced that he bet on the sorrel gelding.
“If
I live to be a hundred and break the bank at Monte Carlo three times a week,”
said Mallory, shaking his head reminiscently, “I could not know a tenth part of
the frantic excitement of that race or of the mad triumph when our horse won. Gran’ther cast his hat upon the ground,
screaming like a steam calliope12 with exultation as the sorrel
swept the judges’ stand ahead of all the others, and I jumped up and down in an
agony of delight which was almost more than my little body could hold.
“After
that we went away, feeling that the world could hold nothing more
glorious. It was five o’clock, and
we decided to start back. We paid
for Peggy’s dinner out of the dollar we had won on the race - I say ‘we,’ for
by that time we were welded into one organism - and we still had a dollar and a
quarter left. ‘While ye’re about
it, always go the whole hog!’ said Gran’ther, and we spent twenty minutes in
laying out that money in trinkets for all the folks at home. Then, dust, penniless, laden with
bundles, we bestowed our exhausted bodies and our uplifted hearts in the old
buckboard, and turned Peg’s head toward the mountains. We did not talk much during that drive,
and though I thought at the time only of the carnival of joy we had left, I can
now recall every detail of the trip - how the sun sank behind Indian Mountain,
a peak I had known before only through distant views; then, as we journeyed on,
how the stars came out above Hemlock Mountain - our own home mountain behind
our house, and later, how the fireflies filled the darkening meadows along the
river below us, so that we seemed to be floating between the steady stars of
heaven and their dancing, twinkling reflection in the valley.
“Gran’ther’s
dauntless spirit still surrounded me.
I put out of mind doubts of our reception as home, and lost myself in
delightful ruminatings on the splendors of the day. At first, every once in a while, Gran’ther made a brief
remark, such as, ‘’Twas the hindquarters of the sorrel I bet on. He was the only one in the hull kit and
bilin’of ‘em that his quarters didn’t fall away’; or, ‘You needn’t tell me that
them Siamese twins ain’t unpinned every night as separate as you and me!’ But later on, as the damp evening air
began to bring on his asthma, he subsided into silence, only broken by great
gasping coughs.
“These
were heard by the anxious, heartsick watchers at home, and as old Peg stumbled
wearily up the hill, father came running down to meet us. ‘Where you be’n?’ he
demanded, his face pale and stern in the light of the lantern. ‘We be’n to the
county fair!’ croaked Gran’ther with a last flare of triumph, and fell over
sideways against me. Old Peg
stopped short, hanging her head as if she, too were at the limit of her
strength. I was frightfully tired
myself, and frozen with terror of what Father would say Gran’ther’s collapse
was the last straw. I began to cry
loudly, but Father ignored my distress with indifference which cut me to the
heart. He lifted Gran’ther out of
the buckboard, carrying the unconscious little old body into the house without
a glance backward at me. But when
I crawled down to the ground, sobbing and digging my fists into my eyes, I felt
Mother’s arms close around me.
“
‘Oh, poor, naughty little Joey!’ she said. ‘Mother’s bad, dear little boy!’ ”
Professor
Mallory stopped short.
“Perhaps
that’s something else I’ll know again in heaven,” he said soberly, and waited a
moment before he went on: “Well,
that was the end of our day. I was
so work out that I fell asleep over my supper, in spite of the excitement in
the house about sending for a doctor for Gran’ther, who was, so one of my
awe-struck sisters told me, having some kind of ‘fits.’
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12. steam calliope: musical instrument consisting of keyboard and steam whistles that
produces a sound identified with fairs and
circuses.
Mother must have
put me to bed, for the next thing I remember, she was shaking me by the
shoulder and saying, ‘Wake up, Joey.
Your great grandfather wants to speak to you. He’s been suffering terribly all night, and the doctor
thinks he’s dying.’
“I followed her into Gran’ther’s room where the
family was assembled about the bed.
Gran’ther lay drawn up in a ball, groaning so dreadfully that I felt a
chill like cold water at the roots of my hair; but a moment or two after I came
in, all at once he gave a great sigh and relaxed, stretching out his legs and
laying his arms down on the coverlid.
He looked at me and attempted a smile.
“ ‘Well, it was wuth it, warn’t it, Joey?’ he
said gallantly, and closed his eyes peacefully to sleep.”
“Did he die?” asked the younger professor
leaning forward eagerly.
“Die?
Gran’ther Pendleton? Not
much! He came tottering down to
breakfast the next morning, as white as an old ghost, with no voice left, his
legs trembling under him, but he kept the whole family an hour and a half at
the table, telling them in a loud whisper all about the fair, until Father said
really he would have to take us to the one next year. Afterward he sat out on the porch watching old Peg graze
around the yard. I thought he was
in one of his absent-minded fits, but when I came out, he called me to him, and
setting his lips to my ear, he whispered:
“ ‘An’ the seventh is a-goin down–hill fast, so
I hear! He chuckled to himself over this for some time, wagging his head
feebly, and then he said; ‘I tell ye, Joey, I’ve lived a long time, and I’ve
larned a lot about the way folks is made.
The trouble with most of ‘em is, they’re ‘fraid-cats! As Jeroboam Warner used to say - he was
in the same regiment with me in 1812 - the only way to manage this business of
livin’ is to give a whoop and let her rip! If ye just about half-live, ye just the same as half-die;
and if ye spend yer time half dyin, some day ye turn in and die all over,
without rightly meanin’ to at all - just a kind o’ bad habit ye’ve got yerself
inter.’ Gran’ther fell into a meditative silence for a moment. “Jeroboam, he said that the evening before the battle of Lundy’s Lane, and
he got killed the next day. Some
live, and some die; but folks that live all over die happy, anyhow! Now I tell you what’s my motto, an’
what I’ve lived to be eighty-eight on-’ ”
Professor Mallory stood up and, towering over
the younger man, struck one hand into the other as he cried: “ ‘This was the motto he told me: “Live
while you live, and then die and be done with it!’ ”
