Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches

To the rich man Fate sends gold,
To the poor man loss on loss.

    THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH.
TWO houses, a saw-mill, and a tide-water marsh, with a railroad-track crossing it from northeast to southwest; on the other side the sea. One of the houses was near the drawbridge, and there the keeper lived, old Mr. Vickery. Not at all despised was old Mr. Vickery on account of his lowly occupation: the Vickerys had always lived on Vickery Island, and, although they were poor now, they had once been rich, and their name was still as well known as the sun in Port Wilbarger, and all Wilbarger district. Fine sea-island cotton was theirs once, and black hands to sow and gather it; salt-air made the old house pleasant. The air was still there, but not the cotton or the hands; and, when a keeper was wanted for the drawbridge of the new railroad, what more natural than that one should be selected who lived on the spot rather than a resident of Port Wilbarger, two miles away?

The other house was on Wilbarger Island, at the edge of the town, and, in itself uninteresting and unimportant, was yet accepted, like the plain member of a handsome family, because of its associations; for here lived Mrs. Manning and her daughter Marion.

The saw-mill was on the one point of solid mainland which ran down into the water cleanly and boldly, without any fringe of marsh; the river-channel was narrow here, and a row-boat brought the saw-miller across to the Manning cottage opposite three times each day. His name was Cranch, Ambrose Cranch, but everybody called him "Bro." He took his meals at the cottage, and had taken them there for years. New-comers at Wilbarger, and those persons who never have anything straight in their minds, supposed he was a relative; but he was not – only a friend. Mrs. Manning was a widow, fat, inefficient, and amiable. Her daughter Marion was a slender, erect young person of twenty-five years of age, with straight eyebrows, gray eyes, a clearly cut, delicate profile, and the calmness of perfect but unobtrusive health. She was often spoken of as an unmoved sort of girl, and certainly there were few surface-ripples; but there is a proverb about still waters which sometimes came to the minds of those who noticed physiognomy when they looked at her, although it is but fair to add that those who noticed anything in particular were rare in Wilbarger, where people were either too indolent or too good-natured to make those conscientious studies of their neighbors which are demanded by the code of morals prevailing on the coast farther north.

Port Wilbarger was a very small seaport, situated on the inland side of a narrow island; the coastwise steamers going north and south touched there, coming in around the water-corner, passing the Old Town, the mile-long foot-bridge, and stopping at the New Town for a few moments; then backing around with floundering and splashing, and going away again. The small inside steamers, which came down from the last city in the line of sea-cities south of New York by an anomalous route advertised as "strictly inland all the way," also touched there, as if to take a free breath before plunging again into the narrow, grassy channels, and turning curves by the process of climbing the bank with the bow and letting the stern swing round, while men with poles pushed off again. It was the channel of this inside route which the railroad-drawbridge crossed in the midst of a broad, sea-green prairie below the town. As there was but one locomotive, and, when it had gone down the road in the morning, nothing could cross again until it came back at night, one would suppose that the keeper might have left the bridge turned for the steamers all day. But no: the superintendent was a man of spirit, and conducted his railroad on the principle of what it should be rather than what it was. He had a hand-car of his own, and came rolling along the track at all hours, sitting with dignity in an arm-chair while two red-shirted negroes worked at the crank. There were several drawbridges on his route, and it was his pleasure that they should all be exactly in place, save when a steamer was actually passing through; he would not even allow the keepers to turn the bridges a moment before it was necessary, and timed himself sometimes so as to pass over on his hand-car when the bow of the incoming boat was not ten yards distant.

But, even with its steamers, its railroad, and railroad superintendent of the spirit above described, Port Wilbarger was but a sleepy, half-alive little town. Over toward the sea it had a lighthouse and a broad, hard, silver-white beach, which would have made the fortune of a Northern village; but when a Northern visitor once exclaimed, enthusiastically, "Why, I understand that you can walk for twenty miles down that beach!" a Wilbarger citizen looked at him slowly, and answered, "Yes, you can – if you want to." There was, in fact, a kind of cold, creeping east wind, which did not rise high enough to stir the tops of the trees to and fro, but which, nevertheless, counted for a good deal over on that beach.

Mrs. Manning was poor; but everybody was poor at Wilbarger, and nobody minded it much. Marion was the housekeeper and house-provider, and everything went on like clock-work. Marion was like her father, it was said; but nobody remembered him very clearly. He was a Northerner, who had come southward seeking health, and finding none. But he found Miss Forsythe instead, and married her. How it happened that Ambrose Cranch, not a relative but a nondescript, should be living in a household presided over by Forsythe blood, was as follows: First, he had put out years before a fire in Mrs. Manning's kitchen which would otherwise have burned the wooden house to the ground; that began the acquaintance. Second, learning that her small property was in danger of being swept away entirely, owing to unpaid taxes and mismanagement, he made a journey to the capital of the State in her behalf, and succeeded after much trouble in saving a part of it for her. It was pure kindness on his part in a time of general distress, and from another man would have been called remarkable; but nothing could be called remarkable in Ambrose Cranch: he had never been of any consequence in Wilbarger or his life. Mrs. Manning liked him, and, after a while, asked him to come and take his meals at the cottage: the saw-mill was directly opposite, and it would be neighborly. Ambrose, who had always eaten his dinners at the old Wilbarger Hotel, in the dark, crooked dining-room, which had an air of mystery not borne out by anything, unless it might be its soups, gladly accepted, and transferred his life to the mainland point and the cottage opposite, with the row-boat as a ferry between. He was so inoffensive and willing, and so skillful with his hands, that he was soon as much a part of the household as old Dinah herself; he mended and repaired, praised the good dishes, watered the flowers, and was an excellent listener. It would be amusing to know how much the fact of being, or securing, a good listener has to do with our lives. Mrs. Manning, fond of reminiscence and long narratives which were apt to run off at random, so that, whereas you began with the Browns, you ended with something about the Smiths, and never heard the Brown story at all, actually retained Ambrose Cranch at her table for eleven years because he listened well. But she did not realize it; neither did he. A simpler, more unplotting soul never existed than that in the saw-miller's body. A word now as to that body: it had a good deal to do with its owner's life, and our story. (O brothers and sisters, if Justice holds the balance, how handsome some of us are going to be in the next life!) Ambrose Cranch was tall and thin, what is called rawboned; all his joints were large and prominent, from his knuckles to his ankles. He had large, long feet and hands, and large, long ears; his feet shambled when he walked, his arms dangled from the shoulders like the arms of a wooden doll, and he had a long, sinewed throat, which no cravat or collar could hide, though he wore them up to his ears. Not that he did so wear them, however: he had no idea that his throat was ugly; he never thought about it at all. He had a long face, small, mild blue eyes, thin, lank brown hair, a large mouth, and long, narrow nose; he was, also, the most awkward man in the world. Was there no redeeming point? Hardly. His fingers were nicely finished at the ends, and sometimes he had rather a sweet smile. But in the contemplation of his joints, shoulders, elbows, wrists, and knuckles, even the student of anatomy hardly got as far as his finger-ends; and as to the smile, nobody saw it but the Mannings, who did not care about it. In origin he was, as before mentioned, a nondescript, having come from the up-country, where Southern ways shade off into mountain roughness; which again gives place to the river-people, and they, farther on, to the Hoosiers and Buckeyes, who are felicitously designated by the expressive title of "Western Yankees." He had inherited the saw-mill from an uncle, who had tried to make something of it, failed, and died. Ambrose, being a patient man, and one of smallest possible personal expenditure, managed to live, and even to save a little money – but only a little. He had been there twelve years, and was now thirty-eight years old. All this the whole town of Wilbarger knew, or might have known; it was no secret. But the saw-mill had a secret of its own, besides. Up stairs, in the back part, was a small room with a lock on the door, and windows with red cloth nailed over them in place of glass. Here Ambrose spent many moments of his day, and all of his evenings, quite alone. His red lights shone across the marsh, and could be seen from Vickery Island and the drawbridge; but they were not visible on the Wilbarger side, and attracted, therefore, no attention. However, it is doubtful whether they would have attracted attention anyway. Wilbarger people did not throw away their somewhat rarely excited interest upon Ambrose Cranch, who represented to them the flattest commonplace. They knew when his logs came, they knew the quantity and quality of his boards, they saw him superintending the loading of the schooner that bore them away, and that was all. Even the two negroes who worked in the mill – one bright, young, and yellow; the other old, slow, and black – felt no curiosity about the locked room and Cranch's absences; it was but a part of his way.

What was in this room, then? Nothing finished as yet, save dreams. Cranch had that strong and singular bias of mind which makes, whether successful or unsuccessful, the inventor.

It was a part of his unconsequence in every way that all persons called him "Bro" – even his negro helpers at the mill. When he first came to live with Mrs. Manning, she had tried hard to speak of him as "Mr. Cranch," and had taught her daughter to use the title; but, as time wore on, she had dropped into Bro again, and so had Marion. But, now that Marion was twenty-five and her own mistress, she had taken up the custom of calling him "Ambrose," the only person in the whole of Wilbarger who used, or indeed knew, the name. This she did, not on his account at all, but on her own; she disliked nicknames, and did not consider it dignified to use them. Cranch enjoyed her "Ambrose" greatly, and felt an inward pride every time she spoke it; but he said nothing.

There was a seminary at Wilbarger – a forlorn, ill-supported institution, under the charge of the Episcopal Church of the diocese. But the Episcopal Church of the diocese was, for the time being, extremely poor, and its missions and schools were founded more in a spirit of hope than in any certainty of support; with much the same faith, indeed, which its young deacons show when they enter (as they all do at the earliest possible moment) into the responsibilities of matrimony. But in this seminary was, by chance, an excellent though melancholy-minded teacher – a Miss Drough, equally given to tears and arithmetic. Miss Drough was an adept at figures, and, taking a fancy to Marion Manning, she taught her all she knew up to trigonometry, with chess problems and some astronomy thrown in. Marion had no especial liking for mathematics in the beginning, but her clear mind had followed her ardent teacher willingly: at twenty-five she was a skilled arithmetician, passably well educated in ordinary branches, well read in strictly old-fashioned literature, and not very pious, because she had never liked the reverend gentleman in charge of the seminary and the small church – a thin man who called himself "a worm," and always ate all the best bits of meat, pressing, meanwhile, with great cordiality, the pale, watery sweet-potatoes upon the hungry schoolgirls. She was also exceedingly contemptuous in manner as to anything approaching flirtation with the few cavaliers of Wilbarger. It is rather hard to call them cavaliers, since they no longer had any good horses; but they came from a race of cavaliers, the true "armed horsemen" of America, if ever we had any. The old-time Southerners went about on horseback much more than on foot or in carriages; and they went armed.

"Bro, will you mend the gate-latch?" said Mrs. Manning at the breakfast-table. They did not breakfast early; Mrs. Manning had never been accustomed to early breakfasts: the work at the saw-mill began and went on for three hours before the saw-miller broke his fast. Bro mended the latch, and then, after a survey of the garden, went up to the open window of the dining-room and said:

"Shall I water the flowers, Miss Marion? They look sadly this morning."

"Yes, if you please, Ambrose," replied the erect young person within, who was washing the cups, and the few old spoons and forks she called "the silver." The flowers were a link between them; they would not grow, and everybody told her they would not save Bro, who believed in them to the last, and watched even their dying struggles with unfailing hope. The trouble was that she set her mind upon flowers not suited to the soil; she sent regularly for seeds and slips, and would have it that they must grow whether they wished to or not. Whatever their wishes were, floral intentions necessarily escaping our grosser senses, one thing was certain – grow they did not, in spite of Bro's care. He now watered the consumptives of the day tenderly; he coaxed straggling branches and gently tied up weak ones, saw with concern that the latest balsam was gone, and, after looking at it for a while, thought it his duty to tell its mistress.

"I am sorry, Miss Marion," he said, going to the window-sill, "but the pink balsam is dead again."

"What can you mean by 'dead again'"? said a vexed but clear voice within. "It can not be dead but once, of course."

"We have had a good many balsams," replied Bro apologetically, "and even a good many pink ones, like this; I forget sometimes."

"That is because you have no real love for flowers," said the irate young mistress from her dish-pan: she was provoked at the loss of the balsam – it was her last one.

Bro, who could not see her from where he stood, waited a moment or two, shuffled his feet to and fro on the sand, and noiselessly drummed on the sill with his long fingers; then he went slowly down to the shore, where his boat was drawn up, and rowed himself across to the saw-mill. He felt a sort of guilt about that pink balsam, as though he had not perhaps taken enough care of it; but, in truth, he had watched every hair's-breadth of its limp, reluctant growth, knew its moist veining accurately, and even the habits and opinions, as it were, of two minute green inhabitants, with six legs, of the size, taken both together, of a pin's point, who considered the stalk quite a prairie.

When she was eighteen and nineteen years old, Marion Manning had refused several suitors, giving as a reason to her mother that they were all detestable; since then, she had not been troubled with suitors to refuse. There were girls with more coloring and brighter eyes in Wilbarger, and girls with warmer hearts: so said the gossips. And, certainly, the calm reserve, the incisive words, and clear gray eyes that looked straight at you of Marion Manning were not calculated to encourage the embarrassed but at the same time decidedly favor-conferring attentions of the youths of the town. Mrs. Manning, in the course of the years they had been together, had gradually taken Bro as a humble confidant: he knew of the offers and refusals; he knew of the succeeding suitorless period which Mrs. Manning, a stanch believer in love and romance, bewailed as wasted time. "I could never have resisted young Echols," she said, "sitting there on the door-step as he used to, with the sun shining on his curly hair. But there! I always had a fancy for curls." Bro received these confidences with strict attention, as valuable items. But one peculiarity of his mind was that he never generalized; and thus, for instance, instead of taking in the fact that curly hair plays a part in winning a heart, he only understood that Mrs. Manning, for some reason or other, liked kinks and twists in the covering of the head; as some persons liked hempen shoestrings, others leathern.

"But Miss Marion is happy," he said once, when the suitorless period was two years old, and the mother lamenting.

"Yes; but we can not live our lives more than once, Bro, and these years will never come back to her. What keeps me up through all the privations I have suffered but the memory of the short but happy time of my own courtship and marriage?" Here Mrs. Manning shed tears. The memory must, indeed, have been a strong one, the unregenerated humorist would have thought, to "keep up" such a weight as hers. But Bro was not a humorist: that Mrs. Manning was fat was no more to him than that he himself was lean. He had the most implicit belief in the romance of her life, upon which she often expatiated; he knew all about the first time she saw him, and how she felt; he knew every detail of the courtship. This was only when Marion was absent, however; the mother, voluble as she was, said but little on that subject when her daughter was in the room.

"But Miss Marion is happy," again said Bro, when the suitorless period was now five years old.

"No, she is not," replied the mother this time. "She begins to feel that her life is colorless and blank; I can see she does. She is not an ordinary girl, and needlework and housekeeping do not content her. If she had an orphan asylum to manage, now, or something of that kind – But, dear me! what would suit her best, I do believe, would be drilling a regiment," added Mrs. Manning, her comfortable amplitude heaving with laughter. "She is as straight as a ramrod always, for all her delicate, small bones. What she would like best of all, I suppose, would be keeping accounts; she will do a sum now rather than any kind of embroidery, and a page of figures is fairly meat and drink to her. That Miss Drough has, I fear, done her more harm than good: you can not make life exactly even, like arithmetic, nor balance quantities, try as you may. And, whatever variety men may succeed in getting, we women have to put up with a pretty steady course of subtraction, I notice."

"I am sorry you do not think she is happy," said Bro thoughtfully.

"There you go!" said Mrs. Manning. "I do not mean that she is exactly unhappy; but you never understand things, Bro."

"I know it; I have had so little experience," said the other. But Bro's experience, large or small, was a matter of no interest to Mrs. Manning, who rambled on about her daughter.

"The Mannings were always slow to develop, Edward used to say: I sometimes think Marion is not older now at heart than most girls of eighteen. She has always been more like the best scholar, the clear-headed girl at the top of the class, than a woman with a woman's feelings. She will be bitterly miserable if she falls in love at last, and all in vain. An old maid in love is a desperate sight."

"What do you call an old maid?" asked Bro.

"Any unmarried woman over – well, I used to say twenty-five, but Marion is that, and not much faded yet – say twenty-eight," replied Mrs. Manning, decisively, having to the full the Southern ideas on the subject.

"Then Miss Marion has three years more?"

"Yes; but, dear me! there is no one here she will look at. What I am afraid of is, that, after I am dead and gone, poor Marion, all thin and peaked (for she does not take after me in flesh), with spectacles on her nose, and little wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, will be falling in love with some one who will not care for her at all. I should say a clergyman," pursued Mrs. Manning meditatively, "only Marion hates clergymen; a professor, then, or something of the kind. If I only had money enough to take her away and give her a change! She might see somebody then who would not wind his legs around his chair."

"Around his chair?"

"Yes," said Mrs. Manning, beginning on another knitting-needle. "Have you not noticed how all the young men about here twist their feet around the legs of their chairs, especially when telling a long story or at table? Sometimes it is one foot, sometimes the other, and sometimes both, which I acknowledge is awkward. What pleasure they find in it I can not imagine; I should think it would be dislocating. Young Harding, now, poor fellow! had almost no fault but that."

"And Miss Marion dislikes it? I hope I do not do it then," said Bro simply.

"Well, no," replied Mrs. Manning. "You see, your feet are rather long, Bro."

They were; it would have taken a giant's chair to give them space enough to twist.

So Bro's life went on: the saw-mill to give him bread and clothes, Mrs. Manning to listen to, the flowers to water, and, at every other leisure moment night and day, his inventions. For there were several, all uncompleted: a valve for a steam-engine, an idea for a self-register, and, incidentally, a screw. He had most confidence in the valve; when completed, it would regenerate the steam-engines of the world. The self-register gave him more trouble; it haunted him, but would not come quite right. He covered pages of paper with calculations concerning it. He had spent about twenty thousand hours, all told, over that valve and register during his eleven years at the saw-mill, and had not once been tired. He had not yet applied for patents, although the screw was complete. That was a trifle: he would wait for his more important works.

One day old Mr. Vickery, having watched the superintendent roll safely past down the road on his way to Bridge No. 2, left his charge in the care of old Julius for the time being, and walked up the track toward Wilbarger. It was the shortest road to the village – indeed, the only road; but one could go by water. Before the days of the railroad, the Vickerys always went by water, in a wide-cushioned row-boat, with four pairs of arms to row. It was a great day, of course, when the first locomotive came over Vickery Marsh; but old Mr. Vickery was lamentably old-fashioned, and preferred the small days of the past, with the winding, silver channels and the row-boat, and the sense of wide possession and isolation produced by the treeless, green expanse which separated him from the town. To-day, however, he did not stop to think of these things, but hastened on as fast as his short legs could carry him. Mrs. Manning was an old friend of his; to her house he was hurrying.

"You are both – you are both," he gasped, bursting into the sitting-room and sinking into a chair – "you are both – ah, ugh! ugh!"

He choked, gurgled, and turned from red to purple. Mrs. Manning seized a palm-leaf fan, and fanned him vigorously.

"Why did you walk so fast, Mr. Vickery?" she said reproachfully. "You know your short breath can not stand it."

"You would, too, Nannie," articulated the old man, "if – if your boy had come home!"

"What, Lawrence? You do not mean it!" she exclaimed, sinking into a chair in her turn, and fanning herself now. "I congratulate you, Mr. Vickery; I do, indeed. How long is it since you have seen him?"

"Thirteen years; thir – teen years! He was fifteen when he went away, you know," whispered the old man, still giving out but the husky form of words without any voice to support them. "Under age, but would go. Since then he has been wandering over the ocean and all about, the bold boy!"

"Dear me!" said Mrs. Manning; "how glad I shall be to see him! I was very fond of his mother."

"Yes; Sally was a sweet little woman, and Lawrence takes after his mother more than after his father, I see. My son was a true Vickery; yes, a true Vickery. But what I came to say was, that you and Marion must both come over to-morrow and spend the day. We must kill the fatted calf, Nannie – indeed we must."

Then, with his first free breath, the old man was obliged to go, lest the superintendent should return unexpectedly and find him absent. There was also the fatted calf to be provided: Julius must go across to the mainland and hunt down a wild turkey.

At dinner Mrs. Manning had this great news to tell her listener – two now, since Marion had returned.

"Who do you think has come home?" she said, enjoying her words as she spoke them. "Who but old Mr. Vickery's grandson, Lawrence, his only living grandchild! He went away thirteen years ago, and one of the sweetest boys I ever knew he was then. – You remember him, Marion."