Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 22, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 February 1885 — THE FAIRFIELD POET. [ARTICLE]

THE FAIRFIELD POET.

Tragedy, which is never far from the most prosperous lives, continually trod upon the tenderest-hearted woman in Fairfield. She hated Fairfield as a background to her existence, but there had fate nailed her for life. It was the forlornest of Indiana railroad stations, looking like an ugly scar on the face of a beautifully wooded country, peopled by the descendants of poor white Carolinians and Tennesseeans. The male portion of the community sat on the railroad platform, in yellow jeans, sprawling-their naked toes to the suna whittling and jetting like true tobacco fountains upon the meerschaum-oolored boards. The women might have lived lives of primitive simplicity, dignified by child-bearing and neighborly sympathy with each other, but they stained their human kindness with slander. And this one among them all felt the progress of the age tearing her heartstrings out while her circumstances kept hpr'at a standstill. Ido not say her life would have been more symmetrical or her experience richer if she had lived in the whirl. She was a plain, ground-loving woman who enjoyed the companionship of her fruit trees and /lowers, and worked with her hands. Indeed, crowds annoyed her, and she was undecided what toilettes ought to be made for a large public. The striped silk dresses of her prosperous days, the fringe crape shawls and gimp-edged mantillas, agreed ill with bonnets of the passing season, and she had more respect for what was rich and old than for all your new inventions. Bat she was fiercely ambitious for her children, especially her eldest son, and for him in spite of his misfortune. The younger boy and girl were still leaping like colts upon their few remaining acres, sonnd in limb and wind, with hopes of a future sheathed in their healthy present, when Willie was tall as a man, and far up in his teens. His mother had a picture of him taken when he was going to school in Cincinnati under his uncle’s care. At that tinjp his auburn carls were unshorn, and he was beautiful. A few days before cottons took their terrific rise during the war, Mr. Harbison had stocked in thousands of yards. Those were Fairfield’s best days, and he kept a general store, making money so rapidly - that the lazy people around him felt helplessly injured. He began his fine brick house building on a generous and artistic plan, at the edge of Fairfield, where lie could surround himself with frnit trees, and have fields for his cattle. Whether it is a more distinct misery to bnild the temple of your home and see some one else inhabit it, or to shelter yourself for years in a house yon have not the power of finishing, the latter fete was reserved the H&rbisons. With a crash they came down from what had been Fairfield’s opulence nearly to W level with Fairfield’s poverty. They kept the house and grounds and a meadow, but under snch weight of mortgages that it was comparatively no grief at all to see the ornamental cornices lying around the partly plastered parlors, balustrades, and newel-post standing on end beside the skeleton stairway, and to find the bath-room useless except as a rubbish closet. The man who had employed half of Fairfield was now obliged to become hinSaelf an employe and the general verdict of the world against those who fail was emphasized by communistic‘envy. But the habit of befog a woman of consideration is not easily forgotten. Mrs. Harbison still made the village respect her. She had something to give to the poorest. She was the wife of a man who bad made a fortune before be had lost it, and sat in the State Senate- More than all, She had her children. the eldest of them a continual ’• '

surprise to her. H£ seerued born to stir her pride and tenderness to their depftug, was tall, fair, and Romanfeatured, sh> ah a girl toward .every one but his mother, and so ravenous in mind that he ytnk partly through college when his father's reverse brought him home. Then he was seized with a spotted fever, and approached the next world so olose that he left part of his faculties there, and was never the same Willie he had been before. He could hear nothing, and seldom said an audible word—Mrs. Harbison’s boy, who was made to take the world by storm — and what had . been the shyness of a country-bred youth, became the setapart seclusion of a hoofed and goateared faun. Willie Harbison was to be seen whirring as noiseless as a bat upon his bicycle across the open ground, at dusk. He was met coming from the woods, silent as an Iffilian^andJus e<yes were on everything in- nartu or sky except the hwtnwh beings just before him. •Whatever were the faults of Fairfield, ’ TBd and respected' Willie Harbison and humored his self-withdrawal. And he loved Fairfield with a partiality which saw mere picturesqueness in the row of whittling men, and various forms of- motherhood or sisterhood in the women. He would dismount from his wheel to let the boys tilt with it at the old warehouse. He loved the woods; he loved Wildcat and Kitten Creeks, which plowed rock-bedded channels through the woods; and what joy in life he fished out of those waters Willie himself only knew. He loved to watch from the mill on a clear morning that plume of steam tbe south-bound train sent aronnd the curve, to watch another plume roll over the first, and finally to see the train stand suddenly on the summit of the grade, sharp cut against the sky. All common life was pleasant to him. Who but his mother could be witness that a double nature dwelt under his floury mill clothes ? Willie worked in the mill with his father, where the roar of grinding and bolting, and the whirr of the belts, made silent liveliness about him. This had been bitterness to his mother—her Willie should work with his bead alone; but she accepted it as the result of his physical misfortune. The parlors were Willie’s workshop, in which he sawed, hammered and glued, or put noiseless inventions together. A carpenter’s bench was set before two uncased windows, and his father’s old store desk had fallen to his unmercantile use. Its lock was never opened unless Willie had something which he could force himself to show to his mother. That ripe instant arriving, he sought her in her kitchen, her garden, or her spinning-wheel upstairs, and seized her by the hand. She went with him to the parlors, they fastened the doors, Willie undid his desk, and placed his paper in her fingers. The paper itself was sometimes brown, sometimes the blue cap left -from the store, sometimes gilt-edged note having penciled landscapes along the margins, or the flowers he rhymed of done in water-colors; for his hand was as skillful as his eye was discerning. The poems were usually short, and sensitive jpn rhymS and rhythm. Willie’s themes 'were the common sights and the common pathos or hnmor of the situations in whioh he found the people aronnd him; his interpretation of the slicker’s feelings; his delight in certain thick fleeces of grass; the panorama of sky and field as it marches across his eye; the grotesque though heartily human family party made by old man Parsons 'and his wife, where half of his descendants unable to get into the small house, sat on the fence while the rest ate dinner. Willie was deaf, but he had inward music. Every smooth and liquid stanza was like wine to his mother. She compared his poems to Burns’, and could not find the “Mountain Daisy" a whit better than her poet’s song about the woods in frost. Even Mr. Harbison thought well of Willie’s performance. They were smuggled to him by his mother, and carefully returned to their place when the poet was out of the house. Mr. Harbison knew all that was going on in the world. A dozen times a year he left the grinding of the mill to meet his old chnms at the capital, or to quicken the action" of his blood in Chicago. A couple of stimulating days tinctured and made endurable his month of mill work. A man of luxurious tastes cannot lose his tastes with his means. He was a judge of poets, and said Willie might as well take to poetry as anything, for business did not pay a man of sound faculties in these days. The hum of bees could be heard all aronnd this unfinished brick house growing mossy at the gables, and its shadow was long on the afternoon sunshine. It was that alert and happy time of year when the earth’s sap starts new from winter distillation. You could hear the voices of 1 children calling in play as they loitered home from school; the days were so long that the cows would not come up the pasture until nearly 7 o’clock. Willie trudged across lots to supper. Mrs. Harbison met him at the north sde of the house, having her garden knife and her rake in her hands. She put them on the stepless front-door sill, which had never been and never would be pressed by the foot of an arriving guest. The stone sill was high enough for a seat, and she sat down, tilting her sun-bonnet back, and smiling at Willie. He was floured from head to foot. Little of his boying beauty except its clear innocence remained to him. His nose was large for his head, and on his head the auburn enris were Bhorn to a thin crisping layer. His young sister was putting sup.per on the table in the diningroom, his brother was fisting with another boy on the railroad, and up the cow-lane came his father, with the slow step and somewhat of the ponderous white presence of the walking statue in Don Giovanni But, olosest knit of all this family, mpther and son talked together.' in silence, some birds in the mulberry tree over their heads making the only calling and replying that could be beard. Before Willie i cached her, he held up his bands and signed-in the deaf-mute language.

“The preacher has come back." Mrs, Harbison raised her hands and darted her.fingers into various shape*!, saying thereby, “Did you see him?”w “No,** Willie replied as swiftly, “I only saw bis coffin in tbe wagon, and Nancy Ellen sitting beside it She had to bring him the whole twenty miles from where he died, in a - wagon,” “Because it wasn’t on a railroad?” > Willie nodded. His mother wove on: "Poor Njtticy Ellen! Her father wouldn’ f „\et her have the preacher for r w long, and turned her off when sh.e did marry him. Now she’s a in lier honeymoon, And old man/Martin saying be told her a preache,* as old as himself wasn’t any match, ibr her. Did you see her father ? Ho’W did he act ?” | got into the wagon by the • driver,” said Willie’s fingers. “Well, that was something for him.” “And they drove to his place.” “I suppose he’ll let her come back and live at home now. ” “I wish you had seen Nancy Ellen.” “I’m going to see her after the milking is done.” “Seen her by the preacher,” insisted Willie’s passes. “She looked like a captive coming in chains to Rome.” “Yes, I’ll be bound she did. Every jolt of that twenty miles is stamped in her mind.” . “I wished,” flashed Willie, “I knew what the preacher sung to. himself all along the road.” “What a notion! You’ll have to fix it up in poetry now, won’t you?” Willie shook his head many times and reddened. “You said the preacher used to sing home from meeting ifiTthe dark.” . ' “Yes he dirl,” affirmed Mrs. Harbison. ’’And Nancy Ellen used to listen for him to go by their place.” Their talk paused, and Willie looked up at the birds in the mulberry. Having afterward caught his mother’s eye, he wove out slowly: “When in the tree above his head The sap goes tingling through the bark, She will remember it wai dead, And hear him singing in’the dark. “Oh, Willie, is that the first verse or the last? Have you written it down?” Willie smiled shyly, putting his head dowu towards one shoulder without making any reply. His mother urged him with eager fingers. "Print it in some place when you get it done. Nancy Ellen would be please.” “I am not an obituary poet,” waved Willie. “But that’s so good.” Mrs. Harbison moved her lips, repeating it to herself. “And ain’t you ever going to publish anything you write? I’ve heard of people getting money for it.” Willie uttered a gentle sneer. He laughed at his mother in a way that always made her laugh with him. “But if you would let your father fix up your writings,” she continued, repeating an old plea, “and send them to some publishing house, I know they would put them in a book for you.” The gate, weighted by a stone, slammed to behind his father coming to the evening meal. v But before his mother rose, Willie found time to make dance before her eves the characters indicating this promise: “Some day I’ll get my bicycle and ride *nd ride unti/L I cospe tjML publisher. If you miss me, youTFknow where I’ve gone. You can just say to yourself, ‘He’s off having his poems published.’ Wait till then, mother, that will be soon enough.” “You’D never db it,” said his mother, having no idea how near the time was. She gave her family their supper and helped to milk the cows. The oows were fragrant of pasture grass and of fern along the fence corners. She thought of Willie’s stanza when the milk first sang in the pad, and kept repeating ■until the rising froth drowned all sounds of the lashing streams quite at her pail’s brim. When the house was tidy and full of twilight stillness, Mrs. Harbison put on a clean apron and took her sun bonnet to make her caU of condolence. It is likely they-would want watchers at Martin’s and she was ready to do anything. She had helped bear the burden of life and death so long in Fairfield that illness, a new baby or the mysterious breathless presence in any house was a pertemptory invitation to her. The boys were playing hide-and-seek around the warehouse, and as she crossed the open lot she saw the usual line of wise men sitting on the edge of the platform with their legs across the rail, as if they had all agreed to makfe an offering of their feet to the juggernaut of the next passing train. Willie darted like a bat x»r a night bird on his bioycle far up and far down the smooth wagon road. Now he took a turn, and came spinning among the boys, scattering them before him, and escaping as often as they chased him. In one of these excursions he crossed his mother’s way. The lamps were just lighted in the station; and they poured full over his laughing face. Besides, the last red streaks and high sunset lights were not gone out of the sky, and these would have given her more than the silhoutte of Willie. She lifted up her hands and spelled, “are you starting out to hunt a publisher now?” And Willie laughed and nodded, and made her a sign of good-by. The pleasant stillness of the evening fell around her like a blessing as she went on. Fire flies were filling one fiel,d, as if a conflagration nnder that particular ground sent np endless streams of sparks. She smelled the bndding elders, and was reminded of the t le-like bits in her past, fitted oddly together. Martin lived but a few steps beyond the village. She had bqpn talking a mere moment with Nancy Ellen, and had not yet entered the room where the preacher lay, when some other neighbor came in with excitement, and said lond. over the whispered talk of the mourning house, that something was wrong down at the depot. “That express has run into something again,” proclaimed the neighbor, “and looks by the wav folks run, as if it wasn’t a cow this, time. Euough oows and pigs has been fciUed by that Tailroad." -’v ■ ; / : “I haven’t Seen the express,”/said Mrs. Harbison, feeling her head flbll of wheels. “14 was all quiet when JL was there s minute ago. 1 * ; 1 “Hie express baa stopped. / Good

3MSB&* i Ito> ® iijHl *fir Olj tll6 track, I tell ye i fity hbor! Willie’s ~ x not be Willie. -He was AonsM M . firrqity, and so cautious ' ’’.jjg had long ceased to be auiioV ja about him. He knew the times opftl the trains with nice Yet she started j from ‘fee house without speaking an cither word, and ran until she reached fee crowd. The engine stood hissing; it confronted her with the glare of its eye, a horrid and renforselesa fate, ready to go its way with bell-clanging and all cheerful noise, no matter who had been ground under its wheels. The conductor was just stepping on board, for time and ord erg wait for nothing. The engineer had already climbed back to his cab; he saw a running woman kneel down on the platform and draV the boy up from the boards to rest in her arms. Having seen that much, the engineer turned away his head and wept out loud; and the train moved oh bearing pale faces that looked backward %s long as they could discern anything. Mrs. Harbison had stumbled over Willie’s bent wheel first. When she found him indeed laid in the midst of the crowd, she did not believe it. He was not mangled, His bones were sound—she felt them with a fiercely quick hand. There was no mark about him excepting a dirty-looking spot on the temple. “Willie,” she said, shaking him. “Willie! Willie!” “We’ll have to carry him home,” said her husband at her side, his voice sounding far off, as if it came strained through some dense medium. She looked up and could not understand it. “He’s knocked senseless,” she exclaimed. “Why doesn’t somebody bring water?” “He never knowed what hurt him,” cautiously said one villager to another. “The train was goin’ so fast, and he came up from among the houses onto it so fast that it was done in a fiash.” “And I don’t never want to see no better boy than Willie Harbison was,” responded the other. But only his mother—when she had him at home lying in that pomp of death with which we all shall impress beholders—could have pronounced the true oration over him. Through her dumb tragedy she wanted to make deaf mute signs to some intelligence that here lay one of nature’s poets, with a gift virgin and untarnished. He had never hunted a public. His public was the woods and sky, and his critic one fond woman. Not a line of unsatisfied ambition marked his placid face. He had lived a humble, happy life, and sung for the sake cf expression, not for the sake of praise. He had, after all, only gone to find the best publisher, and his mother could always hear him “singing in the dark.”—Harper’s Bazaar.