“Ain’t but three kinds of flowers worth a tinker’s damn,” declared Grandma Margot Hamilton as she stooped her ancient bulk to strip off a few withered leaves from her rose bushes. “And they’re roses, lilacs, and sweet locust.”
Her cracked old voice and her words were full of a curious combination of ignorance, intelligence, and culture. At times, she might have been at home in a drawing room, despite her sun-darkened old face with its web of deep furrows and wrinkles; at other times she might have been merely an ancient crone with misshapen heavy body and ragged old clothes. Seventy years ago she had been as tall and strong and vital as Margaret Hamilton, her great-granddaughter; she still had height and dignity but she was bowed. Her skin was like rich but cracking leather; nearly ninety, her black hair was still thick, with hardly a streak of gray; under beetling brows like Peter’s, her small black eyes were intelligent and shrewd. She had told her great-granddaughter that she hated most everything; humanity, cats, cities, polite conversation, children, preachers, and, especially, women. This hatred included Peter Hamilton’s wife and his four other children. “Can’t abide that woman and her brats!” Her only human exceptions were Peter and his daughter, Margaret. A terrible old woman, finding no sin unpardonable, and few virtues forgivable.
She had been born in 1782; this fall of 1872 would bring her ninetieth birthday. She and her young husband, Samuel Hamilton, her cousin, had come to the raw new land, and had experienced Indians, desolation, wars, hunger, drought, fever, death, and birth in that ancient old log cabin at the front of her garden. These bare golden hills were still forest-covered in her memory; she remembered the great trees being cut around this very site and the ground cleared. Her cousin and husband had been somewhat of a scapegrace and blackguard in England; there was some suspicion of forgery or other felony. At any rate, she had defied everyone and had married him just one day before she had sailed with him to the new country.
In the new raw country there was no elegant society, little civilization. They drifted westward and arrived in new territory, all foothills and flat wide valleys and Indians and forest. There were only a few settlers. Here, said Margot tranquilly, they would live.
The little settlement grew. Sam Hamilton took his place arrogantly among the men. He worked as hard as any of them; he plowed the rich untouched earth, made rude furniture, sowed and harvested, fought marauding Indians, smoked a big pipe. Margot bore five children in the thick-walled log cabin, buried two of them at the edge of the forest.
Her speech took on the color and rough vitality of the other settlers; her hands became gnarled, the fingernails broken. Her face was burned a rich brown, and her black eyes and straight black hair gave her the look of Indian blood. She tucked up her homespun skirts for easy striding; there was no man in the settlement taller than she.
She never forgot the night that Sam died. She had pulled him, bed and all, near to the fire, for the snow was thick on the ledges of the narrow windows, and at night they could hear the howling of the timber wolves beneath a glittering moon. She sat beside him for long hours. The dying man did not move; neither did his wife seem to move. At length she rose, took a candlestick, and went into the children’s room. In that room stood her one huge ironbound box which she had brought from England. In it lay some of her old dresses, rich satins, furred cloaks, glinting brocades; her remaining pieces of jewelry, a garnet necklace and a pair of garnet earrings bordered with tiny seed pearls now discolored with age; several old books of Shakespeare, Milton, and Ben Jonson. She drew forth a gown, all gold brocade, delicate lace rustling. She also took out her garnet jewelry and a fan of black lace stitched with tiny pearls.
Once back with Sam, she removed her homespun dress, slipped the brocade over her brawny shoulders and great brown arms. The fastenings would not meet, but she did not mind that. She hung her garnets in her ears, and about her throat she clasped the garnet necklace. She drew her hands vaguely over the rough black coils of her hair with its streaks of gray. The gown hung on her, misshapen and drawn into folds not intended by the dressmaker. Yet she had an austere dignity that would have precluded laughter. The firelight picked red points of light from the garnets, golden threads from the brocade.
Margot sat down again and took up her vigil. On the stretched brocade of her lap lay the black lace fan, its jewels glittering restlessly. She waited.
Moments crept on. A log fell heavily on the hearth and threw up a shower of golden sparks. Then Sam opened his eyes. They were filmed with approaching death.
Margot did not move. Sam stared at her heavily for a long time, as though trying to focus. Then he seemed to start; he stared more acutely. Margot sat, unmoving, the fire to the side of her, coppery and restless, gleaming in the jewels, finding shadows of light in the brocade. She was immense, majestic and ludicrous.
He continued to stare, his weary eyes traveling over her. And then of a sudden he began to laugh, helplessly, weakly, the tears starting from his eyes, rolling down his sunken cheeks. Margot still did not move, but a smile touched her mouth. She lifted the black fan; with great affectations of daintiness she fanned herself, coquetting with Sam with Gargantuan coyness. He sobbed loudly with laughter; at last he lay spent.
Margot, still smiling, knelt beside him, smoothed his grayed hair with a tender hand. He stared in her face, childishly grave, and at peace. Then he laughed a little again. His laughter rose; suddenly it congealed in a cry; he struggled in her arms, twisted, and collapsed. Gently she lay him back on his rough pillows; gently she closed his eyes.
She had staked out one hundred acres of land. It was a terrible struggle to wrench from it sustenance for her children and for herself. During the years that followed Sam’s death she became grim, harsh of hand. Her little daughter succumbed to one hideous winter; her two sons were restless unhappy boys. The eldest went still farther west with a caravan of pioneers. Two years later she heard of his death in an Indian raid. The younger boy, Oliver, remained with his mother, unhappy and savage.
Slowly the acres began to slip through Margot’s hands until only twenty were left. She worked grimly, with only slight assistance from Oliver.
Many of her neighbors had long since moved into town. There were many strangers about her now, the Blodgetts, the Hobarts, the Kings, and the MacKensies. She had little to do with them. She hated the Blodgetts, who were shiftless, the Hobarts, who were upstarts, the Kings, who were crafty, the MacKensies, who were austere and insulting. When Oliver was twenty years old, he married one of Silas King’s many daughters, and brought her to his mother to support. The girl was frail and shifty-eyed, and Margot literally worked her to death, in her sultry hatred. The girl died when her son, young Peter, was born. Between Margot and Oliver there was a silent inflexible hatred. One night he ran away and she never heard from him again. She brought up young Peter with grimness, and without love, at first. But the boy, she soon discovered, was like herself—sturdy, logical, strong. But she never forgave him for marrying Melinda Blodgett, another like his mother. When the friction between the old and the young woman became too great, Peter sensibly built a crude three-room shack at the other extreme end of the twenty acres, and took his bride there. Margot remained in her two-room cabin.
Peter was strong; he became a blacksmith. The twenty acres, with the exception of five cultivated by Margot, fell into decay. Melinda bore ten children; five survived, four girls and a boy. Margot loved only Margaret, the eldest daughter.
She taught Margaret to read; out of her old ironbound box, she had taken her few books. Ignorant of the world growing about her, Margaret could quote Hamlet’s soliloquy faultlessly and with understanding; the tragedy of Macbeth was real to her; the tender beauty of Romeo and Juliet moved her deeply. Peter, shamefully proud of his eldest daughter, had newspapers brought to her, though he himself could neither read nor write, and boasted of it. Nevertheless, like her great-grandmother, she loved the earth. She was tall and strong and slender, brown of skin and black of eye. She was also very beautiful, and her features were delicately made.
Now, old Margot Hamilton was nearly ninety; her great-granddaughter, Margaret, or Margot, as the old woman insisted upon calling her, was nearly nineteen, a wild impulsive girl, barefooted half the year, wearing her long black hair in two swinging braids between her proud, straight shoulders. The Blodgetts and the Kings and the MacKensies sniffed at her, called her “that young savage with no refinement.” The neighbors had long since dismissed the Hamilton family; they were pagans, ostracized from decent God-fearing society. Only the Blodgetts remembering their daughter Melinda was the wife of Peter, kept up a stiff and distant communication, tried to induce Peter to send his children to school. But Peter had driven them all away. The Hamilton family lived rudely and boisterously, except for Melinda, who had retreated from the unequal conflict into whining invalidism.
With stupefaction and dismay, the country folk heard of John Hobart’s infatuation with Margaret Hamilton. John Hobart, the richest man in ten counties, the arbiter of the whole countryside! He could have had the finest girl in Whitmore, even in Williamsburg, the state capital. And it was now an established fact that he wished to marry Margaret Hamilton. The country folk were dumfounded.
Why, the girl ran unchecked about the countryside, her hair down around her shoulders, her dress revealing her long legs, her hands stained brown by the sun, as nobody’s should be. She had never been to school, could not sew a stitch; John Hobart’s infatuation was bewildering.
But it was not bewildering to old Margot Hamilton as she watched Margaret stroke the head of her dog and look off to the brazen hills beneath the pale amber of the evening sky.
For a long time Margaret stared at the hills and scratched the head of her dog, and Margot, squatting on a tree stump in her garden, watched her. She liked to see the figure of the girl outlined darkly against the pale sky. It was strong and slender, the glistening black braids hanging between her shoulders, her vital profile lifted, the dark crimson lips parted. Margot smiled, rubbed her dry old hands together. The smile was at once compassionate and bitter.
“Margot,” she called, “what are you thinking about, girl?”
Margaret started a little, turned her head. She smiled, but her eyes were vague.
“Oh, I wasn’t really thinking, Granny.” She began to walk toward her grandmother, the dog at her heels, her flimsy dress outlining every curve of her splendid young body. She stopped to smell a late rose, touched it with a tender finger. She stood at last before old Margot.
“I think I’d better be going along home. It’s late. Want me to milk Bossy before I go, Granny?”
“No. Leave her be. I’ll tend to her in a minute.” She looked at the girl sharply. “You’re a great lass, Margot. Well, girl, made up your mind to marry Johnny Hobart yet?”
Margot shook her head dubiously. Over her dark face a darker shadow settled. “I almost think I won’t, after all, Granny. Johnny ain’t got, I mean, hasn’t, any real feelings.”
Margot snorted contemptuously. “Sounds for all the world like that Ralph Blodgett! Thought you had better sense, Margot.”
“Oh, Granny, but it’s true. John hardly ever reads even a newspaper, and he just laughs at poetry. Sometimes I almost hate him when he makes fun of the things I love. He can’t talk about anything but crops and cattle and building a new house, and—”
“Well, what else is there in life, you stupid child? Those are real things. The things that Blodgett boy talks about ain’t living. What do you want, anyways?”
Margaret looked at the ground. Under her tanned skin there crept a crimson stain. “I want to live,” she said, almost inaudibly.
“To live? What do you mean by that, Margot?” The old woman’s smile was still derisive, but there was something close to pain in her eyes.
Margaret lifted her head, her manner confused.
“Why, I mean—beauty, Granny. Not just getting up at daybreak and doing the chores and working all day until you’re so tired you just fall into bed at night. There must be something more than that in living. There must be men and women somewhere who think about, well—poetry—and softer things, things that last after you’re dead. I want to be like them. I guess I can’t explain it very clearly.”
The old woman slowly got to her feet, her stiff knees creaking. She grasped her gnarled stick with one hand, with the other she touched Margot’s elbow imperatively. “Come with me,” she said. She began to hobble out of the flower garden, and Margaret, frowning, followed her. They progressed slowly over the broken ground to the edge of a clump of old trees on the other side of the cabin and sat down on a fallen trunk. For a long time old Margot stared before her. Six paces away, there were four slightly sunken places in the earth. She pointed to them with her stick.
“There lie my husband and my three children,” she said. Margaret stared and shivered a little.
“You remember what we read in Macbeth, Margot? ‘Life is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sounds and fury, signifying nothing?’ Remember that. Look at them graves. They prove it, Margot. What do you and that soft boy cousin of yours talk about? I know. You told me once. Souls and hereafters and meaning of life, and whether there is a God, or something, and how mystifying and hopeless things are, in general. I ’spect, at times, he even talks about life not being worth the living. Perhaps it is. Perhaps it ain’t. I don’t know anything, Margot, and I’ve lived a good sight of years. Only fools and very young folks think they know what life’s all about. But now that I’m old, there’s only one real thing to me, lass. This.”
She stooped, bending her head between her ancient knees, and scooped up a clod of earth. She held it before Margaret’s eyes.
“This, lass. Earth. That’s the only real thing. Earth.” She touched the girl’s forehead with a broken fingertip. “And there’s the enemy, lass. In there. Full of sickness and self-deceit. Oh, it’s a grand thing when that enemy talks, and puts God in his place, and the world and men! Makes the owner think he’s a sort of little god himself, proud of his misery. Nothing seems to have substance to him. And after a while, he comes to believe the enemy in his head, his brain, and life retreats from him, lass. Then he dies. After that, what? This. This piece of earth, at last. The only reality gets him when the enemy’s mouth is closed with death.”
Margaret still said nothing. She averted her head.
“I’ve lived ninety years, lass. And I still don’t know any more about it than that dog there. Yet young fools like Ralph Blodgett always know, talking about the final reality.”
Margaret looked at her sullenly. “But, Shakespeare talked so, and so did Milton and Voltaire—”
“Yes, they did. But they had health in them. There’s no health in that Ralph Blodgett. Not yet, anyway. I ain’t saying a man can’t look for God and wonder about everything, so long as he keeps his feet firm in the earth. These men did. They were men of the earth, strong and steady, and they could afford to listen to the enemy in their heads occasionally. But this Blodgett boy; he has no feeling for the land, no strength. He thinks to work until you sweat is vulgar. Thinks his boredom sets him apart, makes him better than real folks. But his boredom, if it is real, is only proof of a blank spirit.”
“You mean you want me to marry John Hobart, is that it, Granny?”
Margot slowly let the clod of earth fall.
“You’ve got to decide that yourself, Margot. But with Johnny Hobart, rascal that he is, you’ll be safe. Safe from Ralph’s things that will destroy you, make you sick, and in the end make you wish you’d never set eyes on him. He—”
“Oh, Granny, you make me tired! He’s a poet, a real poet! And someday the world will recognize that—”
“I shouldn’t wonder,” said the old woman with a shrug. “The world always recognizes fools, especially fools that despise it.”
The girl stood up as though she could endure hearing no more. She started to speak, and then with a fierce gesture she strode off, her dog following her with more spirit now that they were homeward bound. Margot watched her tall strong figure striding over the meadow until the evening dimness made it unreal. The hills were quite dark now, gloomy and colorless. Distant cattle were lowing; in the barn behind the cabin old Bossy stamped, demanding.
‘I’ll go milk you soon, drat you!” muttered the old woman.
She leaned back against the trunk of the tree, looked over the land, lifted her eyes to the sky.
“I don’t know,” she muttered again. “I don’t know.” She felt very tired. She closed her eyes. Her shapeless garments, her powerful old figure, were absorbed in the dimness that overtook the woods. Soon she was not distinguishable from the other shadows about her.
At the other side of the valley, a pale moon drifted over the crest of the hills behind which the sun had so recently sunk. It began to outline the dark hulk of the mountains in ghostly light. Margot still sat, leaning against the trunk of the tree. Her eyes were closed, her great old arms on her knees, part of the clod of earth still between her fingers.
All night long the distant farmers heard the distressed lowing and crying of old Bossy. Once or twice a dog howled, and some superstitious farm woman shivered in her warm bed and murmured that there would be death that night.