UNUSED,” that was one of the words the Doctor used that day in speaking of her. He, the doctor, was an extraordinarily large and immaculately clean man, by whom I was at that time employed. I swept out his office, mowed the lawn before his residence, took care of the two horses in his stable and did odd jobs about the yard and kitchen—such as bringing in firewood, putting water in a tub in the sun behind a grape arbor for the doctor’s bath and even sometimes, during his bath, scrubbing for him those parts of his broad back he himself could not reach.
The doctor had a passion in life with which he early infected me. He loved fishing and as he knew all of the good places in the river, several miles west of town, and in Sandusky Bay, some nineteen or twenty miles to the north, we often went off for long delightful days together.
It was late in the afternoon of such a fishing day in the late June, when the doctor and I were together in a boat on the bay, that a farmer came running to the shore, waving his arms and calling to the doctor. Little May Edgley’s body had been found floating near a river’s mouth half a mile away, and, as she had been dead for several days, as the doctor had just had a good bite, and as there was nothing he could do anyway, it was all nonsense, his being called. I remembered how he growled and grumbled. He did not then know what had happened but the fish were just beginning to bite splendidly, I had just landed a fine bass and the good evening’s fishing was all ahead of us. Well, you know how it is—a doctor is always at everyone’s beck and call.
“Dang it all! That’s the way it always goes! Here we are—as good a fishing evening as we’ll find this summer—wind just right and the sky clouding over—and will you look at my dang luck? A doctor in the neighborhood and that farmer knows it and so, just to accommodate me, he goes and stubs his toe, like as not, or his boy falls out of a barn loft, or his old woman gets the toothache. Like as not it’s one of his women folks. I know ’em! His wife’s got an unmarried sister living with her. Dang sentimental old maid! She’s got a nervous complaint—gets all worked up and thinks she’s going to die. Die nothing! I know that kind. Lots of ’em like to have a doctor fooling around. Let a doctor come near, so they can get him alone in a room, and they’ll spend hours talking about themselves—if he’ll let ’em.”
The doctor was reeling in his line, grumbling and complaining as he did so and then, suddenly, with the characteristic cheerfulness that I had seen carry him with a smile on his lips through whole days and nights of work and night driving over rough frozen earth roads in the winter, he picked up the oars and rowed vigorously ashore. When I offered to take the oars he shook his head. “No kid, it’s good for the figure,” he said, looking down at his huge paunch. He smiled. “I got to keep my figure. If I don’t I’ll be losing some of my practice among the unmarried women.”
As for the business ashore—there was May Edgley, of our town, drowned in that out of the way place, and her body had been in the water several days. It had been found among some willows that grew near the mouth of a deep creek that emptied into the bay, had lodged in among the roots of the willows, and when we got ashore the farmer, his son and the hired man, had got it out and had laid it on some boards near a barn that faced the bay.
That was my own first sight of death and I shall not forget the moment when I followed the doctor in among the little group of silent people standing about and saw the dead, discolored and bloated body of the woman lying there.
The doctor was used to that sort of thing, but to me it was all new and terrifying. I remember that I looked once and then ran away. Dashing into the barn I went to lean against the feedbox of a stall, where an old farm-horse was eating hay. The warm day outside had suddenly seemed cold and chill but in the barn it was warm again. Oh, what a lovely thing to a boy is a barn, with the rich warm comforting smell of the cured hay and the animal life, lying like a soft bed over it all. At the doctor’s house, while I lived and worked there, the doctor’s wife used to put on my bed, on winter nights, a kind of soft warm bed cover called a “comfortable.” That’s what it was like to me that day in the barn when we had just found May Edgley’s body.
As for the body—well, May Edgley had been a small woman with small firm hands and in one of her hands, tightly gripped, when they had found her, was a woman’s hat—a great broad-brimmed gaudy thing it must have been, and there had been a huge ostrich feather sticking out of the top, such an ostrich feather as you see sometimes sticking out of the hat of a kind of big flashy woman at the horse races or at second-rate summer resorts near cities.
It stayed in my mind, that bedraggled ostrich feather, little May Edgley’s hand had gripped so determinedly when death came, and as I stood shivering in the barn I could see it again, as I had so often seen it perched on the head of big bold Lil Edgley, May Edgley’s sister, as she went, half-defiantly always, through the streets of our town, Bidwell, Ohio.
And then as I stood shivering with boyish dread of death in that old barn, the farm-horse put his head through an opening at the front of the stall and rubbed his soft warm nose against my cheek. The farmer, on whose place we were, must have been one who was kind to his animals. The old horse rubbed his nose up and down my cheek. “You are a long ways from death, my lad, and when the time comes for you you won’t shiver so much. I am old and I know. Death is a kind comforting thing to those who are through with their lives.”
Something of that sort the old farmhorse seemed to be saying and at any rate he quieted me, took the fear and the chill all out of me.
It was when the doctor and I were driving home together that evening in the dusk, and after all arrangements for sending May Edgley’s body back to town and to her people had been made, that he spoke of her and used the word I am now using as the title for her story. The doctor said a great many things that evening that I cannot now remember and I only remember how the night came softly on and how the grey road faded out of sight, and then how the moon came out and the road that had been grey became silvery white, with patches of inky blackness where the shadows of trees fell across it. The doctor was one sane enough not to talk down to a boy. How often he spoke intimately to me of his impressions of men and events! There were many things in the fat old doctor’s mind of which his patients knew nothing, but of which his stable boy knew.
The doctor’s old bay horse went steadily along, doing his work as cheerfully as the doctor did his and the doctor smoked a cigar. He spoke of the dead woman, May Edgley, and of what a bright girl she had been.
As for her story—he did not tell it completely. I was myself much alive that evening—that is to say the imaginative side of myself was much alive—and the doctor was as a sower, sowing seed in a fertile soil. He was as one who goes through a wide long field, newly plowed by the hand of Death, the plowman, and as he went along he flung wide the seeds of May Edgley’s story, wide, far over the land, over the rich fertile land of a boy’s awakening imagination.
There were three boys and as many girls in the Edgley family of Bidwell, Ohio, and of the girls Lillian and Kate were known in a dozen towns along the railroad that ran between Cleveland and Toledo. The fame of Lillian, the eldest, went far. On the streets of the neighboring towns of Clyde, Norwalk, Fremont, Tiffin, and even in Toledo and Cleveland, she was well known. On summer evenings she went up and down our main street wearing a huge hat with a white ostrich feather that fell down almost to her shoulder. She, like her sister Kate, who never succeeded in attaining to a position of prominence in the town’s life, was a blonde with cold staring blue eyes. On almost any Friday evening she might have been seen setting forth on some adventure, from which she did not return until the following Monday or Tuesday. It was evident the adventures were profitable, as the Edgley family were working folk and it is certain her brothers did not purchase for her the endless number of new dresses in which she arrayed herself.
It was a Friday evening in the summer and Lillian appeared on the upper main street of Bidwell. Two dozen men and boys loafed by the station platform, awaiting the arrival of the New York Central train, eastward bound. They stared at Lillian who stared back at them. In the west, from which direction the train was presently to come, the sun went down over young corn fields. A dusky golden splendor lit the skies and the loafers were awed into silence, hushed, both by the beauty of the evening and by the challenge in Lillian’s eyes.
Then the train arrived and the spell of silence was broken. The conductor and brakeman jumped to the station platform and waved their hands at Lillian and the engineer put his head out of the cab.
Aboard the train Lillian found a seat by herself and as soon as the train had started and the fares were collected the conductor came to sit with her. When the train arrived at the next town and the conductor was compelled to attend to his affairs, the brakeman came to lean over her seat. The men talked in undertones and occasionally the silence in the car was broken by outbursts of laughter. Other women from Bidwell, going to visit relatives in distant towns, were embarrassed. They turned their heads to look out at car windows and their cheeks grew red.
On the station platform at Bidwell, where darkness was settling down over the scene, the men and boys still lingered about speaking of Lillian and her adventures. “She can ride anywhere she pleases and never has to pay a cent of fare,” declared a tall bearded man who leaned against the station door. He was a buyer of pigs and cattle and was compelled to go to the Cleveland market once every week. The thought of Lillian, the light o’ love traveling free over the railroads filled his heart with envy and anger.
The entire Edgley family bore a shaky reputation in Bidwell but with the exception of May, the youngest of the girls, they were people who knew how to take care of themselves. For years Jake, the eldest of the boys, tended bar for Charley Shuter in a saloon in lower Main Street and then, to everyone’s surprise, he bought out the place. “Either Lillian gave him the money or he stole it from Charley,” the men said, but nevertheless, and throwing moral standards aside, they went into the bar to buy drinks. In Bidwell vice, while openly condemned, was in secret looked upon as a mark of virility in young manhood.
Frank and Will Edgley were teamsters and draymen like their father John and were hard working men. They owned their own teams and asked favors of no man and when they were not at work did not seek the society of others. Late on Saturday afternoons, when the week’s work was done and the horses cleaned, fed and bedded down for the night they dressed themselves in black suits, put on white collars and black derby hats and went into our main street to drink themselves drunk. By ten o’clock they had succeeded and went reeling homeward. When in the darkness under the maple trees on Vine or Walnut Streets they met a Bidwell citizen, also homeward bound, a row started. “Damn you, get out of our way. Get off the sidewalk,” Frank Edgley shouted and the two men rushed forward intent on a fight.
One evening in the month of June, when there was a moon and when insects sang loudly in the long grass between the sidewalks and the road, the Edgley brothers met Ed Pesch, a young German farmer, out for an evening’s walk with Caroline Dupee, daughter of a Bidwell drygoods merchant, and the fight the Edgley boys had long been looking for took place. Frank Edgley shouted and he and his brother plunged forward but Ed Pesch did not run into the road and leave them to go triumphantly homeward. He fought and the brothers were badly beaten, and on Monday morning appeared driving their team and with faces disfigured and eyes blackened. For a week they went up and down alleyways and along residence streets, delivering ice and coal to houses and merchandise to the stores without lifting their eyes or speaking. The town was delighted and clerks ran from store to store making comments, they longed to repeat within hearing of one of the brothers. “Have you seen the Edgley boys?” they asked one another. “They got what was coming to them. Ed Pesch gave them what for.” The more excitable and imaginative of the clerks spoke of the fight in the darkness as though they had been on hand and had seen every blow struck. “They are bullies and can be beaten by any man who stands up for his rights,” declared Walter Wills, a slender, nervous young man who worked for Albert Twist, the grocer. The clerk hungered to be such another fighter as Ed Pesch had proven himself. At night he went home from the store in the soft darkness and imagined himself as meeting the Edgleys. “I’ll show you—you big bullies,” he muttered and his fists shot out, striking at nothingness. An eager strained feeling ran along the muscles of his back and arms but his night time courage did not abide with him through the day. On Wednesday when Will Edgley came to the back door of the store, his wagon loaded with salt in barrels, Walter went into the alleyway to enjoy the sight of the cut lips and blackened eyes. Will stood with hands in pockets looking at the ground. An uncomfortable silence ensued and in the end it was broken by the voice of the clerk. “There’s no one here and those barrels are heavy,” he said heartily. “I might as well make myself useful and help you unload.” Taking off his coat Walter Wills voluntarily helped at the task that belonged to Will Edgley, the drayman.
If May Edgley, during her girlhood, rose higher than any of the others of the Edgley family she also fell lower. “She had her chance and threw it away,” was the word that went round and surely no one else in that family ever had so completely the town’s sympathy. Lillian Edgley was outside the pale of the town’s life, and Kate was but a lesser edition of her sister. She waited on table at the Fownsby House, and on almost any evening might have been seen walking out with some traveling man. She also took the evening train to neighboring towns but returned to Bidwell later on the same night or at daylight the next morning. She did not prosper as Lillian did and grew tired of the dullness of small town life. At twenty-two she went to live in Cleveland where she got a job as cloak model in a large store. Later she went on the road as an actress, in a burlesque show, and Bidwell heard no more of her.
As for May Edgley, all through her childhood and until her seventeenth year she was a model of good behavior. Everyone spoke of it. She was, unlike the other Edgleys, small and dark, and unlike her sisters dressed herself in plain neat-fitting clothes. As a young girl in the public school she began to attract attention because of her proficiency in the classes. Both Lillian and Kate Edgley had been slovenly students, who spent their time ogling boys and the men teachers but May looked at no one and as soon as school was dismissed in the afternoon went home to her mother, a tall tired-looking woman who seldom went out of her own house.
In Bidwell, Tom Means, who later became a soldier and who has recently won high rank in the army because of his proficiency in training recruits for the World War, was the prize pupil in the schools. Tom was working for his appointment to West Point, and did not spend his evenings loafing on the streets, as did other young men. He stayed in his own house, intent on his studies. Tom’s father was a lawyer and his mother was third cousin to a Kentucky woman who had married an English baronet. The son aspired to be a soldier and a gentleman and to live on the intellectual plane, and had a good deal of contempt for the mental capacities of his fellow students, and when one of the Edgley family set up as his rival he was angry and embarrassed and the schoolroom was delighted. Day after day and year after year the contest between him and May Edgley went on and in a sense the whole town of Bidwell got back of the girl. In all such things as history and English literature Tom swept all before him but in spelling, arithmetic, and geography May defeated him without effort. At her desk she sat like a little terrier in the presence of a trap filled with rats. A question was asked or a problem in arithmetic put on the blackboard and like a terrier she jumped. Her hand went up and her sensitive mouth quivered. Fingers were snapped vigorously. “I know,” she said, and the entire class knew she did. When she had answered the question or had gone to the blackboard to solve the problem the half-grown children along the rows of benches laughed and Tom Means stared out through a window. May returned to her seat, half triumphant, half ashamed of her victory.
The country lying west of Bidwell, like all the Ohio country down that way, is given to small fruit and berry raising, and in June and after school has been dismissed for the year all the younger men, boys, and girls, with most of the women of the town go to work in the fruit harvest. To the fields immediately after breakfast the citizens go trooping away. Lunches are carried in baskets and until the sun goes down everyone stays in the fields.
And in the berry fields as in the schoolroom May was a notable figure. She did not walk or ride to the work with the other young girls, or join the parties at lunch at the noon hour, but everyone understood that that was because of her family. “I know how she feels, if I came from a family like that I wouldn’t ask or want other people’s attention,” said one of the women, the wife of a carpenter, who trudged along with the others in the dust of the road.
In a berry field, belonging to a farmer named Peter Short, some thirty women, young men and tall awkward boys crawled over the ground, picking the red fragrant berries. Ahead of them, in a row by herself, went May, the exclusive, the woman who walked by herself. Her hands flitted in and out of the berry vines as the tail of a squirrel disappears among the leaves of a tree when one walks in a wood. The other pickers went slowly, stopping occasionally to eat berries and talk and when one had crawled a little ahead of the others he stopped and waited, sitting on his haunches. The pickers were paid in proportion to the number of quarts picked during the day but, as they often said, “pay was not everything.” The berry picking was in a way a social function, and who were the pickers, wives, sons and daughters of prosperous artisans, to kill themselves for a few paltry dollars?
With May Edgley they understood it was different. Everyone knew that she and her mother got practically no money from John Edgley, the father—from the boys, Jake, Frank and Will—or from the girls, Lilian and Kate, who spent their takings on clothes for themselves. If she were to be decently dressed, she had to earn the money for the purpose during the vacation time when she could stay out of school. Later it was understood she planned to be a school teacher herself, and to attain to that position it was necessary that she keep herself well dressed and show herself industrious and alert in affairs.
Tirelessly, therefore, May worked and the boxes of berries, filled by her ever alert fingers, grew into mountains. Peter Short with his son came walking down the rows to gather the filled crates and put them aboard a wagon to be hauled to town. He looked at May with pride in his eyes and the other pickers lumbering slowly along became the target for his scorn. “Ah, you talking women and you big lazy boys, you’re not much good,” he cried. “Ain’t you ashamed of yourselves? Look at you there, Sylvester and Al—letting yourself be beat, twice over, by a girl so little you could almost carry her home in your pocket.”
It was in the summer of her seventeenth year that May fell down from her high place in the life of the town of Bidwell. Two vital and dramatic events had happened to her that year. Her mother died in April and she graduated from the high school in June, second only in honors to Tom Means. As Tom’s father had been on the school board for years the town shook its head over the decision that placed him ahead of May and in everyone’s eyes May had really walked off with the prize. When she went into the fields, and when they remembered the fact of her mother’s recent death, even the women were ready to forget and forgive the fact of her being a member of the Edgley family. As for May, it seemed to her at that moment that nothing that could happen to her could very much matter.
And then the unexpected. As more than one Bidwell wife said afterwards to her husband. “It was then that blood showed itself.”
A man named Jerome Hadley first found out about May. He went that year to Peter Short’s field, as he himself said, “just for fun,” and he found it. Jerome was pitcher for the Bidwell baseball nine and worked as mail clerk on the railroad. After he had returned from a run he had several days’ rest and went to the berry field because the town was deserted. When he saw May working off by herself he winked at the other young men and going to her got down on his knees and began picking at a speed almost as great as her own. “Come on here, little woman,” he said, “I’m a mail clerk and have got my hand in, sorting letters. My fingers can go pretty fast. Come on now, let’s see if you can keep up with me.”
For an hour Jerome and May went up and down in the rows and then the thing happened that set the town by the ears. The girl, who had never talked to others, began talking to Jerome and the other pickers turned to look and wonder. She no longer picked at lightning speed but loitered along, stopping to rest and put choice berries into her mouth. “Eat that,” she said boldly passing a great red berry across the row to the man. She put a handful of berries into his box. “You won’t make as much as seventy-five cents all day if you don’t get a move on you,” she said, smiling shyly.
At the noon hour the other pickers found out the truth. The tired workers had gone to the pump by Peter Short’s house and then to a near-by orchard to sit under the trees and rest after the eating of lunches.
There was no doubt something had happened to May. Everyone felt it. It was later understood that she had, during that noon hour in June and quite calmly and deliberately, decided to become like her two sisters and go on the town.
The berry pickers as usual ate their lunches in groups, the women and girls sitting under one tree and the young men and boys under another. Peter Short’s wife brought hot coffee and tin cups were filled. Jokes went back and forth and the girls giggled.
In spite of the unexpectedness of May’s attitude toward Jerome, a bachelor and quite legitimate game for the unmarried women, no one suspected anything serious would happen. Flirtations were always going on in the berry fields. They came, played themselves out, and passed like the clouds in the June sky. In the evening, when the young men had washed the dirt of the fields away and had put on their Sunday clothes, things were different. Then a girl must look out for herself. When she went to walk in the evening with a young man under the trees or out into country lanes—then anything might happen.
But in the fields, with all the older women about—to have thought anything at all of a young man and a girl working together and blushing and laughing, would have been to misunderstand the whole spirit of the berry picking season.
And it was evident May had misunderstood. Later no one blamed Jerome, at least none of the young fellows did. As the pickers ate lunch May sat a little apart from the others. That was her custom and Jerry lay in the long grass at the edge of the orchard also a little apart. A sudden tenseness crept into the groups under the trees. May had not gone to the pump with the others when she came in from the field but sat with her back braced against a tree and the hand that held the sandwich was black with the soil of her morning labors. It trembled and once the sandwich fell out of her hand.
Suddenly she got to her feet and put her lunch basket into the fork of a tree, and then, with a look of defiance in her eyes, she climbed over a fence and started along a lane past Peter Short’s barn. The lane ran down to a meadow, crossed a bridge and went on beside a waving wheatfield to a wood.
May went a little way along the lane and then stopped to look back and the other pickers stared at her, wondering what was the matter. Then Jerome Hadley got to his feet. He was ashamed and climbed awkwardly over the fence and walked away without looking back.
Everyone was quite sure it had all been arranged. As the girls and women got to their feet and stood watching, May and Jerome went out of the lane and into the wood. The older women shook their heads. “Well, well,” they exclaimed while the boys and young men began slapping each other on the back and prancing grotesquely about.
It was unbelievable. Before they had got out of sight of the others under the tree Jerome had put his arm about May’s waist and she had put her head down on his shoulder. It was as though May Edgley who, as all the older women agreed, had been treated almost as an equal by all of the others had wanted to throw something ugly right in their faces.
Jerome and May stayed for two hours in the wood and then came back together to the field where the others were at work. May’s cheeks were pale and she looked as though she had been crying. She picked alone as before and after a few moments of awkward silence Jerome put on his coat and went off along a road toward town. May made a little mountain of filled berry boxes during that afternoon but two or three times filled boxes dropped out of her hands. The spilled fruit lay red and shining against the brown and black of the soil.
No one saw May in the berry fields after that, and Jerome Hadley had something of which to boast. In the evening when he came among the young fellows he spoke of his adventure at length.
“You couldn’t blame me for taking the chance when I had it,” he said laughing. He explained in detail what had occurred in the wood, while other young men stood about filled with envy. As he talked he grew both proud and a little ashamed of the public attention his adventure was attaining. “It was easy,” he said. “That May Edgley’s the easiest thing that ever lived in this town. A fellow don’t have to ask to get what he wants. That’s how easy it is.”