WHEN Alwyn was ten years old there was a solemn excitement at the farmhouse. His great-aunt Mary, the most romantic member of the family, was dead, and her daughter, a woman in black veils whom no one had seen before, brought her body to be buried at Hope's Corner, as she had requested. His grandparents and his father and mother went to the station to meet her, and they proceeded directly to the cemetery.
There Alwyn and his little sister waited on a stone pile, and stared over the fence, over the shrubs and the monuments, at the nearly soundless funeral. The tall stranger and the great blue-gray box had come a thousand miles from a place called Oklahoma City; and Alwyn breathed heavily as the coffin, covered with bouquets, disappeared in the new grave, because the heroine of an old story had come back to the place where her travels had begun.
This one of his great-aunts had undertaken many journeys in her lifetime. Later in the day her daughter, sitting on the porch between Alwyn's grandparents, told how her house was cluttered with souvenirs of the last journey, a trip to Europe, which appeared to have hastened the old woman's death: water in tiny bottles-water of the Rhine, the Jordan, the Nile; chips of stone from the Alps, and Vesuvian lava; shells from the Channel and the Ægean Sea, all carefully labeled; pressed flowers, a box of sand from the Sahara, and a picture frame of Italian mosaic like. petrified confetti, in which she had placed a tintype of herself and her sister Eliza when they were girls. The care of these relics was a problem; no one had any use for them; they would have to be thrown away. Alwyn wanted them, but his mother said it would be too expensive to have them sent from the Far West. Mary Tower, born Harris, had been brave, energetic, and virtuous; and Alwyn's grandmother, who had not seen her for half a century, loved her still, and said she was "the greatest of the pioneer women." This adventurous life embodied not all the womanly qualities of the period, but all that his grandmother admired and meant to praise. So she told the story of it whenever she was asked, and in her very old age, on important occasions such as family reunions. or Thanksgiving dinners, she began it without invitation.
Thus the life of this woman was fixed in Alwyn's memory like the plot of the first book he ever read. A life in profile, an almost incredible history, a boy's adventure story with a single female musketeer for heroine. . . . Her death added nothing to the adventure, and subtracted nothing from it; Alwyn's grandmother went on repeating the story—the same words appearing in the same order—as if she had been dead a long time, or had never actually lived, or could never die.
So, quite naturally, as Alwyn grew up, the October afternoon on which she was buried, among her relatives and his own, mingled in his memory with the afternoons of her girlhood, at the very beginning of the story. Autumn stood that day like a scarecrow at the crossroads, and the blackbirds, pigeons, and plovers fluttered overhead. Autumn had stood there before, its great sleeves flapping in the wind; and birds in October never know which way they are going. Across the road, like a large dry-goods box, stood the district school which he attended, where, before the Civil War, the dead woman's sister Eliza had taught. In Eliza Harris's day it was a hard school. The pupils had to stand around the stove in winter, three or four at a time, to keep their ears from freezing. Girls with full breasts and wild boys in their teens founded friendships and flirtations on plans to shame her and make her cry before the class.
One evening, when her work was done, Eliza turned the key in the lock and started home. She shivered at the clumps of bushes so close to the road that they seemed to stagger to meet her. As she passed a willow thicket two or three girls ran out, howling, with switches; half paralyzed by fear, she stumbled away, but received a dozen cuts under her long skirts. Speechless with sobbing and incessant fits of coughing, she pushed open the door of her mother's cabin.
Her failure as a teacher was a tragic misfortune, for her mother and sister lived on her salary. After Samuel Harris's death his widow had sold the small farm he had cleared in the 'forties, rearing the children on the proceeds; now they were penniless.
The widow Harris resembled Eliza. All that evening she shuffled up and down the one room in which they lived—Eliza crying in one corner, sixteen-year- old Mary giggling irrepressibly in another—now raging against the young hussies of the school, now scolding her daughters in turn.