The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 01, No. 05, March, 1858

"I tell ye, Doctor, if I'd 'a' had a sound arm, he'd 'a' gone after it; but I had to take it out in ratin' at him, and that night my mind was made up; I was bound to desart at the first land. And it come about that a fortnight after my arm had jined, and I could haul shrouds agin, we sighted the Marquesas, and bein' near about out o' water, the cap'en laid his course for the nearest land, and by daybreak of the second day we lay to in a small harbor, on the south side of an island where ships wa'n't very prompt to go commonly. But old Twist didn't care for cannibals nor wild beasts, when they stood in his way; and there wasn't but half a cask of water aboard, and that a hog wouldn't 'a' drank, only for the name on't. So we pulled ashore after some, and findin' a spring near by, was takin' it out, hand over hand, as fast as we could bale it up, when all of a sudden the mate see a bunch of feathers over a little bush near by, and yelled out to run for our lives, the savages was come.

"Now I had made up my mind to run away from the ship that very day, and all the while I'd been baling the water up I had been tryin' to lay my course so as to get quit of the boat's crew, and be off; but natur' is stronger than a man thinks. When I heerd the mate sing out, and see the men begin to run, I turned and run too, full speed, down to the shore; but my foot caught in some root or hole, I fell flat down, and hittin' my head ag'inst a stone near by, I lay; good as dead; and when I come to, the boat was gone, and the ship makin' all sail out of harbor, and a crew of wild Indian women were a-lookin' at me as I've seen a set of Simsbury women-folks look at a baboon in a caravan; but they treated me better!

"Findin' I was helpless, for I'd sprained my ankle in the fall, four of 'em picked me up, and carried me away to a hut, and tended me like a baby; and when the men, who'd come over to that side of the island 'long with 'em, and gone a-fishin', come back, I was safe enough; for women are women all the world over, soft-hearted, kindly creturs, that like anything that's in trouble, 'specially if they can give it a lift out on't. So I was nursed, and fed, and finally taken over the ridge of rocks that run acrost the island to their town of bamboo huts; and now begun to look about me, for here I was, stranded, as one may say, out o' sight o' land.

"Ships didn't never touch there, I knew by their ways, their wonderin' and takin' sights at me. As for Cap'en Twist, he wouldn't come back for his own father, unless he was short o' hands for whalin'. I was in for life, no doubt on't; and I'd better look at the fair-weather side of the thing. The island was as pretty a bit of land as ever lay betwixt sea and sky; full of tall cocoa-nut palms, with broad, feathery tops, and bunches of brown nuts; bananas hung in yellow clumps ready to drop off at a touch; and big bread-fruit trees stood about everywhere, lookin' as though a punkin-vine had climbed up into 'em and hung half-ripe punkins off of every bough; beside lots of other trees that the natives set great store by, and live on the fruit of 'em; and flyin' through all, such pretty birds as you never see except in them parts; but one brown thrasher'd beat the whole on 'em singin'; fact is, they run to feathers; they don't sing none.

"It was as sightly a country as ever Adam and Eve had to themselves; but it wa'n't home. Howsomever, after a while the savages took to me mightily. I was allers handy with tools, and by good luck I'd come off with two jack-knives and a loose awl in my jacket-pocket, so I could beat 'em all at whittlin'; and I made figgers on their bows an' pipe-stems, of things they never see,—roosters, and horses, Miss Buel's old sleigh, and the Albany stage, driver'n' all, and our yoke of oxen a-ploughin',—till nothin' would serve them but I should have a house o' my own, and be married to their king's daughter; so I did.

"Well, Doctor, you kinder wonder I forgot Hetty Buel. I didn't forget her, but I knew she wa'n't to be had anyhow; I thought I was in for life; and Wailua was the prettiest little craft that ever you set eyes on, as straight as a spar, and as kindly as a Christian; and besides, I had to, or I'd have been killed, and broiled, and eaten, whether or no! And then in that 'are latitude it a'n't just the way 'tis here; you don't work; you get easy, and lazy, and sleepy; somethin' in the air kind of hushes you up; it makes you sweat to think, and you're too hazy to, if it didn't; and you don't care for nothing much but food and drink. I hadn't no spunk left; so I married her after their fashion, and I liked her well enough; and she was my wife, after all.

"I tell ye, Doctor, it goes a gret way with men-folks to think anything's their'n, and nobody else's. But when I married her, I took the chain with Hetty Buel's ring off my neck, and put 'em in a shell, and buried the shell under my doorway. I couldn't have Wailua touch that.

"So there I lived fifteen long year, as it might be, in a kind of a curus dream, doin' nothin' much, only that when I got to know the tongue them savages spoke, little by little I got pretty much the steerin' o' the hull crew, till by-'n'-by some of 'em got jealous, and plotted and planned to kill me, because the king, Wailua's father, was gettin' old, and they thought I wanted to be king when he died, and they couldn't stan' that no way.

"Somehow or other Wailua got word of what was goin' on, and one night she woke me out of sleep an' told me I must run for't, and she would hide me safe till things took a turn. So I scratched up the shell with Hetty's ring in't, and afore morning I was over t'other side of the island, in a kind of a cave overlookin' the sea, near by to a grove of bananas and mammee apples, and not fur from the harbor where I'd landed; and safe enough, for nobody but Wailua knew the way to't.

"Well, the sixth day I sot in the porthole of that cave I see a sail in the offing. I declare, I thought I should 'a' choked! I catched off my tappa cloth and h'isted it on a pole, but the ship kep' on stiddy out to sea. My heart beat up to my eyes, but I held on ag'inst hope, and I declare I prayed; words come to me that I hadn't said since I was a boy to Simsbury, and the Lord he heerd; for, as true as the compass, that ship lay to, tacked, put in for the island, and afore night I was aboard of the Lysander, a Salem whaler, with my mouth full of grog and ship-biscuit, and my body in civilized toggery. I own I felt queer to go away so and leave Wailua; but I knew 'twas gettin' her out of danger, for the old king was just a-goin' to die, and if ever I'd have gone back, we should both have been murdered. Besides, we didn't always agree; she had to walk straighter than her wild natur' agreed with, because she was my wife; and we hadn't no children to hold us together; and I couldn't 'a' taken her aboard of the whaler, if she'd wanted to go. I guess it was best; anyhow, so it was.

"But this wasn't to be the end of my v'yagin'. The Lysander foundered just off Valparaiso; and though all hands was saved in the boats, when we got to port there wasn't no craft there bound any nearer homeward than an English merchant-ship, for Liverpool, by way of Madeira. So I worked a passage to Funchal, and there I got aboard of a Southampton steamer, bound for Cuba, that put in for coal. But when I come to Havana I was nigh about tuckered out; for goin' round the Horn in the Lemon, —that 'are English ship,—I'd ben on duty in all sorts o' weather; and I'd lived lazy and warm so long I expect it was too tough for me, and I was pestered with a hard cough, and spit blood, so't I was laid up a long spell in the hospital at Havana. And there I kep' a-thinkin' over Hetty's Bible, and I b'lieve I studied that 'are chart till I found out the way to port, and made up my log all square for the owner; for I knowed well enough where I was bound; but I did hanker to get home to Simsbury afore shovin' off.

"Well, finally, there come into the harbor a Mystic ship that was a-goin' down the Gulf for a New York owner. I'd known Seth Crane, the cap'en of her, away back in old Simsbury times. He was an Avon boy; and when I sighted that vessel's name, as I was crawlin' along the quay one day, and, seein' she was Connecticut-built, boarded her, and see Seth, I was old fool enough to cry right out,—I was so shaky. And Seth he was about as scart as ef he'd seen the dead, havin' heerd up to Avon, fifteen year ago nearly, that the Lowisy Miles had been run down off the Sandwich Islands by a British man-of-war, and all hands lost, exceptin' one o' the boys. However, he come to his bearin's after a while, and told me about our folks, and how't Hetty Buel wasn't married, but keepin' deestrict school, and her old grandmother alive yet.

"Well, I kinder heartened up, and agreed to take passage with Seth.—Good Lord, Doctor! what's that?"

A peculiar and oppressive stillness had settled down on everything in and out of the hospital while Jackson was going on with his story. I noticed it only as the hush of a tropic midnight; but as he spoke, I heard—apparently out on the prairie—a heavy jarring sound like repeated blows, drawing nearer and nearer the building.

Jackson sprung upright on his pillows, the hectic passed from either gaunt and sallow cheek, leaving the red and blue tattoo marks visible in most ghastly distinctness, while the sweat poured in drops down his hollow temples.

The noise drew still nearer. All the patients in the ward awoke and quitted their beds, hastily. The noise was at hand,—blows of great violence and power; and a certain malign rapidity shook the walls from one end of the hospital to the other,—blow upon blow, like the fierce attacks of a catapult, only with no like result. The nurse, a German Catholic, fell on his knees and told his beads, glancing over his shoulder in undisguised horror; the patients cowered together, groaning and praying; and I could hear the stir and confusion in the ward below. In less than a minute's space the singular sound passed through the house, and in hollow, jarring echoes died out toward the bay.

I looked at Eben;—his jaw had fallen; his hands were rigid and locked together; his eyes were rolled upward, fixed and glassy; a stream of scarlet blood trickled over his gray beard from the corner of his mouth;—he was dead! As I laid him back on the pillow and turned to restore some quiet to the ward, a Norther came sweeping down the Gulf like a rush of mad spirits; tore up the white crests of the sea and flung them on the beach in thundering surf; burst through the heavy fog that had trailed upon the moon's track and smothered the island in its soft pestilent brooding; and in one mighty pouring out of cold pure ether changed earth and sky from torrid to temperate zone.

Vainly did I endeavor to calm the terror of my patients, excited still more by the elemental uproar without; vainly did I harangue them, in the plainest terms to which science is reducible, on atmospheric vibrations, acoustics, reverberations, and volcanic agencies; they insisted on some supernatural power having produced the recent fearful sounds. Neither common nor uncommon sense could prevail with them; and when they discovered, by the appearance of the extra nurse I had sent for, to perform the last offices for Jackson, that he was dead, a renewed and irrepressible horror attacked them, and it was broad day before composure or stillness was regained in any part of the building except my own rooms, to which I betook myself as soon as possible, and slept till sunrise, too soundly for any mystical visitation whatever to have disturbed my rest.

The next day, in spite of the brief influence of the Norther, the first case of yellow fever showed itself in the hospital; before night seven had sickened, and one, already reduced by chronic disease, died. I had hoped to bury Jackson decently, in the cemetery of the city, where his vexed mortality might rest in peace under the oleanders and china-trees, shut in by the hedge of Cherokee roses that guards the enclosure from the prairie, a living wall of glassy green, strewn with ivory-white buds and blossoms, fair and pure; but on applying for a burial-spot, the city authorities, panic-stricken cowards that they were, denied me the privilege even of a prairie grave, outside the cemetery hedge, for the poor fellow. In vain did I represent that he had died of lingering disease, and that nowise contagious; nothing moved them. It was enough that there was yellow fever in the ward where he died. I was forthwith strictly ordered to have all the dead from the hospital buried on the sand-flats at the east end of the island.

What a place that is it is scarcely possible to describe. Wide and dreary levels of sand, some four or five feet lower than the town, and flooded by high tides; the only vegetation a scanty, dingy gray, brittle, crackling growth,—bitter sandworts and the like; over and through which the abominable tawny sand-crabs are constantly executing diabolic waltzes on the tips of their eight legs, vanishing into the ground like imps as you approach; curlews start from behind the loose drifts of sand and float away with heartbroken cries seaward; little sandpipers twitter plaintively, running through the weeds; and great, sulky, gray cranes droop their motionless heads over the still salt pools along the shore.

To this blank desolation I was forced to carry poor Jackson's body, with that of the fever-patient, just at sunset. As the Dutchman who officiated as hearse, sexton, bearer, and procession, stuck his spade into the ground, and withdrew it full of crumbling shells and fine sand, the hole it left filled with bitter black ooze. There, sunk in the ooze, covered with the shifting sand, bewailed by the wild cries of sea-birds, noteless and alone, I left Eben Jackson, and returned to the mass of pestilence and wretchedness within the hospital walls.

In the spring I reached home safely. None but the resident on a Southern sand-bank can fully appreciate the verdure and bloom of the North. The great elms of my native town were full of tender buds, like a clinging mist in their graceful branches; earlier trees were decked with little leaves, deep-creased, and silvery with down; the wide river in a fluent track of metallic lustre weltered through green meadows that on either hand stretched far and wide; the rolling land beyond was spread out in pastures, where the cattle luxuriated after the winter's stalling; and on many a slope and plain the patient farmer turned up his heavy sods and clay, to moulder in sun and air for seed-time and harvest; and the beautiful valley that met the horizon on the north and south rolled away eastward and westward to a low blue range of hills, that guarded it with granite walls and bristling spears of hemlock and pine.

This is not my story; and if it were, I do not know that I should detail my home-coming. It is enough to say, that I came after a five years' absence, and found all that I had left nearly as I had left it;—how few can say as much!

Various duties and some business arrangements kept me at work for six or seven weeks, and it was June before I could fulfil my promise to Eben Jackson. I took the venerable old horse and chaise that had carried my father on his rounds for years, and made the best of my way out toward Simsbury. I was alone, of course; even Cousin Lizzy, charming as five years had made the little girl of thirteen whom I had left behind on quitting home, was not invited to share my drive; there was something too serious in the errand to endure the presence of a gay young lady. But I was not lonely; the drive up Talcott Mountain, under the rude portcullis of the toll-gate, through fragrant woods, by trickling brooks, past huge boulders that scarce a wild vine dare cling to, with its feeble, delicate tendrils, is all exquisite, and full of living repose; and turning to descend the mountain, just where a brook drops headlong with clattering leap into a steep black ravine, and comes out over a tiny green meadow, sliding past great granite rocks, and bending the grass-blades to a shining track, you see suddenly at your feet the beautiful mountain valley of the Farmington river, trending away in hill after hill,—rough granite ledges crowned with cedar and pine,—deep ravines full of heaped rocks,—and here and there the formal white rows of a manufacturing village, where Kühleborn is captured and forced to turn water-wheels, and Undine picks cotton or grinds hardware, dammed into utility.

Into this valley I plunged, and inquiring my way of many a prim farmer's wife and white-headed school-boy, I edged my way northward under the mountain side, and just before noon found myself beneath the "great ellum," where, nearly twenty years ago, Eben Jackson and Hetty Buel had said good-bye.

I tied my horse to the fence and walked up the worn footpath to the door. Apparently no one was at home. Under this impression I knocked vehemently, by way of making sure; and a weak, cracked voice at length answered, "Come in!" There, by the window, perhaps the same where she sat so long before, crouched in an old chair covered with calico, her bent fingers striving with mechanical motion to knit a coarse stocking, sat old Mrs. Buel. Age had worn to the extreme of attenuation a face that must always have been hard-featured, and a few locks of snow-white hair, straying from under the bandanna handkerchief of bright red and orange that was tied over her cap and under her chin, added to the old-world expression of her whole figure. She was very deaf; scarcely could I make her comprehend that I wanted to see her grand-daughter; at last she understood, and asked me to sit down till Hetty should come from school; and before long, a tall, thin figure opened the gate and came slowly up the path.

I had a good opportunity to observe the constant, dutiful, self-denying Yankee girl,—girl no longer, now that twenty years of unrewarded patience had lined her face with unmistakable graving. But I could not agree with Eben's statement that she was not pretty; she must have been so in her youth; even now there was beauty in her deep-set and heavily fringed dark eyes, soft, tender, and serious, and in the noble and pensive Greek outline of the brow and nose; her upper lip and chin were too long to agree well with her little classic head, but they gave a certain just and pure expression to the whole face, and to the large thin-lipped mouth, flexible yet firm in its lines. It is true, her hair was neither abundant, nor wanting in gleaming threads of gray; her skin was freckled, sallow, and devoid of varying tint or freshness; her figure angular and spare; her hands red with hard work; and her air at once sad and shy;—still, Hetty Buel was a very lovely woman in my eyes, though I doubt if Lizzy would have thought so.

I hardly knew how to approach the painful errand I had come on, and with true masculine awkwardness I cut the matter short by drawing out from my pocket-book the Panama chain and ring, and placing them in her hands. Well as I thought I knew the New England character, I was not prepared for so quiet a reception of this token as she gave it. With a steady hand she untwisted the wire fastening of the chain, slipped the ring off, and, bending her head, placed it reverently on the ring-finger of her left hand;—brief, but potent ceremony; and over without preface or comment, but over for all time.

Still holding the chain, she offered me a chair, and sat down herself,—a little paler, a little more grave, than on entering.

"Will you tell me how and where he died, Sir?" said she,—evidently having long considered the fact in her heart as a fact; probably having heard Seth Crane's story of the Louisa Miles's loss.

I detailed my patient's tale as briefly and sympathetically as I knew how. The episode of Wailua caused a little flushing of lip and cheek, a little twisting of the ring, as if it were not to be worn, after all; but as I told of his sacred care of the trinket for its giver's sake, and the not unwilling forsaking of that island wife, the restless motion passed away, and she listened quietly to the end; only once lifting her left hand to her lips, and resting her head on it for a moment, as I detailed the circumstances of his death, after supplying what was wanting in his own story, from the time of his taking passage in Crane's ship, to their touching at the island, expressly to leave him in the Hospital, when a violent hemorrhage had disabled him from further voyaging.

I was about to tell her I had seen him decently buried,—of course omitting descriptions of the how and where,—when the grandmother, who had been watching us with the impatient querulousness of age, hobbled across the room to ask "what that 'are man was a-talkin' about."

Briefly and calmly, in the key long use had suited to her infirmity, Hetty detailed the chief points of my story.

"Dew tell!" exclaimed the old woman; "Eben Jackson a'n't dead on dry land, is he? Left means, eh?"

I walked away to the door, biting my lip. Hetty, for once, reddened to the brow; but replaced her charge in the chair and followed me to the gate.

"Good day, Sir," said she, offering me her hand,—and then slightly hesitating,—"Grandmother is very old. I thank you, Sir! I thank you kindly!"

As she turned and went toward the house, I saw the glitter of the Panama chain about her thin and sallow throat, and, by the motion of her hands, that she was retwisting the same wire fastening that Eben Jackson had manufactured for it.

Five years after, last June, I went to Simsbury with a gay picnic party.

This time Lizzy was with me; indeed, she generally is now.

I detached myself from the rest, after we were fairly arranged for the day, and wandered away alone to "Miss Buel's."

The house was closed, the path grassy, a sweetbrier bush had blown across the door, and was gay with blossoms; all was still, dusty, desolate. I could not be satisfied with this. The meeting-house was as near as any neighbor's, and the graveyard would ask me no curious questions; I entered it doubting; but there, "on the leeward side," near to the grave of "Bethia Jackson, wife of John Eben Jackson," were two new stones, one dated but a year later than the other, recording the deaths of "Temperance Buel, aged 96," and "Hester Buel, aged 44."

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