In the shade of the tree

== IN THE SHADE OF THE TREE ==
=== by Wilbur Daniel Steele ===
From The Best Stories of Wilbur Daniel Steele 1946 
When you see a very old person you are apt to think,
what can there be in living, for that one? You wonder to yourself, what has he
got? Well, he's got this: he's got his memories. So have we all, you say. But
memories, you say, are not meat of adventure or wine of hope for daily
sustenance; they are but thin stuff, ghost and gone. You don't know the
memories of the old. 
A cow, walking across the morning pastures, tears her
mouthfuls here and there, half in haste, eye on some rich tuft ahead. A boy, a
man in his prime— he does the same. Broken grasses, little tasted. 
The savor is in the cud. Lying by and by in the shade
of the tree of age, redrawing it up the gullet of the years— no, it is no thin
stuff, ghost and gone. Now it begins for the first time to surrender its inner
juices to the unhurried tongue, presently pungent, vividly sweet. What is this?
A tang of wind-tossed stems from the hilltops of excitement. And this? Lush,
deep clover of loves accomplished, triumphs won. And this, to sting the appetite?
Thistle of passing sorrows and small defeats. 
No, no; commonly when a man comes to a certain age he
steps right clear of the law. He's eaten his cake, and here's his cake to eat
again. 
Commonly. But sometimes there's to be found an old man
condemned by this or that to live imprisoned in today, this morning, this
evening, tomorrow morning, dustily present, pitilessly awake. It's like the
predicament of a camel in the desert with his hump cut off. Or it's like that
torture devised to drive a man crazy, the trick of denying him sleep for days
and nights on end, continually jerking him back out of the beginnings of dreams
by a tickle or a buffet or an abrupt loud sound, like the ringing of a bell. 
In Leander Killen's case the instrument was, in fact,
a bell. The clangor of that bell, hung outside the back door where his garden
ran down to the river, had fetched him back to here-and-now so often, so many
hours, days, and years, that now he couldn't have dreamed off if it had stopped
and let him. It was as if his powers of reminiscence, too long denied, had
fallen into atrophy— worse than the powers even— the appetite. 
It's one thing to be a young man without a past; it's
another to be an old one. Leander had come clear of the law the wrong way. Not
only hadn't he his cake to eat; it was as though he never had had it; he hadn't
even the lingering taste of it left. He hadn't anything left now but his hatred
of that bell. 
He hadn't even his garden, and this was because his
eyes had been frozen permanently open by the habit of that alarm, and he
couldn't close them to repicture what a brave garden it once was; he had no way
of seeing it but as a senile, shallow ground, whiskered with fewer flowers,
beans, and lettuces than with weeds, now his hoe had grown so dull. 
Weeding is not so bad; it's work to do without
thinking. The trouble was, Leander thought about the weeds as he went at them,
having nothing else with which to occupy his mind. 
The two o'clock sun, coming from across the river, lay
on his face, a heavy glare. Bang, bang, feebly, with his hoe. How tough the
ragweed stems had grown. Stubborn things! Damned things! Bang, bang . . . 
Clang! . . . That bell! 
Shame that it was, there used to be a moment of
mutiny, in other days. 
There was none now. Letting the hoe handle fall from
his hand, he turned and hastened slowly up the garden. "Yes, yes, I'm
coming, ain't I?" 
He entered the kitchen. His eyes frozen open, he saw
everything there, the mop marks left by the woman who came in in the morning,
the towels drying on a string over the stove, the soiled plate of his dinner on
the oilcloth-covered table. He had never in his memory seen the room otherwise.
As many years as his rusty consciousness ran back, what seemed his whole life,
every dingy thing had been just so. 
He passed through a dark hallway and came into his
wife's room. 
"Yes, my dear?" 
"I feel like I'm going to die, L'ander. I'm sorry
to be such a " 
"Now, now! Pshaw!" 
"But I never felt this way before. It's a
giddiness." 
It seemed to Leander that if he had ever been a boy he
must have stood in this room with his little cap off, listening to this old,
bedridden woman saying: "I never felt this way before; it's a
giddiness." For he couldn't seem to arouse himself to imagine her as ever
having been anything but a cadaverous martyr pinioned beneath a stuffysmelling
quilt. 
"It scares me, L'ander." 
"Now, now! Would you be comfortabler if I put you
on your side?" 
"I might try it that way. But I don't know."
It began to take his strength these days to get her
rolled over. 
"There, I'm sure you'll be comfortabler now. You
know your giddiness is always better for turning." 
"So you don't believe me. You think I'm just
putting on, for sympathy." The woman twisted her mouth in a wan, secretive
smile. "I'm glad you can. After all, what good is it, your getting upset
any sooner than you have to? " 
"Oh no, no, Mama, you don't think for a minute
" 
The invalid bit her lip and turned her face away.
"Go back to your garden, L'ander, out into the air and sunshine. I— I
shall be all right." 
"If you're not, all you have to do is pull the
bell; I'll come in quick." 
"Will you? I hate to— but— you used to come
quicker. I suppose " 
"No, now, don't you worry, I'll come on the
run." 
Leander went outdoors, took up the hoe, and banged at
a weed. 
It was Saturday. Young Mr. Cotton, next door, was out
in his garden. He had rank rows of beans and a strong stand of cabbages. He
smiled to himself as he studied the antique figure beyond the pickets.
"Myra," he said to his wife, "wouldn't it kill you? Look at him
standing there, innocent as bliss, square in the middle of the only decent
button chrysanthemum he's got, whacking for the past five minutes at one old
sunflower stalk!" Mrs. Cotton smiled too, but there was a shine of
moisture in her eyes. 
"Poor man, we oughtn't to laugh at him. If ever
there was a saint on earth!" There were ten very old frame houses in the
row, Gibb's Terrace, and he spoke for nine of them. "I hate to think
what'll happen to him when she goes." 
Her husband looked sober. "When she passes on,
you mean?" 
"He won't last long beyond her, Jack. They don't,
not when they've been together as long as those two, so devoted, wrapped up in
each other, like a pair of lovers. If there were more like him today!" 
Cotton didn't know whether there was a dig at him in
that. He hunkered down, creasing his brow. "Here's a worm got into this
cabbage." 
"It's because he does love her." The woman's
eyes were wetter than ever as she went back to her perennial borders. 
Over in the next yard Leander said to himself: "I
hate her!" It made him jump. He had never shaped the thought before. Only
a monstrous disaster could have provoked it now. Plodding in circles after
weeds, here he had come on the one ewe lamb among his button chrysanthemums
laid in ruin. He stood with his chin hanging. The work of a vandal! There lay
the footprints bold to see among the broken stems. Whose? Leander hadn't an
enemy he could name. 
Had he? Had he given anyone cause, without knowing it
It was too upsetting; he wrested his mind away. Let it go for just one of those
things that are always happening. Concentrate on something else. 
Now he could concentrate on the larger aspects of his
bitterness. It was not that plant alone, it was the whole garden. How could he be
expected to make a decent garden, when, no sooner had he a plan matured or an
action started, it was shattered and scattered beyond memory's recall by that
damned bell? 
Till today he had been at pains to keep his anger
centered on that bell. Unconsciously afraid of shame, he had tied a knot in the
bell cord over which his passionate resentment could not slide, to run along it
and come to the ringing hand. Now it was like a bolt from the blue of truth: 
"I hate her!" 
He tried to undo it by forgetting he had said it. He
threw himself against the weeds. His hoe must have wondered at the renewed
violence of his hands. 
Batter and bancr— what odds what his blade hit? If he
could but have kept it up at that pace! Perspiration, thin as water, broke from
his skin. He found of a sudden that all the while he had been holding his
breath. 
He stood to breathe. He felt strangely terror-smitten.
"His gaze, turning this way and that, came to the masts of the shipping,
sticks as fine as spider thread a mile away down the river, and remained there
dully. It marks the complete atrophy of his imagination, that those sticks
which for the normal man, wherever seen, will set fancy straightway towering,
golden cloud in a blue wind, ebullient hail of up-anchor, freed heart, swift
keel, the narrow room of trouble forgotten, the ineffable, perilous embrace of
space— it marks it, that in old Leander's sight they stood but lesser brothers
of the clothes posts running in ranks down the diminishing yards. If they
aroused any emotion at all, it was one of querulous protest: "Why do
people want to keep moving about; why not be quiet and rest?" 
As a matter of fact nine tenths of his mind was fixed
on the business of breathing. Once he let up on it, here he was, holding his
breath again. 
Why? Something was amiss. What? Something in the world
of this afternoon was so weirdly changed that his lungs wouldn't, or couldn't,
do their work. Perhaps it's so a fish feels, taken out of water into the air. 
He opened his mind a crack. Was it that he had said:
"I hate her! "? 
He tried to close it again, but now a pair of figures
coming up the riverbank prevented him. A sailor and a girl. 
It was a favorite stroll for sailors wanting to get
girls out into the country the shortest way. Leander's eyes followed them past
the bottom of the garden. Though the lass was not the prettiest in the world,
nor her lad the most prepossessing, there was something in the hunger of the
arm he threw about her swiftly at the lilac cover at the fence corner that had
a beauty quite unrelated to either of them— even despite them— as if willfully
mingling with their amorphous young excitement a tenderness, a larger yearning,
a nobler groping of its own. 
"How lucky he is," thought Leander.
"Head over heels in love with her." He struck his hoe on the dust
with a sudden ferocity. "Why wouldn't he be?" He wheeled and faced
the backs of the kindly, neighborly houses, like an animal cornered. "No,
I won't take it back, nor you can't shame me into it!" 
As he recommenced his hacking at the weeds he muttered
to himself: "Why should a man be ashamed for looking at the truth?" 
He seemed to be getting an immense amount done this
afternoon. Freshly pecked-at soil ran in long snake trails around him. At a
price, though. Whether it was this continued holding of his breath, or what, he
grew as wobbly with weariness as if he had done the work of three ordinary
shifts. Yet now he was so nervous he couldn't stop till he was stopped. 
Unconsciously, all this while that seemed the length
of hours, he was waiting for that bell to ring. 
A ray of the lowering sun struck under his lids. 
So it wasn't that it seemed hours. It was hours. 
There was a clump of dandelions. It was in the turf
border of a bed, so he couldn't use the hoe. But every time he took hold of the
sticky leaves to try and pull its roots out they broke in his fingers. 
He straightened, wheeled, and cried aloud at the bell.
"What's the matter with you? Why don't you
ring?" 
He hurried slowly up the yard. He passed through the
kitchen and the hall. 
"Mama," he said, at the doorway to her room.
No answer. It was not like her to sleep so soundly. 
"Mama!" 
He went in and shook her by the shoulder. But she
didn't wake. 
The sun rested on the woods beyond the river; indoors
it was already dusk. So many neighbors had come in to manage things for the old
man, the house seemed crowded to suffocation with their tiptoeing business.
They had the wisdom of the humble. They occupied themselves with practical
matters, tidying the place, especially the room where the body lay, calling up
the elected undertaker, preparing supper for the bereaved one, when he refused
dumbly to go out for it to another house. So overtly— while privily their one
preoccupation was in that figure seated bolt up in a chair in a corner of the
death chamber, hands folded, motionless as wood. 
"When he does come to!" they whispered among
them. "When  he does begin to cry—
oh, dear!" But there were some who thought differently. "No, this is
the worst— this while he's stunned yet. Crying eases the pain." 
Leander sat there staring at the sheeted bed for
upwards of an hour without a sign of emotion of any sort changing the muscles
of his face. 
It was dreadful, this waiting for him to break. 
"He don't realize yet. Somebody's got to do
something." 
One man, nerving himself to it, went in and laid a
hand on Leander's shoulder. "Come, Mr. Killen." 
Rattled, he began to shake the old man. "The
ladies've got some supper for you in the kitchen, Mr. Killen. You ought to eat
something—do you good. That's the man!" 
In the hall, the others put fingers to their lips and
bent their ears. 
Silence. 
"Mr. Killen, now, come. We understand what this
means to you, one and all. But you've got to help us if we're to help
you." 
There was a break at last. Low, harsh, throat-trapped,
a sound of brief laughter. A cartilaginous cackle. 
Leander came out of the room then faster than they had
thought his feet would carry him. It gave them no time to wipe the confusion
from their faces. Over his own, at the sight, spread a redness of more blood
than they had supposed was in him. There was a savage misery in his eyes. They
thought: "How awful. He's too old for it, and he's gone queer." Aloud
they said: "There's some supper for you in the kitchen. That's it, take an
arm, out this way. Sit down right here and have a bite." 
But Leander had another purpose. Cutting loose in
mid-floor, he followed the line of his own shuffling momentum and passed out of
the back door. 
Alarm. "What's he doing? Catch him. Somebody must
go with him." 
Young Mrs. Cotton had a ray of sense. "Let him
be. He just wants to get out in his garden, alone, and maybe it's the very best
thing." 
Leander went down to the bottom of the garden. It was
true, he wanted to be alone and rid of them. He wished passionately they were
all dead too. Damned whisperers, damned tear dabbers, why couldn't they have
come straight out with it: "Poor, poor fellow, your heart is broken and we
know it, so why try to keep the sobs back? It's too stunning a blow, too cruel
a loss." 
He had an impulse to go back and brutally challenge
them: "What loss? Say! Frankly, putting sentimentality aside, describe it
to me." 
He could see their faces. They'd feel silly enough
then. But no, they wouldn't. They'd only signal to one another: "See, it's
unhinged his mind." 
For that hadn't escaped him, in the hall. The heat of
it still burned his cheeks and temples, its redness doubled by the light from
the dome of sunset reared above the transriver woods. 
What if they were right, and it was his mind? He grew
aware of a kind of numbness, lying, not in him, but tight around him, like an
iron cloak. Was it possible they were the right ones and he the twisted and
wrong? 
With a scared sincerity he tried to think of some
single thing in his life with his wife, the loss of which would have subtracted
from his happiness. He'd be reasonable; he wouldn't take today, or yesterday;
he'd struggle back into the past. Ten years. Twenty years. It was still
yesterday, still today. Twenty-five, then— a quarter of a century. An ache in
the brain. Calling on emotional memory for so long a leap was like asking power
of a machine wrecked by rust. 
Maybe he could begin to do it by and by. Perhaps with
time, now he had been given the gift of time. . . . 
Clang! 
Sweat struck out on Leander's forehead. Ghostly,
incorruptible even by death, that bell! 
A calm man would have considered that there were
outsiders in the room in there, unfamiliar with the purpose of that rope end
hung by the bed, curious hands itching to finger and find out. "Goodness,
so that's what rings!" 
But sweat struck out on Leander's forehead. Vividly,
he saw the hand of the dead one on the time-greened cord. 
"Come in, my poor dear husband. Don't lag this
time, for pity's sake! All I ask is so little, L'ander. To see your
tears." 
Panic grabbed him. Scuttling through a gap in the
pickets, he fled down the path along the riverbank. His soles scratched on the
gravel, heavier and heavier, but he wouldn't, he daren't, give in. Not till he
had gone a great way (it might be fifty yards) did he pause to breathe. He sank
on a bench made of a single board, below the path, facing the river. 
He fastened his mind upon the glowing surface. Damned
to live in the moment, he would live and lose himself in that maze of reflected
sunset. The tide was making, the river ran backwards, with what slowly
dissolving, softly flaming whorls, with what crimson ripple nets cast about
glimmers caught from the greener top sky, like little, cool, green fishes! 
Engrossed so, the one old man did not see the second
old man who came up along the path from townward. This was a fellow much of
Leander's age, but brighter of eye and ruddier of cheek, where it showed above
the white ring of his whisker. And livelier. 
No wonder he was livelier; he had eighty years of
brave alarums and sweet excursions to regale his gums with and hunger his
appetite. 
He sat down on the other end of the bench. Leander
might be dumb, but this was not one to be quiet long. 
"Yessir, by Jolly, I been here before; same
identical place, by Jumbo! Comes back to me, plain as plain now. It was when I
was a sailor." 
Once Leander was assured that this was none of his
tormentors, he got back among the fluent whorls. Now the fire from the sky
began to pale; the little green fishes caught in the ripple nets grew paler,
dying. . . . Here came dismay. What was he to do when they were quite gone? How
then keep his mind from the senseless, numb discomfort that lay wrapped tight
around him? 
To any but an ancient mariner, this abstraction might
have been a damper. But after all, the stranger's speech was less conversation
than soliloquy. Only as an afterthought did he turn his word on Leander. 
"Yessirree, comes back to me. Used to be, right
up along there somewheres, a little stage with a boat made fast to it. Eh?
" 
Leander glowered and shook his head. "Don't ask
me." 
"Newcomer, eh? Heh-heh! Well, I could tell you
things." 
Now a shadow ran toward the zenith. To the one old
fellow it was the coming of tonight. To the other it was neither day nor night,
here nor there; it was the shade in the pasture of the sunny past, cool to lie
down in under the tree of age. Now, at his ease, this time-gelded bullock of a
man who had been a sailor had up his cud of memories. Ruminant, reminiscent, he
worked his jaws, expressing the juices a hundred times savored, but never so
sweet, never so vividly actual. 
"A sailor, mate, he's got a funny lay. He's got
no home where he can stay long. Take girls and women, the best of 'em. It'd
surprise you, now and again. Them and sailors. The way I figger it— a sailor—
when a sailor he's got on his ship and gone, he's gone a long ways over the
water, and they nor nobody's going to hear of him ever again. Heh-heh. . .
." 
Chewing and chuckling. 
"Good women too. But all women are good, God
bless 'em. This one was good, pretty and good. Only she was young, and her
husband he was long away. I see her plain as if she stood there now, in her
skimpy waist and big long skirt the color of lilacs. Her cheeks they'd go red
one minute and white the next— no sir, she didn't know how to handle herself,
the way things were. Know what she'd say, mate? 'You mustn't come by here
again— with my husband away in the West,' she'd say, with her blue eyes as big
as two-bit pieces and her fingers working crisscross on her breast— she was
built full in the breast, I remember, like a beauty ought to be— upstanding—
mmmm-mmmm— a right armful of a woman for a strong handsome man!" 
Leander would have got up and gone away if the weight
of his strange numbness had let him. There was no flame left in the water. 
The other sucked at his ambrosial pabulum. "I
forget her name." 
"It's growing cold," Leander thought.
"I'll catch my death." The word made him writhe. "I wish I could
feel like moaning and crying; then they'd be satisfied." 
"Where was I?" the other mused. "I was
a seafaring man. I was second mate on the bark Andrew L. Cram. I could thrash
any man aboard of her. Good-looking too. Always ready for anything. We were
taking on spruce logs here, and they came along slow— yes, I remember where I
was now— and she'd say: 'If you come by again, I'm sure I shan't speak to you.'
"Then I give her a grin— I was always a cocky
one— and I'd say: 'I don't see what's the harm, my helping you with your
flowers.' 
"She had an almighty lot of flowers— all kinds—
asters and pansies and bachelor buttons— all kinds— and rambler roses climbing
over the kitchen porch— and everything. How sweet they smelled! Maybe it was
because she was messing with 'em so much— but, mate, she smelled like flowers,
all kinds mixed up. Ever since, a flower garden's put me in mind of her. 
"She had little ways with her, enough to craze a
man. The way she could pout. 'You're lucky you're a sailor; sailors have so
many ladyloves; ladyloves everywhere.' And she'd run down into the vegetables
then and stand with her hands going crisscross on her breast— she was built full
in the breast, I remember— and 'I wish,' she'd cry, 'I wish my husband would
hurry and come home.' 
"I told her the ship was laded and I was going
away. 'Tomorrow? ' says she. 'Day after,' says I. 
" 'My husband he's coming home day after
tomorrow,' she says, and she run, and I run after her into the lilacs and
caught her and give her a kiss, the first I done. Delicious! Day following, I
went by to say good-by. 
" 'Here's a boat tied up,' I says, 'and here I am
a sailor. Come out on the river for a little row.' 
" 'No, no,' says she, 'no, no, no.' 
"We got in the boat and I rowed across the river.
. . . See them woods over there yonder, mate? " 
The woods were no more than a low black wall now above
dark water. 
"See them woods there?" Ancient Lothario, he
rolled between tongue and gum his succulent morsel of memory. "Mate, don't
ask me. We walked a ways in the woods. She laughed and cavoorted. Then she'd
get white's a sheet and run hide, so's I couldn't find her, and I had to stand
and hail for her. 'Ahoy, Marjorie'— by Jolly, I got it, that was her
name." 
"Marjorie!" Syllables uttered at a great
distance in Leander's mind. 
"Marjorie!" An echo from beyond a gulf. The
numbness that had been as wide as an iron cloak shrank as narrow as an iron
hoop around Leander's brain. Where had he known one by the name of Marjorie? 
"We walked in the woods. Ah, mate, but there was
a lovely woman. Only she'd put her hands to her neck and cry out: 'My husband's
coming tomorrow.' " 
"Marjorie, Marjorie!" A dam, thick as twenty
years, crumbling before the inflood of forgotten memories. . . . 
"See them woods over there yonder, mate? Don't
ask me. I was a sailorman them days. Yum-yum! When I left her she was
crying." 
That inflood, tumultuous, instantaneous, complete and
vivid. . . . Stench of train smoke. . . . Smell of the earth of a street, years
ago now paved. ... In a gateway the fragrance of a garden of flowers. . . . 
Leander opened his mouth. "She was crying when I
got here. It was because I'd been away so long and she'd been so lonely. She
always had a playful way— could look like a thunderstorm. 'You don't love me
any more, otherwise you'd have hurried more. You can be happy away. I suppose I
ought to be happy you're so lucky.' " 
The weight was gone from the other end of the bench. 
"How pretty she was— Marjorie! No, not pretty—
beautiful!" 
When Leander looked up to see the other old man
standing there, his mouth a black hole in his whiskers, he gasped. He got to
his feet with a sense of towering. 
"You— I'm going to thrash you." 
He had to say that. He was a man. 
"I'm going to kill you." 
What a shame it would be to him if he were to forget
it before he could do it, too helpless, too happy? 
The hole in the whiskers opened and shut. "I—
mate— I thought you says — " 
Leander shuffled toward him. Desperately he fought to
make it remain momentous, that dirty little pebble in the great white flood. He
got his hands on the scoundrel's shoulders. But it was too late. He'd
forgotten. 
The dams in his tear ducts broke, and water poured out
of his eyes. 
"She was lovely. Wasn't she lovely? She was so
sweet. She was so true, so good, and so beautiful." 
He opened his hands and the ancient mariner was gone,
a gulp and a shadow. Turning his feet homeward, thirty years of age had
vanished too. 
Full dark had come, but he needed no light up the
yard. It was a garden thronged and fair. The good green smell of brittle
cabbages, firm squashes and melons and tall young corn, and mingled now the coming
perfume of many, many flowers. Flowers that Marjorie gathered in a great sheaf
against her bosom— gay with pride of them— and one for love for young Leander's
buttonhole. . . . 
He passed into the kitchen. A clean room, a singing,
busy room, never so shining a kitchen. . . . Dr. Hathelly drying drug-washed
hands by the stove there. . . . "It's a r]ne baby, Leander, fine big
boy." . . . 
Chug-chug and cinders. . . . Trip to Niagara. . . .
What a sight! 
"Jack got ninety in algebra. The Hewett boy got
only eightyfive." 
"They found him early this morning; he must have
fallen in yesterday on his way from school." ... In this hall here,
nothing in words to say to each other, nothing to do but hang tight to one
another's hands. . . . 
"Your beans have never looked so well as this
year, L'ander." . . . "Nor your hollyhocks either, my dear." . .
. 
Bedroom. There was something under a sheet. A thing
that was still and white, full-breasted and young and beautiful. 
Leander went down aspraddle on his knees. 
Out in the hall they listened, and sighed after the
long strain. 
"That's better. He's crying now."