Half in Shadow Read online

  She confessed timidly. “But I had all the dates in my head, and he wrote down what I told him. Then Jared,” again she glanced at the hunched muttering figure, “he seen ‘em and tore out the page. Said hit was a sin and a ‘domination to the Lord to write a lie in His Book... But it was Him sent ’em! Every one! I... I know I never – birthed ary one of ’em my own self, not like other women have kids. But... I.. She floundered, a vague bewildered look coming into her face as though she puzzled over an old familiar problem, still unsolved to her satisfaction. “I’m their maw...

  Then, suddenly, she turned to me. Those luminous dark eyes, alight with an innocent happiness and devotion, seemed to blot out the poverty ‘ and squalor of that small mountain farm, bathing it in a soft golden glow like the sunlight sifting through the trees overhead.

  “Ma’m,” she said abruptly, in a quiet voice like the murmur of a mountain brook, “Ma’m... You love kids, too, don’t ye? You got ary young’nes of your own?”

  I SAID I had a little boy, aged six, whom I loved dearly... and added, politely, that I should be getting back to him before suppertime. Martha Forney nodded, beaming. She shot a look of triumph at the old man, who was still muttering under his breath.

  “There, Jared!” she said happily. “You see? That’s all there is to it. There’s some as don’t want young uns,” she added sadly. “For one reason or another, .they don’t want to bring a baby into the world. There’s some as destroy.... But once they’ve started, once they’ve come just so far towards bein’ borned, they can’t go back—poor mites! All they ever . want is... just to be wanted and loved, and mebbe needed, like Woodrow. Why, there must be thousands,” she said . softly, “a-pushin’ and crowdin’ outside some place, in hopes somebody’ll let ’em come on ahead and be somebody’s young’ne. Now, Wood-row, I reckon he waited for years out there, wherever it is they have to wait. He was a real big boy when I... I wanted a son. And,” she sighed, happily, “that very evening, I heard somebody choppin’ firewood out back o’ the cabin. Thought it was Jared... but he was off a-huntin’ possum! When he come back and found all that stovewood, he thought I done it—or some neighbor who was wantin’ to shame him for leavin’ me alone, without ary man-person to do for me. But... it was Woodrow! Jared, he ain’t never been able to see his boy a-holpin’ him around the place—just sees what he does. He’s learned,” the little old woman chuckled, “to tell him and-then go off. Some place. When he gits, back, the chores is done. Woodrow,” she spoke proudly with a note of deep fondness, “he’s a .right handy boy around a farm. Ain’t -hardly nothin’ he can’t turn his hand to!

  ... and,” her eyes saddened, “why there was somebody onct that didn’t want a son like him, I jest can’t understand!”

  I had sat in wordless amazement, listening to all this. Now it was my turn to gape at Jared Forney, wracking my brain to figure out which of these two old mountain people was the insane one... or whether I was! Out of sheer desire to get .my feet on solid earth again. I scribbled some figures on my census sheet, cleared my throat, and asked little Mrs. Forney point-blank:

  “And.... the baby’s birthday? He’s about... eight months old, isn’t he? Some... er... some .neighbor left them on your doorstep? They’re foster-children, is that it?”

  “No ma’m,” Martha Forney said dearly. “They’re mine! I... I caused ’em to git borned, jest by wishin’.... and lovin’. Like an old hen settin’ on another hen’s eggs!” she chuckled with a matter-of-fact humor that made my scalp stir. “Of course they ain’t... ain’t regular young’nes. Jared, now, he ain’t never seen ’em... exceptin’ once when he was lickered up,” she said in a tone of mild reproof for past sins. “Fell in a ditch full o’ rain water, and liked to drownded! Hit was Cleavydel holped him out... and he was that ashamed before his own daughter, he never has drunk another jugful! Oh! Mebbe a nip now and then,” she added with a tender tolerant grimace at her errant spouse.”

  “But not, you know, drinkin’. Them kids has been the makin’ of Jared,” she said complacently. “Time was he’d beat me and go off to town for a week or more,” she confided. “But now he knows the young’nes is lookin’ up to him... even if he can’t see them!... and he’s as good a man as you’d find in these hills!”

  I almost snickered, noting the sheepish, subdued, and even proud look on the old man’s face. Here, indeed, was a fine and loving father... But I still could not” understand the origin of that smiling, group of children before me, and of the baby in the woman’s arms—the baby she said was born before those other three half-grown . Children! ’ -

  “Er... I tried again, helplessly. VMrs. Forney.... You mean they’re’ adopted? I mean, not legally adopted, but... You say they were given to you by somebody who ‘didn’t want them,’ as you call it? I... I’m afraid I don’t quite...

  “They wasn’t give to me,” Martha Forney interrupted stoutly, with a fond smile from the baby to the group near the. Pine coppice. “I taken ’em! They was supposed to be born to some other woman, every last one of ’em! Some woman who-didn’t ‘want ’em to be born... But I did! You can do anything, if you’re a’ mind to... and the Lord thinks it’s right. So,” she finished matter-of.-factly, “Jared and me have got eleven young’nes. Nary one – of ’em looks like us, except Woodrow’s a redhead like Jared. But that’s accidental, o’course. They look like their real ma and pa...~ }ohn Henry!” she raised her voice abruptly. “Where are you, son? . .-. John Henry,” she explained to me in a halfwhisper, “he’s kind of timid. Ressie May!” she called again, then sighed: “Folks can think up more reasons for not wantin’ young’nes, seems like!”

  I RUBBED my eyes, staring at the group of children beside the cabin, waiting in a silent, good-humored group for whatever fond command their parents might issue next. As I looked, two more dim figures—for they all seemed dim, all at once, like figures in an old snapshot, faded-by time—joined the others. One, a thin sad-eyed boy of seven, with a markedly

  Jewish cast to his features, smiled at me and ducked his head shyly, playing with a flower in his hand—a mountain daisy that, oddly enough, looked clumsy and solid in the misty fingers that held it. The second new figure—I started—was a little Negro girl. She giggled silently as my gaze fell on ‘her, digging one bare black toe into the dust. On her face, too, was that blissful glow of complete happiness and security from all hurt.

  “Ressie May’s colored,” Mrs. Forney whispered. “But she don’t know it! To me, she’s jest like all the rest o’ my young’nes....”

  Suddenly Jared Forney leaped to his feet, glowering down at me.

  “I ain’t gonna have no more of this!” he thundered nervously. “They... they ain’t there,, and you both know it! You don’t see nary young’ne, and neither does Marthy! I tell her over and over, it’s all in her mind —from wantin’ a passel o’ kids we never could have! She’s... sickly, Marthy is. She... Her paw aliuz allowed she was a wood’s-colt, her ownself, and he tuck it out in beatin’ her till she run off from him! All that’s mixed up in her head, and now... well, she’s a mite teched, as folks around here know. Her with her makelike young’nes named Woodrow, and Cleavydel, and... and some of ’em not even of our faith or color! I... I don’t know where she gits all them berries she says the children pick, or how she does all them chores behindst my back—that she makes out like Woodrow, done! But... if it made her any happier,” he lowered his voice, speaking fiercely for my ears only, “I’d pretend the Devil was takin’ the night with us!”

  MY EYES misted, and I was about to nod in complete sympathy. But he wasn’t having any. To this hard-bitten old rascal, I was against him, like the rest of the world, just another menace to his wife’s peace of mind.

  “And now,” he snarled, “you git! You got no call, to set there, makin’ a- mock of them as cain’t help theirselves. And laughin’, makin’ out like you see them young’nes same as she... !”

  “But... but I do see... !”

  I broke off hastily.
Jared Forney’s rifle had appeared again as if by magic, cradled in that good arm of his... and pointed unwaveringly at my forehead. His left eye sighted along the barrel, drawing a bead on a spot just between my startled eyes... and I didn’t stop to ‘ protest any longer. There was cold-blooded murder in that squinting blue eye, and a fierce proud protectiveness for that vague little wife of his that brooked no argument.

  I turned and ran, hugging my census-folder under my arm. And not stopping to pick up a pencil that bounced from behind my ear. I ran, praying. Then I heard the click of a cocked rifle and just ran.

  Only once did I so much as glance back over my shoulder at the humble little mountain cabin. When I did... well, it was only a bundle of old clothes that crooning .woman was cuddling in her empty arms. There were four lard-buckets brimful of blackberries someone had picked and set down just beyond the pine coppice. But the group of smiling, ill-assorted children had disappeared.

  For me, that is, they had disappeared— perhaps because... I don’t know. Because I didn’t care enough, and it took that to make them live and to keep them alive. Perhaps it was only my devotion to my own little boy that made me see them’at all, as Jared Forney’s childless wife saw them. Rather sadly, I took out my census sheet, a few yards down the road, and scratched out the names of eleven children that no one-—no one but Martha Forney— had wanted to live. Uncle Sam, I realized with a wry smile, might take a dim view of statistics such as those. Dream-children. Wish-children, born only of will and need... and love. The unwanted. The unborn…

  But for little old Mrs. Forney, their “mother” with the heart as big as all outdoors, I am quite certain that they are very much alive. And the Bureau of Vital Statistics could be wrong!

  The Shot-Tower Ghost

  MOST of us have nostalgic, so-dear-to-my-heart memories tucked into the back of our minds, our subconscious minds, to be coaxed out briefly now and then by some particular sound, some odor, some half-familiar sight…

  As for me, I can not hear a whippoorwill crying at night but I go. Flying back through time and space to our old family ’’Homeplace” in Wythe County, Virginia.

  The ferry is no longer there—replaced by a coldly efficient steel bridge that the state built. Cars and wagons, herds of sheep and leisurely riders oh horseback no longer pause at the brink of New River to call across: “Hello-o-ol” for the stocky, smiling, ferryman to raft them over to where the road to Wytheville begins again. But on the east bank, the tall square headstone shot-tower still broods over the green-velvet countryside—a grim reminder of a day when Virginia was wracked with civil war, and brother turned against brother. .

  Yes; the shot-tower is still, there, a historical landmark which my family at last turned over to the United Daughters of the Confederacy, for the edification of the passing tourist. The spiral staircase that winds up and up inside the tower is new—not rotten and precarious as it was when I was there, one of the scattered cousins who came “Back Home’’ every summer for a visit. The sturdy beamed floor of the single room, high up against the ceiling, used to be spattered with little hardened splashes of lead, spilled eighty-five years ago by determined Rebels and loyal sweating negroes frantically making ammunition for Lee’s troops. The leaden souvenirs are probably gone by now; and the square hole in the floor is fenced in by chicken wire, lest the unwary tourist fall through it into that dark matching hofè in the towers dirt floor below. This leads, well-like, into the river. I am not sure about the huge iron cauldron which caught the shot.

  (Molten lead formed round rifle balls when it fell, hissing, into cold water.)

  The pot may yet be hanging down there into the river. Once, on a dare from another visiting cousin, I climbed halfway down the slimy ladder into that chill murmuring darkness. But something slithered against my arm, and I never finished the adventure... especially as it was almost nightfall, and time for the Shot-Tower Ghost to appear.

  Let me say here, to your probable disappointment, that there never was a “shot-tower ghost”.

  This gruesome family-spectre was nothing more than a product of my Great-uncle Robert’s fertile imagination. He is dead now, a white-bearded irascible old bachèlor of the “hoss-racin’ and cyard game” school. Dead, too, is Shadrach, his stooped arid gray-haired “body-servant,” last of the family slaves who accepted their “freedom” with a bored sniff as the impractical notion of “a passel o’ po-white Yankees.”

  To the last day of their lives—about two weeks apart—-Uncle Robert and Shadrach, respectively, remained unreconstructed and unfreed. And the fact that one of my aunts married a Northerner, bore him a fine son, got rich, and came back to buy and remodel another old country place adjoining the Homeplace, was a great shock to both of them. I think they were convinced that “Yankees” are a roving tribe of gipsy marauders, and incapable of fathering offspring.

  That son was my Cousin Mark, who had none of the gracious charm of his mother’s side of the family and all of the butt-headed stubbornness of his Connecticut father. But in those days just after World War I—”the war in Europe” as Uncle Robert verbally shrugged off any of our conflicts but the one between the States—I was a very young fluttery miss with a terrible crush on one Francis X. Bushman, thence my Cousin Mark because he slightly resembled him.

  This particular summer, however, another cousin of mine from the Georgia branch was also visiting the Homeplace, a red-headed minx named Adelia-—she is quite fat and has five children now, may I add with vicious satisfaction. But she was two years older than I, and just entering the Seminary, so Cousin Mark’s eyes were all for her, not for a gawky high school sophomore from Birmingham, Alabama.

  Adelia was also popular with the younger set of Wytheville. Almost every night a squealing, laughing carful of young people would bear down on the ferryman, who had orders to ferry Miss Adelia’s friends across free of charge; Uncle Robert and Shadrach would roll their eyes at each other and moan faintly, but a short while later my uncle would be grinning from ear to ear, seated in his favorite chair on the wide, columned veranda with a bouquet of pretty girls clustered around him, begging for “ghost stories.”

  Shadrach, his eyeballs and teeth the only white thing about his grinning ebony face, would circulate around, offering syllabub and tiny beaten-biscuits with baked ham between them, or calling “rounds” for an old-fashioned reel in the big living room where the Victrola played incessantly.

  COUSIN MARK was a member of this coterie more often than anyone else, and Uncle Robert always made him welcome in a formally polite manner that Adelia, giggling beside me later in our big featherbed upstairs, would mock outrageously. Mark and Unde Robert seemed to clash as naturally as a hound and a fox, for Mark had a rather rude way of finding holes in Uncle Robert’s tall tales, mostly about the supernatural.

  “Did you ever actually see a ghost, sir?” Mark demanded once, sitting at ease on the front steps against a backdrop of gray dusk and twinkling fireflies... and the distant plaintive crying of whip-poor-wills.

  “I have, suh!” my unde lashed back at him stiffly. “With mah own two eyes... and if Ah may say so, Ah could pick off a Yankee sniper right now at fifty yards with a good rifle!”

  “Unless he picked you off first,” my cousin pointed out blandly. Then, with stubborn logic that seemed to’ infuriate my uncle: “When did you ever see a ghost, sir, may I ask?” he pursued. “And where? And how. Do you know it wasn’t just an . , . an optical illusion?”

  “Suh...!” Uncle Robert drew himself up, sputtering slightly like an old firecracker.

  “Suh, the Shot-Tower Ghost is no optical illusion. He is, and Ah give you mah word on it, a true case, of psychic phenomena. You understand,” Uncle slipped into his act —a very convincing one, in spite of Adelia’s covert giggling, “you understand that, after some very dramatic or tragic incident in which a person dies suddenly, there may be left what is called... ah... I believe the American Society for Psychic Research calls it ‘psychic residue.’ An em
anation, an . , . an ectoplasmic, replica, if you will, of the person involved. This replica is sometimes left behind after death occurs—the death of the body, that is. For, the circumstances under which the person died may have been so... so impossible to leave hanging, the ectoplasmic replica of that person lives on, repeating and repeating his last act or trying to finish some task that he strongly wishes to finish....”

  “Poppycock!” my cousin interrupted . flatly. “I don’t believe there’s any such thing as an... ‘ectoplasmic replica!’ What a term!” he laughed lightly. “Where’d you dig that one up, sir? At some table-tapping séance—price ten bucks a spook?”

  “No, suh, I did not.” Uncle Robert was bristling now; Adelia punched me and-giggled. We could all see. How very much he wanted to take this young Yankee-born whippersnapper down a peg or two. “I find the term used often” Uncle drawled, “in worshipful Madame Blavatsky’s four-volume work on the metaphysical. She was considered the foremost authority on the supernatural during the last century, the Nineteenth Century, when such notables as Arthur Conan Doyle were seriously studying the possibility of life after death. ....”

  “Blavatsky... Blavatsky,” Mark-murmured, then grinned and snapped his fingers. “Oh . Yes’. I remember reading about her, something in The. Golden Bough. Sir James Frazer says she’s either the greatest authority... or, more likely, the biggest fraud in the history of metaphysical study! I read that once in the library at Tech, just browsin’ around...”

  Uncle Robert choked. Most young people listened in wide-eyed awe to his erudite-sounding explanations of his “tower ghost” and certain, other spook-yarns that he cooked up for our naive pleasure. But Mark was tossing his high-sounding phrases right back at him with great relish, and a covert wink at Adelia who was perched on the arm of Uncle’s chair.