My Year in a Log Cabin

by William Dean Howells

Chapter IX

We had a poor fellow, named B——, for our saw-miller, whose sad fortunes are vividly associated with the loveliness of the early summer in my mind. He was a hapless, harmless, kindly creature, and he had passed most of his manhood in a sort of peonage to a rich neighboring farmer whom he was hopelessly in debt to, so that I suppose it was like the gift of freedom to him when he came into our employ; but his happiness did not last long.

Within a month or two he was seized with a flux that carried him off after a few days, and then began to attack his family. He had half a dozen children, and they all died, except one boy, who was left with his foolish, simple mother. My oldest brother had helped nurse them, and had watched with them, and seen them die; and it fell to me to go to the[Pg 38] next village one morning and buy linen to make the last two of their shrouds. I mounted the italic-footed mare, barebacked, as usual, with my legs going to sleep on either side of her, but my brain wildly awake, and set out through the beautiful morning, turned lurid and ghastly by the errand on which I was bent.

When I came back with that linen in my hand it was as if I were accompanied by troops of sheeted dead, from whom that italic-footed nightmare could not be persuaded to escape by any sawing of her mouth, or any thumping of her sides with my bare heels.

I am astonished now that this terror should have been so transient. The little ones were laid with their father and their brothers and sisters in the unfenced graveyard on the top of our hill, where the pigs foraged for acorns above their heads in the fall; and then my sun shone again. So did the sun of the surviving B——s. The mother turned her household goods into ready money, and with this and the wages due her husband bought a changeable silk dress for herself and an oil-cloth cap[Pg 39] for her son, and equipped in these splendors the two set off up the road towards the town of X——, gay, light-hearted in their destitution, and consoled after the bereavement of a single week.