My father was born in Kansas, as I was, because the old man had come there from Maine just to help Free Soilers establish the right to vote, because the constitution was going to be voted on that would decide whether Kansas entered the Union slave or free. Quite a few people went out there at that time for that reason. And, of course, so did people from Missouri who wanted Kansas for the South. So things were badly out of hand for a while. All best forgotten, my father used to say. He didn’t like mention of those times, and that did cause some hard feelings between him and his father. I’ve read up on those events considerably, and I’ve decided my father was right. And that’s just as well, because people have forgotten. Remarkable things went on, certainly, but there has been so much trouble in the world since then it’s hard to find time to think about Kansas.
We came to this house when I was still a small boy. We had no electricity for years, just kerosene lamps. No radio. I was remembering how my mother used to love her kitchen. Of course it was very different then, with an icebox and a pump sink and a pie safe and a woodstove. That old table is about all that is the same, and the pantry. She had her rocker so close to the stove that she could open the oven door without getting up. She said it was to keep things from burning. She said we couldn’t afford the waste, which was true. She burned things often enough anyway, more often as the years passed, and we ate them anyway, so at least there wasn’t any waste. She loved the warmth of that stove, but it put her to sleep, especially if she’d been doing the wash or putting up preserves. Well, bless her heart, she had lumbago, and she had rheumatism, too, and she did take a little whiskey for it. She never slept well during the nights. I suppose I got that from her. She’d wake up if the cat sneezed, she said, but then she’d sleep through the immolation of an entire Sunday dinner two feet away from her. That would be on a Saturday, because our family was pretty strict on Sabbath-keeping. So we’d know for an entire day beforehand what we had to look forward to, burned peas and scorched applesauce I remember particularly.
Your mother was startled the first time I mentioned to her that she might as well not do the ironing on a Sunday evening. It’s such hard work for her to stop working that I don’t know what I have accomplished by speaking to her about the day of rest. She wants to know the customs, though, and she takes them to heart, the Good Lord knows. It was such a relief to her to find out that studying didn’t count as work. I never thought it did, anyway. So now she sits at the dinner table and copies out poems and phrases she likes, and facts of one sort and another. This is mainly for you. It is because I’ll be gone and she’ll have to be the one to set an example. She said, “You’d better show me what books I got to read.” So I pulled down old John Donne, who has in fact meant a lot to me all these years. “One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally, / And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.” There are some very fine lines in Donne. I hope you will read him, if you have not read him yet. Your mother’s trying to like him. I do wish, though, that I could afford to own some new books.
I have mostly theology, and some old travel books from before the wars. I’m pretty sure a lot of the treasures and monuments I like to read about now and then don’t even exist anymore.
Your mother goes to the public library, which has been down on its luck for a long time, like most things around here. Last time she brought back a copy of The Trail of the Lonesome Pine that was worn ragged, all held together with tape.
She just sank into it, though, she just melted into it. And I made scrambled eggs and toasted cheese sandwiches for our supper so she wouldn’t have to put the book down. I read it years ago when everyone else did. I don’t remember enjoying it particularly.
When I was a boy I knew of a murder out in the country where the weapon, a bowie knife, was said to have been thrown into the river. All the children talked about it. An old farmer was attacked from behind in his barn while he was milking. The main suspect was known to have had a bowie knife, because he was proud of it, always showing it around. So they came near hanging him, I guess, since he couldn’t produce that knife and nobody else could find it. They thought he must have thrown it in the river. But his lawyer pointed out that someone, maybe a stranger, could have stolen it from him and done the crime and thrown the knife in the river, or just walked off with it, which seemed reasonable enough. Besides, he was certainly not the only man in the world with a knife of that kind. And no one could come up with any sort of motive. So they let him go, finally.
Then nobody knew whom to be scared of, which was terrible. The man who had owned the knife just drifted away.
There were rumors from time to time that he was in the area, and he may well
