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Roy Glashan's Library
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Collier's, 23 May 1936, with "Proud People"
IT was always like this in New Hope those far- off days when I was a boy, and the world was so young. The weeks ran on without event until, it seemed, time stood still, and then excitement would burst across our town like a sudden prairie storm.
I stood on St. Vrain Street in front of the Western House that morning at the moment old Henry Bland, a tall and genteel man with an old soldier's brisk carriage, wheeled out of his bank and walked toward the courthouse with more haste than was usual. The freighters were rumbling up from the river landing, their great wheels dipping and dropping the dust like water, and the Omaha mail stage rounded the corner of Prairie Street at a very reckless clip. Mr. Wackrow stepped from the Western House, spoke to me, and went on toward the bank. And just then Mark Morrison, Henry Bland's cashier, came from the bank with his cheeks set like marble and hurried into the adjoining alley. Henry Bland was returning from the courthouse with our sheriff, Tom Blaine, and Mr. Wackrow had stopped on the street to look at them. And at that moment I heard one shot break through the alley.
Mr. Wackrow said—"My God."—and ran into the alley, and the sheriff jumped away from Henry Bland, trotting after Mr. Wackrow, and people began to run out of the buildings on St. Vrain Street. I do not know why, but for some reason I watched old Henry Bland who seemed to walk more and more slowly, as though there was a weight pushing on his shoulders. Suddenly there was a crowd in front of the bank, and Tom Blaine came back from the alley. I heard him say: "Mark Morrison just killed himself." Afterward he followed Henry Bland into the bank. Through the glass of the door I could see Mr. Bland lock the door and put the Closed sign across it. As young as I was, I knew then what that meant.
These things are so clear in my memory. Camilla Bland came from the Bon Marché, a startled expression in her eyes. She called to me: "What is it, Tod?" On hearing her voice, young Phil Hendry turned from the edge of the gathering crowd and went directly to her. "You've got to go home, Cam," he said, and took her away. My father appeared from his office, and pushed through the crowd, rapping on the bank's door. Henry Bland let him in. Dr. Gillespie turned from the White Palace directly into the alley. By this time St. Vrain Street was full of people, and Johnny Dix slid beside me, his eyes as round as plates. He said: "Mark Morrison blew his head off." I was shocked and a little sick, and turned away. Somebody was carrying a canvas tarpaulin into the alley.
My father came home late that night. Mother and I were on the porch, and I noticed the roundness of his shoulders in the twilight and the heaviness of his step. My mother just looked at him, not speaking.
He stood on the steps, one foot above the other, and I recall now that I was suddenly aware of his age. There was a faint gray along the edges of his black hair. He was looking at Mother, quietly shaking his head. He said: "The bank examiner dropped in today. Mark Morrison wasn't expecting him."
"I always trusted Mark," said my mother.
"So did Henry Bland," said my father. "Too much. Mark was speculating." He so seldom swore, but he swore now. "Damn him, he's left half the families in this town in trouble!"
"Tod."
They were looking at each other, and, afterward, Father's glance seemed to rise and run along the front of our house, and my mother said instantly: "Oh, not that, Tod."
"I'm one of the stockholders," he said. "I'll have to stand the assessment."
There was a long, long silence, and then my mother, gentle soul, said in a soft voice: "I'm so sorry for Henry Bland."
Father said: "You had better be sorry for a good many other people."
After a moment he left, and a little later I went roaming down St. Vrain Street and saw the lights of the bank shining through the cracks of the drawn shades, and I knew Father was in there with the other directors. Tom Blaine guarded the doorway. This news had spread like a grass fire, and half the farmers of the county had come in, and the teamsters and river roustabouts choked the street, and the talk was sullen and a little wild. Father came home long after I was in bed that night. His voice and Mother's voice made a murmuring below me until at last I fell asleep.
YOU have to see New Hope clearly to understand the havoc that
failure wrought. Sitting beside the Missouri and facing the long
swells of the prairie, our town depended on the freighting trade
for its existence. Its wealth sprang from the traffic of all
those great wagons pitching westward with the land's long
undulations. In the beginning old Henry Bland had pioneered that
trade; he had supported and encouraged most of the others who had
grown moderately wealthy in the trade. The river and the wagons
and the far-off settlements—and Henry Bland. This was the
way of it; and, when the bank closed, the life of our town
fluttered.
I could see care and anxiety deepen the lines of my father's face that following week when the big stockholders and the leading merchants of our town met to apportion their losses. And I remember how bitterly he said one thing: "Alex Hendry is a damned hard man!"
My mother said: "The law says he must stand his assessment, doesn't it?"
My father looked at her. "We've got to shoulder more than that."
She said: "I don't understand."
Neither did I. But I was soon to learn. It was the next night that Bette Mellish, the widow of a teamster tragically killed, came to the porch. I was in the house, but I heard her say to Father: "It's little I had in that bank, and, if I'm to lose half of it, how do I live? There's years ahead of me, and now I've got to take my boy out of school and put him to work. How am I to live?"
I didn't hear my father's answer, but, after she went away, I did hear him speak to Mother. "There's a hundred like her in New Hope. We've got more to shoulder than just our assessments. But Alex Hendry won't assume a dime more than the law compels him."
My mother spoke in a softly wondering way. "What will Phil Hendry do... and what will Camilla Bland think?"
AT thirteen my boyhood world was widening in a queer way, with
strange things creeping in to disturb it, to make it less secure.
I thought of Camilla Bland and of Phil Hendry, who was old Alex's
son, the day they auctioned off the Bland possessions. Everybody
said that Bland had turned all that he ever owned over to the
creditors; and this was the last he had to give. Legally he
didn't need to; but, if you knew Henry Bland, you understood he
could have done nothing else.
I remember the auctioneer's voice crying through the rooms of that big and pleasant and homely house, and I remember how crowded the place was with people I had never seen before—farmers in from the prairie and bargain hunters from adjoining towns; and I remember, too, that of the Bland family's friends only my father, who represented the bank, and Phil Hendry were there. It was a sense of courtesy, I think, that kept the others away. And I remember Camilla standing alone in a corner, tall and a little pale and not showing anything out of her eyes but a bitter pride while all the things that had been a part of her life for so many years slowly melted away. Later, in the yard, I heard my father swear faintly to himself when a Dutch hardscrabble settler from Sage Coulee bought the two, matched, gray mares Henry Bland had driven for so long.
My mother cried when Father told her how the auction had gone. He said: "I would rather have been horse-whipped, but the creditors wanted me to be there. I don't know why Phil Hendry put in his appearance."
And then I remembered that Phil Hendry had stood across the room from Camilla, a big, yellow-headed young man inclined to laughter and to indifference, but who hadn't smiled that long afternoon and who had only looked at the girl and had never gone over to where she stood. It was strange to me, for all New Hope understood those two were to be married.
In the end the bank was reorganized and my father made president by the stockholders. After the assessments had been paid in, there was, I think, about fifty cents on the dollar; and then the leading men of the town went their own personal notes to assure the small depositors another twenty-five cents. My father's share of that extra assessment was, I recall, five thousand dollars.
Often in later years I wondered why they had gone beyond their strict responsibilities, why they had so quietly and so calmly assumed that added debt. And I was a man fully grown before I saw those bearded and slow-speaking and rather stolid men in the proper light. Well, there was something in them they could not help, a taciturn sense of duty they could not escape. A hundred or more little depositors, like Mrs. Bette Mellish, had suffered in the crash, and the extra money raised was to relieve them.
ALEX HENDRY had been one of the big operators of our town, a wry,
taut New England man with a shrewdness for trading that was
marked even in a country of traders. But he had not joined in the
extra assessment. All the way through he had fought for his pound
of flesh, threatening to liquidate the bank if his interests were
pushed, and in the end the other stockholders, with an
indescribable bitterness, had made their hard bargain with him.
The Bland block on St. Vrain Street was turned over to him to
satisfy his share of the lost deposits, and a working interest in
the brewery as well. A month after the crash I saw a painter put
a ladder to the arch of the Bland Block building; when I passed
that way later, it had become the Hendry Block. My father had
been this man's friend; and Henry Bland had been his banker and
his advisor. But it made no difference. From that day forward I
never saw my father speak to Alex Hendry. And once when Henry
Bland happened to be walking down Prairie Street, I saw this
shrewd and foxy Alex stop and speak quite civilly to Bland. There
was no answer. Henry Bland, grown terribly old, looked at Alex
Hendry in a way that erased the man from existence.
I think from that day on Alex Hendry, as rich as any man in our county, had no real friend. I can look back now and see our town with wiser eyes than I had then; and I think something came to New Hope it had not possessed before. I cannot see them as romantic figures, those slow and solid and heavy men who ran our stores and owned the stage lines and lived in the big sprawling houses out along Prairie Street. They were hard men, and they were drivers; in a rough and sometimes cruel world they were extreme realists, all of them. Yet, they had a sense of duty they could not voice—a kind of pride in their obligations to this town and to the people in it. It had pulled them together; it had shut Alex Hendry out.
It was just after the bank reopened that New Hope noticed Camilla Bland had returned Phil Hendry's ring.
I remember the night my mother told this to Father. He was reading the paper, but he put it aside and looked over to her a rather long while, as if considering what he ought to say. I see her so vividly now—a quiet woman with sweet lips and a way that was soft and gracious, filling all my boyhood with a gentleness that comes to me now like a fragrance. He said, soberly and cheerlessly: "It's better that way."
My mother protested. "He was always a good boy. They were so nice a couple."
My father said: "He'll get his father's money... which is tainted. I think Camilla wants none of that."
OFTEN, in the months that followed, I wondered. For these were
the days when the world was opening for me, and I was thinking of
things I felt and feared—and could not under stand. I saw
Phil Hendry go down Prairie Street one evening after dusk and
stop at the little house the Blands were then living in; and I
saw her come to the door, her white dress shining in the faint
moonlight. I could not help myself. Stopped in the shadows I
watched those two. She came out to the porch, closing the door,
and for a moment they stood near each other, and some brief word
was said. Afterward, she went back in the house, and he walked
away. A laughing, careless man, this Phil Hendry. But he wasn't
laughing then.
In our town it was inevitably a matter of speculation. All of us lived close together, and our lives touched and became common property. We had manners, and we had a strictness of belief that seems to me now to have been narrow; but below that was a curiosity so frank and real and earthy. Some thought Camilla wanted nothing to do with any Hendry, but there were others who thought Phil Hendry, seeing the obligation that hung over Camilla Bland, was afraid to assume it. There was evidence to favor this belief, for the whole town knew that the aging Henry Bland had laid upon his daughter the obligation of paying off his debts. The debts he didn't legally owe and yet could not forget.
None of us knew the truth, though all the sharp eyes of the town were upon those two. It was a little after the bank's crash when Camilla went to Omaha, leaving a neighbor woman to look after her father. And it was around that time, too, that Phil Hendry bought himself some wagons and started a freighting business. I remember the town had its skeptical thoughts about that, for Phil Hendry had never been a serious man, and it made no sense that he, who would one day inherit old Alex's wealth, should be striking off for himself like any other moneyless boy. Six months later Camilla Bland returned from Omaha with a teacher's certificate, and that fall she took the third grade of the old First Ward School—the first woman to teach in our town.
I used to see these people walking their lonely ways along our streets and be possessed by a wonder that would not diminish. Old Alex, turning into the stairway of his building, dressed more poorly than any stable roustabout, with a sly and strange backward glance at whoever might be passing behind him; and Camilla, going soberly down Custer Street in the morning, with an inner grace that was like a light shining; and old Henry Bland, passing the bank without ever looking at it, his age coming upon him like quick winter; and Phil Hendry sitting up on the box of one of his wagons, his big shoulders bowed over against the sudden slant of our March rains. I used to watch them and wonder, and I know now that all New Hope was also watching them—trying to resolve this puzzle.
IN the middle of the following year old Henry Bland died, and,
when they lowered him into his grave on Locust Hill, I could look
up and see all the people I ever knew standing bareheaded there,
crying or near to crying. In his young years he had been a
strength to our town; in his tragic years he had been a strength.
I can still feel the emptiness of that day. He had left behind
twenty thousand dollars in life insurance that was, for our time,
a large amount. And he had said to Camilla as his last words:
"People trusted me, Cam. You remember that."
When the insurance company's check came, Camilla Bland turned it over to Father, to be applied to the old debt. I remember Father telling it to Mother that night. He sat in his accustomed place on the porch, gently rocking; and then he stopped rocking, and his voice went out on a note that I can still hear—deeply stirred and proud, and regretful in a way that hurt you to hear.
My mother wasn't happy. Just and fair as she was, she could not find it right to balance Camilla Bland's life against old Henry Bland's stern sense of honesty. She said: "It has gone too far."
"Perhaps," my father said, "it has."
Mother said: "Is she giving you part of her teacher's pay, too?"
But Father never answered that question. I knew other people wondered about it, and I know that he was often asked. But Father found a way of stiffening against talk he thought improper. Without speaking he had a way of drying up curiosity and leaving the silence uncomfortable. I recall that we were still grouped there in the soft, spring night when Phil Hendry came down Prairie Street on his big, high-wheeled freighter—headed outward toward the west. He had his hat off, and his blond head swayed a little to the wagon's motion. He sat in freighter style, bowed on the seat, his heavy hands clasping the reins. After he had gone on, my father said something that surprised me: "Perhaps that's gone too far, also."
He said no more, and after all these years that silence is what comes back to me, freighted with a thousand memories. My town was like that—realistic and hard and often brutal. But with a deep silence covering the kindness that ran beneath all that stubborn life. All those people look across time to me now, stiff in their clothes, tight-lipped, and almost grim in the way they faced upon the world. I know now I misjudged them. There was somewhere in them an imaginativeness almost wild, a strain of hidden sentiment, an honesty they were afraid to reveal.
I REMEMBER Phil Hendry stolidly riding his freight wagon through
that summer and that fall. There were parties in New
Hope—hayriding and skating on Beechey's pond, and dances,
and long trips out to Buttermilk Farm during the hot spell. But
Phil Hendry, who once had lived this way, never went. I think the
younger crowd avoided inviting him. Once, under the arch of the
Bon Marché, I saw him come face to face with Camilla; and for a
moment they stopped, stepped suddenly back from each other, and
stared in a way that even to me was somehow bitter and hopeless
and strange beyond belief. In a moment he bowed his head and
turned.
This was the way it went, all our eyes upon that pair, with nobody knowing and nobody satisfied. With the feeling of something unfinished in the air. And then Alex Hendry, who had moved so obscurely through New Hope that year, came to the end of his time and, like a shadow, passed out. He had a moment with his son, a moment in which all the misery of his life seemed to break forth. He had sent Dr. Gillespie from the room so that he might have his word with Phil. But Gillespie heard the old man's voice, high and strident, come down the length of the hallway.
"It's your money now, and you can do what you damned please with it."
Gillespie heard Phil Hendry speak in a slow, sad way. And then old Alex broke in, still bitter. "No, you'll find out what I found out long ago. I can't tell you... it's something you've got to learn. But you'll never buy a dime's worth of happiness that way. It's pleased me to see you turn to work this last year, though you've been a fool in the way you've used what you made. I know you like a book, Phil... and I see what you're going to do now. It won't work. You'll find out."
When the Menefees' big, black horses drew the hearse up Locust Hill, there was only one carriage to follow, and only Phil Hendry there to see his father buried. The resentment of our town was that strong, its memory that hard and that unforgiving. My mother cried a little; she could not bear to think of this anger following Alex Hendry to his death. But my father had no pity.
"He lived his life the way he wanted. Never gave any sympathy and never asked for any. I give him credit for consistency. That was his one virtue."
A WEEK afterward, with soft dusk falling out of the sky, Phil
Hendry came down Prairie Street and stopped at our gate. My
father went out there, and the two of them talked for a long
while. When Father returned to his chair, he lighted a fresh
cigar and smoked it entirely through, so silent that my mother
gathered up her sewing and went to bed. How indelibly stamped
upon my memory that scene is.
There was something in the wind. I felt it, and our town felt it. And then, a month or more later, I turned into St. Vrain Street and saw Camilla Bland come out of the Bon Marché and pause deliberately and turn to wait for Phil Hendry who had been standing across the street. He came over and lifted his hat, and for a little while they stood like that, with a graveness deeply covering both their faces. She said something in a low voice and lifted her cheeks, and I noticed how fair and pale and proud she was at that moment. I was almost fourteen then and not particularly an observing boy. But these people I watched, because I liked them, and because I wanted them to like each other. There was something in Phil Hendry's eyes, like pain, and his lips came together and were very thin. They walked down the street together.
ONE day, a little after school had started in the fall, they were
married without announcement in Judge Rawl's office and left on
the next stage for Omaha. They were gone about a month, I
remember, and, while they were gone, my father announced that
Phil Hendry had made a settlement of the bank's old debt,
clearing up each depositor's account and assuming a share of each
stockholder's assessment. I do not think New Hope realized until
then how large Alex's fortune had been; for Phil had paid out in
that transaction over a hundred thousand dollars.
I remember that, when they returned and had settled in Syl Connoyer's house at the end of Prairie Street, all the friends of the Bland family went there to see them; and I remember my parents talking about it on the porch of our place, later in the evening.
Mother said: "I'm happy for Camilla. She looks lovely. But I didn't see Phil there."
My father said gently: "He was playing seven-up in the back room at Dolph Oliver's saloon."
"Tod!"
But Father made an impatient gesture with his arm. His face wasn't pleased. "It's Camilla's friends who called to pay their respects. Not his. That's why he wasn't home."
She said: "That's over, Tod. Nobody's holding Alex Hendry's sins against Phil."
"Perhaps not," my father said. "But perhaps Phil is holding New Hope to account for its sins."
I didn't understand, and I know my mother didn't. And as the months went along, New Hope had no answer for that puzzle, either. For there was a strangeness here that nobody could explain. They had returned from Omaha—two tall, fine people who once had been in love and who once had been so quick to find laughter in living; and who maintained now a reserve New Hope could not penetrate.
It was like a riddle that wouldn't leave you alone; our town perplexed itself more and more with the little clues that furnished no answer. We all knew that Alex Hendry had secretly bought the old Bland mansion, and that it was now Phil Hendry's. Yet the Bland mansion remained empty, its windows scummed with the dust blowing out of the deep prairie and the iron sage in the front yard half overgrown by the upshooting weeds, while Camilla and Phil remained in the little place at the end of Prairie Street. It would have pleased New Hope to have seen those young people move back into old Henry Bland's big house; it would have been like the happy answer to a troubled story. But there was something here between Phil and Camilla too bitterly remembered; some pride stung beyond forgiveness, some thought that, married though they were, built its barrier between them. We could see it. We could feel it. We could watch it grow.
At times they walked the pleasant dusk together, which was a habit of the folks in our town. From my porch I could see them pacing along the uneven boards of Prairie Street, saying little and very grave; as though each was deep-caught in some loneliness that could not be shared. A big, blond-headed man with a growing solidity about him that caught your attention, and a tall, slender woman who had a beauty hard to describe—a beauty that came from some deep and steadfast place. At times they strolled this way.
Otherwise New Hope saw them seldom together. She seemed to stay habitually in the little house at the end of Prairie. As for Phil, he had his office in the Hendry Block. Now and then he liked to take over the reins of one of his freighters and make the long week's trip westward. Sometimes in duck season we would see him ride out along the Missouri and disappear behind the long banks of autumn haze hanging a lovely color across the horizon; and sometimes we saw him, late at night, come slowly back. Somewhere, through all this time, he had kept two or three of his oldest friends, and, if there was need to find him in the evenings, it was best first to look in the back room of Dolph Oliver's saloon. Ordinarily he'd be there, playing seven-up in his shirt-sleeves, an old pipe clenched in the deep corner of his mouth, his heavy eyes thoroughly unreadable.
I saw them once meet at the stairway entrance of the Hendry Block. He was leaving the building, and she was turning up the street in company with Fay Stayton, who had just been married. And I recall with what exactness he removed his hat and looked down at Camilla, giving back to her the same measure of thoughtful, steel-hard courtesy she was giving him. I heard her say: "I'm giving Fay and Billy a dinner. What night would be best for you?"
He said: "Whatever night you choose."
She said: "I do not wish to interfere with your plans."
He said: "They are not important."
That was all. The women turned away, leaving him paused there.
There was that antagonism, clear to me and clear to all of the people in our town, something as cold and hard as steel that made their courtesy to each other painful. It was an unnatural thing—a thing that in time would break their hearts. This was what New Hope, more and more irritated, felt and said.
I think my mother mirrored the sentiment in our town. Kindly and tolerant always, she watched this affair until she could no longer be still. There was a desire in her to do something about it. She told my father so.
"They are both so proud. They'll go on like this... never making up." And then, because she felt, as all New Hope felt, that Father knew the roots of this affair, she challenged him directly. It was a thing she seldom did. Yet, as I say, she could no longer look idly on. "What is it, Tod?"
He was a long time answering. I can see him now, seated quietly in the rocking chair, his face rather grayly fixed. Shadows were running across the housetops of our town, and the smell of summer drifted in from the prairie. He said: "Maybe she wonders if it was a fear of assuming her debts that made him drop away from her when the bank crashed."
"Then why," said my mother, "why did she marry him?"
My father said, so softly, so deeply regretting: "She told her father she'd pay the debts he left behind. Maybe Phil went to her, when the money became his, and offered to pay off what she owed. Maybe it was a bargain."
"Tod," said my mother, completely outraged. "Don't say such an indecent thing! No man would want to buy a woman."
But my father said: "They were in love once, and then they got caught in the crash. A man might have things in his head he couldn't speak... particularly if his father was hated like Alex was. Who knows what Phil thinks... what he thought then, or what he thinks now? We can't tell. There's the chance he thought he had to do it this way, to correct the wrong old Alex did. And now maybe he's remembering what old Alex told him. The money will buy him no happiness."
Mother said: "Is that what he thinks?"
But she could press Father no further. He put his cigar between his lips and fell into a deep silence, leaving Mother restless and unhappy. I recall how mild a woman she was, and yet how injustice and pain could sometimes lift her to action that left my father astonished.
It was the way all the town felt, seeing tragedy work its way with two people who had a right to something better. Looking back now, I can feel that sense of smoldering dissatisfaction burn through New Hope. And yet there was nothing to be done, for Phil and Camilla Hendry held New Hope away with that gravity, that cold and distant pride.
PERHAPS it might have gone this way for the rest of their lives,
the laconic habit of our times, holding tongues still and real
thoughts hidden. Our days ran along, slow and uneventful, until
it seemed the world stood still. And then Belle Mellish took to
her bed and called in Dr. Gillespie; and late one night Gillespie
sent Belle's fifteen-year-old boy down to the end of Prairie
Street to summon Phil Hendry.
All this New Hope had from Dr. Gillespie, a man who had attended our town from its beginning. There was a sharpness in him that punctured our pride when it suited him to be that way, and a knowledge of our secrets that made him a little bit feared. He was like my father, faintly grim and past the stage of hoping for very much out of life. And yet, if he knew how to hold his silence, he knew also when silence was no longer good. And so he spoke of that scene, so that New Hope might understand.
When Phil Hendry came into the room, Belle Mellish said: "I want you to take my boy. He'll not bother you long, but he needs care the next three years."
Hendry said: "I'll take him, Belle."
She said: "You're a good man, Phil, and the town has treated you poorly."
Dr. Gillespie said: "What's that, Belle?"
"The day the bank closed," said Belle, "Phil Hendry came to me with a promise to make good what I had lost. That's why he drove freight wagons, Doctor Gillespie. He's got old Alex's money now, but it was his own, not Alex's, that I got. There's others on Custer Street that can tell you the same."
Gillespie said: "You hear that, Camilla?"
She had been on the porch, and she had heard. It was the way Gillespie later told it that made my mother cry. For pure happiness. For sorrow at all those two fine, proud people had gone through. Camilla came into the room then. Pale, Gillespie said, pale and her eyes terribly dark. Phil Hendry stood there, looking at her in the way a man might look when desperately hungry and desperately hurt.
Camilla said: "The day of the auction I saw you standing across the room... and I thought you were afraid of what I might cost you as a wife. I thought you didn't want me at that price. How could I believe anything else? You never said anything."
"There was nothing to say," said Phil Hendry. "I couldn't shame my father by letting New Hope know I took on a debt he refused to recognize."
"Then," said Camilla, "you inherited his money, and it seemed to me you thought you could afford me as a wife."
He said bitterly: "You took up my bargain."
"Yes," she said in one breath. "Yes, I did."
They were all so still. Belle Mellish and Belle's boy and Gillespie who had turned his back to them because, he said, he had a little decency left in him, even after forty years of practice. But he heard Phil Hendry say: "I'm awfully proud of you, Cam."
When Gillespie turned around, Phil had taken his girl solidly between his big arms. Gillespie told the story to Mother many times because she so loved to hear it, and always at this point Mother would say with an eagerness she could never suppress: "And then, Doctor?" And always Gillespie would smile a little and shake his head. "What," he would always say, "do you suppose a man would tell his wife after years wasted? I think they forgot there was anybody in the room."
A DAY or two later, in passing down Prairie Street, I saw men
cutting the weeds of the old Bland mansion. The door was open,
and Camilla was inside, a towel around her head, sweeping like
fury.
I look back to that town and that time, and I can understand why Phil Hendry could say he was proud of her for having made that deliberate bargain. There was love between them, long delayed and hard used, but it was another thing that made him smile and reach out with his big hands—a sense of stubborn honesty that could silently applaud what she had done. In my boyhood people were like that, doing what they had to do without crying and without explanation, hiding the heat and the strength of their lives so often behind silence.