The Black Cottage
We chanced in passing
by that afternoon
To catch it in a sort of special
picture
Among tar-banded ancient cherry
trees,
Set well back from the road
in rank lodged grass,
The little cottage we were
speaking of,
A front with just a door between
two windows,
Fresh painted by the shower
a velvet black.
We paused, the minister and
I, to look.
He made as if to hold it at
arm’s length
Or put the leaves aside that
framed it in.
“Pretty,” he said.
“Come in. No one will care.”
The path was a vague parting
in the grass
That led us to a weathered
window-sill.
We pressed our faces to the
pane. “You see,” he said,
“Everything’s
as she left it when she died.
Her sons won’t sell
the house or the things in it.
They say they mean to come
and summer here
Where they were boys.
They haven’t come this year.
They live so far away—one
is out west—
It will be hard for them to
keep their word.
Anyway they won’t have
the place disturbed.”
A buttoned hair-cloth lounge
spread scrolling arms
Under a crayon portrait on
the wall
Done sadly from an old daguerreotype.
“That was the father
as he went to war.
She always, when she talked
about war,
Sooner or later came and leaned,
half knelt
Against the lounge beside
it, though I doubt
If such unlifelike lines kept
power to stir
Anything in her after all
the years.
He fell at Gettysburg or Fredericksburg,
I ought to know—it
makes a difference which:
Fredericksburg wasn’t
Gettysburg, of course.
But what I’m getting
to is how forsaken
A little cottage this has
always seemed;
Since she went more than ever,
but before—
I don’t mean altogether
by the lives
That had gone out of it, the
father first,
Then the two sons, till she
was left alone.
(Nothing could draw her after
those two sons.
She valued the considerate
neglect
She had at some cost taught
them after years.)
I mean by the world’s
having passed it by—
As we almost got by this afternoon.
It always seems to me a sort
of mark
To measure how far fifty years
have brought us.
Why not sit down if you are
in no haste?
These doorsteps seldom have
a visitor.
The warping boards pull out
their own old nails
With none to tread and put
them in their place.
She had her own idea of things,
the old lady.
And she liked talk. She
had seen Garrison
And Whittier, and had her
story of them.
One wasn’t long in learning
that she thought
Whatever else the Civil War
was for
It wasn’t just to keep
the States together,
Nor just to free the slaves,
though it did both.
She wouldn’t have believed
those ends enough
To have given outright for
them all she gave.
Her giving somehow touched
the principle
That all men are created free
and equal.
And to hear her quaint phrases—so
removed
From the world’s view
to-day of all those things.
That’s a hard mystery
of Jefferson’s.
What did he mean? Of
course the easy way
Is to decide it simply isn’t
true.
It may not be. I heard
a fellow say so.
But never mind, the Welshman
got it planted
Where it will trouble us a
thousand years.
Each age will have to reconsider
it.
You couldn’t tell her
what the West was saying,
And what the South to her
serene belief.
She had some art of hearing
and yet not
Hearing the latter wisdom
of the world.
White was the only race she
ever knew.
Black she had scarcely seen,
and yellow never.
But how could they be made
so very unlike
By the same hand working in
the same stuff?
She had supposed the war decided
that.
What are you going to do with
such a person?
Strange how such innocence
gets its own way.
I shouldn’t be surprised
if in this world
It were the force that would
at last prevail.
Do you know but for her there
was a time
When to please younger members
of the church,
Or rather say non-members
in the church,
Whom we all have to think
of nowadays,
I would have changed the Creed
a very little?
Not that she ever had to ask
me not to;
It never got so far as that;
but the bare thought
Of her old tremulous bonnet
in the pew,
And of her half asleep was
too much for me.
Why, I might wake her up and
startle her.
It was the words ‘descended
into Hades’
That seemed too pagan to our
liberal youth.
You know they suffered from
a general onslaught.
And well, if they weren’t
true why keep right on
Saying them like the heathen?
We could drop them.
Only—there was
the bonnet in the pew.
Such a phrase couldn’t
have meant much to her.
But suppose she had missed
it from the Creed
As a child misses the unsaid
Good-night,
And falls asleep with heartache—how
should I feel?
I’m just as glad she
made me keep hands off,
For, dear me, why abandon
a belief
Merely because it ceases to
be true.
Cling to it long enough, and
not a doubt
It will turn true again, for
so it goes.
Most of the change we think
we see in life
Is due to truths being in
and out of favour.
As I sit here, and oftentimes,
I wish
I could be monarch of a desert
land
I could devote and dedicate
forever
To the truths we keep coming
back and back to.
So desert it would have to
be, so walled
By mountain ranges half in
summer snow,
No one would covet it or think
it worth
The pains of conquering to
force change on.
Scattered oases where men
dwelt, but mostly
Sand dunes held loosely in
tamarisk
Blown over and over themselves
in idleness.
Sand grains should sugar in
the natal dew
The babe born to the desert,
the sand storm
Retard mid-waste my cowering
caravans—
“There are bees in this
wall.” He struck the clapboards,
Fierce heads looked out; small
bodies pivoted.
We rose to go. Sunset
blazed on the windows.
