The Cinder Buggy by Garet Garrett Page B

clerk, outraged in both his authority and his traditions, meanwhile had fallen downstairs and was shaking a red, tissue-logged hulk that dozed in a hickory chair at the end of the bar. This was Thaddeus Crawford, the proprietor. He never opened his eyes but to eat and speak and look at the books. The sign he gave of listening, or of waking when addressed, was to open his mouth,—a small, cherubic orifice,—and roll the tip of his tongue round and round it. When he closed his mouth that was a sign he was no longer interested. When he opened his eyes and spoke it was a shock to discover that he could speak distinctly, that his senses were alert, that the triumph of matter was incomplete.
    During the clerk’s recital of what was taking place upstairs he rolled his tongue excitedly without opening his eyes. Then he heaved himself, achieved locomotion, and went up to look at the names on the register. He looked at them hard and long, dozed a bit, looked at them again, then returned inarticulate to the hickory chair downstairs and fell into it panting.
    “What shall we do?” asked the clerk, who had followed him up and down again.
    “Do the dishes,” said Thaddeus. “Wouldn’t, anyhow... Won’t hurt the house... Care a damn if it does... Time we had a funeral here.” He dozed off for a minute, chortled in his depths, and spoke again with his eyes closed.
    “Put it on you, didn’t he? Guess he did. Guess yes. Damn smart... Want to see him when he comes back... Knew his father.”
    When John Breakspeare returned, the clerk, now very civil, took him down to Thaddeus.
    They talked until long after the bar closed. Thaddeus was surprised to discover how little the young man knew of his pre-natal history and proceeded to restore him to his background. The picture was somewhat blurred in the romantic passages, from a feeling of delicacy. That loss was more than compensated by high lights elsewhere. He told him in turgid, topical, verbless sentences what the old Woolwine Mansion was like in that other time, how Enoch and Aaron founded the iron industry together, how they prospered, how strange it was that they got along so well, how they parted suddenly when Esther, the banker’s daughter, who was engaged to Enoch, changed her mind suddenly and married Aaron instead, and finally of Aaron’s failure with steel and how he changed all over after Esther’s death.
    The narrative had form and drama and a proper ending, very unexpected to the young man. The parlor room in which the body of his father then lay and the one adjoining in which he himself would spend the night were rooms he had lived in once before. They were the rooms his father took when he closed the Woolwine Mansion, unable to live there without Esther, and came to this inn with nurse and infant. That infant was himself.
    It came two o’clock. With no premonitory sign Thaddeus heaved himself out of the hickory chair and called for the porter to put out the lights.
    “What are you going to do?” he asked.
    “I haven’t thought of it,” said the young man.
    “Stay with us,” said Thaddeus. “Long as you like.”
    On his way to bed Thaddeus said to the clerk: “Give him anything he wants. Don’t send him a bill till he asks for it. Don’t send him a bill at all.”
    A spiritual adventure awaited John Breakspeare to complete his day. As he re-entered the room where his father’s body was and closed and locked the door behind him he got suddenly a sense of reality beyond any perception of things. It was a reality to which he himself merely pertained. This was a sense of existence. The story he had just heard in the bar room, as he was hearing it, seemed to concern only his father; and his father was a separate being who had lived and was dead and about to be buried. But no. That was not so. Vividly, yet with no way of saying it, no way of thinking it, with only a way of feeling it, he became in one instant aware that the story no less concerned himself.