.jpg)
Stranger's Return
by Phil Stong
Chapter 1
Homecoming
Despite themselves, the three people about the Storr breakfast table exchanged glances of uneasy anticipation when they heard Grandpa Storr's slow, firm tread approaching the dining room. After a moment, however, Beatrice Storr, the wife of Grandpa Storr's nephew, cloaked her alarm with a look of calm righteousness; Thelma Redfield, Grandpa's stepdaughter through a third marriage, followed the other woman's example. Only her husband, Allen Redfield, continued to tremble.
Grandpa wore his woolen dressing-gown, dark maroon, which, when his silvery beard spread over its wide rich lapels of velvet, made him look like some city notable from a Flemish painting. The two women looked up brightly.
"Good morning, Father."
He peered first at Allen, then at Thelma and finally at Beatrice, without replying. He had peered at so many curious things in his eighty-five years that his eyes were always alert and searching even when he was not thinking of the thing seen. He smiled gently and took his place at the head of the table. The three automatically thrust their chins against their chests and closed their eyes.
"Father -- in -- Heaven -- we -- thank -- Thee -- that -- Thou -- hast -- again -- provided -- this -- our -- daily -- bread -- bless -- us -- and -- keep -- us -- for -- Thy -- Son's -- sake -- Amen!"
Grandpa Storr was proud of this blessing, which had been the Storr family blessing before his own grandfather could remember. There was not a family blessing for miles around with the dignity and simplicity of the Storr blessing -- certainly not the "Bless-our-meat" gibberish for which old Jake Kucher argued, and which the German family had only set over into English two or three generations before.
So thinking, and with a small smile of satisfaction that Storr dining had always been graced by the gentle pessimism of those phrases, Grandpa Storr took the bowl of patent cereal before him, walked across the dining room, through the kitchen, and out to the chicken pens, where he threw bowl, plate, spoon and cereal to the chickens.
Sherman's dashing Yankee boys will never reach the sea,
So the haughty rebel said, who fought 'gainst you and me --
He hummed cheerfully as he broke eggs into a frying pan and put several slices of pink, lean bacon across the toast grill.
"Father!"
He glanced up. Tall, slender and with a pallor which had not yet become quite cadaverous, Beatrice spoke as she would have spoken to a petulant child, and extended a lean hand toward him from the kitchen door. He said before she could conclude her gesture:
"I've told you time and again that I won't eat that damned cardboard, or whatever it is. I ain't sure it's even fit for the chickens."
Beatrice's tone softened almost to playfulness. "Father, fried eggs are too hard to digest. The doctor said -- !"
His face remained kindly, but his brows drew down and enhanced the aquilinity of his nose. "What doctor?"
Beatrice crossed the kitchen to him and he drew his arm away as she attempted to put her hand on it.
"Father, we didn't mean to tell you, but we're all worried about you -- about your health. So Allen talked to Doctor Spalding, and he said you must have simple foods and not so much meat -- "
"Why?"
" -- and cereals for breakfast -- "
"If you three," Grandpa said benignantly, "will have the God-damned kindness to attend to your own lives, I will continue to attend to mine."
"But, Father, it's all because -- "
He patted her shoulder -- toward the kitchen door. "I know that line now -- it's all because you love me. If you aren't going to use this kitchen, will you kindly get out of it?"
She hesitated at the door. "Well, Father, we don't want to try to tell you -- "
"It's better to spend two minutes doing what you want to do than a hundred years doing things you don't want to do. Why prolong a miserable existence? I'll take bacon. Go eat your breakfast."
After she had gone, he looked around the spacious kitchen with satisfaction, forked out a slice of bacon from the frying pan and nibbled gingerly on its sizzling end, finally spilled the contents of the skillet into a plate and rejoined the company at the table. He gulped down an egg and looked at Beatrice with an expression of the most exquisite enjoyment.
His niece by marriage looked away. "Father, we'd have been glad to cook you whatever you wanted."
"Liver and bacon, bacon and eggs, ham and eggs, beefsteak and potatoes, veal kidney, pork chops, lamb chops and fruit -- those are things I like for breakfast -- and lots of coffee."
He poured his coffee into the saucer, blew on it and as he sipped it made an unconscious inventory -- the ten thousandth -- of the old fireplace mantel -- an old Seth Thomas clock, his father's flintlock and his own squirrel rifle, a powder horn, an unutilitarian duster made of peacock feathers, Night Scenes in the Bible, Lincoln's Wit and Humor, Butler's Concordance, St. Elmo, Ingersoll Answered, Tempest and Sunshine, The War of the Rebellion in five volumes -- they must be dusty -- there must be hundreds of dusty things around the house -- the upper attic must be thick with dust -- the mud daubers go in and out of the upper attic -- why did he think of the 14 upper attic only once or twice a year and then wonder why he thought of the upper attic only once or twice a year?
"Uh -- Father -- did you get the telegram from Chicago?"
The little attorney involuntarily cringed, as he always did when Grandpa looked at him, and then as he always did, stroked his thin hair professionally and swelled out his belly as if he were about to address a jury. Like a fat setter pup, Grandpa thought, as Allen disengaged the corner of his belly from the corner of the table.
"I've got a collection case I'm handling for a Chicago firm and I thought they might have gotten 'care of' you for my name."
Grandpa knew about Allen's collection cases. They were usually not in excess of ten dollars. For years the husband of his fat third wife's daughter had maintained his incompetence meagerly on abstracts and pettifogging business in the neighboring county seat, Pittsville. Allen could hardly endure the awful thrill of standing before a judge and jury to talk. With hard times upon the country, litigation became a luxury too expensive for the average Iowa farmer, and the light balance which enabled Allen to keep a home, tilted toward the bottom. So he lived with Grandpa, to take care of him.
"It was for me," Grandpa said. "It was from Louise -- George's girl." His eyes were now fixed upon the crossed sabers under the rifles. He had picked them up on a battlefield in Tennessee and shipped them home. He suddenly recognized, with mild interest, that great events which are past are more real than petty affairs which are present.
"Louise!" said Thelma Redfield. "You mean the one who is separated from her husband?"
Beatrice gave the buxom peasant woman a hidden glance of contempt. "Is Louise coming on from New York?" she asked with plausible hopefulness.
"Of course," Grandpa answered. "Allen, when you drive over to Pittsville this morning leave the car at Sleepy Sherrid's garage and have him fill it up and look at the tires. Simon and I have to meet the midnight train in Fairfield."
Allen had been sleepy ever since he had moved to the farm, for now he had to rise to a long drive every morning. He smothered a yawn and looked at Grandpa piteously. "I can meet her, Father."
"No," said Grandpa, "it's the first time she'll have seen Storrhaven. She's the only child of my oldest son. I'll go for her."
Allen sighed with relief. Beatrice, the niece by marriage, looked at Thelma, the stepchild; their eyes met and held and made a covenant. Thelma could remember, but faintly, when George Storr's name had disappeared from the family plans and conversations and she could remember how her mother had hated the boy -- the quarrel between George and Grandpa had been over Grandpa's new marriage.
The Storrs were people who never looked back; there was a hint of grim satisfaction on Grandpa's face now. If the Prodigal Son had been a Storr, Scripture would have been robbed of an implausibility. George had been a real Storr -- except by the occasional accident of a Pittsvilleite visiting New York, Grandpa had never heard a word from him since the morning of their final quarrel. But as Beatrice and Thelma knew, the quarrel reached only to George. "She's supposed to be pretty, isn't she?" Beatrice said.
"Elmer Buckles saw her two years ago," Allen said. "He said she was real pretty. She looks like -- her father." He shot an uneasy glance at Grandpa, but the old man paid no attention. "She had a good job then, buying for some department store. I wonder what's happened to her job."
Beatrice hastened to cut the little man off. "Oh, she's probably just taking a vacation. Well, we must do everything we can to make her visit pleasant." She wondered if this fool had yet realized the possibilities this visit might have with relation to a very satisfactory will in his safe.
"Another cup of coffee, please, Thelma," Grandpa said, extending the enormous cup and saucer.
"Father -- the doctor said coffee was particularly -- "
Grandpa's voice was casual. "When I was with McClellan we had meat that was so stale you had to hold it with a bayonet while you fried it. When I was in the silver mines in Nevada -- "
He glanced up with surprise as Thelma placed her handkerchief delicately over her mouth and fled from the room. "What's the matter with Thelma?" he inquired innocently.
"You've upset her stomach, Father," Beatrice said reproachfully. "You know how delicate her stomach is."
Grandpa rose with his coffee cup and went to the kitchen door. "She eats too damn much cardboard for breakfast," he said so kindly that the triumph in his voice was barely discernible. "And she doesn't wash it down with enough good hot coffee."
Grandpa took his coffee to the long back porch. It had been built of frame long after the brick house was completed, but it was old enough to be thickly covered with clematis and trumpet vine, and on the trellis at the end, the stalks of the grape vines were thicker than a strong man's arm.
Sitting on a bench against the trellis, leaning against the vines, Simon, the hired hand, merely looked at him with bland eyes. Grandpa blew on his coffee and sipped it from the cup.
"Woman again?"
The supinated head barely moved. "Ump."
"Well, you've got one eye open already. That's all you'll need to get up the clover on the Miller Spring piece. Ancy'll load for you."
There was a perfectly toneless voice. "Oh, God, the hay?"
"Yes, the hay." Grandpa sniffed. "Already? Doesn't that jug of yours ever get empty?"
" -- dying -- "
"Well, it's a satisfaction to me to think that when you do die for a wicked, shameless life of lechery and corn whiskey, you'll go straight to hell."
"Be there in five minutes. It's on the Miller Spring piece."
Simon painfully pulled his six feet together. Once he had risen, he shook off his weariness like an old shirt. Suddenly he was lithe and swift and certain. His eyes were bloodshot, but he had run a comb through the crisp curl of his black hair; he was shaved, and his nails were trimmed and clean.
Grandpa surveyed him from head to foot and pulled thoughtfully at his beard. Suddenly the merest gleam of a smile appeared in Simon's eyes -- and was gone.
"God help you," said Grandpa. "You knock off at noon and get some sleep. We've got to go over to Fairfield and meet the midnight train."
"Relatives," Simon ventured.
"George's girl -- Louise." Grandpa pulled at his whiskers. "Hmm," he said, and then suddenly, "she'd be twenty-six and she's likely to be pretty. If I ever see you look at her twice I'll blow your head off the next minute."
"I know that," Simon said with ennui. "I got to get a jug of water." He stalked around the corner of the kitchen to the pump. At the very instant that he would have clattered the jug on the platform under the spout, however, he retrieved the motion like a cat. Through the vine-screened kitchen window he heard women's voices.
" -- husband was a writer, wasn't he?"
"I think he worked on a newspaper."
"Poor thing! She probably hasn't the first idea in the world about farms or housework or anything of that sort."
There was a pause. Then it was Beatrice's voice again, evenly modulated, cold and expressionless. "Well, we must watch out to see the poor girl doesn't try to do things she doesn't know how to do while she's here. We've got everything organized now so that the house runs itself. We want her to feel that she's a visitor and she's welcome here without taking over any of the farm work."
A slow, cynical smile overspread Simon's face. He made as if to throw the jug through the window, caught the gesture in mid-arc, and waited for more.
The peasant woman spoke. "Yes -- if she gets her fingers into -- " Beatrice interrupted smoothly. "It will probably be quite a treat to her to see a farm -- such a strange thing to her."
"Strange! Well, I should say -- and I always say about women who can't or won't keep their husbands -- " Again Beatrice stopped her. "We mustn't mention that to her or other people -- there'll probably be talk enough. What was her husband's name?"
"I heard once -- Dehart, I think."
" -- she'll probably hear talk enough, so that we mustn't even refer to her husband. It may have been quite a blow to her. We must make her feel that she's welcome to just stay here and -- rest."
Grandpa's voice boomed from the porch, a soft, carrying boom, "What in all hell are you doing around there? Waiting for it to rain to fill that jug?"
The voices stopped. Simon leaped a dozen feet from the kitchen window in two, quick, noiseless springs. "You've got to kill that yellow cat. It was chasin' a chicken." He rattled the jug on the pump platform and turned the handle. Then he heard Beatrice's voice at the kitchen door next the porch. "Oh, Father, did you tell Simon?"
He could not hear the old man's reply, but he grinned as he thrust his wrist through the leather carrying strap of the burlap-covered jug and sloshed water through the fabric to keep the jug cool.
Grandpa woke Simon at seven o'clock, and after he had eaten dinner the hired hand promptly went to sleep again. At eleven, when he was wakened for the twenty-five-mile drive to Fairfield, his eyes were clear and he came from sleep to complete wakefulness with the first touch on his shoulder.
"If you'd spend more nights like this," Grandpa suggested, not severely and not paternally, but with scientific detachment, "you'd probably live longer."
"Aw, hell, but what for? I wouldn't notice when I was dead that I hadn't been dead so long." The hired hand rose from the bed in the guest room to which he had been assigned for convenience, considering the lateness of the hour at which Grandpa must start for Fairfield. He laced his shoes -- the only garments he had removed -- and followed Grandpa through the hall. There was a light in the living room.
"Those two -- are the women going to wait up for us?"
Grandpa waited until they were in the open air, almost at the car, before he answered, "What do you think could stop them from seeing a relative that's separated from her husband?"
"Ump," said Simon, and he rolled the car down the long lane to the river road.
"Moon's smoky," said Grandpa at the end of ten miles; "we better hurry with the hay."
"Do you think I spend my time out in those fields pickin' flowers?"
Fifteen more miles rolled by and lights appeared on the horizon.
"There's Fairfield," said Simon.
"Right where it was the last time I came," said Grandpa.
Half a dozen people waited in the small, dimly lighted depot for the main line train from Chicago which was scheduled On Time. As a matter of fact, it was only a little more than fifteen minutes past its hour when the engine whistled long and eerily at the edge of town. Grandpa and Simon went out to the platform.
"She'll have a trunk too," Grandpa said. "Bring any rope?"
"Of course."
The train stopped and people began to dismount -- from the other side. When the train had drawn on, the dozen or so people on the right platform rapidly withdrew themselves from the girl Simon and Grandpa were seeking. She stood trim and quiet, with the lapels of her coat about her face like the petals of a flower. Beside her were a half dozen pieces of luggage. She was frightened.
"Louise? Louise Storr?" Grandpa strode across the tracks to her and seized two of the bags.
"Oh! Grandpa Storr!" He felt her cling to his coat sleeves as she kissed him and for an instant he realized the pathos of that clinging.
Yes, it was George's girl, Grandpa decided as they stood in the station light waiting for Simon to pack the luggage and tie the trunk to the car. The delicate, slightly tip-tilted nose was not his or George's, but the dark, waving hair and the long oval of the girl's face were Storr; above everything, the long, dark, humorous eyes were Storr.
"You look like George," Grandpa Storr said abruptly.
"That's what everyone said," the girl said eagerly, gratefully seizing the first scrap of conversation that had offered. "Father looked like you, too -- "
"All tied up," Simon interrupted. "Trunk and everything." They got into the car in silence; left the little town in silence, and rolled down between the fields and the fence rows. A mile passed, two miles, three --
"This isn't like the farmland I've been riding through," Louise said in a small voice. "That seemed so desolate and flat. You've trees and hills here -- "
"This is river country -- more cut up," Grandpa said.
"The air's so warm and sweet and the moon's so warm -- you can't somehow feel lonesome here, even though it's strange -- "
"Look at that moon, Simon! We're certainly going to get that rain tomorrow."
"I heard you the first time."
More miles passed in silence. At last Grandpa said, "Have a long trip?"
"Yes. It's worst from New York to Chicago." They could hear her smile in her words. "They oughtn't to have made Pennsylvania and Ohio so wide. There ought to be all long, thin states, like Indiana."
"Iowa's a wide state," Grandpa said.
The next words came as they turned into the lane to the house:
"This is Storrhaven," Grandpa told the girl.
