Watson saw me and waved. Though he was barely sixteen then, he had added considerably to his height since I’d last seen him and walked like a grown man who’d done a hard day’s work. In the months since my departure, Watson had managed to slip away from most of his boyhood, and when I drew near, I saw that his long, narrow face had the beginning haze of a reddish beard. It cheered me to see him so grown up. Nearly my height, he was well on his way to being taller than I, who up to now had been the tallest in the family.
For a few seconds, we grinned at one another with slight self-consciousness, and then I embraced him warmly and tugged his new whiskers. “What’s this, Wat?” I laughed. “Growing yourself a beard, eh?”
He grabbed my beard and gave it an answering yank. “Everybody always says you’re the handsome one. I thought I’d give it a try, see if it’s the beard. It’s just great to see you, Owen!” he exclaimed, and threw his ropey arm over my shoulder. He cocked his head and studied me and said that I looked different to him, that I’d changed somehow.
“Come on, I’ve not been gone that long.”
“No, seriously, Owen. You’re looking different. You didn’t fall in love or something, now, did you?” he said, and shook my shoulder and grinned.
I confessed that it did feel weird to me, coming home this time, as if I had been away for years. My mind filled for an instant with the face of Sarah Peabody, but I swiftly put the image away, replacing her, as if for Watson’s sake, with the sights and sounds of Liverpool, London, Waterloo.
“You’re a famous world traveler now!” he said. “I want to hear about every single thing that you and the Old Man saw over there.”
We walked along beside the horse and sledge, the broad valley opening out in front of us, with white-topped Tahawus and Mclntyre in the distance and the burnished range beyond, and although it was a gray, overcast day threatening to snow, I saw again how lovely this place was. Of course, Father loved it here. How could he not? And how could he not have envied me for being free to return here? I thought, and regretted for a moment that I had been so disgruntled with him.
I was expected, Watson then told me. But expected sooner than this, he said, as they had received a letter from Father some days earlier, telling them I was on my way north. “Me and the boys thought you might’ve got distracted some over in Westport.”
This surprised me. “When was his letter dated?”
He didn’t know. The thirteenth, he thought. Yes, the thirteenth. “I copied it” he said proudly. “Like you used to.”
How could that be? Two days prior to my signing the pledge with the Gileadites, Father had written to the family that I would soon be coming home? I grew angry again and freshly confused. He had already decided and had known, even as he was working up my spirits, that we would not fight alongside the Negroes of Springfield! He knew all along that I would be sent to North Elba. And had said nothing of it until afterwards, when he feebly claimed unexpected legal troubles.
What purpose could he have had — for the meetings, the sermonizing, the pledge? And appointing me secretary and treasurer — why? Was it all for show? And for whom? Not me, certainly. For the Negroes? Had he merely been putting on a play for the blacks of Springfield, working them up, organizing them for battle and steeling them to pledge and risk their lives, when he had no real intention of joining them himself, or even of allowing his son to join them?
I cursed aloud: “Damn him!”
“What’s wrong?” Watson asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “No, the Old Man, actually. It’s just that he knew I was coming back here long before he told me. Even you knew before I did.”
He laughed and punched me on the shoulder. “Ah, well, Owen, that’s the Old Man, isn’t it? You can forget about him now, though. He’s there, and we’re here. You’ve just been spending too much time with him and not enough with us. C’mon, Mother’s going to be happy to see you,” he declared. “And Ruth, too. Everybody!”
“Lyman, too?”
“Sure. Lyman, too,” he said. “It’s great you’re home, though. Tell me everything. I want to hear everything. Especially about old John Bull. I want to hear all about England. And Flanders! What’s that like?”
As we walked, I related some of the details of my journey, pleasing and exciting him to a surprising degree, as if I had been to the South Seas on a whaling ship. Down the long hill we went, and soon, although it was not yet four o’clock in the afternoon, we were walking in wintry darkness, as if dead of night had fallen. Then, in the distance, I saw the glimmer of lamplight from the kitchen, and I made out the shape of the house. In this wide, dark, cold valley with the blackened mountains beyond, the house looked like a small ship bobbing at anchor in a safe harbor.
“You go in,” Watson said. “I’ll take care of Adelphi. We can unload these trees tomorrow in a twink.”
I said fine and headed for the door, anxious suddenly and a little afraid, as if I were about to hear unwanted news.
But, no, everything was joy and thanksgiving, kisses and embraces and bright, shining faces. They all gathered around me, as if I were one of Ulysses’ returning warriors, gone for long years instead of months, and put their faces next to mine and kept touching me with their hands even after we had hugged one another. My face nearly hurt from the smiling. They pulled my coat off me and bade me sit at the table, while the babies, Annie and Sarah, who, at seven and four years old, were no longer babies, unlaced and playfully drew off my boots.
Mary, sweetly calm in the center of the sun-shower, blessed me and thanked the Lord for my safe return. She looked healthier than when I had left, her round face reddened from the heat of the kitchen stove and the excitement, and I glimpsed her prettiness, saw her for a second as she must have looked to Father when he first met her some eighteen years earlier, a warm, soft, utterly benevolent presence in his unyielding, masculine world.
I held her hands in mine and said, “I’m truly glad to see you, Mary. Are you as well as you look?”
“Oh, my, yes!” she said, and laughed, and Ruth and the boys, Oliver and Salmon, laughed, too.
“What’s the joke?”
“Oh, we’ll tell you later,” Ruth said, and ruffled my hair with her cool hand. “We’ve lots to tell. You and Father may not know it, Owen, but believe it or not, life goes on without you.”
“Apparently!’ I said, and looked around the crowded room. There were Oliver and Salmon, lithe, tanned boys grinning like monkeys, and the little girls, Sarah and Annie, already back at work, the one churning and the other putting out plates. And then for the first time I saw Susan Epps, standing beside the stove in the further corner of the kitchen. Her hands were folded in her apron, and she was smiling gently at me, as if waiting for me to acknowledge her before she could greet me. At once I got up and crossed down the room to her and gave her a friendly embrace, realizing as I did so that she was pregnant, and well along with it, too.
“Yes, indeed,” I said to her. “Life does go on!” and she gave a winning, shy laugh. I congratulated her and turned to look for Lyman. “Where’s your excellent husband?”
There was a silence, and then Watson, who had come in from the barn and was shucking his coat by the door, said, “He’ll be back soon.”
“Soon?”
“Tonight. Or tomorrow night. He’s moving a few folks north.”
“Well, good!’ I said. “I was kind of afraid that the whole operation’d come to a halt. You know, after the business with Mister Fleete and our jailbreak.”
In a low voice, Mary said, “It did stop things, Owen. At least amongst the whites.”