He Was There
By Jean Mitchell Boyd
(in Mysterious New England printed by Yankee
Magazine)
The rain danced on the roof and its silver
fingers tapped on the windows. The wind haunted the comers of the house and
seemed to cry to come in-to come into the library of Mr. Gideon Welles,
Secretary of the Navy during the Civil War. The "Old Man of the Sea"
he was sometimes called. We sat there in the library on that rainy afternoon,
Mr. Welles' grandson and I. It was a wonderful place for children to read. The
library was not on the first floor. Opposite the front door was a broad
stairway with a polished banister. It was the best banister on the street for
"sliding down." The stair carpet was thick, so that as you climbed to
the landing it was like walking on oysters. If you were going to the second
floor, you turned to the right and climbed more stairs, but the library was one
high step from the landing. It may have been an ell, added after the old brick
house was built. The roof was flat and made a nice dancing floor for the rain.
There were windows on three sides, making the light good for reading. The bookcases
went up to the ceiling. Many of the books were bound in canvas and were worn as
if someone loved them and read them.
Mr. Welles
had come to Hartford in 1869, after he finished his second term as Secretary
of the Navy. He lived there until he died in 1878. Those of us who were
children at the turn of the century never knew him, but we always had heard so
much about him that he still seemed to be a neighbor. The house was on Charter
Oak Place, so named because the oak had stood there which had been the hiding
place in 1687 of the Connecticut Charter. Sir Edmund Andros, the royal governor,
had come to take it to England to the King, which he couldn't do.
We sat there
in the library on that long ago afternoon. We each had a book by Joel Chandler
Harris -"Aaron in the Wildwoods" and "Aaron the Runaway."
Aaron was a slave, an Arab, who knew the language of animals. He understood
the mysteries of the swamps-the will-o'-the-wisp and the sound of wind in the
loblolly pine.
Now and then
when I turned a page I looked around the room. Some of the low shelves held
neatly folded newspapers, a complete file of Civil War newspapers. I think it
was The Hartford Times because Mr. Welles had been an editor until Mr.
Lincoln asked him to be a member of his cabinet. He needed someone from New
England.
Once when we
were in the library there was a wooden box in the corner. It was one of the
boxes from the attic, which held all the correspondence concerning the Navy
during the Civil War. There were notes signed A. Lincoln and Seward and Porter
and Farragut. We were interested in Farragut because his flagship had been the
Hartford and her flags were in the State Capitol, but you had the
feeling that Mr. Welles wouldn't want his papers disturbed.
There was a
portrait of him over the white marble mantle in the "best parlor." He
looked like Mr. Lowell, only fiercer. It would be well for children to leave
his papers alone. I wonder now if Mr. Welles' diary was on one of the shelves.
It was called "The Deadly Diary" because it was such a frank
document. Years after his death, when it was published and I read it, I wished
that I might have sat in his library and held the original in my hands. I would
have liked to have read in the stillness of that book-lined room about the gray
day in 1864 when Mr. Welles "witnessed the wasting life of the good and
great man who was expiring before me."
So we sat in
the peace of the late afternoon, lost in stories of other years, shuddering
pleasantly when bloodhounds bayed and "patterollers" rode after
runaway slaves. The little feet of the rain ran more lightly. The wind went away
to ruffle the Connecticut River. The door of the room was open, and from
downstairs came the sound of the piano in the "best parlor" being
played softly, as people often play when twilight glides through the windows in
her gray velvet shoes.
And then into the stillness of the room someone came, someone came
silently as fox fire comes, unseen as wind in the tree tops, but beyond all
shadow of doubting, someone came.
We looked up,
both of us. There was no one we could see. We listened, but we heard nothing,
no mice running in the wall, no creaking board in the floor. Nothing touched
us, no breath of air, no invisible garment. But someone seemed to be there.
I said softly, "Did you think-just now-someone came in?"
"Yes, I did, but I don't see him."
"Do you s'pose it could be your grandfather?"
"It prob'ly is."
"If it is your grandfather, wouldn't it be polite for us to stand
up?" "Yes, it would."
We laid down our books and stood respectfully, as children who lived before the Atomic Age were taught to do when an older person came into a room. You stood because it showed your respect for a person's years, and the wisdom which the years had brought. A disrespectful child came to no good end.
For a short
time we stood there, neither frightened nor amazed. A grandfather is a pleasant
person. My grandfather had been a captain in the Civil War, marched in his blue
uniform in parades, and usually had button peppermints in his pocket. The fact
that we could not see this grandfather did not seem particularly strange. After
all, it was his library.
And then we
heard the heavy steps of Henry Green on the stairs, making a clump-thump sound.
He was coming with a taper to light the lamps. Whoever had been with us went
away. We sat down.
Henry Green
had been a slave in Virginia who had escaped to Washington and attached himself
to the Welles family. He had squeezed whole groves of lemons into lemonade for
very best people - Mrs. Lincoln, a special friend of Mrs. Welles; the Stantons;
the Sewards; Mr. Chase and his daughter, Miss Kate - everybody. He said there
was a cannonball in his back which made him lame.
He came into
the library and said that night and the bats were coming early. He lighted the
lamp on the big round table with the marble top. He drew the plain dark-red
curtains and shut out the darkness. As he left, he turned in the doorway. The
taper made strange shadows on his dark face.
He said, "Ah 'clare to goodness, sometimes it seem lak he was
here." We nodded solemnly. His fingers went into the pocket where he kept
the rabbit's foot. He believed in spirits and witches.
We listened
as he went upstairs to light the lamps in the upper hall. Then he started
downstairs thump-clump. Henry Green had
been the body servant of Colonel Thomas Welles, son of Mr. Secretary Welles.
Once, before a battle, Henry became frightened and fled. But he came to a
bridge on which Mrs. Gideon Welles seemed to appear. She cried, "Go back,
Henry, go back." She was more awesome than the whole Rebel Army, so he
went back. And that was the battle that won the war, so that Mr. President
Lincoln took a gold tack hammer and knocked the chains off the hands and feet
of every slave in America.
Thump-clump.
And after the war Colonel Welles and Henry sailed around the world with Admiral
Farragut. The Devil walked beside the boat and ruffled the water just to be
mean.
We heard
Henry reach the lower hall. We held our books, but we did not read. The
lamplight touched the old books gently. Here and there a book was missing from
a shelf.
At length I said, "Do you think your grandfather was really
here?" "He was here."
"Why did he come, do you s'pose?"
"I s'pose he came down for a book he wanted. Prob'ly one they don't
have in the library in Heaven."
"Do-do-they read Up There?"
"Yes. What else could you do forever and ever, amen?"
And lo, the old New England Heaven of golden
harps, a great White Throne and Cherubim and Seraphim passed away. And the new
Heaven was a vast Celestial Library beyond the foothills of the Pleiades. The
books were bound in solid gold. The reading lamps were of alabaster and the
lights were stars. And those who had been good on earth sat in purple velvet
chairs and read forevermore. But those who had been disrespectful and had not
gone to church on Sunday spent all eternity merely dusting books with dusters
of gray cat-stitched clouds.
And so, when the fingers of the rain are on
the north windows, and the wind cries like a lost lamb, I look back across the
years which make up more than half a century, and see two children standing in
the twilight, standing quietly, respectfully, because they thought Mr. Gideon
Welles had come back to his library.
