The Old Darned Man
Back in the thirties, in the midst of the Depression, I fled
the city and moved to a Connecticut farm.
It was the period of my first marriage.
We lived in an old gambrel house, built about 1740, on top of a ridge
called Wormwood Hill. I had bought the
house, together with more than 100 acres of woodland and pasture, for $500
down. It had no electricity, not heat,
no running water, and it was in bad repair, but it was a great, beautiful
house. I spent most of three years,
working with my hands, making it habitable.
At that time early American art and furniture were practically being
given away. Poor as we were, we managed
to fill the house with priceless stuff.
We were so far from the city and from all signs of progress that we
might as well have been living in another age.
One spring there appeared on the road, climbing up the hill,
a man in a patchwork suit, with a battered silk hat on his head. His trousers and swallow-tail coat had been
mended so many times, with varicolored swatches, that when he approached us,
over the brow of the hill, he looked like a crazy-quilt on stilts.
He was an iterant tinker, dried-out and old, thin as a
scarecrow, with a high, cracked voice.
He asked for pots and pans to repair, scissors and knives to
sharpen. In the shade of the sugar maples,
that a colonel in Washington's army was said to have planted, he set up his
shop and silently went to work on the articles I handed him.
When he was done, I offered him lunch in the kitchen. He would not sit down to eat, but accepted
some food in a bag. "I have been
here before," he said to me quietly.
On our way out, while we were standing in the front hall at the foot of
the staircase, he suddenly cried, "I hear the worms tumbling in this
house." "What do you
mean?" I asked. He did not answer,
but cupped his hands over his eyes. I
took it as a bad omen, a fateful prophecy, about my house, my marriage. And so it turned out to be.
Some time later I learned that my visitor was a legendary
figure, known throughout the countryside as the Old Darned Man. He had been a brilliant divinity student at
Yale, engaged to a childhood sweetheart, with the wedding day set for the day
after graduation. But on that very day,
while he waited at the church, the news was brought to him that she had run off
with his dearest friend. Ever since then
he had been wandering distractedly from village to village in his wedding
clothes.
As for the worms, they belonged to a forgotten page in local
history. Late in the nineteenth century
the housewives of the region, dreaming of a fortune to be made, had started a
cottage industry in silkworm culture, importing the worms from China. The parlors of every farmhouse were lined
with stacks of silkworm trays, in which the worms munched on mulberry leaves,
making clicking and whispering noises.
That was the sound heard in my hall.
It's a story without a happy ending. The worms died; the dreams of riches faded;
abandoned plows rusted in the farmyards; one breathless summer day a
black-funneled twister wheeled up Wormwood Hill from the stricken valley,
dismantling my house, my barn, my grove of sugar maples; the face of my bride
darkened and broke into a wild laughter; I never saw the Old Darned Man again.
