The Old Darned Man - Stanley Kunitz

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.