There was a story about the house which happened before my time. They said that a certain old man known as Elder Sammis had lived there once and that he’d beaten his daughter to death when he found that she’d got into trouble.
He didn’t mean to beat her as bad as that, but when he found she was dead he put her body in a box under the bed and ran away, and they found the dead girl there two weeks later. They tried to catch him but they never did, because about a month later he jumped off a river boat and was drowned.
So nobody lived in the house and everybody was scared of it, so there wasn’t any reason why we couldn’t swim there in peace.
After Homer was hanged, one of the pictures I remembered was that swimming hole on an afternoon in early June when he’d come over from the Theological Seminary to spend Sunday with his folks. The water was clear and the sunlight was hot, and after we’d swum about a bit and splashed at each other like a couple of kids, we got out of the water and lay on the grass and talked.
We lay there almost in the shadow of the empty old home and for a long time we didn’t say anything. It was beautiful, with the sun on our bodies and the soft grass under us and a warm breeze blowing over us.
A calf came up and sniffed at me and went away again, and it struck me all of a sudden how beautiful Homer was lying there in the sun. He was like the ideas some people have about the Greeks, which aren’t true probably but are kind of idealized.
That afternoon he was preachier than ever. He went after me for going on buggy rides at night with old man Fisher’s girl, and for not believing in God. And he began to hash over a lot of ideas about purity that didn’t make any sense, and all the time I wanted to get up and laugh and dance, because it seemed so funny to hear all that claptrap coming out of the mouth of a young fellow, sitting on the grass beside that clear stream.
I wanted to laugh but I kept my mouth shut, and then he said something that made me want to cry. I’m not emotional or sentimental, but I guess it must have been the feel of the grass and the sun and the warm breeze that made me feel that way. He said, “I don’t care for myself, Buck. It’s because when I go to heaven I want to find you there, too.”
And then the sun disappeared. It had slipped down behind the desolate Sammis house and was shining through the empty holes where the windows used to be, and the breeze wasn’t so warm any more and I began to pull on my clothes; and then Homer, seeing that all his talk wasn’t having any effect, began to dress, too.
After we dressed we sat around for a while and Homer said presently, “Let’s go up and look through old Sammis’s house.”
We’d never done it as kids on account of the story that Hester Sammis’s ghost was always in the house. I don’t believe in ghosts, and that afternoon I knew for the first time that it wasn’t really the thought of ghosts which had scared me but something else. I knew that it was because of the sadness that clung to the old house itself.
We didn’t go into the house, but all the way home he kept kidding me about being afraid of ghosts and I didn’t try to explain to him. Lately, I’ve been thinking I was wrong not to have talked about it and that if I’d tried as hard to convert him as he tried to convert me, they mightn’t have hanged him last Tuesday.
The trouble was that I was finding my heaven right here on earth and not worrying much about what happened afterwards, and he was afraid of this earth and worrying himself about the next and he wanted me to be in heaven with him. I guess he cared a lot more for me than I knew in those days.
It was that afternoon that he told me he was going to get married as soon as he was out of college. I was glad, because I thought it would be good for him.
But I didn’t see the girl until after they were married and came back to Hanover to live. He didn’t become a preacher, after all, because his uncle died and left his hardware store to Homer’s lather and Homer’s father thought it over and decided the cash drawer of a good-paying hardware store was better than the rewards of saving souls.
So Homer came back to Hanover to live and set up his wife in a house alongside his parents’ house and took over the hardware store.
The hardware business flourished because Homer was honest and reliable and sold only the best hardware, and his father kind of looked after the business, because Homer wasn’t very good about things like that. He was really romantic and all that squeezing into a hard pious shell couldn’t change that in him. It was always bursting out somewhere.
After he got married he took to reading all kinds of romantic novels like The Three Musketeers. He really wanted to travel to places alone, looking for adventures, but he’d got himself married when he was twenty-one and his wife had twins, and after that there was a baby about every eighteen months until there were five, so he couldn’t very well do anything but look after the store and take care of the children when his wife Etta was doing church work.
And his wife wasn’t much. I’m kind of an idealist, and before he got married, I always pictured him taking up with a woman who was as fine and beautiful as himself. There was something wonderful in the idea of a beautiful girl marrying such a handsome fellow as Homer and in their having a lot of beautiful children.
But when he came back and invited me to supper one night to meet Etta, I felt kind of sick when I saw her. I knew right away that Homer had been up to his old tricks. He’d married the kind of woman he’d been brought up to marry and not the kind he’d been meant by Nature to marry.
She didn’t take to me and I certainly didn’t like her, and after that first meeting, Homer and I began to see less and less of each other. She was the kind of woman who wasn’t going to let her husband have any friends.
It wasn’t just women. She wouldn’t let him have men friends, either. And I guess she thought I was the devil himself, so she wouldn’t even let Homer go on trying to save my soul so I could be in heaven with him.
Once she buttonholed me on the street and called me a sot and harangued me until I got away from her, and after that Homer was ashamed and he’d walk around a block or go into a store if he saw me coming. I guess there’s lots of women like her in America.
Of course, with all that going on, she didn’t have much time for housework. The children were always sick and the dishes were never washed, and Homer used to have to stay at home to look after the children and take care of the house while she went to meetings and traveled about lecturing and haranguing.
I always thought he had too much character to do things like that, but I guess she just wore him down with abuse and whining and nagging. But he did have enough character to preserve a kind of dignity in spite of everything. He just gave up going out anywhere and lived between his house and the hardware store. He was crazy about his children.
But marriage didn’t do him much good. Instead of growing fat on it like most men, he seemed to grow dry. He looked older than he was and there were hard lines in his face that oughtn’t to have been there, and I only found out the reason when he sent for me at the Mitchellville jail after he got into trouble.
When I got word that he wanted to see me, I could have died of surprise, because he hadn’t seen me in fifteen years for more than long enough to say “Howdydo” when we passed in the street. I guess his mind must have gone back a long way, beyond Etta and all she’d done to him, to that day when we went swimming together for the last time and lay on the soft grass behind the haunted Sammis house.
Sitting there in the cell of the Mitchellville jail, he told me all about Etta and about everything else, too. After the fifth child was born, she told him the doctor said if she had another child it would kill her, so they couldn’t live together as man and wife any more. And that happened before Homer was 30. So for seventeen years they lived together as if they weren’t married.