Mickey's Harvest by Howard L. Terry

Author:Howard L. Terry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallaudet University Press
Published: 2015-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

* In Ch. 10, Bunny is described as being able to use his voice with ease. Terry may be making a distinction here between using one’s voice for communicative purposes and then the quality of the speech, as judged by hearing listeners.

* Editor’s note. This poem is “ Invictus: The Unconquerable ” by the English poet William Ernest Henley (1849–1903).

CHAPTER 14

Months rolled by. Mrs. Raleigh had found it expedient to leave town. Spring and summer came and passed into the years, and these months brought me sad news from home: Mrs. Walton had died, and Nell was engaged to be married. I had twice written to Aunt Libby. No answer. With the slow transition that marks the change of seasons we approach and enter into new epochs of our lives, and we become aware of this new order of things only by a forced and ever-present realization, a surrounding atmosphere that affects every fibre of our being. We are no longer what we were, something has left us that will never return; we are confronted by a stranger in the person of our new self whose acquaintance it takes time to make.

The old Walton homestead no longer appealed to me as a sure haven to which I might steer through the blackness of the storm; the kindly keeper in the person of “ Mother ” was not there, and the beacon light, Nell, must now not shine so sure with a man between her and me. I felt that my presence in the old home would not be so welcome with the other male on the place. I must look ahead, now, with a new and real earnestness, as one who knows there is no turning back; I must form plans for the future. Many a night I lay quietly awake, dreaming, planning, trying to solve a problem I didn’t even know how to begin on; many an evening I stole away from my companions, leaving them wondering, as I sought aloneness, even in the city crowds, to think, to find a way out. And from these wanderings I would return, feeling no better than when I strolled forth.

As thus I entered upon my changed life little did I dream that very soon a bright star in the form of a beautiful girl was to appear on my horizon, that my great adventure was near at hand, and that I was to be led irresistibly into a romance and carried away into a realm of glorious anticipation. Nor did I dream that another star, an opposing one, in the person of a woman whose acquaintance we have already made, was to flash across my heaven and come so dangerously near my bright one as to bring about a cataclysm in our little firmament.

A day came when Bunny lost his job, and he decided to try another city, the city where the convention of my people was soon held. There Bunny readily got another printer’s stick to fill, another press to feed, and when Bunny was thus established he was contented, as people must be in this world.

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