I HAD the story, bit by bit, from
various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time was a
different story.
If you know Starkfield, Massachusetts, you know the
post-office. If you know the post-office you must have seen Ethan Frome
drive up to it, drop the reins on his hollow-backed bay and drag
himself across the brick pavement to the white colonnade; and you must
have asked who he was.
It was there that, several years ago, I saw him for the first
time; and the sight pulled me up sharp. Even then he was the most
striking figure in Starkfield, though he was but the ruin of a man. It
was not so much his great height that marked him, for the "natives" were
easily singled out by their lank longitude from the stockier foreign
breed: it was the careless powerful look he had, in spite of a lameness
checking each step like the jerk of a chain. There was something bleak
and unapproachable in his face, and he was so stiffened and grizzled that
I took him for an old man and was surprised to hear that he was not more
that fifty-two. I had this from Harmon Gow, who had driven the stage
from Bettsbridge to Starkfield in pre-trolley days and knew the chronicle
of all the families on his line.
"He's looked that way ever since he had his smash-up; and
that's twenty-four years ago come next February," Harmon threw out
between reminiscent pauses.
The "smash-up" it was—I gathered from the same
informant—which, besides drawing the red gash across Ethan Frome's
forehead, had so shortened and warped his right side that it cost him a
visible effort to take the few steps from his buggy to the post-office
window. He used to drive in from his farm every day at about noon, and
as that was my own hour for fetching my mail I often passed him in the
porch or stood beside him while we waited on the motions of the
distributing hand behind the grating. I noticed that, though he come so
punctually, he seldom received anything but a copy of the Bettsbridge
Eagle, which he put without a glance into his sagging pocket. At
intervals, however, the post-master would hand him an envelop addressed
to Mrs. Zenobia—or Mrs. Zeena—Frome, and usually bearing conspicuously
in the upper left-hand corner the address of some manufacturer of patent
medicine and the name of address of some manufacturer of patent medicine
and the name of his specific. These documents my neighbor would also
pocket without a glance, as if too much used to them to wonder at their
number and variety, and would then turn away with a silent nod to the
post-master.
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