Books: Nostalgia

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There were also characters like irreligious Mr. Curtis: "What do you do on Sundays while your wife is in church?" the preacher asked him. "Breed mares, geld colts, and build hogpens. I can always find some pleasant way to pass the time." There was mysterious Jerry Billings, Father's gardener, whose trial and ten-year sentence for arson was one of the high points of Country Lawyer.

Father never believed Jerry was guilty, and when Jerry got out of jail, offered to set him up in business in another town. Jerry insisted on coming back to prove "he could be as good a citizen as any of them." Father set Jerry up as a butcher. When Jerry died, "Father, too upset to eat, served the rest of us and then sat looking at his empty plate." "Well, Jerry is gone, and I've lost a friend," he said finally. "A friend that I was proud of. ... I don't know who Jerry was or where he came from, but I do know that he was made of good stuff. ..."

Mother, who never liked Jerry, thought that people would not go to his funeral. "People," she said, "are funny about funerals." She would not let Bellamy go. But walking past the house, he could see that it was packed, "and even the door-yard was full of people who stood there all through the service. ... I had never before seen people walking in the street behind a hearse, and I was so absorbed by the sight that I did not notice that the onlookers were uncovering their heads until a man behind me touched my shoulder. 'Take off your hat,' he said in a low tone, 'and show your respect for a real man. Ain't you got no manners?' " At that moment young Bellamy Partridge realized that manners "were not just a form of household oppression . . . but that they had a substantial standing in the community."

Author Partridge is no more sentimental than a washbasin. In getting back to the past he completely bypasses the antique shop. His books are nostalgic, but it is not a nostalgia for antimacassars or oil lamps. The nostalgia is for a democracy that was real because in the general dearth of material things, nobody was able to have much more than anybody else. It was integral and uniform, and its patterns were as obvious and as artless as the patterns in its Brussels carpets.