The Boarded Window by Ambrose Bierce

"...people of the frontier—restless souls who no sooner had hewn fairly habitable homes out of the wilderness and attained to that degree of prosperity which to-day we should call indigence than impelled by some mysterious impulse of their nature they abandoned all and pushed farther westward, to encounter new perils and privations in the effort to regain the meagre comforts which they had voluntarily renounced."

So many of us reach our goals, only to set out and repeat the cycle: finally got that promotion or house? Well, it must be time to change jobs or get a new house? But what if you were one of the few, who stayed put. In this Ambrose Bierce tale, narrator Rae Wilson invites us to explore that very question.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Echoes in the Dark, a podcast dedicated to the oral tradition of storytelling. If you're looking to enjoy more classic literature, struggle to find the time to read, hate reading, or just love listening to stories, then this podcast is for you. At the end of each story, I'll share my analysis on the story's deeper meanings. The Boarded Window by Ambrose Bierce is a short story that was originally published in 1891 in the San Francisco Examiner. Bierce wrote some 90 short stories throughout his career. The entire story combines first person and third-person narration. If you want to follow along, you can get a copy on my website, better essaywriting.com. The Boarded Window by Ambrose Beer. In 1830, only a few miles away from what is now the great city of Cincinnati, lay an immense and almost unbroken forest. The whole region was sparsely settled by people of Frontier. Restless souls who no sooner had hewn fairly habitable homes out of the wilderness and attained that degree of prosperity which today we should call engineers. Then impelled by some mysterious impulse of their nature, they abandoned all and pushed farther westward to encounter new perils and privations in the effort to regain the meager comforts which they had voluntarily renounced. Many of them had already forsaken that region for the remoter settlements. But among those remaining was one who had been of those first arriving. He lived alone in a house of logs surrounded on all sides by the great forest, of whose gloom and silence he seemed a part, for no one had ever known him to smile nor speak a needless word. His simplest wants were supplied by the sale or barter of skins of wild animals in the river town. For not a thing did he grow upon the land, which, if needful, he might have claimed by right of undisturbed possession. There were evidences of improvement. A few acres of ground immediately about the house had once been cleared of its trees, the decayed stumps of which were half concealed by the new growth, that had been suffered to repair the ravage wrought by the axe. Apparently the man's zeal for agriculture had burned with a failing flame, expiring in penitential ashes. The little log house, with its chimney of sticks, its roof of warping clapboards weighted with traversing poles and its chinking of clay, had a single door and directly opposite a window. The latter, however, was boarded up. Nobody could remember a time when it was not, and none knew why it was so close. Certainly not because of the occupant's dislike of light and air, for on those rare occasions when a hunter had passed that lonely spot, the recluse had commonly been seen sunning himself on his doorstep if heaven had provided sunshine for his need. I fancy there are few persons living today who ever knew the secret of that window, but I am one, as you shall see. The man's name was said to be Mlock. He was apparently seventy years old, actually about fifty. Something besides years had had a hand in his aging. His hair and long, full build were white, his grey, lustreless eyes sunken, his face singularly seamed with wrinkles which appeared to belong to two intersecting systems. In figure, he was tall and spare, with a stoop of the shoulders, a burden bearer. I never saw him. These particulars I learned from my grandfather, from whom also I got the man's story when I was a lad. He had known him when living nearby in that early day. One day, Murlock was found in his cabin dead. It was not a time and place for coroners and newspapers, and I suppose it was agreed that he had died from natural causes, or I should have been told and should remember. I know only that. With what was probably a sense of the fitness of things, the body was buried near the cabin, alongside the grave of his wife, who had preceded him by so many years that local tradition had retained hardly a hint of her existence. That closes the final chapter of this true story. Excepting, indeed, the circumstances that many years afterward, in company with an equally intrepid spirit, I penetrated to the place and venture near enough to the ruined cabin to throw a stone against it, and ran away to avoid the ghost, which every well informed boy thereabout knew haunted the spot. But there is an earlier chapter that supplied by my grandfather. When Murloc built his cabin and began laying sturdily about with his axe to hew out a farm. The rifle, meanwhile, his means of support, he was young, strong, and full of hope. In that eastern country whence he came he had married, as was the fashion. A young woman in all ways worthy of his honest devotion, who shared the dangers and privations of his lot with a willing spirit and light heart. There is no known record of her name, or her charms of mind and person tradition is silent, and the doubter is at liberty to entertain his doubt, but God forbid that I should share it. Of their affection and happiness, there is abundant assurance in every added day of the man's widowed life. For what but the magnetism of a blessed memory could have chained that venturesome spirit to a lot like that. One day, Murlock returned from gunning in a distant part of the forest to find his wife prostrate with fever and delirious. There was no physician within miles, no neighbor, nor was she in a condition to be left to summon help. So he set about the task of nursing her back to health. But at the end of the third day, she fell into unconsciousness and so passed away, apparently with a never a gleam of returning reason. From what we know of a nature like his, we may venture to sketch in some of the details of the outline picture drawn by my grandfather. When convinced that she was dead, Murlock had sense enough to remember that the dead must be prepared for burial and performance of this sacred duty, he blundered now and again, did certain things incorrectly, and others which he did correctly were done over and over. His occasional failures to accomplish some simple and ordinary act filled him with astonishment, like that of a drunken man who wonders at the suspension of familiar natural law. He was surprised too that he did not weep. Surprised and a little ashamed. Surely it is unkind not to weep for the dead. Tomorrow, he said aloud, I shall have to make the coffin and dig the grave, and then I shall miss her. When she is no longer in sight. But now she is dead, of course, but it is alright. It must be alright somehow. Things cannot be so bad as they seem. He stood over the body in the fading light, adjusting the hair and putting the fishing touches to the simple toilet, doing all mechanically with soulless care. And still through his consciousness ran an under sense of convention that all was right, that he should have her again as before. And everything explained. He had had no experience in grief, his capacity had not been enlarged by use. His heart could not contain it all, nor his imagination rightly conceive it. He did not know he was so heart struck. That knowledge would come later and never go. Grief is an artist of powers as various as the instruments upon which he plays his dirges for the dead, evoking from some the sharpest, shrillest notes, and others the low grave chords that throb a recent like the slow beating of a distant drum. Some natures it startles, some it stupefies. To one it comes like the stroke of an arrow stinging all the sensibilities of a keener life, to another as the blow of a bludgeon, which in crushing benumbs. We may conceive Murloch to have been that way affected for and here we are upon sure ground than that of the conjecture. No sooner had he finished his pious work than sinking into a chair by the side of the table upon which the body lay, and noting how white the profile showed in the deepening gloom, he laid his arms upon the table's edge and dropped his face into them, tearless yet unutterably weary. At that moment came in through the open window a long wailing sound like the cry of a lost child in the far deeps of the darkening wood. But the man did not move. Again, and nearer than before sounded that unearthly cry upon his failing sense. Perhaps it was a wild beast, perhaps it was a dream. For Murlock was asleep. Some hours later, as it afterward appeared, this unfaithful watcher awoke and lifting his head from his arms, intently listened. He knew not why. There, in the black darkness by the side of the dead, recalling all without a shock, he strained his eyes to see he knew not what. His senses were all alert, his breath was suspended, his blood had stilled its tides as if to assist the silence. Who? What had waked him, and where was it? Suddenly the table shook beneath his arms, and at the same moment he heard, or fancied that he heard, a light, soft step, another sounds as of bare feet upon the floor. He was terrified beyond the power to cry out or move. Perforce he waited. Waited, therefore, in the darkness through seeming centuries of such dread as one may know yet live to tell. He tried vainly to speak the dead woman's name, vainly to stretch forth his hand across the table to learn if she were there. His throat was powerless, his arms and hands were like lead. Then occurred something most frightful. Some heavy body seemed hurled against the table with an impetus that pushed it against his breast so sharply as nearly to overthrow him, and at the same instant he heard and fell the fall of something upon the floor with so violent a thump that the whole house was shaken by the impact. A scuffling ensued and a confusion of sounds impossible to describe. Murloch had risen to his feet. Fear had by excess forfeited control of his faculties. He flung his hands upon the table. Nothing was there. There was a point at which terror may turn to madness, and madness incites to action. With no definite intent, from no motive but the wayward impulse of a madman, Murlock sprang to the wall with a little groping, seized his loaded rifle, and without aim discharged it. By the flash which lit up the room with a vivid illumination, he saw an enormous panther dragging the dead woman toward the window, its teeth fixed in her throat. Then there were darkness blacker than before and silent. And when he returned to consciousness, the sun was high and the wood vocal with song. The body lay near the window. Where the beast had left it when frightened away by the flash and the report of the rifle. The clothing was deranged, the long hair and disorder, the limbs lay anyhow from the throat, dreadfully lacerated, had issued a pool of blood not yet entirely coagulated. The ribbon with which he had bound the wrist was broken. The hands were tightly clenched. Between the teeth was a fragment of the animal's ear. This is the second story I've read by Bierce. And uh when doing a quick little Google search on this author, the good old AI summed up Bierce's work as being sarcastic and witty. And I'm gonna say I agree with that sentiment. And just the things that I certainly look for in a short piece. Um with that being said, I so if you might remember the other piece that I read for this podcast was A Vine on a House, and I got a kick out of the twisted little knots, those, the roots. It just really stands out to me. I still giggle when I think about it. This one isn't funny, haha. In terms of our ending, I think Bierce's humor is really strong in the beginning. When Bierce is just describing this really desolate area, it is rich in trees, and that's gonna, of course, mean rich in animals. So rich in wilderness. And yet we have this wonderful description of people who come to the area to make lives for themselves, only to then be like, up, you know what? We're just gonna leave and go try to make our life elsewhere and do it all over again. Like, what was wrong with what you had? But we'll come back to that thought. So anyway, I thought that description was really funny and fun. And I loved it, and I hoped you loved it too. With that being said, I found the ending to be truly surprising. So partway through this, I was getting a little disappointed. I'm like, oh my gosh. Okay, clearly this guy is bumbling, uh, preparing his wife for burial, which also brought up another question for me in terms of, so what exactly do you feel you need to do to this body? I mean, I'm thinking of Egyptian times. Is he, I mean, he's not gonna have a coat hanger to pull out a no uh the brain from the nose. So what is he doing to this body? I'm imagining that he's removing organs and things of that nature. He's doing things right and he's doing things wrong. I don't even know what this man is doing. And as I'm saying this, I'm thinking about maybe he was just like, okay, let me undress her and then wash her and then dress her. We do get the sense that he's fixing her hair. This is mentioned. Um, he he bound her hands, okay. So, okay, maybe there's no organ removal. Um he's got a rifle, there's probably an axe outside, but there's there's no hatchery happening. So, what is he so tired for? I know it's hard to move a dead body, but dude, why are you so tired? Why is this so taxing? So, with that being said, I kind of wish Pierce had given us a little bit more on that aspect, but it's all good. He needed to put together a short story for the San Francisco paper. I gotcha. And as someone who lived in San Francisco, I just love knowing. Oh, Pierce was published in the San Francisco Examiner. Woo-hoo. Okay. So I don't know what he did to this body, but apparently it was something that made him oh so tired, and something that he was kind of sort of maybe not good at. But yeah, I'm thinking, oh my gosh, this is so typical. She's not really dead. And then I'm thinking, well, maybe she is dead and she's a ghost because he hears something. What's happening? There's a thud. Is she gonna like wake up and murder him because he removed her organs? What's happening? Like, what is going on here? And then we have him grab the rifle, shoot, and there's the mention of the panther. I thought, oh, well, that's interesting. Was not expecting that. So my brain kind of automatically put out the fact that he is alone in the wilderness. Not just alone, no people around, but there's animals out there, and it's nighttime, and there's death in the area. There is a dead body, and so yeah, animals are gonna be like, I think I smell something. Um now, with that being said, let's put up let's put a little pillow pen in that death smelling thing. Because the ending ending, right? Like after the the the Panther was like, okay, whatever, it's Panther. That was a little surprise. Thank you. But the pièce de résistance, the real creme de la creme of this story is really the last sentence, my friends. Oh my. So here it is again, because I'm loving it, and I hope you do too. Between the teeth, let me back it up, the ribbon with which he had bound the wrist was broken, the hands were tightly clenched. Between the teeth was a fragment of the animal's ear. So these two sentences reveal so much to us. And actually, even just I'm rereading the sentence before that, from the throat, dreadfully lacerated, had issued a pool of blood not yet entirely coagulated. So the blood coagulates when it's been there for a long time, so she had not been bleeding out for a long time, she was not dead, she found herself being attacked by a panther. She fought back, she bit that thing. So I guess she was too weak in her fevered state to really say much of anything when her husband was trying to prepare her for death and like tying her hands and stuff. But when she felt something on her throat, she bit down and bit that animal's ear. I love that so much. And um, she fought back. Her she was able to. Get her hands free. But ultimately she died. And she just laid there like bleeding out for quite some time. So she died not from her fevered state, not from her husband's bumbling negligence, but from being mauled by a panther. Ugh. So, so good. I thought this story, when it started off with this whole thing about a window when kids are running away because of spirits. I thought for sure, okay, we're gonna have a ghost. Whoop-de-doo, this guy's ghost is haunting the place, or um maybe the wife's ghost was haunting him. Like, come on, I'm I don't need the same old, same old. Here am I, a bit of a critic and a skeptic after reading. I love, I love gothic stories. And so you do expect to see the same layout over and over. This is not abnormal. So I really shouldn't be complaining. But I think it's so fun when an author gives us something truly different, and I think that's what Bierce is really good at. Really good at just giving you something that you probably weren't expecting. Okay, so as much as I love the surprise ending and I love the fact that it was short, what can we learn from this story? Um, how about don't isolate yourself so much that you can't get your basic needs met, right? I mean, this guy's body was found dead in his cabin later on in life. When his wife was sick, he couldn't go get help. And he was also probably on the younger side, so probably didn't even know, like, oh, who would I go and ask? What would I do? I might not have any money. So he decides, oh, I'm gonna take care of it myself. So yeah, and it just reminds me of today's society where, you know, since 2020, people have found it even more acceptable to just stay indoors, to not go out. I myself work remotely. Um, I do love going outside and taking walks in nature, but because of my lifestyle, I'm not in a position where I can go and hang out with my friends all the time. That's true. I could probably go on some chat forums and meetups and whatnot and start making lots of new friends. However, it's not really a priority for me right now. But we get all these reports in the US about oh, scientists and researchers say that um people today are lonelier than ever. There's a loneliness epidemic, everyone is isolated, blah, blah, blah. Everyone's on their phones. And when you do go out to restaurants, a lot of times you do see people on their phones. Uh, the younger generation, they're all online on social media. They don't go and see friends in person. You see these reports all the time. Um, you know, YouTube headlines of uh people rotting away in their homes, people who don't get out of bed, they just rot away. I always wonder these rotting people, like who's paying your bills? How do those bills how do you have a phone with internet access? Because if you ain't working, then at some point that phone will get shut off. So are your families just supporting your rotting lifestyle? I don't know. Those doesn't really make much sense to me. But what makes absolute sense is this idea of wanting to uh start a life on your own terms and have all the space. And this guy, he and his wife, they go, they start a life on their own terms, they have all this space. And they, unlike everyone else, have decided they are content. They are happy with what they have. They have each other, they have their lands, they're happy. Whereas, remember in the beginning of the story, everyone else is not happy with what they have. They are going off to seek new lands, uh, to find new challenges and stake new claims and do it all over again. So that also brings up another question, right? Because they were happy with what they had, they stayed put. So is happiness death? We already know that Beerce is saying, don't isolate to the point where you can't get help. Like you need people. You might be happy with what you got, but you do need people. Um, that's how that's how we live. Um you you can't exist completely on your own. Now, with that being said, I'm thinking about okay, this guy does live for a bit after his wife has passed away, but is he really on his own? Because he has the memories of her. So I'm gonna say that no, it's not that you can't live on your own, but that to to Beers is cautioning us about isolation. There's caution. There's also caution about making assumptions. Don't make assumptions. Dude assumed his wife was dead. She'd been in this fever state. He's not a doctor. He, and this is a while ago, right? So maybe he doesn't know to check for pulse. Maybe he doesn't know how to check if she's breathing. Um, maybe he just sees that, oh, she's not eating, she's not drinking, she's kind of not moving, so I guess she's dead. Um, she looks sickly. So don't make assumptions. Don't just assume your loved ones are dead and follow your instincts. He is alerted in the night of something wrong, something being in the room, and he goes for his gun and just kind of blindly shoots. And that saves his life. It doesn't save her life. Uh, but in a way, in a way, it it helped her have a more dignified death as opposed to the other potential was being buried alive by your husband because he assumed that you were dead. So yeah, don't make assumptions, follow your instincts, be careful of how much you isolate. It does bring up this question, though, is happiness death, right? Because these two people were very happy and they chose not to follow the herd. I don't think Beers is telling us follow the herd. I think he's actually saying in the beginning, no, you don't need to follow the masses. Like, people don't need to keep going in this cycle of struggle, achievement. They go find struggle, achievement. They go find more struggle. Like, why are we doing this? This makes no sense. Once you find happiness, well, I guess this is kind of it, right? Once you find happiness, it's okay if you die, right? This guy wasn't moping around his cabin, like, oh, my wife is dead. He happily stayed there. He could have left, he could have remarried, but no, he stayed there. He didn't care about maintaining the property anymore, but he stayed there. You know, his little joys, getting some sun. Absolutely. There's probably some comfort for him just being there near his wife that he loved dearly. I like the disclaimer. It's not that he didn't love her. We have no evidence that it is that he didn't love her. It's not that he was trying to bury her alive. I thought it was kind of funny. Anyway I I think uh it's a good story. Beers packed a lot into a very short story. Um and really introduced some super cool words that has certainly inspired me to be like, you know what? I really gotta do something with all this amazing vocabulary that these authors are giving me. Because some of these words, you guys, I have to look up and practice pronouncing. Like, what is this? Now, I will say that if you took the opportunity or have had the opportunity to listen to the three-part series on the gray woman, that was a lot of research, a lot of looking up words. Um, there are multiple languages happening there, and it was fun, it was very exhausting. I found for this one though, there's some words I'm like, oh, what is that? And I really feel like I just miss how stories used to encourage us to expand our vocabularies. And I understand writing in a manner in which the author shows common language, makes it more accessible by more readers, and so that way more people will be inclined to read. But this is also similar to how in uh Hollywood nowadays directors are being told to restate uh restate the plot multiple times because audiences aren't fully paying attention because they're multitasking, because they're on their phone while also watching that show or sit in the theater. So you gotta restate it a couple of times throughout the episode. And I feel like in a way, writers have uh it's certain writers, you know, have strayed away from using big words, uncommon words, fancy words, because they want for their books to be very accessible. But I always say to people, if you want to get better at English, read. Read, read a lot because it really does help expand the vocabulary. Now, as someone who is studying French, I am trying to read in French, and is it expanding my vocabulary? There are times where I stop and I go, oh my goodness, I don't really know what that means. But right now I'm just at a point where I'm like, I'm just trying to make it through the book. Um, but I do know, I know that the more I read, it's going to expand my vocabulary. So I think I'm saying all this because I want you to know that on this podcast, you are going to soon be able to get little drip drops of definitions for words. I understand that when it's the audio version of a story, you may catch a word, but it's not really it doesn't really stick. It's like, okay, I don't even know what that means. Get on to the next part of the story. Um, but by knowing the definition of a word, it can really enhance um the the the meaning of the story. And, you know, why not build some vocabulary at the same time? So gonna be gonna be doing in some drip drops for ya. I do listen to I recently discovered a podcast that I think is pretty freaking fabulous. This gal has a great voice and fun sense of humor. Clearly takes her a long time to write her stuff. I'm just free talking for the most part when I do my post story analysis. But she does her whole podcast is built around vocabulary and words, and she does list off some words at the end of the episodes, and I thought, oh, that's fun. I can I can not only um think critically, but I can also or expand my critical thinking, but I can also build my vocabulary. Now, 99% chance I will forget the vocabulary words after hearing an episode and I'm not going to actually use them in my daily language, but still, let's keep words alive. Don't replace words with emojis, you guys. Keep words alive. Can you imagine if all these stories were just listed in emojis? And you were listening to this podcast, and it was just some me trying to decode eggplant poop coffee, smiley face, hard heart. Like, what is she talking about? And I'm just like, I don't even know. I'm imagining, you know, in a thousand years people recovering documents from the last five years and just seeing things like text messages that were printed out or something, and all these emojis, and be like, what is this? Why is there a wink and a cartwheel? I don't understand. All right, my friends. Well, I hope you enjoyed this story. I certainly loved it. I loved it. Last two sentences, so good, but yeah, pretty strong from start to finish. I hope you enjoyed this story, and please do come back for another gothic tale.