The Boarded Window

“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.” 

A sense of foreboding emerges from the forest and permeates the cabin and its owner, who seems resigned to it. Something terrible happened here that took the spirit out of the man. Taciturn and insular, he wants little to do with humanity.

“Apparently the man's zeal for agriculture had burned with a failing flame, expiring in penitential ashes.”

The thing that destroyed his spirit also fills him with remorse and guilt. No longer does he try to keep up the property; he lets it grow wild, as if wishing to be absorbed back into the forest.

“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.” 

The window’s role in the terrible thing that happened must be banished from collective memory. Somehow, boarding it up gives Murlock a small amount of peace. Since then, the cabin hasn’t changed, a vestige of a long-ago past.

“The man's name was said to be Murlock. He was apparently seventy years old, actually about fifty. Something besides years had had a hand in his aging. His hair and long, full beard were white, his gray, lusterless eyes sunken, his face singularly seamed with wrinkles which appeared to belong to two intersecting systems.” 

The two types of wrinkles on Murlock’s face attest to a double tragedy, some loss compounded on another that aged him prematurely. 

“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.” 

His wife, barely remembered by the locals, must have died young. Their gravesite hints at something tragic: Two graves at the edge of an unkempt property, lying fallow in the shadow of a great, brooding forest, suggest an unspeakable horror buried deep in the past.

“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; of 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!” 

Murlock never leaves his homestead, even after his young wife dies. Her memory chains him to the place. Their love must have been great enough to hold him forever.

“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 never a gleam of returning reason.” 

Life on the frontier, lacking many of the necessities of civilization, can be cruel, and death can come suddenly, even to the young and fit, even to those who don’t deserve it. Despite his best efforts, Murlock apparently loses his wife to a sudden illness. Now he must deal with her burial and his remorse.

“He was surprised, too, that he did not weep—surprised and a little ashamed; surely it is unkind not to weep for the dead.” 

Stunned by her sudden death, Murlock goes about preparing for her burial without tears. His emotional breakdown will come in the form of sleep. Now, he feels a twinge of guilt about not weeping, which foreshadows a much greater guilt to come.

“And still through his consciousness ran an undersense of conviction 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.” 

Murlock’s lack of grief, coupled with his sense that all would be right again, betrays his unconscious sense that somehow his wife isn’t dead. He attributes this to his lack of experience with loss and decides that his feelings will adjust themselves to the new reality in due time.

“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 woods! 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.” 

The eerie wail might be an animal or a lost child, but it might also be the soul of Murlock’s wife trying to reach him, or perhaps the peal of death coming to claim her. That it might be any of these things adds to the disorientation and fear of the story. Murlock no longer cares about his safety—he sleeps, ignoring possible danger.

“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?”

Murlock, sleeping, has failed fully to guard his wife’s body on the table. Now, something is moving in the room. Groggy and confused, Murlock struggles to make sense of the situation. It’s a moment of hesitation he’ll come to regret.

“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!” 

Either an intruder has bumped the table or Murlock’s wife has arisen and stepped quietly down from the table onto the floor. She’s supposed to be dead, though, so, in his half-asleep state, Murlock’s surprise turns quickly to horror.

“There is a point at which terror may turn to madness; and madness incites to action.” 

His fear and the disappearance of his wife’s body, activates Murlock’s survival instincts. Automatically he reaches for the gun on the wall and fires it. The sudden report shocks the intruder and, at the same time, illuminates the room so that Murlock can see at once the situation. His actions, though finally quick and purposeful, may be too late.