Mary Jane's Pa

Summary

Fifteen vagabond seasons rust Hiram Perkins’s boots; he ghosts back into a clapboard universe where ink-stained matriarch Kate has transmuted marital desertion into a thriving gazette, her quill the sole wage for two growing daughters who have never tasted paternal lullabies. Hiram, sun-creased and penitent, bargains for domestic oxygen: he may dwell within the cedar aroma of the family parlor if he consents to anonymity—call him ‘handyman,’ not ‘husband.’ Meanwhile, Kate’s editorials brand the corrupt assemblyman Joel Skinner a civic leech; her inkpot crusade intensifies when she uncovers Skinner’s cruelty toward the widowed Mrs. Miller, whose trembling hands once stitched quilts for both their children. Rome Preston, Skinner’s silver-tongued electoral rival, arrives with velvet gloves and iron threats: silence the story or the press will be stilled. Kate’s refusal clangs like iron on anvil; Preston’s saboteurs jam the gears, metal shrieks, type falls like metallic snow. Enter the spectral father: beneath guttering lamplight Hiram reassembles the gutted Gutenberg, feeds it with clandestine sheets, and by dawn Skinner’s sins flap on every porch like accusatory ravens. Retribution arrives cloaked in kerosene and torch; the print shop becomes a pyre, and a mob howls for the stranger’s skin to be lacquered in tar and plumage. Kate, no longer able to let her daughters witness a surrogate scaffold, proclaims the stranger’s true surname; the word ‘husband’ detonates in the square, halting torches mid-flame. In that crucible of smoke and revelation, forgiveness is not a sermon but a pragmatic necessity: the press is ash, the political serpent slithers off wounded, and a family—fractured, reassembled—stands amid embers, their silhouettes stitched together by soot and the stubborn refusal to abandon the story of themselves.

Synopsis

After wandering the world for fifteen years, Hiram Perkins returns home to find his wife running a small town newspaper to support their two daughters. With pity in her heart, Mrs. Perkins allows her husband to stay in the house providing that he not disclose his identity. Mrs. Perkins is waging a battle against the re-election of Joel Skinner for a seat in the assembly, and when she learns that Skinner has mistreated old Mrs. Miller, she is determined to expose his actions. Rome Preston, running in opposition to Skinner, requests that she stop the story, but Mrs. Perkins refuses and so Preston disables the press. With Hiram's help, Mrs. Perkins prints the story and Skinner is defeated. In revenge, Skinner's men burn the press and demand that Hiram be tarred and feathered. At this moment, Mrs. Perkins acknowledges that Hiram is her husband and all is forgiven as the Perkins family is reunited.