I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.
If you know Starkfield, Massachusetts, you know the post office, and 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, 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, despite 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 than fifty-two.
“He’s looked that way ever since he had his smash-up, and that’s twenty-four years ago come next February,” said 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.
The “smash-up”, I gathered, had, besides drawing the red gash across Ethan Frome’s forehead, 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 I often passed him on the porch or stood beside him while we waited on the motions of the distributing hand behind the grating. I noticed that, though he came 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 postmaster would hand him an envelope addressed to Mrs. Zeena-Frome, and usually bearing conspicuously in the upper left-hand corner the address of some manufacturer of patent medicine.
Everyone in Starkfield knew him and gave him a greeting tempered to his own grave bearing, but his taciturnity was respected and it was only on rare occasions that one of the older men of the place detained him for a word. When this happened, he would listen quietly, his blue eyes on the speaker’s face, and answer in so low a tone that his words never reached me; then he would climb stiffly into his buggy, gather up the reins in his left hand and drive slowly away toward his farm.