They went, the little caravan of mountaineers, some sixty miles, over stony winding mountain roads, half trails. The men carried axes to cut underbrush away. Up and down mountains they went, a team of oxen pulling a covered wagon, a few dozen jugs or kegs of whiskey in the wagon. They made good whiskey in that day, let it mature, didn’t hurry it, didn’t load the beer with sugar to hurry it, didn’t make the later stomach-destroying stuff Tom got rich handling. The whiskey would be buried in straw in the wagon and a man with a gun walked on a mile or two ahead. If a federal appeared... they existed at the time too... he was to fire the gun. The whiskey was quickly hidden in the near-by brush. At night, when the little caravan camped by some clear mountain stream, it was again carried into the brush, hidden for the night under the thick laurel and rhododendron. When the men got down, near the town, it would be again hidden while they went on into town.
The caravan took all of three long days making its way down to the town where there was a store. There was a branch railroad that came up to the town. It was another three days getting home.
Could a man, several men, come over such roads, for such a great distance, merely to sell a few hens, a little sang? It was too difficult to haul the corn down. Whiskey was the distillation of the corn. Men wanted it. A man and his family wanted sugar, salt, tobacco, snuff. The women and children had to have clothes.
The little pilgrimage going down camped at night by a mountain stream. Tom Halsey remembered that. He remembered the mysterious darkness of the great forests, the cry of owls at night, the talk of the men. The men who would be so silent in town, among town men, now talked freely. When they got near the town the whiskey would be hidden and the smartest, shrewdest one among them... it would be Tom’s father... pride in the boy in that fact... would be appointed the one to make the trade for the liquor. “We are mountain men, cannot read or write, but when we speak we tell the truth. It is good liquor. If you think we are dull and stupid, come, try swapping horses with one of us.
“The whiskey is hidden in such and such a place. Come, I will show you.” Tom’s father spoke of good times when he was a boy. His people lived in the hills of Tennessee. There was a war... it was the Spanish-American War... and thousands of young men from the North came to camp at a place called “Chickamaugua Park.”
And did they want whiskey? Did they buy it? It was good times for the liquor makers in the hills. It may be that later, when Tom became a big business men, he remembered his father’s talk of that time.
In the town something to be seen. There was, for example, the railroad locomotive. It was really a cheaply constructed bit of railroad that ran up to that mountain place, a mere branch road. There was to be a big lumber cutting started there. But, to the boy, the railroad engine had seemed wonderful and terrible enough. To Tom’s mind it may have suggested something. Organizers of big business must have imagination too. They must be born with imagination. The business, the acquisitive instinct, that enables a man to grow rich and powerful, may be, after all, but a perversion, a twist of some finer instinct. Oh, the great world, off there in the distance somewhere, down along that poor little mountain railroad, great rich plains opening out down there, broad rivers flowing! Oh, the great cities being built! Oh, the great forests that still covered so much of a hill country!
The mountain country lay between the North and the South. It had long been the middle-land, the border-land between two civilizations. How many battles of the Civil War fought in the hills, mountain men on both sides in the struggle. Birds, from the North, going South, stopped their flight for a time in the hills. Some from the South stayed there, in the high cool places; from the North, in the warm valleys. Southern and Northern flowers and trees grew along mountain trails. There was snow falling on the mountain tops, far South, warm days in winter far North.
The forest that once covered the whole land to be remembered by all those who had known it. Tom’s father became a lumberjack when the lumber kings came. He talked, sometimes, when Tom was a young fellow, growing up at home, of the forest. It was something mysterious. You felt strange sometimes. Tom’s father could not find words for what he wanted to say. He did not know that man had got his notion for the cathedrals, for the Gothic, from the forests. The great aisles, leading away mysteriously under the trees. It was dark overhead, the branches of the great trees intertwined. “You didn’t want to speak loud.”
There was no underbrush in some places, on upper plateaus where the biggest trees were, and the ground underneath was soft. You walked always on a deep thick carpet of moss.
It was a great sponge. You sank in it to the boot tops.
An idea Tom Halsey never got, that his father never got. This great middle-ground between the North and the South, the Southern Appalachian Highlands, meant something terribly important to the whole country. It was the great stream source. What great rivers having their source in the hills. Once Pinchot, in Theodore Roosevelt’s time, was trying to make the idea of forest preservation clear to a group of senators. He took a board and held it on a table, at an angle of forty-five degrees. He poured a glass of water down the face of the board and then took the same board and covered it with blotting paper.
Again he poured the water down the face of the board but it did not run off. The water trickled, a few drops at a time, slowly out at the base of the board.
To see the country as a whole, understand it as a whole, a faculty that, as statesman, Lincoln had, as warrior, Grant had. The lumber kings going into the Southern Highlands and stripping the timber away, often destroyed timber they could not get out. Whole mountain slopes were often destroyed to make a runway for tall timber on some upper plateau... the washing away of the good soil beginning, going on year after year, floods in the Tennessee, the Cumberland, the Ohio. Floods down the Mississippi... fair lands made deserts... countries have been destroyed thus... towns destroyed, farms destroyed. A lumber baron has made a million, two million, five million. It is a sweet picture. Kill the TVA! Kill the CCC! These things embarrass private enterprises. Suppose it were possible that, some day, a new impulse be carried to the point where all men, in youth, were compelled to spend perhaps three years, working in the forests, or in any work that would benefit the whole country, getting thereby a sense of the country as a whole.
The dream of a new conception of life and the land.
CHAPTER SIX
TOM HALSEY, A mountain man and the son and grandson of mountain men, was born with a talent. It was not altogether an accident that he became a success later. He was by his very nature a man of business, an organizer of men and affairs. In him there was the same sort of talent that has come to the surface in so many other Americans, some of them historical figures... important surely in the development of industrial America. Do not be too quick to condemn them. Wait. Have you had the opportunity for wealth and the power that wealth brings? For a long time the industrial organizers were America’s heroes, looked up to by American youth... their glory is fading now. They were more influential in making young Americans than the Jeffersons and Lincolns. Is it worth while naming some of them... the Rockefellers, Goulds, Harrimans, etc., etc., etc.? A list of names could be made covering a long page.
Did I say their glory has passed? Do you live in any small or fairly large American town? If one of these great ones were to come, perhaps to live in your town... how wonderful. Are you sure that John W. Gates did not make more splash, that he was not more courted in Springfield, Illinois, than was ever Abraham Lincoln or say the poet Vachel Lindsay?
You begin small. There was an early American philosopher, Benjamin Franklin... “A stitch in time saves nine.”... “Take care of the pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves.”
Later product of that last, “Safety first.”
There came a time when the young Tom Halsey left his father’s house. He had already got his start. He had a calf his father gave him, and that grew into a cow. In a year when the moss in the old forest was thick
on the ground two young pigs he had acquired grew into fat hogs at no cost to young Tom.
Be careful, be cautious, be shrewd. Do not mind too much using others. Be as fair with them as you can. Tom was never much of a talker. Don’t waste words either. He went once to make some liquor with his father, when he was still little more than a boy. They were walking up a long mountain trail. They were going to a certain spot, beside a small mountain stream. You had to push through thick laurel to get in.
Tom’s father had an idea. He spoke of it as the two made their way up the path. They had been up there some time before to set the mash, to make the beer for the run. It was to be a big one, the biggest they had ever made. The father walked in front, not looking back. “Now you look here, Tom”... the father spoke of his plan. There was a good and growing sale for liquor in the lumber camp where he had been at work. He had got off work for two or three weeks and had tramped home, over the mountains from the big lumber cutting forty miles away. “You will bring the stuff over there at night.” He named a certain date. He was to go back to the camp in a few days. The idea was that the boy was to haul the liquor to the vicinity of the camp at night. It would take two nights and he would have to hide in the woods during the day. The father would meet him on the second night and together they would store the liquor in a place near the camp where the father could get it out, a gallon at a time. It would bring a good price. There was an advantage, the father being there, one of the workmen. The man at the head of the camp was sharp on bootleggers. The sharpness had driven up the prices.
The father was telling the son. He was taking him into his plan.
Well, not quite. They walked along in silence for a time and then the boy spoke and the father turned in the path to look at him. There was that quality in the young Tom. It was always in him. He did not get excited, speak sharply. He meant what he said. There was a certain finality that made others stop, take a look, wonder.
It was the sort of remark a mountain boy did not make to his own father.
“Uh huh. And me?”
A moment of suspense, there on the mountainside between the two... this after the father had stopped and was looking at young Tom. The two standing looking at each other, the silence, the challenge, not from son to father but, because it was Tom Halsey and even though he was but a boy, from man to man.
As though birds in the woods might be singing the words, the wind that blew among the trees carrying the words.
“And me? And me? And me?”
“Now there has come the time for the bargain between us.”
The above words not said... just the, “And me... and me... and me.”
But a mountain man, if he is a man, does not bargain with his son. He orders and the son obeys.
“And me? And me? And me?”
Young Tom, even then, would not have been defiant. He was handling his father as later he handled officers of the law, members of the gang he organized. His “and me” was rather an explanation. “You see, you do not understand. I am not merely a mountain boy, son of a mountain man. I am myself.
“I have certain plans, not very definite yet. You have to begin small, but you must take advantage of every opportunity. The time will come when I will command men, will command affairs.”
The “and me.” What an influence it has had in the affairs of the world, eh?
The father turned, after a long silent look at the son and went on along the trail up the mountain and the son followed in silence. He hadn’t said, “If you don’t split I won’t do it, I won’t play ball,” but the words were implicit in his voice, the sound of his voice, a certain quiet thing in his eyes. Already he had the cow. It was his and he had sold the fat pigs. More than one mountain boy has left home, got himself a wife, set up for himself, on less.
The father went along before his son in silence. He was thinking. If he took some other mountain man in with him, to make the stuff at home, haul it to the camp, take most of the risk, he would have to share.
The boy had not defied him. He had asked a question. There were no other sons at home. The boy was already trained as a liquor maker. There was a quality Tom had from the beginning. If he got what he wanted he did not try to win moral or spiritual victories. It was as though he said to himself... “Be careful now. A man wants to keep his self-respect. Be careful. Give the other fellow a way out. If he wants to feel big, you let him. You get what you’re after.” There was nothing more said until evening, when the two were coming back down the mountain and then the father spoke, as though an idea had just occurred to him.
“Tom, my boy,” he said... “It is all right. We will make some money.
“By God, you shall have your share,” he said.
Get a little and a little more. Don’t waste anything at first. Keep your eye on the main chance.
CHAPTER SEVEN
EVEN FOR THE masters of the art of acquiring, for the men-handlers, organization-handlers, money-getters, power-getters, there are bad times. The hand slips. The brain doesn’t work. A man becomes a captain of some great industry. He commands money, men, affairs. See how cool, self-possessed and quiet he is. He is not an artist. He does not make a fool of himself, say like a Vincent Van Gogh. He does not run across fields, shout, try to catch the glory of the sun on a canvas, give the sun to other men. He does not go God-seeking, wanting to give God to men.
He perhaps gets sick. He is in a hospital and there is a little blonde, a nurse. Look out, man! She is holding his hand. “I can see you are a man of feeling. How sensitive you are, so easily hurt.
“I am sure you are a man not understood. People think you are hard, cruel, without feeling. What a mistake it is.” A sigh. A look of longing in a woman’s eyes.
Or it is a show girl. The man, the grizzled old warrior of money, has gone to see a show. “Ah, there is one.” Inner excitement in the old fellow. What hope, what longing. It is generally understood that blondes do it best.
As it happened, however, Tom Halsey was one of the lucky ones. A woman came to him when he was very young.
She was not a woman. She was a young girl but, in the mountains, young girls suddenly and mysteriously become women. Tom was working in a field, a sloping field, planted to corn in the spring, and the field went down to a mountain road. You went along the mountain road, perhaps a quarter of a mile, to the Halsey house, a large and rather comfortable log farmhouse. At the foot of the field, near the road, there was a spring and locust trees grew there, spreading their branches out over the spring. The locust puts out its leaves late in the spring. How delicate and feathery they are. The honey locust blooms riotously and the trees are covered with bees. They make a soft, sometimes loud, murmuring sound. Tom was hoeing corn, working it for the first time, and an odd caravan came along the road.
But the caravan wasn’t so odd. It was a sight Tom had seen before. Some little mountain farmer had failed. He had been living on a mountainside farm somewhere back up in the hills, a man of fifty, with pale watery eyes and a little scrawny red beard, now turning gray. It looked dirty and the man was dirty. He had a wife and several children, some of them quite young.
Why, what a producer. It was, in the mountains, a common enough sight. Look. There are twelve, thirteen, perhaps fourteen kids. The man has two half-broken-down old horses and there is a wagon, the wheels tied in place by ropes, and on the wagon, pretty much covered with younger children clinging on, there are a few sticks of furniture, some dirty torn blankets and equally torn and dirty bed ticks. On one of the blankets, held in the arms of a girl child of eight, a sickly looking pale child, there is a babe and it cries lustily. The babe is not sickly. It will still be at the breast of the woman, the mother, who sits on the wagon beside the man. She is a huge fat woman who looks like an old Indian squaw. She may be that. She sits so placidly as the wagon crawls creaking along, Tom, in the field, near the fence and the spring, watching. She may be an Indian. There are still small fragments of Indian tribes in the hills.
Tom is standing and looking. He looks with impersonal eyes. The hill farmer on the wagon has had ill luck. He had a crop of corn planted and there came a great rain. The corn was planted on new ground in a sloping field and the man and the children had worked all winter clearing the land. It was a piece of cheap land, the timber having been taken off some years before.
And then the great rain came, the water washed down the hill and across the face of the field. There was nothing to be done. The man stood helpless. He was a man who had always had ill luck. His wife was slovenly, a bad housekeeper and a bad cook and as her children dropped from her... they came regularly, one after another, easily, falling from between her great thighs, they were all girl children. What is a man to do about that?
There was the great rain, all the good soil in the new ground washed away, the young corn gone, all washed away. There were three young calves and three cows and two sows, soon to farrow, in the field by the creek. It was a long narrow field and the grass was good. In the mountains when the great rains come, in country where the timber has been cut off, small mountain streams become suddenly torrents. It may happen without warning. The great rain may be above you, far up some mountain. It may be the rain comes at night, when a man is asleep. The calves, sows and cows were all drowned.
Last year the bean beetles took his beans. He had four fine hogs, fat, almost ready to kill. He had driven them down, out of an upper oak forest where they had grown fat on the fallen acorns. It was almost killing time but they all took the cholera and died.
What was the use? What was a man to do? The man had heard that in a distant town, far away, a hundred miles, there was work to be had for women and girls. Some of his girls were quite big now. There was a cotton mill in the town. It took such girls. It was no place for a man. They did not take a man of fifty, did not want such men, but a man must do something. Hungry children must be fed. The man sat sadly on the broken seat of his broken wagon beside his fat silent placid wife, driving his bony team. In the town to which he was going, a growing industrial town, the girls would find work. They would earn money. There were some five or six girls, now old enough to go to work. He himself would have to sit at home, with the fat wife, in a house in a mill village.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 186