The two boys, filled with scorn of their parentage, on the father’s side, are in a little grove of trees at the edge of an Ohio town. In later days the father — also born out of his place and time — will come to mean more to them but now he has little except their contempt. Now Uncas is determined — absorbed — and I, who have so little of his persistence, am impressed by his silent determination. It makes me a little uncomfortable for, since he has snatched the hatchet out of the neighbor boy’s hand, saying, “Go on home, crybaby,” no word has passed his lips. There is but a small grunting sound when the hatchet is hurled and a scowl on his face when it misses the mark.
And “Le Renard Subtil” has gone home and blabbed to his mother, who in turn has thrown a shawl over her head and has gone to our house, no doubt to blab, in her turn, to our mother. “La Longue Carabine,” being a paleface, is a little intent on disturbing the aim of “Le Cerf Agile.”
“We’ll catch hell,” he says, looking at the hatchet thrower who has not so far unbent from the natural dignity of the Indian as to reply. He grunts and taking his place solemnly at the line poises his body. There is the quick abrupt swing forward of the body. What a shame Uncas did not later become a professional baseball player. He might have made his mark in the world. The hatchet sings through the air. Well, it has struck sideways. The Huron is injured but not fatally, and Uncas goes and sets him upright again. He has marked the place where the Huron warrior’s head should be by pressing a ball of snow into the wrinkled bark of the tree and has indicated the dog’s body by a dead branch.
And so Hawkeye the scout— “La Longue Carabine.”
— has gone creeping off among the trees to see if there are any more Hurons lurking about and has come upon a great buck, pawing the snow and feeding on dry grass at the edge of a small creek. Up goes la longue carabine and the buck pitches forward, dead, on the ice. Hawkeye runs forward and swiftly passes his hunting knife across the neck of the buck. It will not do to build a fire now that there are Hurons lurking in the hunting ground of the Delawares so Uncas and he must feed upon raw meat. Well, the hunter’s life for the hunter! What must be must be! Hawkeye cuts several great steaks from the carcass of the buck and makes his way slowly and cautiously back to Uncas. As he approaches he three times imitates the call of a catbird and an answering call comes from the lips of “Le Cerf Agile.”
“Aha! the night is coming on,” Uncas now says, having at last laid the Huron low. “Now that the dirty lover of squaws is dead we may build a fire and feast. Cook the venison ere the night falls. When darkness has come we must show no fire. Do not make much smoke — big fires for the paleface, but little fires for us Indians.”
Uncas stands for a moment, gnawing the bone of the buck, and then of a sudden becomes still and alert. “Aha! I thought so,” he says, and goes back again to where he has drawn the mark in the snow. “Go,” he says; “see how many come.”
And now Hawkeye must creep through the thick forests, climb mountains, leap canyons. Word has come that “Le Renard Subtil” but feigned when he went off crying, across the field — fools that we were! While we have been in the forest he has crept into the very teepee of our people and has stolen the princess, the mother of Uncas. And now “Le Renard Subtil,” with subtle daring, drags the stoical princess right across the path of her warrior son. In one moment from a great height Hawkeye draws the faithful Deer Killer to his shoulder and fires, and at the same moment the tomahawk of Uncas sinks itself in the skull of the Huron dog.
“‘Le Renard Subtil’ had drunk firewater and was reckless,” says Uncas, as the two boys go homeward in the dusk.
The older of the two boys now homeward bound is somewhat afraid but Uncas is filled with pride. As they go homeward in the gathering darkness and come to the house, where lives “Le Renard Subtil,” to which he has gone crying but a few hours before, an idea comes to him. Uncas creeps in the darkness, halfway between the house and the picket fence in front and, balancing the hatchet in his hand, hurls it proudly. Well for the neighbor’s family that no one came to the door at that moment for Uncas’ long afternoon of practicing has got results. The hatchet flies through the air and sinks itself fairly and deeply into the door panel as Uncas and Hawkeye run away home.
And now they are in the bed and the mother is rubbing the warm grease into their chapped hands. Her own hands are rough, but how gentle they are! She is thinking of her sons, of the one already gone out into the world and most of all at the moment of Uncas.
There is something direct brutal and fine in the nature of Uncas. It is not quite an accident that in our games he is always the Indian while I am the despised white, the paleface. It is permitted me to heal my misfortune a little by being, not a storekeeper or a fur trader but that man nearest the Indian’s nature of all the palefaces who ever lived on our continent, “La Longue Carabine”; but I cannot be an Indian and least of all an Indian of the tribe of the Delawares. I am not persistent patient and determined enough. As for Uncas, one may coax and wheedle him along any road and I am always clinging to that slight sense of leadership that my additional fifteen months of living gives me, by coaxing and wheedling, but one may not drive Uncas. To attempt driving him is but to arouse a stubbornness and obstinacy that is limitless. Having told a lie to mother or father, he will stick to the lie to the death while I — well, perhaps there is in me something of the doglike, the squaw man, the paleface, the very spirit of “Le Renard Subtil” — if the bitter truth must be told. In all my after years I shall have to struggle against a tendency toward slickness and plausibility in myself. I am the tale-teller, the man who sits by the fire waiting for listeners, the man whose life must be led into the world of his fancies, I am the one destined to follow the little, crooked words of men’s speech through the uncharted paths of the forests of fancy. What my father should have been I am to become. Through long years of the baffling uncertainty, that only such men as myself can ever know, I am to creep with trembling steps forward in a strange land, following the little words, striving to learn all the ways of the ever-changing words, the smooth-lying little words, the hard, jagged, cutting words, the round, melodious, healing words. All the words I am in the end to come to know a little and to attempt to use for my purpose have, at the same time, the power in them both to heal and to destroy. How often am I to be made sick by words, how often am I to be healed by words, before I can come at all near to man’s estate!
And so as I lie in the bed putting out my chapped hands to the healing touch of mother’s hands I do not look at her. Already I am often too conscious of my own inner thoughts to look directly at people and now, although I am not the one who has cuffed the neighbor boy and jerked the hatchet out of his hands, I am nevertheless busily at work borrowing the troubles of Uncas. I cannot let what is to be be, but must push forward striving to change all by the power of words. I dare not thrust my words forward in the presence of mother, but they are busily getting themselves said inside myself.
There is a consciousness of Uncas also within me. Another curse that is to lie heavily on me all through my life has its grip on me. I am not one to be satisfied to act for myself, think for myself, feel for myself but I must also attempt to think and feel for Uncas.
At the moment slick plausible excuses for what has happened during the afternoon are rising to my lips, struggling for expression. I am not satisfied with being myself and letting things take their course, but must be inside the very body of Uncas, striving to fill his stout young body with the questioning soul of myself.
As I write this I am remembering that my father, like myself, could never be singly himself but must always be a playing some rôle, everlastingly strutting on the stage of life in some part not his own. Was there a rôle of his own to be played? That I do not know and I fancy he never knew, but I remember that he once took it into his head to enact the rôle of the stern and unyielding parent to Uncas and what came of it.
The tragic little comedy took place in the woodshed
back of one of the innumerable houses to which we were always moving when some absurd landlord took it into his head that he should have some rent for the house we occupied, and Uncas had just beaten with his fists a neighbor boy who had tried to run away with a baseball bat belonging to us. Uncas had retrieved the bat and had brought it proudly home, and father, who happened along the street at that moment, had got the notion fixed in his mind that the bat belonged, not to us, but to the neighbor boy. Uncas tried to explain, but father, having taken up the rôle of the just man, must needs play it out to the bitter end. He demanded that Uncas return the bat into the hands of the boy from whom he had just ravaged it and Uncas, growing white and silent, ran home and hid himself in the woodshed where father quickly found him out.
“I won’t,” declared Uncas; “the bat’s ours”; and then father — fool that he was for ever allowing himself to get into such an undignified position — began to beat him with a switch he had cut from a tree at the front of the house. As the beating did no good and Uncas only took it unmoved, father, as always happened with him, lost his head.
And so there was the boy, white with the sense of the injustice being done, and no doubt father also began to feel that he had put his foot into a trap. He grew furious and, picking up a large stick of wood from a woodpile in the shed, threatened to hit Uncas with it.
What a moment! I had run to the back of the shed and had thrown myself on the ground where I could look through a crack and as long as I live I shall never forget the next few moments — with the man and the boy, both white, looking at each other; and, that night, in the bed later, when mother was rubbing my chapped hands and when I knew there was something to be settled between her and Uncas, that picture danced like a crazy ghost in my fancy.
I trembled at the thought of what might happen, at the thought of what had happened that day in the shed.
Father had stood — I shall never know how long — with the heavy stick upraised, looking into the eyes of his son, and the son had stared, with a fixed determined stare, back into the eyes of his father.
At the moment I had thought that — boy as I was — I understood how such a strange unaccountable thing as a murder could happen. Thoughts did not form themselves definitely in my mind but after that moment I knew that it is always the weak, frightened by their own weakness, who kill the strong, and perhaps I also knew myself for one of the weak ones of the world. At the moment, as father stood with the stick upraised, glaring at Uncas, my own sympathies (if my own fancy has not tricked me again) were with father. My heart ached for him.
He was saved by mother. She came to the door of the shed and stood looking at him and his eyes wavered, and then he threw the stick back upon the pile from which he had taken it and went silently away. I remembered that he tramped off to Main Street and that, later in the evening when he came back to the house, he was drunk and went drunken to bed. The trick of drunkenness had saved him from the ordeal of looking into the eyes of Uncas or of mother, as so often words have later saved me from meeting fairly some absurd position into which I have got myself.
And so there was I now, in the bed and up to one of father’s tricks: upstart that I was, dog of a Huron myself, I was trembling for mother and for Uncas — two people very well able to take care of themselves.
Mother dropped my hand and took the outstretched hand of my brother.
“What happened?” she asked.
And Uncas told her, fairly and squarely. “He was a cry-baby and a big calf and I walloped him one. I wanted the hatchet and so I took it — that’s what I did. I banged him one on the nose and jerked it out of his hand.”
Mother laughed — a queer unmirthful little laugh. It was the kind of laugh that hurts. There was irony in it and that got to Uncas at once. “It doesn’t take much of a fellow to snatch a hatchet out of the hands of a cry-baby,” she said.
That was all. She kept on rubbing his hands and now it was my eyes, and not the eyes of Uncas, that could look directly into our mother’s eyes.
Perhaps it was in that moment, and not in the moment when I lay on the ground peeking through the crack into the shed, that the first dim traces of understanding of all such fellows as father and myself came to me. I looked at mother with adoration in my own eyes, and when she had taken the kerosene lamp and had gone away, and when we boys were all again curled quietly like sleeping puppies in the bed, I cried a little, as I am sure father must have cried sometimes when there was no one about. Perhaps his getting drunk, as he did on all possible occasions, was a way of crying too.
And I cried also, I suppose, because in Uncas and mother there was a kind of directness and simplicity that father and all fellows, who like myself are of the same breed with him, can never quite achieve.
NOTE II
A FAMILY OF five boys and two girls — a mother who is to die, outworn and done for at thirty —
A father, whose blood and whose temperament I am to carry to the end of my days. How futile he was — in his physical life as a man in America in his time — what dreams he must have had!
There was a dream he had of something magnificent — a lone rider on a horse, dressed in shining armor and riding in a city before a vast multitude of people — the beating of drums... “The man — he comes! Hurra!” People who live their lives by facts can never understand such a fellow. “He comes! All hail!” What has he done? Well, never mind — something grand, you may be sure of that. The dream that never can become a fact in life can become a fact in fancy. “There he goes... ‘Teddy the magnificent’!” One both laughs and cries over the memory of him.
The showman was there, in him — it flowered within him — and it is in me too. When Carl Sandburg, the poet, long after said to me — speaking of his lecturing and reading his poetry aloud, to make a living— “I give ’em a good show,” I understood what he meant and I understood the pride in his voice when he said it. And then, later still, when I was writing my own novel, “Poor White”; and when my boyhood friend, John Emerson, gave me a job — doing publicity for movie people, in order that I might have some income to write at my leisure — and for a time I saw a good deal of that strange perverted hand,! could understand them also. They were people like my own father, robbed of their inheritance. In an odd way they were my own people too.
John Emerson, a boyhood friend from my own village, had given me the movie job, knowing I would be no good at it. He was a successful man, a moneymaker, and was always planning out schemes for giving me money and leisure. I went often to the movie studios and watched the men and the women at work. Children, playing with dreams — dreams of an heroic kind of desperado cowboy, doing good deeds at the business end of a gun — dreams of an ever-virtuous womanhood walking amid vice — American dreams — Anglo-Saxon dreams. How they wanted to be the things they were always playing, and how impossible it all was!
My father lived in a land and in a time when what one later begins to understand a little as the artist in man could not by any possibility be understood by his fellows. Dreams then were to be expressed in building railroads and factories, in boring gas wells, stringing telegraph poles. There was room for no other dream and since father could not do any of these things he was an outlaw in his community. The community tolerated him. His own sons tolerated him.
As for the movie people I saw, they worked in a strange land of fragments of dreams. The parts they were to play were given them in fragments. Everything was fragmentary and unfinished. A kind of insanity reigned. A “set” having been made, at a certain cost in dollars and cents, half a dozen little bits of the dream they were to enact were gone through — sometimes a dozen times — and the very piece the actors were supposed to play they often did not know. A strange greenish light fell down over them, and when they were not playing, they sat stupidly hour after hour arrayed in their motley, often pawing one another over listlessly with their hands and seeking outside the studios — in drink, in dope, in futile lovemaking, in trying to carry on an absurd p
retense to being ladies and gentlemen of parts — seeking in all these things to compensate themselves for being robbed of their inheritance as artists — the right to pour their emotional energies into their work.
The result of all this perversion of workmanship and of emotional energy in the movie world seemed to me to reduce human beings to a state that most of all suggested to my mind angleworms squirming in a boy’s bait-can; and why any human being, under the conditions in which they must work and with the materials with which they must work, should want to be a movie actor or a writer for the movies is beyond my comprehension.
But to return to my father. At least, there was little of the dull listlessness of the angleworm in him. He created his own, “dope,” inside himself, most of the time.
Once he actually set up as a showman. With a man of our town, named Aldrich, who owned a broken-down horse and a spring wagon he went forth to strut his own little hour upon the boards.
It was winter and there was no work for father to be had in our town and I presume Aldrich also had no work. I remember him as a quiet-looking middle-aged man with a red face. He also was a house-painter, during the summer months, and he and father had by some chance got hold of a secondhand magic-lantern outfit.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 331