"You have quite a few lines there," I volunteered, trying to evade the necessity for comment. "At ten cents a line you are going to have a big bill to pay."
"That's so," he agreed, scratching his head rather ruefully. "I hadn't thought o' that. Let's see," and he began to count them.
Looking at him as he counted up the cost of his poetic flight, which totaled three dollars and forty cents, as he finally announced, and thinking of his wife, the dreary round of her days, the heavy labor up to the very hour of her death, the carefully exacted agreement as to the ultimate disposition of her property in case of her death, I could not help thinking of the pathos and the futility of so much that we call life and effort, the absolute nonsense that living becomes in so many instances. Above me as I speculated was that great blazing ball we call the "sun" spinning about in space and with its attendant planets. And upon the surface of this thing, "the earth," we, with our millions of little things we call "homes" and "possessions." And about and above and beneath us, mysteries, mysteries, mysteries. Not even within miles of a guess as to what we are or what the sun is or the "reason" for our being here for anything. And yet passion and lust and beauty and greed and yearning, this endless pother and bitterness and delight in order to retain this elusive and inexplicable something, "life," "us," "ours," in space. Birds awing, trees blowing and whispering, fields teeming with mysterious and yet needed things, and then, on every hand, this wealth of tragedy. Life living on life, men and animals plotting and scheming as though there were only so much to be had and all of that in the possession of others.
And yet, despite the mystery and the suffering and the bitterness, here was this golden day, an enormous treasure in itself, and these lovely trees, those mountains blue, this wondrous, soothing panorama. Beauty, beauty, beauty, appealing and consoling to the heart -- life's anodyne. And here, in the very heart of it, Ida Hauchawout, and her father, with his "no enimel gets fet py me," and his son who threw a pitchfork at him, and this poor clown before me with his death-rhymes and his fear of losing the little that had been left to him. His love. His loss. His gain. His desire to place himself right before the "world." This was what he was rhyming about. This was what he was worrying about.
Was he guilty of any wrong before the world? Not a bit that I could see. Was he entitled to what he had come by? As much so as any of us are entitled to anything. But here he was, worrying, worrying, worrying, and trying to decide in the face of his loss or gain whether his verse, this tribute or self-justification, was worth three dollars and forty cents to him as a display in a miserable, meagerly circulated and quickly forgotten country newspaper.
Mesdames and Messieurs, are we all mad? Or am I? Or is life? Is the whole thing, what it appears to be to so many, an aimless, insane, accidental jumble and gibberish? We articulate or put together out of old mysteries new mysteries, machines, methods, theories. But to what end? What about all the Hauchawouts, past, present, and to come, sons, daughters, and relatives, and all the fighting and the cruelty and the parading and the nonsense?
The crude and defeated Ida. And this fumbling, seeking, and rather to be pitied dub with his rhymes. Myself, writing and wondering about it all.
§ 6
A letter written several years later by my relative's wife adds this for my enlightenment:
"He has taken to religion now and interprets the Bible in his own fumbling way, coming to me occasionally for help. He plows his fields and meditates, expecting God any minute to come in the form of a dragon or giant and finish him and all men. He has figured out that the world will come to an end in this wise: God will appear as a dragon or a gigantic man, and wherever he places his foot, there life will cease to exist. That will be the end of the world. Yet he has no notion that the world is any larger than the United States at most. I said to him once, 'But it would take Him a long time to step over all the world and crush out all life.' 'Yes, that's so,' he replied; 'but I guess His feet are bigger than ours -- maybe as big as a barn,' -- those great barns! -- 'an' mebbe He can walk faster than we can.' He has lost himself completely in the Bible now and reads and meditates all the time, applying everything he reads to his own few acres. He still lives alone and does his own cooking. His chief dish is cornmeal mush, which he boils and pours into saucers or flat plates to the thickness he wants, because he doesn't know how to pour it into a deep dish and slice it."
Ida Hauchawout Page 3