Boy's Town

by William Dean Howells

  III.

  THE RIVER.

  IT seems to me that the best way to get at the heart of any boy's townis to take its different watercourses and follow them into it.

  The house where my boy first lived was not far from the river, and hemust have seen it often before he noticed it. But he was not aware of ittill he found it under the bridge. Without the river there could nothave been a bridge; the fact of the bridge may have made him look forthe river; but the bridge is foremost in his mind. It is a long woodentunnel, with two roadways, and a foot-path on either side of these;there is a toll-house at each end, and from one to the other it is aboutas far as from the Earth to the planet Mars. On the western shore of theriver is a smaller town than the Boy's Town, and in the perspective theentrance of the bridge on that side is like a dim little doorway. Thetimbers are of a hugeness to strike fear into the heart of the boldestlittle boy; and there is something awful even about the dust in theroadways; soft and thrillingly cool to the boy's bare feet, it liesthick in a perpetual twilight, streaked at intervals by the sun thatslants in at the high, narrow windows under the roof; it has a certainpotent, musty smell. The bridge has three piers, and at low waterhardier adventurers than he wade out to the middle pier; some heroeseven fish there, standing all day on the loose rocks about the base ofthe pier. He shudders to see them, and aches with wonder how they willget ashore. Once he is there when a big boy wades back from the middlepier, where he has been to rob a goose's nest; he has some loose silverchange in his wet hand, and my boy understands that it has come out ofone of the goose eggs. This fact, which he never thought of questioning,gets mixed up in his mind with an idea of riches, of treasure-trove, inthe cellar of an old house that has been torn down near the end of thebridge.

  On the bridge he first saw the crazy man who belongs in every boy'stown. In this one he was a hapless, harmless creature, whom the boysknew as Solomon Whistler, perhaps because his name was Whistler, perhapsbecause he whistled; though when my boy met him midway of the bridge, hemarched swiftly and silently by, with his head high and looking neitherto the right nor to the left, with an insensibility to the boy'spresence that froze his blood and shrivelled him up with terror. As hisfancy early became the sport of playfellows not endowed with one sovivid, he was taught to expect that Solomon Whistler would get him someday, though what he would do with him when he had got him his anguishmust have been too great even to let him guess. Some of the boys saidSolomon had gone crazy from fear of being drafted in the war of 1812;others that he had been crossed in love; but my boy did not quite knowthen what either meant. He only knew that Solomon Whistler lived at thepoor-house beyond the eastern border of the town, and that he rangedbetween this sojourn and the illimitable wilderness north of the town onthe western shore of the river. The crazy man was often in the boy'sdreams, the memories of which blend so with the memories of realoccurrences: he could not tell later whether he once crossed the bridgewhen the footway had been partly taken up, and he had to walk on thegirders, or whether he only dreamed of that awful passage. It was quitefearful enough to cross when the footway was all down, and he could seethe blue gleam of the river far underneath through the cracks betweenthe boards. It made his brain reel; and he felt that he took his life inhis hand whenever he entered the bridge, even when he had grown oldenough to be making an excursion with some of his playmates to the farmof an uncle of theirs who lived two miles up the river. The farmer gavethem all the watermelons they wanted to eat, and on the way home, whenthey lay resting under the sycamores on the river-bank, Solomon Whistlerpassed by in the middle of the road, silent, swift, straight onward. Ido not know why the sight of this afflicted soul did not slay my boy onthe spot, he was so afraid of him; but the crazy man never really hurtany one, though the boys followed and mocked him as soon as he got by.

  The boys knew little or nothing of the river south of the bridge, andfrequented mainly that mile-long stretch of it between the bridge andthe dam, beyond which there was practically nothing for many years;afterwards they came to know that this strange region was inhabited.Just above the bridge the Hydraulic emptied into the river with aheart-shaking plunge over an immense mill-wheel; and there was a clusterof mills at this point, which were useful in accumulating the watersinto fishing-holes before they rushed through the gates upon the wheel.The boys used to play inside the big mill-wheel before the water waslet into the Hydraulic, and my boy caught his first fish in the poolbelow the wheel. The mills had some secondary use in making flour andthe like, but this could not concern a small boy. They were as simply apart of his natural circumstance as the large cottonwood-tree which hungover the river from a point near by, and which seemed to have always anoriole singing in it. All along there the banks were rather steep, andto him they looked very high. The blue clay that formed them was full ofsprings, which the boys dammed up in little ponds and let loose inglassy falls upon their flutter-mills. As with everything that boys do,these mills were mostly failures; the pins which supported the wheelswere always giving way; and though there were instances of boys whostarted their wheels at recess and found them still fluttering away atnoon when they came out of school, none ever carried his enterprise sofar as to spin the cotton blowing from the balls of the cottonwood-treeby the shore, as they all meant to do. They met such disappointmentswith dauntless cheerfulness, and lightly turned from some burstingbubble to some other where the glory of the universe was still mirrored.The river shore was strewn not only with waste cotton, but with driftwhich the water had made porous, and which they called smoke-wood. Theymade cigars for their own use out of it, and it seemed to them that itmight be generally introduced as a cheap and simple substitute fortobacco; but they never got any of it into the market, not even themarket of that world where the currency was pins.

  The river had its own climate, and this climate was of course much sucha climate as the boys, for whom nature intended the river, would havechosen. I do not believe it was ever winter there, though it wassometimes late autumn, so that the boys could have some use for thecaves they dug at the top of the bank, with a hole coming through theturf, to let out the smoke of the fires they built inside. They had thejoy of choking and blackening over these flues, and they intended tolive on corn and potatoes borrowed from the household stores of the boywhose house was nearest. They never got so far as to parch the corn orto bake the potatoes in their caves, but there was the fire, and thedraft was magnificent. The light of the red flames painted the little,happy, foolish faces, so long since wrinkled and grizzled with age, ormouldered away to dust, as the boys huddled before them under the bank,and fed them with the drift, or stood patient of the heat and cold inthe afternoon light of some vast Saturday waning to nightfall.

  The river-climate, with these autumnal intervals, was made up of aquick, eventful springtime, followed by the calm of a cloudless summerthat seemed never to end. But the spring, short as it was, had its greatattractions, and chief of these was the freshet which it brought to theriver. They would hear somehow that the river was rising, and then theboys, who had never connected its rise with the rains they must havebeen having, would all go down to its banks and watch the swellingwaters. These would be yellow and thick, and the boiling current wouldhave smooth, oily eddies, where pieces of drift would whirl round andround, and then escape and slip down the stream. There were saw-logs andwhole trees with their branching tops, lengths of fence and hen-coopsand pig-pens; once there was a stable; and if the flood continued, therebegan to come swollen bodies of horses and cattle. This must have meantserious loss to the people living on the river-bottoms above, but theboys counted it all gain. They cheered the objects as they floated by,and they were breathless with the excitement of seeing the men whocaught fence-rails and cord-wood, and even saw-logs, with iron prongs atthe points of long poles, as they stood on some jutting point of shoreand stretched far out over the flood. The boys exulted in the turbidspread of the stream, which filled its low western banks and stole overtheir tops, and washed into all the ho
llow places along its shores, andshone among the trunks of the sycamores on Delorac's Island, which wasalmost of the geographical importance of The Island in Old River. Whenthe water began to go down their hearts sank with it; and they gave upthe hope of seeing the bridge carried away. Once the river rose towithin a few feet of it, so that if the right piece of drift had beenthere to do its duty, the bridge might have been torn from its piers andswept down the raging tide into those unknown gulfs to the southward.Many a time they went to bed full of hope that it would at least happenin the night, and woke to learn with shame and grief in the morning thatthe bridge was still there, and the river was falling. It was a littlecomfort to know that some of the big boys had almost seen it go,watching as far into the night as nine o'clock with the men who sat upnear the bridge till daylight: men of leisure and public spirit, but notperhaps the leading citizens.

  There must have been a tedious time between the going down of the floodand the first days when the water was warm enough for swimming; but itleft no trace. The boys are standing on the shore while the freshetrushes by, and then they are in the water, splashing, diving, ducking;it is like that; so that I do not know just how to get in that period offishing which must always have come between. There were not many fish inthat part of the Miami; my boy's experience was full of the ignominy ofcatching shiners and suckers, or, at the best, mudcats, as they calledthe yellow catfish; but there were boys, of those who cursed and swore,who caught sunfish, as they called the bream; and there were men whowere reputed to catch at will, as it were, silvercats and river-bass.They fished with minnows, which they kept in battered tin buckets thatthey did not allow you even to touch, or hardly to look at; my boyscarcely breathed in their presence; when one of them got up to cast hisline in a new place, the boys all ran, and then came slowly back. Thesemen often carried a flask of liquid that had the property, when takeninwardly, of keeping the damp out. The boys respected them for theirability to drink whiskey, and thought it a fit and honorable thing thatthey should now and then fall into the river over the brinks where theyhad set their poles.

  But they disappear like persons in a dream, and their fishing-timevanishes with them, and the swimming-time is in full possession of theriver, and of all the other waters of the Boy's Town. The river, theCanal Basin, the Hydraulic and its Reservoirs, seemed all full of boysat the same moment; but perhaps it was not the same, for my boy wasalways in each place, and so he must have been there at different times.Each place had its delights and advantages, but the swimming-holes inthe river were the greatest favorites. He could not remember when hebegan to go into them, though it certainly was before he could swim.There was a time when he was afraid of getting in over his head; but hedid not know just when he learned to swim, any more than he knew when helearned to read; he could not swim, and then he could swim; he could notread, and then he could read; but I dare say the reading came somewhatbefore the swimming. Yet the swimming must have come very early, andcertainly it was kept up with continual practice; he swam quite as muchas he read; perhaps more. The boys had deep swimming-holes and shallowones; and over the deep ones there was always a spring-board, from whichthey threw somersaults, or dived straight down into the depths, wherethere were warm and cold currents mysteriously interwoven. They believedthat these deep holes were infested by water-snakes, though they neversaw any, and they expected to be bitten by snapping-turtles, though thisnever happened. Fiery dragons could not have kept them out;gallynippers, whatever they were, certainly did not; they were believedto abound at the bottom of the deep holes; but the boys never stayedlong in the deep holes, and they preferred the shallow places, where theriver broke into a long ripple (they called it riffle) on its gravellybed, and where they could at once soak and bask in the musical rush ofthe sunlit waters. I have heard people in New England blame all theWestern rivers for being yellow and turbid; but I know that after thespring floods, when the Miami had settled down to its summer businesswith the boys, it was as clear and as blue as if it were spilled out ofthe summer sky. The boys liked the riffle because they could stay in solong there, and there were little landlocked pools and shallows, wherethe water was even warmer, and they could stay in longer. At mostplaces under the banks there was clay of different colors, which theyused for war-paint in their Indian fights; and after they had theirIndian fights they could rush screaming and clattering into the riffle.When the stream had washed them clean down to their red sunburn or theirleathern tan, they could paint up again and have more Indian fights.

  I do not know why my boy's associations with Delorac's Island wereespecially wild in their character, for nothing more like outlawry thanthe game of mumble-the-peg ever occurred there. Perhaps it was becausethe boys had to get to it by water that it seemed beyond the bounds ofcivilization. They might have reached it by the bridge, but the temperof the boys on the western shore was uncertain; they would have had torun the gauntlet of their river-guard on the way up to it; and theymight have been friendly or they might not; it would have depended agood deal on the size and number of the interlopers. Besides, it wasmore glorious to wade across to the island from their side of the river.They undressed and gathered their clothes up into a bundle, which theyput on their heads and held there with one hand, while they used theother for swimming, when they came to a place beyond their depth. Thenthey dressed again, and stretched themselves under the cottonwood-treesand sycamores, and played games and told stories, and longed for a gunto kill the blackbirds which nested in the high tops, and at nightfallmade such a clamor in getting to roost that it almost deafened you.

  My boy never distinctly knew what formed that island, but as there was amill there, it must have been made by the mill-race leaving andrejoining the river. It was enough for him to know that the island wasthere, and that a parrot--a screaming, whistling, and laughing parrot,which was a Pretty Poll, and always Wanted a Cracker--dwelt in a prettycottage, almost hidden in trees, just below the end of the island. Thisparrot had the old Creole gentleman living with it who owned the island,and whom it had brought from New Orleans. The boys met him now and thenas he walked abroad, with a stick, and his large stomach bowed in frontof him. For no reason under the sun they were afraid of him; perhapsthey thought he resented their parleys with the parrot. But he and theparrot existed solely to amuse and to frighten them; and on their ownside of the river, just opposite the island, there were established somesmall industries for their entertainment and advantage, on a branch ofthe Hydraulic. I do not know just what it was they did with amustard-mill that was there, but the turning-shop supplied them with adeep bed of elastic shavings just under the bank, which they turnedsomersaults into, when they were not turning them into the river.

  I wonder what sign the boys who read this have for challenging orinviting one another to go in swimming. The boys in the Boy's Town usedto make the motion of swimming with both arms; or they held up theforefinger and middle-finger in the form of a swallow-tail; they didthis when it was necessary to be secret about it, as in school, and whenthey did not want the whole crowd of boys to come along; and often whenthey just pretended they did not want some one to know. They really hadto be secret at times, for some of the boys were not allowed to go in atall; others were forbidden to go in more than once or twice a day; andas they all _had_ to go in at least three or four times a day, somesort of sign had to be used that was understood among themselves alone.Since this is a true history, I had better own that they nearly all, atone time or other, must have told lies about it, either before or afterthe fact, some habitually, some only in great extremity. Here and therea boy, like my boy's elder brother, would not tell lies at all, evenabout going in swimming; but by far the greater number bowed to theirhard fate, and told them. They promised that they would not go in, andthen they said that they had not been in; but Sin, for which they hadmade this sacrifice, was apt to betray them. Either they got theirshirts on wrong side out in dressing, or else, while they were in, someenemy came upon them and tied their shirts. There are few cruelties
which public opinion in the boys' world condemns, but I am glad toremember, to their honor, that there were not many in that Boy's Townwho would tie shirts; and I fervently hope that there is no boy nowliving who would do it. As the crime is probably extinct, I will saythat in those wicked days, if you were such a miscreant, and there wassome boy you hated, you stole up and tied the hardest kind of a knot inone arm or both arms of his shirt. Then, if the Evil One put it intoyour heart, you soaked the knot in water, and pounded it with a stone.

  I am glad to know that in the days when he was thoughtless and senselessenough, my boy never was guilty of any degree of this meanness. It washis brother, I suppose, who taught him to abhor it; and perhaps it washis own suffering from it in part; for he, too, sometimes shed bittertears over such a knot, as I have seen hapless little wretches do,tearing at it with their nails and gnawing at it with their teeth,knowing that the time was passing when they could hope to hide the factthat they had been in swimming, and foreseeing no remedy but to cut offthe sleeve above the knot, or else put on their clothes without theshirt, and trust to untying the knot when it got dry.

  There must have been a lurking anxiety in all the boys' hearts when theywent in without leave, or, as my boy was apt to do, when explicitlyforbidden. He was not apt at lying, I dare say, and so he took thecourse of open disobedience. He could not see the danger that filled thehome hearts with fear for him, and he must have often broken the law andbeen forgiven, before Justice one day appeared for him on the river-bankand called him away from his stolen joys. It was an awful moment, and itcovered him with shame before his mates, who heartlessly rejoiced, aschildren do, in the doom which they are escaping. That sin, at least, hefully expiated; and I will whisper to the Young People here at the endof the chapter, that somehow, soon or late, our sins do overtake us, andinsist upon being paid for. That is not the best reason for not sinning,but it is well to know it, and to believe it in our acts as well as ourthoughts. You will find people to tell you that things only happen soand so. It may be; only, I know that no good thing ever happened tohappen to me when I had done wrong.