Boy's Town

by William Dean Howells

  XIX.

  THE TOWN ITSELF.

  OF course I do not mean to tell what the town was as men knew it, butonly as it appeared to the boys who made use of its opportunities forhaving fun. The civic centre was the court-house, with the countybuildings about it in the court-house yard; and the great thing in thecourt-house was the town clock. It was more important in the boys'esteem than even the wooden woman, who had a sword in one hand and apair of scales in the other. Her eyes were blinded; and the boysbelieved that she would be as high as a house if she stood on theground. She was above the clock, which was so far up in the air, againstthe summer sky which was always blue, that it made your neck ache tolook up at it; and the bell was so large that once when my boy was avery little fellow, and was in the belfry with his brother, to see ifthey could get some of the pigeons that nested there, and the clockbegan to strike, it almost smote him dead with the terror of its sound,and he felt his heart quiver with the vibration of the air between thestrokes. It seemed to him that he should never live to get down; and henever knew how he did get down. He could remember being in thecourt-house after that, one night when a wandering professor gave anexhibition in the court-room, and showed the effects of laughing-gas onsuch men and boys as were willing to breathe it. It was the same gasthat dentists now give when they draw teeth; but it was then used tomake people merry and truthful, to make them laugh and say just whatthey thought. My boy was too young to know whether it did either; but hewas exactly the right age, when on another night there was a largepicture of Death on a Pale Horse shown, to be harrowed to the bottom ofhis soul by its ghastliness. When he was much older, his father urgedhim to go to the court-house and hear the great Corwin, whose MexicanWar speech he had learned so much of by heart, arguing a case; but theboy was too bashful to go in when he got to the door, and came back andreported that he was afraid they would make him swear. He was sometimesin the court-house yard, at elections and celebrations; and once he camefrom school at recess with some other boys and explored the region ofthe jail. Two or three prisoners were at the window, and they talked tothe boys and joked; and the boys ran off again and played; and theprisoners remained like unreal things in my boy's fancy. Perhaps if itwere not for this unreality which misery puts on for the happy when itis out of sight, no one could be happy in a world where there is so muchmisery.

  The school was that first one which he went to, in the basement of achurch. It was the Episcopal church, and he struggled for some meaningin the word Episcopal; he knew that the Seceder church was called sobecause the spire was cedar; a boy who went to Sunday-school there toldhim so. There was a Methodist church, where his grandfather went; and aCatholic church, where that awful figure on the cross was. No doubtthere were other churches; but he had nothing to do with them.

  Besides his grandfather's drug and book store, there was another drugstore, and there were eight or ten dry-goods stores, where every springthe boys were taken to be fitted with new straw hats; but the store thatthey knew best was a toy-store near the market-house, kept by a quaintold German, where they bought their marbles and tops and Jew's-harps.The store had a high, sharp gable to the street, and showed its timbersthrough the roughcast of its wall, which was sprinkled with broken glassthat glistened in the sun. After a while the building disappeared like ascene shifted at the theatre, and it was probably torn down. Then theboys found another toy store; but they considered the dealer mean; heasked very high prices, and he said, when a boy hung back from buying athing that it was "a very superior article," and the boys had that for aby-word, and they holloed it at the storekeeper's boy when they wantedto plague him. There were two bakeries, and at the American bakery therewere small sponge-cakes, which were the nicest cakes in the world, for acent apiece; at the Dutch bakery there were pretzels, with salt andashes sticking on them, that the Dutch boys liked; but the American boysmade fun of them, and the bread at the Dutch bakery was always sour.There were four or five taverns where drink was always sold anddrunkards often to be seen; and there was one Dutch tavern, but theDutchmen generally went to the brewery for their beer, and drank itthere. The boys went to the brewery, to get yeast for their mothers; andthey liked to linger among the great heaps of malt, and the huge vatswreathed in steam, and sending out a pleasant smell. The floors werealways wet, and the fat, pale Dutchmen, working about in the vapory air,never spoke to the boys, who were afraid of them. They took a boy'sbottle and filled it with foaming yeast, and then took his cent, all ina silence so oppressive that he scarcely dared to breathe. My boywondered where they kept the boy they were bringing up to drink beer;but it would have been impossible to ask. The brewery overlooked theriver, and you could see the south side of the bridge from its backwindows, and that was very strange. It was just like the picture of thebridge in "Howe's History of Ohio," and that made it seem like a bridgein some far-off country.

  There were two fire-engines in the Boy's Town; but there seemed to besomething always the matter with them, so that they would not work, ifthere was a fire. When there was no fire, the companies sometimes pulledthem up through the town to the Basin bank, and practised with themagainst the roofs and fronts of the pork-houses. It was almost as goodas a muster to see the firemen in their red shirts and black trousers,dragging the engine at a run, two and two together, one on each side ofthe rope. My boy would have liked to speak to a fireman, but he neverdared; and the foreman of the Neptune, which was the larger and feeblerof the engines, was a figure of such worshipful splendor in his eyesthat he felt as if he could not be just a common human being. He was astorekeeper, to begin with, and he was tall and slim, and his blacktrousers fitted him like a glove; he had a patent-leather helmet, and abrass speaking-trumpet, and he gave all his orders through this. It didnot make any difference how close he was to the men, he shoutedeverything through the trumpet; and when they manned the breaks andbegan to pump, he roared at them, "Down on her, down on her, boys!" sothat you would have thought the Neptune could put out the world if itwas burning up. Instead of that there was usually a feeble splutter fromthe nozzle, and sometimes none at all, even if the hose did not break;it was fun to see the hose break. The Neptune was a favorite with theboys, though they believed that the Tremont could squirt farther, andthey had a belief in its quiet efficiency which was fostered by itsreticence in public. It was small and black, but the Neptune was large,and painted of a gay color lit up with gilding that sent the bloodleaping through a boy's veins. The boys knew the Neptune was out oforder, but they were always expecting it would come right, and in themeantime they felt that it was an honor to the town, and they followedit as proudly back to the engine-house after one of its magnificentfailures as if it had been a magnificent success. The boys were alwaysmaking magnificent failures themselves, and they could feel for theNeptune.

  "THE ARTIST SEEMED SATISFIED HIMSELF."]

  Before the Hydraulic was opened, the pork-houses were the chief publicattraction to the boys, and they haunted them, with a thrilling interestin the mysteries of pork-packing which none of their sensibilitiesrevolted from. Afterwards, the cotton-mills, which were rather smallbrick factories, though they looked so large to the boys, eclipsed thepork-house in their regard. They were all wild to work in the mills atfirst, and they thought it a hardship that their fathers would not letthem leave school and do it. Some few of the fellows that my boy knewdid get to work in the mills; and one of them got part of his fingertaken off in the machinery; it was thought a distinction among theboys, and something like having been in war. My boy's brother was socrazy to try mill-life that he was allowed to do so for a few weeks; buta few weeks were enough of it, and pretty soon the feeling about themills all quieted down, and the boys contented themselves with theirflumes and their wheel-pits, and the head-gates that let the water in onthe wheels; sometimes you could find fish under the wheels when themills were not running. The mill-doors all had "No Admittance" paintedon them; and the mere sight of the forbidding words would have beenenough to keep my boy away, for he had a gr
eat awe of any sort ofauthority; but once he went into the mill to see his brother; andanother time he and some other boys got into an empty mill, where theyfound a painter on an upper floor painting a panorama of "ParadiseLost." This masterpiece must have been several hundred feet long; theboys disputed whether it would reach to the sawmill they could see fromthe windows if it was stretched out; and my boy was surprised by theeffects which the painter got out of some strips of tinsel which he wasattaching to the scenery of the lake of fire and brimstone at differentpoints. The artist seemed satisfied himself with this simple means ofsuggesting the gleam of infernal fires. He walked off to a distance toget it in perspective, and the boys ventured so close to the paintswhich he had standing about by the bucketful that it seemed as if hemust surely hollo at them. But he did not say anything or seem toremember that they were there. They formed such a favorable opinion ofhim and his art that they decided to have a panorama; but it never cameto anything. In the first place they could not get the paints, letalone the muslin.

  Besides the bridge, the school-houses, the court-house and jail, theport-houses and the mills, there was only one other public edifice intheir town that concerned the boys, or that they could use inaccomplishing the objects of their life, and this was the hall that wasbuilt while my boy could remember its rise, for public amusements. Itwas in this hall that he first saw a play, and then saw so many plays,for he went to the theatre every night; but for a long time it seemed tobe devoted to the purposes of mesmerism. A professor highly skilled inthat science, which has reappeared in these days under the name ofhypnotism, made a sojourn of some weeks in the town, and besidesteaching it to classes of learners who wished to practise it, gavenightly displays of its wonders. He mesmerized numbers of the boys, andmade them do or think whatever he said. He would give a boy a cane, andthen tell him it was a snake, and the boy would throw it away likelightning. He would get a lot of boys, and mount them on chairs, andthen tell them that they were at a horse-race, and the boys would gallopastride of their chairs round and round till he stopped them. Sometimeshe would scare them almost to death, with a thunder-storm that he saidwas coming on; at other times he would make them go in swimming, on thedusty floor, and they would swim all over it in their best clothes, andwould think they were in the river.

  There were some people who did not believe in the professor, or the boyseither. One of these people was an officer of the army who was staying awhile in the Boy's Town, and perhaps had something to do withrecruiting troops for the Mexican War. He came to the lecture onenight, and remained with others who lingered after it was over to speakwith the professor. My boy was there with his father, and it seemed tohim that the officer smiled mockingly at the professor; angry wordspassed, and then the officer struck out at the professor. In an instantthe professor put up both his fists; they flashed towards the officer'sforehead, and the officer tumbled backwards. The boy could hardlybelieve it had happened. It seemed unreal, and of the dreamlike qualitythat so many facts in a child's bewildered life are of.

  There were very few places of amusement or entertainment in the Boy'sTown that were within a boy's reach. There were at least a dozen placeswhere a man could get whiskey, but only one where he could getice-cream, and the boys were mostly too poor and too shy to visit thisresort. But there used to be a pleasure-garden on the outskirts of thetown, which my boy remembered visiting when he was a very little fellow,with his brother. There were two large old mulberry-trees in thisgarden, and one bore white mulberries and the other black mulberries,and when you had paid your fip to come in, you could eat all themulberries you wanted, for nothing. There was a tame crow that my boyunderstood could talk if it liked; but it only ran after him, and triedto bite his legs. Besides this attraction, there was a labyrinth, orpuzzle, as the boys called it, of paths that wound in and out amongbushes, so that when you got inside you were lucky if you could findyour way out. My boy, though he had hold of his brother's hand, did notexpect to get out; he expected to perish in that labyrinth, and he hadsome notion that his end would be hastened by the tame crow. His firstvisit to the pleasure-garden was his last; and it passed so wholly outof his consciousness that he never knew what became of it any more thanif it had been taken up into the clouds.

  He tasted ice-cream there for the first time, and had his doubts aboutit, though a sherry-glass full of it cost a fip, and it ought to havebeen good for such a sum as that. Later in life, he sometimes went tothe saloon where it was sold in the town, and bashfully gasped out ademand for a glass, and ate it in some sort of chilly back-parlor. Butthe boys in that town, if they cared for such luxuries, did not missthem much, and their lives were full of such vivid interests arisingfrom the woods and waters all about them that they did not need publicamusements other than those which chance and custom afforded them. Ihave tried to give some notion of the pleasure they got out of the dailyarrival of the packet in the Canal Basin; and it would be very unjust ifI failed to celebrate the omnibus which was put on in place of theold-fashioned stage-coaches between the Boy's Town and Cincinnati. Idare say it was of the size of the ordinary city omnibus, but it lookedas large to the boys then as a Pullman car would look to a boy now; andthey assembled for its arrivals and departures with a thrill of civicpride such as hardly any other fact of the place could impart.

  My boy remembered coming from Cincinnati in the stage when he was soyoung that it must have been when he first came to the Boy's Town. Thedistance was twenty miles, and the stage made it in four hours. It wasthis furious speed which gave the child his earliest illusion of treesand fences racing by while the stage seemed to stand still. Severaltimes after that he made the journey with his father, seeming to havebeen gone a long age before he got back, and always so homesick that henever had any appetite at the tavern where the stage stopped for dinnermidway. When it started back, he thought it would never get off the citypave and out from between its lines of houses into the free country. Theboys always called Cincinnati "The City." They supposed it was the onlycity in the world.

  "MY BOY REMEMBERS COMING FROM CINCINNATI IN THE STAGE."]

  Of course there was a whole state of things in the Boy's Town that theboys never knew of, or only knew by mistaken rumors and distortedglimpses. They had little idea of its politics, or commerce, or religionthat was not wrong, and they only concerned themselves with persons andplaces so far as they expected to make use of them. But as they couldmake very little use of grown persons or public places, they kept awayfrom them, and the Boy's Town was, for the most part, an affair ofwater-courses, and fields and woods, and the streets before the houses,and the alleys behind them.

  Nearly all the houses had vegetable gardens, and some of them hadflower-gardens that appeared princelier pleasaunces to my boy than hehas ever seen since in Europe or America. Very likely they were not sovast or so splendid as they looked to him then; but one of them at leasthad beds of tulips and nasturtiums, and borders of flags and pinks, withclumps of tiger-lilies and hollyhocks; and in the grassy yard beside itthere were high bushes full of snow-balls, and rose-trees withmoss-roses on them. In this superb domain there were two summer-housesand a shed where bee-hives stood; at the end of the garden was abath-house, and you could have a shower-bath, if you were of a mindto bring the water for it from the pump in the barn-yard. But this wasall on a scale of unequalled magnificence; and most of the houses, whichwere mostly of wood, just had a good big yard with plum-trees andcherry-trees in it; and a vegetable garden at one side that the boyhated to weed. My boy's grandfather had a large and beautiful garden,with long arbors of grapes in it, that the old gentleman trimmed andcared for himself. They were delicious grapes; and there were blackcurrants, which the grandfather liked, because he had liked them when hewas a boy himself in the old country, but which no Boy's Town boy couldhave been induced to take as a gracious gift. Another boy had a fatherthat had a green-house; he was a boy that would let you pull pie-plantin the garden, and would bring out sugar to let you eat it with in thegreen-house. His clever
ness was rewarded when his father was electedgovernor of the state; and what made it so splendid was that his fatherwas a Whig.

  Every house, whether it had a flower-garden or not, had a woodshed,which was the place where a boy mostly received his friends, and madehis kites and wagons, and laid his plots and plans for all the failuresof his life. The other boys waited in the woodshed when he went in toask his mother whether he might do this or that, or go somewhere. A boyalways wanted to have a stove in the woodshed and fit it up for himself,but his mother would not let him, because he would have been certain toset the house on fire.

  Each fellow knew the inside of his own house tolerably well, but seldomthe inside of another fellow's house, and he knew the back-yard betterthan the front-yard. If he entered the house of a friend at all, it wasto wait for him by the kitchen-door, or to get up to the garret with himby the kitchen-stairs. If he sometimes, and by some rare mischance,found himself in the living-rooms, or the parlor, he was very unhappy,and anxious to get out. Yet those interiors were not of an oppressivegrandeur, and one was much like another. The parlor had what was calleda flowered-carpet or gay pattern of ingrain on its floor, and the otherrooms had rag-carpets, woven by some woman who had a loom for the work,and dyed at home with such native tints as butternut and foreign colorsas logwood. The rooms were all heated with fireplaces, where wood wasburned, and coal was never seen. They were lit at night withtallow-candles, which were mostly made by the housewife herself, or bylard-oil glass lamps. In the winter the oil would get so stiff with thecold that it had to be thawed out at the fire before the lamp wouldburn. There was no such thing as a hot-air furnace known; and the fireon the hearth was kept over from day to day all winter long, by coveringa log at night with ashes; in the morning it would be a bed of coals.There were no fires in bedrooms, or at least not in a boy's bedroom, andsometimes he had to break the ice in his pitcher before he could wash;it did not take him very long to dress.

  I have said that they burned wood for heating in the Boy's Town; but myboy could remember one winter when they burned ears of corn in theprinting-office stove because it was cheaper. I believe they stillsometimes burn corn in the West, when they are too far from a market tosell it at a paying price; but it always seems a sin and a shame that ina state pretending to be civilized food should ever be destroyed whenso many are hungry. When one hears of such things one would almost thinkthat boys could make a better state than this of the men.