When Laban returned he showed his workroom, files, schedules, correspondence; and then the bedrooms. They kept all doors and windows open all the time, merely shutting the downstairs doors at night. The doors and windows all over the house commanded every part of their land; the track, the creek, the two bridges, the Sobieski cattle. “The Empress Eugenie and her court,” said Laban. The cattle lounged handsomely under the trees on the grassy knoll beneath which the house lay. They were sheltered and surrounded by sweet waters and grasses.
No one had ever bothered them. Last winter had been dry and the roads easy. They had gone to distant towns for their groceries. The mailman came twice a day. They went to the Newbolds’ to telephone. Frankie had friends at school, especially the fine little Sobieski boys who did all the work on the farm with their widowed mother; and the lively little Tanner boys, two Negro lads, sons of a very fine man who lived in the back streets and by hereditary right had the business of cleaning the outhouses for the whole community. Sometimes Frankie went with them to the Delaware and along to Trenton; at other times they explored the creeks and woodlands; or they got to know everyone in town; real boys.
“Frankie has got everyone tabbed,” said his mother: “he knows everyone in Newbold Township as well as the doctor or the sheriff. He has political genius, Sam.”
And the father said that, if his books sold, they could have two cars, one for Frankie at Princeton. “We can manage with another edition of Jeroboam.”
Laban went back to work. Sam went to perambulate along the grassy track under old trees. He met Frankie with the two Tanner boys. They were all going bird-nesting. Sam returned to the homestead with Frankie’s thin hand in his short square one; and both talked politics. Frankie, last seen a big-eyed starveling of six, was unrecognizable in this self-confident stripling, with acid prattle, deliberate views. He referred to “the party line,” criticized all writers of left literary bent if they deviated, as men will, from his stiff-necked views. But Sam laughed at him, the boy allowed his old charm to flash out; and they laughed, returning like a good-tempered child and a sensible man.
The days passed. The Davies were poor but would not allow their guest to provide anything. The first item in their budget was tyres and repairs to the old Ford; then, flour, potatoes, bacon, coffee, cigarettes, typewriter supplies and stamps; next, milk, eggs, and occasionally a fowl from Mrs. Sobieski on the hill. Mrs. Sobieski was Ruth’s only friend in the district. The vegetable garden by the creek, with only Ruth to work in it, had not yielded. Laban went straight from bed and table to his desk. Frankie was being raised as a straight, clean American boy, with woodlore and boy’s friendships; and ahead of him, his brain, his dizzying future. Ruth, the mother of them both, and now of three, cleaned, cooked and dug, worked the pump, chopped wood, brought coal, collected sticks, heated water and carried tubs, scrubbed linen, spread it and ironed it; fixed blinds, mended doors, carried food to the deep cellar. She had been a strong girl, brought up in jolly health, a success in a small town. Now she was overworked, uneasy and cranky: she saw dangers all around them. The Davies voted Democrat. Mr. Thornton, the rich farmer on the next hill, who collected their rent for the Dilleys, voted Republican. He and Will Newbold were heads of the local farmers’ co-operative and charged the rate agreed, fourteen cents a quart for their pasteurized milk. They were all rich farmers, long established; some of the families went back over two hundred years in that district; some had first fraternized with the mild Leni Lenape.
Mrs. Sobieski, poor and a newcomer, like the Austrian and German farmers, did not belong to the co-operative, but sold her uninspected milk for eleven cents a quart. She was a young widow with six boys and a girl to bring up; she had to get rid of her farm produce around the neighbourhood. Ruth was preoccupied with these troubles. The farmers might use their own unpasteurized milk. The summer visitors were “typical bourgeois hygienic snobs” and would only buy pasteurized milk from the rich farmers. And there was a well-to-do German family living on the terraced ridge just below the Newbold farmers, who had plenty of water and spoke to no one, “typical Nazis.” The Austrian farmers on the ridge opposite were shy, ignorant, peculiar people, too poor to get their cow serviced, so that it had bellowed all last summer rubbing its hungry flanks on the fence; you could see the hairy railings now. There were two black-eyed sulky full-grown sons, who went past without speaking and drove furiously to town on Saturday afternoons. Ruth, brought up in a town, was quite at home in all the cults and sects of any metropolitan society, and very uneasy here. Laban, bred in a farming community of the Middle West, was knowing and sarcastic about all his neighbours. Frankie learned all these opinions from his parents, and all the local news from the Tanner and Sobieski boys; and the three of them, anxious and hungry, lived in a ferment of distrust.
Sam Parsons was a great one for going to the mail box. He waited for the mailman at the other end of the track near the ravens’ tree. Laban said, “If no newspaper comes and no letter, I don’t worry. All I love is here. No radio, no local news, I don’t care. If the cities go up in smoke, ditto. Nothing can happen to us here. Ruth is here and Frankie is here; and I am here. Ruth has no other interests but Frankie and me; and Frankie, when the time comes, will have all we can give him.” Frankie, listening to this, leaned back in his chair, while his gaunt mother, in her turban and overalls, hustled between stove and table feeding the three men with toast, cereal and coffee.
“I’ll have eggs this morning,” said Frankie.
“Give him some eggs,” said Laban.
“If he asks for them, he needs them,” said she.
Frankie remarked, “I was in the post office at Ingalls yesterday with the Tanner boys, when a man came in to buy eggs. Don’t buy eggs from Mrs. Smith, the postmistress here, I told him, she overcharges and she gets her eggs from the Strassers, they’re Austrian dirt-farmers. Their hens come over into our farm all day and peck our grass. They’re not properly fed. I’m always chasing them off. They get drowned in the creek sometimes. Those Strassers don’t know how to farm and they overcharge. They belong to the Bund. Do you want to encourage Bundists, I asked him. They stick together, they cheat and they’re enemies of the Republic. You must go to Lambertville, or go to Mrs. Sobieski’s farm just along the road and you’ll get eggs for twenty-three cents a dozen. They’re not candled, but no need; she sells all she has. Mrs. Smith told me to get right out and said I had no right to spoil her trade; but I told her very plainly she had no right to cheat the public and that I wouldn’t let her get away with it. I told her I’d make people aware. A friend of mine has a printing press in Lambertville, I told her that; and I said, if necessary I can have leaflets printed.”
This was greeted with a silence that surprised Parsons. “How do you know the Strassers are Bundists?” he asked.
“They must be Bundists, they’re Austrians and sulky bad people, too mean to spend a cent on their farm. The boys go to Lambertville every Saturday night and get drunk. You’ll hear them coming home at two in the morning.”
“That doesn’t prove that they’re Bundists,” said Laban; “but they are, in fact, Bundists. I’m sure they vote Republican if they vote at all.”
“I’m not going to allow Bundists round here to make a living,” said the boy; “they’ve got to be driven out. I told Mrs. Smith I’d close her store if she kept on selling Bundist eggs. At any rate, the man was scared and he went out. Mrs. Smith said she’d make me pay for the lost sale. I said, No, indeed she wouldn’t; and it wasn’t the last dozen eggs I’d lose her.”
Laban was leaning back looking his boy in the face and his own face was shining as if in the sun.
“Well, by gum, Frankie,” said Sam, “aren’t you ashamed to take the bread out of people’s mouths? What crust, my lad! You’re a twelve-year-old school kid and you go running about ruining people’s business and uttering threats. Supposing Mrs. Smith came to the school and said, Don’t teach Francis Davies, he’s a numskull, I don’t like his looks,
put him on a stool in the corner.”
Frankie laughed heartily at this. “Oh, it wouldn’t work,” he cried. Sam Parsons was laughing and the father smiled a little; but the poor mother did not like it. She said that the farmers in the co-op put an unjust price on the eggs, where her poor widowed friend could not get rid of all hers even at a cutthroat price. She was sabotaged; and as for the Strassers, who undersold the co-op, it was not the same thing, for they were European individualists, dirt-farmers, mean, dangerous, vindictive. Embittered by ill-luck, and their hard-won failures, they were ready to join the Bund at any moment: they formed a solid pro-Nazi bloc in spirit. If people did not stand with the Democrats, the Bundists and Mr. Thornton would turn Newbold Township into black reaction.
“But I happen to know that this section has been copperhead since the beginning; they’re too durn sly to side with anyone,” said Sam Parsons.
When the boy had gone out to play and they heard him hallooing innocently along the track with his friends, Ruth said kindly to Sam Parsons that they were careful not to make any attacks on Frankie’s self-esteem; they wanted him to have a perfect sense of security, to be sure of their love. At school he was, of course, a prizewinner. He had a vivid imagination and he might easily have a nightmare tonight at the scene of disgrace evoked by Sam. “Supposing he dreamed of failure!”
“Surely no boy is as brittle as that!” said Parsons.
But the parents explained that Frankie was not like other boys, but a genius; and all his idiosyncrasy was only that of genius of a high order. He slept feverishly and often called out in his sleep; he dreamed about political enemies, thought he was making speeches. He had a particular ferocity against the “half-savage backward and medieval individualists” of this part of the country. This phrase Laban read from a diary which he kept of his son’s remarks.
At each meal, the conversation turned to political matters; and while Laban listened and interjected, both men argued and the boy laid down the law, the mother, always on her feet, hurried from stove to table serving. The child developed his ideas. He listened in silent satisfaction, however, when his parents spoke about his future; but the reality of his genius, the certainty of his eminent future, was so often discussed and as a matter of course, that he had no fatuity. His future was a rather important fact in the future history of the country; he would possibly be President. Afterwards he ran about with the children of the hereditary outhouse cleaner and the Polish widow’s sons, while the parents listened to his distant voice and yearned after the thin child running like a rabbit in the hills.
Laban said, “We don’t feel any sacrifice is too great; we don’t need anything ourselves; we have each other.”
“You see,” said the mother, hastily cleaning up the table and setting a fresh pot of black coffee between the men, “a boy like that especially must not be frustrated in any normal desire or deprived of any normal object. Satisfaction is release of energy, it is victory. That’s why we want a good car for him, too. Here it’s the symbol of achievement, it’s the normal means of personal expression in this country; it’s release of power for every individual; it means normal living. We were brought up with older symbols, symbols of poverty. But he must be normal in this age.”
“Yes, in a few years Frankie will live in rooms in Princeton or Harvard and have his car and spend money. I would walk to Princeton or hitch-hike to Harvard to see him; and if, when I got there, I saw his car parked there and him in good clothes, a leader in his society, I would know that I was right in denying him nothing.”
“You see, Laban knew what deprivation was. It didn’t do him any good. It doesn’t do any of us any good,” she said, beginning to weep suddenly, but still hurrying with her work. “We blame Laban’s troubles on his early frustrations: the struggle is too hard, too hard.” She turned her back to them and began vigorously washing pot and pans.
“And for you,” said Parsons, “why don’t you go back to town? You mean—the rent?”
“It’s for Laban: he’s on the wagon,” said Ruth, now cheerful again. “Back in town he gets into that drinking set. He wants to get his books done. He needs success: he needs fulfilment. Adversity was always bad for him. He needs recognition. No one knows where we are: and when we come out of the woods, Laban will have his reputation made. That’s why we’re so glad to see you. Laban has an intellectual equal in the house; and you never touch the booze.”
Sam was very happy at this and talked for some time about how much coffee he drank and how it had been in his boyhood; as much coffee as you could drink at Child’s, for a nickel; and how he almost bankrupted the place; and probably because of him they had changed the rule; and how, after meetings, when he was a boy, they had all gone to a Greek baker’s, and over only one cup of coffee for a nickel, and perhaps a roll, they had talked till two or three in the morning. They could see that though he had been very poor, he had been happy and had had fulfilment.
In between his working-spells, Laban with Sam, in Jeroboam, scoured the low Jersey hills, past cornfields and barleyfields, lost farms where the cattle and farmers watered at an outdoor trough, where nothing was to be seen but low long fences, a big barn sometimes broken, a shaky hovel surrounded by children, pigs, dogs. The river was now fat, the tasselled maize turned red, the wheat yellow, the wind blew dry, strong, the air was full of dust, pollen and mites. Laban would often stop halfway in a winding rutted track in a place free of trees in a yellow land, and snuff it up. In the distance, perhaps, would be the Delaware and the Pennsylvania hills turned yellow and red. Laban had then more of the hobbledehoy; he was full of shouting and joy; and in these days he brought out an old manuscript which he had written as a farm labourer. He then wrote of trees, moons, moonlit cornfields, long open stretches of bearing soil where he worked and grew dry; a man, a farm labourer lying dead drunk by the fence, in the silver, in the moon.
The two men would wait for young Frankie outside the school. In the morning, they would wait for Newbold the mailman, walking up and down the sunny track. “See the humming birds sitting on the twig: he’s off and back quicker than the speed of sight,” said Laban. Sam could not see so fast. Sometimes, they were off somewhere when the mailman sounded his horn for Laban’s registered letters. One day when Sam returned from one of his walks, which always lay along the green tracks where the careless rabbits sat in the ruts, he found the Davies couple very nervous. Laban was drinking black coffee in a determined manner, and Ruth was sitting at the table rucking up the tablecloth with her fingers and talking hurriedly.
“Read it,” said Laban, pushing a letter across the table to Sam.
It was a scribble saying:
Ha, old Laban, you old horsethief! We just found out your hideaway from someone New Hope way who saw you scorching up the Jersey hills. We made enquiries of your mailman. We hear you’re on the wagon; well we’re coming to drag you off it. Expect us: we’re on our way. The Rosses are throwing a big shindig Saturday: we all want you there! Tell the good grey mare we’re coming to get you off the chain. Nuts to Ruth. What’s the idea, chaining up the best drunk in the USA? Nuts. The Old Bunch.
There followed a dozen signatures.
“I felt something impending,” said Laban. “I felt anxiety.” “If you could go out and dig the potato patch,” said his wife, “you might work it off; it’s the mental concentration.”
“I hate digging; I’m an ex-farmboy. If I stop writing and do physical work, I become what I was, as a boy on the farm in Illinois, anxious, troubled, a sort of black sterile perpetual insomnia in the daytime. My mind is awake; the back of your mind, which sleeps normally, wakes up in insomnia, is then awake all the time. There’s anxiety and a sort of sinister grin too. I know more than I let on. Well, you want to drink to shut that terrible eye. They’re right in one thing. I know the danger of cutting yourself off from men and living among the ragged rocks and shivering shocks of Nature. And society and work go together. Without communication I lose my working ability. T
he contrast between the world I’ve seen and those self-satisfied copperhead farmers and the clods on the ridges is too great. I have to shut my eyes to it. Every psychopathic drunk like me is an intensely dissatisfied and yearning man. He can trust no one and he longs for the simple rest a child or a woman or a dog has. People who can rest, sleep, as they innocently call it, are never fully awake even in the daytime. And life here is vegetation. A man wants more, much more. I have the will power to live as a recluse in this green prison, but I know what I am missing. The life of cities. The mind is like a city; it isn’t like a clod. You don’t know the agony of living by will power. What will power do you or Ruth need to stay off drink? I don’t want to make out that I’m a moral hero. There’s the physical and mental sickness to help you, the awful paralyzing weakness, the feeling, How can I ever get back to shore? I’m in the shallows only a few yards from shore, where I could lie down and drink in strength from the sun, but I can’t get there; I’ll never make it. If I ever get there, I’ll do anything, live on bread and water for the rest of my life. And then there’s the hate of drink! I loathe it. I must smoke,” he continued stridently, “and smoking dries your throat and turns your tongue to pemmican; and I drown all that in black coffee. A man must turn out work, living like that. And we’re eating badly now, saving for the boy. That’s another reason I mustn’t drink. Drink’s a matter of physical need, that’s what you don’t know. You have a certain temperament, high strung, hungry, and your cells, your enzymes, I don’t know what, are crying out for the one thing that will satisfy the one desire; and we haven’t even enough food.”
Sam Parsons, exceedingly embarrassed, said he ought to go to New York and look for a place for himself and his wife, see about getting some work; he oughtn’t to be there. They had a little money still which they must not waste, but keep in reserve.
Laban hectored him, “Sam, you stay here and keep me from thinking about New York. I get the idea at times that they are all drinking and kidding around there and calling me names, saying I’m tied to apron-strings; and so I am, but I bless them for tying me.” He paused, got up and kissed his wife. “My blessed chains. I bless you.” He turned to Sam. “That’s what they’re saying when I’m here. They insult Ruth and I’m too cowardly to defend her. I agree with them; ‘damn cow likes to graze.’ They’re a lousy lot. But I fool myself into thinking that if I were there I could sit on them, stop their sneering. This is a refuge, an asylum in both senses. I’m always glad when I get into hospital after a bout; I wish I could live in one. Once I wrote to an asylum to take me in; they wouldn’t.
The Puzzleheaded Girl Page 13