“Mama, he’s a goin’!” he shrilled.
Not a sound or stir came from the house. The driver clicked to the horses. They woke from their drowsing. The wheels started to turn. The axles rattled in the hubs. The wagon creaked and lumbered. Then Rosa’s mother came hurrying out of the door. She had thrown her brown shawl over her head and shoulders. You could see only part of her face. She looked like a starved bird or fowl peering out of its feathers. Rosa wasn’t sure she’d have known her own mother passing her on the street. She looked so different out here in the broad pitiless light of day. The wagon stopped to wait for her. Rosa ran to help her mother catch it. She and Turkey pushed her up over the wheel to the front seat where she pulled the brown shawl around her. The driver sat very still, not looking at her even when she sat up there beside him.
Rosa and her father and the boys walked, keeping abreast of the wagon. It reminded her of the baby’s funeral. That’s the way they had walked to the cemetery while the cart bumped along with the little coffin. But that had been winter time. Wasn’t it nice this spring the way so many folks were planting trees in the city? Hardly anybody so poor that they couldn’t have one or two in front of their house. In twenty years the streets of Americus would be green with dancing leaves, but where would she be then?
The wagon turned off Water Street at Sixth. Now why did the driver have to take their poor traps through the fine square? Her mother would hate it if Miss Bogardus looked out and saw her friend go by on the seat of a moving van. Rosa hoped none of the ladies who bought their hats from Mrs. Doan would see her traipsing with her father and three brothers like country jakes moving to town. That great plastered white house was where Mrs. Stowe lived who had such a lovely slope the way she sat lying back in her carriage when it went by. Next door stood the striped brick mansion house of Judge Wheeler.
Farther on the houses got poorer and smaller, one against the other, then big warehouses and little wooden houses stood together. You could smell the canal down here, with old bones from the soap works and hide scrapings from the tannery. From that brick corner Mr. Percy Yates, the Yankee, had bought all the anvils in Ohio and made a fortune, running up the price and letting his wife buy the handsomest bonnets Mrs. Doan could trim. Other rich men had places of business down here. They came only by day. In the evening they went back to their fine houses, but the people that lived here had to stay and breathe the bad smells all night when the smells got stronger and when the mills and warehouses stood dark and unfriendly on the street. Oh, it had been so open and free around their house by the river! But that life was gone to her now.
In an empty log house they passed, Turkey said that a man traveling by canal boat had been murdered. The boys wouldn’t walk on the log house sidewalk but turned into the street. Next came a long stable smelling of canal mules. On beyond, the driver came to a halt in front of a faded red one-story house, hardly more than a shanty. A second shanty with a loft was attached to it in back. The front door stood fastened with a huge iron lock. Over the door letters had been painted in green on the red boards.
THE RED MULE
Rosa’s father took a muddy stone from the street and hammered on the lock till the catch gave. Then he threw the lock on the floor. The boys rushed to be the first in. Rosa followed slowly. She saw that the house had two rooms like her father said. But he hadn’t said everything. The front room was a rude barroom with an unpainted plank bar. An empty keg rested on one end of the plank. Behind on a shaky shelf stood a row of nearly empty bottles.
It didn’t seem like a house at all, Rosa thought, never like their house. The second room was little more of a place to live than the dark hollow of the sycamore shanty. Pieces of glass and pottery, lumps of mud and plaster, drifts of rubbish all lay on the floor. The sour barroom smell hung as strong in the back room as the front. Even the walls smelled of stale mead and bitters.
Rosa wondered what her mother would say when she came in, but she only upbraided them bitterly for not bringing in her chair. When it came, she let herself down in it and sat blind to the swirling dust and dirt around her, deaf to the quarreling where to put this and that. She didn’t even want to remember they had moved, Rosa thought. That’s the way she kept sitting when Jake and Turkey went out for wet goods, and after dark when the sound of heavy feet and rough voices in the front shook the back room, while the scrape of mugs and glasses and the sharp scent of freshly opened beer and whiskey penetrated under the door and came through the cracks and broken panel.
“Come on and go to bed, Mama,” Rosa said, “I have it all ready.”
But her mother wouldn’t go to bed. Not till the ugly sounds from the front room had ceased and Rosa’s father came stumbling back, yawning and reeking of grog. Then Rosa’s mother flew into him.
“You disgraced me!” she accused. “You brought me down right by his house like any common person in a wagon!”
Rosa, who hadn’t slept a wink in the new house, pondered her words. Now whose house was it her father had brought her mother by? Was it Mr. Millard’s where Miss Bogardus kept house, or the gray stone house of Mr. Percy Yates? Never had Rosa been in Mr. Millard’s or Mr. Yates’ houses, but once she had been in the old Wheeler cabin and once almost in the Wheeler mansion house. She wasn’t ever supposed to go there. When a Wheeler bonnet was ready, Mrs. Doan took it herself. But this had been before Easter, and there were always too many bonnets for Mrs. Doan at Eastertide. She had to work half the night and drink gin to keep her awake in the day time. She was too unsteady on her feet to go to Judge Wheeler’s. So she said Rosa must take the bonnet, but not until late was it finished. If the Wheelers were in bed, Rosa should put it in the usual place, back in the privy in the box for paper. Then she must close the door tightly. The first one out there would find it on Easter morning.
But there was still plenty of light in the Wheeler windows when Rosa got there. She went around the back way. Miss Dezia herself with a candle in her hand came to the door. Something flew into her face when she saw Rosa.
“I’ll take it,” she said, and snatched the bonnet. “Goodnight,” she said and closed the door.
Rosa hardly noticed at the moment. In that short space of time that the door was open, she could see like into the golden scene of one of Mrs. Phillips’ novels. It seemed her eyes could run through the whole house. Right before her lay the big wonderful kitchen with black kettles and shining copper pans, beyond that the dim dining room with the fearfully grand shape of a mahogany clawfoot sideboard. She had a glimpse into still another huge room with soft light streaming from it and deep tones of a piano, like the sound of water in a blue cavern. It was hardly more than a few moments that the door was open, not a bit longer than Miss Dezia could help, but Rosa had seen and heard everything.
She could still see and hear it tonight lying on her bed in the back room of the Red Mule. It was plain as if she stood by the open Wheeler door this minute, and Miss Dezia getting ready to slam it on her. On the way home she thought it must have been Chancey playing, for Mrs. Bernd would hardly be there so late and plain old Mrs. Wheeler in her knitted cap could never make such beautiful music. But Miss Bogardus said that Master Chancey was lazy and good for nothing and that he liked to fool at the piano so he wouldn’t have to do an honest day’s work.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
THE OFF–OX
All of a piece of what they said before.
EARLY SAYING
CHANCEY didn’t want to go to the Independence Day celebration in the first place, but he had no idea anything would happen to him there.
He only knew he’d feel like a lost sheep at the big gathering. He always did. Most everybody else enjoyed it with an energy and zest that weakened him just to see it. They wouldn’t have missed it for the world. They arrived early and a wild light came into their eyes the minute they got there. They revelled in meeting old friends, in playing old games, in eating old-fashioned rations and talking and praising old-fashioned customs in which, try as
he might, Chancey could see nothing except a harder way to live and do things. What made people like that? Why did they want to leave the brighter present for the dark and painful past?
Take today. The high light of the celebration was a cabin raising. There was utterly no use for it as far as Chancey could see. It was just to show the younger generation and especially city folks how they used to put up a house in the old days in the woods. They had to go to a great deal of trouble for the event. Logs had to be bought far up the country, boated down the canal and hauled to the scene by ox team. No timber was left standing around Americus any more. The settlers and sawmill people had cut it all down. There wasn’t even a grove left to hold the celebration in, only patches of scrub overgrown with brush. So the last few years after decorating the graves, the people went to Brown’s pasture where the fairs and circuses came.
The worst of it was that Chancey had to take part in the raising. There must have been a thousand other sons of the pioneers who would have jumped at the chance. The trouble was, they didn’t have Judge Wheeler for a father. All Chancey wanted was to be left alone, and yet he had to get right out in front of the crowd and help carry logs to the end men.
The committee was a little simple-minded, Chancey thought. Indeed he felt sure all pioneers were more or less simple, almost like children. More than once he had noticed it in his mother. She could be hard as hickory denying him some small thing he wanted to do, but let somebody tell her a noble story of old times and water would be liable to run from her eye. Like the story she told of the boy in Dark County who had no boots. In the winter time he’d warm two boards by the fire, run out in the snow and stand on them in his bare feet while he chopped firewood.
Any grown-up moved by that story was a little pathetic, Chancey told himself, but then all pioneers were a little that way. Take these Revolutionary and Indian war veterans brought in carriages and who now sat in a place of honor to review the cabin raising. It was hard to believe that these ancient and tottery old codgers had ever fought the British or Indians in the primeval forest. Why, they didn’t look as if they could find their way in the woods, let alone outsmart war-whooping savages. Doddering, palsied or half-blind, they sat on the platform like they hardly knew what was going on. When the veterans of 1812 fired a salute, Major Phillips, who was deaf as a post, got up and squeaked:
“I kain’t hear your volley, men, but your powder smells good.”
That was the kind of partner Chancey had the luck to draw for the raising, a little dried-up fellow named MacNulty, with bandy legs. He looked a hundred years old beside the boy. Youth and age, Chancey’s father, called them. He was master of ceremonies.
“The first ox team will now stand at their yokes!” he called out, and Chancey and five other men took their places where three handspikes had been laid on the ground and a log rolled on them.
Chancey was at the last handspike. He reached down to take hold but he could hardly get his fingers under the iron, and when he tried to pull it up, it felt like his end had been spiked to the ground. He glanced over at Mr. MacNulty, but that little shriveled old man had his end up already, and no matter how Chancey heaved, Mr. MacNulty’s side stayed so much higher that the log kept sliding against the boy’s fingers.
“Let me give you a little more handspike, boy,” the old man croaked.
“No, sir, I got all I can carry now!” Chancey shouted, to make his partner hear.
The older settlers had a good laugh over that.
“He’s got all the handspike he can carry now,” they said.
“Your off-ox is a calf, Judge!” a Tateville democrat bellowed.
Chancey felt his face burn. Oh, he lifted his share from then on. He vowed he’d raise his end if it tore him apart inside. If that little old dried-up runt with one foot in the grave could do it, he could, he kept telling himself. He did it, too. Now wouldn’t you think folks would give him credit for that and forget what he said? But, no, they wouldn’t let him rest. That little old devil, MacNulty, was the worst. His nose and chin came mighty close together, but they’d spread apart with glee every time they went back for another log.
“Some more handspike, Chancey?” he’d twit him.
As soon as his stint was over, Chancey tried to melt away in the crowd. But wherever he went, folks recognized him and grinned. His father wouldn’t look in his direction, and he daren’t meet his mother’s eye. Libby, when she saw him, told him out in front of everybody that maybe now he’d take the powders that Harry had given him, but the worst was the silent pity from Sooth’s brown eyes. He felt relieved that Kinzie was away in the navy and Huldah in Cincinnati, soon to go to England to stay.
The only one of the family Chancey wished for was Guerdon. Good old Guerdon would have stood up for him. He’d have knocked down the man who called his younger brother a calf. But Guerdon was so long swallowed up by the world that at times he seemed to Chancey like somebody he had once read about in a book.
From across the field he heard the quavering voices of the old soldiers singing Sinclaire’s Defeat.
’Twas November the fourth in a year that is done,
We had a sore engagement near to Fort Jefferson.
Sinclaire was our commander, which may remembered be,
For there we left nine hundred men in Western Territory.
All afternoon Chancey had to listen to the pioneer singing and story telling. Their theme was ever of hardship and tragedy, of drowning and starving, of mourning, and sudden death. Now how could these old people be so pleased and comforted by such dark and terrible tales? They engulfed Chancey in gloom. He found coming up in him today all the small creeping terror that used to plague him in church when as a child beside his mother, he listened to the long, shouted sermons on dying and being cast into hell. He could always see hell plain as if he was there, the deep red pits, the brimstone flames and waist deep in them the poor naked people he had known in life, now repentant but too late. Their clothes were burned off but their bodies could never be consumed for that would be unjust to the mercy of God. In hell they must stay not this year and next but forever, crying for mercy, getting not even a drop of water to wet the ends of their tongues. How they could stand it, Chancey didn’t know, for he himself would almost expire in rebellion and sympathy. And yet when he looked up at his mother, there she would sit calm as could be. Only great firmness and peace flowed from her, and she could join in a strong quiet voice when they sang:
Thee we adore, eternal name,
And humbly own to thee,
How feeble is our mortal frame,
What dying worms are we!
Our wasting lives grow shorter still.
Ourselves we cannot save.
Whate’er we do, whate’er we will,
We’re traveling to the grave.
How could she? the little boy would say to himself. And how could all the others, for when he looked around, there the congregation sat undisturbed, singing with a great fervor that had no resemblance to dying worms at all. Even Massey when she was twelve years old, sewed that awful motto on her sampler and never dropped a stitch. It hung in the hall today.
There is an hour when I must die,
I do not know how soon.
How many children young as I
Are called to meet their doom?
It never bothered Massey. Not for a lick. And still didn’t. There she was now in a bunch of young ladies, all seventeen or eighteen, in their good dresses, and yet playing Father and Son like simple-minded children. You played it in pairs, racing to a mark and back. Each had a switch. On the way over the son tried to birch the father and on the way back it was the father’s turn if he could reach the son. The girls held up their dresses and ran, switching each other unmercifully and pealing with laughter. Only their silly heartlessness, Chancey told himself, could make them cheerful in the face of all the gloom. And yet the sounds of their high spirits drew him hungrily closer, too unsuspectingly close, for when Hester Patterson
saw him, she put her thumbs to her ears with her hands out like two flaring horns.
“Moooo!” she cried. “Moooo!”
Chancey withdrew with what dignity he could muster while their screaming and howling came after. You’d think his own sister would stick up for him, but he could hear her laughter with the rest. He dreaded meeting the family at breakfast. He hadn’t much faith in his mother’s philosophy, but one of her expressions came to him. “You’ll have to live it down,” she used to say. That’s what he’d have to do now.
Living it down was a harder job than Chancey looked for. Till it was over, he thought the cure worse than the disease. For three weeks he couldn’t walk across the square without the back of his scalp twitching, fearing the call, “Moooo!” after him. But when July was out, he breathed deeper. The month of his disgrace had been lived through. Perhaps August would be better.
His father seemed a little better, too. Since the night of the celebration he had been ill of the gravel, with pleurisy on the side to plague him. The doctors said he had had too much cheer on Independence Day but Chancey felt a burdening sense of guilt, although he couldn’t tell why. Whenever someone called at the house to ask about him, Chancey felt himself unaccountably flinch. Callers came from over the county, clients, voters, lawyers, court attendants, canal men and friends. Some of them stayed for a meal or the night. But outside, Chancey gave no sign, moving like a sleepwalker through all that went on at the house till Little Turtle came, cutting through his shell to the shrinking and indefensible self within.
It was morning when Chancey walked in the kitchen and found the Indian chief there, journeyed all the way from another state, older now, dressed in white man’s clothes. He had become heavy, his rugged face layered in brown fat. But he carried himself with great dignity, and there was still something in his black eyes that struck fear to those remnants of childhood surviving in Chancey’s breast.
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