Many a winter night Mart and I went up to see him. He always made us welcome. We began calling him “Uncle Joe” and he enjoyed that. He never referred to his being lonely in any way, and we couldn’t believe he had anything sad in his loneliness. We would come up to his kitchen after our supper and he would be setting his table with its oilcloth cover for his supper. He would set chairs for us at the table, then step to the oven and bring out a fresh-baked pie. He would cut the pie and put a quarter of it on my plate and another quarter on Mart’s plate. He was proud of the pies he could bake. So were Mart and I. When we told him we had never tasted such good pie, his face had a quiet shine.
Mother said we were going up too often and too early: “You should leave him some pie for himself.” And when we came up to see him finished with supper, he would get out a couple of flatirons, hand us a hammer apiece, and bring out a canvas sack of black walnuts, hickory nuts, or hazelnuts. While he joined us in cracking and eating nuts—though we always ate more than he—he did most of the talking.
Joe Elser had been in The War. There was only one war then a man could have been in, the war over the Union and the slaves. Joe had had nearly four years of it. He went in as a private and came out as a private. He had been in battles, and he would take stove wood, put one piece on the floor “where they were lined up” and another “where we stood.” Then he would change the wood to show “where they came at us” and “where we counter-charged.” He had never been wounded, “but once I had malarial fever bad for six weeks.” He didn’t make himself out any kind of hero. “You enlisted and then you took what come.” The eating was mostly “sowbelly and beans, though sometimes in enemy territory we had rich living on cattle we took and butchered and sometimes there was a sight of pigs and chickens we caught and roasted and fried.” They had knapsacks and haversacks at first but threw them away and put everything into a blanket roll. On the march, over the left shoulder went the blanket roll and on the right shoulder the rifle—and a cartridge belt around the middle.
This or that was “issued”—uniforms, shoes, socks, rations. You didn’t need to buy anything, but if you wanted something special there was the “sutler,” who followed the army and set up a store where the army stopped.
When Joe Elser moved away after three or four years, we missed him. Out of what he had he made a pretty good life. He had his carpenter’s wage of two dollars a day, and thirty dollars a month pension from the government. He liked his work and took pride in being a good carpenter. He was temperate and never talked about temperance. He was lonely and prized his loneliness. Joe Elser never showed any signs of being afraid. He learned somehow to get along without being afraid of what is or of what is to come.
When my father bought the Berrien Street house I am sure he had talked over with his cousin Magnus Holmes the advantages of having enough rooms so you could rent them and have cash coming in every month. Mr. Holmes had bought a used lumberyard office, had it moved on rollers pulled by horses to a vacant lot he owned next to his home, and fixed it over into a house to rent. And when August Sandburg went in for buying a quarter section of land out in Pawnee County, Kansas, he was keeping pace with his cousin, who had bought a quarter section near Holdrege, Nebraska.
Payments he owed on the big house were a load on Papa’s mind. So were the payments on that first quarter section of land. He sold this land at some kind of profit and bought another quarter section. I came to know by heart the numbers of the range and the township, because once a year I would write the letter to the County Treasurer of Pawnee County, enclosing a postal money order for the year’s taxes. To write that letter Papa would hand me a pencil he prized. Just why he had that pencil, we never knew. The lead was purple and indelible, and Papa called it “indebible.” He liked it that you couldn’t erase what you wrote.
For several years those one hundred and sixty acres of Kansas farm land haunted the family. Papa talked vaguely about leaving Galesburg and trying his hands on that land way out there. Folders with pictures came from railroads and speculators, showing what bumper crops of wheat and corn, even of pears and apples, could be raised there. “Independent”—we learned that word. The farmer never starves, he can live on what he raises, he is his own boss, he can’t be fired from his job, he is “independent.”
Then came the crash, the Panic of 1893 and the Hard Times. We heard how corn went to ten cents a bushel in Kansas. We read of Kansas farmers burning corn for fuel. Kansas land went down in price. What father sold his land for I never heard. But we quit our family discussions about whether a man is more independent working for a railroad or taking his chances as a farmer.
A panic—people running to the banks to find the banks closed, men out of work, charity balls, Coxey’s Army in the news for months, men marching on Washington to ask Congress to get them work—and the Hard Times definitely reached Galesburg. Except for watchmen, the railroad shopmen went from a ten-hour to a four-hour day, the checks on payday less than half what they were used to.
We learned to eat bread spread with lard sprinkled with salt, and we liked it. When lard was short we put molasses or sorghum on the bread, which was not so good. We were lucky in our garden giving a bumper crop of potatoes. The land laughed with spuds. As Mart and I helped father dig potatoes and carry the bushel baskets into the cellar, we saw him do the only writing of his we ever witnessed. For each bushel brought in he would chalk on a ceiling rafter a straight vertical line. When there were four verticals he would cross them with a diagonal line, meaning we had five more bushels, by golly.
A little co-operative of neighbors sprang up. They borrowed a horse and wagon and hauled to town a hog from John Krans, “the price near nothing,” laughed Krans. Two lots away from us, in front of a small barn in open daylight of a winter day, I first saw a hog killing. The butchering was a drama to us kids. I carried home a bucket of blood from which Mama made a tasty “blood pudding.” Mart and I hustled home with a ham and hog sections from which we had across the weeks that winter pork chops, pork loins, side meat, spareribs, cracklings, sowbelly, pig’s knuckles, lard for frying and for bread spread.
We learned about “slack” that winter, screenings of coal with no lumps, much cheaper than regular soft coal or bituminous. Into our small heating stove in the kitchen we would shovel it and then keep watch on it, breaking its cinder formations with a poker. If not carefully tended there would be clinkers too large to pass through the grate below. With poker and shovel we would bring up the clinker and put it in its special galvanized iron bucket.
I learned to stoop going through the door to our coalbin under the stairs. I learned to stoop swinging a hammer breaking big lumps into little lumps so they would fit into the coalhod and the stove door. Hands black, nose and ears filled with coal dust, I felt I was earning my board and keep. I would have thought my fate a hard one if I hadn’t been reading the Youth’s Companion with its stories about miners and breaker boys who worked all day and came out with black faces and coal dust in layers. Once I rigged up a small tin can, fastened it to my cap, and went into the dark coalbin playing it was a mine and I had a head lamp like a regular miner.
The kitchen was the only room heated during the cold months. The second-floor bedrooms got what heat went through the door and up the stairs. No heat reached the third-floor garret where Mart and I slept. But we enjoyed, on a below-zero night, standing by the warm kitchen stove, stripping to our underwear and then dashing up two floors and getting under the quilts and snuggling into the cornhusks before Old Mister Zero Fahrenheit could tag us.
The kitchen at first was heated by a stove with lids. At the stove end was a small oblong tank holding water warmed by the hot coals. At first we children called this, as Papa and Mama did, “the rissy-warn.” When we learned it was a reservoir we went on calling it “rissy-warn” out of habit. Later this cookstove went to the cellar, where it served on washdays during the warmer months. Improvements then modern came to the kitchen—a gasoline stove for cook
ing, and a heating stove with an isinglass door and an ashpan at the bottom. Was it a thousand times or two thousand that I took that ashpan out to the ends of the potato rows to dump one more pan of ashes on the honorable Ashpile?
The kitchen was fifteen feet long and twelve wide, and with cupboard and pantry, sink, gasoline stove and heating stove, a table, eight chairs, and a baby high chair, any passageway was narrow. There we were, a family of, at one time, nine persons in that one room—kitchen, dining room, study room, playroom, workshop. We saw mother mix flour and knead dough, put it in the oven, and bring out brown loaves of bread. We saw coats and trousers patched and socks and stockings darned. We saw father during Hard Times cut leather and peg half-soles on our shoes and cut boy’s hair with the family scissors—a ragged-edged haircut but it saved the barber’s two bits.
We popped corn and made taffy. We put a flatiron bottom up on the knees, and with a hammer cracked hazelnuts and walnuts we had picked in October. We made cocked hats out of newspapers. When the lamp needed tending, we went to the cellar for the kerosene can and filled the lamp after trimming the wick. To light the lamp we scratched a blue sulphur match, waited till the blue light was gone and the yellow blaze came, then ran it along the wick and put on the chimney.
We tried a cat once or twice, but it took up too much room and got in the way. Papa was looking on the bright side of things when one day he said Mama could buy a canary and a cage. As it hung high over our heads it didn’t get in our way. The canary stayed a year or two but the babies were coming along and each of them was plenty of a pet to look after. In such a room as our kitchen you come to know each other. You learn to mind your own business or there is trouble.
Papa shaved at the kitchen sink before a small looking glass. A serious father with lather over cheeks, chin, and neck looks less serious to his children. The sound of the scraping razor mowing down the three days’ growth of whiskers had a comic wonder for us. He couldn’t shave without making faces at himself. There were times that his face took on so fearful and threatening a look we were a little scared.
We saw his razor travel over cheeks, chin, upper lip, below the jaws, everywhere except a limited area under his chin. There he left a small tuft of hair. At intervals over a few weeks we would see him take scissors and trim this goatee. Father didn’t mind Mart and me singing the popular song that ended each verse, “With the little bunch of whiskers on his chin.”
The pump in the back yard was wooden and stood about fifteen steps from the foot of the stairs going down from the back door. In the warm months water standing in a pail an hour or two didn’t taste good and the call was for fresh water, father saying, “Friskt vatten, Sholly,” I would take an empty galvanized iron pail from the side of the kitchen sink, set the pail under the pump spout, put my two hands on the wooden pump handle, push down, pull up, and go on pumping till water poured out of the spout and filled the pail. Others did this chore at times but I was counted the oldest boy, the handy strong boy who was called on.
In a summer dry spell when the pump handle came up light and loose, pulling up no water, I knew the water was low and the pump needed “priming.” I would go back to the kitchen for a pail of cistern rain water and pour it down to the leather sucker and the tubing. Then I would push and pull at the pump handle till at last the pump spout was running glad and free saying, “Here is your water!” And on sweltering summer days when butter melted in the kitchen, mother would put it in a small tin pail, tie a doubled grocery string to the handle, and I would let the butter down the well to become cool and hard again.
There were winter mornings when my hands in mittens went round the pump handle and I couldn’t budge it. Watching from the kitchen window, they were ready with a pail of hot water. I would skip back to the kitchen for this and pour it down the pump, sometimes running back for a second pail of hot water. After the pump was thawed out, I pumped and carried in two pails of water to last the family till the next morning, when again we thawed out the pump. And this meant carrying extra pails of water from the cistern, where there was no pump and you let down your galvanized iron pail and broke the thin ice and pulled the pail up with a rope.
Three or four times when I pushed and pulled at the pump handle no water came. Papa looked it over, then cut leather and shaped a new sucker. He let me down into the well on a rope, told me what to do, and stood looking down telling me more what to do. I was glad when he pulled me up and we could say the new sucker worked.
In our early years every house and lot in our block and the near-by blocks had a fence in front, in back, and on the sides. The front fences had gates. Slowly and little by little the fences and gates were taken away. The front-yard fences went first, then the side and backyard fences. It began on such streets as North Broad and North Prairie where the rich and the well-to-do had their homes. One theory of why the fences and gates came and vanished goes back to the early days when people, rich and poor, kept horses, cows, pigs, and chickens that were always straying, and if you didn’t have your house and yard fenced they would stray in and forage and trample your garden. As the roving livestock became fewer, the North side set the style of tearing fences away and the rest of the town slowly followed. The year came when we tore down our front-yard fence and burned it for kindling wood, saving good boards for repair jobs. But the side and backyard fences stayed the seventeen years we lived in that house.
Three: A Young Republican
I WAS SIX years old on the October night I walked holding my father’s hand to Seminary Street near South. It was the first time I saw politics run hot in the blood of men. Hundreds of men were standing in line, two by two. The line ran farther than my eyes could see. Each man had a pole over his shoulder. At the end of the pole swung a lighted torch. I had never seen one torch in my life, and now of a sudden I saw hundreds of torches in a straight line. Over his shoulders each man had a red, white, and blue oilskin cape. Drippings from the kerosene lamp of the torch fell on the oilskin. My father told me it was “a Republican rally.” The sidewalk edges were filled with people waiting to see the march.
We walked north and came to men carrying flambeaus. When the order was given each man blew into a pipe that ran high over his head and they sent up into the air tongues of fire three or four feet high, spreading and weaving like big flowers of fire. I had never seen one flambeau before, and now to see twenty of them blaze up at once was a wonder. When the long red and yellow tongues slowed down and flickered out, the darkness was darker.
We walked farther north to the brass band heading the procession. Leading them as they turned into Main Street was a tall man in yellow pants with a red coat and a red-velvet hat nearly as tall as I. He had a stick with a big gold ball on the end and with this stick he motioned the parade how to make the turn. West on Main Street they marched, blowing horns and pounding drums.
On a Main Street corner we watched the parade go by. Every man marching was a Republican. By marching he was showing the Democrats he was a Republican. My father explained that to me. I heard the marching men holler to people along the sidewalks, and most often it was “Hurrah for Blaine!” or “Blaine for President!” Sometimes a hundred of them would be keeping time with their feet to “Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine.”
I heard a man on the sidewalk yell, “Hurrah for Cleveland!” Right away came howls from the procession, “And a rope to hang him!” I asked my father about it and he said, “Cleveland is a Democrat. He is against Blaine.”
On the way home I asked my father more questions. He gave me the idea that Republicans are good men and Democrats are either bad men, or good men gone wrong, or sort of dumb. And I had a feeling that Cleveland was an ugly man, and if the Republicans got a rope and hanged him, I wouldn’t be sorry. Nobody had ever explained to me exactly how you hang a man, but if hanging was what the Republicans wanted for Cleveland then I was for it. I was a young Republican, a six-year-old Republican.
A few months later came election. I was told that G
rover Cleveland, instead of being hanged, had been elected President. And when Cleveland named a new postmaster for Galesburg it was William Twohig, who lived only two blocks from us in a plain frame house. We called him Billy Twohig. In his back yard he had a sand pile, and when my father had bricklaying to do he sent me with a wheelbarrow over to Billy Twohig’s for ten cents’ worth of sand. On these trips I came to know him, and I thought he was a pretty good man even though he was a Democrat, even though the ugly Grover Cleveland had named him Galesburg postmaster and boss of all the mail carriers. My father too liked Billy Twohig. I was so mixed up in my head about the Republicans and the Democrats that I didn’t ask my father any more questions about it.
I was seven and a half years old when General Ulysses S. Grant died and I went to his funeral. He had died far from Galesburg, I didn’t hear where. But Main Street stores closed for the afternoon and the Q. shops and the Brown Cornplanter Works and Frost’s foundry shut down too. A parade began at the Q. depot on Seminary Street and moved to Main Street, turned west, and marched to the Public Square. They said it was the longest parade Galesburg had ever seen.
The five long blocks of Main Street sidewalks from Seminary to the Square were crowded with people. It was a hot July afternoon in 1885. My father had been pushed and squeezed and had done some pushing and squeezing himself till at last we stood about three or four feet from the curb in front of the big O. T. Johnson dry-goods store. It was good they had made me put on shoes and stockings, because the way I got tramped on would have been worse if I had been barefoot. I tried to see the parade looking between the legs of men ahead of me but all I saw was more legs of more men. I pulled my father’s hand and blubbered, “I can’t see! I can’t see!”
The Sandburg Treasury Page 26