Sam Barlow was different from George Burton. He would take a two-gallon can of milk and walk a route of a few blocks while Fatty or I drove the wagon. He would keep telling us to pay respect to any complaints of customers, never to “sass” them, whereas Burton used to act as though it was something special for people to get their milk from him. Mr. Barlow had us keep an eye out for any house people were moving out of, and when new people came in we would be on the spot asking if they wouldn’t like to have milk from us. Usually we got a new customer. From October on, when the cows didn’t have pasture, we sold eighteen quart tickets for a dollar; then in summer twenty for a dollar. Starting in early June, till about the middle of September, we made two deliveries a day. Most customers didn’t have iceboxes and didn’t want their milk to sour over night. That meant Mr. Barlow and I would wash all the cans twice a day in the warm-weather months—the big eight-gallon cans that stayed on the wagon and the two- and three-gallon cans we carried and poured out the pints and quarts from. After washing up we always had a good dinner set out by Mrs. Barlow and her daughter.
To one house every day I carried a small can holding the milk of one cow. A doctor had ordered the baby in that house to have milk from one cow and every day the same cow. We were proud to be doing this because the father of the baby was Frank Bullard, whose name had been flashed to newspapers all over the country as the engineer on a fast mail train that set a new world’s record for locomotive and train speed. I would see him walk out of his house and up the street carrying a wicker lunchbox, walking cool and taking it easy—a square-shouldered, upstanding man with black hair and a black mustache. We did the best we could to see that the baby never changed cows. But there were two or three times we couldn’t help it; milk and cans got mixed up and the baby got the milk of several cows, and we never heard but the baby was doing well.
It was on my milk route that I had my “puppy love.” Day and night her face would be floating in my mind. Her folks lived on Academy Street next to the Burlington tracks of the Q. They usually left a crock on the porch with a quart ticket in it. I would take the ticket out of the crock, tilt my can and pour milk into my quart measure, then pour it into the crock, well aware she was sometimes at the kitchen window watching my performance, ducking away if I looked toward the window. Two or three times a week, however, the crock wasn’t there and I would call “Milk!” and she would come out with the crock in her hands and a smile on her face. At first she would merely say “Quart” and I would pour the quart and walk away. But I learned that if I spoke a smooth and pleasant “Good morning,” she would speak me a “Good morning” that was like a blessing to be remembered. I learned too that if I could stumble out the words, “It’s a nice day” or “It’s a cold wind blowing” she would say a pert “Yes, it is” and I would go away wondering how I would ever get around to a one- or two-minute conversation with her.
It was a lost love from the start. It began to glimmer away after my first and only walk with her. I dropped in with another boy one summer night to revival services at the Knox Street Congregational Church. There I saw her with another girl. After the services my chum took the other girl and I found myself walking with the girl of my dreams. I had said, “See you home?” and she had said, “Certainly.” And there we were walking in a moonlight summer night and it was fourteen blocks to her home. I said it was a mighty fine moonlight night. She said “Yes” and we walked a block saying nothing. I said it was quite a spell of hot weather we had been having. She said “Yes” and we walked another block. I said one of the solo singers at the church did pretty good. Again she agreed and we walked on without a word. I spoke of loose boards in the wooden sidewalk of the next block and how we would watch our step.
I had my right hand holding her left arm just above the elbow, which I had heard and seen was the proper way to take a girl home. And my arm got bashful. For blocks I believed maybe she didn’t like the way I was holding her arm. After a few blocks it was like I had a sore wooden arm that I ought to take away and have some peace. Yet I held on. If I let go I would have to explain and I couldn’t think of an explanation. I could have broken one of the blocks we walked without a word by saying, “Would you believe it, your face keeps coming back to me when I’m away from you—all the time it keeps coming back as the most wonderful face my eyes ever met.” Instead I asked her how her father, who was a freight-train conductor on the Q., liked being a conductor.
The fourteen blocks came to an end. At her gate I let go of her arm, said “Good night,” and walked away fast, as if I had an errand. I didn’t even stand to see if she made it to the front door. I had made the decision that we were not “cut out for each other.” I had one satisfaction as I walked home. My bashful right arm gradually became less wooden.
After sixteen or eighteen months with Barlow, at twelve dollars a month and a good dinner every day, I asked him for a raise. He said the business couldn’t stand it. I had to say, “I hate to leave you. You’re the best man I ever worked for but I can’t see I’m getting anywhere.” He said, “If you have to go, then all right, Charlie. What has to be has to be. You’ve been a good boy and we’ve had some good times together. I hope you’ll come around and see us once in a while.” And I did. They put in a new Edison phonograph with a lot of cylinder records and I never got tired of hearing “Poet and Peasant.” Sam Barlow and I stayed good friends as long as he lived.
Fifteen: On the Road
I HAD MY bitter and lonely hours moving out of boy years into a grown young man. But I had been moving too in a slow way to see that to all the best men and women I had known in my life and especially all the great ones I had read about, life wasn’t easy, life had often its bitter and lonely hours, and when you grow with new strengths of body and mind it is by struggle. I was through with Tom the Bootblack, From Rags to Riches, and the books by Horatio Alger. Every one of his heroes had a streak of luck. There was a runaway horse and the hero saved a rich man’s daughter by risking his life to grab the reins and save her life. He married the daughter and from then on life was peaches and cream for him.
There was such a thing as luck in life but if luck didn’t come your way it was up to you to step into struggle and like it. I read Ouida’s Under Two Flags. The hero lost everything he had except a horse, lived a dirty and bloody life as a fighting man, with never a whimper. I read Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm, sad lives on nearly every page, and yet a low music of singing stars and love too deep ever to be lost. I believed there were lives far more bitter and lonely than mine and they had fixed stars, dreams and moonsheens, hopes and mysteries, worth looking at during their struggles. I was groping.
I was nineteen years old, nearly a grown man. And I was restless. The jobs I’d had all seemed dead-end with no future that called to me. Among the boys I could hold my own. With the girls I was bashful and couldn’t think of what to say till after I left them, and then I wasn’t sure. I had never found a “steady.”
I read about the Spanish General Weyler and his cruelties with the people of Cuba who wanted independence and a republic. I read about Gomez, Garcia, Maceo, with their scrabbling little armies fighting against Weyler. They became heroes to me. I tried to figure a way to get down there and join one of those armies. I would have signed up with any recruiting agent who could have got me there. Nothing came of this hope.
What came over me in those years 1896 and 1897 wouldn’t be easy to tell. I hated my home town and yet I loved it. And I hated and loved myself about the same as I did the town and the people. I came to see that my trouble was inside of myself more than it was in the town and the people.
I decided in June of 1897 to head west and work in the Kansas wheat harvest. I would beat my way on the railroads; I would be a hobo and a “gaycat.” I had talked with hoboes enough to know there is the professional tramp who never works and the gaycat who hunts work and hopes to go on and get a job that suits him. I would take my chances on breaking away from my home town whe
re I knew every street and people in every block and farmers on every edge of town.
I had never been very far from Galesburg. I was sixteen when for the first time I rode a railroad train for fifty miles. I opened a little bank of dimes and found I had eighty cents. My father got me a pass on the Q. and I rode alone to Peoria and felt important and independent. I saw the State Fair and sat a long time looking at the Illinois River and the steamboats. I was a traveler seeing the world, and when I got home I couldn’t help telling other people how Peoria looked to me.
I had made my first trip to Chicago only the year before, when I was eighteen. I had laid away one dollar and fifty cents and my father, after years of my begging for it, got me a pass on the Q. I was traveling light, no valise or bag. In my pockets I had my money, a knife, a piece of string, a pipe and tobacco and two handkerchiefs. John Sjodin had coached me how to live cheap in Chicago. The longer my dollar and a half lasted, the longer I could stay. I ate mostly at Pittsburgh Joe’s on Van Buren near Clark Street, breakfast a high stack of wheat pancakes with molasses and oleo and coffee with a dash of milk in it, all for five cents. Dinner was a large bowl of meat stew, all the bread you wanted, and coffee, at ten cents. Supper was the same.
A room on the third floor of a hotel on South State Street was twenty-five cents a night. The rickety iron bedstead with its used sheets took up most of the bare wooden floor space. In the corners were huddles of dust and burnt matches. There were nails to hang my clothes on, and I went down a dark narrow hallway to a water closet and washroom with a roller towel.
I went two nights to the Variety Show, vaudeville, in a top gallery at ten cents. I mustn’t miss at ten cents the Eden Musée on South State, John Sjodin had said, and there I saw in wax Jesse James and several murderers. I walked through the big State Street department stores I had heard about for years, Siegel Cooper’s at Van Buren and north to Marshall Field’s. I stood in front of the Daily News Building, the Tribune and Inter-Ocean buildings. I had carried and sold so many of their papers that I wanted to see where they were made. I had great respect for Victor Lawson and his Record and Daily News and I would have liked to go into his office and speak to him but I couldn’t think of what I would say.
I walked miles and never got tired of the roar of the streets, the trolley cars, the teamsters, the drays, buggies, surreys, and phaetons, the delivery wagons high with boxes, the brewery wagons piled with barrels, the one-horse and two-horse hacks, sometimes a buckboard, sometimes a barouche with a coachman in livery, now and again a man in a saddle on horseback weaving his way through the traffic—horses, everywhere horses and here and there mules—and the cobblestone streets with layers of dust and horse droppings. I walked along Michigan Avenue and looked for hours to where for the first time in my life I saw shimmering water meet the sky. I walked around every block in the Loop, watched the frameworks of the Elevated lines shake and tremble and half expected a train to tumble down to the street. I dropped in at the Board of Trade and watched the grain gamblers throwing fingers and yelling prices.
The afternoon of my third day in Chicago I stopped in at a saloon with a free-lunch sign. I helped myself to slices of rye bread and hunks of cheese and baloney, paid a nickel for a glass of beer. I didn’t care much for beer but I had heard so much about Chicago saloons that I wasn’t going to leave without seeing the inside of one.
I had seen Chicago for three days on a dollar and a half. I rode home and tried to tell the folks what Chicago was like. None of them had ever been there except Papa and Mama and they had stayed only long enough to change trains. I was glad to be back in a room with a clean floor and a bed with clean sheets and it was good to have Mama’s cooking after Pittsburgh Joe’s. Yet there were times I wished I could be again in those street crowds and the roaring traffic.
Now I would take to The Road. The family didn’t like the idea. Papa scowled. Mama kissed me and her eyes had tears after dinner one noon when I walked out of the house with my hands free, no bag or bundle, wearing a black-sateen shirt, coat, vest, and pants, a slouch hat, good shoes and socks, no underwear. In my pockets were a small bar of soap, a razor, a comb, a pocket mirror, two handkerchiefs, a piece of string, needles and thread, a Waterbury watch, a knife, a pipe and a sack of tobacco, three dollars and twenty-five cents.
It was the last week in June, an afternoon bright and cool. A little west of the Santa Fe station stood a freight train waiting for orders. As the train started I ran along and jumped into a boxcar. I stood at the open side door and watched the running miles of young corn. Crossing the long bridge over the Mississippi my eyes swept over it with a sharp hunger that the grand old river satisfied. Except for my father, when riding to Kansas to buy land, no one of our family had seen the Father of Waters. As the train slowed down in Fort Madison, I jumped out.
I bought a nickel’s worth of cheese and crackers and sat eating and looking across the Mississippi. The captain of a small steamboat said I could work passage to Keokuk unloading kegs of nails, I slept on the boat, had breakfast, sailed down the river watching fields and towns go by—at Burlington, Quincy, and Keokuk shouldering kegs of nails to the wharves. At Keokuk I spread newspaper on green grass near a canal and slept in the open. I washed my face and hands at the canal, using soap from my pocket and drying with a handkerchief. Then I met a fellow who said, “On the road?” When I said “Yes,” he led me to where he had been eating bread and meat unwrapped from a newspaper. “I got three lumps last night,” he said, and handed me a lump. A lump was what you were handed if you got something to eat at a house where you asked for it. My new friend said, “I got a sitdown before I got the lumps.” At one house he had been asked to sit at the kitchen table and eat. Then because he wanted to have this day free to look at the canal and the blue sky, he went from house to house for lumps, hiding them under wooden sidewalks so his hands were empty. The lump he gave me had four slices of buttered bread and two thick cuts of roast beef. “This is breakfast and dinner for me,” I said.
His face and hands were pudgy as though your fingers would sink into them if you touched them. He had come out of a Brooklyn orphan asylum, had taken to The Road, and said he had never done a day’s work in his life. He was proud he had found a way to live without working. He named Cincinnati Slim and Chicago Red and other professional tramps he had traveled with, as though they were big names known to all tramps and I must have heard of them. He named towns where the jail food was good and how in winter he would get a two or three months’ sentence for vagrancy in those jails. “Or I might go South for the cold weather,” he said, “keeping away from the towns where they’re horstyle.” Now I had learned that where they are hostile they are “horstyle” in tramp talk. He had a slick tongue and a fast way of talking, and soon I walked away, leaving him where he lay on the green grass looking at the blue sky. I would have felt sorry for him if he wasn’t so sure he could take care of himself.
During a heavy rainstorm that night I slept in the dry cellar of a house the carpenters hadn’t finished and I was up and out before they came to work. I had a fifteen-cent breakfast, found an old tomato can, bought a cheap brush, and had the can filled with asphaltum for a few nickels. Then I went from house to house in several blocks and got three jobs blacking stoves that were rusty, earning seventy-five cents, and two jobs where my pay was dinner and supper. I slept again in the house the carpenters hadn’t finished and the next day went from house to house and got no jobs with pay brushing alphal-tum on rusty stoves, though I did get breakfast, dinner, and supper for three jobs. The day after I bought a refill of asphaltum, earned three meals and twenty-five cents. The following day was the same as the day before. I found that the housewives were much like those for whom I had poured milk in Galesburg. I found, too, that if I said I was hoping to earn money to go to college they were ready to help me. The trouble was there were not enough rusty stoves.
The next day was the Fourth of July, with crowds pouring into Keokuk. I saw a sign “Waiter Wanted
” in a small lunch counter near the end of Main Street. The owner was running the place by himself and said I could make myself useful at fifty cents a day and meals. He showed me the eggs, lard, and frying pan, the buns and ham for sandwiches, the doughnuts and the coffeepot. At ten o’clock he went out, telling me I was in charge and to be polite serving customers. Three or four people drifted in before eleven-thirty, when he came back, feeling good, he said, and he would help through the noon rush. Five or six customers came in the next two hours and he sat in a quiet corner taking a sleep while I handled the trade. There were not more than two customers at any one time and I flourished around, got them what they called for on our plain and simple bill of fare. I felt important. Maybe after a while I might work up to be a partner in the business.
The owner woke up and went out saying he would be back soon. At three o’clock he came in feeling better than the last time. He had forgotten to eat at noon and I offered to fix him two fried eggs, which I served him with a bun and coffee. He went out again saying he would be back soon. At five o’clock he came back “stewed to the gills,” slumped himself in a corner on the floor, and went to sleep. I fried myself three eggs and ate them with two buns and coffee. I fixed two sandwiches with thick cuts of ham, put them in my coat pockets along with two doughnuts, opened the money drawer and took out a half-dollar. With my coat on one arm, I closed the front door softly, and that night slept in a boxcar that took me halfway across the State of Missouri. For a poor boy seeking his fortune I hadn’t done so bad for one day.
The Sandburg Treasury Page 35