Their own morning-glories, honeysuckle, and blooming perennials came to leafage out of the rhythmic text, “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin; and yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” They felt enough portents in the two words, “Jesus wept,” for the arrangement of that as a verse by itself.
At the Pigeon church one of the favorite hymns was “How Tedious and Tasteless the Hours,” and another, “Oh, to Grace How Great a Debtor!” and another began with the lines:
When I can read my title clear
To mansions in the skies.
To confess, to work hard, to be saving, to be decent, were the actions most praised and pleaded for in the sermons of the preachers. Next to denying Christ, the worst sins were drinking, gambling, fighting, loafing, among the men, and gossiping, back-biting, sloth, and slack habits, among the women. A place named Hell where men, women, and children burned everlastingly in fires was the place where sinners would go.
In a timber grove one summer Sunday afternoon, a preacher yelled, shrieked, wrung his hands in sobs of hysterics, until a row of women were laid out to rest and recover in the shade of an oak-tree, after they had moaned, shaken, danced up and down, worn themselves out with “the jerks” and fainted. And young Abe Lincoln, looking on, with sober face and quiet heart, was thoughtful about what he saw before his eyes.
The Sabbath was not only a day for religious meetings. After the sermon, the members, who rode horses many miles to the meetinghouse, talked about crops, weather, births and deaths, the growing settlements, letters just come, politics, Indians, and land-titles.
Families had prayers in the morning on arising, grace at breakfast, noon prayers and grace at dinner, grace at supper, and evening prayers at bedtime. In those households, the manger at Bethlehem was a white miracle, the Black Friday at Golgotha and the rocks rolled away for the Resurrection were near-by realities of terror and comfort, dark power and sustenance. The Sabbath day, Christmas, Easter, were days for sober thoughts and sober faces, resignation, contemplation, rest, silence. Verses in the Gospel of St. John had rhythm and portent. “I am the way, the truth, and the life. . . . He that believeth in me shall not perish but shall have everlasting life.”
Besides a wisdom of short syllables covering all the wants of life in the Lord’s Prayer, they found a melodious movement of musical intention in the arrangement of its simple words. It was like a walk from a green valley to a great mountain to pronounce with thoughtful cadence: “Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.”
The glisten of dewdrops on wheat straws, in the gray chill of daybreak on harvest fields, shone in the solemn assurance of, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil:. . . thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”
There was occupation of the imaginative gift, a challenge even to the sleeping or crying senses of color and form, hidden in the picture of Jacob’s ladder stretching from the man in earth-slumber up beyond the limits of sky; in the drama of Jonah entering the belly of the whale and later issuing forth from that darkness; in the swift stride of the four horsemen of the apocalypse; in the coat of many colors worn by Joseph and the dream of seven years of famine to come upon Egypt; in the flawless and clear-eyed sheep-boy David, walking with sling and stone to win battle against the stiff-necked giant Goliath by reason of one fierce stone pounded home to the forehead of the swaggerer; in the massive prefigurements of preparation for calamity or destruction of mortal pride to be found in the episodes of Noah’s ark and the upthrust and comedown of the Tower of Babel.
After a day of plowing corn, watching crop pests, whittling beanpoles, capturing strayed cattle, and fixing up a hole in a snake-rail fence, while the housewife made a kettle of soap, hoed the radishes and cabbages, milked the cows, and washed the baby, there was a consolation leading to easy slumber in the beatitudes: “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth. . . . Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.” It was not their business to be sure of the arguments and the invincible logic that might underlie the Bible promises of heaven and threats of hell; it was for this the preacher was hired and paid by the corn, wheat, whisky, pork, linen, wool, and other produce brought by the members of the church.
The exquisite foretokening, “In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so I would have told you,” was but a carrying farther of the implications of that cry from the ramparts of the unconquerable, “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”
Beyond Indiana was something else; beyond the timber and underbrush, the malaria, milk-sick, blood, sweat, tears, hands hard and crooked as the roots of walnut trees, there must be something else.
Young Abraham Lincoln saw certain of these Christians with a clean burning fire, with inner reckonings that prompted them to silence or action or speech, and they could justify themselves with a simple and final explanation that all things should be done decently and in order. Their door-strings were out to sinners deep in mire, to scorners seemingly past all redemption; the Jesus who lived with lawbreakers, thieves, lepers crying “Unclean!” was an instrument and a light vivifying into everyday use the abstractions behind the words “malice,” “mercy,” “charity.”
They met understanding from the solemn young Lincoln who had refused to join his schoolmates in torturing a live mud-turtle, and had written a paper arguing against cruelty to animals; who when eleven years old took his father’s rifle and shot a prairie turkey and had never since shot any game at all; who could butcher a beef or hog for food but didn’t like to see rabbit blood; who wanted to be a river steamboat pilot but gave up in simple obedience when his father told him he was needed at home; who as a nine-year-old boy helped get a traveling preacher to speak some sort of final ceremonial words over the winter grave of Nancy Hanks Lincoln; who would bother to lug on his shoulders and save from freezing the body of a man overloaded with whisky; who had seen one of his companions go insane and who used to get up before daylight and cross the fields to listen to the crooning, falsetto cackling, and disconnected babbling of one whose brain had suddenly lost control of things done decently and in order.
The footsteps of death, silent as the moving sundial of a tall sycamore, were a presence. Time and death, the partners who operate leaving no more track than mist, had to be reckoned in the scheme of life. A day is a shooting-star. The young Lincoln tried to rhyme this sentiment:
Time! what an empty vapor ’tis!
And days how swift they are:
Swift as an Indian arrow—
Fly on like a shooting star,
The present moment just is here,
Then slides away in haste,
That we can never say they’re ours,
But only say they’re past.
His mother Nancy Hanks and her baby that didn’t live, his sister Sarah and her baby that didn’t live—time and the empty vapor had taken them; the rain and the snow beat on their graves. The young man who was in his right mind and then began babbling week in and week out the droolings of a disordered brain—time had done it without warning. On both man and the animals, time and death had their way. In a single week, the milk-sick had taken four milch-cows and eleven calves of Dennis Hanks, while Dennis too had nearly gone under with a hard week of it.
At the Pigeon Creek settlement, while the structure of his bones, the build and hang of his torso and limbs, took shape, other elements, invisible, yet permanent, traced their lines in the tissues of his head and heart.
Chapter XVII
PIONEERS ARE HALF gypsy. The lookout is on horizons from which at any time another and stranger wandersong may come calling and take the heart, to love or to kill, with gold or with ashes, with bluebirds burbling
in ripe cornfields or with rheumatism or hog cholera or mortgages, rust and bugs eating crops and farms into ruin.
They are luck-hunters. And luck—is it yonder? Over the horizon, over yonder—is there a calling and a calling? The pioneers, so often, are believers in luck . . . out yonder.
And always the worker on land, who puts in crops and bets on the weather and gambles in seed corn and hazards his toil against so many whimsical, fateful conditions, has a pull on his heart to believe he can read luck signs, and tell good luck or bad luck to come, in dreams of his sleep at night, in changes of the moon, in the manners of chickens and dogs, in little seeming accidents that reveal the intentions and operations of forces beyond sight and smell.
They have noticed certain coincidences operating to produce certain results in the past. And when again those coincidences arise they say frankly, “I’m superstitious—what happened before is liable to happen again.” The simple saying among simple people, “If a bird lights in a window there will be a death in that house,” goes back to the fact that there have been deaths, and many of them, in houses to which a bird came and sat on a window-sill and picked his wings and put on dark assumptions.
Down in Indiana, as Abe Lincoln grew up, he cherished his sweet dreams, and let the bitter ones haunt him, and tried to search out from the muddled hugger-mugger of still other dreams whether the meaning was to be sweet or bitter. His father had had portentous dreams; his father told how in a night’s sleep once he saw a wayside path to a strange house; he saw the inside walls, the chairs, the table, the fireplace in that house; at the fireside a woman was sitting, and her face, eyes, and lips came clear; she was paring an apple; she was the woman to be his wife. This was the dream, and in his night’s sleep it came again and again; he could not shake it off. It haunted him till he went to the path, followed the path to the house, went inside and there saw the woman, sitting at the fireside paring an apple; her face, eyes, and lips were those he had seen so often in his night sleep; and the rest of his dream came to pass. Tom Lincoln had told this to his son, Abe, and the boy searched his dreams for meanings. He learned to say of certain coincidences, “I’m superstitious,” feeling that what had happened before under certain combinations of events would probably happen again.
Even the water underground, the streams and springs, were whimsical, unreliable, ran by luck, it seemed, in southern Indiana. Not far from the Lincolns was a region where rivers dipped down into limestone and faded out of sight. “Lost rivers,” they were called. In Wyandotte Cave a walker could go fifteen miles around the inside. In some counties there was no telling when a good well would give out and say, “No more water here.”
Abe’s father hired a man to come with a witch-hazel and tell by the way the magic stick pointed where to dig a well that wouldn’t go dry. The well was dug where the witch-hazel said it should be dug. And that well went dry just as others before had on the Lincoln farm.
Besides superstitions there were sayings, to be spoken and guessed about, old pieces of whim and wisdom out of bygone generations of Kentuckians, of English, Scotch, and Irish souls. Potatoes, growing underground, must be planted in the dark of the moon, while beans, growing above-ground, must be planted in the light of the moon. The posts of a rail fence would sink in the ground if not set in the dark of the moon. Trees for rails must be cut in the early part of the day and in the light of the moon. If in planting corn you skipped a row there would be a death in the family. If you killed the first snake you saw in the spring, you would win against all your enemies that year. If rheumatism came, skunk-grease or red worm-oil rubbed where the ache was would cure it.
Steal a dishrag, people said, and hide it in a tree-stump and your wart will go away. If you have many warts, tie as many knots in a string as there are warts, and bury the string under a stone. A dog crossing a hunter’s path means bad luck unless he hooks his two little fingers together and pulls till the dog is out of sight. Feed gunpowder to dogs and it will make them fierce. To start on a journey and see a white mule is bad luck. If a horse breathes on a child, the child will have the whooping-cough. Buckeyes carried in the pocket keep off the rheumatism.
When a man is putting up a crop of hay or shucking a field of corn or driving a load of wood, the weather has a particular interest for him. Out of the lives of farmers, timber-workers, ox-drivers, in Kentucky and Indiana, have come sayings:
If the sun shines while it is raining, it will rain again the next day; birds and hens singing during the rain indicate fair weather; if roosters crow when they go to roost it is a sign of rain; the first thunder in the spring wakes up the snakes from their winter sleep; when chickens get on a fence during a rain and pick themselves, it is a sign of clear weather; when the rain gets thick and heavy, almost like mist, it will turn cold; if a bobwhite says bob only once there will be rain; rain from the east rains three days at least; if it rains before seven it will clear before eleven; if there is lightning in the north it will rain in twenty-four hours; lightning in the south means dry weather.
“If a man can’t skin he must hold a leg while some one else does,” was a saying among the butcher gangs Abe Lincoln worked with. Men in those gangs would indicate a short distance by saying it was “far as you can throw a bull by the tail.” A strong whisky “would make a rabbit spit in a dog’s face.” There were admonitions: “Spit against the wind and you spit in your own face,” or “Don’t see all you see, and don’t hear all you hear.”
Then, too, there were sayings spoken among the men only, out of barn-life and handling cattle and hogs; the daily chores required understanding of the necessary habits of men and animals.
And naturally in field and kitchen, among young and old, there were the phrases and epithets, “as plain as the nose on your face; as easy as licking a dish; as welcome as the flowers in May; as bare as the back of my hand; before the cat can lick her ear; as red as a spanked baby.”
And there were eloquent Irish with blessings, maledictions, and proverbs. “Better be red-headed than be without a head.” “No man can live longer at peace than his neighbors like.” “I think his face is made of a fiddle; every one that looks on him loves him.” “She’s as dirty as a slut that’s too lazy to lick herself.” “A liar must have a good memory.” “It’s an ill fight where he that wins has the worst of it.” “Hills look green that are far away.” “It will be all the same after you’re dead a hundred years.”
Among the young people were whimsies often spoken and seldom believed. Fancy was on a loose leash in some of these. “If you can make your first and little finger meet over the back of your hand, you will marry.” “If you spit on a chunk of firewood and speak your sweetheart’s name, he will come before it burns out.” “The new moon must never be seen through the trees when making a wish.” “If a butterfly comes into the house a lady will call wearing a dress the color of the butterfly.” “If you sing before breakfast you will cry before night.” “If the fire roars there will be a quarrel in the family.”
“If two hens fight in the barnyard there will be two ladies calling.” “If your ears burn somebody is gossiping about you.” “If your hand itches you will get a present or shake hands with a stranger; if your right foot itches you are going on a journey; if the left foot itches you are going where you are not wanted; if your nose itches away from home you are wanted at home, but if your nose itches at home some one is coming to see you; if your right eye itches you will cry and if it is the left eye you will laugh.” “If you break a looking-glass you will have seven years of bad luck.” “If you let a baby under a year old look in the mirror it will die.” “It is bad luck to step over a broom.” Among the games played at parties by the young people in Indiana was the farm classic “Skip to My Lou” which tells of a little red wagon painted blue, a mule in the cellar kicking up through, chickens in the haystack shoo shoo shoo, flies in the cream jar shoo shoo shoo, rabbits in the bean patch two by two.
Hurry up slow poke, do oh do,
Hurry up slow poke, do oh do,
Hurry up slow poke, do oh do,
Skip to my Lou, my darling.
I’ll get her back in spite of you,
I’ll get her back in spite of you,
I’ll get her back in spite of you,
Skip to my Lou, my darling.
Gone again, what shall I do?
Gone again, what shall I do?
Gone again, what shall I do?
Skip to my Lou, my darling.
I’ll get another one sweeter than you,
I’ll get another one sweeter than you,
I’ll get another one sweeter than you,
Skip to my Lou, my darling.
And there were other classics such as “Way Down in the Pawpaw Patch,” “All Chaw Hay on the Corner,” “Pig in the Parlor,” “Old Bald Eagle, Sail Around,” and “Pop Goes the Weasel.” The game of “Old Sister Phoebe,” with a quaint British strain, had song couplets:
Old Sister Phoebe, how merry were we,
The night we sat under the juniper tree,
The juniper tree, high-o, high-o,
The juniper tree, high-o.
Take this hat on your head, keep your head warm,
And take a sweet kiss, it will do you no harm.
It will do you no harm, but a great deal of good,
And so take another while kissing goes good.
In “Thus the Farmer Sows His Seed,” an ancient human dialogue is rehearsed:
Come, my love, and go with me,
And I will take good care of thee.
I am too young, I am not fit.
The Sandburg Treasury Page 44