The American: A Middle Western Legend

by Howard Fast

  Then the Judge heard the door of his wife’s dressing room open, and she stepped outside and said, “Both of you go downstairs and stop this horrible racket.”

  The Judge sat up in bed. Life was complex and even the servant problem was not simple. He knew what was disturbing him now. Today was November eleventh, in the year eighteen hundred and eighty-seven.

  III

  The Judge turned back the covers, let his feet dangle over the side of the bed for a moment, then wriggled his feet into the slippers. He went to the window and looked out into the sunny Chicago morning. November in Chicago is a good month, cold and fine and clean. Most of the leaves are gone from the trees, and those of the tree birds who haven’t gone south are alive and brisk. Already, at this hour, still somewhat before seven, people were on their way to work. A policeman stood not far away, and a brewery wagon clattered by. All was right in the world. The Judge shivered a moment, found a bathrobe, and wrapped it around him.

  This morning, the Judge was uncommonly alive to sounds, smells, to heat and cold, to the compass of the four walls of his room, to all the sensations which usually the body accepts so readily and unconcernedly. Irritation was ready and waiting, and many things contributed to it, a picture of Daniel Webster on the wall—What a stupid, ridiculous decoration for a bedroom wall! Why don’t I throw it out! Black Daniel, black as his own ignorance!—an ugly carved curl in the back of a chair, the wallpaper, the rug on the floor. But he knew that he was consciously irritating himself, and he fought the feeling. He paced the room, back and forth, several times, stretched his arms, revolved them once or twice, opened the window, and breathed deeply of the cold morning air. But the chill was depressing rather than exciting, and he closed the window hurriedly, seating himself on the bed and rubbing his beard. He was not yet fully awake, and a drowsy reminiscence of sleep still lingered, expressing itself as a thoughtfulness, a slowly revolving wonder and meditation which could be shattered in a basin of cold water and soap, but which the Judge did not choose to shatter yet. Rathèr was he concerned with his irritation, his state of mind on this special day; and letting his thoughts drift, he sought to recover himself.

  He took refuge in an old and reliable counterpoint; he was a judge and he despised judges, more so now than ever, and with that idea he smiled for the first time this morning. A case he had tried outlined itself, and for at least the fifth time he considered the sardonic and clever remark he might have and should have made at a certain point, a remark which would have been repeated for weeks all over Chicago—Judge Altgeld said that the other day—but which he did not make simply because he did not think of it until a good deal too late. And then, annoyed at himself for returning to this egotism so readily, he wrenched his thoughts away and dropped back into a vague trend of recollection.

  Some things always stood out, leaped into silhouette effect, presented themselves as a matter of habit. A miserable and unhappy rainy day during his army service always recalled itself, although there was nothing so very special about it; it was just a lasting and well-remembered discomfort, and it stood out more sharply than anything else. Also, there was a consideration of chance and purposefulness which presented itself whenever he was in such a mood as this; he was a great believer in purposefulness: didn’t the thread of his own proud ego run back into the mistiest memories of childhood, so that when he was the miserable, ugly child, standing before the father, he nevertheless felt within him his destiny, and knew so surely that it could not elude him? But in his recollection of his fever-blurred walk northward from the railroad, there was not so much certainty of destiny. He was a tramp, a dirty, ill-smelling, sick tramp, when he came to a farm and pleaded for shelter and work.

  “But a sick man can’t work,” Cam Williams, the farmer protested.

  How well he remembered Cam Williams! No, a sick man can’t work; so craftily, exalted by his fever, grinning as over a well-hidden joke, he bargained with the farmer. If he got well, he would work it off; he was a mighty worker in his health, and he boasted of what he had done on the railroad. “And if you die?” the farmer said. But the farmer wasn’t taken in, not even a little bit. There are men who are kind and who love other men; and though the Judge did not fully understand this broad, encompassing love of a species that is so basic in some, he recognized that it existed. Otherwise, why had the farmer made the poor bargain, sheltered him, fed him, and given him work? Hadn’t that been the beginning, there outside the little town of Savannah in Iowa? But his refuge lay in the fact that if it hadn’t been this farmer, mightn’t it have been another? The primer of success said that man was strong and mighty, and the clue to destiny lay in his head and his own two hands; and revolting against the broad, soft, species-loving man, the unreasonable humanitarian, the Judge sought for a train of events to bear out the primer. Memory paraded and collected and sorted, spurred on by the very fact that this was November 11, 1887. Had anyone been worse equipped, so ugly, so little gifted, so poorly raised, so miserably educated; all this was against him at the start, was it not? And he had gone down, deep down, before he came up. Was Cam Williams to receive the credit? Yet he, Pete Altgeld, John Peter Altgeld, Judge Altgeld, might have remained at the farm all his life, a laborer and then perhaps a farmer himself. Wasn’t that to be weighed in the balance? Ambition is dissatisfaction, and on that thread the world spins. From farm laborer, he had gone to a job in Savannah, teaching, but that was not the end; he read law, worked on farms to swell his small earnings. It was not just that he came to know people; rather, he developed in himself those qualities which made people admire him, and thereby, not by chance, came his appointment as city attorney.

  Sitting on his bed now, the Judge looked at his own two hands, strong, square, purposeful. “My doing,” he reflected. “And I could do it again—and again.”

  No one gave him anything. He practiced law from the bottom; the smallest cases were not too mean for him. He fought his own campaigns; he stood on his own two feet, hammering his way into the job of prosecuting attorney of Andrew County, Iowa. Did they say he climbed on the Granger bandwagon without ideal or principle?—if a man walked there were mice enough nibbling at his feet. What would they say if he told them that he had known this same dominating purpose in himself when he was twelve years old? Was he jealous of his ambition? Did he hoard it? He could have remained there as prosecuting attorney; no one forced him to walk out on the job and go to Chicago. It was his doing; step by step, he saw his way and he took it.

  And now he was Judge Altgeld of Chicago. Not Cam Williams! Not one of these damned species-lovers. Yet he could not hide from himself that this whole train of thought, this whole protest against the kindness of a simple farmer so long ago, came from the disturbing fact that today Albert Parsons and the others would die, that in not too many hours they would be hanging by their necks, with the life gone out of them.

  IV

  He dressed methodically. Though his friend, Joe Martin the gambler, had once remarked to him, “Pete, you’re the damnedest Yankee, inside and outside, I’ve ever known,” he retained certain habits which might be called German. In some things, he was extraordinarily methodical; he had a sense of place for things and for people. Now, as he dressed, the routine of doing a simple thing he had done so often relaxed him, and when his wife put her head in the door and asked, “You’ll be ready soon, dear?” he answered, “In a few minutes. And I’m hungry, too.” “Do you want eggs or hotcakes?” “I want hotcakes,” he nodded firmly. “Well, I just don’t know if we have honey.” “Then butter. Butter is just as good. My goodness, does having hotcakes depend on honey? I remember hotcakes when honey was a dream. Believe me, a dream.” “All right,” she said. “Butter. I got some fresh butter yesterday.”

  He took his little silver scissors and went to the mirror, to see whether his mustache or beard needed trimming today. A hair here or a hair there made all the difference in the world. Looking at his reflection, he was pleased, for on top of the train of memory,
it was nice to see this dignified and not uncomely jurist of forty years. The close-clipped beard and mustache gave his face dignity, lessened the prow of his chin, yet did not age him as beards age some men. The mustache was carefully groomed to cover his harelip, and it was surprising what a difference that made in the whole aspect of his face. As a matter of fact, men who knew him long and fairly intimately were completely unaware of his defect, and of late he had even ceased to allow it to be a weight on his own mind. His face had become leaner, and that too helped. A good barber trained his unruly shock of hair to fold back over his fine brow, and he had a habit of so carrying his head as to give that clean, well-shaped brow its fullest effect. All in all, his appearance was not anything he would have to resist, anything to hold him back; it is true that he was not as tall as he would have preferred, but he had long ago formed a theory that small men fight better.

  Trimming his mustache and beard, observing himself, half detachedly, the way men do in their morning mirror, he decided that he had made the best of a poor face, very much the best of it, even to the extent of winning the girl he wanted. That thought pushed away the last unpleasant connotations of the day, and he nodded agreement at his reflection. He had a penchant for storytelling, and some day he would write down the tale of his love and courtship. Actually, it was as good as those romances people are paid to write.

  It was another ugly-duckling tale. Long, long ago, when he had held his first teaching job in Ohio, he fell in love with a girl named Emma Ford. Just to think of what he was then could explain why the girl’s family would have nothing of him; but he always felt the girl cared for him, and his boyhood love was something he sought along with the more solid values men put store in. The girl was a dream that walked with him; she was part of loneliness; she was part of the indescribable ache when he lay on his back on the hard ground and looked at the stars. This was not to say that he had loved only one woman; women, to him, were beautiful, to be wanted, to be desired; but there were many women and only one who inhabited that time when he had nothing and wanted all. So it was not surprising that at the age of thirty, with a future, some property, and certainly some standing in the world, he had returned and asked for her hand again.

  And she took him. This tall, beautiful, well-educated girl took him, Pete Altgeld, the disinherited, the self-made. Some might be cynical about this, but he couldn’t be; he knew her better than any of them. He had her, in the morning, in the daytime, at night. This was the romance that life gives to only a few, and life had given it to him.

  It was no wonder that looking at his face in the mirror, snipping a hair here, a hair there, he was able to forget that today was sure to be profoundly disturbing, and take comfort from the man who had married the woman, Emma Ford. He had a fine wife, and it was a boyhood love, the best love, the most lasting. When other men looked at her, casually at first, and then more intently, he felt the fierce pride of possession. Shouldn’t a man stand on the firm foundation of his own things? Here he was in his own house, in this fine graystone mansion that was his; he had been only twelve years in Chicago, and the achievement was no small one. Actually, he had grown with the city, grown with the brutal, creative vigor of it.

  How well he recalled what kind of a place Chicago had been in 1875! There, already, America’s peculiar triumph, the railroads, converged. From the west and southwest the cattle came, by the millions, to be gutted, blooded, and rendered; a crazy-quilt of a city grew around the process of slaughter. Coal came from the south, iron from the north. Lumber drifted in through the lakes. Five hundred miles of Godforsaken street alternated between ice and mud, and an endless vista of shacks and sprawling factories spread like fast-multiplying mold. Here, a whole creed of power, success, wealth, and brute energy came into being. Alongside the horsecars came cattle riders from the vast prairie lands westward, and alongside the sooty trains were magnificent carriages. From the east, the south, the west, from the across the seas, workingmen poured in by the hundreds of. thousands—Yankees, Rebels, Germans, Irish, Bohemians, Jews, Slavs, Poles, Russians—hard, desperate men who fought to put enough in their bellies to maintain life, and always it seemed that for every job there were two men; and even as these men fought, others fought them, a new kind of giant, emperor, king, the man of the million dollars and the hundred million dollars. So there was blood let, and violence, and such a ferment as existed nowhere else in all the known world, and still into every corner of the earth Chicago sent forth her hungry cry for men, and more men.

  This was it, his city, making him and made out of him. A man should stand on what is his own.

  V

  He went down to breakfast, and when he was at the foot of the stairs, his wife said to him, “Isn’t it a fine morning, dear?” “A fine morning—yes, a fine morning,” he answered. She was wearing a gray skirt and a white blouse, crisp, clean, and bright; a person whom mornings agreed with, she smiled confidently. It might be said about her, if you were to say one thing to define her, that she was poised, and it was poise the Judge needed and appreciated. If it came to him that other people were speaking about her childlessness, and what a shame it was that a man like the Judge had no children, his reaction was furious anger; what did they know, and what did they understand of marriage and of what a man wanted of a wife?

  As they sat down at the table, he looked at her again, nodded, and returned her smile. As usual, his paper was folded alongside his plate. As he unfolded it, he was already spooning into the heavy applesauce. “Cream?” his wife asked him. He nodded. He read, in the large black head, ANARCHISTS TO DTE TODAY. Then he took his second spoonful of sauce. ANARCHISTS TO DIE TODAY.

  Emma, his wife, poured heavy, yellow-tinted cream onto his fruit as he read, “At long last, after a year and a half, finis will be written to the Case of the Anarchists, and honest citizens can draw a deep breath and sleep soundly in their beds once more. We express our approval that in spite of so much malignant pressure put to bear, the verdict—”

  His wife interrupted him by asking what it was.

  “What?”

  “I don’t think,” she said, “that it’s good for you to read at meals. I don’t think it’s good for your digestion, and it certainly isn’t polite.”

  “Polite?”

  “It’s simply bad manners, Pete.”

  He always bowed to his wife when it came to manners. He had been congratulated many times, by those of his friends who knew about such things, on his wife’s impeccable taste. Of taste, he had a small and carefully and painfully acquired stock, and while he trusted it, he did not stretch it. As long as he lived, he would not forget his first formal dinner, in the not so distant past, where the array of silver baffled; challenged, and angered him all at once, and with what pain and forbearance he got through, always managing to be a little behind the others.

  “I’m sorry,” he nodded. “Only—”

  “I wonder if the newspaper isn’t a curse rather than a benefit. After all, what pleasure is there in knowing the misery of the world scarcely an hour after you awaken?”

  “Very little, I suppose,” he admitted, folding the paper and returning to the fruit.

  “Is it the anarchists?” she asked him.

  “Yes.” And added after a moment, “They’re going to die today. They’re going to be hanged.”

  She watched him as he ate. Actually, she knew more of him than he thought, than most of his friends thought. She knew about things inside of him, and when they came up, over the improving surface of the jurist, she took her stand—not entirely with selfishness, but with a fondness which recognized, as so few did, that there was fire inside that had never been allowed to burn.

  “It’s so long since they’ve been sentenced—over a year.”

  “About sixteen months.”

  “And they’ve had every chance,” she said carefully. “I think people are just tired of hearing about the anarchists. I think people are tired of talking about them.”

  “Are the
y?”

  “I think they are,” she said, still carefully. “With all you’ve said, Peter, I think they’ve had a fair trial.”

  “I don’t,” he said.

  “You change your opinion,” she smiled. “I’ve heard you say that it was a very fair trial, an exceptionally fair trial. Are those your words?”

  “Yes.”

  “And every chance for appeal?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you change your opinion?”

  The maid came in with the hotcakes. “Draw the blinds, please,” Mrs. Altgeld said, “and let in the sun.” When she had gone, the Judge said:

  “Yes, I change my opinion, Emma. I don’t think that’s anything to be ashamed of. Too many people never change. I admit I change hard, but sometimes I change.”

  “But they’re anarchists.”

  “Or socialists, or communists. I’m not sure I know what they are. I don’t see that it matters a lot.”

  “No. And at least we’ll be able to sleep without worrying about bombs—”

  “Emma!”

  She knew signs of anger in him. She helped him to honey, and he began to eat the hotcakes. “They’re good?” she asked.

  “Very good. I’m going to get fat, too. Emma, look here. In this damned paper—”

  “I don’t like you to swear,” she said.

  “I know. I shouldn’t swear. Especially at breakfast, I shouldn’t swear. I know and I’m sorry. But look here, in the paper it says: ‘… honest citizens can draw a deep breath and sleep soundly in their beds …’ The same words. I don’t like it when people begin to talk like sheep. Some of us should think.”

  “Are you calling me a sheep?”

  “No, no, no. But what were they tried for—for being anarchists, or communists, or socialists? No! For throwing the bomb. For over a year we’ve been crazy on this subject of bombs. But there’s no evidence to convict them.”