CHAPTER LI

ANOTHER “OLD HOME”

Be that as it may, it was much of this and related matters that I was ruminating as I came through this region. But I could find no traces of what had formerly been. There was no red house anywhere—repainted probably. The coal mine, which I had remembered as being visible from this section, was not to be seen. Later I learned that it had been worked out and abandoned. The coal had all been dug out. Many new small houses in orderly, compact rows now made streets here. We had Bert follow this road a few blocks and then turn discreetly to the east until we should cross the railroad tracks, for I recalled that it was across these tracks or track facing another weed-grown square, and what was then a mildly industrious institution of the town, the hay press, that our house stood.

This square had always seemed a fascinating thing to me, for despite the fact that it was on the extreme outskirts of the town and in a district where (a little farther out) stood the village slaughterhouse, emitting uncomfortable odors when the wind was blowing right, still it was near the town’s one railroad station and switching yards—there was a turntable near the hay press—and we could see the trains go by and watch the principal industry of the place, switching, the taking on or dropping off of cars. Every morning at ten-thirty and every afternoon at two there was a freight train—the one in the morning from the south, the other in the afternoon from the north—which stopped and switched here. As an eight to ten-year-old boy how often I have sat on our porch, playing “engine” or “freight” with empty cigar boxes for cars (an extra big one for a caboose) and a spool for a smokestack, and imitated the switching and “making up” which I saw going on across the common. A delicious sense of wonder and delight always lingered in my mind in connection with Sullivan, for although we were apparently desperately poor there were compensations which the inscrutable treasure of youth trebled and quadrupled—nay multiplied an hundred and a thousand fold.

This indeed, I said to myself, as I looked at it now trying eagerly to get it all back and failing so dismally in the main, was that Egyptian land of which I have spoken. Here were those blue skies, those warm rains. Back of this house which I am now to see once more perhaps will be that perfect field of clover—only remembered in the summer state, so naturally optimistic is the human soul. In the sky will be soaring buzzards, surely. Over a field of green will stand a tall, gnarled dead tree trunk, its gauntness concealed by a cape of wild ivy. On its topmost level will sit a brown hawk or a grey headed eagle calculating on methods of capture. Across the street, up the road a little way, will be the brown home of “crazy old Bowles,” who used to come to our well for water singing and sometimes executing a weird step, or gazing vacantly and insanely at the sky. He was an ex-army man, shot in the head at Lookout Mountain and now a little daffy. He had been pensioned and was spending his declining years here. “Crazy old Bowles” was his local name.

A few steps farther out this same road, the last house but one (which was ours) would be the house of Mrs. Hudson, a lonely and somewhat demented old widow whose children had long since gone and left her to live here quite alone. We children thought her a witch. Down in a hollow, beyond our house, where lay the whitening skulls and bones of many an ox and cow, stood the tumbledown slaughterhouse, to me a fearsome place. I always imagined dead cows prowling about at night. Over the way from our house had been a great elm, in which Ed and I used to climb to swing on its branches. In its shade, in summer time, Tillie, Ed and I played house. I can hear the wind in the leaves yet. Beyond the slaughterhouse eastward was a great cornfield. In autumn, when the frost was whitening the trees, I have seen thousands of crows on their way southward resting on the rail fences which surrounded this field, and on the slaughterhouse roof and on a few lone trees here and there, holding a conference. Such a cawing and chattering!

Beyond the clover field again, in a southeasterly direction, was the fine farm of Mr. Beach, his white house, his red barn, his trees sheltering peacocks that in summer “called for rain.” In the fields all about were blackberries, raspberries, dewberries, wild plums, wild crabapple trees—a host of things which we could gather free. If either Ed or I had had the least turn of ingenuity we might have trapped or shot enough wild animals to have kept us in meat—possibly even in funds, so numerous were various forms of small game. In summer we could have picked unlimited quantities of berries and helped mother preserve them against dark days. We did—some. But in the main all we did was to fish a little—as the thought of pleasure moved us.

But oh, this pleasing realm! Once here I could not see it as it really was at the moment, nor can I now write of it intelligently or dispassionately. It is all too involved with things which have no habitat in land or sea or sky. The light of early morning, the feet of youth, dreams, dreams, dreams—— Yes, here once, I told myself now, we carried coal in winter, Ed and Al and I, but what matter? Was not youth then ours to comfort us? My father was gloomy, depressed, in no position or mood to put right his disordered affairs. But even so, oh Sullivan! Sullivan! of what wonders and dreams are not your poorest and most commonplace aspects compounded!

As we crossed the tracks by the railroad station, only two long blocks from “our house” in the old days, I began to recognize familiar landmarks. At the first corner beyond the station where I always turned north had been four young trees and here now were four quite large ones. I was convinced they were the same. Looking up the street north I recognized the open common still intact, and as we neared the house the identical hay press, if you please, newly covered with tin and perhaps otherwise repaired, but standing close to the tracks, where formerly the hay was loaded onto cars. By the sounds issuing from it, it must have been busy indeed. At the spot where we now were at the moment should have been Bowles' house, a low, one story yellow affair, but now only a patch of weeds and a broken well top indicated that a house had once stood there. Looking quickly for “our house” I distinguished it, one of a row of seemingly new and much poorer ones, but this older house was still the best of them all. Beyond, where Mrs. Hudson’s house should have been and the great elm, and the Poe-like slaughter-house, was nothing but a railroad track curving Y-fashion and joining another which ran where once the slaughter-house hollow had been. There was no hollow any more, no tree, no nothing. Only a right-angled railroad track or switching Y.

My field of clover!

It was an unkempt weed patch, small, disreputable, disillusionizing—a thing that had never been large at all or had shrunk to insignificant proportions. My tree—the column of the brooding hawk—it was gone. There was no fine fecund truck patch alongside our house, where once we had raised corn, potatoes, peas, onions, beans—almost our total summer and winter fare. Three other small shabby houses and their grounds occupied the field we had cultivated. I realized now in looking at this what an earnest, industrious woman my mother must have been.

A band of ragamuffin children were playing out in front, children with bare legs, bare arms, in most cases half bare bodies, and so dirty! When they saw our car they gathered in a group and surveyed us. One of the littlest of them had a sore-eyed puppy elevated to his loving breast. It was a “poor white trash” neighborhood.

[Illustration:

MY FATHER'S MILL Sullivan, Indiana ]

“My brother’s got tabuckalosis of the bones,” one little girl said to me, nodding at a skimpy, distrait looking youth who stood to one side, rather pleased than not that his ailment should attract so much attention.

“Oh, no,” I said, “surely not. He doesn’t look as though he had anything but a good appetite, does he, Franklin?”

“Certainly not,” replied the latter cheerfully.

The youth gazed at me solemnly.

“Oh, yes, he has,” continued his sister, “the doctor said so.”

“But don’t you know that doctors don’t know everything?” put in Franklin. “Doctors just imagine things, the same as other people. Why, look at him—he’s nice and healthy.”

“No, he ain’t either,” replied this protector argumentatively. “If he don’t get better he’ll haff to go to the 'ospital. Our doctor says so. My mother ain’t got the money or he’d go now.”

“Dear! Dear!” I exclaimed, looking at the youth sympathetically. “But there, he looks so well. You feel all right, don’t you?” I asked of the contemplative victim, who was staring at me with big eyes.

“Yes, sir.”

“You’re never sick in bed?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, now here’s a nickel. And don’t you get sick. You’ll be well so long as you think so.”

“Ooh, let’s see it,” commanded the advertising sister, drawing near and trying to take the hand with the coin.

“No.”

“Well, let’s see how it looks.”

“No.”

“Well, then, keep it, smarty! You’ll have to give it to maw, anyhow.”

I began to wonder whether “tabuckalosis” of the bones was not something developed for trade purposes or whether it was really true.

The house was in exactly the same position and physically unchanged save that in our day the paint was new and white; whereas, now, it was drab and dirty. The yard, or garden as the English would call it, had all been cut away, or nearly so, leaving only a dusty strip of faded grass to the right as one looked in. In “our” time there was a neat white picket fence and gate in front. It was gone now. Inside, once, were roses in profusion, planted by mother, and a few small fruit trees—a peach, a cherry, an apple tree. Now there were none. The fence on which I used to sit of a morning—the adored back fence—and watch the swallows skimming over the clover and the yellow humble bees among the blooms was gone also. Not a trace of all the beauty that once was mine. I stood here and thought of the smooth green grass that I had rejoiced in, the morning and evening skies, the cloud formations, the bluebird that built a nest under one corner of our roof, the swallows that built their hard bony nests in our chimneys and lost them occasionally—they and their poor naked young tumbling to ruin on our cool hearthstones. Had it been in fact or only in my own soul?

I thought of my mother walking about in the cool of the morning and the evening, rejoicing in nature. I saw her with us on the back porch or the front—Tillie, Ed, myself, and some of our elders gathered about her—listening to stories or basking in the unbelievable comfort of her presence.

Here, at dusk, I said, Ed and I used to throw cinders and small rocks at the encircling bats, hoping, as Ed used to say, to “paralyze” them. From our doorstep at night we could hear the whistle of incoming and outgoing trains and see the lighted coaches as they passed. An old grist mill a half mile “down the track,” as we always referred to the region due south, ground grain all night and we could hear the poetic rumble of the stones. Here, occasionally, my brooding father would come from Terre Haute, to sit with us and bring a little money—the money that he could spare from past accumulated debts.

My brother Rome came here once—"to get drunk and disgrace us," as my sister said. My elder sisters came, to avoid their father and have the consoling counsel and love of their mother. My brother Al came from my Uncle Martin’s fruit farm at North Manchester, if you please, to lord it over us with his rustic strength, to defeat and terrorize all our accumulated enemies (Ed and I had a genius for storing up enemies for him) and to elicit our contempt for his country bumpkin manners. And here finally when my mother was distrait as to means of weathering the persistent storm and we were actually cold and hungry, my brother Paul, now a successful minstrel man and the author of “The Paul Dresser Comic Songster” (containing all the songs sung in the show) and now traveling in this region, came to her aid and removed us all to Evansville—the spring following this worst of winters.

In addition to all this my father’s first mill was still here at that time—and even now as I later discovered—only two blocks away, behind the station—burned once but restored afterward—and also an old house which he had built and owned but had been compelled to sell. In those days these were the signs and emblems of our former greatness, which kept our drooping spirits from sinking too low and made us decide not to be put upon forever and ever by life.

As I stood looking at this I had once more that sinking sensation I experienced in Warsaw and Terre Haute. Life moves so insensibly out from under you. It slips away like a slow moving tide. You look and the box or straw that once was at your doorstep is far down stream—or rather you are the box, the straw. Your native castle is miles removed. I went in and knocked at the door while Franklin, without, sketched and photographed to suit himself. A slattern of a woman, small, young, stodgy, greasy, but not exactly unattractive, came to the door and stared at me in no particularly friendly way. Why are some animals so almost unconsciously savage?

“I beg your pardon,” I said. “I lived here once, years ago. Would you let me come in and look over the house?”

As I spoke a tall, gaunt yokel of not over twentysix ambled out from an inner room. He was an attractive specimen physically but so crude and ignorant. He looked me over superficially. I might have been a policeman or an enemy.

I repeated my question.

“Yes, I guess you kin look it over,” he said distantly. “It ain’t quite made up yet. The boarders don’t keep their rooms just as spick as might be.”

Boarders! In this unkempt house! It was a litter. The best pictures were flyspecked lithographs or chromos. The floors when they were laid with anything were covered with earthy looking rag carpets—creaky, yellow, nondescript furniture. A litter and crush of useless things—tin and glass lamps, papers, cheap pamphlets—a red tablecloth or two—and there were flies and odors and unmade beds.

I went through, looking into each room, restoring it to my mind as it had been. We had not had much—the rooms in our day were sparely and poorly furnished, tastelessly so no doubt—but there is an art in spareness and bareness and cleanliness, and still more in a pervasive personality like my mother’s. What we had, thanks to her, was clean and neat, with flowers permitted to approach as near as summer and soil and pots made possible. I realized now that it was her temperament which like a benediction or a perfume had pervaded, surrounded, suffused this whole region and this home for me. It was my mother and myself and my brothers and sisters in part whom I was remembering—not just the house and the grounds.

Aside from this house there was not much that I wanted to see—not much with which I was intimately identified. A Catholic church to which a priest came once a month and in which the Catholic school was held—an institution which, fortunately, I was not permitted to attend very long, for want of shoes to wear; the old mill which my father built and which after a fire was restored, and in the mill pond of which Ed and I were wont to fish, on occasion; the courthouse square and postoffice, in the latter of which I have often waited eagerly for the distribution of mail—not that it meant anything to me personally, but because my mother was so pathetically eager for word of some kind; the Busseron river or creek, which I knew we would see as we left town. We left this group of chattering children, one of whom, a girl, wanted to sell us the small dog in order, as she said, to buy herself a new riding whip. I could not decide whether she was indulging in a flight of fancy—so poverty stricken was her home—or whether on some farm near by was a horse she was actually permitted to ride. She was brisk and stodgy—a black eyed, garrulous little creature with a fondness for great words, but no real charm.

With one backward glance on my part we were off to the mill, which stood just as it was in my day, only instead of running full time as it did then there was an assignee’s sign on the door saying that all the stock and fixtures of the Sullivan Woolen Mills Company would be sold under the hammer at a given date to satisfy certain judgments—a proof I thought of Mr. Shattuck’s assertions. The small white Catholic Church, still at hand, was no longer a Catholic Church but a hall, the Catholics having moved to a more imposing edifice. The county courthouse was entirely new, a thing in the usual fashion and scarcely so attractive as the old. The little old postoffice in its brown shell was replaced by a brick and glass structure, owned no doubt by the government. There was a Carnegie Library of sorts—what town has been skipped? A new central public school, various new churches, Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, showing where a part of the savings of the American people are being put. We stopped for lunch and picture postcards—and found only sleepy, lackadaisical merchants and clerks, a type of indolence befitting a hot, inter-river region. For to the east of this town about twenty miles was the White river (which we crossed at Indianapolis), and to the west about ten miles the Wabash, and all between was low, alluvial soil—a wonderful region for abundant crops—a region frequently overflowed in the springtime by the down rushing floods of the north.