LIFE AT THE ROOST
JACK’S after recollections of this earlier part of his life in America
while he lived at the Roost always remained with him as singularly
fragmentary memories of things passed. The various events that then
happened to him never, in those recollections, had a feeling of
keen and vivid reality as a part of his own life. It was almost as
though they might have somehow happened outside of the real things
of his life. Nearly every one who has reached manhood and who looks
back thence to the earlier periods of his adolescence, feels such
strangeness of unfamiliarity in certain fragmentary parts of his
younger life.
Maybe Jack felt this lack of reality in the events of that time because
that just then he was passing from boyhood into manhood; perhaps the
memory of those times seemed strange to him and lacking of vitality
because of the many changes of scene and circumstance that then
happened to him, and because he did not have time to become intimately
acquainted with any especial arrangement of his surroundings before it
was changed for some other surroundings of a different sort.
For Jack’s master was very often away from home, and generally he would
take Jack with him, and so it was that during this period there were
successive memories of queer rambling Virginia towns—level streets of
earth fronted by gray wooden buildings with narrow windows and wide
brick chimneys, in the midst of which lesser buildings there towered
here and there maybe a more pretentious mansion of brick, set back in a
tangled garden, approached by a steep flight of stone steps. The towns
were nearly all of this nature:—Yorktown, Jamestown, Williamsburg and
the lesser courthouse towns, more or less inland, up the river; and
they always remained in Jack’s memory as so many pictured scenes rather
than as various settings of his actual life.
At other times Mr. Parker would maybe take Jack with him on his
periodical visits to the plantation houses of his friends; nearly all
wide, rambling, barn-like structures, where wild company sometimes
gathered, and where, during the time of his master’s visits, Jack would
live in the company of the white servants and negroes who lounged
about, ready to run at any moment at the owner’s call. Jack made many
acquaintances among these people, but no friends.
This life was so varied and so entirely different from anything that he
had known before that he never got to feel as though it were perfectly
a part of himself. Even the Roost, with its bare, rambling rooms and
hallways, never entirely lost this feeling of unfamiliarity.
Nearly always there was more or less company at the old house—the same
sort of wild, roistering company that gathered at the other plantation
houses; men who came riding fine high-bred horses, who fought cocks,
who gambled, drinking deeply and swearing with loud voices, and with an
accent that was not at all like the English speech that Jack had known
at home.
One of his earlier experiences of this new life of his in the strange
new world into which he had come was of such a company that one day
came riding up to the gray old wooden mansion with a vast clattering of
horses’ hoofs, a shouting of voices and laughter, and a cloud of dust.
The party was accompanied by a following group of negro servants, one
of whom carried a fighting-cock on a saddle before him. Jack and Little
Coffee and another negro boy ran out to hold the horses, and Dennis
and two negroes came over from the stable to help. Mr. Parker came out
and stood on the upper step in the doorway, looking on as the visitors
dismounted. The scene was always very vivid in Jack’s memory.
The most prominent of the visiting party was young Mr. Harry Oliver. He
had been drinking, and his smooth cheeks were dyed a soft, deep red.
He dismounted with some difficulty, and then with uncertain steps went
over to his negro servant, who still sat on his horse, holding the cock
before him on the horn of the saddle. “Give the bird to me, Sambo,”
said the young man in a loud, unsteady voice.
“He strike you, mea-asta, you no take care,” said the negro warningly.
“Better let me take him, Mr. Oliver,” cried out Dennis.
The young man paid no heed to either warning, but took the bird from
the negro. It struggled, and one of the spurs caught in the lace of Mr.
Oliver’s cuff, tearing a great rent in it. Everybody laughed but Mr.
Parker, who stood looking calmly on at the scene. “Ouch! Look what he’s
done to me,” cried out Mr. Oliver. “Here, Dennis, you take him.” And
again the others laughed loudly at the young man’s mishap.
Dennis took the bird, seizing its narrow cruel head deftly, and holding
it so that it might not strike him.
“Hath Mr. Castleman been here yet?” asked one of the visitors of Dennis.
“No, your honor,” said Dennis.
“Aha!” shouted Harry Oliver, “what do you think of that, Tom? I tell
you he’ll not come. His black cock’s no match for Red Harry. I’ll bet
you five pounds he doesn’t come at all. I knew he was only talking
for talk’s sake last night when he said that he would match his bird
against Harry.”
The others, ready to be amused at anything the tipsy young fellow said,
again laughed loudly.
“If you want to bet your money, I’ll cover your five pounds that the
gentleman is here in the hour,” said one of the party, who was a
stranger to Jack.
“Let him alone, Phillips,” said Mr. Parker, coming down the steps.
“The boy is not cool enough to bet his money now. Won’t you come in,
gentlemen?”
“Yes, I am cool enough, too,” cried out Oliver. “I’ll bet my money as
I choose; and you shall mind your own business, Parker, and I’ll mind
mine.”
Then they all went into the house and to the dining-room, where the rum
and the sugar stood always ready on the sideboard.
Jack, as was said, was still new to all this life. “What are they going
to do?” he asked of Dennis as he led the horse he held over toward the
stable.
“Do?” said Dennis; “what d’ye think they’d do but fight a cock main?”
About an hour after the arrival of the first party of guests, Mr.
Castleman and four of his friends came in a body. Mr. Castleman’s negro
also brought a cock, and almost immediately the birds were pitted
against one another in the bare and carpetless hallway.
Jack did not see the beginning of the fight. He was up-stairs helping
Mrs. Pitcher make up some beds for the night. When he heard that they
were fighting the cocks down in the hall, he hurried down-stairs,
boy-like, to see what was going on. A burst of loud voices greeted his
ears as he descended the stairway. A number of the negroes and some
white servants were clustered on the steps, looking over the banister
and down below. There was another loud burst of voices dominated by
Mr. Oliver’s shrill boyish tones crying out, “Why, then! Why, then!
That’s my hero! Give it to him again! Why, then! ’Tis Red Harry against
them all! Where’s your fifty pounds now, Castleman?”
Jack at the head of the stairs could look down upon the tragedy being
enacted on the floor below. He stood for a second—two seconds—gazing
fascinated. The black cock—a dreadful bloody, blinded thing—was
swaying and toppling to death. The red cock towered above him, cruel,
remorseless, striking, and striking again; then poising, then striking
its helpless dying enemy again. Harry Oliver was squatted behind
his bird, hoarse with exultation. The end was very near. Mr. Parker
sat calm and serene, looking down at the fight. The others stood or
squatted around in a circle, tense and breathless with excitement. All
this Jack saw in the few dreadful seconds that he stood there, and the
scene was forever fixed upon his memory. He awoke to find that his
mouth was clammy with a dreadful excitement. Peggy Pitcher had followed
him out on the landing. Suddenly she burst out laughing. “Look at
Jack!” she cried. “‘T hath made him sick.”
Jack saw many cock-fights after that one, but the circumstances of this
time always remained the most keenly stamped upon his memory as one of
the most vivid of those unreal realities of that transition period.
Another memory of an altogether different sort was of one time when
Mr. Parker was away from home, and when he himself went with Dennis,
and Little Coffee, and two other negroes, down the river to the Roads,
fishing. Mrs. Pitcher had advised him not to go. “His honor may come
back,” said she; “and if he does and finds you away he’ll be as like as
not to give you a flaying with his riding-whip.”
“A fig for his honor!” said Jack. “I’m not afraid of his honor. And as
for being away when he comes back, why, that I shall not. He’ll be
sure not to be back from Annapolis for a week to come.”
The memory that followed was of a long sail in the open boat of some
forty miles or so in the hot sun and the swift, brisk wind; a memory of
sitting perched on the up-tilted weather-rail listening to Dennis and
the negroes chattering together in the strange jabbering English that
was becoming so familiar to him now.
It was pretty late in the afternoon when they approached the
fishing-ground. Dennis leaned over the rail every now and then, and
peered down into the water, as the hoy drifted along close-hauled to
the wind. One of the negroes stood ready to drop the sail, and the
other stood in the bow to throw over the stone that served as an anchor
when Dennis should give the order. “Let go!” shouted Dennis suddenly,
and the sail fell with a rattle of the block and tackle, and in a
heap of canvas. At the same time the negro in the bow threw the stone
overboard with a great loud splash.
Jack and Little Coffee were the first to drop their lines into the
water. Jack sat watching the negro boy; he hoped with all his might
that he might catch the first fish, but it did not seem possible that
he could catch a fish in that little open spot of the wide, wide
stretch of water. Then all of a sudden there came a sharp, quivering
pull at the hook, and he instantly began hauling in the wet and
dripping line wildly, hand over hand. He thought for a moment that
he had lost the fish; then there came a renewed tugging at his line,
and in another second he had jerked the shining thing into the boat,
where it lay flashing and splashing and flapping upon the boards of the
bottom. “I caught the first fish, Little Coffee!” he shouted.
“Look dar, now,” said Little Coffee, testily. “Fish just bite my hook,
and you talk and scare ‘um away.”
Jack jeered derisively, and Dennis burst out laughing, while Little
Coffee glowered at Jack in glum sullenness.
They fished all that afternoon, and it was toward evening when they
hoisted up the anchor stone. Two of the negroes poled the hoy to
the shore. Jack was the first to jump from the bow of the boat to
the white, sandy beach, littered with a tangle of water-grasses
and driftwood, washed up by the waves. A steep bluff bank of sand
overlooked the water, and Jack ran scrambling up the sliding, sandy
steep, and stood looking around him. For some little distance the
ground was open, and there was a low wooden shed, maybe fifty or sixty
paces away; beyond it stood the outskirts of the virgin forest. He
stood and gazed about him, realizing very keenly that this was the new
world, and sensing a singular thrilling delight at the wildness and
strangeness of everything.
This, too, was a very vivid memory fragment of that strange and
distantly impersonal period of his life.