PART V

TAR

_A

Midwest Childhood_

SHERWOOD ANDERSON

NEW YORK

BONI AND LIVERIGHT

1926

COPYRIGHT 1926 :: BY

BONI & LIVERIGHT, Inc.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES

TO

ELIZABETH ANDERSON

Portions of this book appeared as short sketches in _Woman’s Home

Companion_, _The American Mercury_ and the author here makes due

acknowledgment of the graciously given permission to reprint.

FOREWORD

I have a confession to make. I am a story teller starting to tell a

story and cannot be expected to tell the truth. Truth is impossible

to me. It is like goodness, something aimed at but never hit. A year

or two ago I determined to try to tell the story of my own childhood.

Very well, I set to work. What a job! I went at the task bravely but

presently came to a dead halt. Like every other man and woman in the

world I had always thought the story of my own childhood would be an

absorbingly interesting one.

I began to write. For a day or two all went well. I sat at my desk

scribbling away. I, Sherwood Anderson, an American man, in my youth did

so and so. Well, I played ball, stole apples out of orchards, began

presently, being male, to think of the female, was sometimes afraid in

the dark at night. What nonsense to speak of it all. I grew ashamed.

And yet there was something I had wanted of which I need not be

ashamed. Childhood is something wonderful. Manhood, sophistication is

something worth striving for but innocence is somewhat sweeter. It may

be the greater wisdom to remain innocent but it cannot be done. I wish

it could.

In a New Orleans restaurant I heard a man explaining the fate of crabs.

“There are two good kinds,” he said. “Busters are so young they are

sweet. Soft shell crabs have the sweetness of age and weakness.”

It is my weakness to want to speak of my youth, a sign perhaps I am

getting old, but I am ashamed. There is a reason for my shame. All

writing of self is egotistical. There is however another reason.

I am a man who has brothers living and they are strong, and I dare say

hard-hitting fellows. Suppose it please my fancy to have a certain

kind of father or mother. That is the great privilege of being a

writer--that life may be constantly re-created in the field of fancy.

But my brothers, respectable men, may have quite different notions of

how these worthy people, my parents and theirs, should be presented to

the world. We modern writers have got a reputation for boldness, for

too much boldness most people think, but none of us like to be knocked

down or cut on the street by former friends or by our relatives. We are

not prize-fighters or horse wranglers, most of us. A poor enough lot,

if the truth be told. Cæsar was quite right in detesting scribblers.

Now it happens that my friends and relatives have already stood

much from me. I am forever writing of myself and dragging them in,

re-creating them to suit my fancy, and they have been a forbearing lot.

It is dreadful really having a scribbler in the family. Avoid it if

you can. If you have a son who has a leaning that way hurry him into

industrial life. If he becomes a writer he may give you away.

You see, if I began writing of my childhood, I had to ask myself how

much more these people would stand. Heavens knows what I might do to

them when I got going.

I kept writing and tearing up. Oh, pshaw! My progress was too

lamentably slow. I could not very well create a lot of little Lord

Fauntleroys growing up in a Middle-western American town. If I made

myself too good I knew it would not work and if I made myself really

bad--which was a temptation--no one would believe. Bad people, when

you come close to them, are such simpletons.

“Where is the Truth?” I asked myself, “Oh, Truth, where are you? Where

have you hidden yourself?” I looked under my desk, under the bed, went

out and looked up and down the road. I have always been looking for the

rascal but have never been able to find him. Where does he keep himself?

“Where is Truth?” What an unsatisfactory question to be compelled to

keep asking, if you are a teller of tales.

Let me explain--if I can.

The teller of tales, as you must all know, lives in a world of his own.

He is one thing, as you see him walking in the street, going to church,

into a friend’s house, into a restaurant, and quite another fellow when

he sits down to write. While he is a writer nothing happens but that

it is changed by his fancy and his fancy is always at work. Really,

you should never trust such a man. Do not put him on the witness stand

during a trial for your life or for money--and be very careful never to

believe what he says under any circumstances.

Take myself for example. I am, let us say, walking on a country road

and there is a man running in a nearby field. Such a thing happened

once and what a tale I made of it.

I see the man running. Nothing else actually happens. He runs across

the field and disappears over a hill but now look out for me. Later I

may tell you a tale of the man. Leave it to me to make up a tale of why

the man ran and to believe my own tale after it is made.

The man lived in a house just beyond the hill. Sure there was a house

there. I created it. I ought to know. Why, I could draw you a picture

of the house, although I never actually saw it. He lived in a house

behind the hill and something absorbingly interesting and exciting just

now happened in the house.

I tell you the tale of what happened with the straightest face in the

world, believe the tale myself, at least while I am telling it.

You see how it is. When I was a child this faculty I have was a

nuisance. It kept getting me into hot water. Every one thought me a

little liar and, of course, I was. I went ten yards beyond the house

and stood behind an apple tree. There was a gentle rising hill and near

the top of the hill a clump of bushes. A cow came out of the bushes,

nibbled grass, no doubt, and then went back into the bushes. It was

fly time and I dare say the bushes were a comfort to her.

I made up a tale concerning the cow. She became for me a bear. There

had been a circus in a nearby town and a bear had escaped. I had heard

father speak of reading an account of the escape in the newspapers. I

gave my story a certain air of probability and the strange part of all

this is that, having thought out the tale, I believed it myself. All

children, I think, do tricks like that. It worked so well that I had

the men of the neighborhood, with guns on their shoulders, scouring the

woods for two or three days and all the neighborhood children shared in

my fright and excitement.

A literary triumph--and I so young.

All tale telling is, in a strict sense, nothing but lying. That is what

people cannot understand. To tell the truth is too difficult. I long

since gave up the effort.

However, when it came to the tellings of the tale of my own

childhood--well, for once, I said to myself, I will hew to the line.

An old pit I had often fallen in before I fell in again. Bravely I set

myself to my task. I pursued Truth back through my own memory like

a dog chasing a rabbit through dense bushes. What toil, what sweat

dropped upon the sheets of paper before me. “To be honest,” I said to

myself, “is to be good, and for once I will be good.

“I will prove how essentially sterling is my character. People who have

always known me and who have perhaps, in the past, had too much reason

for doubting my word will now be surprised and delighted.”

I had dreams of people giving me a new name. As I went along the street

people would whisper to each other, “There goes Honest Sherwood.”

Perhaps they would insist on electing me to Congress or sending me as

an ambassador to some foreign country. How happy all of my relatives

would be.

“At last he is giving all of us a good character. He has made us out

respectable folk.”

As for the people of my native town, or towns, they also would be

happy. Telegrams would be received, meetings held. There might be an

organization formed for raising the standard of citizenship of which I

would be elected president.

I have always so wanted to be president of something. What a splendid

dream.

Alas--it would not work. I wrote one sentence, ten, a hundred pages.

They had to be torn up. Truth had disappeared into a thicket so dense

that it could not be penetrated.

Like every one else in the world I had so thoroughly re-created my

childhood, in my own fancy, that Truth was utterly lost.

And now for a confession. I have a love of confessions. I do not

remember the face of my own father. My wife is in the next room as I

sit writing, but I do not remember what she looks like.

My wife is to me an idea, my mother, my sons, my friends, are ideas.

My fancy is a wall between myself and Truth. There is a world of

the fancy into which I constantly plunge and out of which I seldom

completely emerge. I want every day to be absorbingly interesting and

exciting to me and if it will not, I, with my fancy, try to make it

so. If you, a stranger, come into my presence there is a chance that

for a moment I shall see you as you are but in another moment you

will be lost. You say something that starts my fancy working and I

am off. To-night perhaps I shall dream of you. We will have fancied

conversations. My fancy will throw you into strange, noble--or perhaps

even mean situations. Now I have no scruples. You are my rabbit and I

am a hound pursuing you. Even your physical being changes under the

driving lash of my fancy.

And here let me say something regarding a writer’s responsibility for

the characters he creates. We writers are always getting out of it

by disclaiming responsibility for our dreams. How absurd. How often,

for example, have I dreamed of making love to some woman who actually

wouldn’t have me. Why deny responsibility for such a dream. I do it

because I like it--although I do not do it consciously. We writers must

take the responsibility of the unconscious, too--it seems.

Am I to blame? I am made that way. I am like all people. You are

yourself more like me than you would care to admit. After all the fault

was partly your own. Why did you interest my fancy? Dear reader, I am

sure that, if you came into my presence, my fancy would at once be

caught.

Judges and lawyers who have had to handle witnesses during trials in

court know how common is the disease I have, know how little people

are to be depended upon for the truth.

As I have suggested, when it came to writing of myself, I, the teller

of tales, would be all right if there were no living witnesses to check

up on me. They, of course, will also have changed the actual happenings

of our common lives to suit their own fancies.

I am doing it.

You are doing it.

Everybody’s doing it.

Much better to meet the situation as I have done here--create a Tar

Moorehead to stand for myself.

At least that lets my friends and relatives out. It is, I admit, a

writer’s trick.

And anyway, it was only after I had created Tar Moorehead, had brought

him into life in my own fancy, that I could sit down before my sheets

and feel at ease. It was only then I faced myself, accepted myself. “If

you are a born liar, a man of the fancy, why not be what you are?” I

said to myself, and having said it I at once began writing with a new

feeling of comfort.

PART I

CHAPTER I

Poor people have children without much feeling of exaltation. Alas,

the children just come. It is another child and children come easily.

On such an occasion a man is for some obscure reason a little ashamed.

The woman escapes because she is ill. Let’s see, now there were two

boys and one girl. This makes only three so far. It is well this last

one is another boy. He won’t cost much for a long time. He can wear the

castoff clothing of his older brother and then, when he gets older and

demands things of his own, he can work. It is the common fate of man

to work. That was provided for in the beginning. Cain killed Abel with

a club. It happened at the edge of a field. There is a picture of the

scene in the Sunday School leaflet. Abel lies dead on the ground and

Cain stands over him with a club in his hand.

In the background is one of God’s angels pronouncing the dreadful

sentence. “By the sweat of your brow shall you eat your bread.” That

sentence to go reverberating down through the ages to catch a small

Ohio boy among all the others. Well, boys find places more readily than

girls. They earn more.

The boy, named Edgar Moorehead, was called Edgar only while he was very

young. He lived in Ohio but his father was a North Carolina man and

North Carolina men are in derision called “Tar-heels.” A neighbor spoke

of him as another little “Tar-heel” and after that he was called, first

“Tar-heel” and then simply “Tar.” What a black sticky name!

Tar Moorehead was born in the town of Camden, Ohio, but when he left

there he went in his mother’s arms. As a conscious human being he never

saw the town, never walked in its streets and later when he grew to

manhood he was careful never to go back.

Being an imaginative child and not fond of disillusions he preferred

having one place all his own, the product of his own fancy.

Tar Moorehead became a writer and wrote tales of people in small towns,

how they live, what they think, what things happen to them, but he

never wrote of Camden. As a matter of fact there is such a place. It

is on a railroad, tourists go through there, stopping to have their

gas tanks filled. There are stores that sell chewing gum, electric

fixtures, automobile tires, canned fruits and vegetables.

Tar discarded all these things when he thought of Camden. He thought

of it as his own town, the product of his own fancy. Sometimes it sat

at the edge of a long plain and the people of the town could see from

the windows of their houses a vast expanse of earth and sky. Such a

place to walk in the evening, out on the grassy plain, such a place to

count the stars, feel the evening wind on the cheek, hear, coming from

a distance, the little sounds of the night.

As a man Tar awoke, let us say, in a city hotel. All of his life he

had been trying to put life into the tales he wrote but his job was

difficult. Modern life is complex. What are you going to say about it?

How are you going to get things straight?

There is a woman, for example. How are you, being a man, going to

understand women? Some men writers pretend they have solved the

problem. They write with great confidence and when you read the

printed tale you are quite swept off your feet but later, when you

think things over, it appears all false.

How are you going to understand women when you cannot understand

yourself? How are you ever going to understand any one or anything?

As a man Tar sometimes lay in his bed in a city and thought of Camden,

the town in which he was born and which he never saw and never intended

to see, the town filled with people he could understand and who always

understood him.

There was a reason for his love of the place. He owed no one money

there, had never cheated any one, had never made love to a Camden woman

he found out later he did not want.

Now Camden had become, for him, a place among hills. It was a little

white town in a valley with high hills on each side. You reached it by

a stagecoach, going up from a railroad town twenty miles away. Being

a realist in his writing and thinking, Tar did not make the houses of

his town very comfortable or the people particularly good or in any way

exceptional.

They were what they were, plain people, leading rather hard lives,

digging a living out of small fields in the valleys and on the

hillsides. Because the land was rather poor and the fields steep,

modern agricultural implements could not be introduced and anyway the

people had no money to buy.

The town of Tar’s birth, this purely fanciful place, which has

nothing to do with real Camden, had no electric lights, there was no

waterworks, no one there owned an automobile. By day men and women

went into the fields to plant corn by hand, they harvested wheat with

a cradle. At night, after ten o’clock, the little streets with the

poor little houses scattered about were unlighted. Even the houses

were dark, except an occasional one where there was sickness or

where company had come. It was, in short, such a place as might have

been found in Judea in Old Testament days. Christ on his mission and

followed by John, Matthew, that queer neurotic Judas and the rest,

might well have visited just such a place.

A place of mystery--the home of romance. How thoroughly the citizens of

the real Camden, Ohio, might have disliked Tar’s conception of their

town.

To tell the truth Tar was trying, through the creation of a town of his

own fancy, to get at something it was almost impossible to get at in

the reality of life. In real life people never stood still. Nothing

in America stands still very long. You are a boy in a town and go away

to live for a mere twenty years. Then one day you come back and walk

through the streets of your town. Nothing is as it should be.

The shy little girl who lived on your street and whom you thought so

wonderful has now become a woman. She has protruding teeth and her hair

is already getting thin. What a shame! When you knew her, as a boy, she

seemed the most wonderful creature in the world. You used to go far out

of your way, coming home from school, just to go past her house. There

she was in the front yard and when she saw you coming she ran to the

door and stood just within the house in the half light. You stole one

glance and then did not dare look again. But in fancy how lovely she

had been.

A sorry day for you when you go back to the real place of your

childhood. Better go to China or the South Seas. Sit on the deck of a

ship and dream. The little girl is married now and the mother of two

children. The boy who played shortstop on the baseball team and whom

you envied until it hurt has become a barber. Everything has gone

wrong. Much better to adopt Tar Moorehead’s plan, move away from your

town early, so early that you can remember nothing very definitely, and

then never go back.

Tar kept the town of Camden as something special in his life. Even when

he had become a grown man and was called successful he clung to his

dreams of the place. He had been spending the evening with some men at

a big city hotel and did not go to his room until late. Well, his head

was tired, his spirit tired. There had been talk and more talk, perhaps

some kind of disagreement. He had quarreled with a fat man who wanted

him to do something he did not want to do.

Then he went up into his room and closed his eyes and at once he was

back in the town of his fancy, his birthplace, the town he had never

consciously seen, in Camden, Ohio.

It was night and he walked in the hills above the town. The stars shone

out. A little wind was making the leaves of the trees rustle.

When he had walked in the hills until he was tired he could come down

through meadows where cows were being pastured and get among the houses.

He knew the people in every house along the little streets, knew all

about them. They were what he had dreamed people were like when he was

a small boy. The man he had thought brave and kind was really brave and

kind; the little girl he had thought lovely had grown into a beautiful

woman.

It is coming close to people that hurts. We find out people are like

ourselves. Better, if you want peace, keep far off, dream about people.

The men who make a romance of life are perhaps right after all. The

reality is too terrible. “By the sweat of your brow shall you earn your

bread.”

By cheating too, by all kinds of dodges.

Cain made things hard for all of us that time he killed Abel at the

edge of the field. He did it with a club. What a mistake it was to be

carrying clubs about. If Cain had not had the club with him that day

long ago the Camden of fact, where Tar Moorehead was born, might have

been more like the Camden of his dreams.

But then perhaps it would not have wanted to be that. Camden wasn’t a

very progressive town as Tar saw it, in dreams.

After Camden how many other towns. Tar Moorehead’s father was a drifter

as he was himself. There are certain people who settle down in one

place in life, hang on and finally make their mark but Dick Moorehead,

Tar’s father, wasn’t that sort. If he finally settled in one place it

was because he was too tired and worn out to make another move.

Tar became a story teller but, if you will notice, it is the shiftless

roving fellows who tell tales. Few tellers of tales are good citizens.

They only pretend to be.

Dick Moorehead, Tar’s father, came from the South, from North Carolina.

He must have just drifted down the mountain sides, looking about,

smelling out the land as did the two men Joshua, the son of Nun, sent

out of Shittim to look at Jericho. He crossed a corner of the old state

of Virginia, the Ohio River, finally alighting upon a town where he

thought he might do well.

What he did on the way, where he slept, what women he saw, what he

thought he was up to, no one will ever know.

As a young man he was rather handsome and he then had a little money in

a community where money was scarce. When he set up a harness shop in

the Ohio town people flocked to him.

For a time it was easy sailing. The other shop in the town was owned

by an old crusty fellow who was a good enough workman but not very

entertaining. In these earlier days in the Ohio communities people had

no theaters, no movies, no radio, no busy brightly-lighted streets.

Newspapers were rare. There were no magazines.

What a god-send to have a fellow like Dick Moorehead coming into town.

Coming from a distance, he had of course tales to tell and people were

eager to listen.

And what an opportunity for him. Having a little money and being

Southern, he of course hired a man to do most of his work and prepared

to spend his own time doing the entertaining, a kind of work more in

his line. He bought himself a suit of black clothes and a heavy silver

watch with a heavy silver chain. Tar Moorehead, the son, saw the watch

and the chain long afterwards. When bad times came to Dick they were

the last things he let go.

Being a young man and for the time prosperous, the seller of harness

was a public favorite. The land was still new, forests were still being

cut away and the fields under cultivation were filled with stumps. At

night there was nothing to do. During the long winter days there was

nothing to do.

Dick was a favorite with the unmarried women but for a time confined

his attentions to the men. There was a certain craftiness in him. “If

you pay too much attention to the women the first thing you know you

get married and then look where you are.”

Being a dark hairy man Dick let his mustache grow and this, with his

thick black hair, gave him a certain foreign air. How impressive it was

to see him making his way along the street before the little stores in

the neat black suit with the heavy silver watch chain dangled across

his then slender waist.

He strutted. “Well, well, ladies and gentlemen, do look at me. Here I

am, come to live among you.” In the backwoods Ohio of that time the man

who wore, on week days, a tailor-made suit and who shaved every morning

when he got up was bound to make a deep impression. At the little hotel

he got the best place at the table and the best room. Awkward country

girls, who had come to town to take places as servants at the hotel,

went into his room to make the bed and change the sheets trembling

with excitement. Dreams for them too. In the Ohio town Dick was, for

the time, a kind of king.

He stroked his mustache, he spoke kindly to the landlady and to the

waitresses and chambermaids but for the time he courted no woman.

“You wait. Let them court me. I am a man of affairs. I must attend to

business.”

Farmers came to Dick’s shop bringing harnesses to be repaired, came

wanting to buy new harnesses. Town people came in. There was a doctor,

two or three lawyers, a county judge. In the town there was an

undercurrent of excitement. It was a time when there was plenty of talk

about.

Dick had come into Ohio in the year eighteen hundred and fifty-eight

and the story of his coming is not Tar’s story. However, the tale aims

to concern itself, somewhat vaguely to be sure, with the childhood of

the Middle-west too.

The background is really a poor badly-lighted village some twenty-five

miles back from the Ohio River in Southern Ohio. There was a rather

rich valley among the rolling Ohio hills and the people were just such

people as could be found nowadays in the hills of North Carolina,

Virginia and Tennessee. They had come into the country and taken up

land, the more fortunate ones in the valley itself, the less fortunate

ones on the hillsides. For a long time they lived largely by hunting

and then the timber was cut off, hauled over the hills to the river and

rafted South to be sold. The game gradually disappeared. Good farming

land began to be worth something, railroads were being built and there

were the canals with their canal boats and the steamers on the river.

Cincinnati and Pittsburgh were not so far away. Daily newspapers began

to circulate and there was presently a telegraph line.

In this community and against this awakening background Dick Moorehead

strutted away his few years of prosperity. Then the Civil War came and

upset things for him. They were days he always remembered and magnified

later. Well, he was prosperous then, was popular, he attended to

business.

He lived then at the town hotel, run by a short fat man who let his

wife attend to the affairs of the hotel while he tended bar and talked

of race horses and politics, and it was in the bar Dick spent much of

his time. It was a time when women worked. They milked the cows, did

the washing, cooked the food, had children and made clothes for them.

After they married they stayed pretty much out of sight.

It was such a town as, being located in Illinois, might well have

been visited on court days by an Abraham Lincoln, a Douglas, a Davis.

In the bar, the harness shop, the hotel office, the livery stable,

men gathered of an evening. There was talk. Men drank whiskey, told

stories, chewed tobacco and talked of horses, religion and politics

and Dick was there among them, setting them up at the bar, expressing

his opinions, telling stories, getting off jokes. At night, when nine

o’clock came and if the men of the town had not drifted to his shop,

he closed up and made his way to the livery stable where he knew they

could be found. Well, it was time for talk now and there was something

special to talk about.

For one thing Dick was a Southerner in a Northern community. That set

him apart. Was he loyal? You bet. He was a Southerner and knew niggers

and niggers were now to the fore. The Pittsburgh paper had come. Samuel

Chase of Ohio had made a speech, Lincoln of Illinois was holding a

debate with Stephen Douglas, Seward of New York spoke of war. Dick held

to Douglas. All this nonsense about the niggers. Well, well! What an

idea! The Southerners in Congress, Davis, Stevens, Floyd, were so in

earnest, Lincoln, Chase, Seward, Sumner and the other Northerners were

so in earnest. “If war comes we’ll catch it hot here in Southern Ohio.

Kentucky will go in and Tennessee and Virginia. The city of Cincinnati

is none too loyal.”

Some of the little towns nearby were Southern in their feelings but

Dick had got into a place that was hotly Northern. A lot of mountain

men had happened to settle in there in the early days. It was just his

luck.

At first he kept quiet and listened. Then people began to want him to

speak out. Very well, he would. He was a Southerner, fresh from the

South. “What have you got to say?” It was a perplexing question.

“What have I got to say, eh?” Dick had to think fast. “There won’t be

any war--about niggers.” At home in North Carolina Dick’s people had

owned niggers, a few of them. They weren’t cotton raisers but lived in

another hill country, and raised corn and tobacco. “Well, you see.”

Dick hesitated and then plunged. What did he care about slavery. It

meant nothing to him. A few niggers hanging around. They weren’t very

good workers. At home you had to have a few to be respectable, to avoid

being called a poor white.

While he was hesitating and keeping quiet, before he took the plunge

and became a thoroughgoing abolitionist and a Northerner, Dick did a

good deal of thinking.

His father had been prosperous once, had inherited lands, but he was a

shiftless man and, before Dick had left, things at home had not gone

too well. The Mooreheads weren’t broke or really hard up but from

owning two thousand acres of land they had been reduced to four or five

hundred.

Things had happened. Dick’s father went to a nearby city and bought

some niggers, a pair of them, both over sixty. The old nigger woman had

no teeth and her old nigger man had a bad leg. He just could hobble

about.

Why had Thad Moorehead bought the pair? Well, the man who owned them

was broke and wanted them to have a home. Thad Moorehead had bought

them because he was a Moorehead. He got the two of them for a hundred

dollars. It was a Moorehead kind of thing to do, buying such niggers.

The old nigger man was really a rascal. No Uncle Tom’s Cabin monkey

business about him. He had been owned far South, in half a dozen

places, and had always managed to keep himself attached to some negro

woman who stole for him, had children by him, took care of him. In the

Far South, when he was owned down there on a sugar plantation, he had

made himself a set of reed pipes and could play. It was the playing of

the pipes that had attracted Thad Moorehead.

Too many of that kind of niggers about.

When Dick’s father got the old couple home they could do little enough

work. The woman helped some in the kitchen and the man made a pretense

of working with the Moorehead boys in the fields.

The old black man told stories, he played his pipes and Thad Moorehead

listened. Finding himself a shady place under a tree at the edge of a

field the old rascally black got out his pipes and played or he sang

songs. One of the Moorehead boys was superintending the work in the

field and a Moorehead is a Moorehead. The work went to pieces. All

gathered about.

The old black could keep it up all day and all night. Tales of strange

places, of the Far South, of the sugar plantations, the big cotton

fields, of the time when he was leased out by his owner to be a hand

on a river steamer on the Mississippi. After the talk a turn on the

pipes. Sweet strange music making echoes in the woods at the edge of

the field, creeping up the nearby hillside. It fairly made the birds

stop singing in envy sometimes. Strange that an old man could be so

wicked and make such sweet heavenly sounds. It made you doubt the value

of goodness, that sort of thing. Not strange though that an old black

woman liked her nigger man, stuck to him. The trouble was that all the

Mooreheads listened, letting the work go. Always too many of that kind

of niggers around. Thanks be, a horse can’t tell tales, a cow can’t

play pipes when she should be giving milk.

You pay less for a cow or a good horse, and a cow or a horse can’t tell

strange tales of far places, can’t tell stories to young men when they

should be plowing corn or chopping tobacco, can’t make music on reed

pipes that will make you forget any kind of work should ever be done.

When Dick Moorehead had made up his mind he wanted to strike out for

himself old Thad had simply sold a few acres of land to give him his

start. Dick had put in a few years as an apprentice in a harness shop

in a nearby town and then the old man had produced the money. “I think

you had better go up North, it’s a more enterprising place,” he said.

Enterprising indeed. Dick had tried to be enterprising. Up North,

specially where abolitionists have come in, they would never put up

with wasteful niggers. Suppose an old nigger man can play the pipes

until it makes you sad and glad and careless about getting work done.

Better let music alone. It’s the devil’s business. Enterprise is

enterprise.

Dick was the sort who turns out to believe what the people about him

believe. In the Ohio town “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was being read. Sometimes

he thought of the blacks at home and smiled in secret.

“I’ve got into a place where people are against shiftlessness. The

niggers are responsible.” He began to hate slavery now. “This is a new

century, new times. The South is too pig-headed.”

Being enterprising in business, the retail kind anyway, was simply

standing in with the people. You had to stand in with the people to get

them into your shop. If you are a Southerner in a Northern community

and go over to their point of view you are stronger with them than you

would be if you were born a Northerner.

“There is more joy in Heaven over one sinner,” etc.

How could Dick tell he was himself a player of the pipes?

Blow your reed pipes, get a woman to take care of your children--if you

are unfortunate enough to have any--tell tales, go with the crowd.

Dick went over, bang. His popularity in the Ohio community went up to

boiling point. Every one wanted to buy him drinks at the bar, in the

evening his shop was full of men. Now Jeff Davis, Stevenson of Georgia

and others, were making fiery speeches in Congress, making threats.

Abraham Lincoln of Illinois was running for President. The Democrats

were all split up, had put three tickets in the field. The fools!

Dick even joined the crowd who were running off niggers at night. If

you go in for a thing you might as well go the whole hog and anyway

running off niggers was half the fun of the game. It was against

the law for one thing--against the law and all the good law-abiding

citizens, the very best in fact, going into it.

Fun, eh? Plenty of excitement. They slipped the niggers across the Ohio

River at night in a row boat. A lot of them not of much account to

their owners if they had stayed South, Dick thought. Well, he was no

special judge of good niggers. The kind his father had at home weren’t

of much account. “If you want to make niggers pay you got to own land

down in Alabama or Mississippi. Then you put a good overseer in charge

and pretty much keep out of the fields yourself.” A lot of the best

overseers were Northern men, nigger drivers. Small owners got all the

worst of it in the slavery business. You owned four or five or even a

dozen niggers and got acquainted with them. The worst was that they

got acquainted with you, knew your weaknesses, knew how to work you.

More niggers like that old reed-blower all through the South in slavery

days than the North ever dreamed of. They got through life pretty easy,

flattered their masters, flattered the women and the children. “A

shrewd canny lot, the niggers of the South,” Dick thought.

Dick kept smiling to himself, helping run niggers off at night,

Northern Methodist and Baptist preachers in the party, superintendents

of Sunday Schools, earnest men. When they got their niggers across

the river wagons were waiting. Sometimes the niggers were made to

lie on the wagon beds and straw was piled on them. There was a husky

young wench with two children, worth about eighteen hundred dollars in

Alabama--the three of them--and a negro preacher who wanted to begin

shouting until Dick made him shut up. “Shut up, nigger,” he growled and

the tone of his voice shocked some of the members of the party.

Dick did not do much thinking. They took the runaway niggers to

some farmhouse, usually on a side road, and after feeding hid them

in a barn. The next night they would be shoved on their way, toward

Zanesville, Ohio, toward a distant place called Oberlin, Ohio, places

where the abolitionists were thick. “Damn an abolitionist anyway.” They

were bound to raise hell for Dick.

Sometimes the parties running the escaped niggers off had to hide in

the woods. The next town to the west was as strong in its Southern

feeling as Dick’s town was for abolition. The citizens of the two towns

hated each other and the neighboring town got up parties to catch the

nigger runners. Dick would have been among them had he happened to

settle in that town. It was a game for them too. None of the crowd

owned any slaves. Sometimes shots were fired but no one in either of

the towns ever got hit.

For Dick it was, for the time, fun, excitement. His getting to the

front in the abolitionist ranks made him a marked man, an outstanding

figure. He never wrote letters home and his father of course knew

nothing of what he was doing. Like every one else he did not think war

would really come and if it did what of it? The North thought it could

lick the South in sixty days. The South thought it would take them

thirty days to whip the North. “The Union must and will be preserved,”

said Lincoln, who had been elected President. That seemed good sense

anyway. He was a backwoods fellow, that Lincoln. People in the know

said he was tall and gawky, a regular countryman. The smart fellows

down East would handle him all right. When it came to a showdown the

South would give in or the North would.

Dick went sometimes to see the runaway niggers hidden in the barns

at night. The other white men were in the farmhouse and he was alone

with two or three blacks. He stood over them looking down. It’s the

South’s way. There were a few words passed. The niggers knew he was a

Southerner all right. Something in his tone told them. He thought of

what he had heard his father say. “For the smaller whites, the common

white farmers in the South, it would have been better had there never

been any slavery, never any blacks.” What happened, when you had them

around, was that you got the notion into your head you didn’t have to

work. Dick’s father had seven strong sons before his wife died. They

were a shiftless lot, really. Dick himself was the only one who had

any enterprise, had ever wanted to get out. Had there never been any

niggers he and all of his brothers might have been taught to work, the

Moorehead place in North Carolina might have amounted to something.

Abolition, eh? If abolition could only abolish. A war wouldn’t make

any deep essential difference in the attitude of the whites toward the

blacks. Any black man or woman would lie to a white man or woman. He

made the niggers in the barn tell him why they had run away. They lied

of course. He laughed and went back to the house. If the war came his

father and his brothers would get in on the Southern side as casually

as he would get in on the Northern side. What did they care about

slavery? They really cared about the way the Northerners talked. The

North cared about the way the South talked. Both sides sent talkers to

Congress. That was natural. Dick was a talker himself, an adventurer.

* * * * *

And then the war came and Dick Moorehead, Tar’s father, got in. He was

made a captain and wore a sword. Could he resist that? Not Dick.

He went south to Middle Tennessee, was in Rosecrans’ army and then

later in Grant’s. His harness shop had been sold. When he paid his

debts there wasn’t much left. He had set ’em up too often at the

tavern, during the exciting days when enlistment was going on.

What fun, during enlistment, what excitement. Women scurrying about,

men and boys scurrying about. They were grand days for Dick. He was

the town’s hero. You don’t get many such chances in life if you are

not born a money-maker and can’t pay to get yourself into a prominent

position. In times of peace you just go along, telling stories,

drinking with other men at the bar, spending your money for a good

suit of clothes and a heavy silver watch, letting your mustache grow,

stroking it, talking when some other man wants to talk as much as you

do. He may be a better talker, at that.

At night sometimes during the excitement, Dick thought of his brothers,

going into the Southern army, much in the spirit in which he had

gone in with the North. They would hear speeches, the women of the

neighborhood would be holding meetings. How could they stay out? They

would go in to hold on to such fellows as that shiftless old black,

playing his reed pipes, singing his songs, lying about his past,

entertaining the whites so he wouldn’t have to work. Dick and his

brothers might be shooting at each other some day. He refused to think

of that side of the matter. The thought came only at night. He had been

made a captain and wore a sword.

One day a chance came to distinguish himself. The Northerners, among

whom he lived, who were his fellows now, were great rifle shooters.

They called themselves “the squirrel shooters of Ohio,” bragged a lot

of what they would do when they drew a bead on a Reb. During the time

when the companies were being formed they held shooting matches.

It was all the go. The men went to the edge of a field near town and

fastened a small target to a tree. They stood off an unbelievable

distance and nearly every man hit the target. If they did not hit the

center of the target they at least made the bullets do what they called

“biting paper.” Every one had the illusion that wars are won by good

shots.

Dick yearned to shoot but did not dare. He had been elected captain of

a company. “You be careful,” he told himself. One day when all the men

had gone to the shooting ground he picked up a rifle. He had hunted

some as a boy but not much, was never a good shot.

Now he stood with the rifle in his hand. A small bird flew far up in

the sky over the field. Quite casually he raised the rifle, took aim

and fired, and the bird came down, almost at his feet. It had been shot

cleanly, through the head. One of those strange accidents that get into

stories but never happen in fact--when you want them to.

Dick strutted out of the field and never went back. Things were on the

wing for him, he was a hero already, before the war started.

A marvelous shot, a captain. Already he had got his sword and had spurs

fastened on his boot-heels. When he walked through the streets of his

town young women looked at him from behind window curtains. Almost

every night there was a party at which he was the central figure.

How was he to know that after the war he was to marry and have many

children, that he would never be a hero again, that all the rest of his

life he would have to build on these days, creating in fancy a thousand

adventures that never happened.

The race of the tale tellers is always an unhappy race but luckily they

never find out how unhappy they are. They are always hoping somewhere

they will find believers, living in that hope. It is in the blood.

CHAPTER II

For Tar Moorehead life began with a procession of houses. They were at

first very dim in his mind. They marched. Even when he grew to be a man

the houses went across the walls of his fancy like soldiers in a dusty

road. As when soldiers marched some few were sharply remembered.

Houses were like people. An empty house was like an empty man or woman.

There were houses cheaply built, thrown together. Others were carefully

built and carefully lived in, having careful loving attention.

When you went into an empty house the experience was sometimes

terrifying. Voices kept calling. They must have been the voices of

people who had lived there. Once, when Tar was a boy and had gone out

of town alone to pick wild berries in the fields, he saw a small empty

house, standing in a field of corn.

Something induced him to go in. The doors were open and many panes had

been broken in the windows. There was gray dust on the floor.

A small bird, a swallow, had flown into the house and could not get

out. In its terror it flew directly at Tar, at the doors, at the

windows. Its body struck the window sash and its terror began to get

into Tar’s blood. The terror had something to do with empty houses. Why

should houses be empty? He ran away and at the edge of the field looked

back and saw the swallow make its escape. It flew gladly, joyously,

circling about over the fields. Tar was half beside himself with desire

to leave the ground and fly away through the air.

To a mind like Tar’s--the truth always washed by the colors being

brushed on by his fancy--houses in which he lived as a child could not

be definitely placed. There was one house he had never lived in that

was very clearly remembered. The house was low and long and a grocer

with a large family lived in it. Back of the house, its roof almost

touching the kitchen door, was a long low barn. Tar’s own family must

have lived near this house and no doubt he wanted to live under its

roof. A child is always wanting to try the experiment of living in some

house other than his own.

There was always laughter in the grocer’s house. In the evening songs

were being sung. One of the grocer’s daughters thumped on a piano and

the others danced. Also there was an abundance of food. Tar’s sharp

little nose could smell it being cooked and served. Did not a grocer

deal in foods? Why not an abundance of food in such a house? At night

he lay in bed in his own house dreaming he had become the son of the

grocer. The grocer was a strong-looking man with red cheeks and a white

beard and when he laughed the sides of his house seemed to shake. In

desperation Tar told himself that he did live in the house, that he was

the grocer’s son. What he dreamed became, in fancy at least, a fact.

It had happened that all of the grocer’s children were daughters. Why

not a trade that would make every one happy? Tar selected the grocer’s

daughter who was to come and live in his house while he went to her

house as a son. She was small and rather quiet. Perhaps she would not

protest so much as the others. She did not look like a protester.

What a glorious dream! As the only son of the grocer Tar would be given

the first choice of the food on the table, he would ride the grocer’s

horse, sing songs, dance, be treated as a kind of prince. Already he

had read or heard fairy tales in which such a prince as he wanted to

be lived in such a place. The grocer’s house was his castle. So much

laughter, so much song and food. What more could a boy want?

Tar was the third child of a family of seven, five of whom were boys.

From the beginning the family of Dick Moorehead, the ex-soldier, was on

the march and no two were born in the same house.

And what does not the house mean to the child? There should be a garden

with flowers, vegetables and trees. Also there should be a barn with

horses standing in stalls and back of the barn a vacant lot in which

tall rank weeds grow. For older children in the house it is all very

well, no doubt, to have an automobile but for the small child nothing

will take the place of an old gentle black or gray horse. If the later

and grown Tar Moorehead were to be born again surely he would have

selected as parent a grocer with a fat jolly wife and he would not have

wanted him to own a delivery truck. He would have wanted him to make

his grocery deliveries with horses and in the morning Tar would have

wanted older boys to come to the house and drive them away.

Then Tar could run out of the house and touch each horse on the nose.

The boys would give him presents, apples or bananas, things they had

got at the store, and after that he would breakfast in state and go

through the empty barn to play in the tall weeds. The weeds would grow

high above his head and he could hide among them. There he could be a

robber, a man making his fearless way through dark forests--anything he

pleased.

Other houses than the ones in which Tar’s family lived during his early

childhood, houses often on the same street, had all of these things

while his house always seemed to sit on a small grassless lot. In the

barn back of the neighbor’s house there was a horse, often two horses

and a cow.

In the morning sounds from the neighboring houses and from the barns.

Some of the neighbors kept pigs and chickens that lived in pens in the

back yard and were fed from the table scraps.

In the mornings the pigs grunted, the cocks crowed, the hens made

soft clucking sounds, the horses neighed, the cows bawled. Calves

were born--strange fascinating creatures with long ungainly legs on

which they, at once and in a funny uncertain manner, began to walk,

following the mother cow about the barnyard.

In Tar’s mind later a dim memory of early mornings in bed, his older

brother and sister at a window. Already, in the Moorehead house of the

moment, another baby had been born, perhaps two babies since Tar’s

turn. Babies did not get up and walk about like calves and colts. They

lay on their backs in bed sleeping like puppies or kittens and then

they awoke to make dreadful noises.

Children, just coming into consciousness of life, as Tar was at that

time, do not fancy younger children about. Kittens are something and

puppies something else. They lie in a basket back of the kitchen

stove. It is nice to put the hand into the warm nest in which they lie

sleeping but other babies of one’s own family about the house are a

nuisance.

How much better a dog or a kitten. Cows and horses are for rich people

but a dog or a cat the Mooreheads might have had. How gladly would Tar

have traded a baby for a dog and as for a horse--it was well he was not

tempted. If the horse were gentle and would let him ride on its back or

if he could sit alone in a cart and hold the reins over a horse’s back,

as did an older neighbor boy in one of the towns in which he lived, he

might have traded off the whole Moorehead family.

In the Moorehead house they had a saying. “The baby has put your nose

out of joint.” What a terrible saying! The new baby cried and Tar’s

mother went to take it into her arms. There was some strange connection

between the mother and the baby that Tar, who had begun walking about

the floor, had already lost.

He was four, his older sister seven and the first-born son of the

household nine. Now, in some odd way that was not understandable, he

belonged to the world of his older brother and sister, to the world of

neighbor children, to the front and back yard into which other children

came to play with his brother and sister, to a tiny section of the

great world in which he would presently have to try to live, not really

to his mother at all. His mother was already a dark strange being, a

little far off. He might still cry and she would call to him and he

might run and put his head in her lap while she stroked his hair but

there was always that later child, the baby, far up there in her arms.

His nose was indeed out of joint. What would set it straight?

To cry and win favor that way was already a shameful trick in the eyes

of his older brother and sister.

Surely Tar did not want to remain always a baby. What did he want?

How huge the world. How strange and terrible it was. His older brother

and sister, out in the yard at play, were so impossibly old. If they

would only stand still, stop growing, stop getting older for two or

three years. They wouldn’t. Something told him that would not happen.

And now his tears had stopped, already he had forgotten what made him

cry as though he were still a babe. “Run now and play with the others,”

his mother said.

But how difficult the others! If they would only stand still until he

caught up.

* * * * *

A spring morning in the house on a street in a Mid-American town. The

Moorehead family changed towns as they did houses, slipping them on and

off as one slips on and off a nightdress. Between them and the others

in the town a kind of separateness. The ex-soldier, Dick Moorehead,

had never got himself settled after the war. Marriage had perhaps

upset him. Now was the time to become a solid citizen and he was not

made to be a solid citizen. Towns and the years slipped away together.

A procession of little houses in grassless lots that had no barns, a

procession of streets, of towns too. Tar’s mother was always busy.

There were so many children and they came so fast.

Dick Moorehead had not married a rich woman, as perhaps he might have

done. He married the daughter of an Italian working woman but she had

beauty. It was a strange kind of dark beauty to be found in the Ohio

town where he had met her after the war and it fascinated him. It

always fascinated Dick and his children.

Now, however, while children were coming so fast, no one had time to

breathe, to look out. Tenderness between people grows slowly.

* * * * *

A spring morning in a house on a street in a Mid-American town. Tar,

now a grown man and a writer, was staying at the house of a friend. His

friend’s life had been utterly unlike his own. The house was surrounded

by a low garden wall and Tar’s friend was born in it and had lived

in it all his life. He, like Tar, was a writer but what a difference

in the two lives. Tar’s friend has written many books--all histories

of men who lived in another age--books of men at war, great generals,

politicians, explorers.

All the man’s life had been lived in books, while Tar’s life had been

lived in the world of men.

Now the friend had a wife, a gentle soft-voiced woman Tar could hear

moving about in a room upstairs in the house.

Tar’s friend was in his workroom reading. He was always reading, while

Tar seldom read. His children played in the garden. There were two boys

and a girl and an old negro woman looked out for them.

Tar sat in a corner of the porch at the back of the house under

rosebushes thinking.

On the day before he and his friend had a talk. The friend spoke of

some of Tar’s books, raising his eyebrows. “I like you,” he said, “but

some of the people you write about! I never saw any of the people.

Where are they? Such thoughts, such terrible people.”

What Tar’s friend had said of his books others had said. He thought of

the years his friend had spent over books, of the life the man had

lived behind the garden wall while Tar had knocked about. Even then, as

a grown man, he had no house of his own. He was an American, had always

lived in America and America was vast, but not a square foot of it had

ever belonged to him. His father had never owned a square foot of it.

Gypsies, eh? Worthless kind of people in an age of prosperity. If you

want to be something in this world own lands, own goods.

When he had written books about people the books had often been

condemned, as they were condemned by his friend, because the people

in the books were of the common sort, because they often did mean

commonplace things.

“But I am myself a commonplace man,” Tar said to himself. “It is true

my father wanted to be a man of distinction and he was also a teller of

tales, but the tales he told would never hold water.”

“Dick Moorehead’s tales went well enough with the farmers and the farm

hands who used to come into his harness shops when he was a young man

but suppose he had been compelled to write them out for people--like

the man in whose house I am now visiting,” Tar thought.

And then his mind leaped back to his own childhood. “Surely childhood

is always distinguished,” he said to himself. “It is only when we grow

up that we become common and vulgar. Has there ever been such a thing

as a vulgar child? Could there be such a thing?”

As a grown man Tar thought much on the subject of childhood and houses.

He sat in one of the little rented rooms in which he as a man was

always living and his pen slipped over the paper. It was early spring

and he thought the room nice enough. There was a fire.

He had begun again, as he was always beginning, on the theme of houses,

places in which people live, into which they come at night and when it

is cold and stormy outside the house--houses with rooms in which people

sleep, in which children sleep and dream.

The later Tar was a little cracked on the subject. The room in which

he sat, he told himself, contained his body but it contained also his

thoughts. Thoughts were as important as bodies. How many people tried

to make their thoughts color the rooms in which they slept or ate, how

many tried to make the rooms a part of themselves. At night when Tar

was in bed and when there was a moon, shadows played on the walls and

his fancies also played. “Do not befoul the house in which the child

must live and remember that you are also a child, will always be a

child,” he whispered to himself.

In the East when a guest came to a house his feet were washed. “Before

I invite the reader into the house of my fancy I should see that the

floors are clean, that the doorsills have been washed.”

Houses were like people standing silently and at attention, along a

street.

“If you honor and respect me and come into my house, come softly. For

the moment think gentle thoughts, leave quarrels and the ugliness of

your life outside my house.”

* * * * *

There is the house and to the child the world outside the house. What

is the world like? What are people like? Older people, neighbor men and

women, men and women who walked along the sidewalk before the Moorehead

house when Tar was a small child went straight on about their affairs.

A woman named Mrs. Welliver was going toward that mysteriously

exciting place known as “uptown” with a market basket on her arm. Tar,

the child, had never been beyond the nearest corner.

A day came. What an event! A neighbor woman, who must have been rich as

she had two horses in the barn back of her house, had come to take Tar

and his sister--three years older--for a ride in a buggy. They were to

go into the country.

They were to go far out into a strange world, through Main Street. In

the early morning they were told and Tar’s older brother, who was not

to go, was angry, while Tar was made happy by his brother’s misfortune.

There were so many things the older brother already had. He wore pants

while Tar still wore skirts. There was something to be gained then by

being small and helpless. How Tar had wanted to come to the time of

pants. Willingly enough, he thought, would he have traded the trip into

the country for his brother’s additional five years and the pants but

why should the brother expect all of the good things of his life? The

older brother wanted to cry because he was not going but how many times

had Tar wanted to cry because of things the brothers had that Tar

could not have.

They set out and Tar was excited and happy. What a huge strange world.

The little Ohio town was to Tar’s eyes a vast city. Now they had come

into Main Street and there was an engine attached to a train, a great

terrifying thing. The horse half ran across the tracks in front of the

nose of the engine, a bell clanged. Tar had heard that sound before--at

night in the room where he slept--the clanging of an engine bell in the

distance, the scream of a whistle, the crashing rumble sound of a train

rushing through town, out in the darkness and silence, outside the

house, outside the windows and the wall of the room where he lay.

In what way was the sound different from the sounds that came from

horses, from cows, sheep, pigs and chickens? Warm friendly sounds,

the others. Tar himself cried, he screamed when he was angry. Cows,

horses and pigs also made sounds. The animal sound belonged to a world

of warmth, of nearness, while the other sound was strange, romantic

and terrible. When Tar heard the sound of the engine at night he crept

close to his sister and said nothing. If she awoke, if his older

brother awoke, they would laugh at him. “It’s only a train,” they

said, their voices filled with contempt. It had seemed to Tar that

something gigantic and terrible was about to crash through walls into

the room.

On the day of his first great voyage out into the world and when the

horse, a creature of flesh and blood like himself, frightened by the

breathing of the great iron horse, had carried the buggy rushing past,

he turned to stare. There was smoke issuing from the engine’s long

up-thrust nose and the dreadful metallic clang of a bell rang in his

ears. A man put his head out of the cab window and waved his hand. He

spoke to another man standing on the ground beside the engine.

The neighbor woman was pulling at the lines and striving to quiet the

excited horse that had infected Tar with its fright, and his sister,

filled with her three additional years of worldly knowledge and a

little contemptuous of him, put her arm about his shoulders.

And now the horse was trotting sedately along and they all turned to

look back. The engine had begun to move slowly, majestically pulling

its train of cars. How fortunate that it did not choose to follow along

the road they had taken. It had crossed the road and was going away,

past a row of small houses toward distant fields. Tar’s fright passed.

In the future and when he was awakened by the sound of a passing train

at night he would not be afraid. When his brother, two years younger,

grew a year or two older and became frightened at night he could speak

to him with contempt in his voice. “It’s only a train,” he could say,

scorning his younger brother’s childishness.

They drove on, over a hill and across a bridge. At the top of a hill

they stopped and Tar’s sister pointed to the train moving across a

valley below. Far off there in the distance, going away, the train

seemed beautiful and Tar clapped his hands with delight.

As it was to the child so it was to be to the man. Trains moving across

distant valleys, the rivers of automobiles that flowed through modern

city streets, squadrons of aeroplanes in the sky, all of the wonders of

the modern mechanical age, when seen from a distance, filled the later

Tar with wonder and awe but when he drew near to them he was afraid.

Power, hidden away, deep down in the belly of an engine, made him

tremble. Where did it come from? The words fire, water, oil were old

words signifying old things but the combining of these things within

iron walls from which, at the touch of a button or a lever, power

sprang, seemed the work of a devil--or a God. He did not pretend to

understand devils or gods. Men and women were difficult enough.

Was he an old man in a new world? Words and colors might be combined.

In the world his imagination could sometimes penetrate, blue did

something strange when combined with red. Words might be thrown

together and sentences made and the sentences had uncanny power. With

a sentence one might destroy a friendship, win a woman, make a war.

The later Tar walked unafraid among words but what happened within the

narrow walls of steel was never understandable to him.

But now he was still a child and was being driven out into the vast

world and was already a little frightened and homesick. His mother,

who was already too much separated from him by another child, was

nevertheless the rock on which he was trying to build the house of his

life. Now he was on shifting sands. The neighbor woman looked strange

and forbidding. She was occupied in driving the horse. The houses along

the road were far apart. There were wide open spaces, fields, great

red barns, orchards. What a world!

The woman who had taken Tar and his sister for the ride must have been

very rich. She had a house in town, with two horses in the barn, and

also owned a farm in the country where there were a house, two large

barns, and horses, sheep, cows and pigs without number. They turned

into a driveway with an apple orchard on one side and a cornfield on

the other and went into a farm yard. Home seemed to Tar thousands of

miles away. Would he know his mother when he returned? Could they ever

find their way back? His sister was laughing and clapping her hands. A

wobbly-legged calf was tied to a rope on the lawn before the house and

she pointed at it. “Look, Tar,” she cried, and he did look with serious

thoughtful eyes. Already he was beginning to realize something of the

utter frivolity of woman.

They were in a barn yard, facing a large red barn, and a woman came out

at the back door of the house and two men emerged from the barn. The

farm woman looked not unlike Tar’s mother. She was tall and her fingers

were long and roughened by toil like his mother’s fingers. Two children

clung to her skirt as she stood by the door.

There was talk. Women were always talking. What a little chatterbox his

sister already was. One of the men from the barn, no doubt the husband

of the farm woman and the father of the strange children, came forward

but had little to say. The people from town had got out of the buggy

and the man, after mumbling some few words, went away again to the barn

accompanied by one of the two children and while the women continued

talking he emerged from the barn door, a child, a boy like Tar but two

or three years older, astride a great farm horse the father was leading.

Tar was left with the women, his sister and the other farm child, also

a girl.

What a come-down for him! The two women having gone into the farm house

he was left with the two girls. In this new world it was as at home in

his own yard. At home his father was gone all day at his shop and his

older brother had little use for him. The older brother thought of him

as a babe but Tar was no longer a babe. Was there not another child in

his mother’s arms? His sister took care of him. Women run everything.

“You take him and the little girl to play with you,” the farm woman

said to her daughter, pointing to Tar. The woman touched his hair with

her fingers and smiled. How far everything seemed. At the door one of

the women stopped to give other instructions. “Remember he is only a

babe. Do not let him get hurt.” What an idea!

The boy of the farm sat astride the farm horse and a second man, no

doubt a hired man, came out at the barn door leading another horse but

did not offer to take Tar aboard. The men and the farm boy went off

along a lane beside the barn and toward distant fields, the boy on the

horse turning to look back, not however at Tar but at the two girls.

The girls with whom Tar had been left looked at each other and laughed.

Then they led the way to the barn. Well, Tar’s sister was up to her

tricks. Did he not know her? She wanted to hold his hand, pretend she

was his mother, but he would not let her. It was a thing girls did.

They pretended they were taking care of you when they were only showing

off. Tar marched sturdily along wanting to cry because he had been

dropped suddenly in a strange place but not wanting to give his sister,

but three years older than himself, the satisfaction of showing off

before the strange girl by mothering him. If women would but do their

mothering in secret how much better it would be.

Tar was now so altogether alone in the midst of such vast strange

beautiful and at the same time terrifying surroundings. How warmly the

sun shone. Long, long afterward, oh, how many times afterward, he was

to dream over the scene, use it as a background for tales, use it all

his life as a background for some great dream he was always having of

some day owning his own farm, a place of great barns with unpainted

timber beams, grown steely gray with age, of the rich smell of hay and

animals, of sun-washed and snow-covered hills and fields and smoke

going up out of the chimney of a farmhouse into wintry skies.

These for Tar the dreams of another and much later time. The child

going toward the great yawning doors of the barn, his sister clinging

to his hand, the while she joined in a stream of talk she and the farm

girl were to keep up until they drove Tar half mad with loneliness, had

no such thoughts. In him there is no consciousness of barns and their

smell, of tall corn growing in fields, of wheat shocks standing like

sentinels on distant hills. There was just a little animal in short

skirts and with bare legs and feet, the son of a harness maker in an

Ohio village, who felt himself neglected and alone in the world.

The two girls went into the barn through wide swinging doors and Tar’s

sister pointed to a box near the door. It was a small box and an idea

had come to her. She would get rid of him for a time. Pointing to the

box and assuming, as nearly as she could, his mother’s tone when she

gave a command, the sister told him to sit down. “You stay right there

until I come back and don’t you dare go away,” she said, shaking her

finger at him. Huh! Indeed! what a little woman she thought herself!

She had black curls and wore shoes and Tar’s mother had let her wear

her Sunday dress while the farm girl and Tar were both barefooted. She

was being a grand lady now. If she only knew how much Tar resented her

tone. If he had been a bit older he might have told her, but had he

tried to speak just at that moment, tears would surely have come.

The two girls began climbing a ladder to a hay loft above, the farm

girl leading the way. Tar’s sister was afraid and trembled as she

climbed and would have liked being a town girl and timid but having

assumed the rôle of grown woman with the child had to play it out.

They disappeared through a dark hole above and for a time rolled and

tumbled about on the hay in the loft, laughing and screaming as girls

do at such times. Then silence settled down over the barn. Now the

girls had hidden themselves away in the loft and were no doubt talking

of women’s affairs. What do women talk of when they are alone together?

Tar always wanted to know. Grown women in the farm house talking, girls

in the loft talking. Occasionally he could hear them laughing. Why all

the laughing and talking?

Women were always coming to the door of the house in town to talk to

his mother. Left alone she might have remained always sensibly silent

but they would not let her alone. Women could not let each other alone

as men did. They are not so sensible and brave. If women and younger

babes had but stayed away from his mother Tar might have had more of

her for himself.

He sat on the box near the door of the barn. Was he glad to be alone?

One of those odd things happened that were always happening later

when he was grown. A particular scene, a country road climbing over a

hill, the yard of a railroad seen from a bridge in a city at night,

a grass-grown road leading into a wood, the garden of a deserted

tumble-down house--some scene that, outwardly at least, had no more

meaning than a thousand other scenes swept by his eye, perhaps on the

same day, printed itself with the most minutely worked out details on

the walls of his mind. The house of his mind had many rooms and each

room was a mood. On the walls pictures were hung. He had hung them

there. Why? Some inner sense of selection had perhaps been at work.

There was the open barn door making a frame for his picture. Back of

him, in the shed-like entrance to the barn, was, on the one side the

blank barn wall up which the ladder climbed to the loft above and up

which the girls had gone. On the wall were wooden pegs on which hung

work-harnesses, horse collars, a row of iron horseshoes and a saddle

and on the opposite wall were openings through which horses, standing

in their stalls, could thrust their heads.

A rat came from some unknown place and ran quickly across the earthen

floor to disappear under a farm wagon at the back of the shed and an

old gray horse, her head thrust through one of the openings, looked at

Tar with sad impersonal eyes.

And so there he was, for the first time thrust out alone into the

world. How isolated he felt! His sister, in the face of all her

grown-up mother-manner, had renigged on her job. She had been told to

remember he was a babe and had not remembered.

Well, he was no longer a babe and was resolved he would not cry. He sat

stoically staring out through the open barn doors at the scene before

him.

What a strange scene. It was thus that later hero of Tar’s Robinson

Crusoe, must have felt when he found himself alone on his isle. What a

vast world this into which he had been thrust. So many trees, hills,

fields. Suppose he were to arise from his box and begin to walk. At one

corner of the frame opening through which he looked was a small section

of the white farm house into which the women had gone. Tar could not

hear their voices. Now he could not hear the voices of the two girls

in the loft. They had disappeared through a dark hole over his head.

Occasionally there was a buzzing whisper and then girlish laughter.

It was really giggling. Perhaps every one in the world had gone away

into some strange dark hole leaving him sitting there in the midst of

a vast empty space. Terror had begun to take hold of him. In the far

distance, as he looked out through the barn doors, were hills and as he

sat gazing a tiny black dot appeared in the sky. The dot grew slowly

larger and larger. What seemed to him a long time passed and the dot

grew into a great bird, a hawk wheeling and circling in the vast sky

over his head.

Tar sat staring at the hawk moving slowly, in great circles, up in the

sky. In the barn at his back the head of the old horse was withdrawn

and then appeared again. Now the horse had taken a mouthful of hay and

was eating. The rat, that had run into some dark hole under the wagon

at the back of the shed, came forth and began creeping toward him.

What shining little eyes! Tar was about to cry out but now the rat had

found what he wanted. An ear of corn lay on the barn floor and he began

gnawing at it. His sharp little teeth made a soft grinding sound.

Time passed slowly, oh, so slowly. What a trick Tar’s sister has played

on him. Why were she and the farm girl, named Elsa, so silent now? Had

they gone away? In another part of the barn, somewhere in the darkness

back of the horse, something began to stir about making a rustling

sound in the straw on the barn floor. The old barn was full of rats.

Tar got off his box and went softly out through the barn doors into the

warm sunlight and toward the house. In a meadow near the house some

sheep were pastured and one of them raised its head to look at him.

Now all of the sheep were looking, were staring. In an orchard beyond

the barns and the house there was a red cow that also raised her head

to stare. What strange impersonal eyes.

Tar hurried across the farm yard and to the door through which the

two women had gone but it was closed. Inside the house also there was

silence. He had been left alone for perhaps five minutes. It seemed to

him hours.

He pounded at the back door with his fists but there was no answer. The

women had only gone upstairs in the house but it seemed to him they

must have gone far away--that his sister and the farm girl had gone far

away.

Everything had gone far away. Looking up into the sky he could see the

hawk circling now far above. The circles grew larger and larger and

then suddenly the hawk flew straight away into the blue. When Tar had

seen him first he was a tiny dot, no larger than a fly, and now he was

becoming like that again. As he looked the black dot grew smaller and

smaller. It wavered and danced before his eyes and then disappeared.

He was alone in the farmyard. Now the sheep and the cow were no longer

looking at him but were eating grass. He went to the fence and stood

looking at the sheep. How contented and happy they seemed. The grass

they ate must be delicious to the taste. For each sheep plenty of other

sheep, for the cow the warm barn at night and the company of other

cows. The two women in the house had each other, his sister Margaret

had the farm girl Elsa, the boy of the farm had his father, a hired

man, the work horses and the dog he had seen trotting at the horses’

heels.

Only Tar was alone in the world. Why was he not born a sheep to be with

other sheep and eat grass? Now he was not afraid, only lonely and sad.

He went slowly across the barn yard and along the green lane the men,

the boys and the horses had followed. He cried a little, softly, as he

went. The grass in the lane was soft and cool under his bare feet and

in the distance he could see blue hills and beyond the hills a blue

cloudless sky.

The lane which seemed so long to him that day was very short. There was

a small woodlot through which it passed to the fields beyond--fields

lying in a long flat valley through which a creek ran--and in the woods

the trees threw blue shadows on the grass-covered roadway.

How cool and quiet in the woods. A passion Tar had in him all his life

may have begun on that day. In the woods he stopped and for what seemed

to him a long time sat on the ground beneath a tree. Ants were running

here and there and then disappearing into holes in the ground, birds

flew about in the branches of the trees and two spiders, who at his

approach had hidden themselves away, came out again and worked at the

business of spinning webs.

If Tar had been crying when he came into the woods he had stopped now.

His mother was very, very far away. He might never find her again but

if he did not it was her own fault. She had put him out of her arms

to take up another and younger member of the family. The neighbor

woman, who was she? She had shoved him off on his sister who had, after

issuing an absurd command about sitting on a box, promptly forgotten

him. There was the world of boys but at the moment boys meant his

older brother John, who more than once had shown his scorn of Tar’s

society, and such people as the farm boy who had ridden away on a horse

without bothering to speak to him or even to give him a parting look.

“Very well,” Tar thought, filled with bitter resentment, “if I am shut

out from one world there is another.”

The ants at his feet were happy enough. What a fascinating world that

in which they lived. The ants were darting up into the light out of

a hole in the ground and were building a little mountain of grains

of sand. Other ants went on voyages out into the world and returned

bearing burdens. An ant was dragging a dead fly along the ground. There

was a stick in his way and now the wings of the fly had caught against

the stick and he could not move it. He ran crazily about, pulling now

at the stick, now at the fly. A bird flew down off a nearby tree and

lighting on a fallen log looked at Tar and far off in the woods through

an opening between trees, a squirrel came down the trunk of a tree and

began running on the ground.

The bird was looking at Tar, the squirrel stopped running and sat up

straight to look and the ant that could not move the fly made frantic

signs with his tiny hair-like feelers.

Had Tar been received into the world of nature? Vast plans had begun

to form in his head. He had noticed that the sheep in the field by

the farm house ate grass eagerly. Why should he not eat grass? Ants

lived warm and snug in a hole in the ground. There were many ants, all

apparently of one age and size in one family and, after Tar had found

his own hole and had eaten much grass so that he had become big like a

sheep--or even like a horse or cow--he would find others of his kind.

There was, he had no doubt, a language of sheep, of squirrels, of ants.

Now the squirrel had begun to chatter and the bird on the log called

and was answered by another bird away somewhere in the woods.

The bird flew away. The squirrel disappeared. They had gone to join

their comrades. Tar alone had no comrades.

Leaning over he lifted the stick so that his tiny brother the ant could

go on about his affairs and then, getting down on all fours, he put his

ear near the ant hill to see if he could hear the talk.

He could hear nothing. Well, he was too large. Far away from others of

his own kind he seemed to himself big and strong. Along the lane he

went, walking now on all fours like a sheep, and got to the log where

but a moment before the bird had been sitting.

The log was hollow at one end and it was obvious that with a little

effort he could crawl into it. He would have a place into which to go

at night. Of a sudden it seemed to him that he had got into a world in

which he could move freely about, in which he could live freely and

happily.

He decided it was time for him to go and eat grass. Walking along the

roadway through the wood he came to a lane that led down into a valley.

In a distant field the two men, driving the two horses, each hitched to

a cultivator, were plowing corn. The corn came up to the horses’ knees.

The farm boy was riding one of the horses. At the heels of the other

horse the farm dog trotted. From the distance, it seemed to Tar that

the horses looked no larger than the sheep he had seen in the field by

the house.

He stood by a fence looking at the men and horses in the field and at

the boy on the horse. Well, the farm boy was grown up--he moved in a

world of men while Tar was left to the women. But he had renounced the

woman’s world, he would go at once into a warm comfortable world--the

world of animal life.

Getting down on all fours again he began crawling on the soft grass

that grew near the fence beside the lane. White clover grew among the

grass and first of all he bit off one of the clover blossoms. It did

not taste badly and he ate another and another. How many would he have

to eat, how much grass would he have to consume before he grew big like

a horse or even like a sheep. He kept crawling about, biting at the

grass, but the edges of the grass blades were sharp and hurt his lips.

When he had chewed a mouthful of the grass it was strange and bitter to

the taste.

He persisted but something within kept warning him that what he was

doing was ridiculous and that if his sister or his brother John knew he

would be laughed at and so from time to time he arose and looked back

along the road through the woods to be sure no one was coming. Then

getting again to his hands and knees he crawled over the grass. As it

was difficult to tear the grass with his teeth he used his hands. The

grass had to be chewed until it was soft before it could be swallowed

and how nasty it tasted.

How hard to grow up! Tar’s dream of growing suddenly big by eating

grass was fading and he closed his eyes. With his eyes closed he could

do a trick he sometimes did in his bed at night. He could in fancy

recreate his own body, make his legs and arms long, his shoulders

broad. With his eyes closed he could be anything he pleased, be a horse

trotting through the streets, a tall man walking in a road. He could be

a bear in the dense forest, a prince living in a castle with slaves to

bring his food, could be the son of a grocer and rule over a household

of women.

He sat on the grass with his eyes closed, pulling grass and trying to

eat it. The green juice of the grass had discolored his lips and chin.

Now surely he had begun growing larger. Already he had eaten two,

three, half a dozen mouthfuls of the grass. After two or three more he

would open his eyes and see what he had accomplished. Perhaps he would

already have the legs of a horse. The thought frightened him a little

but he put out his hand and tearing loose more of the grass put it in

his mouth.

Something dreadful happened. Jumping quickly to his feet Tar ran two

or three steps and then sat quickly down. In reaching for the last

handful of grass he had captured a bee, sucking honey out of one of the

clover blossoms, and had carried it to his lips. The bee stung him on

the lip and then a convulsive moment of his hand had half crushed the

insect and it had been thrown aside. He could see it lying on the grass

struggling to arise and fly away. Its broken wings beat the air madly

and it made a loud buzzing sound.

The most terrible pain had come to Tar. He put his hand to his lip and

rolling over on his back closed his eyes and screamed. As the pain grew

in intensity his screams grew louder and louder.

Why had he come away from his mother? The sky into which he now looked,

when he dared open his eyes, was empty and he had wandered away from

all things human into an empty world. The world of crawling and flying

things, the world of animals that went on all fours, he had thought

so warm and safe, had now become dark and threatening. The little

struggling winged beast on the grass nearby was but one of a vast army

of winged things surrounding him on all sides. He wanted to get to

his feet and run back through the wood and toward the women in the

farmhouse but did not dare move.

There was nothing to do but this humiliating business of screaming

and so, lying on his back in the lane and keeping his eyes closed,

Tar continued screaming for what seemed to him hours. Now his lip

was burning and was becoming large. He could feel it throbbing and

pulsating with growth under his fingers. Growth then was a thing of

terror and pain. What a fearful world, this into which he had been born.

Tar did not want to grow big like a horse or a man. He wanted some one

to come. The world of growth was too empty and lonely. Now his screams

were broken by sobs. Would no one ever come?

There was the sound of running feet in the lane. Two men, accompanied

by the dog and the boy, had come from the field, the women had come

from the house and the girls from the barn. All were running and

calling to Tar but he did not dare look. When the farm woman reached

him and had taken him into her arms he still kept his eyes closed and

presently stopped screaming although his sobs came harder than ever.

There was a hurried consultation, many voices talking at once and then

one of the men stepped forward and lifting his head from the woman’s

shoulder forced Tar’s hand away from his face.

“Why, look,” he said, “the little rabbit has been eating grass and has

been stung by a bee.”

The farmer laughed, the hired man and the farm boy laughed and Tar’s

sister and the farm girl shrieked with delight.

Tar kept his eyes closed and it seemed to him that the sobs that now

shook his body went deeper and deeper. There was a place, far down

inside, where the sobs started and it hurt more than his swollen lip.

If the grass he had so painfully swallowed were now making something

inside him grow and burn as his lip had grown, how terrible that would

be.

He buried his face on the farm woman’s shoulder and refused to look at

the world. The farm boy had found the injured bee and was showing it to

the girls. “He tried to eat it. He was eating grass,” he whispered and

the girls shrieked again.

These terrible women!

Now his sister would go back to town and tell John. She would tell

neighbor children who came to play in the Moorehead yard. The place

inside Tar was hurting harder than ever.

* * * * *

The little party went along the lane through the woods and to the

house. The great voyage alone that was to have utterly separated Tar

from mankind, from the world that had no understanding, was retraced in

but a few minutes. The two farm men and the boy had gone back to the

field and the horse that had brought Tar out from town was hitched to

the buggy and was standing tied to a post at the side of the house.

Tar would have his face washed and would be put into the buggy and

taken back to town. The farm men and the boy he would not have to see

again. The farm woman who had him in her arms had made his sister and

the farm girl stop laughing but would his sister stop when she had got

back to town and to his brother?

Alas, she was a woman and Tar had no faith. If women could only be more

like men. The farm woman had taken him into the house, had washed the

grass stains from his face and had applied a soothing lotion to his

swollen lip but the thing inside kept on swelling and swelling.

In fancy he could hear his sister, his brother and the neighbor

children whispering and giggling in the yard at home. Shut out from his

mother by the presence of the younger babe in her arms and from the

yard by malicious voices saying over and over, “The little rabbit tried

to eat grass; he was stung by a bee,” where could he turn?

Tar did not know and could not think. He kept his face buried in the

farm woman’s bosom and continued sobbing broken-heartedly.

Growing up, in any way he could conceive of at the moment, seemed a

terrible if not impossible task. For the moment he was glad enough to

be a babe in the arms of the strange woman and in a place where there

was no other babe waiting to push him aside.

CHAPTER III

Men live in one world, women in another. People kept coming to the

kitchen door to talk to Mary Moorehead when Tar was a small child.

There was an old carpenter whose back had been hurt by a fall from a

building and who was sometimes drunk. He did not enter the house but

sat on the steps by the kitchen door and talked with the woman while

she worked at her ironing board. A doctor also came. He was a tall thin

man with strange looking hands. The hands were like old grape vines

that cling to the trunks of trees. People’s hands, rooms in houses,

the faces of fields were things the child did not forget. The old

carpenter had short stumpy-looking fingers. The nails were black and

broken. The fingers on the doctor were like his mother’s, rather long.

Afterward Tar used the doctor in several of his printed tales. When the

boy grew up he did not remember exactly how the old doctor looked but

his imagination had by that time invented a figure to take his place.

What he got from the doctor, the old carpenter and from several of the

women visitors was a sense of gentleness. They were all people defeated

by life. Something had gone wrong with them as something had gone wrong

with Tar’s mother.

Could it have been her marriage? He did not ask himself that question

until long afterward. When he grew to be a man Tar found in an old

trunk a diary kept by his father during his time in the war and

immediately afterward. The notes were short. For several days there

would be nothing written and then the soldier had written page after

page. He also had an inclination to be a scribbler.

All during the war there was something eating at the soldier’s

conscience. Knowing his brothers would be enlisted on the Southern side

he was beset by the notion that some day he might meet one of them in

battle. Then, if nothing worse happened, he would be found out. How

could he explain, “Well, the women were cheering, the flags flying, the

bands playing.” When he fired a shot in a battle the bullet, flying

across the space between the Northern and Southern men, might lodge

in the breast of a brother or even in his father’s breast. Perhaps

his father had also enlisted, on the Southern side. He had himself

gone into the war without convictions, almost casually, because the

men about him were going, for the sake of a captain’s uniform and a

sword to hang at his side. If a man thought much about any war he

wouldn’t go in--of course. As for the niggers--their being free men or

slaves--he had still the Southern attitude. If walking in the street

with Dick Moorehead you had seen a negro woman who was in her own way

beautiful, who walked with an easy care-free carriage, whose skin was

in color a lovely golden brown, and had mentioned the fact of her

beauty, Dick Moorehead would have looked at you with amazement in his

eyes. “Beautiful! I say! My dear fellow! She is a nigger.” Looking at

negroes Dick saw nothing. If a negro served his purpose, if he was

amusing--very well. “I am a white man and a Southerner.” “I belong to

the ruling race. We had an old black at home. You should have heard

him play the pipes. Niggers are what they are. Only we Southerners

understand them.”

The book kept by the soldier, during the war and later, was full of

notes concerning women. Sometimes Dick Moorehead was a religious man,

going regularly to church, and sometimes he was not. In one town,

where he had lived immediately after the war, he was superintendent of

a Sunday School and at another place taught the Bible class.

When he had become a grown man Tar looked at the book, filled with

delight. He had quite forgotten his father was so naïve, so charmingly

human and understandable. “I was at the Baptist Church and succeeded in

taking Gertrude home. We went the long way by the bridge and stopped

almost an hour. I tried to kiss her and at first she would not let me

but later she did. Now I am in love with her.” “On Wednesday evening

Mable went past the shop. I closed up at once and followed her to the

end of Main Street. Harry Thompson was after her and had got his boss

to let him off, on some trumped up excuse. We were both sailing down

the street but I got there first. I went home with her but her father

and mother were still awake. They sat up until I had to go so I gained

nothing. Her father is a fearful talker. He has got a new driving horse

and talked and bragged about the horse all evening. For me the evening

was a failure.”

Note after note of that sort in the diary kept by the young soldier

after he had got home from the war and when he had begun his restless

march from town to town. At last he had found, in one of the towns,

the woman Mary and had married her. Life took on for him a new flavor.

Having a wife and children he now sought the company of men.

In some of the towns into which Dick went after the war life went well

enough but in others he was unhappy. For one thing, and although he

had gone into the war on the Northern side, he would not forget the

fact that he was a Southerner and therefore a Democrat. In one of the

towns there was a half insane man the small boys used to tease. There

he was, Dick Moorehead, the young merchant, the ex-officer in the army

who, whatever his inner feeling may have been, had nevertheless fought

for the preservation of the Union, who had helped hold together these

United States, and there on the same street was that crazy man. The

crazy man walked with his mouth hanging open and with a queer vacant

look in his eyes. Winter or summer he wore no coat but went about in

his shirt sleeves. He lived with a sister in a little house at the edge

of the town and when let alone was harmless enough but when small boys,

concealed behind trees or in the doorways of stores, shouted, calling

him a “Democrat,” he became furiously angry. Running into the roadway

he picked up stones and threw them recklessly. Once he broke a window

in a storefront and his sister had to pay for it.

Was it not an insult to Dick? A Democrat indeed! When he wrote about it

in his notebook his hand trembled. Being the only real Democrat in the

town the cries of the small boys made him want to run and beat them.

He kept his dignity, did not betray himself but as soon as he could he

sold his shop and moved on.

Well, the crazy man in his shirt sleeves was not really a Democrat, he

wasn’t like Dick, a born Southerner. The word, picked up by the boys

and repeated over and over, merely touched off his half-hidden insanity

but for Dick the effect was something special. It made him feel that,

although he had fought in a long and bitter war, he had fought in vain.

“Such people,” he muttered to himself as he hurried away. When he had

sold his shop he had to buy, in the next town, a somewhat smaller one.

After the end of the war and his marriage Dick was constantly sliding

down the financial hill.

* * * * *

For the child the man of the home, the father, is one thing and the

mother quite another. The mother is something warm and safe toward

which the child may go, while the father is the one who goes out into

the world. Now the house in which Tar lived was something he began to

understand a little. Even though you live in many houses in many towns

a house is a house. There are walls and rooms. You go through doors

into a yard. There is a street with other houses and other children.

You can see a long way along the street. On Saturday evenings sometimes

a neighbor woman, who had been engaged for the purpose, came to care

for the other children and Tar was permitted to go uptown with his

mother.

Now Tar was five and his older brother John was ten. There was Robert,

now three, and a new babe, always lying in a crib. Although the babe

could do nothing but cry it already had a name. It was called Will and,

when she was at home, was always in the mother’s arms. What a little

pest! And to have a name too, a boy’s name! There was another Will in

the street, a tall freckle-faced boy who sometimes came to the house

to play with John. He called John “Jack” and John called him “Bill.”

He could throw a ball like a shot. There was a trapeze John had hung

from a tree and the boy named Will could hang by his toes. He went to

school, as John and Margaret did, and had been in a fight with a boy

two years older than himself. Tar had heard John speak of it. When John

was not about he himself spoke of it to Robert, pretending he had seen

the fight. Well, Bill had punched the boy, had knocked him down. He had

given the boy a bloody nose. “You should have seen it.”

It was something right and proper that such a one should be named Will

and be called Bill but a babe in a crib, a little thing always in its

mother’s arms--! What nonsense!

On Saturday nights, sometimes, Tar was permitted to go with his mother

down into town. They could not start until the lights were lit. First

of all the dishes had to be washed, Margaret helping, and then the baby

had to be put to sleep.

What a fuss he made, the little wretch. Now, when he might so well have

ingratiated himself with his brother by being reasonable, he cried and

cried. First Margaret had to hold him and then Tar’s mother had to take

her turn. It was fun for Margaret. She could pretend she was a woman

and girls liked that. When there were no babies around they made them

out of rags. They talked and scolded and cooed and held the things in

their arms. Tar was already dressed and so was his mother. The best

part of going to town was the feeling of being alone with her. Nowadays

that so seldom happened. The baby was spoiling everything. Pretty soon

it would be too late to go, the stores would be closed. Tar moved

restlessly about the front yard wanting to cry. If he did he would have

to stay at home. He had to appear at ease, say nothing.

The neighbor woman came and the baby went to sleep. Now his mother had

stopped to talk to the woman. They talked and talked. Tar had hold of

his mother’s hand and kept pulling but she paid no attention. At last,

however, they got into the street and into darkness.

Tar walked along holding his mother’s hand and took ten steps, twenty,

a hundred. He and his mother had got through the gate and were walking

on a sidewalk. They passed the Musgrave house, the Wellivers’ place.

When they had got to the Rogers’ house and had turned a corner they

would be safe. Then, if the baby cried, Tar’s mother could not hear.

He began to feel at ease. What a time for him. Now he was going out

into the world, not with his sister--who had her own ways and thought

too much of herself and her own desires--or with a neighbor woman in

a buggy, a woman who could understand nothing, but with his mother.

Mary Moorehead had put on her black Sunday dress. That was fine. When

she wore the black dress she wore also a bit of white lace about the

neck and other bits about the wrists. The black dress made her look

young and slender. The lace was fine and white. It was like cobweb. Tar

wanted to touch it with his fingers but did not dare. He might tear it.

They walked past one street lamp and then another. Electric lights had

not yet come and the streets of the Ohio town were lighted by kerosene

lamps set on posts. They were far apart, at the street corners mostly,

and between the lamps was darkness.

What fun to walk in darkness feeling safe. Going anywhere with his

mother was to Tar like being at home and at the same time abroad.

When he and his mother had got out of their own street the adventure

began. The Mooreheads lived nowadays always in small houses in streets

far out at the edges of towns but when they went to Main Street they

went through streets lined with tall houses. The houses were set far

back in lawns and great trees were growing along the sidewalks. There

was a large white house with women and children sitting on a wide front

porch and as Tar and his mother passed a carriage with a negro driver

came out at a driveway. The woman and child had to stand aside to let

it pass.

What a princely place. The white house had at least ten rooms and

lamps of its own hanging from the ceiling on the front porch. There

was a girl of about Margaret’s age dressed all in white. The carriage

Tar saw the negro driving, could go right into the house. There was a

porte-cochère. His mother told him. What splendor!

The Mooreheads were poor and were getting every year poorer but that

Tar did not know. He did not ask himself why his mother he thought so

beautiful had but one good dress and walked while another woman rode

in a carriage, why the Mooreheads lived in a small house through the

cracks of which the snow sifted during the winter, while others were in

warm brightly-lighted houses.

The world was the world and he was seeing it, his mother’s hand in his.

They passed other street lamps, went through other dark places and now

they had turned a corner and there was Main Street.

Now life had indeed begun. How many lights, how many people! To the

town droves of country people had come for the Saturday night and the

street was filled with horses, wagons and buggies.

Young fellows with red faces, who all week had been at work in

cornfields, had come into town dressed in their best clothes and

wearing white collars. Some of them rode alone while others, more

fortunate, had girls with them. They hitched their horses to posts

along the street and walked on the sidewalk. Grown men went clattering

through the street on horseback and women stood talking at the doors of

stores.

The Mooreheads were living for the moment in quite a large town. It was

a county-seat and there was a square and a courthouse past which the

main street ran. Well, there were stores on the side streets, too.

A patent medicine seller had come to town and had set up his stand at a

corner. He bawled in a loud voice, inviting people to stop and hear him

and for a few minutes Mary Moorehead and Tar stood at the edge of the

crowd. There was a sputtering torchlight at the end of a pole and two

negro men who sang the songs. Tar remembered one of the verses. What

did it mean?

“The white man he lives in a big brick house,

The yallow man wants to do the same,

The old black man lives in the county jail,

But he’s got a brick house just the same.”

When the black men sang the verses the crowd whooped with delight and

Tar also laughed. Well, he laughed because he was so excited. His eyes

shone with excitement. When he grew to be a man he would spend all his

time in the midst of crowds. He and his mother moved off along the

street, the child clinging to the woman’s hand. He did not dare wink

for fear of missing something. Again the Moorehead house seemed miles

away, in another world. Now even the baby could not come between him

and his mother. The little wretch might cry but he need not care.

John Moorehead, his brother, was almost grown. On Saturday evenings he

sold newspapers on Main Street. He sold a paper called the “Cincinnati

Enquirer” and another called the “Chicago Blade.” The “Blade” had

brightly colored pictures and sold for five cents.

There was a man leaning over a pile of money on a table and another

fierce-looking man was creeping upon him with an open knife in his hand.

A wild-looking woman was about to throw a babe off a bridge to the

rocks below but a boy rushed forward and saved the babe.

Now a train rushed around a curve in the mountains and four men on

horseback and with guns in their hands were waiting. They had piled

rocks and trees on the tracks.

Well, they intended to force the train to stop and then rob it. It was

Jesse James and his band. Tar had heard his brother John explain the

pictures to the boy Bill. Later when no one was about he had looked

long and long. Looking at the pictures made him dream bad dreams at

night but during the day they were wonderfully exciting.

It was fun, during the daytime, to imagine yourself a part of the

adventures that went on in life, in the world of men. The people who

bought John’s papers sure got a lot for five cents. Why, you could take

such a scene and change it all about.

What you did was to sit on the porch of your house and close your

eyes. John and Margaret had gone to school, the baby and Robert were

both asleep. The baby slept well enough when Tar did not want to go

somewhere with his mother.

You sat on the porch of the house and closed your eyes. Your mother was

ironing. Damp clean clothes being ironed made a nice smell. That old

crippled carpenter, who could not work any more, who had been a soldier

and drew what was called a pension, was on the back porch of the house

talking. He was telling Tar’s mother of buildings on which he had

worked when he was young.

He told of how log cabins were built in the forest when the country was

new and of how men went out to shoot wild turkey and deer.

It was fun enough to hear the old carpenter talk but more fun to make

up your own talk, build your own world.

The colored pictures in the papers John sold on Saturdays had become

indeed alive. In fancy Tar had grown to be a man, and what a brave one.

He took part in all of the desperate scenes, changed them about, thrust

himself into the very midst of the swirl and hurly-burly of life.

A world of grown people moving about and Tar Moorehead among them.

Somewhere in the crowd on the street John was now running about selling

his papers. He pushed them under people’s noses, showed the colored

pictures. Like a grown man John went into saloons, into the stores,

into the courthouse.

Soon now, Tar himself would be grown. It could not possibly take very

long. How long, though, the days sometimes seemed.

With his mother he threaded his way through the crowd. Men and women

spoke to his mother. A tall man did not see Tar and knocked against

him. Then another very tall man with a pipe in his mouth gave him a

regular bang.

The man wasn’t so nice. He apologized and gave Tar a nickel but that

did not do any good. It was the way he did it that hurt more than the

bang. Some men think a child is only a child.

And now they had got off Main Street and into the one where Dick had

his shop. There were plenty of people on Saturday nights. Across the

street was a two-storied building in which a dance was being held.

It was a square dance and a man’s voice was calling off. “Do-se-do.

Gentlemen all lead to the right. Balance all.” The whining voices of

fiddles, laughter, many voices talking.

Dick Moorehead was as yet able to put on some style. He had still the

watch with the heavy silver chain and for the Saturday evening’s rush

had been shaved and had waxed his mustache. A silent old man, much like

the carpenter who came to visit Tar’s mother, was employed in the shop

and was there now at work, seated on his wooden horse. He was sewing a

strap.

It seemed to Tar that the life led by his father was something

magnificent. When the woman and the child came into the shop Dick ran

at once to a drawer and taking out a handful of money offered it to his

wife. It may have been all the money he had but that Tar did not know.

Money was something with which you bought things. You had it or you did

not have it.

As for Tar he had money of his own. He had the nickel the man on the

street had given him. When the man had banged him and had given him the

nickel his mother had asked sharply, “Well, Edgar, what do you say?”

and he had replied by looking at the man and saying rudely, “Give me

some more.” It had made the man laugh but Tar had not seen the sense

of his laughing. The man had been rude and he had been rude too. His

mother was hurt. It was very easy to hurt his mother.

In the shop Tar was seated on a chair at the back and his mother was on

another chair. She had taken but a few of the coins offered by Dick.

Again there was talk. Grown people are always indulging in talk. A

half dozen farmers were in the shop and when Dick had offered the

money to his wife he did it with a flourish. Dick did everything with

a flourish. That was his nature. He said something about the cost of

women and children. He was being rude like the man on the street but

Dick’s being rude never mattered. He did not mean what he said.

Anyway Dick was a man of affairs.

How he bustled about. Men kept coming into the shop bringing harnesses

and throwing them down with a bang on the floor. The men talked and

Dick talked. He talked more than all the others. At the back of the

shop there was only Tar, his mother and the old man on the horse sewing

the strap. The man was like the carpenter and the doctor who came to

the house when Tar was at home. He was small and shy and spoke timidly,

asking Mary Moorehead about the other children and the baby. Presently

he got off the bench and coming to Tar gave him another nickel. How

rich Tar was getting. This time he did not wait for his mother to ask

but said at once what he knew he should say.

* * * * *

Tar’s mother had gone away and left him in the shop. Men came and went.

They talked. With some of the men Dick went out into the street. A

business man who has taken an order for a new harness is expected to

set-em-up. Each time when he came back from such a trip Dick’s eyes

shone more brightly and the mustache stood out straighter. He came and

stroked Tar’s hair.

“He’s a bright one,” he said. Well, Dick was bragging again.

It was better when he talked to the others. He told jokes and the men

laughed. When the men were doubled up with laughter, Tar and the old

harness maker on the horse looked at each other and also laughed. It

was as though the old man had said, “We’re out of it, my boy. You are

too young and I am too old.” As a matter of fact the old man said

nothing. It was all imagined. All the best things for a boy are always

imagined. You sit in a chair at the back of your father’s shop on a

Saturday night, while your mother goes to the stores, and such thoughts

you have. There is the sound of the fiddle in the dance hall outside in

the street and the nice sound of men’s voices far away. At the front

of the shop there is a hanging lamp and harnesses are hanging on the

walls. All is neat and in order. Harnesses have silver buckles, they

have buckles of brass. Solomon had a temple and in the temple were

shields of brass. There were vessels of silver and gold. Solomon was

the wisest man in the world.

In a harness shop on a Saturday evening the oil lamps hanging from

the ceiling sway a little. Everywhere bits of brass and silver. The

lamps, when they sway, make tiny lights appear and disappear. The

lights dance, men’s voices are heard, there is laughter, the sound of a

fiddle. In the street outside people are walking up and down.

CHAPTER IV

For the boy as for the man there is the world of fancy and the world of

facts. Sometimes the world of facts is very grim.

Solomon had vessels of silver, he had vessels of gold, but Tar

Moorehead’s father was not a Solomon. Within a year after the Saturday

evening when Tar sat in his father’s shop seeing the bright glitter of

the buckles in the swaying lights, the shop had been sold to pay Dick’s

debts and the Mooreheads were living in another town.

All summer Dick had been working as a house-painter but now cold

weather had come and he had got a job. He was now but a workman in a

harness shop and sat on the harness-maker’s horse sewing straps. The

silver watch and the watch chain were gone.

The Mooreheads lived in a mean little house and all through the fall

Tar had been ill. As the fall advanced there was a time of bitter cold

days and then there came a period of soft days.

Tar sat on the porch wrapped in a blanket. Now the corn in distant

fields was in shocks and the other crops had been hauled away. In

a small field near at hand where the corn crop had not been good a

farmer had gone into the field to pick the corn and then had turned

cows into the field to nibble at the stalks. In the woods the red and

yellow leaves were falling fast. With every gust of wind they flew like

brightly colored birds across the field of Tar’s vision. In the corn

field the cows making their way among the dry standing corn stalks made

a low crashing sound.

Dick Moorehead had names Tar had never heard before. One day when he

sat on the porch of the house a man with a board balanced across his

shoulder came along the road past the house and seeing Dick Moorehead

coming out at the front door stopped and spoke to him. He called Dick

Moorehead “Major.” “Hello, Major,” he shouted.

The man’s hat was tilted jauntily on the side of his head and he smoked

a pipe. After he and Dick had gone off along the road together Tar got

up out of his chair. It was one of the days when he felt quite strong.

The sun was shining.

Going around the house he found a board fallen out of a fence and tried

to carry it as had the man in the road, balancing it on his shoulder

as he walked up and down a path in the back yard, but it fell and an

end of it hit him on the side of the head, raising a large bump.

Tar went back to sit alone on the front porch. There was to be a new

baby in the house. He had heard his father and mother speak of it at

night. With three children in the house younger than himself it was

time he grew up.

His father was called Captain and Major. Tar’s mother sometimes called

her husband Richard. How grand to be a man and have so many names.

Tar had begun to wonder if he would ever be a man. How long to wait!

How annoying to be sick and not able to go to school.

Nowadays, immediately after he had bolted his food, Dick Moorehead

hurried away from the house. At night he did not come home until

all had gone to bed. In the new town he had joined a brass band and

belonged to several lodges. When he did not have to work in the shop

at night there was always a lodge to attend. Although his clothes had

grown shabby Dick wore two or three brightly colored badges in the

lapel of his coat and on special days gayly colored ribbons.

One Saturday evening when Dick came home from the shop something had

happened.

All the house felt it. It was dark in the street outside and the

evening meal had been waiting for a long time. When at last the

children of the house heard their father’s footsteps on the sidewalk

that led from the gate to the front door, all became silent.

How very strange. The footsteps came along the hard road outside and

then stopped before the house. Now the front gate had opened and Dick

was going around the house to the kitchen door where all the rest of

the Moorehead family were sitting and waiting. It was one of the days

when Tar felt strong and had come to the table. When the footsteps were

still in the road outside, his mother stood silently in the middle of

the room but as they moved about the house she hurried to the stove.

When Dick came to the kitchen door she did not look at him and all

through the evening meal, eaten in a strange new kind of silence, she

did not speak to her husband or to the children.

Dick had been drinking. Many times when he came home during that fall

he had been drinking but the children had never before seen him when

he was really off balance. When he had come along the road and the

path that led around the house, all of the children had recognized

his footsteps that were at the same time not his footsteps. There

was something wrong. All in the house felt it. Each step was taken

uncertainly. The man had, quite deliberately perhaps, surrendered

something of himself to some power outside himself. He had surrendered

control over his faculties, his mind, his fancy, his tongue, the

muscles of his own body. He was for the time quite helpless in the

hands of something his children could not understand. There was a kind

of assault upon the spirit of the house. At the kitchen door he lost

control over himself a little and had to catch himself quickly, his

hand on the door frame.

When he got into the room and had put aside his hat he went at once

to where Tar sat. “Well, well, how are you, little monkey?” he cried,

standing before Tar’s chair and laughing, a little foolishly. No doubt

he felt the eyes of all the others upon him, felt the frightened

silence of the room.

To pass it off he took Tar up in his arms and tried to go toward his

place at the head of the table, to sit at the table. He almost fell.

“How big you are getting,” he said to Tar. He did not look at his wife.

Being in his father’s arms was like being in the top of a tree pitched

and tossed by a wind. When Dick had managed to get his balance again

he got to the chair and sitting down put his cheek against Tar’s. For

several days he had not shaved and there was a half-grown beard that

hurt Tar’s face and his father’s long mustache was wet. His breath

smelled of something strange and pungent. The smell made Tar a little

ill but he did not cry. He was too frightened to cry.

The fright of the child, of all the children in the room, was something

special. The feeling of discouragement that had for months brooded

over the house had come to a head. Dick’s drunkenness was a kind of

assertion. “Well, life has proven to be too much of a job. I shall let

things go. There is a man in me and there is something else. I have

tried being a man but I cannot make it. Look at me. Now I have become

what I am. How do you like it?”

Watching his chance Tar crept out of his father’s arms and went

to sit near his mother. All of the children of the household had

instinctively edged their chairs along the floor so that the father

was left quite alone, with a wide open space on either side. Tar felt

feverishly strong. His brain was making strange pictures, one after the

other.

He kept thinking of trees. Now his father was like a tree in the middle

of a great open meadow, a tree tossed by a wind, a wind all the others,

standing at the edge of the meadow, could not feel.

The strange man who had suddenly come into the house was Tar’s father

and was at the same time not his father. The man’s hands kept making

uncertain movements. There were baked potatoes for supper and he tried

to begin serving the children by sticking a fork into a potato but

missed and the fork struck on the side of the dish. It made a sharp

metallic sound. He tried two or three times and then Mary Moorehead,

getting up from her place, walked around the table and took the dish

away. Having been served, all began eating in silence.

The silence was unbearable to Dick. There was a kind of accusation in

it. All of life, now that he was married and the father of children,

was a kind of accusation. “There is too much accusation. A man is what

he is. You are expected to grow up, be a man, but what if you are not

made that way?”

It was true Dick drank, that he did not save money, but other men were

that way. “There is a lawyer in this very town who gets drunk two or

three times every week but you look at him. He is successful. He makes

money and dresses well. With me everything is a muddle. To tell the

truth I made a mistake in being a soldier and going back on my father

and brothers. I have always been making mistakes. Being a man is not so

easy as it seems.

“I made a mistake when I married. I love my wife but I have been able

to do nothing for her. Now she shall see me as I am. My children shall

see me as I am. What do I care?”

Dick had worked himself into a state. He began to talk, addressing not

his children or his wife but the kitchen stove that stood in a corner

of the room. The children were eating in silence. All had grown white.

Tar turned to look at the stove. How odd, he thought, that a grown

man should be talking to a stove. It was a thing such as a child like

himself might have done when alone in a room but a man was a man. As

his father talked he saw in fancy and quite distinctly the faces of

people appearing and disappearing in the darkness back of the stove.

The faces, called into being by the voice of his father, emerged quite

distinctly out of the darkness back of the stove and then as rapidly

disappeared. They danced in the air, became large and then small.

Dick Moorehead talked as though making a speech. There were certain

men who, when he lived in another town and owned a harness shop, when

he was a man of business and not, as now, a mere workman, had not paid

for harnesses bought in his shop. “How can I get along if they do not

pay?” he asked aloud. Now he held a small baked potato balanced on the

end of a fork and began waving it about. Tar’s mother was looking at

her plate but his brother John, his sister Margaret and his younger

brother Robert were all looking at their father with staring eyes.

As for Tar’s mother, when something happened she did not approve she

went about the house with a strange lost look in her eyes. The eyes

frightened. They frightened Dick Moorehead as well as the children. All

became self-conscious, afraid. It was as though she had been struck

a blow and when you looked at her you felt at once that your hand had

delivered the blow.

The room in which the Mooreheads now sat was lighted only by a small

oil lamp on the table and by the glow from the stove. As it was already

late in the fall darkness had come. In the kitchen stove were many

cracks through which ashes and bits of burning coal sometimes fell. The

stove was bound together with wires. The Mooreheads were indeed very

hard up just at that time. They had reached the low stage in all the

memories Tar afterward kept of his childhood.

Dick Moorehead declared his position in life a terrible one. In the

house at the table he kept looking into the darkness back of the

kitchen stove and thinking of the men who owed him money. “Look at me,

I am in a certain position. Well, I have a wife and children. I have

these children to feed and men owe me money they do not pay. I am down

and out and they laugh at me. I want to do my part like a man but how

can I manage?”

The drunken man began calling out a long list of names of men who he

declared owed him money and Tar listened filled with wonder. It was an

odd circumstance that when he grew to be a man and became a writer of

tales Tar remembered many of the names called out by his father that

evening. Many of them were afterwards attached to characters in stories

of his.

His father called off names and condemned the men who had not paid for

harnesses bought when he was prosperous and owned a shop of his own but

Tar did not afterward connect the names with his father or with any

injustice done to his father.

Something had happened. Tar sat on a chair near his mother facing the

stove in the corner.

Light appeared and disappeared on the wall. As Dick talked he held the

small baked potato balanced on the end of a fork. The baked potato made

dancing shadows on the face of the wall.

The outline of faces began to appear. As Dick Moorehead talked a

movement began in the shadows.

One by one the names were called and then the faces appeared. Where had

Tar seen the faces before? They were the faces of men seen passing the

Moorehead house, faces seen traveling on trains, faces seen from the

seat of the buggy, that time Tar went into the country.

There was a man with a gold tooth and an old man with his hat pulled

down over his eyes and these were followed by others. The man who had

balanced the board on his shoulder and who had called Tar’s father

“the Major,” came out of the shadows to stand looking at Tar. The

illness from which Tar had been suffering and from which he had begun

to recover was now coming back. The cracks in the stove made dancing

lights on the floor.

The faces Tar saw emerging so suddenly out of darkness and then so

quickly disappearing again, he did not connect with his father. Each

face as it appeared had for him a life of its own.

His father kept talking in the thick angry voice and the faces kept

appearing and disappearing. The meal progressed but Tar did not eat.

The faces seen in the shadows did not frighten, they filled the child

with wonder.

He sat by the table looking occasionally at his angry father and from

him to the men who had so mysteriously come into the room. How glad he

was his mother was there. Did the others see what he saw?

The faces now dancing on the walls of the room were the faces of men.

Some time he would himself be a man. He watched and waited but as his

father talked did not connect the faces with the words of condemnation

that were coming from his lips.

Jim Gibson, Curtis Brown, Andrew Hartnett, Jacob Wills--men of an Ohio

countryside, who had bought harnesses of a small harness maker and then

had not paid. Names were themselves something to think about. Names

were like houses, they were like pictures people hang on the walls of

a room. When you see a picture you do not see what the man saw who

painted the picture. When you go into a house you do not feel what the

people feel who live in the house.

Names called out make a certain impression. Sounds also make pictures.

There are too many pictures. When you are a child and ill the pictures

crowd in upon each other too fast.

Now that he was ill Tar sat too much alone. On rainy days he sat by a

window inside the house and on fair days sat on a chair on the porch.

His illness had made him habitually silent. All during his illness

Tar’s older brother John and his sister Margaret had been kind. John,

who nowadays had much business going on, in the yard and in the road,

and who was often visited by other boys, came to bring him marbles and

Margaret came to sit with him and tell him happenings at school.

Tar sat staring about and saying nothing. How could he tell any one

what was going on inside. There was too much going on inside. With his

weak body he could do nothing but inside his body there was intense

activity.

Something peculiar there was, down inside, something constantly being

torn apart and then joined together again. Tar did not understand and

never did understand.

For one thing, everything kept going far away. There was a tree at the

side of the road before the Moorehead house that kept coming out of the

ground and floating away into the sky. Tar’s mother came to sit in the

room with him. She was always at work. When she was not bending over

the wash tub or over the ironing board, she was sewing. She also, the

chair in which she sat, even the walls of the room, seemed to float

away. Something inside Tar struggled constantly to bring everything

back and put everything in its place. If things would only stay in

their places how calm and nice life would be.

Tar knew nothing of death but was afraid. Things that should be small

became large, things that should remain large became small. Often Tar’s

own hands, white and small, seemed to leave his arms and float away.

They floated away over the tops of the trees seen through the window,

almost disappeared into the sky.

Not to have everything disappear was Tar’s problem. It was a problem

he could not explain to any one, and absorbed him completely. Often

the tree that had come out of the ground and had floated away became

merely a black dot in the sky but it was his problem not to lose sight

of it. If it happened that you lost sight of the tree you lost sight of

everything. Tar did not know why that was true but it was. Grimly he

held on.

If he held on the tree would come back, everything would come back.

Some day he would get all adjusted again.

If Tar held on things would at last be all right. Of that he was quite

sure.

The faces in the street before the houses in which the Mooreheads had

lived had sometimes floated across the fancy of the sick boy as now in

the kitchen of the Moorehead house the faces were floating on the wall

back of the stove.

Tar’s father kept calling new names and new faces kept coming. Tar had

grown very white.

The faces on the wall appeared and disappeared faster than ever. Tar’s

white small hands gripped the edges of his chair.

Had it become a test for him to follow with his fancy all of the faces,

must he keep track of them as he did of the trees when they seemed to

float into the sky?

The faces had become a whirling mass. His father’s voice seemed far

away.

Something slipped. Tar’s hands that had been gripping so tightly the

edges of his chair let go their hold and with a little sigh he slipped

from the chair to the floor, into the darkness.

CHAPTER V

In the tenement districts of American cities, among the poor in small

towns, strange things to be seen by a boy. Most of the houses in small

Middle-Western towns are without dignity. They are cheaply made, thrown

together. The walls are thin. Everything was done in a hurry. What goes

on in one room is known to the child who is ill in the next room. Well,

he knows nothing. What he feels is another matter. He cannot tell what

he feels.

At times Tar resented his father as he resented the fact of younger

children. While he was still weak with illness, that time after the

drunken episode, his mother was pregnant. He did not know the word, did

not know definitely that another child was coming. Still he did know.

Sometimes, on warm clear days, he sat in a rocking-chair on the

front porch. At night he lay on a cot in a room next to the father

and mother’s room, downstairs. John, Margaret and Robert were asleep

upstairs. The baby lay in the bed with the father and mother. There

was another baby in there not born yet.

Tar had already seen things, heard things.

Before he became ill his mother was tall and slender. When she worked

in the kitchen there was a babe lying on a chair, among pillows. For a

time the baby fed at the breast. Then he began feeding from a bottle.

What a little pig! The eyes of the baby were screwed up in a peculiar

way. He was crying before he got the bottle and then, when he had got

it into his mouth, he stopped at once. The tiny face got red. When the

bottle was empty the baby slept.

When there is a baby in the house there are always unpleasant smells.

Women and girls do not mind.

When your mother becomes suddenly round like a barrel there is a

reason. John and Margaret knew. It had happened before. Some children

do not apply what they see and hear going on around them to their

lives. Others do. The three older children did not speak to each other

of what was in the air. Robert was too young to know.

When you are a child and ill, as Tar was at that time, you get human

things all mixed up in the mind with the animal life about. Cats

screamed at night, cows bawled in the barns, dogs ran in packs along

the road before the house. Something always stirring in people, in

animals, trees, flowers, grasses. How are you going to tell what is

gross, what is fine? Kittens were born, calves, colts. Neighbor women

had babies. A woman who lived near the Mooreheads had two at one time.

Judging from what people said hardly anything more tragic could happen.

Boys in small towns, after they begin going to school, write things on

fences with chalk they steal from the schoolroom. They make pictures on

the sides of barns and on the sidewalks.

Even before he began going to school Tar knew things. How had he found

out? His being ill may have made him more aware. There was a queer

feeling down inside--fear growing. His mother, his own relation to the

tall woman going about the Moorehead house doing her housework, was in

some way involved.

Tar’s being ill made things difficult. He could not run about the yard,

play ball, go off on adventurous trips to nearby fields. When the baby

had his bottle and was asleep his mother brought her sewing and sat

beside him. All was still in the house. If things could only stay like

that. Now and then her hand stroked his hair and when she stopped he

wanted to ask her to go on doing it always but could not get his lips

to form the words.

Two boys of the town, John’s age, went one day to a place where a

small creek crossed a street. There was a wooden bridge with cracks

between the boards and the boys crawled down under the bridge and lay

quietly for a long time. They wanted to see something. Afterwards they

came into the Moorehead yard and talked to John. Their being under the

bridge had something to do with women crossing above. When they came

to the Moorehead house Tar was sitting among pillows in the sun on the

front porch and when they began to talk he pretended to be asleep. The

boy who told John about the adventure whispered when he came to the

important part but to Tar, who lay back among the pillows with his

eyes closed, just the sound of the boy’s voice whispering was like

cloth being torn. It was like a curtain being torn so that you stand

facing--what?

On another day Tar was in the same chair on the porch and Robert was

playing in the street. He went off down the road to where there was

a field and presently came running back. In the field he had seen

something he wanted Tar to see. He could not tell what it was but his

eyes were large and round and he whispered one word over and over.

“Come, come on,” he whispered and Tar got up out of the chair and went

with him.

Tar was at that time so weak that as he hurried along at Robert’s

heels he had to stop several times to sit beside the road. Robert

danced restlessly about in the dust in the middle of the road. “What is

it?” Tar kept asking but his younger brother could not tell. If Mary

Moorehead had not been so occupied with the baby already born and the

one about to be born she might have kept Tar at home. Among so many

children one child gets lost.

The two children came to the edge of a field surrounded by a rail

fence. Elders and berry bushes grew thick between the fence and the

road and they were in bloom. Tar and his brother crawled in among the

bushes and looked through the fence, between the rails.

What they saw was startling enough. No wonder Robert was excited. A sow

had just given birth to a litter of pigs. It must have happened while

Robert was running to the house to bring Tar.

The mother pig stood facing the road and the two children. Tar could

look directly into her eyes. It was all a part of the day’s work with

her, a part of a female pig’s life. It happened just as the trees

happened to put on green leaves in the spring, just as the berry bushes

happened to bloom and later bear fruit.

Only with trees, grasses, berry bushes, things were hidden from sight.

Trees and bushes did not have eyes across which the shadows of pain

flitted.

The mother pig stood for a moment and then lay down. She still seemed

looking directly at Tar. There was something on the grass beside her,

a squirming mass of life. The secret inner life of pigs was being

revealed to the children. The mother pig had stiff white hairs growing

on her nose and her eyes were heavy with weariness. Often Tar’s

mother’s eyes looked like that. The children were so near the pig that

Tar could have put out his hand and touched her hairy snout. Always,

after that morning, he remembered the look in her eyes, the squirming

things beside her. When he grew to be a man and was himself tired or

ill he walked in city streets and saw people with that look in their

eyes. People crowded into city streets, into tenements in cities, were

like squirming things on the grass at the edge of an Ohio field. When

he turned his eyes to the sidewalk or closed them for a moment he saw

again a mother pig trying to stand on her trembling legs, lying down on

the grass and then getting wearily up.

For a moment Tar watched the scene before him and then, lying down on

the grass under the elders, closed his eyes. His brother Robert went

away. He crawled away to where the bushes grew thicker, already looking

for some new adventure.

Time passed. The elders in bloom beside the fence were very fragrant

and bees came in swarms. They made a droning soft sound in the air

above Tar’s head. He felt very weak and sick and wondered if he would

be able to make his way back home. As he lay thus a man came along

the road and, as though sensing the boy’s presence under the bushes,

stopped and stood staring.

The man was a half-witted fellow who lived several doors away from the

Mooreheads and on the same street. He was thirty years old but had the

mind of a child of four. All Middle-Western towns have such fellows.

All their lives they remain gentle or one of them becomes suddenly

vicious. In small towns they live with relatives who are usually

working people and are neglected by every one. People give them old

clothes, too large or too small for their bodies.

The half-witted man did not see Tar. He may have heard the mother

pig moving about in the field beyond the bushes. Now she had got to

her feet and the little pigs--five of them--were being cleansed and

prepared for life. Already they were at the business of being fed. When

feeding little pigs make a sound like a babe. They screw up their eyes

in the same way. Their faces get red and after they have been fed they

sleep.

Some sense in feeding little pigs. They grow big rapidly and may be

sold for money.

The half-witted man stood looking toward the field. Life may be a

comedy half-witted people understand. The man opened his mouth and

laughed softly. In Tar’s memory the scene and the moment remained

unique. It seemed to him afterward that, at the moment, the sky

overhead, the bushes with their blossoms, the bees droning in the air,

even the ground on which he lay had begun to laugh.

* * * * *

And then the new Moorehead baby was born. It happened at night. Such

things usually do. Tar was in the front room of the house, wide awake,

but he managed to create the impression that he was asleep.

At first, that night when it began, there was the sound of some one

groaning. It did not sound like Tar’s mother. She never groaned. Then

some one moved restlessly in the bed in the next room. Dick Moorehead

was awake. “Had I better get up?” A low voice answered and there was

another groan. Dick hurried about getting into his clothes. He came

into the front room, carrying a lamp and stood by Tar’s cot. “He’s

asleep in here. Had I better wake him up and take him upstairs?” More

whispered words intercepted by groans. The lamp in the bedroom shed a

faint light through the open door into the room.

They had decided to let him remain. Dick put on his overcoat and went

out the back way, through the kitchen door. He had put on the coat

because it was raining. The rain made a steady pounding sound on the

side of the house. Tar could hear his footsteps on the boards leading

round the house to the front gate. The boards were merely thrown on the

ground and some of them had become old and warped. When you stepped on

them you had to be careful. In the darkness Dick had bad luck. There

was a low muttered curse. He was standing in the rain rubbing his shin.

Tar heard his footsteps on the sidewalk outside and then the sound grew

faint. It could not be heard above the steady sound of the rain on the

side walls of the house.

Tar lay, listening intensely. He was like a young quail crouched under

leaves when a dog is ranging a field. Not a muscle of his body moved.

In a household like the Mooreheads’ a child does not run instinctively

to the mother. Love, warmth, the natural expression of tenderness, all

such impulses are buried away. Tar had to live his own life, lie quiet

and wait. Most Middle-Western families of the old days were like that.

Tar lay listening a long time. His mother groaned softly. She stirred

in her bed. What was going on?

Tar knew because he had seen the pigs born in the field, knew because

what was happening in the Moorehead house was always happening in

some house on a street in which the Mooreheads lived. It happened to

neighbor women and to horses, to dogs, to cows. Chickens, turkeys and

birds got born out of eggs. That was much better. The mother bird did

not groan with pain while it was going on.

It would have been better, Tar thought, if he had not seen the thing in

the field, if he had not seen the look of pain in a mother pig’s eyes.

His own illness had been something special. His body was weak sometimes

but there was no pain. It was a thing of dreams, of distorted dreams

that would not come to an end. He always, when the bad times were on,

had to hold on to something to keep from falling away into nothingness,

into some black cold dismal place.

If Tar had not seen the mother pig in the field, if older boys had not

come into the yard and talked....

The mother pig, standing in the field, had a look of pain in her eyes.

She made a sound that was like a groan.

She had long dirty white hairs on her nose.

The sound coming from the nearby room did not seem to come from Tar’s

mother. She was to him something lovely. He clung to that thought. What

was going on was shocking. It could not happen to her.

That was a comforting thought when it came. He held on to the thought.

There was a trick his illness had taught him. When he felt he was about

to fall into darkness, into nothingness, he just hung on. There was

something inside him that helped.

Once that night, during the period of waiting, Tar crept out of bed.

He was quite sure his mother was not in the next room, that it was not

she he heard groaning in there but he wanted to be quite sure. He would

creep to the door and look. When he had got his feet to the floor and

stood upright the groans in the room stopped. “Well, you see,” he told

himself, “what I heard was just made up.” He got silently back into bed

and the groans started again.

His father came with the doctor. He had never been to the house before.

Such things happen unexpectedly. The doctor you plan to get is out of

town. He had gone off to a patient in the country. You do the best you

can.

The doctor was a large man with a great voice. He came into the house

with his booming voice and a neighbor woman also came. Tar’s father

came and closed the door that led into the bedroom.

Again he got out of bed but did not go toward the door leading to the

bedroom. He knelt beside the cot and felt around until he had got hold

of the pillow and then buried his face. He pressed the pillow against

his cheeks. In that way it was possible to shut out all sound.

What Tar achieved was a sense of nearness to his mother. She could

not be in the next room groaning. Where was she? Birth was a thing

belonging to the world of pigs, to cows and horses, and to other women.

What was happening in the next room was not happening to her. His own

breath, after his face had been for a few moments buried in the pillow,

made a warm place. The dreary sound of the rain outside the house, the

booming sound of the doctor’s voice, the queer apologetic voice of

his father, the neighbor woman’s voice--all sounds were shut out. His

mother had gone away somewhere but he could hold on to his thoughts of

her. It was a trick his illness had taught him.

Once or twice, since he had been old enough to be conscious of such

things, and in particular since he had been ill, his mother had taken

him into her arms and had pressed his face against her body. That was

at a moment when the younger baby in the house was asleep. If there

were no babies it would happen oftener.

With his face buried in the pillow, his arms embracing it, he achieved

the illusion.

Well, he did not want his mother to have another baby. He did not want

her to lie groaning in a bed. He wanted her in the dark room with

himself.

In fancy he could bring her there. When you have an illusion hang on.

Tar hung on grimly. Time passed. When at last he lifted his face from

the pillow all was quiet in the house. The silence frightened him a

little.

Now he thought himself quite convinced nothing had happened.

He went softly to the bedroom door and opened it softly. There was

a lamp on a table and his mother was lying in the bed with her eyes

closed. She was very white. Dick Moorehead was in the kitchen sitting

in a chair by the stove. He had got wet going out into the rain and was

drying his clothes.

The neighbor woman had water in a pan and was washing something.

Tar stood by the door until the new baby cried. It had to be dressed

now. Now it would begin to wear clothes. It would not be like a little

pig, a puppy, a kitten. Its clothes would not grow on it. It would have

to be taken care of, dressed, washed. After a time it would begin to

dress itself, wash itself. Tar already did that.

Now he could accept the fact of the new baby. It was the matter of

being born he could not bear. Now it was done.

He stood by the door trembling and when the baby cried his mother

opened her eyes. It had cried before but with the pillow pressed

against his ears Tar had not heard. His father sitting in the kitchen

did not move. He sat staring at the lighted stove, a discouraged

looking figure. Steam arose from his clothes.

Nothing moved but the eyes of Tar’s mother and he did not know whether

or not she saw him standing there. The eyes seemed to be looking

reproachfully at him and he backed softly out of the room into the

darkness.

* * * * *

In the morning Tar went into the bedroom with John, Robert and

Margaret. Margaret went at once to the new babe. She kissed it. Tar did

not look. He, John and Robert stood at the foot of the bed and said

nothing. There was something stirring, under the covers, beside the

mother. They were told it was a boy.

They went outside. After the rain of the night the morning was bright

and clear. Fortunately for John, a boy of his own age came along the

street and he called to him and hurried off.

Robert went into the woodshed at the back of the house. He had business

going on in there with wooden blocks.

Well, he was all right and so was Tar. The worst was over. Dick

Moorehead would go uptown and into a saloon. He had been through a hard

night and would want a drink. While he was drinking he would tell the

bartender the news and the bartender would smile. John would tell the

neighbor boy. It might be he already knew. In a small town such news

travels fast. For a few days the boys and the father would alike be

half ashamed, with a kind of queer secret shame, and then it would pass

off.

In time they would accept the new babe as one of themselves.

Tar was weak from his night’s adventure but so also was his mother.

John and Robert felt the same way. It had been a strange hard night in

the house and now that it was over Tar was relieved. He would not have

to think about it again. A babe is just a babe but to a boy an unborn

babe in the house is something he is glad to see come out into the

light.

PART II

CHAPTER VI

Henry Fulton was a thick-shouldered, thick-headed boy much larger than

Tar. They lived in the same part of an Ohio town and when Tar went to

school he had to walk right past the Fulton place. There was a small

frame house on the bank of a creek and near a bridge, and back of it,

in the little valley made by the creek, was a cornfield and a thicket

of uncleared land. Henry’s mother was a stout red-faced woman who

went about the back yard in her bare feet. Her husband drove a dray.

Tar could go to school another way. He could walk along a railroad

embankment or go clear around by the waterworks pond, nearly a half

mile out of the way.

The railroad embankment was fun. There was a certain risk. Tar had to

cross the railroad bridge, built high up over the creek, and when he

was in the middle of it he looked down. Then he glanced nervously up

and down the tracks and shivers ran through his body. What if a train

should come? He planned what he would do. Well, he would lie flat on

the tracks, letting the train pass over him. A boy at school had told

him of another boy who did that. It took nerve, I tell you. You have to

lie flat as a pancake and must not move a muscle.

And so along comes the train. The engineer sees you but cannot stop his

train. It rushes on. If you keep your nerve now what a tale you will

have to tell. Not so many boys have been run over by trains and not got

a scratch either. Sometimes when Tar went to school by the railroad

embankment he almost wished a train would come. It should be a fast

passenger train going at sixty miles an hour. There is a thing called

suction you have to watch out for. Tar and a boy friend at school had

discussed that. “There was a boy once who stood close beside the tracks

when the train went through. He got too close. The suction drew him

right under the train. Suction is a thing that pulls at you. It hasn’t

got any hands but you’d better look out.”

Why had Henry Fulton got it in for Tar? John Moorehead walked right

past his house, never thinking. Even little Robert Moorehead, who was

now in the baby room, the primary, went that way without thinking

anything about it. Whether or not Henry really wanted to punch Tar

was the question. How could Tar tell? When Henry saw Tar he shouted

and made for him. Henry had strange-looking small gray eyes. His hair

was red and stood straight up on his head and when he rushed at Tar

he laughed and the laugh gave Tar the shivers, like walking over the

railroad bridge.

About the suction now, when you have been caught walking across a

railroad bridge. When the train is coming you want to tuck your shirt

down tight inside your pants. If an end of your shirt sticks up it

catches on some whirling thing under the train and you are drawn right

up. Talk about sausage!

The best part is when the train has passed. At last the engineer has

stopped his engine. The passengers climb off. Every one is pale, of

course. Tar would lie still for a little while because now he wasn’t

scared. He would fool ’em a little just for a joke. When they got to

where he was, the white anxious people, up he would jump and walk off

as cool as a cucumber. The story would get all over town. After that

happened, if a boy like Henry Fulton took after him there would always

be a big boy around to take Tar’s part. “Well, he’s got moral courage,

that’s it. It’s a thing generals have in battles. They don’t fight.

Sometimes they are little fellows. You could put Napoleon Bonaparte in

the neck of a bottle--almost.”

Tar knew a lot about moral courage because his father often spoke of

it. It’s something like suction. You couldn’t describe it or see it but

it was as strong as a horse.

As it was Tar might have asked John Moorehead to take his part against

Henry Fulton but after all he couldn’t. You can’t let on about things

like that to an older brother.

There was another thing he might do about being run over by a train, if

he had the nerve. He might wait until the train was almost upon him.

Then he could drop through between two of the railroad ties and hang by

his hands like a bat. Maybe that would be the best way.

The house in which the Mooreheads now lived was larger than any during

Tar’s time. Things had changed. Tar’s mother caressed her children more

than she used to, she talked more and Dick Moorehead spent more time at

home. Nowadays he was always taking some of the children with him when

he went house or sign painting on Saturdays. He drank some but not so

much as he did, just enough to make him talk well. It didn’t take much

for that.

As for Tar, he was now all right. He was in the third room at school.

Robert was in the primary. There had been two new babies, little Fern,

who died within a month after she was born, Will, still a baby almost,

and Joe. Although Tar did not know it Fern was to be the last baby born

to the family. For some reason, and although he had always resented

Robert, Will and the baby Joe were great fun. Tar even liked to take

care of Joe, not too often but now and then. You could tickle his toes

and he made the funniest sounds. It made you laugh to think you had

once been like that, couldn’t talk, couldn’t walk about, had to have

some one feed you.

A boy could not understand older people most of the time, no use

trying. Sometimes Tar’s parents were one way, sometimes another. If

he depended on his mother it wouldn’t work. She had babies and had to

think about them, after they came. The first two or three years a baby

isn’t any good, while a horse, big as he is, can work and everything

when he is three.

Sometimes Tar’s father was all right and then again he was all

wrong. When Tar and Robert went with him, sign painting on fences on

Saturdays, and when there were no older people about he was O. K.

Sometimes he told about the battle of Vicksburg. He really won the

battle. Well, anyway he told General Grant what to do and he did it,

but afterward General Grant never gave Dick any credit. The fact is

that after the city was won General Grant left Tar’s father out West

with the army of occupation while he took General Sherman, Sheridan and

a lot of other officers with him down East, and let them have chances

Dick never had. Dick never even got promoted. He was a captain before

the battle of Vicksburg and a captain afterward. It would have been

better if he had never told General Grant how to win the battle. If

Grant had taken Dick down East he wouldn’t have been so long licking

General Lee. Dick would have thought up a plan. He did think up one but

he never told any one.

“I tell you what. If you tell another man how to do something and he

does it and it works then, afterwards, he doesn’t like you much. He

wants all the credit for himself. As though there weren’t enough to go

around. That’s the way men are.”

Dick Moorehead was all right when there were no other men about but let

another man come along and then what? They talked and talked, about

nothing mostly. You never got hardly any sign painting done.

The best thing, Tar thought, would be to have a friend who was another

boy nearly ten years older. Tar was smart. He had skipped a whole

grade in school already and he could skip another grade if he wanted

to. Maybe he would. The best thing would be to have a boy friend who

was strong as an ox but dumb. Tar would get his lessons for him and

he would do Tar’s fighting. Well, in the morning he would come around

Tar’s way to go to school with him. Tar and he would walk right past

Henry Fulton’s house. Henry had better keep out of sight.

Older people got strange ideas into their heads. When Tar was in the

first grade at school, the primary (he stayed there only two or three

weeks because his mother had taught him his letters and how to read

when he was sick that time) when he was in the primary Tar told a lie.

He said he did not throw a stone that broke a window in the schoolhouse

when every one knew he did.

Tar said he did not do it and stuck to the lie. What a fuss was made.

The teacher came to the Moorehead house to talk to Tar’s mother. What

every one said was that if he would confess, own up, he would feel

better.

Tar had stuck it out for a long time. He wasn’t allowed to go to school

for three days. How strangely his mother acted, so unreasonable. You

wouldn’t have expected it from her. He would go into the house all

cheered up to see if she had forgotten the whole nonsensical business

but she never had. She agreed with the teacher that if he would own up

everything would be all right. Even Margaret got to talking that way.

John had more sense. He kept out of it, never said a word.

And it was all foolishness. Finally Tar did own up. The truth was that

by that time there had been such a fuss made that he could not rightly

remember whether he had thrown the stone or not. And what if he did?

What of it? Another glass had already been put in the window. It was

only a small stone. Tar wasn’t throwing at the window. That was the

whole point.

If he owned up to a thing like that he got credit for something he

never intended doing at all.

Tar had finally confessed. Of course he had felt badly during the

three days. No one knew how he did feel. What you’ve got at such a time

is moral courage and that’s what people can’t understand. When every

one is against you what are you going to do? Sometimes, during the

three days, he cried when no one was looking.

It was his mother who really got him to own up. He was sitting with her

on the back porch and she said again that if he would own up he would

feel all right. How had she known he wasn’t feeling all right?

He did own up, all of a sudden, without thinking.

Then his mother was satisfied, the teacher was satisfied, every one was

satisfied. After he had told what they thought was the truth he went

out to the barn. His mother had put her arms about him, but that one

time her arms did not feel so good. It was better not to tell a lie

like that when every one is going to make such a fuss about it after

you have told it.... Anyway, during the three days, every one had found

out something. Tar could stick to a thing when he had made up his mind.

The best part of the place where the Mooreheads now lived was that it

had a barn. Of course there wasn’t any horse or cow but a barn is a

barn.

After Tar confessed that time he went out to the barn and crawled up

into the empty loft. What an empty feeling inside too--the lie gone.

When he was holding out even Margaret, who had to go and preach, had

a kind of admiration for him. If, when Tar grew to be a man, he ever

became a great criminal like Jesse James or some one and got caught,

they would never get any confession out of him. He had made up his mind

to that. He would defy them all. “Well, go ahead, hang me then.” As he

stood up on the gallows he would smile and wave his hand. If they let

him he would wear his Sunday suit--all white. “Ladies and gentlemen, I,

the notorious Jesse James, am about to die. I’ve something I want to

say. You think you can make me come down off my perch. Well, try it.

“You can all go to hell, that’s where you can go.”

That’s the way to do a thing like that. Grown people have such mixed up

ideas. There are a lot of things they never get straight.

When you have a boy friend ten years older who is stout but dumb you

are all right. There was a boy named Elmer Cowley Tar thought might

almost have done for the place but he was too dumb. And then besides he

never paid any attention to Tar. He wanted to be John’s friend but John

would not have him. “Ah, he’s a blockhead,” John said. If he hadn’t

been quite so dumb and had taken a notion to Tar it might have been

just the thing.

The trouble with a boy like that, who was too dumb, was that he would

never get the point. Let Henry Fulton get after Tar when they were

going to school in the morning and like as not Elmer would only laugh.

If Henry really started pounding Tar he might rush in but that wasn’t

the point either. Pounding isn’t the worst part. It’s expecting to be

pounded that is the worst of all. If a boy isn’t smart enough to know

that, what good is he?

The trouble with going around by the railroad bridge or by the

waterworks pond was that it made Tar out a coward to himself. What if

no one knew? What difference did that make?

Henry Fulton had a gift Tar would have given much to possess. The

chances were he only wanted to scare Tar because Tar had caught up with

him in school. Henry was nearly two years older, but they were both in

the same room and both by ill luck lived at the same end of town.

About Henry’s special gift. He was a born butter. Some are born that

way. Tar wished he had been. Henry could put down his head and run

against anything and it did not seem to hurt his head at all.

In the schoolhouse yard there was a high board fence and Henry could

stand back and take a flying run, hitting the fence with all his might

and afterwards only smile. You could hear the boards of the fence

crack. Once, at home in the barn, Tar gave the thing a trial. He did

not run full speed and afterwards he was glad he didn’t. His head was

sore enough as it was. If you haven’t a gift you haven’t it. You might

as well give the matter up.

The only gift Tar had was that he was smart. It isn’t anything at all

to get such lessons as they give you in school. There are always a lot

of dumb boys in your class and the whole class has to wait for them.

If you’ve got any sense you don’t have to work much. It isn’t any fun

though to be smart. What good does it do?

A boy like Henry Fulton had more fun than a dozen smart boys. At the

recess time all the other boys gathered around. Tar kept in the

background only because Henry had got that notion of taking after him.

In the school yard there was a high board fence. At the recess time the

girls played on one side the fence, the boys on the other. Margaret

was over there on the other side with the girls. On the fence the boys

drew pictures. They threw stones and in the winter, snowballs, over the

fence.

What Henry Fulton did was to knock loose one of the boards with his

head. Some older boys put him up to it. Henry was really dumb. He

would have been a good one to be Tar’s friend, the best one in school,

counting the talent he had, but it wasn’t to be.

Henry ran against the fence full tilt, then he ran again. The board had

begun to give a little. It began to creak. The girls on their side knew

what was going on and all the boys were gathered around. Tar was so

jealous of Henry that it made him ache inside.

Bang! Henry’s head went against the fence and then he drew back and,

bang, it went again. He said it didn’t hurt at all. Maybe he lied,

still his head must have been tough. Other boys went up to feel of it.

There wasn’t any bump raised at all.

And then the board gave way. It was a wide board and Henry had knocked

it right out of the fence. You could have crawled right through to the

girls’ side.

Afterwards when they were all back in the room the superintendent of

the school came to the door of the room in which both Tar and Henry

sat. He, the superintendent, was a large man with a black beard and

he admired Tar. All the older Mooreheads, John, Margaret and Tar, had

a record for being smart and that is what a man like a superintendent

admires.

“Another one of Mary Moorehead’s children. And you jumped a grade.

Well, you’re a smart lot.”

The whole schoolroom had heard him say that. It put a boy in bad. Why

didn’t the man keep his mouth shut?

He, the superintendent, was always lending books to John and Margaret.

He told all three of the older Moorehead children to come to his house

any time and get any book they wanted.

It was fun to read books all right. “Rob Roy,” “Robinson Crusoe,” “The

Swiss Family Robinson.” Margaret read the Elsie Books but she did not

get them from the superintendent. A dark pale woman who clerked in

the postoffice started lending them to her. They made her cry but she

liked it. Girls like nothing better than crying. In the Elsie Books

a girl about Margaret’s age was sitting at a piano. Her mother was

dead and she was afraid her papa was going to marry another woman, an

adventuress, who was sitting right in the room. She, the adventuress,

was the kind of woman who would make a fuss over a little girl, kiss

her and pet her when her father was around, and then maybe hit her a

clip over the head when her papa wasn’t looking, that is to say after

she’d married the papa. Margaret read that part of one of the Elsie

Books to Tar. She just had to read it to some one. “It was so full of

feeling,” she said. She cried when she read it.

Books are all right but it’s better not to let other boys know you like

them. It’s all right to be smart but when the superintendent of the

school gives you away, right before every one, what fun is there in

that?

That day when Henry Fulton butted the board out of the fence at the

recess time the superintendent came to the door of the room with a whip

in his hand and called Henry Fulton out. There was a dead silence in

the room.

Henry was going to get a beating and Tar was glad. At the same time he

wasn’t glad.

What would happen would be that Henry would walk right out and take it

as cool as you please.

He would get a lot of credit he did not deserve. If Tar’s head had

been made like that he could have butted a board out of the fence too.

If they would whip a boy for being smart, for having his lessons so

he could reel them right off, he’d get as many lickings as any boy in

school.

In the schoolroom the woman teacher was silent, all the children

were silent while Henry got up and went to the door. He made a loud

clattering sound with his feet.

Tar could not help hating him because he was so brave. He wanted to

lean over to the boy who sat in the next seat and ask a question. “Do

you suppose?”

What Tar wanted to ask the boy was rather hard to put into words.

There was a hypothetical question to be asked. “If you were a boy,

born with a thick head and could knock boards out of fences and if

the superintendent found you out (probably because some girl told)

and you were going to be whipped and were in a hall alone with the

superintendent, would the same kind of nerve that led you not to

let on it hurt your head to the other boys when you butted a fence,

would the same kind of nerve you had then lead you to butt the

superintendent?”

Standing up and just taking a licking without crying wasn’t anything.

Even Tar could do that, maybe.

Now Tar had got himself into one of his thinking times, one of his

questioning moods. One of the reasons it was fun to read books was

that while you were reading, if the book was any good and had any good

exciting places in it, you did not think or ask questions while you

were reading. At other times--oh well.

Tar now was in one of his bad times. What he did when he was in such

times was to make himself do, in imagination, what maybe he never

would do if he had the chance. Then sometimes he was betrayed into

telling others what he had imagined as a fact. That was all right too,

but nearly every time some one caught him. It was the kind of thing

Tar’s father was always doing but his mother did not do it. That was

why nearly every one respected his mother so much, while they liked

his father and did not respect him hardly at all. Even Tar knew the

difference.

Tar wanted to be like his mother but had a secret fear he was growing

more like his father all the time. It made him sick inside to realize

it sometimes and still he could not help being as he was.

He was doing the thing now. Instead of Henry Fulton, he, Tar Moorehead,

had just marched out of the room. He was not born to be a butter, try

as hard as he might, he never could knock a board out of a fence with

his head but here he was pretending he could.

He had in fancy just been marched out of the schoolroom and was alone

with the superintendent in a hall where the children hung up their hats

and coats.

There was a stairway leading down. Tar’s room was on the second floor.

The superintendent went along as cool as you please. It was all a

part of the day’s work with him. You caught a boy doing something and

whipped him. If he cried, all right. If he did not cry, was one of the

stubborn kind that would not cry, you just hit him a few extra clips

for good luck and let him go. What else could you do?

There was a place right at the head of the stairs, an open space. That

was where the superintendent did the whipping.

All right for Henry Fulton but what about Tar?

When he, Tar, was out there, in fancy, what a difference. What he did

was to walk along, just as Henry would have done, but he was thinking

and planning. Here’s where smartness comes in. If you’ve got a thick

head that will knock boards out of fences you get credit all right but

you can’t think.

Tar was thinking about the time when the superintendent went and called

the attention of the whole room to his Moorehead smartness. Now was the

time to get even.

The superintendent wouldn’t be expecting anything at all, not from a

Moorehead. He would be thinking, because they were smart, they were a

lot of sissies. Well, they weren’t. Maybe Margaret was one but John

wasn’t. You ought to see him clip Elmer Cowley on the chin.

If you can’t butt fences that doesn’t mean you can’t butt people.

People are pretty soft, right in the middle. What made Napoleon

Bonaparte such a great man, Dick said, was that he was always doing

what no one expected.

What Tar did, in fancy, was to walk along before the superintendent

right to that place at the head of the stairs. He had got a little

ahead, just enough to give him a flying start, and then he turned. He

used just the technique Henry used on fences. Well, he had watched

often enough. He knew how it was done.

He took a flying start and aimed right for the soft place in the

superintendent’s middle and he hit it too.

He knocked the superintendent down a flight of stairs. It made a

racket. People, women teachers and scholars, came running into the hall

from all the rooms. Tar was trembling all over. Imaginative people,

when they do anything like that, always tremble afterward.

Tar was trembling as he sat in the schoolroom, having done nothing.

When he got through thinking a thing like that out he was trembling so

that when he tried to write something on a slate he couldn’t. His hand

trembled so he could hardly hold a pencil. If any one wanted to know

why he was so sick that time Dick came home drunk, there it was. If

you’re made that way you are.

Henry Fulton had come back into the room as cool as you please. Of

course all the others were looking at him.

What had he done? He had taken a licking without crying. People thought

he was brave.

Had he knocked a superintendent down a flight of stairs as Tar had? Had

he used his brains? What was the good having a head that was good for

butting boards out of fences when you didn’t know enough to butt the

right thing at the right time?

CHAPTER VII

What was really hardest for Tar, the bitterest thing of all to face,

was that a fellow like himself hardly ever worked any of his fine

schemes out into facts. Tar did once.

He was coming home from school and Robert was with him. It was spring

and there was a flood. Over by the Fulton house the creek was full and

was tearing under the bridge that stood right near the house.

Tar had not wanted to go home that way but Robert was with him. You

can’t be always explaining.

The two boys went along the street down through the little valley that

led up to the part of the town where they lived and there was Henry

Fulton with two other boys Tar did not know, standing on the bridge and

throwing sticks into the creek.

They threw them in on the upside and then ran across the bridge to see

them shoot out. Maybe, that time, Henry never intended to take after

Tar and show him up for a coward.

Who knows what any one thinks, what they intend? How can you tell?

What Tar did was to walk along with Robert as though there wasn’t any

such person as Henry. Robert was talking and chattering away. One of

the boys threw a large stick into the creek and it went bounding under

the bridge. Suddenly all three of the boys turned and looked at Tar and

Robert. Robert was all for joining in the fun, getting some sticks and

throwing them in.

Tar was in one of his bad times again. If you are the kind that has

such times you are always thinking--“Now so and so is going to do so

and so.” Maybe they aren’t at all. How do you know? If you are that

kind what you think people are going to do is just as bad as what they

do. Henry, when he saw Tar alone, was always putting down his head,

squinting up his eyes and taking after him. Tar ran like a scared

cat and then Henry stopped running and laughed. Every one who saw it

laughed. He couldn’t catch Tar running and knew he couldn’t.

At the edge of the bridge Tar stopped. The other boys were not looking

and Robert wasn’t paying any attention but Henry was looking. What

funny eyes he had. He was leaning against the railing of the bridge.

The two boys stood looking at each other. What a situation! Tar was

then as he was all through his life. Let him alone, let him think and

have fancies and he could work you out a perfect scheme for anything.

That’s what later made him able to tell stories. When you write or tell

stories you can make things come out just fine. What do you suppose

Dick would have done if he had been compelled to stay around where

General Grant was after the Civil War? It would have crabbed his style

something awful.

A writer is all right writing and a story teller is all right telling

stories but what if you put him in a position where he has to act? Such

a person is always doing either the right thing at the wrong time or

the wrong thing at the right time.

Maybe, that time, Henry Fulton did not intend to take after Tar and

show him up for a coward before Robert and the two strange boys. Maybe

Henry wasn’t thinking of anything but throwing sticks in the creek.

How was Tar to know? He was thinking, “Now he is going to put down his

head and butt me. If I run Robert and the others will begin to laugh.

Like as not Robert will go home and tell John.” Robert was a pretty

good sport, for a kid, but you can’t expect a young kid to use good

judgment. You can’t expect him to know when to keep his mouth shut.

Tar moved a few steps across the bridge toward Henry. Pshaw, now he was

trembling again. What was the matter with him? What was he going to do?

It all came of being smart, of thinking you are going to do something

when you aren’t. At school Tar had been thinking about that soft spot

in people’s middle, about butting the superintendent down the stairs--a

thing he would never have the nerve to try to do really--and now!

Was he going to try to butt the champion butter? What a foolish notion.

Tar almost felt like laughing at himself. Of course Henry did not

expect any such thing. He would have had to be pretty smart to ever

expect any boy to butt him and he wasn’t smart. That wasn’t his line.

Another step, another and another. Tar was in the middle of the bridge.

He made a quick dive and--great Scott--he had done it. He had butted

Henry, had hit him right in the middle.

The worse time came when it was done. What happened was that Henry,

expecting nothing, was caught off guard. He doubled up and went right

through the bridge railing into the creek. He was on the upper side of

the bridge and at once his body disappeared. Whether he could swim or

not Tar did not know. As there was a flood the creek was fairly raging

along.

As it turned out it was one of the few times in his life Tar ever did

anything that really turned out pretty well. At first he just stood

trembling. All the other boys were struck dumb with amazement and did

not do a thing. Henry had disappeared. It may have been that only a

second passed before he appeared again but it seemed to Tar hours.

He ran to the railing of the bridge as did all the others. One of

the strange boys ran toward the Fulton house to tell Henry’s mother.

In another minute or two Henry’s dead body would be dragged ashore.

Henry’s mother would be leaning over it and crying.

What would Tar do? Of course the town marshal would come for him.

After all it might not be so bad--if he kept his nerve and did not run

or cry. He would be led right up through town, every one looking, every

one pointing. “That’s Tar Moorehead, the murderer. He murdered Henry

Fulton, the champion butter. He butted him to his death.”

It would not be half bad if it weren’t for the hanging in the end.

What happened was that Henry got out of the creek by himself. It wasn’t

nearly as deep as it looked and he could swim.

The whole thing would have turned out fine for Tar if he hadn’t been so

trembly. Instead of staying where the two strange boys could see how

cool and collected he was he had to leave.

He did not even want to be with Robert--not for a time. “You cut

on home and you keep your mouth shut,” he managed to say. He hoped

Robert would not know how upset he was, would not notice how his voice

trembled.

Tar went over by the waterworks pond and sat under a tree. He was

disgusted with himself. Henry Fulton had a scared look on his face

when he crawled out of the creek and Tar thought maybe now Henry would

be scared of him all the time. For just a second Henry had stood on

the bank of the creek looking at Tar. Tar wasn’t crying anyway. What

Henry’s eyes were saying was this--“You’re crazy. Sure I’m afraid of

you. You’re crazy. A fellow can’t tell what you’ll do.”

“It was all right and a gain,” Tar thought. Ever since he had been

going to school he had been planning something and now he had done it.

If you are a boy and read, aren’t you always reading about such things?

There is a bully in the school and a smart boy, who is pale and not

very well. One day, to every one’s surprise, he licks the bully of the

school. What he has is a thing called moral courage. It’s like suction.

That’s what carries him through. He uses his head, learns to box. When

the two boys meet it is a contest between brains and brawn and brains

win.

That was all right, Tar thought. It was just the sort of thing he was

always planning to do and never doing.

What it came down to was this--if he had planned in advance to out-butt

Henry Fulton, if he had practiced up, say on Robert or Elmer Cowley,

and then if--in front of every one in school, during the recess

time--he had walked right up to Henry and had challenged him....

What was the use? Tar stayed over by the waterworks pond a while, until

his nerves got less trembly and then went home. Robert was there and

so was John and Robert had told John.

It was pretty fine. Tar was a hero after all. John made a fuss over him

and wanted him to tell about it and he did.

When he told he was all right. Well, he could put in certain

flourishes. The thoughts he had been having when he was alone went

away. He could make it sound pretty good.

After all the story would get around. If Henry Fulton thought he, Tar,

was a little crazy and a desperate fellow, he would keep his hands off.

Older boys who did not know what Tar knew would think he, Tar, had

planned it all out and had done it all with cool determination. Bigger

boys would begin to want to be his friend. That’s the way boys are.

It was pretty good after all, Tar thought, and he began to strut a

little. Not too much. He had to be careful now. John was pretty foxy.

If he put it on too thick he would be found out.

Doing a thing is one thing and telling about it is another.

At the telling Tar thought he wasn’t so bad.

Anyway, when you tell about it you can use your brains. The trouble

with Dick Moorehead, Tar had even then begun to suspect, was that when

he told his stories he laid it on a little too thick. Better let others

do most of the talking. If others lay it on a little thick, as Robert

was now doing, shrug your shoulders. Deny it. Pretend not to want any

credit. “Ah, I didn’t do anything.”

That was the way. Tar had now got ground under his feet. The story of

what had happened at the bridge, when he had done something without

thinking, in a crazy kind of way, had begun to reshape itself in his

fancy. If he could keep the truth down for a time it would be all

right. He could reconstruct the whole thing to his liking.

There were only John and his mother to fear. If his mother heard of the

story she might smile one of her smiles.

Tar thought he would be all right if only Robert would keep still. If

Robert would not get too excited and just because, temporarily, he

thought Tar a hero, would not talk too much.

As for John--there was a good deal of the mother in him. That he had

seemed to swallow the story as Robert had told it was a comfort to Tar.

CHAPTER VIII

Horses trotting around a race track in an Ohio town on a Sunday morning

in the summer, squirrels running along the top of a worn fence, apples

getting ripe in orchards.

Some of the Moorehead children went to Sunday School on Sundays, others

did not. When Tar had a clean suit of Sunday clothes he sometimes went.

The teacher talked of how David slew Goliath and of how Jonah fled from

the Lord and concealed himself in a ship bound for Tarshish.

What a strange place that must be, that Tarshish. Words making pictures

in Tar’s head. The teacher had said little enough about Tarshish. That

was a mistake. Thinking of Tarshish Tar couldn’t pay attention to the

rest of the lesson. If his father had been teaching the class he might

have spread himself about the town, or country, or whatever it was. Why

had Jonah wanted to go to Tarshish? Just at that time a passion for

race horses had taken possession of Tar. He saw in fancy a wild place

of yellow sand and bushes--wind swept. Men were racing horses at the

edge of the sea. He may have got the notion out of a picture book. Most

places that are any fun are wicked places. Jonah was fleeing from the

Lord. Maybe Tarshish was the name of a race course. It would be a good

name.

The Mooreheads never owned any horses and cows but there were horses

pastured in a field near the Moorehead house.

A horse had funny thick lips. When Tar held an apple in his hand and

put his hand through the fence the lips of the horse closed over the

apple so gently he hardly felt anything at all.

Yes, he did. The funny hairy thick lips of the horse tickled the inside

of the hand.

Animals were funny creatures but so were people. Tar spoke to his

friend Jim Moore on the subject of dogs. “A strange dog, if you run

from him and are afraid, will take after you and act as though he was

going to eat you up, but if you stand still and look him right in the

eye he won’t do anything. No animal can stand the steady penetrating

gaze of the human eye.” Some people have a more penetrating gaze than

others. It’s a good thing to have.

A boy at school had told Tar that when a strange fierce dog took after

you the best thing to do was to turn your back, stoop down and look at

the dog through your legs. Tar never tried it, but when he grew to be a

man he read the same thing in an old book. Boys were telling other boys

that same tale on the way to school in the time of the old Norse Sagas.

Tar asked Jim if he had ever tried it. They both agreed they would some

time. It would be a ridiculous position to be caught in though, if it

did not work. It would sure be a cinch for the dog.

A better scheme is to pretend to pick up stones. There are hardly ever

any good stones around when a fierce dog gets after you, but a dog

is easily bluffed. It’s better to pretend to pick up a stone than to

actually pick up one. If you throw your stone and miss, where are you?

You’ve got to get used to people in towns. Some are one way, some

another. Older people act so strangely.

When Tar was sick that time there was an old man, a doctor, who used

to come to the house. He had a good deal to do with straightening the

Mooreheads out. What was wrong with Mary Moorehead was that she was

almost too good.

If you are too good you think--“Well now, I’ll be patient and kind.

I won’t scold, whatever happens.” In the saloon sometimes, when Dick

Moorehead was spending money he should have taken home, he heard other

men speaking of their wives. Most men are afraid of their wives.

The men used to say things. “I don’t want the old woman on my neck.”

That was just a way of speaking. Women don’t really get on men’s necks.

A panther, when he is after a deer, jumps on her neck and pins her to

earth, but that wasn’t what the man in the saloon meant. He meant he

would get Hail Columbia when he got home and Dick hardly ever did get

Hail Columbia. Doctor Reefy said he should get it more often. Maybe he

gave it to Dick himself. He might have given Mary Moorehead a stiff

talking to. Tar never heard any of it. He might have said, “Look here,

woman, that husband of yours needs to have the gaff put to him now and

then.”

In the Moorehead house things changed, got better. Not that Dick became

good. No one expected that.

Dick stayed more at home, brought more of his money home. Neighbors

came in more. Dick could tell his war stories on the front porch in

the presence of some neighbor man, a drayman, a man who was section

boss on the Wheeling Railroad, and the children could sit and listen.

Tar’s mother had a way she always kept, of knocking the props out from

under people sometimes with little side remarks, but she held herself

back more and more. There are some people that, when they smile, make

the whole world smile. When they freeze up every one around freezes up.

Robert Moorehead got to be a good deal like his mother when he grew

older. John and Will were the steady ones. The youngest one of all,

little Joe Moorehead, was to be the artist of the family. Later he was

what people call a genius and had a hard time making a living.

After his childhood was over, and after she had died, Tar thought his

mother must have been smart. He was in love with her all his life. This

trick of thinking some one is perfect does not give them much chance.

Tar always, after he grew up, let his father alone--just as he was. He

enjoyed thinking of him as a lovable improvident fellow. It may even

have been that he afterwards attributed to Dick a lot of sins he never

committed. Dick wouldn’t have objected. “Well, take some notice of

me. If you can’t figure me out to be good, figure me out to be bad.

Whatever you do, pay me some attention.” Something of that sort Dick

would have felt. Tar was always a good deal like Dick. He liked the

notion of being always in the limelight and hated it too.

It may be that you are most likely to love some one you can’t possibly

be like. After Doctor Reefy began coming to the Moorehead house Mary

Moorehead changed but not so much. She went to the children’s room

after they had gone to bed and kissed them all.

She was like a young girl about it, did not seem able to caress them in

the daylight. None of her children ever saw her kiss Dick and the sight

would have startled them--shocked them a little.

If you have a mother like Mary Moorehead and she is lovely to look

at--or you think she is, which is the same thing--and she dies when

you are young, what you do all your life afterwards is to use her as

material for dreams. It is unfair to her but you do it.

Very likely you make her sweeter than she was, kinder than she was,

wiser than she was. What’s the harm?

You are always wanting some one almost perfect to think about because

you know you can’t be that way yourself. If you ever do try you give up

after a time.

Little Fern Moorehead died when she was three weeks old. Tar was sick

in bed that time, too. After that night when Joe was born he had a

fever. Then he wasn’t much good for another year. That was what brought

Doctor Reefy to the house. He was the only man Tar ever knew who talked

up to his mother. He made her cry. The Doctor had big funny-looking

hands. He looked like pictures of Abraham Lincoln.

When Fern died Tar did not even have a chance to go to the funeral but

he did not mind, was, in fact, glad. “If you have to die it’s too bad

but the fuss people make is awful. It makes everything so public and

kind of terrible.”

Tar escaped it all. It would be the kind of time when Dick would be at

his worst and Dick at his worst would be pretty bad.

By being sick Tar missed everything and his sister Margaret had to stay

at home with him and she missed it too. A boy always gets the best side

of girls and women when he is sick. “It’s their chief time,” thought

Tar. He thought about it sometimes in bed. “That may be why men and

boys are always getting sick.”

When Tar was sick and had a fever he was out of his head a part of the

time and all he ever knew of his sister Fern was a sound sometimes at

night in the next room, a sound something like a tree toad. It got into

the dreams of his fever time and stayed in his dreams.

Afterwards he thought Fern was more real to him than any of the others.

Even when he grew to be a man Tar used to walk along the street

sometimes thinking of her. He would be walking and talking with some

other man and there she would be, just ahead of him. He saw her in

every lovely gesture other women made. If, when he was a young man and

very susceptible to women’s charms, he said to some woman, “You make

me think of my sister Fern who died,” it was the finest compliment he

could pay but the woman did not seem to appreciate it. Pretty women

want to stand on their own feet. They do not want to remind you of any

one.

If a child in the family dies and you knew the child alive you always

think of him as he was when he died. A child dies in spasms. It is

terrible to think about.

But if you have never seen the child.

Tar could think of Fern as fourteen when he was fourteen. He could

think of her as forty when he was forty.

Imagine Tar as a grown man. He has had a quarrel with his wife and goes

out of the house in a huff. Time now to think of Fern. She is a grown

woman. A little, now, he has got her confused in his mind with the

figure of his dead mother.

When he grew older--up around forty--Tar always fancied Fern as about

eighteen. Older men like the notion of some woman about eighteen with

the wisdom of forty and the physical beauty and sweetness of girlhood.

They like to think of such a one as attached to them with iron bands.

It’s the way older men are.

CHAPTER IX

Ohio in the spring or summer, race horses trotting on a race track,

corn growing in fields, little streams in narrow valleys, men going out

in the spring to plow. In the fall, the nuts getting ripe in the woods

about an Ohio town. Over in Europe they clean everything up. They have

a lot of people and not too much land. When he grew to be a man Tar saw

Europe and liked it, but all the time he was there he had an American

hunger and it wasn’t a Star Spangled Banner hunger either.

What he hungered for was waste places, roominess. He wanted to see

weeds growing, neglected old orchards, empty haunted houses.

An old worm fence where the elders and berries grow wild wastes a lot

of land a barbed wire fence saves, but it is nice. It’s a place for

a boy to crawl under and hide for a while. A man, if he is any good,

never gets over being a boy.

In the woods about Middle-Western towns in Tar’s time, a world of waste

places. From the top of the hill where the Mooreheads lived, after

Tar got well and began to go to school, you only had to walk across a

cornfield and a meadow, where the Shepards kept their cow, to get to

the woods along Squirrel Creek. John was selling papers and was pretty

busy, so maybe he couldn’t go along and Robert was too young.

Jim Moore lived down the road in a white, freshly-painted house and

could nearly always get away. The other boys at school called him

“Pee-Wee Moore,” but Tar didn’t. Jim was a year older and was pretty

strong, but that wasn’t the only reason. Tar and Jim went through the

standing corn, they went across the meadow.

If Jim could not go it was all right.

What Tar did when he went alone was to imagine things. His imagination

made him afraid sometimes, it made him glad and happy sometimes.

The corn, when it grew high, was like a forest down under which there

was always a strange soft light. It was hot down under the corn and

made Tar sweat. At night his mother made him wash his feet and hands

before he went to bed, so he got as dirty as he wanted to. There was

nothing saved by keeping clean.

Sometimes he sprawled on the ground and lay for a long time sweating

and watching the ants and bugs on the ground under the corn.

Ants, grasshoppers and bugs in general had a world of their own, birds

had their world, wild animals and tame animals had their worlds. What

does a pig think? Tame ducks in some one’s yard are the funniest things

in the world. They are scattered around and one of them makes a honking

sound and they all begin to run. The back part of a duck wobbles up and

down when he runs. Their flat feet go pitter-patter, pitter-patter, the

funniest sound. And then they all get together and there isn’t anything

special going on. They stand looking at each other. “Well, what were

you honking for? What’d you call us for, you fool?”

In the woods along a creek in a wasteful country, logs lie about

rotting. There is first a cleared place and then a place so filled with

brush and berry bushes, you can’t see into it. It makes a good kind of

place for rabbits--or snakes.

In a woods like that there are paths everywhere, leading just nowhere.

You sit on a log. If there is a rabbit in the pile of brush in front,

what do you suppose he is thinking about? He sees you and you can’t

see him. If there is a man and a woman rabbit, what are they saying to

each other? Do you suppose a man rabbit ever gets a little lit up and

comes home to sit around bragging to the neighbors about when he was

in the army, the neighbors having been only privates while he was a

captain? If the man rabbit does that he certainly talks pretty low. You

can’t hear a word he says.

CHAPTER X

Tar had got, through Doctor Reefy, who came to the house when he was

ill, a man friend. His name was Tom Whitehead and he was fat and

forty-two and owned race horses and a farm and had a fat wife and no

children.

He was a friend of Doctor Reefy who also had no children. The Doctor

had married, when he was past forty, a young woman of twenty, but she

only lived for a year. After his wife’s death and when he was not at

work, the Doctor went around with Tom Whitehead, with an old tree

nurseryman named John Spaniard, with Judge Blair and with a young

dudish fellow who got drunk a lot but who said funny, sarcastic things.

The young man was the son of a United States Senator, now dead, and had

been left some money every one said he was fooling away as fast as he

could.

All of the men who were the Doctor’s friends had taken a sudden fancy

for the Moorehead children and the race-horse man seemed to have picked

out Tar.

The others helped John make money and gave presents to Margaret and

Robert. The Doctor did it all. He managed everything without any fuss.

What happened to Tar was that in the late afternoons or on Saturdays

or sometimes on Sundays, Tom Whitehead drove along the road past the

Moorehead place and stopped for him.

He was in a jogging cart and Tar sat on his knees.

First they went along a dusty road, past waterworks pond, then up a

little hill and in at the fair ground gate. Tom Whitehead had a stable

over near the fair ground and a house near it, but it was more fun to

go to the race track itself.

Not many boys had such chances, Tar thought. John didn’t because he had

to work so much and Jim Moore didn’t. Jim lived alone with his mother,

who was a widow and she fussed over him a lot. When he went anywhere

with Tar his mother gave a lot of directions. “Now it’s early in the

spring and the ground is damp. Don’t sit on the ground.

“No, you can’t go in swimming, not yet. I don’t want you little fellows

to be going in swimming when there are no older people about. You

might get cramps. Don’t go into the woods. There are always hunters

around shooting off guns. I read in the paper only last week where a

boy got killed.”

Better to get killed right out than be fussed at all the time. If

you’ve got such a mother, the loving fussy kind, you’ve got to stand

for it but it’s tough luck. A good thing Mary Moorehead had so many

children. It kept her busy. She could not be thinking up a lot of

things for a boy not to do.

Jim and Tar had talked it over. The Moores had some money. Mrs. Moore

owned a farm. In some ways it is fine to be the only child a woman has

but on the whole you lose by it. “It’s the same way with a hen and

chicks,” Tar said to Jim and Jim agreed. Jim did not know how it hurts

sometimes--when you want your mother to fuss over you and she is so

busy with one of the other kids she can’t pay you any attention.

Not many boys had the chance Tar had after Tom Whitehead took him up.

After Tom called for him a few times he did not wait to be asked but

went almost every day. If he went to the stables there were always men

sitting around. Tom had a farm in the country where he raised some

colts and others he bought as yearlings at the Cleveland sale in the

spring. At such a sale other men who raise racing colts bring them in

and they are sold at auction. You stand around and bid. That’s where a

good horse eye comes in.

You buy a colt that hasn’t had any training, or two or four or maybe

a dozen colts. Some will turn out corkers and some will be dubs. As

good an eye as Tom Whitehead had, and he was known to horsemen all

over the state, he made a lot of mistakes. When a colt turned out no

good he said to the men sitting around, “I’m slipping. I thought that

bay was all right. He has good blood in him but he won’t ever go fast.

He hasn’t got that little extra something. It ain’t in him. I guess I

better go to an eye doctor and get my eyes fixed up. Maybe I’m getting

old and a little blind.”

It was good fun over at the Whitehead stables but better fun at the

fairground tracks where Tom trained his colts. At the stables Doctor

Reefy came and sat around, Will Truesdale, the young swell who was good

to Margaret and gave her presents, came, Judge Blair came.

A lot of men sitting and talking--always of horses. There was a bench

along the front. Neighbor women told Mary Moorehead she shouldn’t

let her boy keep such company but she went right on. Many times Tar

couldn’t understand the talk. The men were always making little

sarcastic cracks at each other, like his mother did sometimes to people.

The men talked of religion and politics and whether or not a man has a

soul and a horse hasn’t. Some of the men held to one set of opinions,

some to another. The best thing, Tar thought, was to go back into the

stable itself.

There was a board floor and a long row of box stalls on each side and

in the front of each stall there was an opening with iron bars so he

could look through but the horse inside could not get out. A good

thing, too. Tar walked along slow, looking in.

“Fassig’s Irish Maid; Old Hundred; Tipton Ten; Willing-to-Please; Saul,

The First; Passenger Boy; Holy Mackerel.”

The names were on little tickets fastened on the front of the stalls.

Passenger Boy was as black as a black cat and went like a cat when he

was going fast. One of the stablemen, Henry Bardshare, said he would

kick the crown off a king’s head if he got a chance. “Say, he’d kick

the stars out of the flag, he’d kick the beard off your face. When he

gets through racing I’m going to set him up for a barber.”

On the bench in front of the stable, on summer afternoons when there

weren’t any horses being worked at the track, the men talked--sometimes

of women, sometimes of why God lets certain things happen, sometimes of

why is a farmer always growling. Tar soon grew tired of the talk. There

was too much talk in his head already, he thought.

CHAPTER XI

At the track in the morning, what a difference. Now the horses held the

stage. Passenger Boy was out and Old Hundred and Holy Mackerel. Tom was

tooling Passenger Boy himself. He and Holy Mackerel, a gelding, and a

three-year-old Tom reckoned was the fastest thing he had, were going to

do a mile together after they got warmed up.

Passenger Boy was old, fourteen years old, but you would never have

guessed it. He had a funny cat-like way of going--smooth and low and

fast when it did not look fast.

Tar went over to where there were some trees in the center of the

track. Sometimes, when Tom didn’t come for him and paid no attention,

he went along afoot and got there early in the morning. If he had to go

without breakfast, it was all right. You wait around for breakfast and

what happens? Your sister Margaret says, “Get some wood in, Tar, get

some water, mind the house while I go to the store.”

Old horses like Passenger Boy are like some old men Tar knew long

afterwards, when he was a man. You’ve got to warm the old ones up

a lot--prod ’em--but when they get going the right kind--boy, look

out. What you’ve got to do is heat them up. At the stables Tar once

heard young Bill Truesdale say that a lot of men, of what he called

antiquity, were the same way. “Look at King David, now. They had a lot

of trouble trying to heat him up at the last.” Men and horses don’t

change much.

Will Truesdale was always talking of antiquity. People said he was a

born scholar but he got soused about three times a week. He claimed

there was plenty of precedent for it. “A lot of the smartest men the

world ever knew could have put me under the table. I haven’t got the

stomach they had.”

That kind of talk, half in fun, half serious, at the stables where the

men sat around, but over at the track mostly silence. When a good horse

is going fast even a talky man can’t talk much.

Out in the very center, inside the oval track, there was a big tree, an

oak, and when you sat under it and edged slowly around you could see a

horse every step of the mile.

Tar went over there once in the early morning and sat down. It was

a Sunday morning and that, he thought, was a good time to go. If he

stayed at home Margaret would say, “You might as well go to Sunday

School.” Margaret wanted Tar to learn everything. She was ambitious for

him but you learn things at the tracks, too.

“On Sunday, when you dress up, your mother has to wash your shirt

afterwards. You can’t help getting it dirty. She has enough to do as it

is.”

When Tar got to the tracks early, Tom and his men and the horses were

already there. One by one they brought the horses out. Some they worked

fast, others they just jogged for miles and miles. That was to harden

up their legs.

Then Passenger Boy came, a little stiff at first, but after they had

jogged him a long time, getting more and more into that easy cat-like

way of going. Holy Mackerel went high and proud. The trouble with him

was that when he was in his speed he would, if you weren’t mighty

careful and pressed him a little too much, break and spoil everything.

Now Tar had got it all down fine, the words of racing, the slang. He

loved to say over horses’ names, racing words, horse words.

When he sat that way, alone over under the tree, he kept talking to the

horses in a low voice. “Easy, boy, now, now ... get along there now ...

hi, boy ... hi, boy ... hi, boy ... hi, boy ... hi, boy” ... pretending

he was driving.

The “hi boy” came when you wanted a horse to flatten himself out into

his stride.

If you aren’t a man yet and can’t do what men do you can have almost as

much fun pretending you are doing it ... if there isn’t any one around

looking and listening.

Tar watched the horses, he indulged in dreams of some day being a

horseman. On the Sunday when he went to the tracks something happened.

When he got there, in the early morning light, it began a gray day, as

so many Sundays are, and it rained a little. At first he thought the

rain might spoil the fun, but it didn’t last long. The rain only laid

the dust on the track.

Tar had come away from home without his breakfast, but as it was

getting late summer and soon Tom would be sending some of his horses

to the races, some of his men were living at the tracks, keeping the

horses over there and eating there themselves.

They cooked out of doors and had a little fire. After the rain the day

half cleared, making a soft light.

On the Sunday morning Tom saw Tar coming in at the fairground gate

and calling to him, gave him some fried bacon and bread. How good it

tasted, better out of doors that way--than anything Tar could ever get

at home. Maybe his mother had told Tom Whitehead how he was so crazy

about being at the tracks that he often left home without his breakfast.

After he gave Tar the bacon and bread--Tar made into a sandwich--Tom

did not pay any more attention to him. It was just as well. Tar did not

want attention, not that day. There are certain days when if every one

leaves you alone it just suits. They don’t come often in a life. For

some the best day is when they marry, for some when they get rich, have

a lot of money left them or something like that.

Anyway there are days that just seem to go high and fine, like Holy

Mackerel when he doesn’t break in the stretch, or like old Passenger

Boy when he finally gets into that soft cat-like stride of his. Such

days are as rare as ripe apples on a tree in the winter.

As soon as he had bolted the bacon and bread Tar went over to the tree

where he could look all around the track. The grass was wet going over,

but it was dry under the tree.

He was glad Jim Moore wasn’t along, glad his brother John, or Robert,

wasn’t there.

Well, he wanted to be alone, that was all.

He made up his mind early in the morning he wasn’t going home all day,

not till night.

He lay on the ground under the oak tree and watched the horses work.

When Holy Mackerel and Passenger Boy got down to business, Tom

Whitehead standing over by the judges’ stand with a stop watch in his

hand and letting a lighter man drive, it was exciting, of course. A lot

of people think it’s great when one horse nips the other right at the

wire but if you are any horseman you ought to know pretty well which

horse is likely to do the nipping. It isn’t settled at the wire but

probably over on the back stretch where there isn’t any one to see. Tar

knew that was true because he had heard Tom Whitehead say so. It was a

shame Tom was so fat and heavy. He would have been as good a driver as

Pop Geers or Walter Cox if he hadn’t been so fat.

It is settled on the back stretch which horse is which, because back

there one horse says to another, “Come on, you big mutt, let’s see what

you’ve got.” Races are won by the little extra something that you’ve

got or you haven’t.

What happens is that these wire-nippers always get in the papers and

stories. A newspaper writer likes that stuff, “nipped at the wire, the

wind sobbing through the mighty lungs,” you know. Newspaper men like it

and the crowd at the races likes it. Tar reckoned sometimes that, had

he been a driver, his Dad would have been that kind and maybe he would

himself, but the thought made him ashamed.

And then sometimes a man like Tom Whitehead says to one of his drivers,

“You let Holy Mackerel get down in front. Take old Passenger Boy back a

little up there at the head of the stretch. Then let him come on.”

You get the idea. It doesn’t mean Passenger Boy couldn’t have won. It

means he couldn’t win, given the handicap he had, being taken back that

way. It was to give Holy Mackerel the habit of landing in front. Old

Passenger Boy maybe didn’t care quite so much. He knew he’d get his

oats all right anyway. If you’ve been down in front a lot of times and

heard the cheering and all that, what do you care?

If you know a lot about racing or anything, it takes something out of

it, but you gain something too. It’s all bunk winning anything if you

don’t win it right. “There’s about three people in Ohio know that and

four of them are dead,” Tar once heard Will Truesdale say. Tar did not

quite know what it meant and yet he did know, in a way.

The point is that the way a horse moves is something in itself.

Anyway, on the Sunday morning, Holy Mackerel won, after Passenger Boy

had been taken back at the head of the stretch, and Tar saw the taking

back and then the way Passenger Boy ate up the space between and almost

made Holy Mackerel break at the critical moment. He might have broken

had Charlie Friedly, driving Passenger Boy, given a certain kind of a

whoop at the right moment, as he would have done in a race.

He saw that and the movements of the horses all around the track.

Then some other horses, colts mostly, worked out and noon came and

afternoon and Tar did not move.

He felt all right. It was just a day when he did not want to see any

one.

After the horsemen got through their work he did not go back over

to where the men were. Some of them went away. They were Irish and

Catholics and could maybe get to a mass.

Tar was lying on his back under the oak. Any one in the world any good

has had such a day. Such days make a person wonder, when they come, why

they are so scarce.

It may have been just a feeling of peace. Tar was lying on his back

under the tree looking up at the sky. Birds flew overhead. Now and then

a bird landed in the tree. For a time he could hear the voices of the

men at work with the horses but could not make out any words.

“Well, a big tree is something in itself. A tree can laugh sometimes,

smile sometimes, frown sometimes. Suppose you are a big tree and a long

dry time comes. A big tree must need a lot to drink. There isn’t any

worse feeling than being thirsty and knowing you can’t get anything to

drink.

“A tree is something, and grass is something else. Some days you aren’t

hungry at all. Put food before you and you don’t even want it. If a

mother sees you just sitting around and sitting around and not saying

anything, it’s likely as not the first thing she thinks of is food.

‘You’d better eat something.’ Jim Moore’s mother is like that. She’s

stuffed him until he is so fat he can’t hardly climb a fence.”

Tar stayed for a long time under the tree and then he heard a sound far

off, a low humming sound that occasionally grew louder and then died

down again.

What a funny sound for Sunday!

Tar thought he knew what it was and presently got up and walked slowly

across the field, climbed a fence, crossed the tracks and then climbed

another fence. When he crossed the tracks he looked up and down. When

he stood on the tracks he always wished he was a horse, young like Holy

Mackerel and full of wisdom and speed and meanness like Passenger Boy.

Tar had got outside the racetrack now. He crossed a stumpy field and

climbed a wire fence and got into a road.

It wasn’t a big road but a little back country road. Such roads have

deep ruts in them and often rocks sticking up.

And now he had got quite out of town. The sound he had heard grew a

little louder. He passed farmhouses, went through a wood, climbed a

hill. Presently he saw it. It was what he had thought. Some men were

threshing grain in a field.

What the deuce! On Sunday!

“They must be some foreigners, like Germans or something. They can’t be

very civilized.”

It wasn’t anywhere Tar had ever been and he knew none of the men, but

he climbed a fence and went toward them.

The stack of wheat was on a hill near a wood. As he got nearer he went

more slowly.

Well, there were a lot of country boys, about his own age, standing

around. Some were all dressed up, for Sunday, some were in their

every-day clothes. They were all strangers. The men were strangers.

Tar went past the machine and the engine and sat down under a tree by

a fence. There was a large old man with a gray beard sitting there

smoking a pipe.

Tar sat near him, staring at him, staring at the men at work, staring

at the country boys of his own age, standing about.

What a queer feeling he had. You’ve had such a feeling. You are walking

in a street you’ve been in a thousand times, and suddenly it is all

different. Wherever you go people are doing something. On certain days

whatever they are doing is full of interest. If they aren’t working out

colts on a race track they are threshing wheat.

You would be surprised how the wheat runs out of a threshing machine,

like a river. Wheat is ground up into flour and made into bread. A

field that isn’t very big and that you can walk across in no time will

produce bushels of wheat.

When men are at work threshing wheat they are like they are when they

train colts for the races. They make funny remarks. They work like the

very deuce for a while and then lay off and maybe wrestle around.

Tar saw one young man, at work on the top of the stack of wheat, push

another to the ground. Then he crawled back up and the two put down

their forks and began to wrestle. There was a man on an elevated

platform feeding the wheat into the separator, and he began to dance.

He took a bundle of the wheat in his hands, shook it in the air, made

a motion like a bird trying to fly that can’t fly, and then began to

dance again.

The two men on the stack wrestled as hard as they could, laughing all

the time, and the old man by the fence near Tar growled at them, but

you could tell he did not mean what he said.

The whole job of threshing came to a stop. All were intent on watching

the struggle on the stack until one fellow had thrown the other to the

ground.

Some women came along a lane bearing baskets and all the men went away

from the machine to sit by the fence. It was in the middle of the

afternoon but in the country when threshing is going on, people do like

that. They eat and eat, just any time. Tar had heard his father talk of

it. Dick liked to be painting a house in the country when the threshers

came. Lots of people served wine then--some they had made themselves. A

good German farmer was best. “It takes the Germans to eat and drink,”

Dick often said. It was funny Dick wasn’t fat, the way he could eat

when he was away from home and could get it.

When the people of the farm, the visiting threshers and the neighbors

who had come to help, were all sitting by the fence eating and

drinking, they kept offering Tar some but he would not take it. Why,

he did not know. It wasn’t because it was Sunday and it seemed strange

to see people at work. It was a queer day for him, a dumb day. One

of the farm boys of about his own age came to sit near him, holding

a large sandwich in his hand. Tar had taken nothing to eat since

breakfast at the track and that was early, about six o’clock. They

always work the horses as early as they can. It was now well past four

in the afternoon.

Tar and the strange boy sat by an old stump that was hollow and a

spider had built his web in it. A large ant crawled up the farm boy’s

leg and when he knocked it off it fell in the web. It struggled

furiously. If you looked close at the web you could see, away back in a

kind of cone-like place, the old fat spider looking out.

Tar and the strange boy looked at the spider, they looked at the

struggling ant, they looked at each other. It’s queer that on some days

you can’t talk to save you. “He’s a goner,” the farm boy said, pointing

at the struggling ant. “You bet,” Tar said.

The men went back to work and the boy disappeared. The old man who had

been sitting by the fence smoking his pipe went to work. He had left

his matches lying on the ground.

Tar went and got them. He gathered up some loose straw and shoved it

into the front of his shirt. Why he wanted the matches and the straw he

did not know. On some days a boy just likes to touch things. He picks

up stones and carries them when he doesn’t want them at all.

There are days when you like everything and days you don’t. Other

people hardly ever know just how you feel.

Tar went away from the threshers, drifted down along the fence and got

into a meadow below. He could see the farm house now. At a farmhouse,

when there are threshers, a lot of neighbor women come in. More come

than need to come. They cook a lot of food but they fool around a lot,

too. What they like to do is talk. You never heard such a chatter.

It was funny though, their doing it on Sunday.

Tar walked across a meadow and then crossed a creek on a fallen log.

He knew in a general way the direction in which lay the town and the

Moorehead house. What would his mother think of his being gone all day?

Suppose it would turn out like Rip Van Winkle, and he had been gone

for years. Usually when he went off to the race track alone in the

early morning he was back at home by ten. If it was Saturday there were

always a lot of things to do. Saturday was John’s big paper day and Tar

was expected to get busy.

He had to split and bring in wood, get water, go to the store.

Sunday was, after all, a lot better. This one was a queer day for him,

an exceptional day. When an exceptional day comes you’ve got to do just

what comes into your head. If you don’t, everything is spoiled. If you

want to eat, you eat, if you don’t want to eat you don’t. Other people

and what they want don’t count, not for that day.

Tar went up a slight hill and sat by another fence in a wood. When he

came out of the wood he could see the fairground fence and knew that in

ten or fifteen minutes he could get home--if he wanted to go. He didn’t.

What did he want? It was growing late now. He must have been in the

woods at least two hours. How quickly the time went--sometimes.

He went down a hill and came to the creek that led to waterworks pond.

At the pond they had built a dam and backed the water up. There was

an engine house near the pond that put on full steam when there was

a fire in town and that also furnished the town with electric lights.

When it was moonlight they did not turn on the lights. Dick Moorehead

was always grumbling about it. He did not pay any taxes and a man who

doesn’t pay any taxes is always the best grumbler. Dick was always

saying the tax payers ought to furnish the schoolbooks, too. A soldier

serves his country and that makes up for not paying taxes, Dick said.

Tar sometimes wondered what Dick would have done if he hadn’t got the

chance to be a soldier. It had given him so much to grumble about, brag

about, talk about. He had enjoyed being a soldier, too. “It was a life

just made for me. If I had been to West Point I’d have stayed in the

army. If you aren’t a West Point man the others look down on you,” Dick

said.

At the waterworks engine house they had an engine with a wheel twice as

high as your head. It whirled round and round, so fast you could hardly

see the spokes. The engineer never said anything. If you went to the

door and stood looking in he never looked at you. You never saw a man

with so much grease on one pair of pants.

Up the creek, at the place to which Tar had now come, there had been a

house once but it had burned down. There was an old apple orchard, the

trees all let go, so many little shoots growing out of the limbs you

could hardly climb up. The orchard was on the side of a hill that led

right down to the creek. Beside it was a cornfield.

Tar sat down by the creek at the edge of the cornfield and the orchard.

When he had been sitting there a long time a ground hog on the opposite

bank of the creek came out of his hole, stood on his hind legs and

looked at Tar.

Tar did not move. It was a queer notion carrying that straw around

inside his shirt. It tickled.

He took it out and the ground hog disappeared into his hole. It was

growing dusk now. Pretty soon he would have to go home. Sunday was a

funny kind of a day, some people going to church, others staying at

home.

The ones that stayed at home dressed up, anyway.

Tar had been told it was God’s day. He gathered some dry leaves along

the fence by the orchard and then went a little way into the corn. When

corn is almost ripe there are always some outer leaves that have dried

and withered.

“Barren corn makes bitter bread.” Tar heard Will Truesdale say

that one day as he sat with the other men on the bench before Tom

Whitehead’s stable. He wondered what it meant. It was poetry Will was

quoting. It would be nice to be educated like Will, but not a souse,

and to know all the words there are and what they mean. If you put

words together in just a certain way they sound nice even though you

don’t know what they mean. They go well together like some people.

Afterwards you are walking along alone and you say the words to

yourself, liking the sound they make.

Nice sounds at night by an old orchard and a cornfield too, about the

best sound you can hear. The crickets are going it and the frogs and

the grasshoppers.

Tar lit the little pile of leaves, dry corn-leaves and straw. Then he

put some sticks on. The leaves weren’t very dry. There wasn’t a big

quick fire--just a gentle one with white smoke. The smoke curled up

through the branches of one of the old apple trees in the orchard some

man had planted, thinking he would make a home there by the creek. He

had got tired or discouraged, Tar thought, and after his house burned

had moved away. People were always leaving one place and moving to

another.

The smoke went lazily up, into the branches of the trees. When a little

breeze came some of it was blown through the standing corn.

People talked about God. There wasn’t anything very definite in Tar’s

mind. Lots of times you do something--like carrying that straw from the

threshing inside your shirt all afternoon (it tickling you) and you

don’t know why you do it.

There is a lot to think about you never can really think about. If you

talk about God to a boy he gets all mixed up. Once some of the kids

were talking about death and Jim Moore said that when he died he wanted

them to sing at his funeral a song called, “Let’s go to the fair in an

automobile,” and a big boy that was standing near laughed fit to kill.

He didn’t have sense enough to know that Jim did not mean what he said.

He meant he liked the sound. Maybe he heard some one sing that song who

had a nice voice.

A preacher who came to the Mooreheads’ house once and talked a lot

about God and hell scared Tar and made Mary Moorehead mad. What’s the

use getting all worked up?

If you sit at the edge of a cornfield and an orchard and you have a

little fire and it is almost night and there is a cornfield and the

smoke goes up lazy and slow toward the sky and you look up....

Tar waited until the fire had all burned out and then went home.

It was dark when he got there. If your mother has any sense she knows

enough to know that certain days are certain days. If you do what she

doesn’t expect on such a day she never says a word.

Tar’s mother said nothing. When he got home his father had gone away

and so had John. Supper was over but his mother got him some. Margaret

was talking with a neighbor girl in the back yard and Robert was just

sitting around. The baby was asleep.

What Tar did, after he had his supper, was just to sit on the front

porch with his mother. She was sitting near and now and then touched

him with her fingers.

PART III

CHAPTER XII

She was an old woman and lived on a farm near the town in which the

Mooreheads lived. All country and small town people have seen such

old women but no one knows much about them. Such an old woman comes

into town driving an old worn-out horse or she comes afoot, carrying a

basket. She may own a few hens and have eggs to sell. She brings them

in a basket and takes them to a grocer. There she trades them in. She

gets some salt pork and some beans. Then she gets a pound or two of

sugar and some flour.

Afterwards she goes to the butcher and asks for some dog meat. She

might spend ten or fifteen cents but when she does she asks for

something. In Tar’s day the butchers gave liver to any one who wanted

to carry it away. In the Moorehead family they were always having it.

One of Tar’s brothers got a whole cow’s liver out at the slaughter

house near the fair ground. He came staggering home with it and

afterwards the Mooreheads had it until they were sick of it. It never

cost a cent. Tar hated the thought of it all the rest of his life.

The old farm woman got her some liver and a soup bone. She never

visited with any one and as soon as she had got what she wanted lit out

for home. It made quite a load for such an old body. No one gave her a

lift. People drive right down a road and never notice such an old woman.

The old woman used to come into town past the Moorehead house during

the summer and fall when Tar was sick. She went home later carrying a

heavy pack on her back. Two or three large gaunt-looking dogs followed

at her heels.

Well, she was nothing special. She was one of the sort hardly any one

knows, but she got into Tar’s thoughts. Her name was Grimes and she

lived with her husband and son in a small unpainted house on the bank

of a small creek four miles from town.

The husband and son were a tough pair. Although the son was but

twenty-one he had already served a term in jail. It was whispered about

that the woman’s husband stole horses and ran them off to some other

county. Now and then, when a horse turned up missing, the man had also

disappeared. No one ever caught him. Once later, when Tar was loafing

at Tom Whitehead’s barn, the man came there and sat on the bench in

front. Judge Blair and two or three other men were there but not one

spoke to him. He sat for a few minutes and then got up and went away.

When he was leaving he turned and stared at the men. There was a look

of defiance in his eyes. “Well, I have tried to be friendly. You do not

want to talk to me. It has always been so wherever I have gone in this

town. If, some day, one of your fine horses turns up missing, well,

then what?”

He did not say anything actually. “I’d like to bust one of you in the

jaw,” was about what his eyes said. Tar remembered afterwards how the

look in his eyes made the shivers run down his back.

The man belonged to a family that had had money once. His father, John

Grimes, had owned a sawmill when the country was new and had made

money. Then he got to drinking and running after women. When he died

there wasn’t much left.

Jake Grimes blew in the rest. Pretty soon there wasn’t any more lumber

to cut and his land was nearly all gone.

He had got his wife “off” a German farmer, where he went to work one

June day in the wheat harvest. She was a young thing then and scared to

death.

You see the farmer was up to something with the girl who was what is

called a “bound girl”--and his wife had her suspicions. She took it

out on the girl when the man wasn’t around. Then, when the wife had to

go off to town for supplies, the farmer got after her. She told young

Jake that nothing really ever happened but he did not know whether to

believe her or not.

He got her pretty easy himself, the first time he was out with her.

Well, he wouldn’t have married her if the German farmer hadn’t tried to

tell him where to get off. Jake got her to go riding with him in his

buggy one night, when he was threshing on the place, and then he came

for her the next Sunday night.

She managed to get out of the house without her employer’s seeing her

and then, when she was getting into the buggy, he showed up. It was

almost dark and he just popped up suddenly at the horse’s head. He

grabbed the horse by the bridle and Jake got out his buggy whip.

They had it out right there. The German was a tough one. Maybe he

didn’t care whether his wife knew or not. Jake hit him over the face

and shoulders with the buggy whip but the horse got to acting up and he

had to climb out.

Then the two men went at it. The girl didn’t see it. The horse started

to run away and went nearly a mile down the road before the girl got

him stopped. Then she managed to tie him to a tree beside the road. Tar

later knew all about it. It must have stuck in his mind from small town

tales, heard when he loitered about where men talked. Jake found her

after he got through with the German. She was huddled up in the buggy

seat, crying, scared to death. She told Jake a lot of stuff, how the

German had tried to get her, how he chased her once in the barn, how

another time, when they happened to be alone in the house together, he

tore her dress open clear down the front. The German, she said, might

have got her that time if he hadn’t heard his old woman drive in at the

gate. The wife had been off to town for supplies. Well, she would be

putting the horse in the barn. The German managed to sneak off to the

fields without her seeing. He told the girl he would kill her if she

told. What could she do? She told a lie about ripping her dress in the

barn when she was feeding the stock. She was a bound girl and did not

know who or where her father and mother were. Maybe she did not have a

father. The reader will understand.

She married Jake and had a son and a daughter by him but the daughter

died young.

Then the woman settled down to feed stock. That was her job. At the

German’s place she had cooked the food for the German and his wife. The

German’s wife was a strong woman with big hips and worked most of the

time in the fields with her husband. The girl fed them and fed the cows

in the barn, fed the pigs, the horses and the chickens. Every moment of

every day, as a young girl, was spent feeding something.

Then she married Jake Grimes and he had to be fed. She was a slight

thing and when she had been married for three or four years, and after

the two children were born, her slender shoulders became stooped.

Jake always had a lot of big dogs around the house that stood near the

unused old sawmill near the creek. He was always trading horses when he

wasn’t stealing something and had a lot of poor bony ones about. Also

he kept three or four pigs and a cow. They were all pastured in the

few acres left of the Grimes place and Jake did little or nothing.

He went into debt for a threshing outfit and ran that for several years

but it did not pay. People would not trust him. They were afraid he

would steal the grain at night. He had to go a long way off to get work

and it cost too much to get there. In the winter he hunted and cut a

little firewood, to be sold in some nearby town. When his boy grew up

he was just like his father. They got drunk together. If there wasn’t

anything to eat in the house when they came home the old man gave his

old woman a clip over the head. She had a few chickens of her own and

had to kill one of them in a hurry. When they were all killed she would

not have any eggs to sell when she went to town and then what would she

do?

She had to scheme all her life about getting things fed, getting the

pigs fed so they would grow fat and could be butchered in the fall.

When they were butchered her husband took most of the meat off to town

and sold it. If he did not do it first the boy did it. They fought

sometimes and when they fought the old woman stood aside trembling.

She had got the habit of silence anyway--that was fixed. Sometimes,

when she began to look old--she wasn’t forty yet--and when the husband

and son were both gone, off trading horses or drinking or hunting or

stealing, she went around the house and the barnyard muttering to

herself.

How was she going to get everything fed--that was her problem. The

dogs had to be fed. There wasn’t enough hay in the barn for the horses

and the cow. If she did not feed the chickens how could they lay eggs?

Without eggs to sell how could she get things in town, things she had

to have to keep the place going? Thank Heavens she did not have to feed

her husband--in a certain way. That hadn’t lasted long after their

marriage and after the babies came. Where he went on his long trips she

did not know. Sometimes he was gone from home for weeks at a time and

after the boy grew up they went off together.

They left everything at home for her to manage and she had no money.

She knew no one. No one ever talked to her. When it was winter she had

to gather sticks of wood for her fire, had to try to manage to keep

the stock fed with very little grain, very little hay.

The stock in the barn cried to her hungrily, the dogs followed her

about. In the winter the hens laid few enough eggs. They huddled in

corners of the barn and she kept watching them. If a hen lays an egg in

the barn in the winter and you do not find it, it freezes and breaks.

One day in the winter the old woman went off to town with a few eggs

and the dogs followed her. She didn’t get started until nearly three

o’clock and the snow was heavy. She hadn’t been feeling very well

for several days and so she went muttering along, scantily clad, her

shoulders stooped. She had an old grain bag in which she carried her

eggs, tucked away down in the bottom. There weren’t many of them but

in the winter the price of eggs is up. She would get a little meat

in exchange for the eggs, some salt pork, a little sugar, and coffee

perhaps. It might be the butcher would give her a piece of liver.

When she had got to town and was trading in the eggs the dogs lay by

the door outside. She did pretty well, got the things she needed, more

than she had hoped. Then she went to the butcher and he gave her some

liver and some dog meat.

It was the first time any one had spoken to her in a friendly way for

a long time. The butcher was alone in his shop when she went in and

was annoyed by the thought of such a sick-looking old woman out on

such a day. It was bitter cold and the snow, that had let up during

the afternoon, was falling again. The butcher said something about her

husband and her son, swore at them, and the old woman stared at him, a

look of mild surprise in her eyes. He said that if either the husband

or the son was going to get any of the liver or the heavy bones with

scraps of meat hanging to them he had put into the grain bag, he’d see

him starve first.

Starve, eh. Well, things had to be fed. Men had to be fed, and horses

that aren’t any good but maybe can be traded off, and a poor thin cow

that hadn’t given any milk for three months.

Horses, cows, pigs, dogs, men.

The old woman had to get back home before darkness came, if she could.

The dogs followed at her heels, sniffing at the heavy grain bag she had

fastened on her back. When she got to the edge of town she stopped by a

fence and tied the bag to her back with a piece of rope she had carried

in her dress pocket for just that purpose. That was an easier way to

carry it. Her arms ached. It was hard when she had to crawl over fences

and once she fell over and landed in the snow. The dogs went frisking

about. She had to struggle to get to her feet again but she made it.

The point of climbing over the fences was that there was a short cut

over a hill and through a wood. She might have gone around by the road

but it was a mile farther that way. She was afraid she couldn’t make

it. And then besides the stock had to be fed. There was a little hay

left, a little corn. Perhaps her husband and son would bring some home

when they came. They had driven off in the only buggy the Grimes family

had, a rickety thing, a rickety horse hitched to the buggy, two other

rickety horses led by halters. They were going to trade horses, get a

little money if they could. They might come home drunk. It would be

well to have something in the house when they got back.

The son had an affair on with a woman at the county-seat, fifteen miles

away. She was a bad woman, a tough one. Once, in the summer, the son

had brought her to the house. Both she and the son had been drinking.

Jake Grimes was away and the son and his woman ordered the old woman

about like a servant. She did not mind much, was used to it. Whatever

happened she never said anything. That was her way of getting along.

She had managed that way when she was a young girl at the German’s and

ever since she had married Jake. That time her son brought his woman to

the house they stayed all night, sleeping together just as though they

were married. It hadn’t shocked the old woman, not much. She had got

past being shocked early in life.

With the pack on her back she went painfully along across an open

field, wading in the deep snow, and got into the wood. She had to go up

a little hill. There wasn’t so much snow in the woods.

There was a path but it was hard to follow. Just beyond the top of the

hill, where the wood was thickest, there was a small clearing. Had some

one once thought of building a house there? The clearing was as large

as a building lot in town, large enough for a house and a garden. The

path ran along the side of the clearing and when she got there the old

woman sat down to rest at the foot of a tree.

It was a foolish thing to do. When she got herself placed, the pack

against the tree trunk, it was nice but what about getting up again?

She worried about that for a moment and then closed her eyes.

She must have slept for a time. When you are about so cold you can’t

get any colder. The afternoon grew a little warmer and the snow came

thicker than ever. Then after a time the weather cleared. The moon even

came out.

There were four Grimes dogs that had followed Mrs. Grimes into town,

all tall gaunt fellows. Such men as Jake Grimes and his son always keep

just such dogs. They kick and abuse them but they stay. The Grimes

dogs, in order to keep from starving, had to do a lot of foraging for

themselves and they had been at it while the old woman slept with her

back to the tree at the side of the clearing. They had been chasing

rabbits in the woods and in adjoining fields and in their ranging had

picked up three other farm dogs.

All the dogs came back to the clearing after a time. They were excited

about something. Such nights, cold and clear and with a moon, do things

to dogs. It may be that some old instinct, come down from the time when

they were wolves and ranged the woods in packs on winter nights, comes

back into them.

The dogs in the clearing, before the old woman, had caught two or three

rabbits and their immediate hunger had been satisfied. They began to

play, running in circles in the clearing. Round and round they ran,

each dog’s nose at the tail of the next dog. In the clearing, under

the snow-laden trees and under the wintry moon, they made a strange

picture, running thus silently in a circle their running had beaten in

the soft snow. The dogs made no sound. They ran and ran in the circle.

It may have been that the old woman saw them doing that before she

died. She may have awakened once or twice and looked at the strange

sight with dim old eyes.

She would not be very cold now, just drowsy. Life hangs on a long time.

Perhaps the old woman was out of her head. She may have dreamed of

her girlhood at the German’s and before that when she was a child and

before her mother lit out and left her.

Her dreams couldn’t have been very pleasant. Not many pleasant things

had happened to her. Now and then one of the Grimes dogs left the

running circle and came to stand before her. The dog thrust his face

close to hers. His red tongue was hanging out.

The running of the dogs may have been a kind of death ceremony. It may

have been that the primitive instinct of the wolf having been aroused

in the dogs by the night and the running, they were afraid.

“Now we are no longer wolves. We are dogs, the servants of men. Keep

alive, man. When man dies we become wolves again.”

When one of the dogs came to where the old woman sat with her back

against the tree and had thrust his nose close to her face he seemed

satisfied and went back to run with the pack. All the Grimes dogs did

it at some time, during the evening, before she died. Tar Moorehead

knew all about it, afterwards, when he grew to be a man, because once

in a wood on another winter night he saw a pack of dogs act just that

way. The dogs were waiting for him to die as they had waited for the

old woman that night when he was a child. When it happened to him he

was a young man and had no intention of dying.

The old woman died softly and quietly. When she was dead and when one

of the Grimes dogs had come to her and had found her dead all the dogs

stopped running.

They gathered about her.

Well, she was dead now. She had fed the Grimes dogs when she was alive,

what about now?

There was the pack on her back, the grain bag containing the piece

of salt pork, the liver the butcher had given her, the dog meat, the

soup bones. The butcher in town, having been suddenly overcome with a

feeling of pity, had loaded her grain bag heavily. It had been a big

haul for the old woman.

A big haul for the dogs now.

One of the Grimes dogs sprang suddenly out from among the others and

began worrying the pack on the old woman’s back. Had the dogs really

been wolves that one would have been the leader of the pack. What he

did all the others did.

All of them sank their teeth into the grain bag the old woman had

fastened with ropes to her back.

They dragged the old woman’s body out into the open clearing. The

worn-out old dress was quickly torn from her shoulders. When she was

found, a day or two later, the dress had been torn from her body clear

to the hips but the dogs had not touched the body. They had got the

meat out of the grain bag, that was all. Her body was frozen stiff when

it was found and the shoulders were so narrow and the body so slight

that in death it looked like the body of a young girl.

* * * * *

Such things happening in towns of the Middle West, on farms near town,

when Tar Moorehead was a child. A hunter out after rabbits found the

old woman’s body and did not touch it. Something, the beaten path in

the little snow covered clearing, the silence of the place, the place

where the dogs had worried the body trying to pull the grain bag away

or tear it open--something startled the man and he hurried off to town.

Tar was on Main Street with his brother John who was taking the

afternoon papers to the stores. It was almost night.

The hunter came into a grocery and told his story. Then he went to

a hardware shop and into a drug store. Men began to gather on the

sidewalks. Then they started out along the road to the place in the

wood.

Of course John Moorehead should have gone on about his business of

distributing papers, but he didn’t. Every one was going to the woods.

The undertaker went and the town marshal. Several men got on a dray and

rode out to where the path left the road, but the horses weren’t very

sharply shod and slid about on the slippery roads. They made no better

time than those who walked.

The town marshal was a large man whose leg had been injured in the

Civil War. He carried a heavy cane and limped rapidly along the road.

John and Tar Moorehead followed at his heels and as they went, other

boys and men joined the crowd.

It had grown dark by the time they got to where the old woman had

turned out of the road but the moon had come out. The marshal was

thinking there might have been a murder. He kept asking the hunter

questions. The hunter went along with his gun across his shoulder, a

dog following at his heels. It isn’t often a rabbit hunter has a chance

to be so conspicuous. He was taking full advantage of it, leading the

procession with the town marshal. “I did not see any wounds. She was a

young girl. Her face was buried in the snow. No, I didn’t know her.” As

a matter of fact, the hunter had not looked closely at the body. He

had been frightened. She might have been murdered and some one might

spring out from behind a tree and murder him. In a woods, in the late

afternoon, when the trees are all bare and there is white snow on the

ground, when all is silent, something creepy steals over the body. If

something strange or uncanny has happened in the neighborhood, all you

think about is getting away from there as fast as you can.

The crowd of men and boys had got to where the old woman had crossed

the field and went, following the marshal and the hunter, up the slight

incline and into the woods.

John and Tar Moorehead were both silent. John had his bundle of papers

in a bag slung across his shoulder. When he got back to town he would

have to go on distributing his papers before he went home to supper. If

Tar went with him, as John had no doubt already determined he should,

they would both be late. Either Tar’s mother or his sister would have

to warm their supper.

Well, they would have something to tell. A boy did not get such a

chance often. It was lucky they just happened to be in the grocery when

the hunter came in. The hunter was a country fellow. Neither of the

boys had ever seen him before.

Now the crowd of men and boys had got to the clearing. Darkness comes

quickly on such winter nights but the full moon made everything clear.

The two Moorehead boys stood near the tree, beneath which the old woman

had died.

She did not look old, lying there frozen--in that light. One of the men

turned her over in the snow and Tar saw everything. His body trembled

and so did his brother’s. It might have been the cold.

Neither of them had ever before seen a woman’s body. It may have been

the snow, clinging to the frozen flesh, that made it look so white, so

like marble. No woman had come with the party from town, but one of the

men, he was the town blacksmith, took off his overcoat and spread it

over her. Then he gathered her into his arms and started off to town,

all the others following silently. At that time no one knew who she was.

Tar had seen everything, had seen the round track in the snow, like a

miniature race track, where the dogs had run, had seen how the men were

mystified, had seen the white bare young-looking shoulders, had heard

the whispered comments of the men.

The men were simply mystified. They took the body to the undertaker’s

and when the blacksmith, the hunter, the marshal and several others

had got inside, they closed the door. If Dick Moorehead had been there

perhaps he could have got in and could have seen and heard everything,

but the two Moorehead boys couldn’t.

Tar went with his brother John to distribute the papers and when they

got home it was John who told the story.

Tar kept silent and went to bed early. It may have been he was not

satisfied with the way John told the story.

Later, in the town, he must have heard other fragments of the old

woman’s story. He remembered her going past the Moorehead house

when he was ill. She was recognized the next day and there was an

investigation. The husband and son were found somewhere and brought to

town and there was an attempt to connect them with the woman’s death,

but it did not work. They had perfect enough alibis.

The town was, however, against them. They had to get out. Where they

went Tar never heard.

He remembered only the picture there in the forest, the men standing

about, the naked, girlish-looking figure, face down in the snow, the

circle made by the running dogs and the clear cold winter sky above.

White fragments of clouds were drifting across the sky. They went

racing across the little open space among the trees.

The scene in the forest had become for Tar, without his knowing it,

the foundation for a story a child could not understand and it needed

understanding. The fragments had to be picked up slowly long afterwards.

Things happened. When Tar was a young man he went to work on the farm

of a German. There was a hired girl and she was afraid of her employer.

The farmer’s wife hated her.

Tar saw things at that place. Once later, on a winter night, he had

a half-uncanny, mystical sort of adventure with dogs in a forest on

a clear moonlit night. When he was a schoolboy, and on a summer day,

he went with a boy friend out along a creek some miles from town and

came to the house where the old woman had lived. No one had lived in

the house since her death. The doors were broken from the hinges, the

window lights were all broken. As the boy and Tar stood in the road

outside, two dogs, just roving farm dogs no doubt, came running around

a corner of the house. The dogs were tall gaunt fellows and came to the

fence and glared through at the boys standing in the road.

The whole thing, the story of the old woman’s death, was to Tar as he

grew older like music heard from far off. The notes had to be picked up

slowly one at a time. Something had to be understood.

The woman who died was one of those who feed animals. From childhood

she had been feeding animal life, in men, in cows, in chickens,

in pigs, in horses, in dogs. She spent her life feeding all sorts

of animals. The experience with her husband was a purely animal

experience. Her having children was an animal experience. Her daughter

had died in childhood and with her one son she had apparently no human

relations. She fed him as she fed her husband. When her son grew up

he brought a woman to the house and the old woman fed them, saying

nothing. On the night when she died she was hurrying homeward, bearing

on her body food for animals.

She died in the clearing in the woods and even after her death

continued feeding the animal life in the dogs that had trotted out of

the town at her heels.

CHAPTER XIII

Something had been bothering Tar for a long time. It got worse during

the summer of his thirteenth year. His mother had not been very well

for a long time but that summer she seemed to get better. Now Tar,

rather than John, sold the papers, but that did not take much time. As

his mother wasn’t very well and had other younger children to take her

time she couldn’t pay much attention to Tar.

He and Jim Moore went off to the woods on afternoons. Sometimes they

just lazied around and sometimes they went fishing or swimming. Up

along the creek farmers were working in the fields. When they went

swimming, in a place called “Mama Culver’s Hole,” other boys from town

came. Young men sometimes came down across the fields to the creek.

There was one young man who was subject to fits. His father was the

town blacksmith who had carried the dead woman out of the woods. He

went in swimming, just as the others did, but some one had to watch

him. Once he had a fit in the water and had to be pulled out so he

wouldn’t drown. Tar saw that, saw the man lying naked on the bank of

the creek, saw the queer look in his eyes, the queer jerky movements of

his legs, arms and body.

The man muttered words Tar couldn’t understand. It might have been like

a bad dream you have sometimes at night. He only looked for a moment.

Pretty soon the man got up and dressed. He walked slowly about in a

field, his head hanging down, went to sit with his back against a tree.

How pale he was.

When the older boys and young men came to the swimming hole Tar and Jim

Moore lit out. Older boys in such a place like to take it out on the

youngsters. They throw mud on small boys’ bodies after they come out

from swimming and are partly dressed. When it hits you you have to go

in and wash yourself off again. Sometimes they do it a dozen times.

Then they hide your clothes or dip them in the water and tie knots in

the sleeve of your shirt. When you want to dress and go away you can’t.

A gentle lot--small-town boys--sometimes.

They take a shirt sleeve and dip it in the water. Then they tie a hard

knot and pull as hard as they can and a boy has a hard time getting it

untied. If he has to take his teeth to it the older boys in the water

laugh and shout. There is a song about it full of words worse than you

could hear in any livery stable. “Chaw beef” the older boys yell. Then

they shout out the song. The whole place rings with it. It isn’t any

fancy singing.

The thing that troubled Tar troubled Jim Moore, too. Sometimes when

they were alone together, in the woods away up the creek beyond the

regular swimming hole, they went in together. Then they came out and

lay naked on the bank of the creek on the grass in the sun. It felt

good.

Then they began to talk about things they had heard, at school, among

the young men at the swimming hole.

“Suppose you ever got a chance with a girl, what then?” Maybe little

girls going home together from school, no boys about, talk the same

way. “Oh, I won’t get any such chance. I’d be afraid, I guess, wouldn’t

you?”

“I guess you get over being afraid. Let’s go.”

You can talk and think about a lot of things and then, when you come

home where your mother and sister are, it doesn’t seem to count much

against you. If you had a chance and did something it might be

different.

Sometimes when Tar and Jim were lying like that, on the creek bank,

one of them touched the other’s body. It was a queer feeling. When it

happened they both sprang up and began to run about. Some young trees

grew by the creek bank up that way and they climbed the trees. The

trees were small, smooth and slender and the boys pretended they were

monkeys or some other kind of wild young animals. They kept on doing it

for a long time, both acting rather crazy.

Once when they were doing it a man came along and they had to run and

hide in some bushes. They were in a close place and had to lie close

together. After the man passed they went at once to get their clothes,

both feeling strange.

Strange about what? Well, how are you going to tell? All boys are that

way sometimes.

There was a boy Jim and Tar both knew, who had the nerve to do

anything. Once he was with a girl and they went into a barn. The girl’s

mother saw them go in and followed. The girl got a whipping. Neither

Tar nor Jim thought anything really happened but the boy said it did.

He bragged about it. “It isn’t the first time.”

Such talk. Tar and Jim thought the boy lied. “He wouldn’t have the

nerve, do you think?”

They talked about such things more than they wanted to. They couldn’t

help it. When they had talked a lot they both felt uncomfortable. Well,

how are you going to find out anything? When men are talking you listen

all you can. If the men see you hanging around they tell you to get out.

Tar saw things, taking papers to houses in the evening. There was a man

used to come with a horse and buggy and wait in a certain place in a

dark street and after a while he was joined by a woman. The woman was

married and so was the man. Before the woman came the man had put on

the side curtains of his buggy. They drove away together.

Tar knew who they were and after a time the man knew he knew. One day

he met Tar on the street. The man stopped. He bought a paper. Then he

stood looking at Tar with his hands thrust into his pockets. The man

owned a large farm, several miles from town, and his wife and children

lived out there but he was in town nearly all the time. He was a buyer

of farm products, shipping them off to nearby cities. The woman Tar had

seen get into the buggy was the wife of a merchant.

The man put a five dollar bill into Tar’s hand. “I guess you know

enough to keep your mouth shut,” he said. That was all. After he said

it the man turned and went away. Tar had never had so much money, had

never before had any money he did not expect to account for. It was an

easy way to get it. When any of the Moorehead children made any money

they gave it to their mother. She never asked anything of the sort. It

just seemed the natural thing to do.

Tar bought himself a quarter’s worth of candy, he bought a package

of Sweet Caporal cigarettes. He and Jim Moore would try smoking them

sometime when they were off in the woods. Then he bought a swell

necktie that cost fifty cents.

That was all right. He had a little more than four dollars in his

pocket. He had got the change in silver dollars. Ernest Wright, who

kept a small hotel in town, was always standing in front of his hotel

with a pile of silver dollars in his hands, playing with them. At the

fair, in the fall, when there were a lot of fakers from out of town

come for the fair, they set up little booths for gambling. You could

get a cane by throwing a ring over it or a gold watch or a revolver

by picking out the right number on a wheel. There were lots of such

places. One year Dick Moorehead, being out of work, got a job in one of

them.

At all such places little piles of silver dollars were stacked about up

where every one could see them. Dick Moorehead said a farmer or a hired

man had about as much chance to win any of the money as a snowball had

in hell.

It was nice, though, to see the silver dollars piled up, nice to see

Ernest Wright jingling silver dollars in his hands as he stood on the

sidewalk before his hotel.

Nice for Tar to have four big silver dollars he did not feel he had to

account for. They had just come down into his hand, out of the sky,

as it were. The candy he could eat, the cigarettes he and Jim Moore

would try smoking some day soon. The new necktie would be a little

difficult. Where would he tell the others at home he had got it? Most

boys of his age in town never got any fifty-cent neckties. Dick didn’t

get but about two new ones a year--when there was a G.A.R. convention

or something. Tar might say he had found it and found the four silver

dollars, too. Then he could give the money to his mother and forget it.

It was fine to feel the heavy silver dollars in his pocket but he had

got them in a strange way. Silver is much better to have than bills. It

feels like more.

When a man is married you see him with his wife and you do not think

anything, but a man like that, waiting in a buggy in a side street, and

then a woman coming along, trying to act as though she is going to call

on some neighbor--it being night and supper over and her husband gone

back to his store. Then the woman looking around and getting, quick,

into the buggy. They driving off with the curtains drawn, that way.

Plenty Madame Bovaries in American small towns--what!

Tar wanted to tell Jim Moore but did not dare. There was a kind of

agreement between himself and the man from whom he had taken the five

dollars.

The woman knew he knew as well as the man. He had come out of an

alleyway, barefooted, making no sound, with a bundle of papers under

his arm, had popped right out on them.

Maybe he did it purposely.

The woman’s husband took a morning paper at his store and had an

afternoon paper delivered at his house. It was a funny feeling to go

into his store afterwards and see him there, talking to some man,

knowing nothing, Tar, just a kid, knowing such a lot.

Well, what did he know?

The trouble is that such things set a boy thinking. You want to see a

lot and when you see something it stirs you up and makes you almost

wish you hadn’t. The woman, when Tar took the paper to her house, never

let on. She had a nerve all right.

Why did they go sneaking out that way? A boy knows, but does not know.

If Tar could only have talked it over with John or Jim Moore it would

have been a relief. You can’t talk about such things to some one in

your own family. You have to go outside.

Tar saw other things. Win Connell, who worked in Cary’s drug store,

married Mrs. Grey, after her first husband died. She was taller than

he was. They took a house and furnished it with her first husband’s

furniture. One evening, when it was raining and dark, only about seven

o’clock, Tar went along back of their house on his paper route and they

had forgotten to close the window blinds. They didn’t have a thing on,

either of them, and he was chasing her around. You would never think

grown people could act like that.

Tar was in the alleyway, just as he was that time he saw the people in

the buggy. By cutting through alleyways you save time delivering papers

when a train is late. There he stood, holding his papers under his coat

so they wouldn’t get wet. And there were the two grown people, acting

like that.

There was a kind of living room and a stairway going upstairs and then

some other rooms on the ground floor, without any lights in them.

What Tar saw first was the woman running like that, without any clothes

on, across the room and her husband after her. It made Tar laugh. They

were like monkeys. The woman ran upstairs and he after her. Then down

she came again. They dodged into the dark rooms and then out again. He

caught her sometimes but she must have been slippery. She got away,

every time. They kept it up and kept it up. Such a crazy thing to see.

There was a couch in the room Tar was looking into, and once she got

behind it and he was in front. He put his hands on the top of the couch

and sprang clear over. You wouldn’t have thought a drug clerk could do

it.

Then he chased her into one of the dark rooms. Tar waited and waited

but they did not come out.

A fellow like Win Connell had to work, after supper, at the store.

He would get dressed and go down there. People coming in to get

prescriptions put up, to buy a cigar maybe. Win standing back of the

counter smiling. “Is there anything else? Certainly, if it is not

satisfactory bring it back. We aim to please.”

Tar going away out of his way, being later than ever to supper, to go

past Cary’s drug store and look in, to see Win in there, just like any

other man, doing what he did all the time every day. And less than an

hour ago....

Win wasn’t so very old but he was already bald-headed.

* * * * *

The world of older people opening out gradually to a boy going around

with his papers. Some older ones seemed to have a lot of dignity.

Others hadn’t. Boys, Tar’s own age, had secret vices. Some of the boys

at the swimming hole did things, said things. When men get older they

grow sentimental about the old swimming hole. They remember only the

pleasant things that happened. There is a trick of the mind that makes

you forget the unpleasant. It’s just as well. If you could see life

clear and straight maybe you could not live.

A boy goes around town filled with curiosity. He knows where the

vicious dogs are, what people speak kindly to him. There are soreheads

everywhere. You can’t get a thing out of them. If the paper is an hour

late they growl and fuss at you. What the deuce? You do not run the

railroad. If the train is late it isn’t your fault.

That Win Connell doing that. Tar laughed about it sometimes at night in

bed. How many other people cutting up all kinds of capers behind the

blinds of houses? In some houses men and women were always quarreling.

Tar came along the street and opening a gate went into a yard. He was

going to put the paper under the back door. Some wanted it put there.

As he went around the house, the sound of quarreling inside. “I didn’t

either. You’re a liar. I’ll knock your damn head off. Try it once.” The

low growling voice of a man, the sharp cutting voice of an angry woman.

Tar tapped on the back door. It might be his collection night. Both the

man and woman came to the door. They both thought it might be some

neighbor and that they had been caught quarreling. “Well, it’s only a

boy.” When they saw it was only Tar a look of relief on the two faces.

The man paid Tar with a growl. “You’ve been late twice this week. I

want my paper to be here when I get home.”

The door was slammed and Tar hung about for a moment. Would they start

quarreling again? They did. Maybe they liked it.

At night streets of houses with closed blinds. Men coming out at the

front door to go uptown. They went into saloons, into the drug stores,

into the barber shop or the cigar store. There they sat bragging,

sometimes, sometimes just being quiet. Dick Moorehead did not quarrel

with his wife, but just the same he was one thing at home and another

when he was out in the evening among men. Tar had slid in among groups

of men when his father was holding forth. He slid out pretty fast. Dick

had to sing pretty low at home. Tar wondered why. It wasn’t because

Mary Moorehead scolded him.

In nearly every house he visited, either the man or woman ruled the

roost. Downtown, among the other men, a man was always trying to create

the impression he was boss. “I said to my old woman--look here, I

said--you do so and so. You bet she did it.”

Did it, eh? In most of the houses Tar visited, it was as at the

Moorehead house--the women were the strong ones. Sometimes they ruled

by bitter words, sometimes by tears, sometimes by silence. Silence was

Mary Moorehead’s way.

PART IV

CHAPTER XIV

There was a girl, Tar’s age, came to visit Colonel Farley’s house on

Maumee Street. The street went out past the Farley place and ended at

the town cemetery. The Farley place was the last one on the street, but

one, an old rickety house where the Thompsons lived.

The Farley house was large and had a cupola on top. There was a low

hedge in front, facing the road, and an apple orchard at the side. At

the back of the apple orchard was a large red barn. It was one of the

swellest places in town.

The Farleys were people who were always nice to Tar after he began

selling papers, but he did not see them often. Colonel Farley had been

in the war, like Tar’s father, and was a married man when he went in.

He had two sons, both of whom had gone to college. Then they went away

to live in some city and they must have got rich. Some said they had

married rich women. They sent money home to the Colonel and his wife,

plenty of it. The Colonel was a lawyer but hadn’t much practice--just

fooled around getting pensions for old soldiers and that sort of thing.

Sometimes he did not go to his office all day. Tar saw him sitting on

the front porch of the house reading a book. His wife sat sewing. She

was small and fat. When he collected for the paper the Colonel always

gave Tar an extra nickel. Such people, Tar thought, were all right.

They had another old couple living with them. The man took care of the

carriage and drove the Colonel and his wife out on fine afternoons and

the woman cooked and did the housework. Every one had it pretty soft at

that house, Tar thought.

They weren’t much like the Thompsons who lived beyond them, out that

street, right by the cemetery gate.

The Thompsons were a tough lot. There were three grown sons and a girl

Tar’s age. Tar hardly ever saw old Boss Thompson or the boys. They

went every summer with a circus or a street fair. One year they had

a stuffed whale on a box car. They had canvas all around it and went

around to towns and charged ten cents to look at it.

When they were at home the Thompsons, father and sons, hung around the

saloons and bragged. Old Boss Thompson always seemed to have plenty of

money, but he made his women folks live like dogs. His old woman never

had a new dress and looked all worn out while the old man and the boys

were always strutting on Main Street. That year they had the whale,

old Thompson wore a plug hat and always had on a fancy vest. He liked

to go into a saloon or a store and take out a big roll of bills. If he

had a nickel in his pocket when he wanted some beer he never showed it.

He took out a ten dollar bill, peeled it off a big roll and threw it

on the bar. Some men said most of the roll was made up of one-dollar

bills. The boys were the same sort, but they did not have so much money

to strut with. The old man kept everything for himself.

* * * * *

The girl that came to visit the Farleys in the summer was their son’s

daughter. Her father and mother had gone to Europe so she was going to

stay until they came back. Tar heard about it before she came--such

things get about town pretty fast--and was on hand at the railroad

station, to get his bundle of papers, when she came in.

She was pretty all right. Well, she had blue eyes and yellow hair and

wore a white dress and white stockings. The Colonel and his wife and

the old man who drove their carriage met her at the station.

Tar had got his papers--the baggage man always threw them off on

the station platform at his feet--and he hustled to see if he could

sell some to people getting off and on the train. When the girl got

off--she had been put in charge of the conductor and he handed her off

himself--the Colonel came over to where Tar stood and asked for his

paper. “I can just as well save you coming clear out our way,” he said.

He was holding the girl’s hand. “This is my granddaughter, Miss Esther

Farley.” Tar went all red. It was the first time any one had ever

introduced him to a lady. He did not know what to do so he took off his

cap but did not say a word.

The girl didn’t even blush. What she did was just to stare at him.

“Lordy,” Tar thought. He did not want to wait to see her again until he

had to take the paper to the Farleys’ the next day, so he went out that

way in the afternoon, but saw nothing. The worst was that when he went

out past the Farleys’ he had to do one of two things. The street did

not go anywhere, just went to the cemetery gate and stopped and he had

to go on into the cemetery, through it and out over a fence and into

another street, or come back again past the Farleys. Well, he did not

want the Colonel, his wife or the girl, to think he was hanging around.

The girl had got him all stirred up, right off. It was the first time

that had happened. He dreamed of her at night and didn’t even dare

speak of her to Jim Moore. One day Jim said something about her. Tar

got red. He had to begin talking of something else. He couldn’t think

what to say.

* * * * *

Tar began going off by himself. If he went out the railroad tracks a

mile, toward the little town of Greenville, then turned off through the

fields, he came to a creek that did not run through town at all.

He could go that way clear to Greenville if he wanted to. He did

once. It was only five miles. It was nice to be in a town where he

did not know a soul. The main street was only half as long as the one

in his own town. People he had never seen were standing in the store

doors, strange people walking in the streets. They looked at him with

curiosity in their eyes. In his own town he had now become a familiar

figure, running around with the papers mornings and evenings.

The reason he liked to go off by himself that summer was that, when he

was alone, he could fancy the new girl was with him. Sometimes when

he took the paper he saw her at the Farley house. She even came out

sometimes to take the paper from him and did it with a self-possessed

smile on her face. If he was disconcerted in her presence, she wasn’t.

She said “good morning” to him and all he could do was to mutter

something she could not hear. Often when he was going around with the

papers in the afternoon he saw her riding with her grandfather and

grandmother. They all spoke to him and he took off his cap, awkwardly.

After all, she was only a girl like his sister Margaret.

When he went out of town alone, in the summer afternoons, he could

imagine she was with him. He took hold of her hand as they walked

along. He wasn’t afraid then.

The best place to go was to a beech woods about a half mile back from

the tracks.

The beech trees grew in a little grassy gully that led down to the

creek and on the hill above. There was a branch of the creek in the

gully in the early spring but during the summer it dried up.

There isn’t any woods like a beech woods, Tar thought. Under the trees

the ground was clear, no small bushes growing, and there were places

among the big roots, that stuck up out of the ground, where he could

lie as in a bed. Everywhere squirrels and chipmunks darted about. When

he had been still a long time they came close. Tar could have shot any

number of squirrels that summer and perhaps if he had and had taken

them home to be cooked, it would have helped the Mooreheads a good

deal, but he never took a gun.

John had one. He had got it cheap, second-handed. Tar could have

borrowed it easy enough. He did not want to.

He wanted to go to the beech woods because he wanted to dream of the

new girl in town, wanted to pretend she was with him. When he got to

the place he settled his body down in a good comfortable place among

the roots and closed his eyes.

There was the girl, close beside him--in fancy, of course. He did not

talk much. What was to be said? He took her hand in his, held her hand

against his cheek. Her fingers were so soft and small that when he held

her hand his own looked big like the hand of a man.

He was going to marry the Farley girl when he grew up. That he had

decided. He did not know just what marriage meant. Yes, he did. The

reason he was so ashamed and blushed so when he went near her was

because he was always having such thoughts when she wasn’t near. First

he would have to grow up and go to the city. He would have to get as

rich as she was. That would take time, but not so long. Tar made four

dollars a week selling papers. He was in a town where there weren’t

many people. If the town were twice as large he would make twice as

much--if four times as large four times as much. Four times four is

sixteen. In a year there are fifty-two weeks. Four times fifty-two is

two hundred and eight dollars. Lordy, that’s a lot.

And he wouldn’t be selling just papers. Maybe he’d get him a store.

Then he would have him a carriage or an automobile. He would ride up

in front of her house.

Tar tried to imagine what the city house the girl lived in when she was

at home, could be like. The Farley house on Maumee Street was about the

grandest place in town, but the wealth of Colonel Farley didn’t amount

to anything against that of his sons in the city. Every one in town

said that.

In the beech woods, during the summer afternoons, Tar closed his eyes

and dreamed the hours away. Sometimes he went to sleep. Nowadays he

was always lying awake in bed at night. In the woods he could hardly

tell the difference between sleeping and waking. All that summer no

one in his own family seemed to pay any attention to him. He just came

and went at the Moorehead house, mostly in silence. Sometimes John or

Margaret spoke to him. “What’s the matter with you?” “Ah, nothing.” It

may have been that his mother was a little puzzled by his state. She,

however, said nothing. Tar was glad of that.

In the beech woods he lay on his back and closed his eyes. Then he

opened them slowly. The beech trees near the foot of the ravine were

heavy-bodied great fellows. Their coats were patched with color, the

white bark alternating with torn brown places. Up the side of the hill,

in one spot, there was a group of young beech trees. Tar could imagine

the forest above going on and on indefinitely.

In books things were always happening in forests. A young girl got lost

in such a place. She was very beautiful, like the new girl in town.

Well, there she was in the forest alone and night came on. She had to

sleep in a hollow tree, or in a place among tree roots. As she lay

there and just as darkness was coming, she saw something. Some men rode

into the forest and stopped near her. She kept very still. One of the

men got off his horse and said strange words--“Open Sesame” and the

ground opened at his feet. There was a great door, so cleverly covered

with leaves, sticks and earth that you would never guess it was there.

The men went down a stairway and stayed a long time. When they came out

they got on their horses and the leader--a strangely handsome man--just

such a man as Tar felt he would be when he grew up--said some more

strange words. “Close Sesame,” he said and the door closed and all was

as before.

Then the girl tried it. She went to the place and said the words and

the door opened. Many strange adventures followed. Tar remembered them

dimly from a book Dick Moorehead read aloud to the children on winter

evenings.

There were other stories, other things always happening in forests.

Sometimes boys or girls got changed into birds or trees or animals.

The young beech trees that grew on the side of the ravine had bodies

like the bodies of young girls. When a little wind blew they swayed

slightly. Tar, when he kept his eyes closed, could fancy the trees

were beckoning to him. There was one young beech--he never knew why he

singled out just that one--that might just have been Colonel Farley’s

granddaughter.

Once Tar went to where it stood and touched it with his finger. The

feeling he had was at the moment so real that he blushed when he did it.

He became obsessed with the notion of going out to the beech grove at

night and one night he did it.

He had picked out a moonlit night. Well, a neighbor was at the

Mooreheads’ and Dick was talking on the front porch. Mary Moorehead was

there but not saying much--as usual. Tar’s papers were all sold. If

he stayed away for a time his mother would not care. She was sitting

silently in a rocking chair. Every one was listening to Dick. He

usually managed to make them do that.

Tar lit out the back way and hurried around through back streets to

the railroad tracks. When he had got out of town a freight train came

along. A lot of tramps were in an empty coal car. Tar saw them as plain

as day. One of them was singing.

He got to the place where he had to turn off the tracks and without

trouble found his way to the beech grove.

It was all strange. Everything was still and spooky. He found a place

where he could lie comfortably, and waited.

For what? What did he expect? He did not know. Perhaps he thought the

girl might come to him, that she might have got lost and would be

somewhere in the woods when he got there. In the darkness he wouldn’t

be so embarrassed when she was near.

She wasn’t there, of course. He didn’t really expect it. No one

was there. No robbers came on horseback, nothing happened. He kept

perfectly still for a long time and there wasn’t a sound.

Then little sounds began. He could see things more clearly as his eyes

grew accustomed to the dim light. A squirrel or a rabbit ran down along

the bottom of the ravine. He saw a flash of something white. There was

a sound back of him, one of the little soft sounds made by tiny animals

when they move about at night. His body trembled. It was as though

something was running over his body, under his clothes.

It might have been an ant. He wondered whether or not ants went out at

night.

The wind blew a little stronger and a little stronger--not a gale, just

blowing steadily, up the ravine from the creek. He could hear the creek

chattering. There was a place near, where it had to run over stones.

Tar closed his eyes and held them closed a long time. Afterwards he

wondered if he slept. If he did it couldn’t have been long.

When he opened his eyes again he was looking right at the place where

the young beeches grew. He could see the one young beech tree he had

gone across the ravine to touch that time, standing out from all the

others.

That time when he was sick--things, trees, houses and people--were

always leaving the ground and floating away from him. He had to hold

onto something inside himself. If he hadn’t he might have died. No one

else understood about that but he did.

Now the white young beech tree was coming toward him. It might have had

something to do with the light and the wind blowing and the young beech

trees swaying in the wind.

He did not know. The one tree just seemed to leave the others and come

toward him. He was as scared as when Colonel Farley’s granddaughter

spoke to him when he took the paper to their house, but in a different

way.

He was so scared that he jumped up and ran and when he ran he got more

scared. How he got out of the woods and back to the railroad track

without being hurt he never knew. He kept running after he got up onto

the tracks. He was in his bare feet and the cinders hurt and once he

stubbed his toe so that it bled, but he never stopped running or being

afraid until he got back into town and to his own house.

He couldn’t have been gone long. When he got back Dick was still going

it on the front porch and the others were still listening. Tar stood

out back by the woodshed a long time, to get his breath and let his

heart stop pounding. Then he had to wash his feet and get the dried

blood off his hurt toe before he went sneaking off upstairs and to bed.

He did not want to get blood on the sheets.

And after he got upstairs and into bed and after the neighbors went

home and his mother came upstairs to see if he and the others were all

right, he could not sleep. There were a lot of nights that summer when

Tar could not sleep much.

CHAPTER XV

Another adventure of quite another sort one afternoon later during

that same summer. Tar could not keep off Maumee Street. In the morning

he got through selling his papers by nine o’clock. Sometimes he had a

job, mowing some one’s lawn. There were plenty of other boys after such

jobs. They didn’t come any too thick.

No good fooling around home. When Tar was with his friend Jim Moore,

during that summer, he was likely to be silent. Jim did not like it and

found some one else with whom to go adventuring to the woods or to the

swimming hole.

Tar went to the fair ground and watched the men work the race horses,

he hung around the Whitehead barn.

There were always some old newspapers that hadn’t been sold, in the

woodshed at home. Tar took several under his arm and went out along

Maumee Street just to be going past the Farley house. Sometimes he saw

the girl, sometimes he did not. When he did, when she was on the porch

with her grandmother, or in the yard or the orchard, he did not dare

look.

The papers under his arm were to create the impression he had business

out that way.

It was pretty thin. Who was there to take a paper out that way? No one

but the Thompsons. They take a paper--huh!

Now old Boss Thompson and the boys were out somewhere with a circus.

It would be fun to do that when Tar grew up, but circuses certainly

carried a tough lot of men with them. When a circus came to the town

where Tar lived he got up early and went down to the ground and saw

everything, right from the start, saw the tent go up, the animals fed,

everything. He saw the men get ready for the parade on Main Street.

They put the bright red and purple coats on right over their old

horsey, manurey clothes. The men didn’t even bother to wash their hands

and faces. Some of them looked as though they never had washed.

The women in the circus and the child actors were pretty near the same

way. They looked grand in the parade but you ought to see how they

live. The Thompson women never were with a circus that came to their

own town but they were like that.

Tar thought that since the Farley girl had come to town he knew

something of what a real swell looked like. She was always dressed in

clean clothes, no matter what time of day Tar saw her. He would have

wagered anything she was all washed up fresh every day. Maybe she took

a bath, all over, every day. The Farleys had a bathtub, one of the few

in town.

The Mooreheads were pretty clean, especially Margaret, but you can’t

expect too much. In the winter it’s a lot of trouble to be always

washing.

It’s nice, though, when you see some one else do it. A girl you’re

crazy about, especially.

It was a wonder Mame Thompson, old Boss Thompson’s one daughter, didn’t

go off to the circus with her father and brothers. She might have

learned to ride a horse standing up or perform on a trapeze. The young

girls who did such things in circuses weren’t so much. Well, they rode

a horse standing up. What of it? It was an old steady horse usually.

Any one could ride that way. Hal Brown, whose father had a grocery, and

cows in the barn, had to go to a field for the cows every night. He

was a friend of Tar’s and sometimes Tar went with him and then later

he went around with Tar delivering the papers. Hal could ride a horse

standing up. He could ride a cow that way. He did it lots of times.

Tar began thinking about Mame Thompson, at about the same time she

began paying attention to him. He may have been to her what the Farley

girl was to him, some one to think about. The Thompsons, in spite of

old Boss Thompson’s splurging around and showing his money, didn’t

stand so well in town. The old woman didn’t go anywhere hardly. She

stayed at home like Tar’s mother, but not for the same reason. Mary

Moorehead had a lot to do--so many children--but what did old Mrs.

Thompson have to do? No one at home all summer but the girl Mame and

she was big enough to help with the work. The old Thompson woman looked

all fagged out. She always had on dirty clothes and so did Mame, when

she was at home.

Tar began seeing a good deal of her. Two or three times a week,

sometimes every day, he sneaked out that way and he couldn’t help going

on past the Farleys’ and to their house.

When he got past the Farleys’ there was a drop in the road and a bridge

across a ditch that was dry all summer. Then he came to the Thompsons’

barn. It stood close beside the road and the house was on the opposite

side, a little farther along, right near the cemetery gate.

They had a general buried in the cemetery with a stone monument. He was

standing with one foot on a cannon and with a finger pointed right at

the Thompsons’.

You’d have thought the town, if it was so blamed proud of its dead

general, would have set up something fancier for him to point at.

The house was one of the small unpainted kind with a lot of the

shingles gone out of the roof. It looked like the Old Harry. There had

been a front porch but most of the floor was all rotted away.

The Thompsons had a barn but there wasn’t a horse, not even a cow.

There was just a little old half-rotten hay upstairs and some chickens

scratching around downstairs. The hay must have been in the barn a long

time. Some of it stuck out through an open door. It was all black and

moldy-looking.

Mame Thompson was a year or two older than Tar. She had had more

experience. At first, when he began going out that way, Tar did not

think about her at all and then he did. She began to notice him.

She had begun to wonder what he was up to, always coming out that way.

He didn’t blame her, but what was he to do? He might have turned back

at the bridge but if he did, his going along the street wouldn’t have

had any sense to it. He always carried a few papers, for a bluff. Well,

he thought he had to keep up the bluff if he could.

Mame got so, when she saw him coming, she would cross the road and

stand in the open barn door. Tar hardly ever saw old Mrs. Thompson. He

had to walk right past the barn or turn back. There was Mame standing

inside the barn door and pretending not to see him just as he was

always pretending not to see her.

It got worse and worse.

Mame wasn’t slender like the Farley girl. She was a little fat and had

big legs. Nearly always she had on a dirty dress and sometimes her face

was dirty. Her hair was red and she had freckles on her face.

Another boy in town, named Pete Welsh, had gone right into a barn with

a girl. He had told Tar and Jim Moore about it, had bragged about it.

In spite of himself Tar began thinking about Mame Thompson. That was

a fine how-de-do but how could he help it? Some of the boys at school

had girls. They gave them things and when they were walking home from

school some of the bolder ones even walked with their girls a little

way. It took nerve. When a boy did it the others came along behind,

shouting and making fun.

Tar might have done that with the Farley girl if he ever had the

chance. He never would have. In the first place she would be going away

before school began and, even if she stayed, she maybe wouldn’t want

him.

He wouldn’t dare ever let it be known, if it happened, that Mame

Thompson had become his girl. What an idea! That would be just nuts for

Pete Welsh and Hal Brown and Jim Moore. They would never let up.

O Lord. Tar had begun to think of Mame Thompson at night now, had got

her all mixed up with his thoughts of the Farley girl, but his thoughts

about her didn’t get mixed up with any beech trees or clouds in the sky

or anything like that.

His thoughts got pretty definite, sometimes. Would he ever have the

nerve? O Lord. What a question to ask himself. Of course he wouldn’t.

After all she wasn’t so bad. He got to looking at her when he went

past. Sometimes she put her hands over her face and giggled and

sometimes she pretended not to see him.

One day it happened. Well, he hadn’t ever intended it should. He had

got clear up to the barn and hadn’t seen her. She might have gone

away. The Thompsons’ house, across the way, looked as it always did,

all closed up and dark, no wash hanging out in the yard, no cats or

dogs around, no smoke going up out of a kitchen chimney. You might

have thought that, when the old man and the boys were away, old Mrs.

Thompson and Mame didn’t ever eat--or wash either.

Tar had not seen Mame as he came along the road and over the bridge.

She was always standing in the barn, pretending to do something in

there. What was she pretending to do?

He stopped by the barn door and looked in. Then, hearing and seeing

nothing, he went in. What made him do it he did not know. He walked

half way into the barn and then, when he turned to go out, there she

was. She had been hiding behind a door.

She didn’t say anything and neither did Tar. They stood looking at each

other and then she went to where there was a rickety old ladder leading

up to the loft.

It was up to Tar whether or not he would follow. That was what she

meant all right, all right. When she had got almost up she turned and

looked at him but she didn’t say anything. There was something in her

eyes. O Lordy.

Tar never dreamed he could be so bold. Well, he wasn’t bold. With

trembling legs he went across the barn floor to the foot of the ladder.

There did not seem enough strength in his arms and legs to climb. There

may be boys who are naturally bold, as Pete Welsh said he was, who do

not care. All they want is a chance. Tar wasn’t like that.

He felt as though he had died. It couldn’t be himself, Tar Moorehead,

doing what he was doing. It was too bold and terrible--wonderful too.

When Tar got up into the barn loft there was Mame sitting on the little

pile of black old hay near the door. The loft door was open. You could

see a long way. Tar could see along the road right into the yard of the

Farley place. His legs were so weak that he sat down at once, right

near the girl, but he did not look at her, did not dare. He looked out

through the barn door. A grocery boy came with things for the Farleys.

He went around the house to the back door with a basket in his hand.

When he came back around the house he turned the horse and drove away.

It was Cal Sleshinger, who drove the delivery wagon for Wagner’s store.

He had red hair.

So did Mame. Well, her hair wasn’t exactly red. It was sandy. Her

eyebrows were sandy.

Now Tar was not thinking of the fact that her dress was dirty, her

fingers dirty, her face perhaps dirty. He did not dare look at her. He

was thinking.... What was he thinking?

“If you saw me on Main Street I bet you wouldn’t speak to me. You’re

too stuck up.”

Mame wanted to be reassured. Tar wanted to answer but couldn’t. He was

right near her, could have put out his hand and touched her.

She said one or two things. “Why do you keep coming out this way if

you’re so stuck on yourself?” Her voice was a little harsh.

It was evident she did not know about Tar and the Farley girl, had not

connected them in her mind. She thought his coming out that way had

been to see her.

That time Pete Welsh went into a barn with a girl her mother came.

Pete ran and the girl got a whipping. Tar wondered if they had gone up

into a barn loft. He looked down through the loft door to see how far

he would have to jump. Pete hadn’t said anything about jumping. He had

just bragged. Jim Moore had kept saying, “I bet you never did. I bet

you never did,” and Pete had answered sharply, “We did, too. I tell you

we did.”

Tar could, maybe, if he had the nerve. If you have had the nerve once

then, maybe, you have it naturally the next time. Some boys are born

with nerve, others aren’t. Everything is easy for them.

Now Tar’s silence and fear had infected Mame. They sat staring out

through the barn door.

Something else happened. Old Mrs. Thompson came into the barn and

called Mame. Had she seen Tar go in? Both children sat in silence.

The old woman stood downstairs. The Thompsons kept a few hens. Mame

reassured Tar. “She’s looking for eggs,” she whispered softly. Tar

could scarcely hear her voice.

They were again silent and when the old woman went out of the barn Mame

got up and began crawling down the ladder.

It may have been she had become contemptuous of Tar. She did not look

at him as she went down and when she had gone and when Tar heard her go

out of the barn he sat for several minutes staring out through the loft

door.

He wanted to cry.

The worst was that the Farley girl came out of the Farley house and

stood looking along the road. She might have been looking through a

window and might have seen him and Mame go into the barn. Now, if Tar

got the chance, he wouldn’t ever speak to her, wouldn’t dare be where

she was.

He wouldn’t ever get either girl. It was the way things turn out if you

haven’t any nerve. He would have liked to beat himself, hurt himself in

some way.

When the Farley girl had gone back into the house he went to the loft

door and let himself down, as far as he could hang, and then dropped.

He had brought a few old newspapers with him, for the sake of his

bluff, and had left them in the loft.

Good Gracious. There wasn’t any way to get out of the hole he was in

except to cut across lots. Along where the little dry ditch ran there

was some low ground where you sank in, almost to your knee. It was the

only way he could go now without going past either the Thompsons’ or

the Farleys’.

Tar went that way, sinking into the soft mud. Then he had to go through

a tangled berry patch where the briers tore his legs.

He was rather glad of that. The hurt places felt almost good.

O Lord! If he had only had the nerve. If he had only had the nerve.

Tar couldn’t help wondering how it would have been if....

O Lord!

To go home after that and to see Margaret and his mother and every

one.... When he was alone with Jim Moore perhaps he could ask

questions, but the answers he would get wouldn’t be much. “If you had a

chance. If you were in a barn with a girl, like Pete was that time.”

What was the use asking questions. Jim Moore would only laugh. “Ah, I

won’t ever have no such a chance. I bet Pete didn’t. I bet he’s just a

liar.”

The worst for Tar wasn’t at home. No one knew anything. Maybe the

strange girl in town, the Farley girl, knew. Tar couldn’t tell. It

might be she thought a lot of things that weren’t true. Nothing had

happened. You could never tell what a girl like that, a good girl,

would be thinking.

The worst for Tar would be when he saw the Farleys on the street,

driving in the carriage, the girl sitting with them. If it was on Main

Street he could dodge into a store, if on a residence street go right

into some one’s yard. He would go right into any yard--dog or no dog.

Better be bit by a dog than meet her face to face now, he thought. He

would not take the paper out to the Farleys’ until after dark and he

would let the Colonel pay him when they met on Main Street.

Well, the Colonel might complain. “You used to be so prompt. The train

can’t be late every day.”

Tar would keep right on being late with the paper, and sneaking in at

odd times, until fall came and the strange girl went back to the city.

Then he would be all right. He could dodge Mame Thompson all right.

She did not come uptown very often and when school started she would be

in another grade.

It would be all right about her because maybe she was ashamed, too.

It might be that, sometimes, when they did meet, when they were both

older, she would laugh at him. That was an almost unbearable thought to

Tar but he put it aside. It might come back at night--for a while.

Perhaps the feeling of shame wouldn’t last very long. When it came at

night he would soon go to sleep or get to thinking of something else.

Now he was thinking of what might have happened if he had had the

nerve. When that thought came at night he would be a good deal longer

time getting to sleep.

PART V