BILL ARNOLD AND HIS BROOD
West of Warsaw about twelve miles lies the town of Silver Lake, on a
small picturesque lake of the same name—a place to which, during our
residence at Warsaw, Ed and I more than once repaired to visit a
ne’er-do-well uncle and his wife, the latter my mother’s half sister.
This family was so peculiar and so indifferent to all worldly success
and precedence, so utterly trifling and useless, that I am tempted to
tell about them even though they do not properly belong in this
narrative. William or “Bill” Arnold, as he was called locally, was
really the cause of it all. He was the father, but little more than a
country wastrel. He had a fiddle on which he could play a little. He had
a slightly cocked eye and a nasal voice, high and thin. He had no more
education than a squirrel and no more care for things of place and
position than any rabbit or woodchuck. His wife, a kindly, inarticulate
and meditative woman, who looked like my mother, was all out of sorts
and down at heels in soul and body because of his indifference to all
things material or spiritual. They lived in an old tumble-down,
paintless house, the roof of which leaked and the eaves sagged, and
here, and in other houses like it, no doubt, they had had four children,
one of whom, the eldest, became a thief (but a very clever one, I have
heard); the second a railroad brakeman; the third the wife of an idle
country loafer as worthless as her father; the fourth, a hunchbacked
boy, was to me, at least, a veritable sprite of iniquity, thinking up
small deviltries the whole day long. He was fond of fighting with his
sister and parents, shouting vile names when angry, and so conducting
himself generally that he was an object almost of loathing to such of
our family as knew him.
Their home was a delightful place for me to come to, so fresh, so new,
so natural—not at all like our ordered home. I felt as though I were
housed with a kind of genial wild animal—a fox or prairie dog or
squirrel or coyote. Old Arnold had no more morals than a fox or
squirrel. He never bathed. He would get up in the morning and feed his
pigs and two horses, the only animals he owned—and then, if the weather
was suitable and he had no absolutely compelling work to do, he would
hunt rabbits (in winter) or squirrel or “patridges,” or go fishing, or
go down to the saloon to fiddle and sing or to a dance. He was always
driving off to some dance where he earned a few cents as a fiddler (it
was his great excuse), and then coming home at two or three in the
morning, slightly tipsy and genial, to relate his experiences to anyone
who would listen. He was not afraid of his wife or children exactly, and
yet he was not the master of them either, and it used to scandalize me
to have him called a loafer and an “old fool,” not by her so much as by
them. My own father was so strict, so industrious, so moral, that I
could scarcely believe my ears.
I used to love to walk west from Warsaw on a fine summer’s day, when my
mother would permit me, and visit them—walk the whole twelve miles. Once
she empowered me to negotiate for a cow which this family owned and for
which we paid twentyfive dollars. Ed and I drove the cow up from Silver
Lake. Another time we bought three (or four) pigs, and drove them (Ed
and I) the whole twelve miles on a hot July day. Great heavens! What a
time we had to get them to come along straight! They ran into bogs and
woods—wherever there was a fence down—and we had to chase them until
they fell exhausted—too far gone to run us farther. Once they invaded a
tangled, low growing swamp, to wallow in the muck, and we had to get
down on our hands and knees—our bellies actually—to see where they had
gone. We were not wearing shoes and stockings; but we took off our
trousers, hung them over our arms, and went in after them. If we didn’t
beat those pigs when we got near enough! Say! We chased them for nearly
a mile to exhaust and punish them, and then we switched them along the
rest of the way to “get even.”
I remember one hot July afternoon, when I was visiting here, how my Aunt
Susan read my fortune in the grounds of a coffee cup. It was after a one
o’clock farmhand dinner. Uncle Bill and one or two of the other children
had come and gone. I was alone with her, and we sat in the shade of an
east porch, comfortable in the afternoon. I can see the wall of trees
over the way, even yet, the bees buzzing about an adjacent trumpet vine,
the grass hot and dry but oh! so summery.
“Now, let’s see what it says about you in your cup,” and she took it and
turned it round and round, upside down three times. Then she looked into
it meditatively and after a while began: “Oh, I see cities, cities,
cities, and great crowds, and bridges, and chimneys. You are going to
travel a long way—all over the world, perhaps. And there are girls in
your cup! I see their faces.” (I thrilled at that.) “You won’t stay here
long. You’ll be going soon, out into the world. Do you want to travel?”
she asked.
“Yes, indeed I do,” I replied.
“Well, you will. It’s all here.”
Her face was so grave! She looked like one of the three fates, so old,
so wrinkled, so distant.
I thought nothing of her at the time, but only of myself. How beautiful
would be that outside world! And I would be going to it soon! Walking up
and down in it! Oh, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful!
When we were traveling toward Warsaw it had been my idea that we would
visit Silver Lake and if I could find nothing more I could at least look
at that body of water and the fields that surrounded it and the streets
with which I had been fairly familiar. The lake had seemed such a
glorious thing to me in those days. It was so sylvan and silent. A high
growth of trees surrounded it like a wall. Its waters reflected in turn
blue, grey, green, black. It was so still within its wall of trees that
our voices echoed hollowly. A fish leaping out of the water could be
heard, and the echo of the splash. Often I sat here gazing at the blue
sky and the trees, and waiting for a small red and green cork on my line
to bob.
But my aunt and my uncle were long since dead, I knew. The children had
gone—where? There was probably no least trace of them anywhere here, and
I was in no mood to hunt them down. Still, in coming West, I had the
desire to come here, to look, to stand in some one of these old places
and recover if I might a boyhood mood.
Now, as we were leaving Warsaw, however, I was too physically tired and
too spiritually distrait to be very much interested. My old home town
had done for me completely—the shadows of older days. For one thing, I
had a splitting headache, which I was carefully concealing, and a fine
young heartache into the bargain. I was dreadfully depressed and gloomy.
But it was a fine warm night, with a splendid half moon in the sky and
delicious wood and field fragrances about. Such odors! Is there anything
more moving than the odors, the suspirings of the good earth, in summer?
As we neared Silver Lake (as I thought) we ran down into a valley where
a small rivulet made its way and under the darkling trees we encountered
a homing woman, coming from a milking shed which was close to the
stream. Five children were with her, the oldest boy packing the
youngest, an infant of two or three years. It reminded me of all the
country families I had known in my time—a typical mid-Western and
American procession. The mother, a not unprepossessing woman of forty,
was clothed in a shapeless grey calico print with a sunbonnet to match,
and without shoes. The children were all barefooted and ragged but as
brown and healthy and fresh looking as young animals should be. It so
chanced that Speed had to do something here—look after the light or
supply the motor with a cooling draught—and so we paused, and the
children gathered around us, intensely curious.
[Illustration:
CENTRAL INDIANA
A Farm and Silo
]
“Gee, ain’t it a big one!” exclaimed the eldest. “Look at the silver.”
He was descanting on the lamp.
“I’ll bet it ain’t no bigger than that jackdigger that went through here
yesterday,” observed the second eldest boastfully.
“What’s a jackdigger?” I inquired helplessly.
“Oh, it’s a car,” replied the eldest, one of the handsomest boys one
would want to look at—beautiful, really—all the more so because of his
torn shirt and trousers and his bare feet and head.
“Yes, but what kind of car? What make?”
“Oh, I can’t think. We see ’em around here now and then—great big
fellers.”
And now the next to the youngest, a boy of five or six, had come
alongside where I was sitting and was looking up at me—a fat little
cherub in panties so small you could have made them out of a good sized
handkerchief.
“There you are,” I said to him helpfully. “Won’t you come up and sit
with me here—such a nice big boy as you are?”
He shook his head and backed away a little.
“Huhuh,” he said, after a pause.
“Why not?” I queried, a little yearningly, for I wanted him to come and
sit with me.
“I can’t,” he replied, eyeing me solemnly. “I’m 'fraid.”
“Oh, no,” I said, “not afraid of me, surely? Don’t you know that no one
would think of hurting a little boy like you—not a person in all the
world? Won’t you come now and sit with me? It’s so nice up here.”
I held out my arms.
“I’m ’fraid,” he repeated.
“Oh, no,” I insisted. “You mustn’t say that, not of me? You couldn’t be.
Can’t you see how much I like you? See here”—and I reached into my
pocket—"I have pennies and picturecards and I don’t know what all. Won’t
you come now? Please do."
“Go on, Charlie,” called a brother. “Whatcha ’fraid of? Go on.” This
brother came around then and tried to persuade him.
All the while he was staring at me doubtfully, his eyes getting very
round, but finally he ventured a step forward, and I picked him up and
snuggled him in my arms.
“There, now,” I said. “Now, you see? You’re not afraid of me, are you?
Up here in the nice, big car? And now here’s your other brother come to
sit beside us”—(this because the next oldest had clambered in)—"and
here’s a nickel and here’s a picturecard and——"
“Who’s ’fraid!” he crowed, sitting up in my lap. “I ain’t ’fraid, am I?”
“Indeed not,” I returned. “Big boys like you are not afraid of anything.
And now here’s a fine big nickel”—I went on because he had ignored the
previous offer. “And here’s a card. Isn’t that nice?”
“Huhuh,” he replied.
“You mean you don’t like it—don’t want it?”
“Huhuh,” he repeated.
“And why not?”
“My mother won’t let me.”
“Your mother won’t let you take any money?”
“Huhuh.”
“Is that right?” I asked of the eldest boy, rather taken aback by the
morals of this group—they were so orderly and sweet.
“That’s right,” he replied, “she won’t let us.”
“Well, now, I wouldn’t have you do anything to displease mother—not for
worlds—but I’m sorry just the same,” observing her in the distance. She
was bending over several full milk pails. Even as I looked she picked
them up and came trudging toward us.
“Well, anyhow, you can take a card, can’t you?” I continued, and I gave
each several pictures of Warsaw scenes. “They won’t hurt, will they?”
“Huhuh,” answered the little one, taking them.
As the mother neared us I suffered a keen recrudescence of the mood that
used to grip me when my mother would go out of an evening like this to
milk or walk about the garden or look after the roses at Sullivan, and
Ed and Tillie and I would follow her. She was so dear and gentle. Under
the trees or about our lawn we would follow her, and here under these
odorous trees, in the light of this clear moon, the smell of cattle and
wild flowers about, my mother came back and took me by the hand. I held
onto her skirt and rubbed against her legs self protectingly. She was
all in all to us in those years—the whole world—my one refuge and
strength.
How benign is the power that makes mothers—and mothers' love!
Soon we were off again, speeding under the shade of overhanging trees or
out in the open between level fields, and after racing about fourteen
miles or thereabouts, we discovered that we were not near Silver Lake
any more at all—had passed it by seven miles or so. We were really
within six miles of North Manchester, Indiana, a place where a half
uncle of mine had once lived, a stingy, greedy, well meaning Baptist,
and his wife. He had a very large farm here, one of the best, and was
noted for the amount of hay and corn he raised and the fine cattle he
kept. My brother Albert, shortly after the family’s fortune had come to
its worst smash—far back in 1878—had been sent up here by mother to work
and board. She was very distraught at the time—at her wits' ends—and her
brood was large. So here he had come, had been reasonably well received
by this stern pair and had finally become so much of a favorite that
they wanted to adopt him. Incidentally he became very vigorous
physically, a perfect little giant, with swelling calves and biceps and
a desire to exhibit his strength by lifting everybody and everything—a
trait which my sister Tillie soon shamed out of him. When we had finally
settled in Sullivan, in 1880, for a year or two he rejoined us and would
not return to his foster parents. They begged him but the family
atmosphere at Sullivan, restricted and poverty stricken as it was,
proved too much for him. He preferred after a time to follow us to
Evansville and eventually to Warsaw. Like all the rest of us, he was
inoculated with the charm of my mother. No one of us could resist her.
She was too wonderful.
And now as we neared this city I was thinking of all this and
speculating where Al might be now—I had not heard from him in years—and
how my half-uncle had really lived (I had never seen him) and what my
mother would think if she could follow this ramble with her eyes. But
also my head was feeling as though it might break open and my eyes ached
and burned dreadfully. I wanted to go back to Warsaw and stay there for
a while—not the new Warsaw as I had just seen it, but the old Warsaw. I
wanted to see my mother and Ed and Tillie as we were then, not now, and
I couldn’t. We rolled into this other town, which I had never seen
before, and having found the one hotel, carried in our bags and engaged
our rooms. Outside, katy-dids and other insects were sawing lustily.
There was a fine, clean bathroom with hot and cold water at hand, but I
was too flat for that. I wished so much that I was younger and not so
sick just now. I could think of nothing but to undress and sleep. I
wanted to forget as quickly as possible, and while Franklin and Speed
sallied forth to find something to eat I slipped between the sheets and
tried to rest. In about an hour or less I slept—a deep, dreamless
sleep;—and the next morning on opening my eyes I heard a wood dove
outside my window and some sparrows and two neighbor women gossiping in
good old Indiana style over a back fence, and then I felt more at ease,
a little wistful but happy.