TERRE HAUTE AFTER THIRTYSEVEN YEARS
For good, bad, or indifferent, whether it had been painful or pleasant,
the youth time that I had spent in Terre Haute had gone and would never
come back again. My mother, as I remembered her then—and when is a
mother more of a mother than in one’s babyhood?—was by now merely a
collection of incidents and pains and sweetnesses lingering in a few
minds! And my father, earnest, serious-minded German, striving to do the
best he knew, was gone also—all of thirteen years. Those brothers and
sisters whose ambitions were then so keen, whose blood moods were so
high, were now tamed and sober, scattered over all the eastern portion
of America. And here was I walking about, not knowing a single soul here
really, intent upon finding one man perhaps who had known my father and
had been kind to him; for the rest, looking up the houses in which we
had lived, the first school which I had ever attended, the first church,
and thinking over all the ills we had endured rather than the pleasures
we had enjoyed (for of the latter I could scarcely recall any), was all
with which I had to employ myself.
In the first place, the night before coming in, because it was nearly
dark and because neither Franklin nor I cared to spend any more time in
this southern extension than we could help, I wanted to find and look at
as many of the old places as was possible in the summer twilight, for
more than look at them once I could scarcely, or at least, would not
care to do. It was not a difficult matter. At the time we lived there,
the city was much smaller, scarcely more than one-third its present
size, and the places which then seemed remote from the business heart
were now a five-minute walk, if so much. I could see, in coming in, that
to get to Ninth and Chestnut, where I was born, I would have to go
almost into the business section, or nearly so. Again, the house at
Twelfth and Walnut, where the first few years of my life were spent—say
from one to five—was first on our route in, and it was best to have Bert
turn in there, for the street labelings were all very plain and it was
easy to find our way. It was very evident that Terre Haute was another
manufacturing city, and a prosperous one, for smoke filled the air and
there was a somewhat inspiriting display of chimneys and manufacturing
buildings in one direction and another. The sound of engine bells and
factory whistles at six o’clock seemed to indicate a cheerful prosperity
not always present in larger and seemingly more successful cities.
Franklin, as I have said, noted a temper or flare of youth and hope
about the town, for he spoke of it.
“I like this place. It is interesting,” he said. “I had no idea Terre
Haute was so fine as this.”
As for me, my mind was recurring to old scenes and old miseries,
commingled with a child’s sensations. Once in this town, in company with
Ed and Al, I picked coal off the tracks because we had no coal at home.
Somewhere here Ed and I, going for a sack of cornmeal, lost the fifty
cents with which to buy it, and it was our last fifty cents. In a small
house in Thirteenth Street, as I have elsewhere indicated, the three
youngest of us were sick, while my father was out of work, and my mother
was compelled to take in washing. In some other house here—Seventh and
Chestnut, I believe—there was a swing in a basement where I used to
swing all alone by the hour, enjoying my own moods even at that time.
From a small brick house in Fourteenth Street, the last I ever knew of
Terre Haute, I carried my father’s dinner to him in a pail at a woolen
mill, of which he was foreman or manager or something. He was never
exactly a day laborer for anyone. I remember a “carder” and a “fuller”
and a “blower” and a “spinning jenny” and his explaining their functions
to me. Somewhere in this town was the remainder of St. Joseph’s School,
or its site, at least, where at five years of age I was taken to learn
my A B C's, and where a nun in a great flaring white bonnet and a black
habit, with a rattling string of great beads, pointed at a blackboard
with a stick and asked us what certain symbols stood for. I recall even
now, very faintly, it is true, having trouble remembering what the
sounds of certain letters were.
I remember the church attached to this school, and a bell in a tower
that used to get turned over and wouldn’t ring until some one of us boys
climbed up and turned it back—a great treat. I remember boating on a
small, muddy pool, on boards, and getting my feet very wet, and almost
falling in, and a serious sore throat afterwards. I remember a band—the
first I ever heard—(Kleinbind’s Terre Haute Ringold Band as my father
afterwards explained was its official title)—marching up the street, the
men wearing red jackets with white shoulder straps and tall black
Russian shakos. They frightened me, and I cried. I remember once being
on the Wabash River with my brother Rome in a small boat—the yellow
water seemed more of a wonder and terror to me then than it does now—and
of his rocking the boat and of my screaming, and of his wanting to whip
me—a brotherly bit of tenderness, quite natural, don’t you think? I
remember, at Twelfth and Walnut, a great summer rainstorm, when I was
very young, and my mother undressing me and telling me to run out naked
in the great splattering drops making bubbles everywhere—an adventure
which seemed very splendid and quite to my taste. I remember my brothers
Paul and Rome as grownups—men really—when they were only boys, and of my
elder sisters—girls of thirteen, fifteen, seventeen, seeming like great
strong women.
Life was a strange, colorful, kaleidoscopic welter then. It has remained
so ever since.
Here I was now, and it was evening. As we turned into Walnut Street at
Twelfth I recognized one of the houses by pictures in the family and by
faint memories and we stopped to give Franklin time to sketch it. It was
a smoky, somewhat treeless neighborhood, with a number of children
playing about, and long rows of one-story workingmen’s cottages receding
in every direction. Once it had a large yard with a garden at the back,
apple, pear and cherry trees along the fence, a small barn or cow shed,
and rows of gooseberry and currant bushes bordering several sides. Now
all that was gone, of course. The house had been moved over to the very
corner. Small houses, all smoky, had been crowded in on either hand so
tightly that there were scarcely sidewalks between them. I asked a
little girl who came running over as the car stopped and Franklin began
sketching, “Who lives over there?”
“Kifer,” she replied.
“What does he do?”
“He works. They keep boarders. What are you making?”
“A picture.”
“Of that house?”
“Yes.”
“What for?”
“Well, I used to live there and I’ve come back all the way from New York
to see it.”
“Oh!” And with that she climbed up on the running board to look on, but
Franklin shooed her off.
“You mustn’t shake the car,” he said.
[Illustration: TERRE HAUTE FROM WEST OF THE WABASH]
She got down, but only to confer with six or seven other children who
had gathered by now, and all of whom had to be enlightened. They ran
back for a moment or two to inform inquisitive parents, but soon
returned, increased in number. They stood in a group and surveyed the
house as though they had never seen it before. Obviously, it had taken
on a little luster in their eyes. They climbed up on the running boards
and shook the car until Franklin was compelled to order them down again,
though it was plain that he was not anxious so to do. Bats were circling
in the air overhead—those fine, ricocheting winged mice. There were
mosquitoes about, annoying numbers of them—horrible clouds, in fact,
which caused me to wonder how people endured living in the neighborhood.
People walked by on their way home from work, or going out somewhere,
young men in the most dandified and conspicuous garbs, and on porches
and front steps were their fathers in shirt sleeves, and women in calico
dresses, reading the evening paper. I studied each detail of the house,
getting out and looking at it from one side and another, but I could get
no least touch of the earlier atmosphere, and I did not want to go in.
Interiorly it held no interest for me. I could not remember how it
looked on the inside anyhow.
After leaving this house, I decided to look up Ninth and Chestnut, where
I was born, but not knowing the exact corner (no one in our family
having been able to tell me) I gave it up, only to notice that at that
moment I was passing the corner. I looked. There were small houses on
every hand. Which one was ours, or had been? Or was it there at all any
more? Useless speculation. I did not even trouble to stop the car.
But from here I directed the car to Eighth and Chestnut, a corner at
which, in an old red brick house still standing, my mother, as someone
had informed me, had once essayed keeping borders. I was so young at the
time I could scarcely remember—say six or seven. All I could recall of
it was that here once was a little girl in blue velvet, with yellow
hair, the daughter of some woman of comparative (it is a guess) means,
who was stopping with us, and who, because of her blue velvet dress and
her airs, seemed most amazing to me, a creature out of the skies. I
remember standing at the head of the stairs and looking into her room—or
her mother’s, and seeing a dresser loaded with silver bits, and
marveling at the excellence of such a life. Just that, and nothing more,
out of a whole period of months. Now I could only recall that the house
was of brick, that it had a lawn and trees, a basement with a brick
floor, and a sense of abandonment and departed merit. Finding it at this
late date was not likely, but we ran the car around there and stopped
and looked. There was a brick house there, old but improved. Was it the
same? Who can tell, or what matter, really? The difference was to me.
We think of life as a definite, enduring thing, some of us; but what a
thin shadow, or nothingness, it must be, really, when the past and your
youth and all connected with it goes glimmering thus like smoke. I
always think of that passage in Job (XIV: 1-2) “Man that is born of a
woman is of few days, and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower
and is cut down; he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.” When I
think of that, and how ideas and notions and fames and blames go
glimmering, I often ask myself what is it all about, anyhow, and what
are we here for, and why should anyone worry whether they are low or
high, or moral or immoral. What difference does it really make? And to
whom? Who actually cares, in the long run, whether you are good, bad or
indifferent? There is much talk and much strutting to and fro and much
concealment of our past ills and shames, and much parading of our
present luxuries and well beings. But, my good friends, the wise know
better. You cannot talk to a man or woman of capacity or insight or
experience of any of these sharp distinctions. To them they do not
exist. We are all low or high according to our dynamic energy to get and
keep fame, money, notoriety, information, skill—no more. As for the
virtuous, and those supposedly lacking in virtue—the honest and those
who are dishonest—kind heaven, we haven’t the first inklings of
necessary data wherewith to begin even to formulate a theory of
difference! We do not know, and I had almost said we cannot know, though
I am not one to be cocksure of anything—not even of the impossibility of
perfection.
Allons! Then we moved the car to Seventh and Chestnut Streets, where had
stood another house near a lumber yard. In this house was the swing in
the basement where I used to swing, the sunlight pouring through a low
cellar window, such days as I chose to play there. Outside was a great
yard or garden with trees, and close at hand a large lumber yard—it
seemed immense to me at the time—pleasingly filled with odoriferous
woods, and offering a great opportunity for climbing, playing hide and
seek, running and jumping from pile to pile, and avoiding the watchman
who wanted to catch us and give us a good beating for coming into it at
all.
And beyond that was a train yard full of engines and cars and old broken
down cabooses and a repair shop. When I was most adventurous I used to
wander even beyond the lumber yard (there was a spur track going out
into this greater world), staring at all I saw, and risking no doubt my
young life more than once. At one time I fell off a car on which I had
adventurously climbed and bruised my hand quite seriously. At another
time I climbed up into a worn out and discarded engine, and examined all
the machinery with the utmost curiosity. It all seemed so amazing to me.
Engineers, firemen, brakemen, yard men—how astonishing they all
seemed—the whole clangorous, jangling compact called life.
But this house was now a mere myth or rumor—something that may never
have existed at all—so unreal are our realities. It had gone glimmering.
There was no house here anything like that which I had in mind. There
was a railroad yard, quite a large one, probably greatly enlarged since
my day. There was a lumber yard adjoining it, very prosperous looking,
and enclosed by a high board fence, well painted, and a long, old, low
white house with green shutters. We stopped the car here and I meditated
on my mother and sisters and on some laughing school teachers who took
meals with us here at this time. Then we moved on. I was glad to go. I
was getting depressed.
The last place we tried for was that much mentioned in Thirteenth
Street, Thirteenth between Walnut and Chestnut, as some one of my
relatives had said, but I could not find it. When we reached the
immediate vicinity we found a hundred such houses—I had almost said a
thousand—and it was a poor, sorrowful street, the homes of the most
deficient or oppressed or defeated. I wanted to hurry on, and did so,
but musingly and romantically, in passing, I picked out one which stood
next to an alley—an old, small, black, faded house, and said to myself,
that must be ours. But was it? Because of uncertainty my heart could not
go out to it. It went out only to that other house back in the clouds of
memory, where my mother and my sisters and brothers were all assembled.
And this street—yes, my heart went out to it—oh, very much. I felt as
though I would be willing to trade places with and take up the burden of
the least efficient and most depressed of all of those assembled here,
in memory of—in memory of——