A MINSTREL BROTHER
But we didn’t reach Evansville, for all our declaration and pretence of
our need. A delightful run along a delightful road, overhung with trees
(and now that we were out of the valley between the two rivers, cut
between high banks of tree shaded earth), brought us to Princeton, a
town so bright and clean looking that we were persuaded, almost against
our wishes, to pass the night here. Some towns have just so much
personality. They speak to you of pleasant homes and pleasant people—a
genial atmosphere. Here, as elsewhere, indeed, in all but the poorest of
these small midwestern towns, the center of it was graced by the court
house, a very presentable building, and four brightly lighted business
sides. The walks about the square were outlined, every fifty feet or
less, by a five-lamp standard. The stores were large and clean and
bright. A drug store we visited contained such an interesting array of
postcards that I bought a dozen—pictures of great grain elevators, four
or five of which we had seen on entering the town, sylvan scenes along
the banks of the Patoka, a small lake or watering place called “Long
Pond,” and scenes along tree sheltered roads. I liked the spirit of
these small towns, quite common everywhere today, which seeks out the
charms of the local life and embodies them in colored prints, and I said
so.
Walk into any drug or book store of any up to date small town today, and
you will find in a trice nearly every scene of importance and really
learn the character and charms of the vicinity. Thus at Conneaut, Ohio,
but for the picture postcards which chronicled the fact, we would never
have seen the giant cranes which emptied steel cars like coalscuttles.
Again, except for the picture postcards displayed, I would never have
sensed the astonishing charms of Wilkes-Barré, Sandusky, or even my
native Terre Haute. The picture cards told all, in a group, of what
there was to see.
We discovered a most interesting and attractive quick lunch here, quite
snowy and clean, with a bright, open grill at the back, and here, since
we now were hungry again, we decided to eat. Franklin saw cantaloupes in
the window and I announced that I had bought a picture card of a
cantaloupe packing scene in a town called Cantaloupe, which, according
to my ever ready map, was back on the road we had just come through.
“They ought to be good around here,” he commented, rather avidly, I
thought. “Nice, fresh cantaloupe right out of the field.”
We entered.
I did not know, really, how seriously Franklin craved fresh, ripe, cold
muskmelon in hot weather until we got inside.
“We’ll have muskmelon, eh?” he observed eagerly.
“All right. I’ll divide one with you.”
“Oh, no,” he returned, with the faintest rise in his inflection. “I’d
like a whole one.”
“Delighted, Franklin,” I replied. “On with the dance. Let muskmelon,
etc.”
He went to the counter and persuaded the waiter maid to set forth for
him two of the very largest—they were like small watermelons—which he
brought over.
“These look like fine melons,” he observed.
“They’re splendid,” said the girl. “This is a melon country.”
A traveling salesman who was eating over at another table exclaimed, “I
can vouch for that.”
Franklin and I began. They were delicious—fragrant, a luscious product
of a rich soil. We ate in silence, and when his was consumed, he
observed, eyeing me speculatively, “I believe I could stand another
one.”
“Franklin!” I exclaimed reproachfully.
“Yes, I could,” he insisted. “They’re great, don’t you think so?”
“As good as ever I have eaten—better even.”
“That settles it. I’m going to have one more.”
He brought it over and ate it alone, while I sat and talked to him and
marveled. Once more, when he was finished, he fixed me with his eye.
“Well, now, how do you feel?” I inquired.
“Fine. You know—you’ll think it’s funny—but I could eat another—a half
anyhow.”
“Franklin!” I exclaimed. “This is too much. Two whole melons and now a
third!”
“Do you think it’s too much?”
There was a sort of childish naïveté about the inquiry which moved me to
laughter—and firmness. Franklin achieves this quite unconsciously, at
times—a certain self-abnegating shyness.
“I certainly do. Here it is after eleven. We are supposed to be up early
and off—and here you sit eating muskmelons by the crate. This is
shameful. Besides, you can get more tomorrow. We are in the land of the
muskmelon.”
“Oh, all right,” he consented, quite crestfallen.
I did not realize at the time that I was actually stopping him, and
before he had enough. It was a joke on my part.
The next day was Wednesday, a bright, sunny day, and pleasantly cool.
The sun streaming under my black shades at six and earlier awoke me, and
I arose and surveyed the small town, as much of it as I could see from
my window and through encircling trees. It was as clean and homey and
pleasing as it had seemed the night before. By now Franklin, hearing me
stirring, was up too, and we awakened Bert, who was still asleep. If we
were to get to Evansville and on to Indianapolis and Carmel again in
this one day, it would have to be a long and speedy run, but even now I
began to doubt whether we should make it. Evansville was too interesting
to me, as one of my home towns. It was all of fifty miles away as we
would ride, and after that would come a cross-country run of one hundred
and fortyfive miles as the crow flies, or counting the twists and turns
we would make, say one hundred and seventyfive miles—a scant
calculation. There were, as my map showed, at least seven counties to
cross on returning. In our path lay French Lick and West Baden—the
advertised Carlsbads of America. North of that would be Bedford, the
home of the world’s supply of Indiana limestone, and beyond it
Bloomington, the seat of the State University, where I had spent one
dreamy, lackadaisical year. After that a run of at least sixtyfive miles
straight, let alone winding, before we could enter Carmel.
“It can’t be done, Franklin,” I argued, as we dressed. “You said three
days, but it will be four at the earliest, if not five. I want to see a
little of Evansville and Bloomington.”
“Well, if we have decent roads, we can come pretty near doing it,” he
insisted. “Certainly we can get home by tomorrow night. I ought to. I
have a lot of things to do in town Friday.”
“Well, you’re the doctor,” I agreed, “so long as I see what I want to
see.”
We bustled downstairs, agreeing to breakfast in Evansville. It was six
thirty. Those favored souls who enjoy rising early in the morning and
looking after their flowers were abroad, admiring, pinching, cutting,
watering. It was a cheering spectacle. I respect all people who love
flowers. It seems to me one of the preliminary, initiative steps in a
love and understanding of beauty. Evansville came nearer at a surprising
rate. I began to brush up my local geography and list in my mind the
things I must see—the houses in which we had lived, the church and
school which I was made to attend, the Ohio River, at the foot of Main
Street—where once in January, playing with some boys, I fell into the
river, knocked off a floating gangway, and came desperately near being
swept away by the ice. Then I must see Blount’s Plow Works, and the
chair factory of Messrs. Nienaber and Fitton, where my brother Al worked
for a time, and where of a Saturday I often went to help him. And the
Evansville Ironstone Pottery Company must be found, too, at whose low
windows I was wont to stand and delightedly watch the men form cups,
plates, pitchers, etc., out of grey, wet clay. This seemed to me the
most wonderful manufacturing process of all those witnessed by me in my
youth. It was so gracefully and delicately accomplished. There was only
one other thing that compared in interest, and that was the heating and
melting of iron in great furnaces in an enormous iron foundry on the
same street with the Catholic School which I used to pass every day and
where the pouring of the glistening metal into cauldrons and the pouring
of that into wondrously intricate moulds of sand, whereby were shaped
iron fences, gratings, culvert tops, had always been of the intensest
interest to me.
The essential interest of Evansville to me, however, was that at that
particular time in my youth, and just at the time when seemingly things
had reached a crisis for my mother—whose moods were invariably my
own—Evansville had appeared like a splendid new chapter in our lives,
and resolved all of our difficulties, for the time being, into nothing.
How was this done? Well, as I have indicated somewhere, I believe, our
oldest brother, the oldest living member of the family of children, had
come to my mother’s rescue in the nick of time. By now he was a
successful, though up to this time wandering, minstrel man—an “end man,”
no less. But, more recently still, he had secured a position with a
permanent or stock minstrel company located in the Evansville Opera
House, where he was honored with the position of interlocutor and end
man, as the mood prompted him, and where nightly he was supposed to
execute a humorous monologue. Incidentally, he was singing his own
songs. Also, incidentally he was conducting a humorous column in a local
paper, the Evansville _Argus_. The fences and billboards of the city
attested to his comparative popularity, for a large red and yellow
single sheet print of his face was conspicuously displayed in many
windows.
His life so far had proved a charming version of the prodigal son. As a
boy of seventeen, for errors which need not be recounted here, he was
driven out of the home. As a man of twentyseven (or boy) he had now
returned (the winter previous to our moving) adorned with a fur coat, a
high silk hat, a gold-headed cane.
My mother cried on his shoulder and he on hers. He really loved her so
tenderly, so unwaveringly, that this in itself constituted a fine
romance. At once he promised to solve all her difficulties. She must
come out of this. He was going to Evansville now. There is a bit of
private history which should be included here, but which I do not wish
to relate, at present. The result was that thereafter a weekly letter
containing a few dollars—three or four—arrived every Monday. (How often
have I gone to the postoffice to get it!) Then there was some talk of a
small house he was going to rent, and of the fact that we were soon to
move. Then one summer day we did go, and I recall so well how, arriving
in Evansville at about nine o’clock at night (my mother and we three
youngest), we were met at the station by the same smiling, happy
brother, and taken to the house at 1413 East Franklin Street; where on
seeing her new home and its rather comfortable equipment, my mother
stood in the doorway and cried—and he with her. I cannot say more than
that. It all seems too wonderful—too beautiful, even now.