THE BACKWOODS OF INDIANA
Stopping to look at the old school door I went in. I recalled how, once
upon a time, when we were first starting to school here, we tried to
induce Ed to enter, he being the youngest and very shy as to education.
But he refused to go and ran back home. The next day my sister Sylvia
and I and Tillie took him, but at the gate he once more balked and
refused to enter. It was a dreadful situation, for already we others had
found the discipline here to be very stern. Perhaps it was Ed’s
subconscious realization of what was about to be done to his soul that
terrified him. At any rate, when pressed to come he cried and even
screamed, making such an uproar that that same Herr Professor Ludwig
Falk, ogreific soul that he was, came rushing out, grabbed him, and
carried him, squalling, within. For a time he was not to be dealt with
even there, but finding eventually that no one harmed him, he sat down
and from that day to the time he left, two years later, learned nothing
at all, not even his catechism—for which same I am truly grateful. But
the formalism of the church caught him, its gold and colors and
thunderings as to hell, and now he is as good a Catholic as any and as
fearful of terrific fires.
Once inside, in the same room in which I used to sit and fear for my
life and learned nothing, I encountered a black-garbed sister, her beads
dangling at her waist, the same kind that used to overawe and terrify me
in my youth. Because she looked at me curiously I bowed and then
explained: “Once I went to school here—over thirty years ago.” (I could
see she assumed I was still a good Catholic.) I went on: “I sat in this
seat here. It was the third row from the wall, about six seats back. A
Mr. Falk was my teacher here then, and a Father Dudenhausen the pastor.”
“Yes,” she said simply, “I have heard of Mr. Falk—but he has not been
here for years. He left many years ago. Father Dudenhausen died fifteen
years ago.”
“Yes, so I heard,” I replied, “and Father Livermann—do you know of him?”
“No, I never heard of him, but if you will go to the pastor in the house
back of the church, he can tell you. He would be pleased to see someone
who had been here so long ago.”
I smiled. I was only fortyfour, but how old I really was, after all.
Then Franklin came in with his camera.
“Do you mind if we take a picture of it?” I asked.
“Not at all,” she replied. “It would be nice.”
“How would you like to sit at the desk there? I have sat in rooms where
a sister was my teacher.”
“Oh, I think I’d better not,” she replied. “I’m not sure if it’s
permissible. I——”
Just then another, an older, nun came in, and she put the matter to her
in soft whispers.
She was dying to do it. I could see that.
“Well, the rules,” I heard the other say aloud.
There was more whispering, and then she mounted the platform and turned
her head sidewise so that her bonnet concealed her face. Franklin
snapped her.
“Would you like a copy of it, if it turns out well?” I inquired.
“Oh, it would please me very much.”
“And your name?”
“Sister Mary Caroline—316 Vine Street.”
I took one last look and went out.
Outside was the yard in which we had always played. As an eleven and
twelve-year-old boy, this had seemed a dreadful place to me—one of
brawls and arguments. I was not a fighter nor tough enough physically to
share in the rough sports that went on here—leap frog, snap the whip,
and bean bag. I did, but I was always getting the worst of it and in
addition, for some unaccountable reason, I was always finding myself
involved in fights. Suddenly, out of a clear sky, without my having said
a word to anybody, I would be the object of some bucky little American’s
or German-American’s rage or opposition—a fist would be shaken in my
face. I would be told to “wait till after school.” After school a crowd
would gather. I would be led, as it were, like a lamb to the slaughter.
The crowd would divide into “sides.” I would be urged to take off my
coat and “go for him.” But I was never much on the go. Somehow I did not
know how to fight; even when at times I thought I ought to, or might
win. A chance blow once won me a victory and great applause. I knocked
my opponent flat—and all the fight out of him apparently—but quite by
accident. I hadn’t intended to at all. At other times I received
undeserved beatings, which left me wondering what I had done and why
life was so fierce. It made me shy of other boys. I kept out of trouble
by keeping away from them, wandering about by myself and rejoicing in
the beauty of life as a whole—its splendid, spectacular reality.
Inside the Church was nothing to disturb me or cause me to alter my
point of view. It was just the same. There was the Reverend Anton
Dudenhausen’s confessional, front, left; and here were all the altars,
statues, stations, windows, just as I had left them. I looked up at the
organ loft where I had pumped air for the organ, weekdays and Sundays.
It was apparently as I had left it. Kind heaven, I exclaimed to myself,
standing in here, what a farce life is anyhow. Here is this same Church,
from the errors and terrors of which I managed by such hard straits of
thought to escape, and here is a city and a school pouring more and more
victims into its jaws and maw year after year, year after year!
Supposing one does escape? Think of all the others! And if this were the
middle ages I would not even dare write this. They would burn me at the
stake. As it is, if any attention is paid to me at all I will be
denounced as a liar, a maligner, a person with a diseased brain, as one
of my dear relatives (Catholic of course) condescended to remark. Yet at
my elbow as I write stands the Encyclopedia Britannica and Van Ranke’s
“History of The Papacy,” and a life of Torquemada, to say nothing of
scores of volumes demolishing the folly of religious dogma
completely—and yet—and yet—the poor victims of such unbelievable
tommyrot as this would be among the first to destroy me and these
things—the very first.
A little way down Vine Street from the school was the old foundry, now
enlarged and doing a good business in old metal melting and recasting.
We turned into Main, where it joined Vine, and there a block away was
Blounts Iron Works unchanged. Thirtythree years had not made a particle
of difference. The walls were as red and dusty, the noise as great. I
went along the windows, looking in, and so interesting were the
processes that Franklin joined me. In exactly the same positions, at the
same windows, were seemingly the same men at the exact machines,
heating, welding, shaping and grinding shares. It was astonishing. I
felt young for the moment. At these windows, with my books under my arm,
I had always lingered as long as I dared, only I recalled now that my
eyes then came just above the window sills, whereas now the sills
touched my middle chest. It was almost too good to be true.
And there, up Main Street, quite plainly was the railroad station we
entered the night we came from Sullivan, and whence we departed two
years later for Chicago and Warsaw—only it had been rebuilt. It was a
newer, a grander affair—a Union Station, no less. Then we had slipped
in, my mother and her helpless brood, and were met by Paul and put on a
little one horse street car which had no conductor at the rear but only
a small step, and in which, after depositing coins in a case where a
light was, we rode a few blocks to Franklin Street. I recalled the
night, the stars, the clang of summer engine bells, the city’s confusing
lights. It seemed so wonderful, this city; after Sullivan, so great. It
had forty or fifty thousand people then (seventyfive thousand today). On
the train, as we came in, it seemed as if we were coming into
fairy-land.
[Illustration:
A BEAUTIFUL TREE ON A VILE ROAD
Warwick County, Indiana
]
“Mister,” I said to a passing Southern water type, a small, gypsyish,
swarthy little man, “can you tell us where Franklin Street is?”
“Why, sweetheart, right they it is—right they at the conoh.”
The eyes poured forth a volume of gentle sunny humor. I smiled back. It
was like being handed a bouquet of roses.
We turned into Franklin Street and rode such a little way—two blocks
say. The house was easy to identify, even though the number had now been
made 1415. It was now crowded in between a long row of brick and frame
houses, of better construction, and the neighborhood had changed
entirely in physical appearance though not in atmosphere. Formerly, save
for our house, all was open common here. You could see from our house to
the station at which we had arrived—from our house to the interesting
potteries which I still hoped to find, east or toward the country. You
could see north to the woods and an outlying Catholic Orphan Asylum.
Now all that was changed. It was all filled with houses. Streets that in
my time had not even been platted now ran east and west and north and
south. Our large yard and barn were gone. The house had no lawn at all,
or just a tiny scrap in front. The fine commons at the back where all
the neighborhood boys gathered to play ball, circus, top, marbles, was
solidly built over with houses. I remembered how I used to run, kicking
my bare toes in clover blooms in the summer. Once a bee stung me and I
sat down and cried; then getting no aid, I made a paste of mud and
saliva and held that on—instructions from big Ed Fisher, one of our
neighborhood gang. I recalled how Ed and I played one old cat here with
Harry Trochee, the gypsy trader’s son, up the street, and how we both
hated to have to run up the street to Main Street to the grocer’s or
butcher’s for anything. Here I could stand and see the steeple of Holy
Trinity, clear across the city at Third and Pine, and hear the Angelus
tolled, morning, noon and night. It was beautiful to me—I have often
paused to listen—and to feel. Across the common of a Saturday I have
wandered to the potteries to look in at the windows at so many
interesting things that were being made.
“Shall we stop?” asked Franklin, as we neared the door.
“Please don’t. I don’t want to go in.”
Some little children were playing on our small front porch.
And next came the potteries themselves, over in the exact region where
they should have been, but now swollen to enormous proportions. The
buildings extended for blocks. Hundreds, if not thousands, of men and
women must have been at work here. You could see them at all the
windows, turning cups, saucers, plates, bowls, pitchers,
tureens—thousands in a day. The size and the swing of it all was like a
song. We got out and wandered about up and down the low red walls,
looking at windows and doors, seeing the thousands upon thousands of
bits of clay being shaped into the forms which they retain for a little
while only to be returned to their native nothingness again. So may we
be shaped and cast back broken—to be used some day for something else.
“The methods have changed,” said one man, talking to me through a
window. “Twenty years ago a lot of the work was still done by hand, but
now we do it all by machinery. We have forms like this”—and he held up
one. “You see we put just so much clay in and press this down and that
makes the exact thickness. It can’t be more or less. I make a hundred
and twenty plates an hour.”
He made twenty while we looked on.
Another man, at the next window, was putting handles on cups.
After this there was nothing of interest to see, so we consulted the map
and decided that our best plan was to go first to Boonville in Warwick
County, the next county east; then northeast to Huntingberg and Jasper
in Dubois County, and then still northeast through Kellerville and
Norton into Orange County, and so reach French Lick and West Baden.
Neither of us had ever been there. It was of some slight interest to me
as being famous—a great cure and the quondam resort of my brother Paul,
who was fond of places of this kind. Indeed, he was a kind of modern
Falstaff, roystering with drinkers and women and having a gay time of it
wherever he was—a vigorous animal soul, with a world of sentiment and a
capacity for living which was the admiration and the marvel of all
beholders.
So we were off.
In so far as this part of the trip was concerned, I can truthfully say
the attraction was off. There was still Bloomington, my one year
university town, but beside Warsaw and Terre Haute and Sullivan and
Evansville—how it paled! Chicago was really of much more interest to me,
the Chicago that I visited between Evansville and Warsaw, but this trip
did not include that. Besides, I had been to Chicago so often since.
We followed hot, wet bottom lands to Boonville, a poorer town even than
Sullivan, with unpaved streets and a skimpy county fair not to be
compared with the one of Knox County, in which Vincennes was situated.
Then we struck northeast through a region where the roads were so bad
that it seemed we should never come through with the car. Water puddles,
and streams even, blocked the way. At one place we shot over a bridge
the far end of which sank as we crossed, and a ditch of nine feet of
depth yawned beside the track, separated by but one foot of earth! Death
seemed to zip close to my ear at that moment. We saw poor homes, poor
stores, wretched farms, shabby, almost ragged people. At one town,
Selvin, on the road to Huntingberg, a pretty country girl “tending” the
general store there asked us if we were coming from Boonville, and when
we said yes, asked if we had seen the fair.
“Yes,” replied Franklin.
“It’s fine, isn’t it?” she commented.
“Yes,” he replied gently.
You can imagine the isolation of this region when I tell you that our
automobile attracted universal attention; that we saw only one other
between Boonville and Huntingberg; that dogs and horses ran away
frightened at the horn; and that children ran out to see. This did not
seem quite possible.
At Holland, however, in the southwest corner of Dubois County, we
encountered a splendid road, smooth and white, along which we tore.
Indeed, this whole county proved a revelation, for whereas the two
preceding ones were poor, wretched even, this was prosperous and
delightful to look upon. Great meadows of emerald were interspersed with
splendid forests of ash and beech. One saw sheep and Jersey and Holstein
cattle in the fields, and for a novelty, new for me in America, repeated
flocks of snow white geese, great droves of them,—a region, no doubt,
given to feather raising.
Huntingberg was alive and clean—a truly handsome little town with well
built houses, wide streets, attractive stores, a brisk, businesslike
atmosphere. It was really charming, romantically so. Beyond it was an
equally fine road leading to Jasper, the county seat. On this we
encountered a beech grove so noble and well planned that it had the
sanctity and aroma of a great cathedral. Through the columns of trees
one could see the sun sinking—a great red ball of fire. The sky was
sapphire and the air cool. Those lowings and bleatings and callings and
tinklings of evening were just beginning. We ran the car into a fence
pocket, and letting down the bars of a gate walked into this great hall.
I was deeply impressed—moved really. I put my arms behind my back and
gazed aloft into the silvery branches. I laid reverent hands on their
smooth, silvery trunks—and my cheek. I almost asked them to bless me—to
help me grow strong, natural, frank—all that a struggling mind in a
mystic world should become. I spoke to the red sun in the West and bade
it adieu for another night. I looked into the small still pools of water
to be found here, wherein stars would see their faces latterly, and
begged of all wood sprites and water nymphs, nixies and pixies, that
some day, soon perhaps, they would make me one in their happy councils
and revels. I looked up through the trees to the sky, and told myself
again, as I do each day, that life is good, that in spite of contest and
bitterness and defeated hopes and lost ambitions and sickness and envy
and hate and death—still, still, there is this wondrous spectacle which,
though it may have no part or lot with us, or we with it, yet provides
all we know of life. The sigh of winds, the lap of waters, the call of
birds—all color, fragrance, yearning, hope, sweet memory—of what old
mysteries are these compounded!
[Illustration:
A CATHEDRAL OF TREES
Jasper, Indiana
]
Jasper, the county seat, was another town of which I most heartily
approved. It was beautiful, like the rest of this striking county. The
court house, like most of those in this region and elsewhere, was new,
but in this instance built with considerable taste and individuality—not
a slavish copy—and set in a square at the intersection of four wide
streets on a slight rise of ground, so that coming townward from any
direction, and from a long way off, one could see it commanding one of
these striking approaches. What a charming place in which to grow up, I
thought!
Again, there was a river here, that selfsame Patoka of Princeton, and as
we entered from the south, it provided some most interesting views,
sylvan and delicate. Still once more there was a church here—St.
Joseph’s Roman Catholic—which was a triumph of taste. Most Roman
Catholic Churches, and for that matter every other denominational church
in America, have enough spent on them to insure originality and charm in
design, if only taste were not wanting—but taste, that priceless,
inexpensive thing, is rarely ever present. They build and build, slavish
copies of European models, usually of cathedrals, so that when one sees
an original design it is like a breath of fresh air entering a stuffy
room. This Church was built of a faintly greenish gray stone, and
possessed a soaring, yet delicate bell tower at one corner. It stood on
a considerable rise, in an open space and at right angles with a low
flat brown convent or school, which gave its entrance way a plaza-like
atmosphere. But for the fact that it was late and we were in a hurry,
and it was locked, we would have entered, but we would have had to go
for a key.