He called it Indian in the Corn.
In autumn, in the field beyond South Pasture, when the husks were built
into tepees around the cobs of massive, orange-colored teeth, it was
his favorite pastime as he bustled up and down the rustling aisles,
to slip into a tepee’s heart. Lie there. Crouch there. Feel sinister
there. And then, deep in his tepee, over the yellow mound of corn that
was like a camp-fire, beat his palm against his open mouth and let out
yips. Henry, when reading him _Leatherstocking Tales_ up in his room
beside the old base-burner, used to yodel thus, against slaps at his
opened mouth.
Never by chance did a farm-hand encounter the particular tepee that
concealed David. Sometimes, to the simply irrepressible excitement
of the small crouching figure whose eyes shone like a cat’s through
apertures in the husks, they rustled perilously near. But never, even
though they could hear him breathe, would hired man be guilty of
finding out Davey.
That made it perennially exciting. Even if one suspected, at times, an
elaborate and almost too consistent immunity to direction of sounds
on the part of the field-workers. Still, one could never be quite
sure. After all, in a wilderness of tepees that reached from the
sheep pasture to the creek, one Indian chieftain might easily throw
puzzlement, even consternation, into the less wily white man.
Tecumseh, Chief of the Shawnees, who had been prominent in border
warfare in that very region where the Old Gentleman’s corn-field flowed
its mellow way, was a favorite rôle.
The War of 1812 could bang in cap-pistol shots among those tepees.
There was a colored picture in one of his brother Henry’s books; _The
Lewis and Clarke Expedition_, of a solitary chieftain skulking in and
out of ambush, and a score of white men from behind a barricade, lying
belly low, aiming rifles at just the wrong clump of bush.
Sometimes Jacob, known throughout the valley as the best farm hand in
the state (when sober), would throw a fit at these yips emanating from
the tepees, and dance up and down on the balls of his feet and rub the
seat of his overalls.
That invariably delighted David into a spell of the short, hiccoughy
laughter of childhood, and out he came, still yipping, and leaping
about in a tribal dance of no authenticity, while Jacob, at sight of
the small figure in the yellow khaki-suit overalls, with fringed sides,
and the band of porcupine-quills made into a head-crest for him by his
sister Rebekka, took to his heels, still rubbing.
Long hazy autumns, the color of an apricot, and of a spanking kind of
heat, these years that led up to Davey’s being seven. Slow days, even
as they grew shortest, that lay in a little yellow mud along the tongue
and tasted of pollen.
All of his life David was to remember the taste of those days of his
first seven years.
Once, in the full prime of his future, standing on the observation
platform of a special train that was draped in bunting, and addressing
a group of townspeople who had crowded up around the tracks of a
station named Vandalia, the smell of that hot autumn haze, drifting in
apricot-colored sunlight from outlying corn-fields, caught him so by
the throat, that he terminated his remarks almost on a gulp and retired
into the car to the rather bewildered cheers of the crowd.[2]
Those with him, accustomed to his grim, unrelenting sort of vitality,
were surprised at this show of fatigue; and his young personal
physician, named Denny Kiskadden, harboring memories of Wilson,
Harding, and Putnam finally exacted from him a respite from the
whirlwind demands upon his time and energy, and the next few towns were
passed with the shades of the car drawn, and the milling crowds about
the stations met with a few brief remarks from the Secretary of State.
But it was not fatigue. It was a memory assailing him along the taste
nerves of his tongue. The taste of the smell of Indian summer drifting
in over soil that was the soil of his being.
The old house on the edge of Centralia was packed with that odor into
the very plush and horsehair of its furniture. Hard coal from the
base-burners, and the smell of winter apples, and a curious smell that
was sweet, like the breath of a cow, mingled with it the year through.
For years, during a sustained hiatus in the growth of Centralia, due
to certain water-power monopolies that held up a foundry-development
which was one day to boom it, the House on Sycamore Street continued
virtually to mark the very spot where the bob-tailed town faded back
into the placid geography of the meadow, field, and brook from whence
it came.
From its square brace of front bay windows, you glimpsed the roofs of
the sedentary houses for blocks along the shady length of Sycamore
Street. But from its rear; from Henry’s window, or Davey’s attic one,
or Trina’s, there uninterrupted, plunged the sheep meadow into the
corn-fields, and the corn-fields into the creek; and climbing out of
the creek, as if the land were hurrying to be on its way, more sheep
pasture, alfalfa, barns and stiles, and so on to the Tarkington Farm,
whose buildings, with the exception of silo, were hidden by trees.
In Rebekka’s and Henry’s childhood, the creek that plunged through
South Meadow had wound its way through the town so that every so
often, as you drove, clump-clump, went hoofs over wooden bridges. The
soft thunder of the loose flooring in these bridges reverberated down
into Davey’s sixth year, then the town appropriation went through for
filling in the creek.
Every Schuyler had reason to remember that rear of flowing pasture and
farm-land, and had plunged and shouted away many a somnolent midsummer
afternoon in this tramp stream that had, in rare fashion, wandered
off the flank of a two-hundred-mile river, to rattle its way over the
stones. While David was growing up, practically all the streets that it
had intersected were filled in, doing away with the pleasant commotion
of the wooden bridges. But like a rash, immediately beyond the town, it
broke out again.
The South Meadow ran on beyond the creek to the railroad. A double row
of persimmon-trees marked the edge of the Old Gentleman’s property.
Sometimes, on the afternoons that were mealy to the tongue of the
apricot haze, David lay flat on his back under them on the coarse,
yellowing pasture-grasses. Sometimes a persimmon came down and spat him
in the face.[3]
Mathilda Schuyler, who sewed a great deal in a large third-story sort
of attic-room, with matting on the floor, and large blobs of unused
blankets, comforters, pillows, and feather beds, tied into sheets and
arranged around the room, could lean out of that window and yodel to
Davey when she wanted him, as she had yodeled to the small Schuylers
who had scampered before.
But somehow, after the interval of more than the score of years that
separated her sixth from this seventh child of hers, Mathilda had taken
on some of the nervousness of a young mother with her first-born. And
an additional kind of self-consciousness, as if to Davey were owing
some sort of an explanation for the circumstance of a curious isolation
caused by years.
And yet, after a certain square little fashion, David was the sturdiest
of her children, with his father’s tight kind of sinew that knitted him
down into stockiness, and short heavy legs that were to remain that way
until at fourteen they shot up, lean and over-lanky. A brownish little
fellow with the blackest of pupils to his eyes, surrounded by the clear
gold of syrup. There were three black dots in the gold of the left eye.
“Faith, Hope, and Charity,” said Emma to him one day, and kissed the
eye shut.
Maybe! But David wriggled. He was pretty constantly being kissed by
the three big women, his sisters. And even by his nieces and nephews.
It was a favorite pleasantry of Rebekka’s eldest son, Steve, who was
fifteen when David was four, to address him as Uncle David and then
pick him up by the seat of his small trousers and deposit him on top of
a mantelpiece.
Emma’s daughter Claire was the niece nearest his age. When she was
an adorable eleven, a blond Bavarian-looking doll with her mother’s
bright, plump Teutonic prettiness, and dimples everywhere, knees,
wrists, elbows, cheeks and chin, her Uncle David was six. It was the
period when he was all square. Square, brown, straight bangs. Square,
ragged front teeth. The squareness beginning to lock his chin. The eyes
of clear gold syrup with the three brown motes in the left, that looked
at you squarely, under the square brow made squarer by bangs.
“He’s a Schuyler every inch,” would say his Mother, placing cold,
oldish hands on his young hair.
“Except the inches that haven’t come yet,” was the Old Gentleman’s
chuckle. “Don’t count your inches before they’re hatched. And there’s
no telling ... he may remain a little shorty....”
“No telling,” repeated Mathilda, with the thought racing across her
eyes that could make them look about to tear. “No telling for us, that
won’t live to see it.”
“We’ll live!” said the Old Gentleman, expanding as if to give validity
to a remark that had none whatsoever, except what grand manner could
contribute. “Never mind, we’ll live, to see everything.”
“Dave, what do you want to be when you grow up?” was a constant
reiteration of the Old Gentleman’s, as if to jerk the future closer, so
that he might cram some of this late son’s maturity into his lifetime.
For the first ten years of his boyhood, with a consistency that never
failed to raise the family-laugh, David stood by a selection that was
neither precocious nor unique:
“I want to be a policeman.”