[20] When Dave’s dog Teddy fell through a trap-door in the upper
reaches of the Igrotte barn, where Dave had a secret reading-retreat in
the hayloft, and landing on the upright prongs of a hay-fork, had to be
chloroformed out of his misery, I think I have never seen so sick and
blasted a face as my brother wore for weeks after. Some of that look
was to remain. Not in expression so much as in the dawn of that later
David to whom all pain was to be something as close to his own capacity
for suffering as the nerves in his own body.
My brother Henry had the dog’s body stuffed by a taxidermist in
Cleveland, Ohio. I confess that at first I questioned both the taste
and the wisdom of this, until I saw the curiously comforting effect it
seemed to have on the boy. Strange thing, but after the death of Teddy,
I never heard my brother refer to him in any way, nor did he ever
accept another pet, although dozens of them were offered and indeed
sent to him, from the beginnings of his public life.
The stuffed Teddy, however, has always stood in every one of my
brother’s offices, an unused pen-wiper dangling from his neck, as if to
ward off the onus of any implication of sentimentality.
[Illustration: Decorative Image]
_Chapter Twelve_
The summer that Dave was seven was one of a drought; added climax of a
late frost, and an absolutely unprecedented scourge of caterpillars had
done for several acres of the Old Gentleman’s cabbages.
It was a crop that the old man by unusual arrangement had sold two
weeks before the first seed of it was sown, on a several-hundred-dollar
advance, to a commission company to whom his word was his bond.
It meant not only the loss of the crop, but the doling back, with
interest, of the advance payment. In the end it was Bek who managed
two hundred of the three hundred refund, Mark Milliken’s failure to
meet a certain large note squeezing the Old Gentleman pretty terribly
on cash. Then the forfeiture of the additional six hundred expectancy
on that same crop put a crimp, so to speak, in the entire summer, so
far as ready cash was concerned. Not that there was any crisis, it
simply meant the old land-anomaly of all outgo and no income. Acres of
potential values, but for one reason or another, without yield enough
to pay their taxes.
It meant, with Mark Milliken’s and the Old Gentleman’s reciprocal habit
of calling upon each other for loans of cash and land-collateral, that
cash was pretty usually at low ebb. Often, indeed, for the Schuylers,
at least, it meant an old story of fending off the little crisis of
having to sell a parcel of land. The land-acquisitive Schuylers!
They came by it honestly. In the Austrian Tyrol, generations of
Schuylers had somehow managed to own an acre, even if the only other
property-holding was a sow. Mathilda’s great-grandfather had owned an
acre which was so meticulously tilled that it resembled a colored
geometric drawing. That acre had passed immaculately from father to
son. Mathilda Schuyler’s hands were still horny with her girlhood part
in coaxing and tilling it.
The Old Gentleman’s battered safe, in one corner of the dining-room,
and the drawers of his still-more-battered old desk beside it, and
the stacks of deeds and notes, current and canceled, bore documentary
evidence of the years and vitality that had been dedicated to trying to
make real estate real, in terms of yield.
Bek’s love of land was ingrained. So was Phil’s. Twice in five years
the family’s cash resources, scant beyond credulity, had been rallied
around Phil’s love-of-land ventures, which ultimately were to make
local history.[21]
This summer of fright, threat of hoof-and-mouth disease, and general
money-tightness, Davey, to save an extra hand’s wage, was put to
tending the South Pasture flocks during school vacation.
Long, slow, sun-drenched days, that vacation after his first year in
public school, with the earth rippling under him as he lay flat against
it until he could seem to feel it pushing softly, like a breathing
flank. Days that moved so slowly from the east where they arrived
pinkly, to the west where they departed redly, that they seemed to
stand stock-still for hours during their middle, pouring into him their
warmth, their hot lush smells. They had a taste, too, all their own,
these motionless days.
Sometimes, when he rolled over on his stomach away from the light, as
it became unendurably strong, and all of him seemed gathering the heat
like a disk, the taste of the earth came crawling into his mouth.
The taste of the land rolling, billowing, and riding him along like a
petal upon its current. The toes bit in. The nostrils breathed in. The
body of the boy wiggled down—wiggled in—close to turf and earth.
At twelve o’clock, Trina, who wore a sunbonnet with a starched visor
that buttoned on, came down to South Meadow with a tin pail of lunch.
Good, square chunks of his mother’s bread, smeared with apple-butter.
Strips of bacon and sometimes strips of the rind itself, tough enough
to be chewed the afternoon through for the last squeeze of flavor.
The tussle with Teddy, as he bounded up from keeping tidy the edges
of the flock, to fasten his teeth into that remnant of chewed-out
rind, forelegs squatted, tail high, white-fanged, eyeballs bulging,
ears laid! Then for the grand jerk! Gorgeously futile jerk. Teddy with
his teeth sunk into the leathery morsel and snarls mixed up with his
breathing, beginning to spin!
The boy and the dog. Teddy out on the horizontal. Sustained momentum.
Terrific momentum. Spinning boy. Spinning dog. Riot of sunlit
afternoon, with the dirty sheep grinding their teeth in a low thunder
and nibbling their strange-eyed heads off.
They had no sense. Teddy was better at making them herd neatly than
Grime, the eleven-year-old sheep-dog. All you had to do was to circle
the flock once every hour or so to close them in a little tighter,
Grime or Teddy yapping at the narrow ankles of any straggler, or Davey
flecking at his flock with a peeled switch off a plane tree.
Otherwise, just hours and hours of his flesh close to flesh of earth.
Lying face-up or on a slope against which the sun banged. When it
rained, and the smells that had been baked into grass and tree-bole and
leafage came out in cool breath, there was the hay-rick to burrow into,
the sheep gathered pat as a mat beneath the spread of two maple trees
that sort of linked arms.
There were books, too, which he concealed evenings in a little spring
house down by the Tarkington hedge. Books off of Henry’s shelves.
Sometimes, if a down-pour came along, or a quick, thick thunder
shower, there was a scurrying of dogs and sheep and boy to cover of
the hay-rick and interleafing maple trees, and the books remained out,
usually face-up, and were drenched, and then, as they dried in a quick,
repentant sun, warped.
There were books on Henry’s shelves twice their normal size. Volumes
that bulged from the damp of the spring house or from hasty showers.
_Around the World in Eighty Days_ was as bedraggled-looking as
something the cat might have dragged in. _The Voyage of Magellan_
had a great blister on its cover; and the most exciting book in the
world, that meant everything when Henry intoned it in his slow, careful
voice, but meant so little when Dave tried to pick it out for himself,
_The Life of the Bee_, had a great rent down its cloth binding. A
combination of damp and Teddy’s teeth.
Henry never remonstrated as his shelves of books began to wave and
careen and warp.
He used to plant himself before them first thing when he came home
evenings, regard the new vacancies and inundations with a wide, slow
smile lowering half of his face, so that his jaw hung over his cravat.
Curious relationship, when Davey was seven and Henry was four times
that seven, and more.