[27] I remember walking across the Tarkington pastures one day and
encountering Davey, with Teddy and Grime minding his sheep, lying
stomach-flat on a rock, reading an old book of mine which he had dug
out of gracious knows where, and which seemed to be causing him some
bewilderment and no great entertainment. “Five Little Peppers and How
They Grew?” he said, looking up at me with his small, square, intent
face, and a quality of eye-strain in his gaze that was later in life
to cause him bad headaches, “Gee—I thought this was a story of the way
pepper grows—and here it’s nothing but the name of a lot of folks.” He
had picked the book on the assumption that it was on botany. There were
years, watching Davey grow, when I sometimes thought of him as becoming
a horticulturist.
[28] ... Honorable Ross Tawkett, who was probably responsible, more
than any other individual, for my brother’s first candidacy for public
office, made the introductory address. He did not, as many believe,
first come into David’s life when they were fellow members of the
International Board of 1937. On the contrary, Ross had lived in our
county for one winter when he was sixteen, then his father, who was a
dairy-farmer, moved to the outskirts of Springfield.
[29] I think that David’s library, begun, I always say, back in the
days when Father accidentally stumbled across a whole nest of books he
had secreted in the spring-house, is probably the greatest commentary
of all, upon his kind of intellectual curiosity. On two important
occasions, it has fallen to my lot to superintend the moving of his
library. First from his home in Springfield to the State Mansion.
There were then, as I remember it, about fourteen hundred, exclusive
of law-books. Many years later, in the move to Washington, there were
over again as many to be recatalogued and boxed. Nor were these volumes
books with uncut pages. A book never reached his permanent shelves
until its contents had been either read or “duly noted.” Insatiably
curious, the headings under which his books fell into catalogue were as
grotesque as varied.
He loved and revered lyric poetry, although modern verse was on
his shelves. The only soothing agent ever discovered for one of
his blinding headaches was curiously enough, Dora’s low and rather
sing-song voice which she had cultivated to a monotony that could
fairly drone him to sleep on the word-rhythms that he loved.
His personal collection was catalogued under such headlines as
Horticulture. Electronic Theory. Soil Chemistry. Parasites in
Central American Tropics. Geographies. Organic Chemistry. Evolution.
Psychiatry. Aeronautics. Physics. History. Greek, American, French,
Russian, Scandinavian Literatures. Drama. Sociology. Church History.
Heredity. Determinism. Behaviorism. Anthropology. National Parks.
Deserts. Travel. Genetics. Shorthorn Cattle. Morphology. Race. Essays.
Philosophy. Waterways. Radio. Theater. Birds. Chess. Dogs. Population.
Fundamentalism. Astronomy. Public Health. Theory of Relativity.
Fisheries. Astronomy. Furniture. Architecture. Journalism.
Senator Harmon once said of my brother, that he knew so well the secret
of surrounding himself with brilliant minds on every subject, that he
had only to press a button marked Coinage, Immigration, Mexico, or
Techno-Psychology, and lo, a specialist on that subject appeared before
him.
That, of course, is an amusing exaggeration. It could more truthfully
be said of my brother’s library. Books were literally at his elbow by
the thousand, on call for almost any reference.
[Illustration: Decorative Image]
_Chapter Eighteen_
A man down at Wohlgemuth’s mill was enlisting. He was a fellow with a
receding chin and a reddish birthmark seared across his cheek, who had
drifted in on a freight-train from Kansas City, and who claimed to have
walked it overland from San Francisco.
For over a year he had been working about the neighborhood. First as
herdsman at the Howey farm, for a while doing chores for Bek, and
finally running a truck for Ed Wohlgemuth.
He was a gangling, big-jointed fellow, full of the lore of the
open road, and with a quid as big as a nugget protruding from one
cheek or the other. He had fought in the Boxer Rebellion and in the
Spanish-American War, and “guerilled,” as he put it, in Mexico and done
six years’ navy-service. A soldier of fortune in the literal sense of
the word. Anybody’s fight was his fight.
The boys, for miles around, clustered about Pete (the only name by
which he was known thereabouts) along about sunset-time, on the row
of barrels that flanked the Wohlgemuth Mill. He had the knacks that
delight boys. He could spit straight, and twice any competitor’s
distance. He could lure a rabbit out of a hole by a jargon he knew. He
could also, by another mysterious jargon, entice grasshoppers to the
back of his tattooed hands and make them spit tobacco there without
so much as touching them. He could tie a sailors’ knot with one hand,
cause hairs from a white horse’s tail to stand straight on end at the
tip of his nose, pull a cork from the inside of a narrow-necked bottle
with a bit of twine, bring down one blackbird to every shot and do a
snake-dance that he had learned from the Pueblos.
And now Pete, who was an Australian by birth, was about to set off
for Montreal to enlist under his own flag. It was the closest that
remote thing, the World War, had penetrated the uninterrupted rhythm of
Whittier County.
To David, racing home that dusk, from having sat about on the row of
cider-barrels with Pete and his cohorts, the fuzz of the day’s heat
was a taste up against his tongue. Cattle lowed. The winding of smoke
from his father’s chimney curled languidly against a torrid sky, and
out of all this gentle trance, something a little terribly alien seemed
suddenly to have come to life off the printed page of a history-book.
War had come to life.
Pete, some one who was as casual to the countryside as—why as the very
barns, the meadows, the silos, the hedges, the farmers themselves, was
going to war. War had come up off the history-pages into reality.
Pete was going. The tidings made Dave’s bare feet send pebbles spinning
from under them. He was panting when he reached home, from the dual
consciousness of being late, which always grated against the Old
Gentleman, who was more easily irascible than formerly, and with the
burden of his news.
His mother and Henry were just about to draw up around the supper-table.
Supper served as near as possible to the range, even in summer, made
dishing-up an easier matter for Mathilda, who no longer kept help.
Trina, poor distressed creature, at the catastrophe of the family-move
from the House on Sycamore Street, had been obliged to accept another
position in Centralia, for the support of the two invalid old sisters
she cared for.
Besides, it was cheerier in the kitchen than in the little aperture
of a room off the parlor that was jammed, except for a narrow rim
for slithering around with the dishes of food, with the heavy,
grape-and-leaf-design, walnut dining-room set from the House on
Sycamore Street.
There was no prevailing upon the Old Gentleman to let go of that
ponderous “set,” even to the antique-dealers from Springfield, who came
sniffing.
There was a lamp with a green-paper shade burning in the center of
the kitchen table; and Henry must have been reading _War and Peace_,
by Tolstoi, because it was hung now, to keep his page, over the lower
rung of his chair, and his place was rumpled, and his unused plate
pushed center toward the sugar-bowl and castor. The exuding heat of
countryside, mingling with the blazing breath of the range, was like
steam, and had the cling to it of a hot, wet blanket.
“Father, Pete’s going to war!”
The Old Gentleman, seated on the kitchen porch, with his shoes and
socks on the floor beside him, and his hot feet dangling to the ground
and soaking in the dew of the small surrounding plot of grass, screwed
around a face that had been jerked from the intent observation of his
dozen or so wyandottes taking roost.
“War?”
“What war?” asked Mathilda and began tilting a skillet of steaming
okra-and-tomato stew into a bowl.
“Why, Mother,” said Henry gently, and rising to take the dish from her,
“you know what war. We’ve discussed precious little else at this table
for weeks.”
“Of course I know, Henry,” snapped Mathilda, and turned toward him with
a flick of her cup-towel. “Don’t speak to me as if I were a baby!”
“I’m sorry, Mother!”
Mathilda’s memory was beginning to lapse on her, more and more.
Sometimes in stretches that were impossible to ignore.[30]
In the beginning, the family met these lapses in pretty much Henry’s
wise fashion, usually succeeding in jerking her back to an injured,
if resentful air she always employed to cover up these hiatuses that
bewildered her and made her constantly afraid of the next.
“Of course! Of course! And what’s he going to war for?”
“He’s going to fight for his country, Mother. His country is—the
Brit-ish Empire. A fellow’s got to fight for his country, Mother, if
his country’s gone to war.”
“Stop talking like a parrot, Davey,” said Henry with rather an
unheard-of-for-him kind of brusqueness and jerked his chair closer to
the table.
The Old Gentleman was pretty apt to become excited and shout at his
mild-mannered son, if these supper-table controversies led to certain
political topics that had particularly to do with the situation in
Europe, and upon which they differed.
Conscription was one of them; and here was Dave running home with a
subject perilously sure to lead up to it. Be it said for Henry that he
made a gallant effort to divert it.
“While I think of it, Mother, here are those washers you’ve been
asking about for your faucets. Ed Ryan, whom I defended way back in a
horse-thieving case, gave me a pocketful.”
“Thank you, Henry. I can do with them nicely. Seven washers for
defending a body against a horse-thievery charge. Ah me, that’s why
you’ll remain a poor man all your life, son. Fine a lawyer as there is
in the state, and taking washers for fee. ’Tain’t dignified, son.”
The Old Gentleman ambled in then, his attention persistently snagged by
the subject Henry had tried to divert. “Who should stop talking like a
parrot? It’s high time the boys of this country should begin talking
like parrots, from the look of yesterday’s _Enquirer_. Wilson can’t any
more keep this country out of wa——”
“Puppa! Now Puppa!” trebled in Mathilda, herself tired to death of
these supper-table reiterations between father and son. “Taste, Puppa!
Bek sent Stevey over with this okra special for your supper. Stevey’s
not looking well, Puppa. Sometimes I think he must have caught some
kind of a slow fever up there at Agricultural School, where he was last
year for that spell.”
“And if talk don’t do the work,” bellowed the Old Gentleman in
immediately argumentative key and starting to swirl the coffee in
his cup with a gouging, angry spoon—“if talk don’t do the work—then
I say _conscription_! And the man who don’t favor conscription for
the salvation of his country in time of need, don’t deserve to have a
country to defend. If you’ve been through what I’ve been in a country
where they demand the best years of a young man’s life, war or no war,
a little conscription in time of need shouldn’t be necessary, and if it
is, by God, I’m for it.”
“You are talking the phraseology of militarism, Father. You’re the
parrot! Go out and train cigar-Indians on such flimsy logic, but not
men who think. Besides, if it is your patriotism that is so aroused,
the modern doctrine of neutrality is an American idea that Washington
conceived and Jefferson phrased in 1803. You can be equally American by
adhering to them.”
“Doctrines of neutrality don’t change the natures of men. Men are men——”
“Except when they are hyenas.”
“Even a hyena will fight for his——”
“Only a hyena should——”
The Old Gentleman began rapping the table with his fork. “I won’t have
sedition talked in my house, where I’ve got a future citizen growing up
to fight for his country, right or wrong.”
“When Decatur said that, Father, he was in love with the magic of a
phrase, not its meaning.”
“He was a brave man and a patriot.”
“He was both, Father. But there is a valor born of hysteria.”
“I talk facts. Not high-sounding phrases.”
“Just the reverse. You talk phrases. The phrases of the immemorial
cant of warfare. Embroidered banners of phrases, made to cover up the
stinking realities of greed and war.”
“Hen-ery! Use nice words.”
“I’m sorry, Mother. Please, Father, there is no use going over it all
again. Whom do you think I ran into on High Street today? Remember Al
Hopkins——?”
“There is this much use,” shouted the Old Gentleman, working himself
more and more into the luxury of an orgy of rage, “I won’t have
a—pacifist in my house! I haven’t raised two sons, and a third one
growing up, to say nothing of sons-in-law and grandchildren, to have
sedition in my house in my old age.”
“Puppa!”
“Let him rave, Mother. My hope for him is that he will never have
anyone in his house with more seditious thoughts against country than
I.”
“I don’t know about that. When a man questions another man’s right to
fight for his country——”
“I question every man’s right to fight. To shed blood. To splatter out
of a man’s heart, with bullets, the life that women go down into hell
to bring forth.”
“Hennery!”
“And I say a country’s honor comes even before that!”
“Puppa, your biscuit is getting cold.”
“And I say no country’s honor can be raised or lowered by shooting the
blood out of human hearts.”
“Such talk is traitorous. I won’t have it talked before Davey. You’re a
traitor. Damnation, you’re a——”
“I won’t be talked to like this, Father.”
“Hennery! Puppa!”
“You don’t deserve the benefits of the country you live in. You don’t
honor it. You don’t know what it is to come like I came, penniless,
and after years of an empty belly, into the country that gave me my
everything. You don’t honor the country that honored your parents and
gave you a full belly. A country whose cobblestones you should kiss as
I kiss them. Traitor!”
There shot along Henry’s slowly mobile face the first quick flash
of heat-lightning David had ever seen cross it. Small areas around
his nose turned jade-white and quivered. Sweat sprang out across
the considerable bulge of his forehead. His lips moved as if trying
to moisten themselves and his neck began to beat. Regarding him,
Mathilda sprang from her chair. Once, in his childhood, she remembered
a paroxysm like that. His sister Bek had dared him to fight a
debt-of-honor over a slate-pencil, in the yard of the House on Sycamore
Street, with a town-boy named Cutty Ditweiler, who had been killed a
year later by the accidental side swipe of his father’s scythe.
Henry had stood by and let himself be bullied, sooner than fight. Bek,
unable to endure it longer, had sprung on Cutty, raining blows, until
the weaker man of the two went down before her. It was then that Henry
had turned sick and run indoors to Mathilda, his face locked in the
same kind of paroxysm that his mother beheld there now.
“Hen-nery!”
His whitish lips were pulled across his face like strips of adhesive
tape, and Davey could not keep his fascinated eyes off them.
“We won’t go into that, Father,” said Henry and swallowed with such an
effort that you could hear his throat click.
Mathilda, frantic at what she saw gathering in her husband’s face,
tilted the whole of the okra-bowl, noisily scraping the last of its
viscous contents to her husband’s plate.
“More okra, Father. Bek sent it over by Stevey. She raises the best I
ever tasted. Stevey isn’t looking so well. Sometimes I think he must
have caught a slow fever——”
“We won’t go into that, won’t we!” exploded the Old Gentleman, his
face a darkening blur, through which he could not or would not see the
darkening face of his son. “We won’t? We _will_ go into that. I’m an
American citizen, grateful for the benefits such a country has given me
and my family, and even the bad times I am in now can’t change that.
I’m an American citizen, willing to give every grandson and son I got,
if, God forbid, the country gets into war. When you talk as you do in
front of your brother, even if he is only a child, I say it again, you
are a traitor. A traitor to your country, sir! A damn traitor!”
The Old Gentleman was launched into his rage now. He shouted. He
screamed. His voice came leaping over his lips, plunging into choking
incoherence.
“God strike me—down—before I should have a son—a—damned traitor!”
It was then that Henry rose to his feet. He had the look of a man whose
blood might have stopped in his veins, and he walked over to his father
and took him up by a loose handful of the shoulder of his coat, and,
for an incredible moment, it looked as if he were going to strike him
down. Only he did nothing of the sort. He just began to shake, gently
at first and then a little more furiously, until the Old Gentleman was
half-off his feet.
“Don’t you dare say that, Father!” To Davey, it scarcely seemed Henry’s
voice. Only something thin, as if some one were clapping two tin
plates. “You—with your bombast! You don’t know what love of country
is. You only love your country enough to die for it, on a battlefield,
the martyred death that gets monuments to it for the spilled entrails
that have fertilized the earth in the name of Hate. You don’t love
your country enough to crucify yourself for it in the name of Love.
You hear me, I do! Yours is the easy patriotism. The patriotism of the
band-wagon. The patriotism of the self-flagellation of feeding the red
dramatic jaws of war with the flesh of your flesh. Of feeding your
sons’ entrails to the bawdy, uncontrolled passions of men of power.
Yours is the easy patriotism. The patriotism that gets its name smeared
across tablets in public squares. I—oh God—what do you know about love
of country?” said Henry, and suddenly, incredibly, released the bunch
of his father’s coat-sleeve and went sobbing from the room.
Davey crept after, but then only after long minutes had
elapsed. Minutes of a silence that was punctuated by the great,
unnatural-sounding ticks of the kitchen clock, with the nosegay painted
on the glass door before its pendulum.
After a while, Mathilda began to cry softly into her apron, and the Old
Gentleman began to swing the low contents of his coffee-cup and drink
it down in slow, untasted gulps.
When Davey crept into his brother’s room, there was the bulk of him
across the red-and-white Paisley quilt of his cot, his head buried in
his arms and his body as felled-looking as a tree.
“Henry,” said Davey, and touched him timidly on the arm, “you’re not
a—a trait-or.”
“No,” said Henry, and jerked himself up and walked to the mirror to run
a runty old hartshorn brush over his baldish spot. “I’m only a damn
fool, Davey.”
“You—you’re great—Henry——”
“Yes, a great ass, Davey,” said Henry, and lifted his small brother by
the armpits and set him down again and walked down into the kitchen,
where his father, in a wilt, still sat in his chair beside the table,
swinging the last dreary contents of his coffee-cup.
“Forgive a fool, Father,” said Henry, and walked up and held out a hand.
“Forgive an older fool,” mumbled the Old Gentleman, taking the hand
without glancing up.
“Hennery,” quavered Mathilda, “will you eat your corn pudding now?”
“A big helping of it, Mother.”
The lamp burned like a round and gracious eye into the thickening gloom
of the kitchen. There were a dozen and one after-dinner chores to be
done, the two men and Davey scattering for them after the meal, and
Mathilda lifting the dishes in clumps and carrying them to the pan of
hot water on the stove.
Out in the hen-roost, where Davey scuttled to count up his wyandottes,
first stars could be seen through the square little window in the roof
of the chicken-house. Lovely Vega, which Davey knew by name, popped out
even as he stared. Curious, that men could bicker unashamed beneath the
placid enormity of stars....
There was water to be carried. On the crest at the back of the house
where the pump stood, the billows of the miles of meadows, peaceful
under the whitish night, ran out to horizon, the occasional farmhouses,
barns, silos, and hay-ricks, looking like frail boats riding a gentle
sea.
The pink patch of kitchen window, against which the hooked figure of
his mother moved now and then, swam disembodied from the rest of the
dark house, and might have been a window to the sky.
Across the silence, a figure, dangling a lantern, moved more deeply
into the gloom. It was the Old Gentleman stalking past the barn down
toward the pig-wallow.
It was deep night. Almost as if the evening were holding its breath
before exuding a deep sigh of satisfaction.
Curious, that this peace had held the turmoil of men’s passions that
had raged in that little room down there behind the pink patch.
Passions that must even now be whirling in its timbers.
The pump squeaked as Davey leaned his lips to the spout for the first
cool gush, Teddy standing by to lick the overflow with more greed than
thirst.
How cool it was! It seemed to Davey he could feel it run along his
throat down into a spot against his chest that hurt.
The country stretched out before him as he lifted his head and ran his
tongue around his lips. Tides of country that seemed to emanate from
the spot on which he stood, appearing to rise and fall, even as his own
breathing, and making the flesh of earth feel almost the same flesh as
the soles of his feet.
“My country,” said Davey, in the recitative voice of Friday afternoons,
and standing there with his bare toes oozing into the cool, thin
mud around the pump—“my country—my country, right or wrong. Mr.
Hen-nery—you!—smartee—’tis anyhow!”