IN all the towns and over the wide countrysides of my own mid-American
boyhood there was no such thing as poverty, as I myself saw it and knew
it later in our great American industrial towns and cities.
My own family was poor, but of what did our poverty consist? My
father, a ruined dandy from the South, had been reduced to keeping
a small harness-repair shop and, when that failed, he became
ostensibly a house-and-barn painter. However, he did not call himself
a house-painter. The idea was not flashy enough for him. He called
himself a “sign-writer.” The day of universal advertising had not yet
come and there was but little sign-writing to do in our town, but still
he stuck out bravely for the higher life. At any time he would let go
by the board the privilege of painting Alf Mann the butcher’s house (it
would have kept him busily at work for a month) in order to have a go
at lettering signs on fences along country roads for Alf Granger the
baker.
There was your true pilgrimage abroad, out into the land. Father
engaged a horse and a spring wagon and took the three older of his sons
with him. My older brother and the one next younger than myself were,
from the first, adept at sign-writing, while both father and myself
were helpless with a brush in our hands. And so I drove the horse and
father supervised the whole affair. He had a natural boyish love for
the supervision of affairs and the picking out of a particular fence on
a particular road became to him as important a matter as the selection
of a site for a city, or the fortification that was to defend it.
And then the farmer who owned the fence had to be consulted and if he
refused his consent the joy of the situation became intensified. We
drove off up the road and turned into a wood and the farmer went back
to his work of cultivating corn. We watched and waited, our boyish
hearts beating madly. It was a summer day and in the small wood in
which we were concealed we all sat on a fallen log in silence. Birds
flew overhead and a squirrel chattered. What a delicate tinge of
romance spread over our commonplace enough business!
Father was made for romance. For him there was no such thing as a fact.
It had fallen out that he, never having had the glorious opportunity
to fret his little hour upon a greater stage, was intent on fretting
his hour as best he could in a money-saving prosperous corn-shipping,
cabbage-raising Ohio village.
He magnified the danger of our situation. “He might have a shotgun,” he
said, pointing to where in the distance the farmer was again at work.
As we waited in the wood he sometimes told us a story of the Civil War
and how he with a companion had crept for days and nights through an
enemy country at the risk of their lives. “We were carrying messages,”
he said, raising his eyebrows and throwing out his hands. By the
gesture there was something implied. “Well, it was an affair of life
or death. Why speak of the matter? My country needed me and I, and my
intrepid companion, had been selected because we were the bravest men
in the army,” the raised eyebrows were saying.
And so with their paint pots and brushes in their hands my two brothers
presently crept out of the wood and ran crouching through cornfields
and got into the dusty road. Quickly and with mad haste they dabbed the
name of Alf Granger on the fence with the declaration that he baked the
best bread in the State of Ohio, and when they returned to us we all
got back into the spring wagon and drove back along the road past the
sign. Father commanded me to stop the horse. “Look,” he said, frowning
savagely at my two brothers, “your _N_ is wrong. You are being
careless again with your _Bs_. Good gracious, will I never teach
you two how to handle a brush?”
If our family was poor, of what did our poverty consist? If our clothes
were torn the torn places only let in the sun and wind. In the winter
we had no overcoats, but that only meant we ran rather than loitered.
Those who are to follow the arts should have a training in what is
called poverty. Given a comfortable middle-class start in life, the
artist is almost sure to end up by becoming a bellyacher, constantly
complaining because the public does not rush forward at once to
proclaim him.
The boy who has no warm overcoat throws back his head and runs through
the streets, past houses where smoke goes up into a clear cold sky,
across vacant lots, through fields. The sky clouds and snows come and
the bare hands are cold and chapped. They are raw and red but at night,
before the boy sleeps, his mother will come with melted fat and rub it
over the raw places.
The warm fat is soothing. The touch of a mother’s fingers is soothing.
Well, you see, with us, we were all of us--mother father and the
children--in some way outlaws in our native place and that thought was
soothing to a boy. It is a soothing thought in all my memories of my
boyhood. Only recently one connected with my family said to me: “You
must remember, now that you are an author, you have a respectable place
in the world to maintain”; and for a moment my heart swelled with pride
in the thought.
And then I went out of the presence of the cautious one to associate
with many other respectables and into my mind flashed thoughts of
the sweetness I have seen shining in the eyes of others--of waiters,
horsemen, thieves, gamblers, women, driven by poverty to the outer
rim of society. Where were the respectables among those who had been
kindest and sweetest to me?
Whatever may be said in this matter, and I admit my feet have slipped
many times toward solid respectability we of our family were not too
respectable then.
For one thing father never paid his rent and so we were always living
in haunted houses. Never was such a family to take the haunts out of
a house. Old women riding white horses, dead men screaming, groans,
cries--all were quieted when we came to live in a haunted house. And
how often because of this talent--inherent in my family--we lived for
months scot-free in a fairly comfortable house, while at the same
time conferring a benefit on the property owner. It is a system--I
recommend it to poets with large families.
There were not enough bedclothes so three boys slept in one bed and
there was a window that, in summer, looked out upon fields, but in
winter had been painted by the hand of the frost king so that moonlight
came softly and dimly into the room. It was no doubt the fact that
there were three of us in one bed that drove away all fear of the
“haunts.”
Mother was tall and slender and had once been beautiful. She had
been a bound girl in a farmer’s family when she married father, the
improvident young dandy. There was Italian blood in her veins and her
origin was something of a mystery. Perhaps we never cared to solve
it--wanted it to remain a mystery. It is so wonderfully comforting to
think of one’s mother as a dark, beautiful and somewhat mysterious
woman. I later saw her mother--my own grandmother--but that is another
story.
She the dark evil old woman with the broad hips and the great breasts
of a peasant and with the glowing hate shining out of her one eye would
be worth a book in herself. It was said she had shuffled off four
husbands and when I knew her, although she was old, she looked not
unwilling to tackle another. Some day perhaps I shall tell the tale of
the old woman and the tramp who tried to rob the farm house when she
was staying alone; and of how she, after beating him into submission
with her old fists, got drunk with him over a barrel of hard cider in
a shed and of how the two went singing off together down the road--but
not now.
Our own mother had eyes that were like pools lying in deep shadows at
the edge of a wood but when she grew angry and fell into one of her
deep silences lights danced in the pools. When she spoke her words were
filled with strange wisdom (how sharply yet I remember certain comments
of hers--on life--on your neighbors!), but often she commanded all of
us by the strength of her silences.
She came into the bedroom where three boys lay on one bed, carrying in
one hand a small kerosene lamp and in the other a dish in which was
warm melted fat.
There were three boys in one bed, two of them almost of the same size.
The third was then a small silent fellow. Later his life was to be very
strange. He was one who could not fit himself into the social scheme
and, until he was a grown man, he stayed about, living sometimes with
one, sometimes with another of his brothers--always reading books,
dreaming, quarreling with no one.
He, the youngest of the three, looked out at life always as from a
great distance. He was of the stuff of which poets are made. What
instinctive wisdom in him. All loved him but no one could help him in
the difficult business of living his life and when on summer evenings,
as the three lay in the bed the two older boys fought or made great
plans for their lives, he lay beside them in silence--but sometimes he
spoke and his words came always as from a far place. We were perhaps
discussing the wonders of life. “Well,” he said, “it is so and so.
There will be no more babies, but the new babies do not come as you
say. I know how they come. They come the same way you grow corn. Father
plants seed in the earth and mother is the earth in which the seed
grows.”
I am thinking of my younger brother after he had grown a little
older--I am thinking of him grown into a man and become habitually
silent like mother--I am thinking of him as he was just before he
mysteriously disappeared out of our lives and never came back.
Now, however, he is in bed with the other brother and myself. An older
brother, he who crept through the cornfields to paint the name of Alf
Granger on the fence, had already gone from our lives. He had a talent
for drawing, and a drunken half-insane cutter of stones for graveyards
has taken him away from our town to another town where he is already
sitting at a desk drawing designs for gravestones. A dove descends out
of the sky and holds a leaf in its bill. There is an angel clinging to
a rock in the midst of a storm at sea.
Rock of ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee.
The three boys are in the bed in the room and there are not enough
bedclothes. Father’s overcoat, now too old to be worn, is thrown over
the foot of the bed and the three boys have been permitted to undress
downstairs, in the kitchen of the house, by the kitchen stove.
The oldest of the boys remaining at home (that is myself) must undress
first and must arrange his clothes neatly on a kitchen chair. Mother
does not scold about such a trifling matter. She stands silently
looking and the boy does as he has been told. There is something of
my grandmother in a certain look that can come into her eyes. “Well,
you’d better,” it says. How unsuccessfully I have tried all my life to
cultivate just that look, for myself!
And now the boy has undressed and must run in his white flannel
nightgown barefooted through the cold house, past frosted windows, up
a flight of stairs and, with a flying leap into the bed. The flannel
nightgown has been worn almost threadbare by the older brother--now
gone out into the world--before it has come down to him who wears it
now.
He is the oldest of the brothers at home and must take the first plunge
into the icy bed, but soon the others come running. They are lying like
little puppies in the bed but as they grow warmer the two older boys
begin to fight. There is a contest. The point is not to be compelled to
lie on the outside where the covers may come off in the night. Blows
are struck and tense young bodies are intertwined. “It’s your turn
to-night! No it’s yours! You’re a liar! Take that! Well then, take
that! I’ll show you!”
The youngest brother of the three brothers has already taken one of the
two outside positions. It is his fate. He is not strong enough to fight
with either of the other two and perhaps he does not care for fighting.
He lies silently in the cold in the darkness while the fight between
the other two goes on and on. They are of almost equal strength and the
fight might possibly last for an hour.
But there is now the sound of the mother’s footsteps on the stairs and
that is the end of the struggle. Now--at this moment--the boy who has
the coveted position may keep it. That is an understood thing.
The mother puts the kerosene lamp on a little table by the bed and
beside it the dish of warm, comforting melted fat. One by one six hands
are thrust out to her.
There is a caress in her long toil-hardened fingers.
In the night and in the dim light of the lamp her dark eyes are like
luminous pools.
The fat in the little cracked china dish is warm and soothing to
burning itching hands. For an hour she has had the dish sitting at the
back of the kitchen stove in the little frame house far out at the edge
of the town.
The strange, silent mother! She is making love to her sons, but there
are no words for her love. There are no kisses, no caresses.
The rubbing of the warm fat into the cracked hands of her sons is a
caress. The light that now shines in her eyes is a caress.
* * * * *
The silent woman has left deep traces of herself in one of her sons.
He is the one now lying stilly in the bed with his two noisy brothers.
What has happened in the life of the mother? In herself, in her own
physical life, even the two quarreling, fighting sons feel that nothing
can matter too much. If her husband, the father of the boys, is a
no-account and cannot bring money home--the money that would feed
and clothe her children in comfort--one feels it does not matter too
much. If she herself, the proud quiet one, must humiliate herself,
washing--for the sake of the few dimes it may bring in--the soiled
clothes of her neighbors, one knows it does not matter too much.
And yet there is no Christian forbearance in her. She speaks sometimes
as she sits on the edge of the bed in the lamplight rubbing the warm
fat into the cracked frost-bitten hands of her children and there is
often a kind of smoldering fire in her words.
* * * * *
One of the boys in the bed has had a fight with the son of a neighbor.
He, the third son of the family, has taken a hatchet out of the
neighbor boy’s hands. We had been cramming ourselves with the contents
of a book, “The Last of the Mohicans,” and the neighbor boy, whose
father is the town shoemaker, had the hatchet given him as a Christmas
present. He would not lend it, would not let it go out of his hands and
so my brother, the determined one, has snatched it away.
The struggle took place in a little grove of trees half a mile from the
house. “Le Renard Subtil,” cries my brother jerking the hatchet out
of the neighbor boy’s hand. The neighbor boy did not want to be the
villain--“Le Renard Subtil.”
And so he went crying off toward his home, on the farther side of the
field. He lived in a yellow house just beyond our own and near the end
of the street at the edge of the town.
My brother now had possession of the hatchet and paid no more attention
to him but I went to stand by a fence to watch him go.
It is because I am a white man and understand the whites better than
he. I am Hawkeye the scout, “La Longue Carabine,” and as I stand by the
fence _la longue carabine_ is lying across the crook of my arm. It
is represented by a stick. “I could pick him off from here, shall I do
it?” I ask, speaking to my brother with whom I fight viciously every
night after we have got into bed but who, during the day, is my sworn
comrade in arms.
Uncas--“Le Cerf Agile”--pays no attention to my words and I rest the
stick over the fence, half determined to pick off the neighbor boy but
at the last withholding my fire. “He is a little pig, never to let a
fellow take his hatchet. Uncas was right to snatch it out of his hand.”
As I withhold my fire and the boy goes unscathed and crying across the
snow-covered field I feel very magnanimous--since at any moment I could
have dropped him like a deer in flight. And then I see him go crying
into his mother’s house. Uncas has, in fact, cuffed him a couple of
times in the face. But was it not justified? “Dare a dirty Huron--a
squaw man--dare such a one question the authority of a Delaware? Ugh!”
And now “Le Renard Subtil” has gone into his mother’s house and has
blabbed on us, and I tell Uncas the news but, with the impenetrable
stoicism of a true savage, he pays no attention. He is as one sitting
by the council fire. Are words to be wasted on a dog of a Huron?
And now “Le Cerf Agile” has an idea. Drawing a line in the snow, he
stands some fifty feet from the largest of the trees in the grove and
hurls the hatchet through the air.
What a determined fellow! I am of the paleface race myself and shall
always depend for my execution upon _la longue carabine_ but Uncas
is of another breed. Is there not painted on his breast a crawling
tortoise? In ink I have traced it there myself from a drawing he has
made.
During the short winter afternoon the hatchet will be thrown not once
but a hundred, perhaps two hundred, times. It whirls through the air.
The thing is to throw the hatchet so that, at the end of its flight,
the blade goes, just so, firmly into the soft bark of the tree. And it
must enter the bark of the tree at just a particular spot.
The matter is of infinite importance. Has not Uncas, “The Last of the
Mohicans,” broad shoulders? He will later be a strong man. Now is the
time to acquire infinite skill.
He has measured carefully the spot on the body of the tree where
the blade of the hatchet must enter with a soft chug, deep into the
yielding bark. There is a tall warrior, a hated Huron, standing by
the tree and young Uncas has measured carefully so that he knows just
where the top of the warrior’s head should come. An idea has come to
him. He will just scalp the unsuspecting warrior with the blade of the
tomahawk; and has not he, Uncas, crept for many weary miles through
the forest, going without food, eating snow for his drink? A skulking
Huron has dared creep into the hunting grounds of the Delawares and has
learned the winter abiding place of our tribe. Dare we let him go back
to his squaw-loving people, bearing such knowledge? Uncas will show him!
He, Uncas, is absorbed in the problem before him and has not deigned to
look off across the fields to where the neighbor boy has gone crying
to his mother. “Le Renard Subtil” will be heard from again but for
the present is forgotten. The foot must be advanced just so. The arm
must be drawn back just so. When one hurls the hatchet the body must
be swung forward just so. An absolute silence must be maintained. The
skulking Huron who has dared come into our hunting grounds is unaware
of the presence of the young Uncas. Is he, Uncas, not one whose feet
leave no traces in the morning dew?
Deep within the breasts of my brother and myself there is a resentment
that we were born out of our time. By what a narrow margin in the
scroll of time have we missed the great adventure! Two, three, at the
most a dozen generations earlier and we might so well have been born in
the virgin forest itself. On the very ground where we now stand Indians
have indeed stalked one another in the forest, and how often Uncas and
myself have discussed the matter. As for our father, we dismiss him
half contemptuously. He is born to be a dandy of the cities and has
turned out to be a village house-painter, in the dwelling places of
the paleface. The devil!--with luck he might have turned out to be an
actor, or a writer or some such scum of earth but never could he have
been a warrior. Why had not our mother, who might have been such a
splendid Indian princess, the daughter of a great chief, why had she
also not been born a few generations earlier? She had just the silent
stoicism needed for the wife of a great warrior. A deep injustice had
been done us, and something of the feeling of that injustice was in the
stern face of Uncas as he crept each time to the line he had marked out
in the snow and sent the hatchet hurtling through the air.
The two boys, filled with scorn of their parentage, on the father’s
side, are in a little grove of trees at the edge of an Ohio town. In
later days the father--also born out of his place and time--will come
to mean more to them but now he has little except their contempt.
Now Uncas is determined--absorbed--and I, who have so little of his
persistence, am impressed by his silent determination. It makes me a
little uncomfortable for, since he has snatched the hatchet out of the
neighbor boy’s hand, saying, “Go on home, cry-baby,” no word has passed
his lips. There is but a small grunting sound when the hatchet is
hurled and a scowl on his face when it misses the mark.
And “Le Renard Subtil” has gone home and blabbed to his mother, who
in turn has thrown a shawl over her head and has gone to our house,
no doubt to blab, in her turn, to our mother. “La Longue Carabine,”
being a paleface, is a little intent on disturbing the aim of “Le Cerf
Agile.” “We’ll catch hell,” he says, looking at the hatchet thrower
who has not so far unbent from the natural dignity of the Indian as to
reply. He grunts and taking his place solemnly at the line poises his
body. There is the quick abrupt swing forward of the body. What a shame
Uncas did not later become a professional baseball player. He might
have made his mark in the world. The hatchet sings through the air.
Well, it has struck sideways. The Huron is injured but not fatally, and
Uncas goes and sets him upright again. He has marked the place where
the Huron warrior’s head should be by pressing a ball of snow into the
wrinkled bark of the tree and has indicated the dog’s body by a dead
branch.
And so Hawkeye the scout--“La Longue Carabine”--has gone creeping off
among the trees to see if there are any more Hurons lurking about and
has come upon a great buck, pawing the snow and feeding on dry grass
at the edge of a small creek. Up goes _la longue carabine_ and
the buck pitches forward, dead, on the ice. Hawkeye runs forward and
swiftly passes his hunting knife across the neck of the buck. It will
not do to build a fire now that there are Hurons lurking in the hunting
ground of the Delawares so Uncas and he must feed upon raw meat. Well,
the hunter’s life for the hunter! What must be must be! Hawkeye cuts
several great steaks from the carcass of the buck and makes his way
slowly and cautiously back to Uncas. As he approaches he three times
imitates the call of a catbird and an answering call comes from the
lips of “Le Cerf Agile.”
“Aha! the night is coming on,” Uncas now says, having at last laid the
Huron low. “Now that the dirty lover of squaws is dead we may build a
fire and feast. Cook the venison ere the night falls. When darkness has
come we must show no fire. Do not make much smoke--big fires for the
paleface, but little fires for us Indians.”
Uncas stands for a moment, gnawing the bone of the buck, and then of a
sudden becomes still and alert. “Aha! I thought so,” he says, and goes
back again to where he has drawn the mark in the snow. “Go,” he says;
“see how many come.”
And now Hawkeye must creep through the thick forests, climb mountains,
leap canyons. Word has come that “Le Renard Subtil” but feigned when he
went off crying, across the field--fools that we were! While we have
been in the forest he has crept into the very teepee of our people
and has stolen the princess, the mother of Uncas. And now “Le Renard
Subtil,” with subtle daring, drags the stoical princess right across
the path of her warrior son. In one moment from a great height Hawkeye
draws the faithful Deer Killer to his shoulder and fires, and at the
same moment the tomahawk of Uncas sinks itself in the skull of the
Huron dog.
“‘Le Renard Subtil’ had drunk firewater and was reckless,” says Uncas,
as the two boys go homeward in the dusk.
* * * * *
The older of the two boys now homeward bound is somewhat afraid but
Uncas is filled with pride. As they go homeward in the gathering
darkness and come to the house, where lives “Le Renard Subtil,” to
which he has gone crying but a few hours before, an idea comes to
him. Uncas creeps in the darkness, halfway between the house and the
picket fence in front and, balancing the hatchet in his hand, hurls it
proudly. Well for the neighbor’s family that no one came to the door at
that moment for Uncas’ long afternoon of practicing has got results.
The hatchet flies through the air and sinks itself fairly and deeply
into the door panel as Uncas and Hawkeye run away home.
* * * * *
And now they are in the bed and the mother is rubbing the warm grease
into their chapped hands. Her own hands are rough, but how gentle they
are! She is thinking of her sons, of the one already gone out into the
world and most of all at the moment of Uncas.
There is something direct brutal and fine in the nature of Uncas. It
is not quite an accident that in our games he is always the Indian
while I am the despised white, the paleface. It is permitted me to
heal my misfortune a little by being, not a storekeeper or a fur
trader but that man nearest the Indian’s nature of all the palefaces
who ever lived on our continent, “La Longue Carabine”; but I cannot be
an Indian and least of all an Indian of the tribe of the Delawares.
I am not persistent patient and determined enough. As for Uncas, one
may coax and wheedle him along any road and I am always clinging to
that slight sense of leadership that my additional fifteen months
of living gives me, by coaxing and wheedling, but one may not drive
Uncas. To attempt driving him is but to arouse a stubbornness and
obstinacy that is limitless. Having told a lie to mother or father,
he will stick to the lie to the death while I--well, perhaps there is
in me something of the doglike, the squaw man, the paleface, the very
spirit of “Le Renard Subtil”--if the bitter truth must be told. In
all my after years I shall have to struggle against a tendency toward
slickness and plausibility in myself. I am the tale-teller, the man
who sits by the fire waiting for listeners, the man whose life must be
led into the world of his fancies, I am the one destined to follow the
little, crooked words of men’s speech through the uncharted paths of
the forests of fancy. What my father should have been I am to become.
Through long years of the baffling uncertainty, that only such men as
myself can ever know, I am to creep with trembling steps forward in
a strange land, following the little words, striving to learn all the
ways of the ever-changing words, the smooth-lying little words, the
hard, jagged, cutting words, the round, melodious, healing words. All
the words I am in the end to come to know a little and to attempt to
use for my purpose have, at the same time, the power in them both to
heal and to destroy. How often am I to be made sick by words, how often
am I to be healed by words, before I can come at all near to man’s
estate!
And so as I lie in the bed putting out my chapped hands to the healing
touch of mother’s hands I do not look at her. Already I am often too
conscious of my own inner thoughts to look directly at people and
now, although I am not the one who has cuffed the neighbor boy and
jerked the hatchet out of his hands, I am nevertheless busily at work
borrowing the troubles of Uncas. I cannot let what is to be be, but
must push forward striving to change all by the power of words. I dare
not thrust my words forward in the presence of mother, but they are
busily getting themselves said inside myself.
There is a consciousness of Uncas also within me. Another curse that
is to lie heavily on me all through my life has its grip on me. I am
not one to be satisfied to act for myself, think for myself, feel for
myself but I must also attempt to think and feel for Uncas.
At the moment slick plausible excuses for what has happened during the
afternoon are rising to my lips, struggling for expression. I am not
satisfied with being myself and letting things take their course, but
must be inside the very body of Uncas, striving to fill his stout young
body with the questioning soul of myself.
As I write this I am remembering that my father, like myself, could
never be singly himself but must always be a playing some rôle,
everlastingly strutting on the stage of life in some part not his own.
Was there a rôle of his own to be played? That I do not know and I
fancy he never knew, but I remember that he once took it into his head
to enact the rôle of the stern and unyielding parent to Uncas and what
came of it.
The tragic little comedy took place in the woodshed back of one of
the innumerable houses to which we were always moving when some
absurd landlord took it into his head that he should have some rent
for the house we occupied, and Uncas had just beaten with his fists a
neighbor boy who had tried to run away with a baseball bat belonging
to us. Uncas had retrieved the bat and had brought it proudly home,
and father, who happened along the street at that moment, had got the
notion fixed in his mind that the bat belonged, not to us, but to the
neighbor boy. Uncas tried to explain, but father, having taken up the
rôle of the just man, must needs play it out to the bitter end. He
demanded that Uncas return the bat into the hands of the boy from whom
he had just ravaged it and Uncas, growing white and silent, ran home
and hid himself in the woodshed where father quickly found him out.
“I won’t,” declared Uncas; “the bat’s ours”; and then father--fool
that he was for ever allowing himself to get into such an undignified
position--began to beat him with a switch he had cut from a tree at
the front of the house. As the beating did no good and Uncas only took
it unmoved, father, as always happened with him, lost his head.
And so there was the boy, white with the sense of the injustice being
done, and no doubt father also began to feel that he had put his foot
into a trap. He grew furious and, picking up a large stick of wood from
a woodpile in the shed, threatened to hit Uncas with it.
What a moment! I had run to the back of the shed and had thrown myself
on the ground where I could look through a crack and as long as I live
I shall never forget the next few moments--with the man and the boy,
both white, looking at each other; and, that night, in the bed later,
when mother was rubbing my chapped hands and when I knew there was
something to be settled between her and Uncas, that picture danced like
a crazy ghost in my fancy.
I trembled at the thought of what might happen, at the thought of what
had happened that day in the shed.
Father had stood--I shall never know how long--with the heavy stick
upraised, looking into the eyes of his son, and the son had stared,
with a fixed determined stare, back into the eyes of his father.
At the moment I had thought that--boy as I was--I understood how such a
strange unaccountable thing as a murder could happen. Thoughts did not
form themselves definitely in my mind but after that moment I knew that
it is always the weak, frightened by their own weakness, who kill the
strong, and perhaps I also knew myself for one of the weak ones of the
world. At the moment, as father stood with the stick upraised, glaring
at Uncas, my own sympathies (if my own fancy has not tricked me again)
were with father. My heart ached for him.
He was saved by mother. She came to the door of the shed and stood
looking at him and his eyes wavered, and then he threw the stick back
upon the pile from which he had taken it and went silently away. I
remembered that he tramped off to Main Street and that, later in the
evening when he came back to the house, he was drunk and went drunken
to bed. The trick of drunkenness had saved him from the ordeal of
looking into the eyes of Uncas or of mother, as so often words have
later saved me from meeting fairly some absurd position into which I
have got myself.
* * * * *
And so there was I now, in the bed and up to one of father’s tricks:
upstart that I was, dog of a Huron myself, I was trembling for mother
and for Uncas--two people very well able to take care of themselves.
Mother dropped my hand and took the outstretched hand of my brother.
“What happened?” she asked.
And Uncas told her, fairly and squarely. “He was a cry-baby and a
big calf and I walloped him one. I wanted the hatchet and so I took
it--that’s what I did. I banged him one on the nose and jerked it out
of his hand.”
Mother laughed--a queer unmirthful little laugh. It was the kind of
laugh that hurts. There was irony in it and that got to Uncas at once.
“It doesn’t take much of a fellow to snatch a hatchet out of the hands
of a cry-baby,” she said.
That was all. She kept on rubbing his hands and now it was my eyes, and
not the eyes of Uncas, that could look directly into our mother’s eyes.
Perhaps it was in that moment, and not in the moment when I lay on the
ground peeking through the crack into the shed, that the first dim
traces of understanding of all such fellows as father and myself came
to me. I looked at mother with adoration in my own eyes, and when she
had taken the kerosene lamp and had gone away, and when we boys were
all again curled quietly like sleeping puppies in the bed, I cried a
little, as I am sure father must have cried sometimes when there was
no one about. Perhaps his getting drunk, as he did on all possible
occasions, was a way of crying too.
And I cried also, I suppose, because in Uncas and mother there was a
kind of directness and simplicity that father and all fellows, who like
myself are of the same breed with him, can never quite achieve.