AS for the show father and Aldrich put on, that is another matter. One
may, without too much injustice, reserve judgment on the show. I myself
never saw one of their performances, but one of my brothers once did
and always, quietly and with commendable firmness, refused to speak of
it afterward.
Fancy will, however, serve. Aldrich would show his pictures of
McKinley, Grover Cleveland and the others, and then father would sing
and do one of his dances. There would be more pictures and another song
and dance and after that the picture of the flag, in colors. If the
night were fair forty or even fifty people, farmers, their wives, the
hired men and the children, would gather in the schoolhouse. The show
only cost ten cents. Too much injustice was not done them.
It is, however, rather a shame they did not let father tell stories
instead. Perhaps in all his life it never occurred to him they might
have been written. Poor father! As a public figure, he had to content
himself with the exercise of an art in which he was as bad, I fancy, as
any man who has ever lived.
And it is his singing and dancing that remains like a scar in my memory
of him. In the late fall, before Aldrich and he started out on their
adventure, father used to rehearse upstairs in our house.
The evening meal would have been out of the way and we children would
be sitting by the stove, about the table in the kitchen. Mother had
washed clothes during the day and now she was doing an ironing. Father
walked about, his hands clasped behind his back as though in deep
thought, and occasionally he raised his eyes to the ceiling, while his
lips moved silently.
Then he went out of the room and we heard him go upstairs into a
bedroom above. None of us, in the kitchen below, looked at each other.
We pretended to read books, to get our school lessons, or we looked at
the floor.
At that time the humor of America--of which we Americans were so
inordinately proud--expressed itself in the broader and less subtle
jokes of Mark Twain, Bill Nye and Petroleum V. Nasby, and there was a
book, commonly read by both children and grown-ups, and reputed to be
very funny, called, “Peck’s Bad Boy.” It told, if I remember correctly,
of the doings of a certain quite terrible youngster who put chewing gum
or molasses on the seats of chairs, threw pepper into people’s eyes,
stuck pins into schoolteachers, hung cats over clotheslines by their
tails, and did any number of other such charmingly expressive things.
This terrible child was, as I have said, reputed to be very funny
and the book recounting his doings must have sold tremendously. And
father, having read it, had written a ballad concerning just such
another youngster. This child also made life a hell for his fellows,
and his father was very proud of him. When the child had done something
unusually shocking the father tried, one gathered, to share in the
honor.
At any rate the refrain of father’s song was:
“You grow more like your dad every day.”
Evening after evening these words rang through our house. They made all
of us children shiver a little. Father sang them, danced a few halting
steps, and then sang them again.
In the kitchen, as I have already said, we others sat with our eyes
on the floor. One could not hear the words of the verses themselves,
but the spirit of the song was known to all of us. Am I right? Were
there--sometimes--tears in mother’s eyes as she bent over the ironing
board?
Of that, after all, I cannot be too sure. I can only be everlastingly
sure of the refrain:
“You grow more like your dad every day.”
* * * * *
And, however that may be, there is always one consoling thought. As
a showman, and on stormy nights, there must sometimes have been but
slight audiences at the schoolhouses and the takings for Aldrich and
father must have been thin. One fancies evenings when eighty cents
might cover all the receipts at the door.
One thinks of the eighty cents and shudders, and then a consoling
thought comes. Of one thing we may be quite sure--father and Aldrich
would not have gone hungry, and at night there must always have been
comfortable beds into which they could crawl. Father had promised
Aldrich he would see to the matter of bed and board.
And no doubt he did.
Even though the farmer and the farmer’s wife should have proved
hard-hearted one remembers the number of Tillies in the farmhouses of
Ohio. When everything else failed the Tillies would have taken care of
the troubadours. Of that one may be, I should say, very very sure.