THE end of the second year after mother’s death was at hand and our
family was at the point of falling to pieces. No more sitting by the
fire in the kitchen through the long fall and winter evenings with
mother at the ironing board. The kitchen of our house was cold and
cheerless. The spirit of the household had fled. It had gone down into
the ground with the body of the woman out of whose living body had come
five strong sons.
Mother had died swiftly, mysteriously, without warning. It was as
though she had got out of bed on a fall morning and had taken a long
look at her sons. “It’s about the time when they will have to push out
into the world. Any influence I may have on their lives has already
been exerted. There is no time to think of any other purpose in life
for myself, and anyway, I am too tired. Having lived out my life, now I
shall die.”
It was as though she had said something of the sort to herself, and
had then laid down her life as one might lay down a finished book. On
a rainy dismal day in the fall there she was, coming in at the kitchen
door from hanging a wash out on the line, temporarily strung up in
our woodshed, smiling quietly, making one of her quick soft ironic
observations, sweetening always the air of the room into which she
came with her presence.
On such a rainy morning in the fall she was like that, as she will live
always in the memory of her sons, and then, on another equally wet
dismal fall day two or three weeks later, she was dead.
What there had been of family life among us was going to pieces. It was
sure that father was not one to hold it together. No one could think of
him as destined to hold that or any other fort. That surely wasn’t his
line.
There was a period of waiting. The older son had already found his
place in life. He had already become what he was to remain to the
end, an American artist, a painter. The making of little designs for
the gravestones of village merchants was for him a passing phase.
Perhaps it was, at that time, the only form of expression one, having a
tendency toward the plastic arts, could find in our towns.
And so there was his destiny fixed--but what of us others? We did not
often speak openly of the matter among ourselves, but it was obvious
something had to be done and soon. In the few talks we had concerning
the matter in our broken household, while the one remaining daughter
(destined to die before her life could be really developed) was acting
as our temporary housekeeper, father held out strongly for the learning
of one of the trades. He talked of long years of apprenticeship to
some craft, and it was characteristic of him that as he talked he
became in fancy himself such a craftsman. One was trained slowly and
surely in one’s craft. Then one became a journeyman and went on his
travels, going from shop to shop, watching the master craftsmen. “It’s
something at your back,” father said, “something that can be depended
upon. It makes a man able to stand up as a man before his fellows.”
Did it? We boys listened and thought our own thoughts. As for
father--he had picked up a smattering knowledge of several crafts; and
how eloquently he, dear word fellow, could speak of them, sling the
jargon of the crafts! He had at various times been a harness-maker,
house-painter, sign-writer of a feeble sort, such an actor as I have
described, the tooter of a cornet in the village band.
In reality he was a tale-teller, but that was no craft among us. No
union had been formed among tale-tellers. The Authors’ League, the Pen
Women, the Poet’s Club, etc., had not yet been formed or, if there were
such organizations in existence, they at any rate did not reach down
into mid-American towns. At that time even the rumors of the vast sums
to be made by turning out clever plot stories for the popular magazines
or the movies had not been whispered about.
Other and more significant-seeming stories were floating however. A
new kind of hero, tarnished somewhat later, filled the popular eye. As
we boys went about in the main street of our town, citizens, feeling
a kindly interest in the motherless sons, continually stopped us.
Everyone was singing a new little song:
“Get on. Make money. Get to the top. A penny saved is a penny earned.
Money makes the mare go.”
“Save up your money, and save up your rocks.
And you’ll always have tobacco in the old tobacco box,”
sang Sil West, the smith, who was shoeing a horse in the alleyway back
of the stores on our main street.
The factories were calling. One went into a factory, did his work with
care and skill, became foreman, superintendent, part owner, married
the banker’s daughter, got rich and went off to Paris to sin the sins
neglected during so busy a youth and early manhood.
It sounded reasonable and possible. Learning a craft was slow business
and one was in a hurry. “Hurry” was the battle cry of the day.
And the time of the factories was just at hand. At that time they
were coming into Ohio, and into all the mid-American states in great
numbers, and no town was without hope of becoming an industrial centre.
The bicycle had come, followed by the automobile, and even the quiet
country roads were taking on the new spirit of speed.
Something was in the air. One breathed a new spirit into the lungs.
The paradise, later to be represented by the ford, the city apartment
building with tiled bathroom floors, subways, jazz, the movies--was it
not all just at hand? I myself and long afterward tried a little, in a
novel of mine called, “Poor White,” to give something of the feeling of
life in our towns at that time.
Oil and gas were spurting out of the ground in Ohio and the discovery
of oil and gas meant the coming of factories, it meant the New Age,
prosperity, growth going onward and upward. “Death to everything
old, slow and careful! Forward the Light Brigade! Theirs not to ask
the reason why! Theirs but to do or die”--the light brigade in our
particular town consisting of every merchant, doctor, workman, lawyer,
who had saved a few pennies that could be invested. In our ears rang
stories of the Lima Boom, the Gibsonburg boom, the Finley boom.
And was it not simple? One bored a hole deep down into the ground and
out came wealth--oil and gas, followed by the coming of the factories.
If we, in our town, did not quite “cut it,” did not “make the grade,”
could not become later another fragrant Akron or blissful Youngstown,
Ohio, it wasn’t because we didn’t try.
A hole was being bored at the edge of the town in a field near a grove
of hickory trees where we lads had formerly gone for nuts and squirrel
shooting on the fall days. In the field--a meadow--there had also been
a baseball diamond, and sometimes visiting circuses set up their tents
there; but now the hole had gone far down below the usually required
depth and nothing had happened. Rumors ran through the streets. The
well-drillers had come from over near Gibsonburg. Only a week or two
before a stranger had got off a train, had walked about through the
streets, and had then visited the place where the drilling was going
on. He had been seen to speak with the drillers. No doubt our drillers
were in “cahoots” with the Rockefellers, the Morgans, or some of
that crowd. Perhaps John D. himself had been pussyfooting about. One
couldn’t tell. Stranger things than that had happened. Were we to be
caught napping? It was decided to do what was called “shooting the
well.”
Surely here was something for a boy to take into account. Mysterious
whisperings among our elders on the streets in the evening; plot and
counterplot; dark doings among the capitalists--“stand back, villain,
unhand the fair figure of our hopes and dreams”--ah! an explosion at
the mysterious hour of dawn, far down in the bowels of Mother Earth.
Old Mother Earth to be given an emetic of a stirring sort. Forth would
flow wealth, factories, the very New Age itself.
One didn’t ask oneself how a participating interest in all these new
glories was to be achieved, and in the whole town no man was more
excited than father who had never owned a share of stock in anything.
He ceased speaking of the crafts and only shook his head in sorrow.
“I’d just like to be alive two hundred years from now,” he said. “Why,
I’ll tell you what; there’ll be a vast city right here--right on the
very spot on which I am now standing there’ll be, why there’ll be a
huge office building, like as not.”
So sure was he of all this that the wealth of the future became in
his fancy a thing of the present, even of the past. He felt himself
magnificently wealthy and, one day when he had been drinking and when,
because of what we thought his lack of dignity, we youngsters had
treated him to a rather thorough snubbing, he grew angry. Night came
and it rained. He went up into the garret of the house in which we then
lived and presently came down with a package of papers in his hand.
Were they old love letters, from the ladies he had known in his youth,
or unpaid grocery bills? It is a mystery that may never be solved.
He went into the little back yard of the house and, making a pile of
the papers, burned them solemnly. We boys crowded to the kitchen window
to watch. There was the little flare of the flame and above it, and
leaning over, father’s stern face--and then darkness.
Back he came into the house and before he went away, to spend the rest
of the evening whispering of the wealth of the future with other men
in the barrooms, he told us what had happened. “Do you know what those
papers were?” he asked sharply. “They were deeds to the whole business
section of the City of Cincinnati. I have been concealing from you
the fact that I had such papers, intending to leave them to you as an
inheritance but--”
“Well, you have not seen fit to treat me with respect and I have burned
them,” he declared, tramping out of the house.
* * * * *
Romance and mystery. There was the imagined figure of the shooter of
wells. The thing was done with nitro-glycerine. One put “nitro” and
“glycerine” together, one fancied, and there was this terrible result.
One did not know what “nitro” was, but had seen and felt “glycerine.”
“Ah! chemistry. You wait and you’ll see what will be done with
chemistry,” said father.
And so there was this mysterious stuff frozen into solid cakes and
carted through the night, along unfrequented roads, by the heroic
well-shooter.
Now, there was a man to suit a boy’s fancy, that well-shooter, a fellow
going nonchalantly along with the frozen cakes in the wagon behind him.
Is he worried? Not at all! He lights his pipe. He looks at the stars.
He sings a little ditty. “My bonny lies over the ocean. My bonny lies
over the sea. My bonny lies over the ocean--Oh, bring back my bonny to
meeeeeee.”
In the wagon back of him that stuff. A jar, a sudden jolt of the wagon,
the breaking of a wagon axle and then--
We boys whisper about it when we meet on the streets. One of the boys
holds up his thumb. “You see that thumbnail?” he asks. “Well, a little
bit of that stuff, no more than would cover that thumbnail, would blow
him and his wagon to smithereens.” The question asked was, how much
farther would, say a ton of the stuff, blow the outfit? Was there a
land as far beyond smithereens as the stars from earth, to which the
fellow might be sent, in the wink of an eye?
A glimpse of the infinite added to all the other excitement and mystery.
My first glimpse of the Industrial Age--with one of my brothers I got
out of bed one morning, before dawn, and crept away into the darkness
to lie in a grove of trees near the meadow and see the well shot.
Several other boys came. The father of one of our town boys, who had
stock in the gas-well company, had let slip the carefully hoarded
secret of the hour when the fearful thing was to happen.
And so, there we were, ten or twelve of us, lying concealed in the
wood. Dawn began to break. Birds and squirrels awoke in the trees over
our heads. On the road that came out from town buggies and surreys
appeared. The visitors tied their horses far away, by an old sawmill,
near the town’s edge, and came afoot to the field.
Now it was quite light and we could begin to recognize the men of
the party, solid respectable men, with money in the bank. There was
Penny Jacobs, who kept a little candy store; Seth McHugh, cashier of
the bank; Wilmott the lawyer, a dozen others. No doubt Em Harkness
was there. Of that I cannot be quite sure. He was a man of our town,
who ran a small general store and brother, I believe, to that other
Harkness who later became a man of vast wealth and a figure in the
Standard Oil Company. His money built the Harkness Memorial at
Yale, and if our town did not achieve the prominent position in the
Industrial Age of which we all at that moment dreamed, we had at least
among us the kin of royalty. We were not entirely left in the cold
outside world. A Harkness was a Harkness and we had a Harkness.
But to return to that significant moment in the field. As we lads
lay in the wood, well concealed from the eyes of our elders, we
were silent. Solemnity lay like a frost over our young souls. Even
the giggling and whispering that had gone on among us died now. The
well-shooter was there and he had turned out to be just an ordinary
looking teamster with whiskers, but that did not matter.
Greater and more significant things were astir. Even the birds stopped
singing and the squirrels chattered no more.
A long tube, containing no doubt the nitro-glycerine, had been lowered
into the hole in the ground and the honored guests of the occasion ran
quickly across the field and stood among the trees near our hiding
place.
They were dressed, these serious-minded citizens, as for a wedding or
a funeral. Even Penny Jacobs had put on what was called among us “a
boiled shirt.”
What an occasion! Now we were, all of us, as we stood or lay under the
trees--we were all one thing; and presently there would be a terrific
explosion, far down in the earth, below our bellies as we lay sprawled
in the wet grass--there would be this explosion, and then would we not
all, at that moment, become something else?
“Bang!” we would go into the New Age--that was the idea. In the
presence of our elders, who now stood in silence very near us, we lads
all felt a little ashamed of our ragged clothes and our unwashed faces.
Perhaps some of us had been to Sunday school and had heard the parable
of the virgins who did not keep their lamps trimmed and filled.
In shame we hid our faces before the glory of the vision before us.
There we were, sons of housepainters, carpenters, shoemakers, and the
like. Our fathers had worked with their hands. They had soiled their
clothes and their faces with common labor. Poor, benighted men! What
did they know of what Mark Twain called, “the glorious, rip-roaring
century, greatest of all the centuries?” A man could make a wagon that
would stand up, or shoe a horse, or build a house slowly and well, but
what was that?
Shucks! There would be this terrific rumble in the bowels of the earth,
and then the little cunning machines would come. Men would walk about
smoking twenty-five-cent cigars; they would put their thumbs in the
armholes of their vests and laugh at the past. Men would fly through
the air, dive under the sea, have breakfast in Cleveland, Ohio, and
lunch in London. A fellow couldn’t tell what would happen now.
Why, no one would work at all maybe--well, that is to say, not really
work. Some of our fathers had read a book called “Looking Backward” and
had talked about it in the homes and in the stores. Then we lads had
talked. Well, a fellow would maybe roll downtown from his country home
in the late morning and turn a few cranks or pull a few levers. Then
he would go and play, make love to some beautiful female or take an
afternoon’s ride over to Egypt to see the Pyramids, or visit the Holy
Land. A fellow had to get up an appetite for dinner, dang it all!
Anyway, that was that, and there we were. The well-shooter dropped
a heavy weight down the hole and cut out for the woods. When he was
halfway across the meadow the rumbling explosion occurred, down in the
earth.
And into the bright morning air shot a great fountain of mud and muddy
water. The derrick over the hole was covered with it, the grass in the
meadow was covered and much of it fell down like rain on us in the
wood. The front of Penny Jacobs’ boiled shirt was covered with it.
The mud fell on us lads, too, but that didn’t matter so much. None of
us had put on Sunday clothes. Our elders, who represented among us the
capitalistic class, went over and stood about the well for a time, and
then went sadly off up the road to unhitch their horses and drive back
to town.
When we lads emerged from the woods no one was left but the
well-shooter, and he was suspect, and grumpy as well, not having
breakfasted. Those of us whose fathers had no money invested were
inclined to take the whole matter as rather a delicious joke, but were
overruled. We stood about for a time, staring at the well-shooter, who
was engaged in gathering his paraphernalia together, and then we also
moved off toward town.
“I’ll bet that well-shooter’s a crook,” said one of my companions.
He had, I remember, a great deal of mud in his hair and on his face.
He kept complaining as we went along. “He could have stuck that
nitro-glycerine only halfway down, and then set it off, that’s what
he could have done.” The idea, later taken up enthusiastically by the
entire community, pleased us all. It was so apparent the well-shooter
was not the hero we had hoped. He didn’t look like a hero. “Well, my
dad says he knows him. He lives over by Monroeville and he gets drunk
and beats his wife, my dad says so,” another lad declared.
It was rather a good solution of our difficulty. If one can’t have a
hero, who wants just a teamster?
It was infinitely better to have a villainous well-shooter about whose
Machiavellian machinations one’s imagination could linger in happiness.