I have read hundreds of queer histories. I have myself had various
adventures, but I know of no experience more odd than that of an old
schoolmate of mine named John Appleman. John was born in Macomb County,
southeastern Michigan, in the year 1830. His father owned a farm of one
hundred acres there. John's mother died when he was but a lad, and after
that he lived alone with his father upon the farm. In 1855 John's father
died. In 1856 John married a pretty girl of the neighborhood. A year
later a child was born to them, a daughter. This is the brief history of
John Appleman up to the time when he began to develop his real
personality.
He was a contented personage in his early married life. His wife, while
not a shrew, had undoubted force of character, but there was not much
attrition; and his little daughter was, in John's estimation, the
fairest child upon the continent. Personally, he was content with all
the world, though his wife was somewhat less so. John had his failings.
He was not counted among the farmers of the neighborhood as a "pushing"
man. There was still much woodland in Macomb County in the year 1857,
and in autumn the woods were most enticing. Squirrels, black and gray,
were still abundant where the oak and hickory were; the ruffled grouse
still fed in families upon beech-nuts on the ridges and the thorn-apples
of the lowlands. The wild turkey still strutted about in flocks rapidly
thinning, and occasionally a deer fell to the lot of the shrewd hunter.
John liked to hunt and fish. He wasted time that way, his neighbors
said, and his wife was of the same opinion. It is true, he possessed
certain qualities which, even in their utilitarian eyes, commanded some
slight respect. He was so close to nature in his thoughts and fancies
that he knew many things which they did not, and which had a money
value. It was he, for instance, who first recognized the superior
quality of the White Neshannock, the potato of the time. It was he who
grafted the Baldwin upon his apple-trees, recognizing the fact that this
particular apple was a toothsome and marketable and relatively
non-decaying fruit. And it was he who could judge best as to what
crosses and combinations would most improve the breed of horses and
cattle and hogs and sheep. They admitted his "faculty," as they called
it, in certain directions, but they had a profound contempt for him in
others. They could not understand why he would leave standing in the
midst of a wheat-field a magnificent soft maple, the branches of which
shaded and made untillable an area of scores of yards. They could not
understand why he hesitated to murder a tree. So it came that he was
with them while scarcely of them, and that Mrs. Appleman, who could not
comprehend, belonged to the majority.
It must not be understood that John Appleman was unpopular. On the
contrary, each sturdy farmer rather liked while he criticised him. Had
John run for township clerk, or possibly even for supervisor, that most
important of township honors throughout Michigan, he might have been
elected, but John did not know his strength. He recognized his own
weakness, after a fashion. He knew that he would work violently for a
month or two at a time, giving the vigorous hired man a decent test in
holding his physical own, and he knew that after that he would become
what the people called "slack," and a little listless; and it was in his
slack times that the squirrel and grouse most suffered. Between him and
the wife of his bosom had grown nothing, so grave as to be described as
an armed neutrality; but more and more he hesitated in entering the
house after an evening's work, and more and more he drifted down to the
Corners--that is, the cross-roads where were the postoffice and the
blacksmith-shop and the general store. He liked to be with the other
fellows. He liked human companionship; and since his fellows drank, he
began to drink with them. It is needless to explain how the habit grew
upon him. The man who drinks whisky affects his stomach, and the
stomach affects the nerves, and there is a sort of arithmetical
progression until the stimulant eventually seems to become almost a part
of life; and the man, unless he be one of great force of character, or
one most knowing and scientific, must yield eventually to the stress of
close conditions. Time came when John Appleman yielded, and carried
whisky home in a gallon jug and hid it in the haymow.
Need does not exist for any going into details, for telling of what
happened at the cross-roads store, of what good stories were related day
by day and week by week and month by month, while the cup went round; it
is sufficient to say that the stomach of John Appleman became querulous
when he had not taken a stimulant within a limited number of hours, and
that he was in a fair way of becoming an ordinary drunkard. With his
experience and decadence came, necessarily, an expertness of judgment as
to the quality of that which he drank. He could tell good liquor from
bad, the young from the old.
It came that, being thoughtful and imaginative, John Appleman decided
that he, at least, should drink better liquor than did tipplers in
general. He would not be seen a weakly vagrant, buying his jugful at the
corner store; neither would he drink raw liquor. He would buy it in
quantity and let it age upon his farm, and so with each replenishing of
the jug from his private store would come an increase in quality derived
from greater age, until in time each daily tipple would be an absorption
of something so smooth and potent that immediate subsequent existence
would be a thing desirable in all ways. And John Appleman had a plan.
The Appleman barn and house stood perhaps three hundred yards apart,
near the crest of what was hardly worthy the name of hill, which sloped
downward into what they called the "flats," through which the creek ran.
The barn stood very close to uncleared woodland, and the banks ending
the woodland showed a decidedly rocky exterior. Appleman, chasing a
woodchuck one day, had seen him scurry into a hole in this rocky
surface, and prying away with a handspike had unloosed a small mass of
rock and discovered a cave; not much of a cave, it is true, but one of
at least twenty feet in length and eight or ten in breadth, and full six
feet in height. This discovery occurred a year or two before John felt
the grip of any stimulant. He had forgotten all about it until there
came to him the idea of drinking better whisky than did other people.
John had sold a yoke of oxen and a Blackhawk colt, and two hundred
dollars in gold were resting heavily in his little cherry-wood desk in
the farm-house sitting-room. One day he took ten of these gold-pieces
and went to town; not to the cross-roads, but to the larger place, some
ten miles distant, where was a distillery, and there he bought two
barrels of whisky. Whisky in those days, before the time of present
taxes, was sold from the distillery at prices ranging from thirty-five
to fifty cents a gallon, about forty-seven gallons to a barrel. The team
of horses dragged wearily home the heavy load; but they did not stop
when home was reached, either in front of the house or at the barn-yard
gate. Instead, they were turned aside through a rude gate leading into
the flats, and thence drew the load to the mouth of the little cave,
where, unseen by any one, Appleman tilted the barrels out and left them
lying on the sward.
Other things had been bought in town that day, and Appleman had no
difficulty in giving reasons for the lateness of his home-coming. Next
day, though, he was a busy man. By the exercise of main strength, and
the leverage afforded with a strong ironwood handspike, he succeeded in
rolling both those barrels into the cave and uptilting them, and leaving
them standing high and dry. The cave was as dry as a bone. He noted with
satisfaction the overhanging clay bank above, and felt that if he were
to be called away his treasure would be safe, since the opening would
doubtless soon be hidden from the sight of anybody. When he went to bed
that night he thought much of the hidden barrels.
An incident has been neglected in this account. When John Appleman
bought those barrels, the son of the distiller, a boy of ten, was told
to see that two designated barrels were rolled out from the storeroom.
The boy marked them, utilizing the great chunk of red chalk which every
country boy carried in his pocket some forty years ago. Furthermore,
being a boy and having time to waste, he decorated the barrels with
various grotesque figures, the ungainly fruit of his imagination. This
boy's work with that piece of red chalk had an effect upon the future of
John Appleman.
So things drifted, the whisky in the cave getting a little older, the
friction between John Appleman and his more business-like wife getting
somewhat more vigorous and emitting more domestic sparks, until there
came a change to every one. The farmer, who had read of martial music,
heard with his own ears the roll of the drum and the shrieking,
encouraging call of the fife. War was on, and good men abandoned homes
and families and surroundings because of what we call patriotism and
principle. As for John Appleman, he was among the very first to enlist.
He went into the army blithely. It is to be feared that John Appleman,
like many a worthier man, preferred the various conditions appertaining
to the tented field and the field of battle to that narrower scene of
conflict called the home. Before leaving, however, he crept into the
cave and varnished those two barrels with exceeding thoroughness.
"That will rather modify the process of evaporation. There will be good
whisky there when I come home next year," he said.
John Appleman went to the war with a Michigan regiment, and it is but
justice to him to say that he made an amazingly good soldier. He was
made corporal and sergeant, and later second lieutenant, and filled that
position gallantly until the war ended. That was his record in the great
struggle. Meanwhile his home relations had somewhat changed.
Rather happier in the army than on the farm, John Appleman had felt a
sense of half-gratitude that there had been no objection to his
departure, and for months after he left Michigan he sent most of his
soldier's pay home to his wife. Then came promotion and little attendant
expenses, and he sent less. There came no letter, and after a while he
sent nothing at all. "They have a good farm there which should support
them," so he said to himself; "as for me, I am a poor fellow battling
along down here, and what little I get I need." There ceased to be any
remittances, and there ceased to be any correspondence.
The war ended and John Appleman was free again; but he had a personal
acquaintance with a friend of the Confederate Major John Edwards of
Missouri, the right-hand man of the daring General Joe Shelby. There
were meetings and an exchange of plans and confidences, and the end of
it all was, that Appleman rode into Mexico on that famous foray led by
Shelby, when the tottering throne of Maximilian was almost given new
foundation by the quixotic raiders. The story of that foray is well
known, and there is no occasion for repeating it. It need only be said
that when Shelby's men rode gayly home again, John Appleman was not in
their company. He had met an old friend in the turbulent City of Mexico;
had, with due permission, abandoned the ranks of the wild riders, and
had fled away to where were supposable peace and quiet. There was
something of cowardice in his action now. He had delayed his home-going;
he should have been in Michigan shortly after Appomattox, and now he was
afraid to face his vigorous wife and make an explanation. In Guaymas, on
the western coast, he thought peace might be. So he bestrode a mule, and
with his friend traveled laboriously to the shores of the Pacific, and
there with this same friend dropped into the lazy but long life of the
latitude.
If one had no memory one could do many things. Memory clings ever to a
man's coat-tails and drags him back to where he was before. There was a
tug upon the coat-tails of John Appleman. He was homesick at times. The
musky odors of the coast in blooming time often oppressed him. The
fragrance of the tropic blossom had never become sweeter in his nostrils
than the breath of northern pines. He wanted to go home, but feared to
do so. Mrs. Appleman was assuming monumental proportions in his
estimation. And so the years went by, and John Appleman, dealing out
groceries in Guaymas for such brief hours of the day as people bought
things, his partner relieving him half the time, hungered more with each
passing year to see southeastern Michigan, and with each passing year
became more alarmed over the prospect of facing the partner of his joys
and sorrows there. He was an Anglo-Saxon, far away from home, and the
racial instinct and the home instinct were very strong upon him.
With a tendency toward becoming a drunkard when he left home, John
Appleton had not developed into one, either during his long experience
as a soldier, or later in western Mexico. There was nothing
unexplainable in this. Certain men of a certain quality, worried and
hampered, are liable to resort to stimulants; the same sort of men,
unhampered, need no stimulants at all. To such as these pure air and
nature are stimulants sufficient. Whoever heard of a drunken pioneer and
facer of natural difficulties, from Natty Bumpo of imagination to Kit
Carson of reality? John Appleman as a soldier did not drink. As a half
idler in Guaymas he tried, casually, _mescal_ and _aguardiente_ and all
Mexican intoxicants, but cast them aside as things unnecessary. More
years passed, and finally fear of Mrs. Appleman became to an extent
attenuated, while the scent of the clover-blossoms gained intensity. And
one morning in April, of the good year of our Lord one thousand eight
hundred and ninety-four, John Appleman said to himself: "I am going home
to take the consequences. The old lady"--thus honestly he spoke to
himself--"can't be any worse than this hunger in me. I am going to
Michigan."
So he started from Guaymas. He had very little money. The straightening
up of affairs showed him to possess only about four hundred dollars to
the good, but he started gallantly, shirking in his mind the meeting,
but overpowered by the homing instinct, the instinct which leads the
carrier-pigeon to its cot.
Meanwhile there had been living and change upon the farm. Mother and
daughter, left together, existed comfortably for some years, with the
aid of the one hired man. The war over, the wife waited patiently the
return of the husband from whom no letter had come for a long time, but
who she knew was still alive, learning this from returning members of
his company, who had told of his good services. She had learned later of
his companionship with the Confederate group under Shelby; but as time
passed and no word came, doubt grew upon her. She wrote to some of the
leaders of that wild campaign, and learned from their kindly answers
that her husband had been lost from them somewhere in Mexico. Both she
and her daughter finally decided that he must have met death. In 1867
Mrs. Appleman put on mourning, and she and Jane, the daughter, settled
down into the management of their own affairs.
As heretofore indicated, the farm had not been a bonanza, even when its
master was in charge, though its soil was rich and it was a most
desirable inheritance. Even less profitable did it become under the
management of the supposed widow and her daughter. They struggled
courageously and faithfully, but they were at a disadvantage. The
mowing-machine and the reaper had taken the place of the scythe and
cradle. The singing of the whetstone upon steel was heard no longer in
the meadows nor among the ripened grain. The harrow had cast out the
hoe. The work of the farm was accomplished by patent devices in wood and
steel. To utilize these aids, to keep up with the farming procession,
required a degree of capital, and no surplus had accrued upon the
Appleman farm. Mrs. Appleman was compelled to borrow when she bought her
mowing-machine, and the slight mortgage then put upon the place was
increased when other necessary purchases were made in time. The mortgage
now amounted to eleven hundred dollars, and had been that for over four
years, the annual interest being met with the greatest difficulty. The
farm, even with the few improved facilities secured, barely supported
the widow and her daughter. They could lay nothing aside, and now, in
1894, there was not merely a threat, but the certainty, of a foreclosure
unless the eleven hundred dollars should be paid. It was due on the
twentieth of September. It was the first of September when John Appleman
started from Guaymas for home. It was nine days later when he left the
little Michigan station in the morning and walked down the country road
toward his farm.
He was sixty-four years of age now, but he was a better-looking man than
he was when he entered the army. His step was vigorous, his eye was
clear, and there was lacking all that dull look which comes to the
countenance of the man who drinks intoxicants. He was breathing deeply
as he walked, and gazing with a sort of childish delight upon the
Michigan landscape about him.
It seemed to Appleman as if he were awakening from a dream. Real dreams
had often come to him of this scene and his return to it, but the
reality exceeded the figments of the night. A quail whistled, and he
compared its note with that of its crested namesake in Mexico, much to
the latter's disadvantage. A flicker passed in dipping flight above the
pasture, and it seemed to him that never before was such a golden color
as that upon its wings. Even the call of the woodpecker was music to
him, and the chatter and chirr of a red squirrel perched jauntily on the
rider of a rail fence seemed to him about the most joyous sound he had
ever heard. He felt as if he were somehow being born again. And when his
own farm came into view, the feeling but became intensified. He thought
he had never seen so fair a place.
He crossed the bridge above the creek which flowed through his own farm,
and saw a man engaged in cutting away the willow bush which had assumed
too much importance along the borders of the little stream. He called
the man to him, and did what was a wise thing, something of which he had
thought much during his long railroad journey.
"Are you working for Mrs. Appleman?" he asked.
The man answered in the affirmative.
"Well," said John, "I want you to go up to the house and say to her that
her husband has come back and will be there in a few minutes."
The man started for the house. Appleman sat down on the edge of the
bridge and let his legs dangle above the water, just as he had done many
years ago when he was a barefooted boy and had fished for minnows with a
pin hook. How would his wife receive him, and what could he say to her?
Well, he would tell her the truth, that was all, and take the chances.
He rose and went up the road until opposite his own gate. How familiar
the yard seemed to him! There was the gravel path leading from the gate
to the door, and the later flowers, the asters and dahlias, were in
bloom on either side, just as they were when he went away in 1861. The
brightness of the forenoon was upon everything, and it was all
invigorating. He opened the gate and walked toward the house, and just
as he reached his hand toward the latch of the door, it opened, and a
woman whose hair was turning gray put her arms about his neck and drew
him inside, weeping, and with the exclamation, "Oh, John!"
There was another woman, fair-faced and demure, whom he did not
recognize at first, but who kissed him and called him father. Of what
else happened at this meeting I do not know. The reunion was at least
good, and John Appleman was a very happy man.
But the practical phases of life are prompt in asserting themselves. It
was not long before John Appleman knew the problem he had to face. There
was a mortgage nearly due for eleven hundred dollars on the farm, and he
had in his possession only about three hundred dollars. A shrewder
financier than he might have known how to renew the mortgage, or to lift
it by making a new one elsewhere, for the farm was worth many times the
sum involved. But Appleman was not a financier. The burden of anxiety
which had rested upon his wife and daughter now descended upon him. He
brooded and worried until he saw the hour of execution only five days
off, with no reasonable existent prospect of saving himself. He wandered
about the fields, plotting and planning vaguely, but to little purpose.
One day he stood beside the creek, gazing absent-mindedly toward the
hillside.
Something about the hillside, some association of ideas, perhaps the
view of a gnarled honey-suckle-bush where he had gathered flowers in his
childhood, set his memory working, and there flashed upon him the
incident of the cave, and what he had left concealed there when he went
into the army. He looked for the cave's entrance, but saw none. The
matter began to interest him. Why there was no entrance visible was
easily explained. Clay had overrun with the spring rains from the
cultivated field above, building gradually upward from the bottom of the
little hill until the aperture had been entirely hidden. This deposit of
clay, a foot perhaps in depth, reached nearly to the summit of the
slight declivity. Appleman began speculating as to where the cave might
be, and his curiosity so grew upon him that he resolved to learn. He cut
a stout blue-beach rod and sharpened one of it, and estimating as
closely as he could where the little cave had been, thrust in his
testing-pole. Scarcely half a dozen ventures were required to attain his
object. He found the cave, then went to the barn and secured a spade and
came back to do a little digging. He had begun to feel an interest in
the fate of those two whisky barrels. It was not a difficult work to
effect an entrance to the cave, and within an hour from the time he
began digging Appleman was inside and examining things by the aid of a
lantern which he had brought. He was astonished. The cave had evidently
never been entered by any one save himself; all was dry and clean, and
the two barrels stood apparently just as he had left them, over thirty
years ago. He decided that they must be empty, that their contents must
have long since evaporated; but when he tried to tilt one of them over
upon its side he found it very heavy. He made further test that day,
boring a hole into the top of one of the barrels, with the result that
there came forth a fragrance compared with which, to a judge of good
liquor, all the perfumes of Araby the Blest would be of no importance.
He measured the depth of the remaining contents, and found that each
barrel was more than two-thirds full. Then he hitched a horse to a buggy
and drove to town--drove to the same distillery where he had bought
those barrels in the latter 'fifties. The distiller of that time had
passed away and his son reigned in his stead--the youth who had
decorated the barrels with the red chalk-marks. To him, now a keen,
middle-aged business man, Appleman told his story. The distiller was
deeply interested, but incredulous. "I will drive back with you," he
said; and late that afternoon the two men visited the cave.
The visit was a brief one. No sooner did the distiller observe those
lurid hieroglyphics upon the barrels than he uttered a shout of delight.
There came back to him the memory of that afternoon so many years ago,
and of his boyish exploit in decoration. He applied his nose judicially
to the auger-hole in the barrel's top. He estimated the amount of
spirits in each. "I wouldn't have believed it," he said, "if I hadn't
seen it. It's because you varnished the barrels. That made evaporation
slow. I'll give you twenty dollars a gallon for all there is of it."
"I'll take it," said John Appleman.
There were in those two barrels just seventy-six gallons of whisky, to
compare with which in quality there was practically nothing else upon
the continent; at least so swore the distiller. Twenty times seventy-six
dollars is fifteen hundred and twenty dollars. The mortgage on the farm
was paid, and John Appleman and wife and daughter leaned back content,
out of debt, and, counting the little John had brought home, with four
or five hundred dollars to the good in the county bank. They are doing
very well now. Appleman regrets the disappearance of the deer, wild
turkey and ruffed grouse, but the quail are abundant, and the flowers
bloom as brightly and the birds sing as sweetly as in the days before
the war. Time, just as it improved the whisky, has improved his wife,
and she has a mellower flavor. He prefers Michigan to Mexico.
I have read somewhere that there is a moral to the life of every man. I
have often speculated as to the moral appertaining to the career of
Appleman. If he had never bought those two barrels of whisky he would
have lost his farm. On the other hand, had he never taken to drink, he
might have remained at home an ordinary decent citizen, and his farm
have never been in peril. The only moral I have been able to deduce is
this: If by any chance you come into possession of any quantity of
whisky, don't drink it, but bury it for thirty-five years at least, and
see what will happen.