by Jack Finney
So there's my trouble, if trouble it is; I'm in love with a town, in love with the handful of Main Street buildings that were built in the last century and that don't look much different, except for the modernized store fronts, from the way they do in the old photographs. Look at their upper stories, as I always do walking along Main, at the tall slim windows with the rounded tops, and maybe, just maybe, you're seeing at least one of the buildings Abraham Lincoln saw when he was in Galesburg. Yes; he debated Douglas on a wooden platform built over the east steps of Old Main at Knox, something the college never seems to get tired of reminding the world about. And Old Main, too, stands very little changed, on the outside, anyway, from the day Lincoln stood there grasping his coat lapels and smiling down at Douglas.
There's sordidness and desolation in Galesburg, and just plain ugliness, too. But in so many other places and ways it's a fine old town, and I move through its streets, buildings, and private houses every day of my life, and know more about Galesburg in many ways than anyone else, I'm certain. I know that E. V. Marsh really saw the streetcar he said he did, whether that's possible or not; and I know why the old Pollard place out on Fremont Street didn't burn down.
The morning after the fire I was driving by on my way to work and saw Doug Blaisdel standing in the side yard, waist deep in yellow weeds. I thought he'd finally sold the place— he's the real-estate man who was handling it—and I pulled in to the curb to see who'd bought it. Then, turning off the ignition, I saw that wasn't it because Doug was standing, fists on his hips, staring up at the side of the building, and now I noticed half a dozen kids there, too, and knew that something had happened.
Doug saw me stop, and as I opened the front gate he turned from the old building to cut across the front yard through the weeds to meet me. The place is on a great big lot, and there's a wrought-iron fence, rusting but in good shape, that runs across the lot in front by the sidewalk. A small gate opens onto a walk leading to the porch, and a larger taller pair of gates opens onto what was once a carriage drive to a portico at the west side of the house. Closing the small gate behind me, I was looking up at the house admiring it as always; it looks like an only slightly smaller Mount Vernon, with four great two-story pillars rising to the roof from a ground-level brick-paved porch, and there's an enormous fanlight above the double front doors. But the old place was at least five years overdue for painting; the heirs live in California and have never even seen it, so it sat empty and they didn't keep it up.
"What's the trouble?" I called to Doug when I got close enough.
He's a brisk, young, heavy-rimmed-glasses type from Chicago; been here about five years. "Fire," he said, and beckoned with his chin to follow, turning back across the yard toward the house, the kids trooping along.
At the side of the house I stood looking up at the damage. The fire had obviously started inside, bursting out a window, and now the white clapboard outside wall was scorched and charred clear to the roof, the upper part of the window frame ruined. Stepping to the window to lean inside the house, I saw there wasn't much damage there. It looked as though the dining-room wallpaper, peeling and hanging loose, had somehow caught fire; but outside of soot stains the heavy plaster wall didn't seem much damaged. Mostly it was the window frame, both inside and out, that had burned; that was all. But it was ruined and would cost several hundred dollars to replace.
I said so to Doug, and he nodded and said, "A lot more than the owners will ever spend. They'll just tell me to have the opening boarded over. Too bad the place didn't burn right down."
"Oh?" I said.
He nodded again, shrugging. "Sure. It's a white elephant, Oscar; you know that. Twenty-four rooms, including a ballroom. Who wants it? Been empty eight years now and there's never been a real prospect for it. Cost twenty thousand bucks to fix it up right, and just about as much to tear it down. Burned to the ground, though"—his brows rose at the thought—"the site empty, I could sell the lot for an apartment building if I could get it rezoned, and I probably could." He grinned at me; everybody likes Doug Blaisdel; he insists on it. "But don't worry," he said. "I didn't start the fire. If I had, I'd have done a better job."
He glanced up at the blackened strip of wall again, then down at the ground around us, and I looked, too. We were standing on what had been the old graveled carriage drive, though the white gravel had long since washed away and it was just dirt now; it was trampled and soggy.
"Somebody put the fire out," Doug said, nodding at the damp ground, "but I can't find out who. Wasn't the fire department; they never got a call and don't know a thing about it. Neither do any of the neighbors. Nobody seems to have seen it."
"I heard the fire bell," one of the kids said. "It woke me up, but then I fell asleep again."
"You did not! You're crazy! You were dreamin'!" another boy answered, and they began wrestling, not serious but laughing.
Doug turned toward the street. "Well, back to work!" he said brightly. "See you around, Oscar. You going to put this in the paper?"
I glanced up at the house again and shrugged. "I don't know; not much of a story. We'll see."
The kids left, too, chasing each other through the weeds, horsing around, no longer interested; but I stood in the old driveway beside the house for a few moments longer. Old Man Nordstrum, as he's been called since he was thirty, I guess, lived in the house next door; and whoever had put this fire out, he'd heard it and seen it, maybe done it himself, no matter what he'd told Doug Blaisdel. I looked over suddenly at the side windows of his place, and he was standing watching me. When he saw that I'd seen him, he grinned. Doug was in his car now, the motor started; he flicked a hand at me, then glanced over his shoulder at the street, and pulled out. Smiling a little, I beckoned Nordstrum to come out.
He came out his front door, buttoning an old tan-and-brown sweater, walked to his front gate, then turned into the old Pollard driveway toward me. He's about seventy-one, a retired lawyer with a reputation for grouchiness. But it's less grouchiness, I think, than a simple unwillingness to put up with anyone who doesn't interest him. He's rich, one of the best lawyers in the state; he's bald and has a lined face with smart brown eyes; a shrewd man.
"Doug Blaisdel tells me you didn't see the fire last night," I said as he walked toward me.
Nordstrum shook his head. "Blaisdel is inaccurate, as usual; that's only what I told him. I saw it; of course I saw it. How could I sleep through a fire right outside my bedroom window?"
"Why didn't you tell Doug about it, Mr. Nordstrum?"
"Because he's a fool. Has it all figured out what he's going to believe for the rest of his life; it takes a fool to do that. But I don't think you're a fool, Oscar, not that kind, so I'll tell you; glad to tell somebody. What wakened me—this was just at three-fourteen this morning; I looked at my luminous alarm clock—was a sound." Eyes narrowing, choosing his words carefully, he said, "It was a combined sound —the hard crackle of growing flames and just the touch of a clapper on a brass fire gong. I opened my eyes, saw the orange light of flames reflected from my bedroom walls, and I jumped out of bed and grabbed my glasses. I looked out my window and saw the fire next door here, the flames and sparks shooting out the window in a strong updraft, licking the eaves two stories up; and I saw the fire engine a dozen yards away toward the street, and the firemen were tugging at the hose, unreeling it just as fast as they could pull. I stood and watched them. Best view of a fire I ever had.
"They worked fast; they got their hose connected to the hydrant out at the curb, and they had a good stream on the fire, the pumper at work, in no more than a minute. In five minutes, maybe less, they had the fire completely out and wet down good. Then they packed up their hose and left." Nordstrum stood there in his old-style button sweater, looking at me over the top of his glasses.
"Well, what's so hard to believe about that?" I asked.
"The fire engine, Oscar, had a tall, upright, cylindrical boiler made of polished brass, narrowing at the top to a short smo
kestack. It looked like a boy's steam engine, only a thousand times larger. Underneath that boiler was a fire made of wood and coal; that's what heated the water that supplied steam pressure for the pump. The whole thing, my boy, along with hose, axes, and all the rest of it, was mounted on a low-slung wagon body with big wooden spoke wheels, painted red; and it was pulled by four big gray horses who stood waiting in the light of the fire stomping their hoofs in the soft dirt now and then and switching their tails.
"And when the fire was out and the hose reloaded, the firemen climbed onto the fire engine—two in the high seat up front, where the reins were; the others on the low step in back, hanging on—and the horses pulled it down the driveway, turned onto Fremont Street, breaking into a trot, and that's the last I could see of them. The firemen wore helmets and rubber coats, and they all had large mustaches, and one had a beard. Now, what about it, Oscar? You think I don't know what I saw?"
I shook my head. "Hard to see how you could be mistaken about what you saw unless you've suddenly gone crazy."
"Which I have not," said Nordstrum. "Not yet. Come here." He turned to walk down the old carriageway toward the street, then stopped and pointed. "Here's where the horses stood," he said, "well away from the heat of the fire."
I looked down at the dirt and saw the horseshoe marks sharp and plain in the damp black earth, dozens of them, overlapping. Nordstrum pointed again with his foot and I saw the manure and, deeply imprinted in the earth at the edges of the carriageway, the long, indented ribbons that were wagon tracks.
That was just under a year ago. Two months later, in September, Doug Blaisdel sold the Pollard place—cheap, as he had to, but still he was glad now that it hadn't burned down—to a retired farm-equipment dealer from Peoria who'd grown up in Galesburg. It took all last winter and I don't know how much money—the farm-equipment business must have been good—to get the old place fixed up; but now it looks the way it always used to, clean and white again, the lawn and iron fence and the burned window restored, and the inside of the house is beautiful. They've got an unmarried daughter, and last Friday they gave a dance in the old ballroom. It was a big affair, and walking up the path to the house—the daughter had invited me—I saw the house all lighted up, heard the music, and saw all the people at the windows and out on the huge porch, the big old house white and fresh and alive again, and I was glad it hadn't burned down and the site sold for an apartment building.
Do you see? Do you understand now what's happening in Galesburg? If you do, then you know why the phone rang late one night last fall out at the old Denigmann farm. It's one of the finest of the farms just past the city limits; a wonderful place. There are a half-dozen acres of fine woodland including some nut trees; there's a small but deep stream that winds through the whole farm and is wide enough for swimming in several places; and scattered over two acres of corn land are a dozen regularly shaped mounds which the kids out there have always believed were Indian burial mounds, and around which every generation of Denigmanns since they've owned the place has carefully plowed.
A lot of the neighboring farms are gone without a trace, the land covered with new houses. That's necessary, of course, and some of them are nice ones. But you wonder why so many of the houses we build nowadays are so tiny, so lightly built, and so nearly identical. And why it's necessary to lay them out in indistinguishable rows alongside raw concrete streets without even sidewalks for children to play on. And why they've simply got to be jammed together a few feet apart, on what was once Illinois prairie with an unlimited horizon. Can you imagine some of the houses we build today lived in and loved a century from now?
Carl Denigmann was going to sell his place to the sub-dividers, too, a big Florida outfit that was reaching up into the North. It was a good offer; he was fifty-nine years old, a widower, his children all grown and gone; why not? Late one night, he told me—this was last November, about the middle of the month, after all his crops were in—he was sitting alone in the farm kitchen thinking about it. Carl's a small, strong man with black heavily grayed hair, all of which he still has, and he was probably smoking a pipe there in the farm kitchen.
Now, the Galesburg telephone company is an independent, and in the fall of last year it brought various country phone lines up to date including Denigmann's—putting lines underground and installing dial phones. And in many a place, Carl's included, the company didn't bother removing the old out-of-date and now useless wall phone, unless the customer insisted on getting rid of it.
So Carl sat in his kitchen—there's a ninety-year-old fireplace in it, and he had a fire going—staring at the fire and thinking, smoking his pipe, I'm sure. And when the telephone rang—the stuttering, uncertain grumbling ring of an old hand-crank phone—he simply got up, stepped to the wall, and answered it as he'd done hundreds of times all through his life. The conversation, then, was ordinary enough; it was just Billy Amling asking Carl if he wanted to go rabbit hunting with their twenty-twos in the woods after school next day, keeping one eye open, as usual, for arrowheads. Carl listened, half nodding, ready to agree, as always, before it came back into his head that Billy had been killed in the war in France in 1918; and the telephone receiver lay dead in his hand, not in the way of a phone when the other party has hung up, but in the completely lifeless way of a telephone that is connected to nothing any more and is just hanging on a wall without even wires leading away to the outside now.
Nearly all the rest of the night Carl Denigmann sat up thinking of all the farm had been to him, and Billy Amling, and many others, including Denigmanns who were dead long before he'd been born. And this spring Carl is out plowing it again and he expects to keep farming for at least a few more years. By then, he told me, he'll have figured out what to do; he thinks maybe Galesburg might accept the old farm as a sort of park or preserve, with picnic tables, maybe, but mostly leaving it pretty much as is for kids to hunt through with their twenty-twos, and swim in the creek, and prowl around the old mounds, and pretend, at least, that they're Indian graves. Carl doesn't know, exactly, what he'll do about the farm; he just knows he's not going to let them subdivide it.
I'm glad about that; just as I'm glad the old Pollard place was saved, and that there won't be a great big factory right out at the end of Broad Street, and about a lot of other things I haven't got time to tell. I'm glad because here in Galesburg, and everywhere else, of course, they're trying— endlessly—to destroy the beauty we inherit from the past. They keep trying, and when they succeed, they replace it— not always, but all too often—with drabness and worse. With a sterile sun-baked parking lot where decrepit, characterful, old Boone's Alley once ran; rechristening the asphalt-paved nothingness (as though even the memory of old Boone's Alley must be blotted from mind) with the characterless title Park Plaza. And with anonymous apartment buildings where fine old houses once stood. With concrete-block ugliness sprawling along what were charming country roads. With—but you know what they're doing; wherever you live, you see it all around you. They even want to level Galesburg's ancient Public Square into—well, a parking lot, of course, as though there were nothing more important.
And who are "they?" Why, "they" are us, of course; who else? We're doing these things to ourselves as though we were powerless to stop; or as though any feeling for beauty or grace or a sense of the past were a kind of sentimental weakness to be jeered down. So what has been happening in Galesburg? Why, it's simple enough.
Galesburg's past is fighting back. It's resisting us, for the past isn't so easily destroyed; it's not simply gone with yesterday's newspaper. No, it is not, for it has been far too much—we are all products of it—to ever be completely gone. And so, somehow, in Galesburg, Illinois, when it's been necessary as it sometimes has, the past has fought against the present. When the need becomes desperate enough, then the old yellow streetcars, or horse-drawn fire engines, or abandoned wall phones can and do flicker into momentary existence again, struggling to keep what I and so many others —Carl Sandburg, f
or one, who was born here—love about Galesburg, Illinois.
It's hard to say whether it's succeeding; they did, after all, chop down a lot of fine old Galesburg elms to widen Losey Street; Boone's Alley is gone; and last year the library burned down and the townspeople voted against rebuilding it. And yet—well, I'd hate to be responsible for turning the old square into a parking lot, I can tell you that much. Because just last night, for example, I learned that those twenty-odd old elm trees on that big corner lot on north Cedar Street will not, after all, be chopped down. The man who was going to whack down with a power saw these trees older than himself—he was tired of raking leaves every fall, he said— is in the hospital instead, with a broken leg in traction. It's strung up in a wire-and-pulley contraption like a broken leg in a comic strip. The neighbor who saw what happened told me that the man was standing out in the street last night looking up at the old trees and estimating which way they'd fall when he sliced through them this weekend. All of a sudden he was struck by a car that appeared out of nowhere. The police report calls it a hit-and-run accident, which it was, and the chief has assured the Register-Mail that they'll find the car very soon. It shouldn't be hard to find, they feel, because the neighbor who saw it happen got a good look at the car and furnished a complete description. It was a 1916 Buick roadster with a red body, varnished spoke wheels, and big polished brass headlights each the size of a small drum.
