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 dear 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 re member, 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, quarrelling with no one.
He, the youngest of the three, looked out at life always as from a great distance lie 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 li
ke 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 arc 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 quarrelling, 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 (light, 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 warr
ior’s head should come. An idea has come to him. He wilt 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.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 330
