Boy's Town

by William Dean Howells

  X.

  HIGHDAYS AND HOLIDAYS.

  "THE BOYS BEGAN TO CELEBRATE IT WITH GUNS AND PISTOLS."]

  THE greatest day of all in the Boy's Town was Christmas. In that part ofthe West the boys had never even heard of Thanksgiving, and their eldersknew of it only as a festival of far-off New England. Christmas was theday that was kept in all churches and families, whether they wereMethodists or Episcopalians, Baptists or Universalists, Catholics orProtestants; and among boys of whatever persuasion it was kept in afashion that I suppose may have survived from the early pioneer times,when the means of expressing joy were few and primitive. On Christmaseve, before the church-bells began to ring in the day, the boys began tocelebrate it with guns and pistols, with shooting-crackers andtorpedoes; and they never stopped as long as their ammunition lasted. Afellow hardly ever had more than a bit to spend, and after he had paidten cents for a pack of crackers, he had only two cents and a half forpowder; and if he wanted his pleasure to last, he had to be careful. Ofcourse he wanted his pleasure to last, but he would rather have had nopleasure at all than be careful, and most of the boys woke Christmasmorning empty-handed, unless they had burst their pistols the nightbefore; then they had a little powder left, and could go pretty wellinto the forenoon if they could find some other boy who had shot off hispowder but had a whole pistol left. Lots of fellows' pistols got outof order without bursting, and that saved powder; but generally a fellowkept putting in bigger and bigger loads till his pistol blew to pieces.There were all sorts of pistols; but the commonest was one that the boyscalled a Christmas-crack; it was of brass, and when it burst the barrelcurled up like a dandelion stem when you split it and put it in water. AChristmas-crack in that shape was a trophy; but of course the littleboys did not have pistols; they had to put up with shooting-crackers, ormaybe just torpedoes. Even then the big boys would get to fire them offon one pretext or another. Some fellows would hold a cracker in theirhands till it exploded; nearly everybody had burned thumbs, and some ofthe boys had their faces blackened with powder. Now and then a fellowwho was nearly grown up would set off a whole pack of crackers in abarrel; it seemed almost incredible to the little boys.

  It was glorious, and I do not think any of the boys felt that there wasanything out of keeping in their way of celebrating the day, for I donot think they knew why they were celebrating it, or, if they knew, theynever thought. It was simply a holiday, and was to be treated like aholiday. After all, perhaps there are just as strange things done bygrown people in honor of the loving and lowly Saviour of Men; but wewill not enter upon that question. When they had burst their pistols orfired off their crackers, the boys sometimes huddled into the back partof the Catholic church and watched the service, awed by the dim altarlights, the rising smoke of incense, and the grimness of the sacristan,an old German, who stood near to keep order among them. They knew thefellows who were helping the priest; one of them was the boy who stoodon his head till he had to have it shaved; they would have liked to mockhim then and there for wearing a petticoat, and most of them had thebitterest scorn and hate for Catholics in their hearts; but they wereafraid of the sacristan, and they behaved very well as long as they werein the church; but as soon as they got out they whooped and yelled, andstoned the sacristan when he ran after them.

  My boy would have liked to do all that too, just to be with the crowd,but at home he had been taught to believe that Catholics were as good asanybody, and that you must respect everybody's religion. His father andthe priest were friendly acquaintances, and in a dim way he knew thathis father had sometimes taken the Catholics' part in his paper when theprejudice against foreigners ran high. He liked to go to the Catholicchurch, though he was afraid of the painted figure that hung full lengthon the wooden crucifix, with the blood-drops under the thorns on itsforehead, and the red wound in its side. He was afraid of it assomething both dead and alive; he could not keep his eyes away from theawful, beautiful, suffering face, and the body that seemed to twist inagony, and the hands and feet so cruelly nailed to the cross.

  But he never connected the thought of that anguish with Christmas. Hishead was too full of St. Nicholas, who came down the chimney, and filledyour stockings; the day belonged to St. Nicholas. The first thing whenyou woke you tried to catch everybody, and you caught a person if yousaid "Christmas Gift!" before he or she did; and then the person youcaught had to give you a present. Nobody ever said "Merry Christmas!"as people do now; and I do not know where the custom of saying"Christmas Gift" came from. It seems more sordid and greedy than itreally was; the pleasure was to see who could say it first; and the boysdid not care for what they got if they beat, any more than they caredfor what they won in fighting eggs at Easter.

  At New-Year's the great thing was to sit up and watch the old year out;but the little boys could not have kept awake even if their mothers hadlet them. In some families, perhaps of Dutch origin, the day was keptinstead of Christmas, but for most of the fellows it was a dull time.You had spent all your money at Christmas, and very likely burst yourpistol, anyway. It was some consolation to be out of school, which didnot keep on New-Year's; and if it was cold you could have fires on theice; or, anyway, you could have fires on the river-bank, or down by theshore, where there was always plenty of drift-wood.

  But New-Year's could not begin to compare with Easter. All the boys'mothers colored eggs for them at Easter; I do not believe there was amother in the Boy's Town mean enough not to. By Easter Day, in thatSouthern region, the new grass was well started, and grass gave abeautiful yellow color to the eggs boiled with it. Onions colored them asoft, pale green, and logwood, black; but the most esteemed egg of allwas a calico-egg. You got a piece of new calico from your mother, ormaybe some of your aunts, and you got somebody (most likely yourgrandmother, if she was on a visit at the time) to sew an egg up in it;and when the egg was boiled it came out all over the pattern of thecalico. My boy's brother once had a calico-egg that seemed to my boy amore beautiful piece of color than any Titian he has seen since; it waskept in a bureau-drawer till nobody could stand the smell. But mostEaster eggs never outlasted Easter Day. As soon as the fellows were donebreakfast they ran out of the house and began to fight eggs with theother fellows. They struck the little ends of the eggs together, and ifyour egg broke another fellow's egg, then you had a right to it.Sometimes an egg was so hard that it would break every other egg in thestreet; and generally when a little fellow lost his egg, he began to cryand went into the house. This did not prove him a cry-baby; it wasallowable, like crying when you stumped your toe. I think this custom offighting eggs came from the Pennsylvania Germans, to whom the Boy's Townprobably owed its Protestant observance of Easter. There was nothingreligious in the way the boys kept it, any more than there was in theirway of keeping Christmas.

  I do not think they distinguished between it and All-Fool's Day incharacter or dignity. About the best thing you could do then was towrite April Fool on a piece of paper and pin it to a fellow's back, ormaybe a girl's, if she was a big girl, and stuck-up, or anything. I donot suppose there is a boy now living who is silly enough to play thistrick on anybody, or mean enough to fill an old hat with rocks andbrickbats, and dare a fellow to kick it; but in the Boy's Town therewere some boys who did this; and then the fellow had to kick the hat, orelse come under the shame of having taken a dare. Most of theApril-foolings were harmless enough, like saying, "Oh, see that flock ofwild-geese flying over!" and "What have you got on the back of yourcoat!" and holloing "April Fool!" as soon as the person did it.Sometimes a crowd of boys got a bit with a hole in it, and tied a stringin it, and laid it on the sidewalk, and then hid in a cellar, and whenanybody stooped to pick it up, they pulled it in. That was the greatestfun, especially if the person was stingy; but the difficulty was to getthe bit, whether it had a hole in it or not.

  From the first of April till the first of May was a long stretch ofdays, and you never heard any one talk about a May Party till April Foolwas over. Then there always began to be talk of a M
ay Party, and who wasgoing to be invited. It was the big girls that always intended to haveit, and it was understood at once who was going to be the Queen. Atleast the boys had no question, for there was one girl in every schoolwhom all the boys felt to be the most beautiful; but probably there wasa good deal of rivalry and heart-burning among the girls themselves.Very likely it was this that kept a May Party from hardly ever coming toanything but the talk. Besides the Queen, there were certain littlegirls who were to be Lambs; I think there were Maids of Honor, too; butI am not sure. The Lambs had to keep very close to the Queen's person,and to wait upon her; and there were boys who had to hold the tassels ofthe banners which the big boys carried. These boys had to wear whitepantaloons, and shoes and stockings, and very likely gloves, and tosuffer the jeers of the other fellows who were not in the procession.The May Party was a girl's affair altogether, though the boys wereexpected to help; and so there were distinctions made that the boysnever dreamed of in their rude republic, where one fellow was as good asanother, and the lowest-down boy in town could make himself master ifhe was bold and strong enough. The boys did not understand thosedistinctions, and nothing of them remained in their minds after themoment; but the girls understood them, and probably they were taught athome to feel the difference between themselves and other girls, and tobelieve themselves of finer clay. At any rate, the May Party was apt tobe poisoned at its source by questions of class; and I think it mighthave been in the talk about precedence, and who should be what, that myboy first heard that such and such a girl's father was a mechanic, andthat it was somehow dishonorable to be a mechanic. He did not know why,and he has never since known why, but the girls then knew why, and thewomen seem to know now. He was asked to be one of the boys who held thebanner-tassels, and he felt this a great compliment somehow, though hewas so young that he had afterwards only the vaguest remembrance ofmarching in the procession, and going to a raw and chilly grovesomewhere, and having untimely lemonade and cake. Yet these might havebeen the associations of some wholly different occasion.

  No aristocratic reserves marred the glory of Fourth of July. My boy wasquite a well-grown boy before he noticed that there were ever any cloudsin the sky except when it was going to rain. At all other times,especially in summer, it seemed to him that the sky was perfectly blue,from horizon to horizon; and it certainly was so on the Fourth of July.He usually got up pretty early, and began firing off torpedoes andshooting-crackers, just as at Christmas. Everybody in town had beenwakened by the salutes fired from the six-pounder on the river-bank, andby the noise of guns and pistols; and right after breakfast you heardthat the Butler Guards were out, and you ran up to the court-house yardwith the other fellows to see if it was true. It was not true, just yet,perhaps, but it came true during the forenoon, and in the meantime thecourt-house yard was a scene of festive preparation. There was going tobe an oration and a public dinner, and they were already setting thetables under the locust-trees. There may have been some charge for thisdinner, but the boys never knew of that, or had any question of thebounty that seemed free as the air of the summer day.

  High Street was thronged with people, mostly country-jakes who had cometo town with their wagons and buggies for the celebration. The youngfellows and their girls were walking along hand in hand, eatinggingerbread, and here and there a farmer had already begun his spree,and was whooping up and down the sidewalk unmolested by authority. Theboys did not think it at all out of the way for him to be in that state;they took it as they took the preparations for the public dinner, and nosense of the shame and sorrow it meant penetrated their tough ignoranceof life. He interested them because, after the regular town drunkards,he was a novelty; but, otherwise, he did not move them. By and by theywould see him taken charge of by his friends and more or less broughtunder control; though if you had the time to follow him up you could seehim wanting to fight his friends and trying to get away from them.Whiskey was freely made and sold and drunk in that time and that region;but it must not be imagined that there was no struggle againstintemperance. The boys did not know it, but there was a very strenuousfight in the community against the drunkenness that was so frequent; andthere were perhaps more people who were wholly abstinent then than thereare now. The forces of good and evil were more openly arrayed againsteach other among people whose passions were strong and still somewhatprimitive; and those who touched not, tasted not, handled not, faroutnumbered those who looked upon the wine when it was red. The pity forthe boys was that they saw the drunkards every day, and the temperancemen only now and then; and out of the group of boys who were my boy'sfriends, many kindly fellows came to know how strong drink could rage,how it could bite like the serpent, and sting like an adder.

  But the temperance men made a show on the Fourth of July as well as thedrunkards, and the Sons of Temperance walked in the procession with theMasons and the Odd-Fellows. Sometimes they got hold of a whole Fourth,and then there was nothing but a temperance picnic in the SycamoreGrove, which the boys took part in as Sunday-school scholars. It was notgay; there was no good reason why it should leave the boys with thefeeling of having been cheated out of their holiday, but it did. A boy'sFourth of July seemed to end about four o'clock, anyhow. After that, hebegan to feel gloomy, no matter what sort of a time he had. That was theway he felt after almost any holiday.

  Market-day was a highday in the Boy's Town, and it would be hard to saywhether it was more so in summer than in winter. In summer, the marketopened about four or five o'clock in the morning, and by this hour myboy's father was off twice a week with his market-basket on his arm.All the people did their marketing in the same way; but it was asurprise for my boy, when he became old enough to go once with hisfather, to find the other boys' fathers at market too. He held on by hisfather's hand, and ran by his side past the lines of wagons thatstretched sometimes from the bridge to the court-house, in the dimmorning light. The market-house, where the German butchers in theirwhite aprons were standing behind their meat-blocks, was lit up withcandles in sconces, that shone upon festoons of sausage and cuts ofsteak dangling from the hooks behind them; but without, all was in avague obscurity, broken only by the lanterns in the farmers' wagons.There was a market-master, who rang a bell to open the market, and ifanybody bought or sold anything before the tap of that bell, he would befined. People would walk along the line of wagons, where the butter andeggs, apples and peaches and melons, were piled up inside near thetail-boards, and stop where they saw something they wanted, and standnear so as to lay hands on it the moment the bell rang. My boyremembered stopping that morning by the wagon of some nice old Quakerladies, who used to come to his house, and whom his father stoodchatting with till the bell rang. They probably had an understandingwith him about the rolls of fragrant butter which he instantly liftedinto his basket. But if you came long after the bell rang, you had totake what you could get.

  There was a smell of cantaloupes in the air, along the line of wagons,that morning, and so it must have been towards the end of the summer.After the nights began to lengthen and to be too cold for the farmers tosleep in their wagons, as they did in summer on the market eves, themarket time was changed to midday. Then it was fun to count the wagonson both sides of the street clear to where they frayed off intowood-wagons, and to see the great heaps of apples and cabbages, andpotatoes and turnips, and all the other fruits and vegetables whichabounded in that fertile country. There was a great variety of poultryfor sale, and from time to time the air would be startled with theclamor of fowls transferred from the coops where they had been softlycrr-crring in soliloquy to the hand of a purchaser who walked off withthem and patiently waited for their well-grounded alarm to die away. Allthe time the market-master was making his rounds; and if he saw a poundroll of butter that he thought was under weight, he would weigh it withhis steelyards, and if it was too light he would seize it. My boy oncesaw a confiscation of this sort with such terror as he would now,perhaps, witness an execution.