Boy's Town

by William Dean Howells

  XVII.

  FANTASIES AND SUPERSTITIONS.

  MY boy used to be afraid of this monument, which stood a long time, orwhat seemed to him a long time, in the yard of the tombstone cutterbefore it was put up at the grave of the philosopher who imagined theearth as hollow as much of the life is on it. He was a brave officer inthe army which held the region against the Indians in the pioneer times;he passed the latter part of his life there, and he died and was buriedin the Boy's Town. My boy had to go by the yard when he went to see hisgrandmother, and even at high noon the sight of the officer's monument,and the other gravestones standing and leaning about, made his fleshcreep and his blood run cold. When there were other boys with him hewould stop at the door of the shed, where a large, fair German wassawing slabs of marble with a long saw that had no teeth, and that heeased every now and then with water from a sponge he kept by him; but ifthe boy was alone, and it was getting at all late in the afternoon, healways ran by the place as fast as he could. He could hardly have toldwhat he was afraid of, but he must have connected the gravestones withghosts.

  "HE ALWAYS RAN BY THE PLACE AS FAST AS HE COULD."]

  His superstitions were not all of the ghastly kind; some of them relatedto conduct and character. It was noted long ago how boys throw stones,for instance, at a tree, and feign to themselves that this thing orthat, of great import, will happen or not as they hit or miss the tree.But my boy had other fancies, which came of things he had read and halfunderstood. In one of his school-books was a story that began, "Charleswas an honest boy, but Robert was the name of a thief," and it went onto show how Charles grew up in the respect and affection of all who knewhim by forbearing to steal some oranges which their owner had set forsafe-keeping at the heels of his horse, while Robert was kicked at once(there was a picture that showed him holding his stomach with bothhands), and afterwards came to a bad end, through attempting to takeone. My boy conceived from the tale that the name of Robert wasnecessarily associated with crime; it was long before he outgrew theprejudice; and this tale and others of a like vindictive virtuousnessimbued him with such a desire to lead an upright life that he was rathera bother to his friends with his scruples. A girl at school mislaid apencil which she thought she had lent him, and he began to have a morbidbelief that he must have stolen it; he became frantic with the meredread of guilt; he could not eat or sleep, and it was not till he wentto make good the loss with a pencil which his grandfather gave him thatthe girl said she had found her pencil in her desk, and saved him fromthe despair of a self-convicted criminal. After that his father tried toteach him the need of using his reason as well as his conscienceconcerning himself, and not to be a little simpleton. But he was alwaysin an anguish to restore things to their owners, like the good boys inthe story-books, and he suffered pangs of the keenest remorse for thepart he once took in the disposition of a piece of treasure-trove.This was a brown-paper parcel which he found behind a leaning gravestonein the stone-cutter's yard, and which he could not help peeping into. Itwas full of raisins, and in the amaze of such a discovery he could nothelp telling the other boys. They flocked round and swooped down uponthe parcel like birds of prey, and left not a raisin behind. In vain heimplored them not to stain their souls with this misdeed; neither thelaw nor the prophets availed; neither the awful shadow of the prisonwhich he cast upon them, nor the fear of the last judgment which heinvoked. They said that the raisins did not belong to anybody; that theowner had forgotten all about them; that they had just been put there bysome one who never intended to come back for them. He went awaysorrowing, without touching a raisin (he felt that the touch must havestricken him with death), and far heavier in soul than the hardenedaccomplices of his sin, of whom he believed himself the worst in havingbetrayed the presence of the raisins to them.

  He used to talk to himself when he was little, but one day his mothersaid to him jokingly, "Don't you know that he who talks to himself hasthe devil for a listener?" and after that he never dared whisper abovehis breath when he was alone, though his father and mother had bothtaught him that there was no devil but his own evil will. He shudderedwhen he heard a dog howling in the night, for that was a sign thatsomebody was going to die. If he heard a hen crow, as a hen sometimesunnaturally would, he stoned her, because it was a sign of the worstkind of luck. He believed that warts came from playing with toads, butyou could send them away by saying certain words over them; and he wassorry that he never had any warts, so that he could send them away, andsee them go; but he never could bear to touch a toad, and so of coursehe could not have warts. Other boys played with toads just to show thatthey were not afraid of having warts; but every one knew that if youkilled a toad, your cow would give bloody milk. I dare say the farforefathers of the race knew this too, when they first began to herdtheir kine in the birthplace of the Aryan peoples; and perhaps theylearned then that if you killed a snake early in the day its tail wouldlive till sundown. My boy killed every snake he could; he thought itsomehow a duty; all the boys thought so; they dimly felt that they weremaking a just return to the serpent-tribe for the bad behavior of theirancestor in the Garden of Eden. Once, in a corn-field near the LittleReservoir, the boys found on a thawing day of early spring knots andbundles of snakes writhen and twisted together, in the torpor of theirlong winter sleep. It was a horrible sight, that afterwards haunted myboy's dreams. He had nightmares which remained as vivid in his thoughtsas anything that happened to him by day. There were no poisonous snakesin the region of the Boy's Town, but there were some large blacksnakes,and the boys said that if a blacksnake got the chance he would run upyour leg, and tie himself round your body so that you could not breathe.Nobody had ever seen a blacksnake do it, and nobody had ever seen ahoop-snake, but the boys believed there was such a snake, and that hewould take his tail in his mouth, when he got after a person, and rollhimself along swifter than the fastest race-horse could run. He did notbite, but when he came up with you he would take the point of his tailout of his mouth and strike it into you. If he struck his tail into atree, the tree would die. My boy had seen a boy who had been chased by ahoop-snake, but he had not seen the snake, though for the matter of thatthe boy who had been chased by it had not seen it either; he did notstop to see it. Another kind of snake that was very strange was ahair-snake. No one had ever seen it happen, but every one knew that ifyou put long horsehairs into a puddle of water and let them stay, theywould turn into hair-snakes; and when you drank out of a spring you hadto be careful not to swallow a hair-snake, or it would remain in yourstomach and grow there.

  When you saw a lizard, you had to keep your mouth tight shut, or elsethe lizard would run down your throat before you knew it. That was whatall the boys said, and my boy believed it, though he had never heard ofanybody that it happened to. He believed that if you gave a chicken-cockburnt brandy it could lay eggs, and that if you gave a boy burnt brandyit would stop his growing. That was the way the circus-men got theirdwarfs, and the India-rubber man kept himself limber by rubbing hisjoints with rattlesnake oil.

  A snake could charm a person, and when you saw a snake you had to killit before it could get its eye on you or it would charm you. Snakesalways charmed birds; and there were mysterious powers of the air andforces of nature that a boy had to be on his guard against, just as abird had to look out for snakes. You must not kill a granddaddy-long-legs,or a lady-bug; it was bad luck. My boy believed, or was afraid hebelieved, that

  "What you dream Monday morning before daylight Will come true before Saturday night,"

  but if it was something bad, you could keep it from coming true by nottelling your dream till you had eaten breakfast. He governed his little,foolish, frightened life not only by the maxims he had learned out ofhis "Gesta Romanorum," but by common sayings of all sorts, such as

  "See a pin and leave it lay You'll have bad luck all the day,"

  and if ever he tried to rebel against this slavery, and went by a pin inthe path, his fears tormented him til
l he came back and picked it up. Hewould not put on his left stocking first, for that was bad luck; butbesides these superstitions, which were common to all the boys, heinvented superstitions of his own, with which he made his life a burden.He did not know why, but he would not step upon the cracks between thepaving-stones, and some days he had to touch every tree or post alongthe sidewalk, as Doctor Johnson did in his time, though the boy hadnever heard of Doctor Johnson then.

  While he was yet a very little fellow, he had the distorted, mistakenpiety of childhood. He had an abject terror of dying, but it seemed tohim that if a person could die right in the centre isle of thechurch--the Methodist church where his mother used to go before shebecame finally a New Churchwoman--the chances of that person's goingstraight to heaven would be so uncommonly good that he need have verylittle anxiety about it. He asked his mother if she did not think sotoo, holding by her hand as they came out of church together, and henoticed the sort of gravity and even pain with which she and his fatherreceived this revelation of his darkling mind. They tried to teach himwhat they thought of such things; but though their doctrine caught hisfancy and flattered his love of singularity, he was not proof againstthe crude superstitions of his mates. He thought for a time that therewas a Bad Man, but this belief gave way when he heard his fatherlaughing about a certain clergyman who believed in a personal devil.

  The boys said the world was going to be burned up some time, and my boyexpected the end with his full share of the trouble that it must bringto every sinner. His fears were heightened by the fact that hisgrandfather believed this end was very near at hand, and was preparedfor the second coming of Christ at any moment. Those were the days whenthe minds of many were stirred by this fear or hope; the believers hadtheir ascension robes ready, and some gave away their earthly goods soas not to be cumbered with anything in their heavenward flight. At home,my boy heard his father jest at the crazy notion, and make fun of thebelievers; but abroad, among the boys, he took the tint of theprevailing gloom. One awful morning at school, it suddenly became sodark that the scholars could not see to study their lessons, and thenthe boys knew that the end of the world was coming. There were noclouds, as for a coming storm, but the air was blackened almost to thedusk of night; the school was dismissed, and my boy went home to findthe candles lighted, and a strange gloom and silence on everythingoutside. He remembered entering into this awful time, but he no moreremembered coming out of it than if the earth had really passed away infire and smoke.

  He early heard of forebodings and presentiments, and he tried hardagainst his will to have them, because he was so afraid of having them.For the same reason he did his best, or his worst, to fall into atrance, in which he should know everything that was going on about him,all the preparations for his funeral, all the sorrow and lamentation,but should be unable to move or speak, and only be saved at the lastmoment by some one putting a mirror to his lips and finding a littleblur of mist on it. Sometimes when he was beginning to try to writethings and to imagine characters, if he imagined a character's dying,then he became afraid he was that character, and was going to die.

  Once, he woke up in the night and found the full moon shining into hisroom in a very strange and phantasmal way, and washing the floor withits pale light, and somehow it came into his mind that he was going todie when he was sixteen years old. He could then only have been nine orten, but the perverse fear sank deep into his soul, and became anincreasing torture till he passed his sixteenth birthday and enteredupon the year in which he had appointed himself to die. The agony wasthen too great for him to bear alone any longer, and with shame heconfessed his doom to his father. "Why," his father said, "you are inyour seventeenth year now. It is too late for you to die at sixteen,"and all the long-gathering load of misery dropped from the boy's soul,and he lived till his seventeenth birthday and beyond it without furthertrouble. If he had known that he would be in his seventeenth year assoon as he was sixteen, he might have arranged his presentimentdifferently.