There Was a Time

by Caldwell, Taylor;

  For miles around little farming was done. The eroded earth opened in yellow yawns on the hillsides and in the valley. No one practised contour farming, though the O’Learys had painfully taught this for a number of years. So that little sustenance could now be obtained from the land in Benton’s immediate vicinity.

  Benton huddled in its narrow valley, treeless, blazing with raw sunlight, between the dour brush-covered hills. It had huddled there, lost for generations, until some intrepid oilman had drilled the first well in the community. Now the oilmen, practically all natives of Kentucky or Tennessee or Oklahoma, had given some life to this drab and arid little spot in the mountains, and had brought with them a few civilized manners, decent food, and raucous immorality. Most of them were young men, with leggings and riding trousers, lusty and noisy, cigarette-smoking and singing, drinkers and lechers, fighters and cheaters, buying up options on land for a few pennies, and, some of them, becoming rich in the process. They lived in tents or abandoned log cabins in the mountains, and descended to Benton in small riotous groups on Saturday nights and Sundays. Some of them lived “down on Benton,” to the east and some “up on Benton,” to the west. They had imported good mules and sturdy horses for their own use, and generously allowed their mares congress with the local jackasses, the resulting mule offspring reverting for a small sum to the owner of the jackass.

  It was not these that were loathsome to Frank, for some of the oilmen had more than average education and subscribed to periodicals. It was the natives who were repulsive to the young man, the women with their long shapeless gingham dresses, trailing dirty bare feet, their blank faces hidden in gingham sunbonnets of blue or pink check, their scrawny offspring with scrofula or deformed legs, their men, incredibly narrow of shoulder, many of them bearded and barefooted. Quite a number had become wealthy, but this had not alleviated their horrible poverty and disease and ignorance. The money went to “the bank” in the “settlements,” via the oilmen, though Frank shrewdly suspected that “the bank” was the oilmen’s pockets. If so, this did no harm. The natives would not have used it in any event; money had a cabalistic quality for those who had seen so little of it in their lifetime. The oilmen were lavish with occasional five-dollar bills, or, more often, with great cartwheels of silver. The silver money meant more to the natives than the green bills, possibly because of its enduring substance. They spent the money on whisky or applejack on Saturdays, and once in a while bought “store bread” or white flour or the strange yellow oranges and bananas they had never seen before.

  Few of them bothered to raise gardens, though occasionally a straggling bed of onions, tomatoes, peppers, corn or tobacco or potatoes, could be seen struggling up, entirely uncultivated, in the rear of the log cabins. Here, on rare occasions, the tubercular and pallid women and children worked languidly, thence to retire to the interiors of their dark and squalid cabins.

  Dogs, of course, were numerous, snarling yellow curs half-starved and mangy. Every family had a chicken coop or two, the fowl being allowed to pick up whatever sustenance could be found in the sweltering gardens or around the privies. Flies swarmed everywhere, great clouds of them.

  The circuit riders, mountaineers themselves, were wise in their generation and wise in the ways of their people. They decried “sin,” which apparently consisted of such vague things as “coveting your neighbor’s wife,” “desecrating the Sabbath” and “worshipping Mammon,” but they avoided the subject of murder and unlawful whisky-making and promiscuous fornication among, the young folk. These were picayune matters. The services of the circuit riders were necessary only for occasional marriages and baptisms, prayers for the dead, who might have passed away some ten months ago, and for exciting the natives to religious frenzies and madnesses and rollings on the wooden floor of the church. The fact that murders were usually of greater frequency after these excursions into dementia was of no concern to the circuit riders, who carried guns of their own strapped to the saddles of their mules.

  The O’Leary brothers had built their little red schoolhouse under the scornful noses of the illiterate circuit riders and the derisive natives of Benton. They held their religious services in the schoolhouse or out under the trees which surrounded it. They made few converts, for they did little proselytizing, content to struggle desperately to bring books and learning to the children, alleviation of pain and disease to the men and women, and comfort to the dying in these hills. Quite often they brought patients to their own tent, for nursing. They tried to bring new agricultural methods to the farmers. They worked patiently and stubbornly for years, until the natives apathetically accepted them and turned to them for medicines and consolation in the dreary winter months when no circuit rider dared brave the hole-filled road. But it was unthinkable that they should ask Wade O’Leary to marry them. He was a Mormon; he believed in many wives, which was against the Bible. Where they had secured this erroneous information remained an eternal mystery to the O’Learys, though they suspected the circuit riders.

  Wade had had a bitter enemy in old Dr. Jim Ward, who was firmly entrenched in Benton, and himself a native. He had at first tried to conciliate the old man, to make himself an ally of his colleague in the fight against disease and death. But Dr. Jim, who had “studied” for two years under a “doctor” as ignorant and benighted as himself, who had never subscribed to a medical journal, and whose knowledge smacked of the medieval, resented the newcomer with his “newfangled notions,” his medical books, and his education. Dr. Jim had never seen a microscope and “didn’t hold with ’em,” regarded germs as some dark machination of the “city folks,” had never seen or used a forceps in delivery of an anguished woman, was unaware of puerperal fever though one-third of his patients had died of it, and used herbs he gathered himself for anything from a boil to diphtheria. Dysentery was dosed with castor oil, as was typhoid fever; poultices of bread and hot milk were his panacea for smallpox; septicemia got the same treatment. He called appendicitis “sickness of the blind bowel,” and advised hot stones on a tortured abdomen, with fatal results. He labeled tuberculosis “weakness of the lungs,” and called for large wrappings against the sun, and a brew of dandelion roots. He surrounded himself with potent mystery, which impressed his ignorant patients. This mystery prevented many of them from consulting Wade O’Leary, with his instruments, his test tubes, his sputum tests, his “needle” and serums, and his well-stocked medical supplies. It was not until Wade had learned to make strange gestures, to mutter odd things under his breath, to put on dark glasses and assume an air of portent that he acquired any patients at all.

  Frank often saw the O’Learys on their mules, riding up the mountain sides, or on mercy bent in Benton. Peter O’Leary was taller and more muscular than his brother, Wade, and was in comparison almost a giant. He had a fair, sunburned young face, pugnacious yet kind, and a shock of untidy yellow hair. All his features had an earthy bluntness and healthy masculinity. He ambled when he walked, which was a gait more familiar to the mountain folk than Wade’s smooth, gentlemanly tread. He had a strong young voice, and had learned to swear obscenely and robustly at the natives when he collared their children for “book-l’arnin’.” Wade might be regarded with awe, respect and devotion; the mountaineers loved Peter O’Leary, for he drank with the best of them, was a far better shot than his brother, and could “sw’ar like a sonofabitch.” Frank learned early of the strong love between the brothers, the deep understanding and fidelity.

  Wade brought books to Frank, who never found enough to read. At first, Frank had been more than glad to see him. But finally Wade, to his distress, saw that some somber misery had made Frank begin to avoid him. Moreover, the last few wells had been drilled farther and farther away from Benton. The last well was some four miles distant, and Wade rarely came “up on Benton.”

  Frank, huddling over his book in the lamplight, suddenly remembered what Wade O’Leary had said to him on the last occasion when they had met awkwardly on the mud road in the village: “Y
ou haven’t found anything of interest among these poor people? Haven’t you talked to them?” Frank remembered Wade’s grave and thoughtful eyes, narrowed in wonder, the slight rebuke and disappointment in his voice, and he burned with sick resentment. “I thought you might find material to write about—”

  What interest could one take in these horrible caricatures of humanity, these whining-voiced imbeciles, these diseased and sub-human wretches? Frank, long ago, had ceased to feel fellowship with these men who spoke with the familiar English accent; they were no longer his people, his fellows in race and blood. He resented the English and Scottish and Irish names they bore; it was an insult for these depravities to bear those names. He found himself thinking nostalgically of the Italians, the Germans, the Slovaks, and even the Poles, of Bison.

  “But they, without any fault of their own, have not advanced beyond the pioneer days their ancestors knew,” Wade had protested. “Can’t you find that interesting enough in itself, that you see folk right out of the pages of old Western history, not a step beyond the prairie schooners that brought them here and abandoned them? You don’t have to imagine those far-away people of a century or more ago.”

  He had added: “I’m disappointed in you, Frank. Come to our tent, soon, and help me administer typhoid serum to them, and smallpox vaccine. I’ll teach you; it’s simple, and I know you will learn quickly. I need every extra pair of hands I can get. Then you’ll have a chance to get close to these people, and to understand them. I want you to understand them. They’ll learn to trust you, and to have affection for you, and you’ll see them as they really are, so damned pathetic and human and simple.”

  But, of course, Frank had not gone. And he had taken care to avoid Wade O’Leary thereafter.

  The despair he had known in Bison was happiness to the despair he was now experiencing, for he was completely disoriented.

  Louder, fiercer, more primordial, more shrill and savage, came the wild and alien voices of the night to Frank Clair’s ears. He pressed his clenched fists to his mouth, and stared through the dark screen of the tent at the now black and formless night, which was pierced only by the thin red tongue of the leaping fire. And it came to him, inexorably, that more terrible than anything else to a man are the strange voices he hears in a land which is not his own, in which he has not spent his boyhood and the flowing years of his youth.

  The voices cried to the night, and the night answered, and all those who had been born in this place understood both the voices and the night. A sleeper turned, half awakened, became conscious, and heard the chorus and the deep answer, and smiled because he knew what they communicated to each other. Their words were his flesh; the message was given to him; he was one with the night which received the message, and one with the creatures who sang it. He was one with this earth, and the voices which had attended his coming would be the voices he would hear at his death.

  Frank thought of Bison. This was late October. Perhaps the first swift dazzle of snow had already fallen; the trees would be bare and black against a blazing sky of chill Northern stars. Leaves would be whispering dryly in the gutters, would rustle down from eaves before the wind. Chimneys would be flowing out their frail silver under a great pallid moon. The shop windows along Grant and Ferry Streets would glisten in the lamplight, and show the big golden heads of the pumpkins crowding against them. Now Frank could smell the midnight dust in the streets; he could strain his ears and hear the lonely rumble of a late streetcar and the thrumming of telephone wires which vibrated in the cold breeze. A footstep would echo somewhere; the lamp lights would be blinking; the crowding wooden houses would sleep under the moon, their verandahs steeped in shadow. These were the things of his home, his city.

  When he had left Bison he had expressed the bitter hope that he would never see the city again, never so long as he lived. When, only a few days ago, he had received a letter from his mother, in which she had said that “bookings” had already been made for herself and Mrs. Clair for England the following March, he had felt nothing at all. Yet now he sat, staring out at the alien night and listening to the terrible alien voices, and he was sick with his longing and nostalgia.

  He thought: But I was not happy there. I was wretched and desperate. No matter, whispered his new knowledge, it was your home. It was the one spot of earth where you had known the dearest happiness and companionship, where you had felt your strongest ecstasies and had dreamt your noblest and sweetest dreams. In Bison was the grave of those ecstasies and those dreams. But even a grave can be more precious than a land in which there is no grave at all. Even men who are not of your race, but who were the familiars of your childhood, are more beloved than men of your blood if they be strangers. Frank thought of the Italian sections along the streets which touched at the Front, and he smelled the sour smell of yeast, of heat and dust and garlic, and the remembered smell was rich to his nostrils. He saw the neat little houses of the Bison Germans, which looked always as though freshly scrubbed with hot water and suds, and he loved them. He saw the broad square faces of the pale Poles, and heard their hoarse Slavic voices, and, though he could not understand a single word, those voices were more his own than the voices of these mountain men, who spoke in the accents of his own race.

  Now, for the first time, he understood the tearing homesickness which his mother had endured all these years, and he felt a pang of pity for her. He thought of his father, and knew why he had saved so desperately, and so cruelly, why he had sacrificed his life for the dream of home. Why, thought Frank, with a strong and soaring wonder, that is the reason I, too, am saving! I never knew it before!

  He thought of the money hidden away in the trunk, and he swung around on the bench and stared at the scarred exterior of it. There lay his ransom. He must add to it quickly, so that he might go home. He stood up abruptly. He heard the thumping of the bit, the dull beat of the pumps which were carrying away the thin trickle of oil from the neighboring well. This well produced only fifteen barrels of oil a day; his share was only three dollars above the three dollars he was receiving daily for his work. But perhaps the new well would “come in,” and he would be free. Free to go home.

  Ira Cunningham rolled in his blankets, and snorted in his dreams. The lamp flickered. Frank carefully opened the screen door, crept down the three wooden steps to the ground. He went towards the new well and the shadows that moved before and around the fire.

  When he tried to recall the individual Cunninghams, he was exasperated that he could not do so. Tim Cunningham, tall, sunburned and tan-colored of hair, with a broad lazy grin and a slow, languid voice, was to remain vaguely in his memory. Ike was a somewhat smaller and thinner edition of Tim, and Ira was of medium height and somewhat fatter than Ike. But their faces were to be forever lost, merged and melted together, so that they were one with the thousands of other faceless men he encountered in his lifetime. This seemed to him the supreme horror, that mankind, distinguished from the other beasts by a dim and flickering awareness of life and alleged to be just a little below the angels, had no real identity as individuals, no strong projection of personality, no intensity of being.

  When he was reminded, by Wade O’Leary, of the great poets, philosophers, saints, scientists and artists that the world of humanity had produced, he declared with a swift rush of pain: “It is these who highlight the enormous stupidity and bestiality of all other men, who throw into relief the brute forms and brute features of mankind. It is not a paradox that men kill their singers and their heroes, their saviors and their saints; it is not even an evil or mysterious thing that they do. They act merely in self-defense, out of the depths of their animal logic.”

  Frank could not remember that any of the Cunninghams had a distinct personality, a sharp individuality. He could not remember whether or not he had liked or disliked them. Their emotions were shallow ripples on a shallow stream; they were happily and healthily merely laughing animals. So it was that when he approached the fire and was greeted with some surprise by
Tim and Ira Cunningham, he experienced no contact of mind or personality with either of them, nor could he ever remember the names of the two mountaineer helpers who assisted them at the well.

  “How is the well coming?” he asked Tim, or perhaps it was Ira.

  “Just dandy,” replied Ira’s voice, or perhaps it was Tim’s.

  Frank broodingly watched the ropes rising and falling in the firelight. One of the helpers was hammering a red-hot bit which had just been removed from the fire. Then a shadow emerged from behind the machinery, and Frank saw the face and dark elegant figure of Wade O’Leary.

  He stared at Wade, and felt his face flushing. He nodded his head in reply to Wade’s casual greeting.

  “Looks as if you might have luck this time,” said Wade, drawing nearer to Frank. Frank scowled. Wade seemed always to hear a man’s thoughts. He turned away; he took a few steps back towards the tent. Wade followed him easily. His voice was calm: “I wanted to see you. I came by here just to see you. I delivered the Hawthorne girl, up over the mountain, of another baby—poor thing. Wonder who the father is this time?”

  Frank shrugged. He felt in himself the old nausea, the old undesire and weariness, which were always enhanced when he saw Wade O’Leary.

  “What did you want to see me about?” he asked sullenly.

  “Some books from a friend of mine who lives on the other side of the mountains, five miles away—and some magazines.”