by Anthology
I mean the curved bay windows with curving window glass; the ridiculous scroll and lathework at the eaves; the rounding, skyrocket-shaped tower rooms with conical roofs; the stained-glass windows (one of them, on Broad Street, I think, an actual pastoral scene); the great, wide front porches; the two stories with an attic above; the tall, lean windows beginning just over the floor. You know what I mean, you’ve seen them, too, and admired them wryly; the kind old houses of other and better times. Some of them are sagging and debauched, decrepit and in need of paint. Some have been modernized, and there are new houses among them. These aren’t museum streets but streets where human beings live. But many of the old houses here in Galesburg stand as always, occasionally the families living in them descendants of the families who built them in the deep peace of the eighties, nineties, the turn of the century, and the early twenties.
“Broad is a nice street, all right,” I said to Marsh and he nodded.
“Very attractive. Last night, when I walked along it the crickets were buzzing in the trees.” They weren’t crickets, of course, but I didn’t correct the man from Chicago. “A lot of living-room lights were lighted, and now and then I heard voices murmuring from front porches. There were fireflies over the lawns and bushes, and all in all I walked a lot farther than I’d meant to. So when I saw a streetcar coming toward me I decided I’d ride back to Main Street.” Marsh leaned toward me, his cigar between thumb and forefinger, pointing its butt end at me. “You hear what I say? I said I saw that streetcar and I heard it, too, I don’t care what anyone tells you.” He sat back in his chair, regarding me bitterly, then continued.
“It was still a long way of?” when I first noticed it. But I saw the single round headlight moving slowly along toward me, swaying above the track down the middle of the street. Then I saw the light begin to glint along the rails, and a moment later heard the sound—there’s no other sound just like it; a sort of steady, metallic hiss—of a streetcar moving along the rails.
“I saw it, I heard it, and I stepped out into the street to wait for it; there was no other traffic. I just stood there in the middle of the street beside the track waiting and thinking absently about the new factory. Down the street somewhere a phonograph was playing. I recognized the tune; it was ‘Wabash Blues,’ and it slowed down for a few moments, the notes growling as they got slower and deeper. Then someone wound the phonograph and it speeded right up.
“Now, that motorman saw me; he must have. I signaled to make sure as the car came closer, stepping right up beside the rails to get into the beam of its light, and waving one arm. So he saw me, all right, and I saw him, very plainly. He had on a black uniform cap and wore a large mustache. He had on a blue shirt with a white stiff collar and a black tie, and a vest with flat metal buttons, and a gold watch chain stretching from pocket to pocket. That’s how close I saw him but he never so much as glanced at me. I stood right there in the beam of his light waving my arm; it made a big swaying shadow down the street past us. Then all of a sudden, that car right on top of me, I saw that he wasn’t going to stop; he hadn’t even slowed down.
“The car swelled out at the sides the way a streetcar does, protruding well past the rails, and I was right next to the tracks. I was about to be hit by that car, I suddenly realized; would have been hit if I hadn’t dropped back, falling to the street behind me like a ballplayer at bat dropping away from a badly pitched ball. Right back and down on my haunches I went, then lost my balance and sprawled out flat on my back on the street as that car rocked past me straight through the space I’d been standing in and went on by like a little island of light swaying off down the rails.
“I yelled after it. I was badly scared and I cursed that guy out. Still lying on my back in the dust of the street, I shouted so he could hear me, and a porch light snapped on. I didn’t care; I was mad. Getting to my feet, I yelled after that guy some more, watching him shrink and disappear down the rails, his trolley sparking blue every once in a while, as though it were answering me. More porch lights were coming on now, and several men in shirt sleeves from the houses up beyond the lawns came walking toward me. I heard their feet scuffle as they crossed the walks.
“Well, I expect I was a sight, all right, standing in the middle of the street shouting and shaking my fist after that streetcar, the entire back of my suit covered with dust, my hat in the gutter somewhere. They asked me, those men, stopping around me—speaking pleasantly and politely enough—what the trouble was. I could see women and children standing on porch steps, watching. I answered. I told them how that streetcar had nearly run me down. This might not be a regular stop, I said; I didn’t know about that. But that was no excuse to run a man down without even clanging his bell to warn me. No reason he couldn’t have stopped, anyway; there were no other passengers, no reason to be in such a hurry. They agreed with me, helping me find my hat, dusting me off. I expect it was one of the women who phoned the police—one of the men signaling to her behind my back, probably. Anyway, they got there pretty quickly and quietly. It wasn’t till I heard the car door slam behind me that I turned and saw the police car, a sixty-two Plymouth with white doors, the two cops already out in the street and walking toward me.
“ ‘Drunk and disorderly,’ or something of the sort, was the charge they arrested me on. I argued, I protested; I wasn’t drunk. But one of the cops just said, ‘Show me the streetcar tracks, mister; just point them out and we’ll let you go.’ ” Marsh looked at me, his face set and angry. “And of course there aren’t any tracks. There haven’t been any on Broad Street since—”
“Since they tore them up sometime in the thirties,” I said. “I know.”
Marsh was nodding. “So of course you don’t believe me, either. Well, I don’t blame you. No one else did; why should you? I had to phone one of the councilmen to come down to the jail and identify me, and, when he arrived, he had the attorney from the city with him. They vouched for me, and apologized, and got me out of jail, and kept their faces straight. Too straight; I knew they were laughing inside, and that it’s a story I could never live down here, never at all. So I’m leaving Galesburg. There are plenty of other towns along the Santa Fe to build a factory in.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t believe you.” I leaned toward him and spoke quietly. “Tell me something. How big was that streetcar?”
Marsh squinted at the ceiling. “Small,” he said then, his voice a little surprised. “Very small, actually; wouldn’t hold much more than a dozen people or so.”
I nodded, still leaning over the tabletop. “You saw the motorman up close, you said, and it was a warm night. Did you happen to notice his cap? What was his cap like, besides being black?”
Marsh thought again, then smiled. “I’ll be darned,” he said. “Yes, I remember; it was wicker. It was a regular uniform cap, just like any other in shape, and with a shiny peak and a stiff hard top. But the top was made of wicker—actual wickerwork—dyed black. I never saw a cap like that before in my life.”
“Neither did I; nowhere else but here. But that’s the kind of cap streetcar motormen used to wear in the summer in Galesburg, Illinois. I was just a little kid but I remember them. What color was that streetcar, red or green?”
“It was yellow,” Marsh said quietly. “I saw it pass under a street light just before it reached me, and it was yellow.”
“That’s right,” I said. “The streetcars in Galesburg were painted yellow, and the last of them quit running years ago.” I stood up and put my knuckles on the tabletop, resting my weight on them, leaning down to look Marsh in the eyes. “But you saw one last night just the same. I don’t know how or why but you did, and I know it and believe you.” I smiled, straightening up to stand beside the table. “But no one else ever will. Of course you’re right; you’d never enjoy living in Galesburg now.”
Do you see what I mean? Do you see why I’m a reporter? How else would you hear a story like that at first hand? I never turned it in, of course; I just wrote that Mr. E
. V. Marsh, of Chicago, had considered but decided against building a factory here, and it ran as a little five-inch story on page three. But it’s because of occasional stories like Marsh’s that I expect to continue reporting for the Register-Mail as long as I live or can get around. I know the town laughs at me a little for that; it’s been a long time since Galesburg took me seriously, though it once expected big things of me.
I was first in my high-school class, in fact, and was offered a scholarship at Harvard. But I didn’t take it. I went to Knox, the local college right here in town, working my way through—my mother was alive then but my father was dead and we didn’t have much money. That’s when I started reporting for the Register-Mail, full time in the summers, part time during school, and I graduated second in my class, Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude, and could have had any of several scholarships for postgrad work, or a job with American Chicle in South America. The town thought I was going places, and so did a girl I was engaged to—a junior at Knox, from Chicago. But I wasn’t going anywhere and knew it; and I turned down every offer that would take me from Galesburg, and when she graduated next year the girl turned me down and went home.
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 plenty 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 Blasidel 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 at just 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 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 smokestack. 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.
