Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  This episode, which I cannot date, much antedated the period of my father’s business failure, though his struggles against it must have already begun; they began, in fact, from the moment of his arrival in Dayton, and the freest and happiest hours we knew there were when the long strain ended in the inevitable break. Then there was an interval, I do not know how great, but perhaps of months, when there was a casting about for some means of living, and to this interval belongs somehow the employment of my brother and myself in a German printing-office, such as used to be found in every considerable Ohio town. I do not know what we did there, but I remember the kindly German printer-folk, and the merry times we had with them, in the smoke of their pipes and the warmth of their stove heated red against the autumnal cold. I explore my memory in vain for proof that my father had some job-printing interest in this German office, but I remember my interest in the German type and its difference from the English. I was yet far from any interest in the German poetry which afterward became one of my passions, and there is no one now left alive whom I can ask whether the whole incident was fact, or not, rather, the sort of dream which all the past becomes when we try to question it.

  What I am distinctly aware of, through a sense of rather sullen autumnal weather, is that a plan for our going into the country evolved itself in full detail between my father and uncle. My uncle was to supply the capital for the venture, and was finally, with two other uncles, to join my father on a milling privilege which they had bought at a point on the Little Miami River, where all the families were to be settled. In the mean time my father was to have charge of a grist-mill and sawmill on the property till they could be turned into a paper-mill and a sort of communal settlement of suitable people could be gathered. He had never run a sawmill or a grist-mill, much less evoked a paper-mill from them; but neither had he ever gathered a community of choice spirits for the enjoyment of a social form which enthusiasts like Robert Owen had dreamed into being, and then non-being, in the Middle West in those or somewhat earlier days. What was definite and palpable in the matter was that he must do something, and that he had the heart and hope for the experiment.

  VIII

  I have told the story of this venture in a little book called My Year in a Log Cabin, printed twenty-odd years ago, and I cannot do better now than let it rehearse

  The Little Miami River at Eureka Mills, twelve miles east of Dayton. Here the ruin of the dam, which served the mills run by Mr. Howells’s father, makes a rapid in the stream.

  itself here from those pages, with such slight change or none as insists. For my father, whose boyhood had been passed in the new country, where pioneer customs and traditions were still rife, it was like renewing the wild romance of those days to take up once more the life in a log cabin interrupted by many years sojourn in matter-of-fact dwellings of frame and brick. It was the fond dream of his boys to realize the trials and privations which he had painted for them in rosy hues, and even if the only clapboarded dwelling at the mills had not been occupied by the miller, we should have disdained it for the log cabin which we made our home till we could build a new house.

  Our cabin stood close upon the road, but behind it broadened a corn-field of eighty acres. They still built log cabins for dwellings in that region at the time, but ours must have been nearly half a century old when we went into it. It had been recently vacated by an old poor-white Virginian couple, who had long occupied it, and we decided that it needed some repairs to make it habitable even for a family inured to hardship by dauntless imaginations, and accustomed to retrospective discomforts of every kind.

  So before the family all came out to it a deputation of adventurers put it in what rude order they could. They glazed the narrow windows, they relaid the rotten floor, they touched (too sketchily, as it afterward appeared) the broken roof, and they papered the walls of the ground-floor rooms. Perhaps it was my father’s love of literature which inspired him to choose newspapers for this purpose; at any rate, he did so, and the effect, as I remember, had its decorative qualities. He had used a barrel of papers from the nearest post-office, where they had been refused by people to whom they had been experimentally sent by the publishers, and the whole first page was taken up by a story, which broke off in the middle of a sentence at the foot of the last column, and tantalized us forever with fruitless conjecture as to the fate of the hero and heroine.

  The cabin, rude as it was, was not without its sophistications, its concessions to the spirit of modern luxury. The logs it was built of had not been left rounded, as they grew, but had been squared in a sawmill, and the crevices between them had not been chinked with moss and daubed with clay in true backwoods fashion, but plastered with mortar, and the chimney, instead of being a structure of clay-covered sticks, was laid in courses of stone. Within, however, it was all that could be desired by the most romantic of pioneer families. It was six feet wide and a yard deep, its cavernous maw would easily swallow a back-log eighteen inches through, and we piled in front the sticks of hickory cord-wood as high as we liked. We made a perfect trial of it when we came out to put the cabin in readiness for the family, and when the hickory had dropped into a mass of tinkling, snapping, bristling embers we laid our rashers of bacon and our slices of steak upon them, and tasted the flavors of the wildwood in the captured juices. At night we laid our mattresses on the sweet new oak plank of the floor, and slept hard — in every sense.

  In due time the whole family took up its abode in the cabin. The household furniture had been brought out and bestowed in its scanty space, the bookcase had been set up, and the unbound books left easily accessible in barrels. There remained some of our possessions to follow, chief of which was the cow; for in those simple days people kept cows in town, and it fell to me to help my father drive ours out to her future home. We got on famously, talking of the wayside things so beautiful in the autumnal day, panoplied in the savage splendor of its painted leaves, and of the books and authors so dear to the boy who limped barefooted by his father’s side, with his eye on the cow and his mind on Cervantes and Shakespeare. But the cow was very slow — far slower than the boy’s thoughts — and it had fallen night and was already thick dark when we had made the twelve miles and stood under the white-limbed phantasmal sycamores beside the tail-race of the grist-mill, and questioned how we should get across with our charge. We did not know how deep the water was, but we knew it was very cold, and we would rather not wade it. The only thing to do seemed to be for one of us to run up to the sawmill, cross the head-race there, and come back to receive the cow on the other side of the tail-race. But the boy could not bring himself either to go or to stay.

  The kind-hearted father urged, but he would not compel; you cannot well use force with a boy when you have been talking literature and philosophy for half a day with him. We could see the lights in the cabin cheerfully twinkling, and we shouted to those within, but no one heard us. We called and called in vain. Nothing but the cold rush of the tail-race, the dry rustle of the sycamore-leaves, and the homesick lowing of the cow replied. We determined to drive her across, and pursue her with sticks and stones through the darkness beyond, and then run at the top of our speed to the sawmill, and get back to take her in custody again. We carried out our part of the plan perfectly, but the cow had not entered into it with intelligence or sympathy. When we reached the other side of the tail-race again she was nowhere to be found, and no appeals of “Boss” or “Suky” or “Suboss” availed. She must have instantly turned, and retraced, in the darkness which seemed to have swallowed her up, the weary steps of the day, for she was found in her old home in town the next morning. At any rate, she had abandoned the father to the conversation of his son, for the time being, and the son had nothing to say.

  I do not remember now just how it was that we came by the different “animals of the horse kind,” as my father called them, which we housed in an old log stable not far from our cabin. They must have been a temporary supply until a team worthy our new sky-blue wag
on could be found. One of them was a colossal sorrel, inexorably hide-bound, whose barrel, as horsemen call the body, showed every hoop upon it. He had a feeble, foolish whimper of a voice, and we nicknamed him “Baby.” His companion was a dun mare, who had what my father at once called an italic foot, in recognition of the emphatic slant at which she carried it when upon her unwilling travels. Then there was a small, self-opinionated gray pony, which was of no service conjecturable after this lapse of time. We boys rode him barebacked, and he used to draw a buggy, which he finally ran away with. I suppose we found him useful in the representation of some of the Indian fights which we were always dramatizing, and I dare say he may have served our turn as an Arab charger, when the Moors of Granada made one of their sallies upon the camp of the Spaniards, and discharged their javelins into it; their javelins were the long, admirably straight and slender ironweeds that grew by the river. This menagerie was constantly breaking bounds and wandering off; and was chiefly employed in hunting itself up, its different members taking turns in remaining in the pasture or stable, to be ridden after those that had strayed into the woods.

  The origin of a large and eloquent flock of geese is lost in an equal obscurity. I recall their possession simply as an accomplished fact, and I associate their desolate cries with the windy dark of rainy November nights, so that they must at least have come into our hands after the horses. They were fenced into a clayey area next the cabin for safe-keeping, where, perpetually waddling about in a majestic disoccupation, they patted the damp ground down to the hardness and smoothness of a brick-yard. Throughout the day they conversed tranquilly together, but by night they woke, goose after goose, to send forth a long clarion alarum, blending in a general concert at last, to assure one another of their safety. We must have intended to pluck them in the spring, but they stole their nests early in March, and entered upon the nurture of their young before we could prevent it; and it would then have been barbarous to pluck these mothers of families.

  We had got some pigs from our old Virginian predecessors, and these kept, as far as they could, the domestic habits in which that affectionate couple had indulged them. They would willingly have shared our fireside with us, humble as it was, but, being repelled, they took up their quarters on cold nights at the warm base of the chimney without, where we could hear them, as long as we kept awake, disputing the places next to the stones. All this was horrible to my mother, whose housewifely instincts were perpetually offended by the rude conditions of our life, and who justly regarded it as a return to a state which, if poetic, was also not far from barbaric. But boys take every natural thing as naturally as savages, and we never thought our pigs were other than amusing. In that country pigs were called to their feed with long cries of “Pig, pig, pooee, poe-e-e!” but ours were taught to come at a whistle, and, on hearing it, would single themselves out from the neighbors’ pigs, and come rushing from all quarters to the scattered corn with an intelligence we were proud of.

  IX

  As long as the fall weather lasted, and well through the mild winter of that latitude, our chief recreation, where all our novel duties were delightful, was hunting with the long, smooth-bore shot-gun which had descended laterally from one of our uncles, and supplied the needs of the whole family of boys in the chase. Never less than two of us went out with it at once, and generally there were three. This enabled us to beat up the game over a wide extent of country, and while the eldest did the shooting, left the others to rush upon him as soon as he fired, with tumultuous cries of, “Did you hit it? Did you hit it?” We fell upon the wounded squirrels which we brought down on rare occasions, and put them to death with what I must now call a sickening ferocity. If sometimes the fool dog, the weak-minded Newfoundland pup we were rearing, rushed upon the game first, and the squirrel avenged his death upon the dog’s nose, that was pure gain, and the squirrel had the applause of his other enemies. Yet we were none of us cruel; we never wantonly killed things that could not be eaten; we should have thought it sacrilege to shoot a robin or a turtledove, but we were willing to be amused, and these were the chances of war.

  The woods were full of squirrels, which especially abounded in the woods-pastures, as we called the lovely dells where the greater part of the timber was thinned out to let the cattle range and graze. They were of all sorts — gray, and black, and even big red fox squirrels, a variety I now suppose extinct. When the spring opened we hunted them in the poplar woods, whither they resorted in countless numbers for the sweetness in the cups of the tulip-tree blossoms. I recall with a thrill one memorable morning in such woods — early, after an overnight rain, when the vistas hung full of a delicate mist that the sun pierced to kindle a million fires in the drops still pendulous from leaf and twig. I can smell the tulip-blossoms and the odor of the tree-bark yet, and the fresh, strong fragrance of the leafy mold under my bare feet; and I can hear the rush of the squirrels on the bark of the trunks, or the swish of their long, plunging leaps from bough to bough in the air-tops.

  In a region where the corn-fields and wheat-fields were often fifty and sixty acres in extent there was a plenty of quail, but I remember only one victim to my gun. We set figure-four traps to catch them; but they were shrewder arithmeticians than we, and solved these problems without harm to themselves. When they began to mate, and the air was full of their soft, amorous whistling, we searched for their nests, and had better luck, though we were forbidden to rob the nests when we found them; and in June, when a pretty little mother strutted across the lanes at the head of her tiny brood, we had to content ourselves with the near spectacle of her cunning counterfeit of disability at sight of us, fluttering and tumbling in the dust till her chicks could hide themselves. We had read of that trick, and were not deceived; but we were charmed the same.

  It is a trick that all birds know, and I had it played upon me by the mother snipe and mother wild duck that haunted our dam, as well as by the quail. With the snipe, once, I had a fancy to see how far the mother would carry the ruse, and so ran after her; but in doing this I trod on one of her young — a soft, gray mite, not distinguishable from the gray pebbles where it ran. I took it tenderly up in my hand, and it is a pang to me yet to think how it gasped once and died. A boy is a strange mixture — as the man who comes after him is. I should not have minded knocking over that whole brood of snipes with my gun, if I could; but this poor little death was somehow very personal in its appeal.

  I had no such regrets concerning the young wild ducks, which, indeed, I had no such grievous accident with. I left their mother to flounder and flutter away as she would, and took to the swamp where her young sought refuge from me. There I spent half a day wading about in waters that were often up to my waist and full of ugly possibilities of mud-turtles and water-snakes, trying to put my hand on one of the ducklings. They rose everywhere else, and dived again after a breath of air; but at last one of them came up in my very grasp. It did not struggle, but how its wild heart bounded against my hand! I carried it home to show it and boast of my capture, and then I took it back to its native swamp. It dived instantly, and I hope it found its bereaved family somewhere under the water.

  The center of our life in the cabin was, of course, the fireplace, whose hugeness and whose mighty fires remained a wonder with us. There was a crane in the chimney and dangling pothooks, and until the cooking stove could be set up in an adjoining shed the cooking had to be done on the hearth, and the bread baked in a Dutch oven in the hot ashes. We had always heard of this operation, which was a necessity of early days; and nothing else, perhaps, realized them so vividly for us as the loaf laid in the iron-lidded skillet, which was then covered with ashes and heaped with coals.

  I am not certain that the bread tasted any better for the historical romance of its experience, or that the corn-meal, mixed warm from the mill and baked on an oak plank set up before the fire, had merits beyond the hoecake of art; but I think there can be no doubt that new corn grated from the cob while still in the milk, and then mo
lded and put in like manner to brown in the glow of such embers, would still have the sweetness that was incomparable then. When the maple sap started in February, we tried the scheme we had cherished all winter of making with it tea which should be in a manner self-sugared. But the scheme was a failure — we spoiled the sap without sweetening the tea.

  We sat up late before the big fire at night, our faces burning in the glow, and our backs and feet freezing in the draught that swept in from the imperfectly closing door, and then we boys climbed to our bed in the loft. We reached it by a ladder, which we should have been glad to pull up after us as a protection against Indians in the pioneer fashion; but, with the advancement of modern luxury, the ladder had been nailed to the floor. When we were once aloft, however, we were in a domain sacred to the past. The rude floor rattled and wavered loosely under our tread, and the window in the gable stood open or shut at its own will. There were cracks in the shingles, through which we could see the stars, when there were stars, and which, when the first snow came, let the flakes sift in upon the floor.

  Our barrels of paper-covered books were stowed away in that loft, and, overhauling them one day, I found a paper copy of the poems of a certain Henry W. Longfellow, then wholly unknown to me; and while the old grist-mill, whistling and wheezing to itself, made a vague music in my ears, my soul was filled with this new, strange sweetness. I read the “Spanish Student” there, and the “Coplas de Manrique,” and the solemn and ever-beautiful “Voices of the Night.” There were other books in those barrels, but these spirited me again to Spain, where I had already been with Irving, and led me to attack fitfully the old Spanish grammar which had been knocking about our house ever since my father bought it from a soldier of the Mexican War.