NEAR SHICKSHINNY
LeavingNew Jersey I kept from all contact with money, and was consequently turning over in memory many delicious adventures among the Pennsylvania-German farmers. After crossing that lovely, lonely plateau called Pocono Mountain, I descended abruptly to Wilkesbarre by a length of steep automobile road called Giant Despair.
It was a Sunday noon in May. Wilkesbarre was a mixture of Sabbath calm and the smoke of torment that ascendeth forever. One passed pious faces too clean, sooty faces too restless. I hurried through, hoping for more German farmers beyond. But King Coal had conspired against the traveller, and would not let him go. The further west I walked, the thicker the squalor and slag heaps, and the presence of St. Francis seemed withdrawn from me, though I had been faithful in my fashion.
King Coal is a boaster. He says he furnishesfood for all the engines of the earth. He says he is the maker of steam. He says steam is the twentieth century. He holds that an infinite number of black holes in the ground is a blessing.
He may say what he likes, but he has not excused himself to me. He blasts the landscape. Never do human beings drink so hard to forget their sorrow as in the courtyards of this monarch. To dig in a mine makes men reckless, to own one makes them tormentors.
I had a double reason for hurrying on. My rules as a mendicant afoot were against cities and railroads. I flattered myself I was called and sent to the agricultural laborer.
When the land grew less black and less inhabited, I mistakenly rejoiced, assuming I should soon strike the valleys where grain is sown and garnered. Yet the King was following me still, like a great mole underground. There was no coal on the surface. The land was rusty-red and ashen-gray,—as though blasted by the torch of a Cyclops and only yesterday cooled by the rain. The best grain that could have been scattered among such rocks with the hope of a crop was a seed of dragons’ teeth.
How long the desolation continued! Toward the end of the day in the midst of the nothingness, I came upon a saloon full of human creatures roaring drunk. Otherwise there was not so much as a shed in sight.
Four vilely dirty little girls came down the steps carrying beer. One of them, too intoxicated for her errand, entrusted her can to her companions. They preceded me toward the smoke-veiled sun by a highway growing black again with the foot-prints of the King.
Now there was a deafening explosion. I sat down on a rock examining myself to see if I was still alive. The children pattered on. My start seemed to amuse them immensely. I followed toward the new civil war, or whatever it was.
Just over the crest and around the corner I encountered the King’s never-varying insignia, the double-row of “company houses.”
Every dwelling was as eternally and uniformly damned as its neighbor, making the eyes ache, standing foursquare in the presence of the insulted daylight. Every porch and railing was jig-sawed in the same ruthless way. Every front yard was grassless. Everything was madeof wood, yet seemed made of iron, so black it was, so long had it stood in the wasting weather, so steadily had it resisted the dynamite now shaking the earth.
There they stood, thirty houses to the left, thirty to the right, with what you might call a street between, whose ruts were seemingly cut by the treasure-chariots of the brimstone princes of the nether world.
Two-thirds of the way through, several young miners were exploding giant powder. As I approached I saw another was loading his pistol with ball-cartridges and shooting over the hills at the sun. He did not put it out.
The group of children with the beer served these knights of dynamite, holding up the cans for them to drink. The little cup-bearers were then given pennies. They scurried home.
By their eyes and queer speech I guessed that these children were Poles, or of some other race from Eastern Europe. I guessed the same about the men celebrating. Every porch on both sides of that street held some heavy headed creatures from presumably the same foreign parts. They were, no doubt, good citizens after their peculiar fashion, but with countenancesthat I could not read. Though the next explosion seemed to jolt the earth out of its orbit, they merely blinked.
I said to myself, “This is not the fourth of July. Therefore it must be the anniversary of the day when ‘Freedom shrieked’ and ‘Kosciuszko fell.’”
I reached the end of the street; nothing beyond but a hollow of hills and a dubious river, enclosing a new Tophet, that I learned afterwards was Shickshinny. It was late. I wanted to get beyond to the green fields.
I zigzagged across that end of the street to folk on the front porches that I thought were Americans. Each time I vainly attempted conversation with some dumb John Sobieski in Sunday clothes. I wondered what were the Polish words for bread, shelter, and dead broke.
Some spick and span people came out on the porch of the last house. Possibly they could understand English. I went closer. They were out and out Americans.
So I looked them in the eye and said: “I would like to have you entertain me to-night. I am a sort of begging preacher. I do not take money, only food and lodging.”
“A beggin’ preacher?”
“My sermon is in poetry. I can read it to you after supper, if that will suit.”
“What sort of poetry?” asked the man.
“I can only say it is my own.”
“Why I justLOVEpoetry,” said the woman. “Come in.”
“Come up,” said the man, and hustled out a chair.
“I’ll go right in and get supper,” said the wife. She was a breezy creature with a loud musical voice. She doubtless developed it by trying to talk against giant powder.
I told the man my story, in brief.
After quite a smoke, he said, “So you’ve walked from Wilkesbarre this afternoon. Why, man, that’s seventeen miles.”
I do not believe it was over fourteen.
He continued, “I’m awful glad to see a white man. This place is full of Bohunks, and Slavs, and Rooshians, and Poles and Lickerishes (Lithuanians?). They’re not bad to havearound, but they ain’t Cawcasians. They all talk Eyetalian.”
The fellow’s manner breathed not only race-fraternity, but industrial fraternity. It had no suggestion of sheltered agricultural caution. It was sophisticated and anti-capitalistic. It said, “You and I are against the system. That’s enough for brotherhood.”
Now that he stood and refilled his pipe from a tobacco box nailed just inside the door, I saw him as in a picture-frame. He had powerful but slanting shoulders. He was so tall he must needs stoop to avoid the lintel. With his bent neck, he looked as though he could hold up a mine caving in. His general outlines seemed to be hewn from fence-rails, then hung with grotesque muscles of loose leather. His eyebrows were grown together. From looking down long passageways his eyes were marvellously owl-like. He was cadaverous. He had a beak nose. He had a retreating chin but, breaking the rules of phrenology, he managed to convey the impression of a driving personality. He looked like an enormous pick-axe.
He calmly commented: “Them Polacks waste powder awful. Not only on Sunday, forfun, but down in the mine they use twice too much. And they can’t blast the hardest coal, either.... And they’re always gettin’ careless and blowin’ themselves to hell and everybody else. It’s awful, it’s awful,” he said, but in a most philosophic tone.
He lowered his voice and pointed with his pipe stem: “Them people that live in the next house are supposed to be Cawcasians, but they haven’t a marriage license. They let their little girl go for beer this afternoon, for them fellows explodin’ powder over there. ’Taint no way to raise a child. That child’s mother was a well-behaved Methodist till she married a Polack, and had four children, and he died, and they died, and some say she poisoned them all. Now she’s got this child by this no-account white man. They live without a license, like birds. Yet they eat off weddin’s.”
“Eat off weddings?”
“Yes,” he said. “These Bohunks and Lickerishes all have one kind of a wedding. It lasts three days and everybody comes. The best man is king. He bosses the plates.”
“Bosses the plates?”
“Yes. They buy a lot of cheap plates.Every man that comes must break a plate with a dollar. The plate is put in the middle of the floor. He stands over it and bangs the dollar down. If he breaks the plate he gets to kiss and hug the bride. If he doesn’t break it, the young couple get that dollar. He must keep on givin’ them dollars in this way till he breaks the plate. Eats and plates and beer cost about fifty dollars. The young folks clear about two hundred dollars to start life on.”
“And,” he continued, “the folks next door make a practice of eatin’ round at weddin’s without puttin’ down their dollars.”
I began to feel guilty.
“It’s a good deal like my begging supper and breakfast of you.” He hadn’t meant it that way. “No,” he said, “you’re takin’ the only way to see the country. Why, man, I used to travel like you, before I was married, except I didn’t take no book nor poetry nor nothin’, and wasn’t afeered of box-cars the way you are.... I been in every state in the Union but Maine. I don’t know how I kept out of there.... I’ve been nine years in this house. I don’t know but what I see as much as when I was on the go....
“That fellow Gallic over there that was shootin’ that pistol at the sky killed a man named Bothweinis last year and got off free. It was Gallic’s wedding and Bothweinis brought fifty dollars and said he was goin’ to break all the plates in the house. He used up twelve dollars. He broke seven plates and kissed the bride seven times. Then the bride got drunk. She was only fifteen years old. She hunted up Bothweinis and kissed him and cried, and Gallic chased him down towards Shickshinny and tripped him up, and shot him in the mouth and in the eye.... The bride didn’t know no better.... He was an awful sight when they brought him in. The bride was only a kid. These Bohunk women never learn no sense anyway. They’re not smart like Cawcasian women, and they fade in the face quick.”
He reflected: “My wife’s a wonderful woman. I have been with her nine years, and she learns me something every day, and she still looks good in her Sunday clothes.”
He became lighter in tone again. “What these Bohunks need is a priest and a church to make them behave. They mind a priest some,if he is a good priest. They’re all Catholics, or no church....”
“Seems though sometimes a man’s got to shoot. Some of them devils over there used to throw rocks at my door, but one Sunday I filled ’em full of buckshot and they quit. The justice upheld me. I didn’t have to pay no fine. They’ve been pretty good neighbors since, pretty good neighbors.”
There was a sound as though the flagstones of eternity had been ripped up. He saw I didn’t like it and said consolingly, “They’ll stop and go to supper pretty soon. They eat too much to do anything but set, afterwards. They don’t have nothin’ to eat in the old country but raw turnips. Here they stuff themselves like toads. I don’t see how they save money the way they do. The mine owners squeeze the very life out of ’em and they wallow in beer. I’ve always made big money, but somehow never kept it. Me and my wife are spenders. But I ain’t afraid, for I am the only man on the street that can dig the hardest coal. I could dig my way out of hell with my pick, and by G—— once I did it, too.”
The wife came to the door newly decked in anelaborate lace waist, torn, alas, at the shoulder. Husband was right. She looked good. She announced radiantly: “Come to supper.”
Then she rushed down between the houses and shouted: “Jimmy and Frank, come here! What you doin’? Get down off that roof. What you doin’, associatin’ with them Polack children? What you doin’ with them switches?” Then she swore heartily, as unto the Lord, and continued, “They’re helpin’ them Polack kids switch that poor little drunk American child. Come down off that coal shed!”
They slunk into sight. She snatched their switches from them.
“Who started it?”
Jimmy admitted he started it. He looked capable of starting most anything, good or bad. He had eyes like black diamonds, a stocky frame, and the tiny beginnings of his mother’s voice.
“I don’t know whether to lick you or not,” she said judicially. Finally: “Go up to bed without supper.”
Jimmy went.
She addressed us in perfect good humor, as a musical volcano might: “Come and eat.”
Never did I see beefsteak so thick. There was a garnish of fried onions. There was a separate sea of gravy. There was a hill of butter, a hill of thickly sliced bread. There was a delectable mountain of potatoes. That was all. These people were living the simple life, living it in chunks.
At table, as everywhere, the husband solemnly deferred to the wife. She was to him a druid priestess. And so she was radiant, as woman enthroned is apt to be. Of course, no young lady from finishing school would have liked the way we tunnelled and blasted our way through the provender. We were gloriously hungry and our manners were a hearty confession of the fact.
My passion for the joys of the table partially sated, I began to realize the room. There were hardly any of the comforts of home. There was a big onyx time-piece, chipped, and not running. Beside it was a dollar alarm-clock in good trim.
There were in the next room, among otherthings, two frail gilt parlor chairs, almost black. The curtains were streaked with soot and poorly ironed. She said she had washed them yesterday. But, she continued, “I just keep cheerful, I don’t keep house. Doesn’t seem like I can, this street is so awful dirty and noisy and foreign.”
“Yet you like it,” said the husband.
“Yes,” she said, “that’s because I’m half Irish. The Irish were born for excitement.”
“What’syourancestry?” I asked the husband.
“My father was a mountain white. Moved here from North Carolina, and dug coal and married a Pennsylvania Dutch lady.”
“It’s your turn,” she said to me. “You are a preacher?”
“That’s a kind of an excuse I make.”
“You can’t be any worse than the preacher we had here,” continued the wife. “He lived down toward Shickshinny. He preached in an old chapel. He wouldn’t start a Sunday school. We needed one bad enough. He just married folks. He hardly ever buried them. They say he was afraid. And,” she continued, with a growing tone of condemnation, “it’s a preacher’sBUSINESSto face death.
“Just about the time two of our children died of diphtheria, was when he came to these parts. He was a Presbyterian, and I was raised a Presbyterian, and he wouldn’t preach the funeral of my two babies. He promised to come, and we waited two hours. So I just read the Bible at the grave.”
This she recounted with a bitter sense of insult.
“And the same day he locked up his mother, too.”
“Locked up his mother?”
“Yes. Some said he wanted to visit a woman he didn’t want her to know about. They said he was afraid she would follow him and spy. He locked up the old lady, and she about yelled the roof off, and the neighbors let her out.
“And then,” continued my hostess, “when he was dying, he sent for a Wilkesbarre priest.”
“Sent for a priest?” I exclaimed, completely mystified.
“Yes,” she whispered. “He must have been a Catholic all the time. And the priest wouldn’t come either.That’s what that old preacher got for being so mean.”
She continued: “That preacher wasn’t much meaner than the man is in the company store.”
She was bristling again.
“He won’t deliver goods up here unless you run a big bill. If I want anything much while big Frank here is at work, I have to take Jimmy’s little play express-wagon and haul it up.”
And now she was telling me of her terrible fright three days ago, down at the company store, when there was a rumor of an accident in one of the far tunnels of the mine.
“All the foreign women came running down the hill, half-crazy. I am used to false alarms, but I could hardly get up to this house with my goods. I was expecting to see big Frank brought in, just like he was before little Frank was born, eight years ago.”
Little Frank lifted his face from its business of eating to listen.
“The first thing that boy ever saw was his father on the floor there, covered with blood.”
“You don’t remember it, Frank?” asked his father, grinning.
“Nope.”
The wife continued: “There was only onedoctor came. We had a time between us. The other doctor was tendin’ the men husband had dug out. The coal fell on them and mashed them flat. It couldn’t quite mash husband. He’s too tough,” she said, lovingly. “He grabbed his pick and he tunnelled his way through, with the blood squirting out of him.”
Husband grinned like a petted child. He said: “It wasn’t quite as bad as that, but I was bloody, all right.”
She continued with a gesture of impatience: “This is cheerful Sunday night talk. Let’s try something else. What kind of a poem are you goin’ to read?”
“It tells boys how to be great men, but it’s for fellows of from fifteen to twenty. You’ll have to save it for your sons till they grow a bit.”
She was at the foot of the stairway like a flash.
“Son, dress and come down to supper.”
Son was down almost as soon as she was in her chair, pulling on a stocking as he came. And he was hungry. He ate while we talked on and on.
After the supper the dishes waited. The wife said: “Now we will have the poetry.” I said in my heart, “Maybe this is the one house in a hundred where the seed of these verses will be sown upon good ground.”
We went into the parlor, distinguished as such by the battered organ. The mother had Frank and Jimmy sit in semicircle with her and big Frank, while I plunged into my rhymed appeal. After the dynamite of the day I did not hesitate to let loose the thunders. I did not hesitate to pause and expound:—the poem being, as I have before described, many stanzas on heroes of history, with the refrain, ever and anon:God help us to be brave.No, kind and flattering reader, it was not above their heads. Earnestness is earnestness everywhere. The whole circle grasped that I really expected something unusual of those boys with the black-diamond eyes, no matter what kind of perversity was in them at present.
I said, in so many words, as a beginning, that nitro-glycerine was not the only force in theworld, that there is also that dynamite called the power of the soul, and that detonation called fame.
But I did not dwell long upon my special saints, Francis of Assisi and Buddha, nor those other favorites who some folk think contradict them: Phidias and Michael Angelo. I dwelt on the strong: Alexander, Cæsar, Mohammed, Cromwell, Napoleon, and especially upon the lawgivers, Confucius, Moses, Justinian; and dreamed that this ungoverned strength before me, that had sprung from the loins of King Coal, might some day climb high, that these little wriggling, dirty-fisted grandsons of that monarch might yet make the world some princely reparation for his crimes.
After the reading the mother and father said solemnly, “it is a good book.”
Then the wife showed the other two pieces of printed matter in the household, a volume of sermons, and a copy ofThe House of a Thousand Candles. You have read that work about the candles. The sermons were by the Reverend Wood M. Smithers. You do not know the Reverend Mister Smithers? He has collected in one fair volume all the sermons that ever putyou to sleep, an anthology of all those discourses that are just alike.
She said she had read them over and over again to the family. I believed it. There was butter on the page. I said in my heart: “She is not to be baffled by any phraseology. If she can get a kernel out of Wood M. Smithers, she will also derive strength from my rhyme.”
She promised she would have each of the boys pick out one of the twenty-six great men for a model, as soon as they were schooled enough to choose. She put the poem in the kitchen table drawer, where she kept some photographs of close relatives, and I had the final evidence that I had become an integral part of the family tradition.
They sent me up to bed. I put out the lamp at once, lest I should see too much. I went to sleep quickly. I was as quickly awakened. Being a man of strategies and divertisements, I reached through the blacknessto the lamp that was covered with leaked oil. I rubbed this on my hands, and thence, thinly over my whole body. Coal oil too thick makes blisters; thin enough, brings peace.
I remember breakfast as a thing apart. Although the table held only what we had for supper, warmed over, although the morning light was grey, and the room the worse for the grey light, the thing I cannot help remembering was the stillness and tenderness of that time. Father and mother spoke in subdued human voices. They had not yet had occasion to shout against the alarums and excursions of the day. And the sensitive faces of the boys, and the half-demon, half-angel light of their eyes stirred me with marvelling and reverence for the curious, protean ways of God.
And now I was walking down the steeps of Avernus into Shickshinny, toward the smoke of torment that ascends forever. Underfoot was spread the same dark leprosy that yesterday had stunted flower and fruit and grass-blade.
I hated King Coal still, but not so much as of yore.