CHAPTER LA LUSH, EGYPTIAN LAND
The next morning, after purchasing our customary picture cards, we were about to achieve an early start when I suddenly remembered that I had not tried to find the one man I really wanted to see—a man for whom my father had worked in years gone by, the son of a mill owner who after his father’s death with a brother had inherited this mill and employed my father to run it. Although he was very much younger than my father at that time, there had always been a bond of sympathy and understanding between them. But even in my father’s lifetime the woolen industry in this region had fallen on hard lines—the East and some patents on machinery held by Massachusetts manufacturers crowding these westerners to the wall—so that this boy and his brother, who had been such good friends to my father, had been compelled to abandon their woolen properties entirely and Adam Shattuck had gone into the electric lighting business, and had helped, I understand, to organize the local electric light plant here and for a while anyhow was its first vice-president and treasurer. After that I heard nothing more.
I had never seen him, but as is always the case with someone commercially connected with a family—a successful and so helpful a personality—I had heard a great deal about him. Indeed, in our worst days here, the Shattuck family had represented to me the height of all that was important and durable, and to such an extent that even now, and after all these years, I hesitated whether to inflict myself on him, even for so laudable a purpose as inquiring the exact site of the old mill or whether he recalled where my father first lived, on movingto Terre Haute from Sullivan, and which was the house where I was born. Nevertheless, I looked him up in the city directory and could find only one Adam B. Shattuck, “hay, grain, and feed, 230 South Fourth Street,” a region and a business which did not seem likely to contain so important a person. Nevertheless, because I was anxious to see the old mill which my father had managed under his ownership (I knew it stood somewhere down near the river’s edge), I ventured to go to this address, to find perchance if he could tell me where the true Adam B. Shattuck was to be found.
And on the way, because it was only a few blocks at most in any direction, I decided to look up the old St. Joseph’s Church and school which I had attended as a child, my first school, to see if possibly I could recognize anything in connection with that. A picture postcard which I had found showed a quite imposing church on the site my father had given, but no school.
Imagine my surprise on reaching it to be able to recognize in a rear building to which a new front had, in years gone by, been added, the exact small, square red brick building in which I had first been drilled in my A B C's. Owing to a high brick wall and the presence of an encroaching building it was barely visible any longer from the street, but stripped of these later accretions I could see exactly how it looked—and remember it! As I gazed, the yard, the pond, the old church, the surrounding neighborhood, all came back to me. I saw it quite clearly. As at Warsaw, Indiana, I now suffered a slight upheaval in my vitals. A kind of nostalgia set in. The very earth seemed slipping out from under my feet. I looked through the small paned windows into one of the old rooms and then, because it was exactly the same, I wanted to get away. I went round by the church side and seeing a funeral train in front walked through the door into this newer building. Before the altar rail, surrounded by tall candles, lay a coffin. And I said to myself: “Yes, it is symbolic. Death and change have taken much, so far. They will soon take all.”
Then I climbed back into the car.
It was only a few blocks to the hay, grain and feed emporium of this bogus Adam Shattuck, and when I saw it, a low, drab, one story brick building, in a very dilapidated condition, I felt more convinced than ever that this man could have nothing to do with my father’s quondam employer. I went through the dusty, hay strewn door and at a small, tall, dusty and worn clerical desk saw an old man in a threadbare grey alpaca coat, making some entries in a cheap, reddish paper backed cashbook. There was a scale behind him. The shadowy, windowless walls in the rear and to the sides were lined with bins, containing sacks of oats and bran, bales of hay and other feed. Just as I entered a boy from the vicinity followed me, pushing a small truck, and laid a yellow slip on the desk.
“He says to make it four half sacks of bran.”
“Can you tell me where I will find a Mr. Adam B. Shattuck, who used to own the Wabash Woolen Mills here?” I inquired.
“I’m the man—Adam B. Shattuck. Just excuse me a minute, will you, while I wait on this boy.”
I stared at him in rude astonishment, for he seemed so worn, so physically concluded. His face was seamed and sunken, his eyes deep tired, his hands wrinkled.
“You’re Mr. Shattuck, are you? Well, I’m the son of Paul Dreiser, who used to work for you. You don’t remember me, of course—I was too young——”
“This isn’t by any chance Theodore, is it?” he commented, his eyes brightening slightly with recognition.
“Yes, that’s me,” I said.
“Your brother Paul,” he said, “when he was out here a few years ago, was telling me about you. You write, I believe——”
“Yes.”
“Well, of course, I’ve never known of you except indirectly, but—how long are you going to be in town?”
“Only this morning,” I replied. “I’m just passing through. This isn’t my car. I’m traveling in it with a friend. I’m visiting all the old places just for the fun ofit. I was just coming to you to ask if you could tell me where the old mill stood—whether it’s still standing.”
“Right at the foot of the street here,” he commented very cheerfully, at the same time bustling about and getting out the half sacks of bran and other things. “It’s just as it was in your father’s day, only it is a wagon company now. All the woolen mills in this section died out long ago. Your father foresaw that. He told me they would. I went into the electric lighting business afterward, but they crowded me out of it—consolidation and all that. Then I got into this business. It isn’t much but it’s a living. One seventyfive,” he said to the boy, who put the money on the desk and went out.
“Yes, indeed, I knew your father. He was a fine man. He worked for us off and on for pretty near fifteen year, after his own mill went up. This was no country for woolen manufacture, though. We couldn’t compete with the East. Why, I read here not long ago that two hundred mills in Indiana, Ohio and Illinois had closed up in twenty years—two hundred! Well, that’s all over. So you’re Theodore! You couldn’t stay and have lunch with me, could you?”
“Thank you, I couldn’t possibly,” I replied. “I’m only a guest in this car and I can’t detain them too long. I did want to see you, though, and so I came.”
“That’s right; that’s right,” he said. “It’s good of you. Times have changed with me some, but then, I’ve lived a long time. I’ve a son in New York. He’s with ... (he mentioned a large and successful company). You ought to call on him some time. He’d be glad to see you, I’m sure.”
He rambled on about one thing and another and followed me ... to the door.
“You couldn’t tell me, by any chance, where the first house my father ever occupied in Terre Haute stands?” I said idly.
“Yes, I can. It’s right around here in Second Street, one block south, next to a grocery store. You can’t miss it. It’s a two story brick now, but they added a story along time ago. It was a one story house in his time, but then it had a big yard and lots of trees. I remember it well. I used to go there occasionally to see him.... Right down there at the foot of the street,” he called after me.
I climbed into the car and down we went to the old mill to stare at that, now whirring with new sounds and looking fairly brisk and prosperous; then back to the old brick house, looking so old and so commonplace that I could well imagine it a fine refuge after a storm. But I had never even heard of this before and was not expecting to find it. Then we raced forth Sullivan-ward and I was heartily glad to be gone.
The territory into which we were now passing was that described in the first chapter of this book—of all places that I ever lived in my youth the most pleasing to me and full of the most colorful and poetic of memories. Infancy and its complete non-understanding had just gone. For me, when we arrived here, adolescence—the inquisitive boy of twelve to sixteen—had not yet arrived. This was the region of the wonder period of youth, when trees, clouds, the sky, the progression of the days, the sun, the rains, the grass all filled me with delight, an overpowering sense of beauty, charm, mystery. How eager I was to know, at times—and yet at other times not. How I loved to sit and gaze just drinking it all in, the sensory feel and glory of it. And then I had gone on to other ideas and other places and this had never come back—not once in any least way—and now I was to see it all again, or the region of it——
Sullivan, as we found on consulting our map, lay only twentyfive miles south, or thereabouts. Our road lay through a perfectly flat region, so flat and featureless that it should have been uninteresting and yet it was not. I have observed this of regions as of people, that however much alike they may appear to be in character there is, nevertheless, a vast difference in their charm or lack of it. This section in which I had been partially reared hadcharm—not the charm of personal predisposition, as others will testify, but real charm. The soil was rich—a sandy loam. The trees were shapely and healthy—peaceful trees, not beaten by angry winds and rains. The fields were lush with grass or grain—warm bottom lands these, composed of soil carried down by ancient rivers—now, in the last hundred years or so, given names. As we came out of Terre Haute I turned and looked back at it, a prosperous, vigorous town. East of it, in a healthy, fruitful region, in that hill country around Reelsville and Brazil, there had been coal mines—soft coal mines, providing work and fuel. Here on our route to Sullivan were other mines, at Farmersburg, seven miles out, a town by the way which I recalled as being somehow an outpost of the priest who read mass at Sullivan, at Shelburne and other places still farther south. You could see the black, dirty breakers across flat green fields in which stood round healthy trees.
As we went south, one of those warm sudden rains sprang up, or came down—one of those quick, heavy rains which I recognized as characteristic of the region of my infancy. We saw it coming in the distance, a thickening of smoke clouds over some groves in the west. Then a green fog seemed to settle between us and the trees, and I knew it was raining.
“Here it comes,” I called. “Had we better get the top up?”
Bert, who was now the master of motion and a radically different temperament to Speed, paid no heed. He was very taciturn or meditative at times, but equally gay at others, and much more self sufficient and reliant, if anything. I had been most interested by the quiet, controlling way in which he had gone about getting himself housed and fed at night and at other times. Porters and garage managers gave no least care to Bert. He managed them and suggested ways and means to us occasionally. Whenever anything happened to the car he leisurely extracted himself with the aid of his crutches and set aboutadjusting it as though there were not the least thing defective about him. It was interesting, almost amusing.
But now, as I say, he paid no heed and soon a few heavy drops fell, great, splattering globules that left inch size wet spots on our clothing, and then we were in the storm. It gushed.
“Now, will you listen?” I observed as we jumped down. Franklin and I bustled about the task of getting the hood up. Before we could do it, though—almost before we could get our raincoats on—it was pouring—a torrent. It seemed to come down in bucketfuls. Then, once we had the hood up and the seats dried and our raincoats on and were suffocating of heat, the storm was gone. The sun came out, the road looked golden, the grass was heavenly. In the distance one could see it raining elsewhere, far across the fields.
“Yes,” I observed feelingly and tenderly, “‘this is me own, me native land;’ only I wish it wouldn’t make its remembered characteristics quite so obvious. I can be shown that it is just as it used to be, without being killed.”
The land smiled. I’m sure it did. Aren’t there such things as smiling lands?
And a little farther on, without any suggestion from me, for I am well satisfied that he would never be so influenced, Franklin was commenting on the luxurious character of the region. The houses were all small and simple, very tasteless little cottages, but very good and new and seemingly comfortable, sheltering no doubt the sons and daughters of people who had been here when I was. Excellent automobiles were speeding along the roads, handsome western makes of cars—not so many Fords. The cattle in the fields looked healthy, fat. Timothy and corn were standing waist high. It was hot, as it should be in a fat riverland like this. We had not gone far before we had to get out to examine a hay baling machine—the first hay baler (for the use of individual farmers) I had ever seen. There had been a haypress at Sullivan, a most wonderful thing to me to contemplate in my day—a horse going round in a ring and so lifting and droppinga great weight which compressed the hay in a box; but this was different. It was standing out in an open field near three haystacks and was driven by a gasoline motor, a force which made short work of the vast quantities of hay piled on the feeder. Three men operated it. The horses that drew it stood idle to one side.
“How much hay can you bale in a day?” I asked of one of the farmers.
“Depends on the number working,” he replied. “We three men can do up a couple of stacks like that.” He was referring to two goodly mounds of sweet brown hay that stood to the left.
“Do you call it hard work?” I asked.
“No, not very,” he answered. “Pitching hay from the stacks down onto it and pulling the bales away.”
“What will the farmer not get next?” I inquired of Franklin. “It seems that nearly all the heavy labor of the old days is gone.”
“It’s true,” he said. “I never saw a machine like this before. I’ve heard of them. All that they need now is a good, cheap traction plow and farming will be a weak man’s job—like golf—and twice as healthy.”
We climbed back.
Scudding along under green trees and through stretches of meadow and under a hot, almost baking sun, we came at last to various signs reading: “For Fine Dry Goods Visit Squibbs, South Side Square,” or “If You Want The Best Hardware In Sullivan Go To Beach & Gens.”
“Ha! then someone of the Beach family has gone into the hardware business,” I commented.
Presently a huge sign appeared hanging across the road. It read:
“Sullivan Welcomes You.”
“Sullivan Welcomes You.”
“Sullivan Welcomes You.”
“Imagine ‘dirty old Sullivan’ venturing to welcome anyone!” I commented, quoting my sister. “If she could only see that!” I added.
“There’s another name I recognize, anyhow,” I commentedto Franklin, as another sign came into view. “Some member of that family owned the clover field back of our house in my time. Good luck to him, if it’s in good condition.”
In a few minutes we were rolling up a street which would have taken us to the public square if we had followed it; instantly I was on thequi viveto see what if anything I could remember. This was a section, the north-west corner of Sullivan, which I recalled as having been a great open common in my time, filled principally with dog fennel and dandelion and thistles and containing only one house, a red one, occupied by an Irish section boss, whose wife (my mother having befriended her years before when first she and her husband came to Sullivan) had now, at the time my mother was compelled to make this return pilgrimage, befriended us by letting us stay—mother and us three youngsters—until she could find a house. It was a period of three or four days, as I recall it. The father of this family, Thomas Brogan, was a great, heavy handed, hulking, red faced Irishman who knew only work and Catholicism. On Sunday in some weird, stiff combination of Sunday clothes and squeaky shoes, he was accustomed to lead in single file procession his more or less recalcitrant family through weeds and along the broken board walks of this poorly equipped region to mass. I saw him often, even in my day. His youngest son, Harry Brogan, often played with Ed and me and once he instigated some other, older boys, to lick us—a tale too long and too sad to be told here. His second youngest son, Jim—alias Red Brogan and subsequently known to fame as “Red Oliphant,” a bank robber (finally electrocuted by the state of New York at Sing Sing for murder—he and three or four others shot a night watchman, or so the police said)—was often beaten by his father with a horsewhip because he would not work in the local coal mine or perhaps do other drudging about his home. This coal mine, by the way, had killed his elder brother Frank some three or four years before by explosion, a tragedy which you might have thought wouldhave ended coal mining in that family. Not at all. Far from it. These beatings had continued until the boy ran away, uneducated of course, and became the character he subsequently was or was alleged to have been. I do not know. If you want to know of a fairly good boy who died a criminal in the chair owing to conditions over which he had no least control or certainly very little, this was one. If I were Red Brogan and were summoned before the eternal throne—would that there were one—I would show Him the stripes on my back and my neglected brain and ask Him why, if He were God, He had forsaken me.
I have heard my mother tell how she was present at the time this older brother’s body was brought up out of the mine (eight men were killed at the time) and how tragic seemingly was the grief of both Mr. and Mrs. Brogan. Later on, after we left Sullivan, the family became somewhat more prosperous and it is likely that the youngest son was not compelled to work as the others had.