CHAPTER XLIBILL ARNOLD AND HIS BROOD
West of Warsaw about twelve miles lies the town of Silver Lake, on a small picturesque lake of the same name—a place to which, during our residence at Warsaw, Ed and I more than once repaired to visit a ne’er-do-well uncle and his wife, the latter my mother’s half sister. This family was so peculiar and so indifferent to all worldly success and precedence, so utterly trifling and useless, that I am tempted to tell about them even though they do not properly belong in this narrative. William or “Bill” Arnold, as he was called locally, was really the cause of it all. He was the father, but little more than a country wastrel. He had a fiddle on which he could play a little. He had a slightly cocked eye and a nasal voice, high and thin. He had no more education than a squirrel and no more care for things of place and position than any rabbit or woodchuck. His wife, a kindly, inarticulate and meditative woman, who looked like my mother, was all out of sorts and down at heels in soul and body because of his indifference to all things material or spiritual. They lived in an old tumble-down, paintless house, the roof of which leaked and the eaves sagged, and here, and in other houses like it, no doubt, they had had four children, one of whom, the eldest, became a thief (but a very clever one, I have heard); the second a railroad brakeman; the third the wife of an idle country loafer as worthless as her father; the fourth, a hunchbacked boy, was to me, at least, a veritable sprite of iniquity, thinking up small deviltries the whole day long. He was fond of fighting with his sister and parents, shouting vile names when angry, and so conducting himself generally that he was an object almost of loathing to such of our family as knew him.
Their home was a delightful place for me to come to, so fresh, so new, so natural—not at all like our ordered home. I felt as though I were housed with a kind of genial wild animal—a fox or prairie dog or squirrel or coyote. Old Arnold had no more morals than a fox or squirrel. He never bathed. He would get up in the morning and feed his pigs and two horses, the only animals he owned—and then, if the weather was suitable and he had no absolutely compelling work to do, he would hunt rabbits (in winter) or squirrel or “patridges,” or go fishing, or go down to the saloon to fiddle and sing or to a dance. He was always driving off to some dance where he earned a few cents as a fiddler (it was his great excuse), and then coming home at two or three in the morning, slightly tipsy and genial, to relate his experiences to anyone who would listen. He was not afraid of his wife or children exactly, and yet he was not the master of them either, and it used to scandalize me to have him called a loafer and an “old fool,” not by her so much as by them. My own father was so strict, so industrious, so moral, that I could scarcely believe my ears.
I used to love to walk west from Warsaw on a fine summer’s day, when my mother would permit me, and visit them—walk the whole twelve miles. Once she empowered me to negotiate for a cow which this family owned and for which we paid twentyfive dollars. Ed and I drove the cow up from Silver Lake. Another time we bought three (or four) pigs, and drove them (Ed and I) the whole twelve miles on a hot July day. Great heavens! What a time we had to get them to come along straight! They ran into bogs and woods—wherever there was a fence down—and we had to chase them until they fell exhausted—too far gone to run us farther. Once they invaded a tangled, low growing swamp, to wallow in the muck, and we had to get down on our hands and knees—our bellies actually—to see where they had gone. We were not wearing shoes and stockings; but we took off our trousers, hung them over our arms,and went in after them. If we didn’t beat those pigs when we got near enough! Say! We chased them for nearly a mile to exhaust and punish them, and then we switched them along the rest of the way to “get even.”
I remember one hot July afternoon, when I was visiting here, how my Aunt Susan read my fortune in the grounds of a coffee cup. It was after a one o’clock farmhand dinner. Uncle Bill and one or two of the other children had come and gone. I was alone with her, and we sat in the shade of an east porch, comfortable in the afternoon. I can see the wall of trees over the way, even yet, the bees buzzing about an adjacent trumpet vine, the grass hot and dry but oh! so summery.
“Now, let’s see what it says about you in your cup,” and she took it and turned it round and round, upside down three times. Then she looked into it meditatively and after a while began: “Oh, I see cities, cities, cities, and great crowds, and bridges, and chimneys. You are going to travel a long way—all over the world, perhaps. And there are girls in your cup! I see their faces.” (I thrilled at that.) “You won’t stay here long. You’ll be going soon, out into the world. Do you want to travel?” she asked.
“Yes, indeed I do,” I replied.
“Well, you will. It’s all here.”
Her face was so grave! She looked like one of the three fates, so old, so wrinkled, so distant.
I thought nothing of her at the time, but only of myself. How beautiful would be that outside world! And I would be going to it soon! Walking up and down in it! Oh, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful!
When we were traveling toward Warsaw it had been my idea that we would visit Silver Lake and if I could find nothing more I could at least look at that body of water and the fields that surrounded it and the streets with which I had been fairly familiar. The lake had seemed such a glorious thing to me in those days. It was so sylvan and silent. A high growth of trees surroundedit like a wall. Its waters reflected in turn blue, grey, green, black. It was so still within its wall of trees that our voices echoed hollowly. A fish leaping out of the water could be heard, and the echo of the splash. Often I sat here gazing at the blue sky and the trees, and waiting for a small red and green cork on my line to bob.
But my aunt and my uncle were long since dead, I knew. The children had gone—where? There was probably no least trace of them anywhere here, and I was in no mood to hunt them down. Still, in coming West, I had the desire to come here, to look, to stand in some one of these old places and recover if I might a boyhood mood.
Now, as we were leaving Warsaw, however, I was too physically tired and too spiritually distrait to be very much interested. My old home town had done for me completely—the shadows of older days. For one thing, I had a splitting headache, which I was carefully concealing, and a fine young heartache into the bargain. I was dreadfully depressed and gloomy.
But it was a fine warm night, with a splendid half moon in the sky and delicious wood and field fragrances about. Such odors! Is there anything more moving than the odors, the suspirings of the good earth, in summer?
As we neared Silver Lake (as I thought) we ran down into a valley where a small rivulet made its way and under the darkling trees we encountered a homing woman, coming from a milking shed which was close to the stream. Five children were with her, the oldest boy packing the youngest, an infant of two or three years. It reminded me of all the country families I had known in my time—a typical mid-Western and American procession. The mother, a not unprepossessing woman of forty, was clothed in a shapeless grey calico print with a sunbonnet to match, and without shoes. The children were all barefooted and ragged but as brown and healthy and fresh looking as young animals should be. It sochanced that Speed had to do something here—look after the light or supply the motor with a cooling draught—and so we paused, and the children gathered around us, intensely curious.
Central Indian: A Farm and SiloCENTRAL INDIANAA Farm and Silo
CENTRAL INDIANAA Farm and Silo
CENTRAL INDIANAA Farm and Silo
“Gee, ain’t it a big one!” exclaimed the eldest. “Look at the silver.”
He was descanting on the lamp.
“I’ll bet it ain’t no bigger than that jackdigger that went through here yesterday,” observed the second eldest boastfully.
“What’s a jackdigger?” I inquired helplessly.
“Oh, it’s a car,” replied the eldest, one of the handsomest boys one would want to look at—beautiful, really—all the more so because of his torn shirt and trousers and his bare feet and head.
“Yes, but what kind of car? What make?”
“Oh, I can’t think. We see ’em around here now and then—great big fellers.”
And now the next to the youngest, a boy of five or six, had come alongside where I was sitting and was looking up at me—a fat little cherub in panties so small you could have made them out of a good sized handkerchief.
“There you are,” I said to him helpfully. “Won’t you come up and sit with me here—such a nice big boy as you are?”
He shook his head and backed away a little.
“Huhuh,” he said, after a pause.
“Why not?” I queried, a little yearningly, for I wanted him to come and sit with me.
“I can’t,” he replied, eyeing me solemnly. “I’m 'fraid.”
“Oh, no,” I said, “not afraid of me, surely? Don’t you know that no one would think of hurting a little boy like you—not a person in all the world? Won’t you come now and sit with me? It’s so nice up here.”
I held out my arms.
“I’m ’fraid,” he repeated.
“Oh, no,” I insisted. “You mustn’t say that, not of me? You couldn’t be. Can’t you see how much I likeyou? See here”—and I reached into my pocket—"I have pennies and picturecards and I don’t know what all. Won’t you come now? Please do."
“Go on, Charlie,” called a brother. “Whatcha ’fraid of? Go on.” This brother came around then and tried to persuade him.
All the while he was staring at me doubtfully, his eyes getting very round, but finally he ventured a step forward, and I picked him up and snuggled him in my arms.
“There, now,” I said. “Now, you see? You’re not afraid of me, are you? Up here in the nice, big car? And now here’s your other brother come to sit beside us”—(this because the next oldest had clambered in)—"and here’s a nickel and here’s a picturecard and——"
“Who’s ’fraid!” he crowed, sitting up in my lap. “I ain’t ’fraid, am I?”
“Indeed not,” I returned. “Big boys like you are not afraid of anything. And now here’s a fine big nickel”—I went on because he had ignored the previous offer. “And here’s a card. Isn’t that nice?”
“Huhuh,” he replied.
“You mean you don’t like it—don’t want it?”
“Huhuh,” he repeated.
“And why not?”
“My mother won’t let me.”
“Your mother won’t let you take any money?”
“Huhuh.”
“Is that right?” I asked of the eldest boy, rather taken aback by the morals of this group—they were so orderly and sweet.
“That’s right,” he replied, “she won’t let us.”
“Well, now, I wouldn’t have you do anything to displease mother—not for worlds—but I’m sorry just the same,” observing her in the distance. She was bending over several full milk pails. Even as I looked she picked them up and came trudging toward us.
“Well, anyhow, you can take a card, can’t you?” Icontinued, and I gave each several pictures of Warsaw scenes. “They won’t hurt, will they?”
“Huhuh,” answered the little one, taking them.
As the mother neared us I suffered a keen recrudescence of the mood that used to grip me when my mother would go out of an evening like this to milk or walk about the garden or look after the roses at Sullivan, and Ed and Tillie and I would follow her. She was so dear and gentle. Under the trees or about our lawn we would follow her, and here under these odorous trees, in the light of this clear moon, the smell of cattle and wild flowers about, my mother came back and took me by the hand. I held onto her skirt and rubbed against her legs self protectingly. She was all in all to us in those years—the whole world—my one refuge and strength.
How benign is the power that makes mothers—and mothers' love!
Soon we were off again, speeding under the shade of overhanging trees or out in the open between level fields, and after racing about fourteen miles or thereabouts, we discovered that we were not near Silver Lake any more at all—had passed it by seven miles or so. We were really within six miles of North Manchester, Indiana, a place where a half uncle of mine had once lived, a stingy, greedy, well meaning Baptist, and his wife. He had a very large farm here, one of the best, and was noted for the amount of hay and corn he raised and the fine cattle he kept. My brother Albert, shortly after the family’s fortune had come to its worst smash—far back in 1878—had been sent up here by mother to work and board. She was very distraught at the time—at her wits' ends—and her brood was large. So here he had come, had been reasonably well received by this stern pair and had finally become so much of a favorite that they wanted to adopt him. Incidentally he became very vigorous physically, a perfect little giant, with swelling calves and biceps and a desire to exhibit his strength by lifting everybody and everything—a trait which my sister Tillie soon shamed out of him. When we had finally settled in Sullivan,in 1880, for a year or two he rejoined us and would not return to his foster parents. They begged him but the family atmosphere at Sullivan, restricted and poverty stricken as it was, proved too much for him. He preferred after a time to follow us to Evansville and eventually to Warsaw. Like all the rest of us, he was inoculated with the charm of my mother. No one of us could resist her. She was too wonderful.
And now as we neared this city I was thinking of all this and speculating where Al might be now—I had not heard from him in years—and how my half-uncle had really lived (I had never seen him) and what my mother would think if she could follow this ramble with her eyes. But also my head was feeling as though it might break open and my eyes ached and burned dreadfully. I wanted to go back to Warsaw and stay there for a while—not the new Warsaw as I had just seen it, but the old Warsaw. I wanted to see my mother and Ed and Tillie as we were then, not now, and I couldn’t. We rolled into this other town, which I had never seen before, and having found the one hotel, carried in our bags and engaged our rooms. Outside, katy-dids and other insects were sawing lustily. There was a fine, clean bathroom with hot and cold water at hand, but I was too flat for that. I wished so much that I was younger and not so sick just now. I could think of nothing but to undress and sleep. I wanted to forget as quickly as possible, and while Franklin and Speed sallied forth to find something to eat I slipped between the sheets and tried to rest. In about an hour or less I slept—a deep, dreamless sleep;—and the next morning on opening my eyes I heard a wood dove outside my window and some sparrows and two neighbor women gossiping in good old Indiana style over a back fence, and then I felt more at ease, a little wistful but happy.