CHAPTER IIIMORE PARENTS
Over the meadows and far away in the dreamy hush of summer days; lying amid scented haycocks and watching the castling clouds drift away like floating fairy isles in a sea of turquoise; listening to the church bells of a quiet Sunday morning; hearing the clear, distant note of a trombone across the valley from some farmhouse in the afterglow; watching the log sleds toil up the hill past our homes into the cold, carmine glory of winter sunsets. Boyhood’s Memory Book is an anthology of little things—sweet, sad, haunting, all vital, ever poignant with heart-hunger—calling us back to live in their atmosphere again, if only for a single blessed day.
Somehow Nat and I fail to remember the ending of the Spanish war as we recall the beginning. Occasionally we would be loitering about the station when trains pulled in and sun-bronzed men in rumpled blue would swing off in pairs, with blanket rolls around their bodies, thump their rifles down in the corner of the nearest lunchroom and appear too ravenously hungry even to flirt with the girl who presided behind the sandwiches and wedges of leathery pie beneath glass globes.
The war did not stop. It petered out. I will not say I did not cry many times in the night when my mother cried, because both of us missed father. But the war was not for Nathan and me,—not for our generation to bear.Ourwar was coming later. We found food of some kind available when we hungered and boys are not epicures. So long as that food was forthcoming, and we had a place to sleep at night, wars or endings of wars affected us not We were too occupied with things that were close to us and close to the soil.
One afternoon in the spring of 1917, before we went to war, Nathan and I were walking together when we came upon a crowd of deadly serious youngsters playing in a vacant lot. One boy, tied securely, was arousing the neighborhood with his shrieking.
“We’re playin’ he’s a German interned for perdition,” one of the lads explained.
“Perdition?” exclaimed Nathan.
“Yeah! Oratin’ against the government and tryin’ to stop the war fer them that wanner fight. Intern fer perdition, doncher understand? Interned for perdition!”
“Kids don’t change much, Bill,” commented Nat, with a sad smile, as we resumed our way. “Remember the day we played ‘Hang the Spy’ and almost succeeded?”
“I remember it, Nat,” I said. “But not because it has anything to do with the sameness of boyhood in different generations. I remember it for what happened to you afterward—what you got for it.”
Nathan sighed. We paced a long way in silence. It was not hard to recall the rear-tragic events of that afternoon and their aftermath.
We caught Nathan duly as the Castilian spy, and made him “surrender his papers.” A court-martial passed fatal judgment upon him. He was led out beneath one of the trees in Mrs. Fairbank’s orchard and ordered to mount “the scaffold”, a dilapidated barrel. Around a high limb I succeeded in tying one end of a rope. It had a slip noose at its dangling end about eight feet from the ground. After much perspiration I got this noose over Nathan’s head.
“There’s too much slack in it,” the condemned man suggested, anxious that there should be no bungle in the ceremony to spoil the grandeur. “When I’m hung, my feet’ll touch the ground and then I won’t be! You better slip it further down, Billy—under my arms or round my waist.”
Rather than reclimb the tree and retie the rope, I conceded.
A little French boy named Beauchamp was commissioned to kick away the barrel and “send the miserable felon tothe wrath of a jealous God.” We had somewhere heard it phrased so.
Rolland Beauchamp played his part perfectly. In fact, the whole execution was a bit too perfect. On a frenzied run our mothers started for that orchard when from under the biggest, highest tree began the wildest and most horrible howling that ever disturbed the quiet of pastoral Vermont.
The spy, on being hung, had thought better of his fate. It wasn’t a bit of fun to be hung. Yet one could not altogether blame him. Never was a spy hung as our spy was hung.
I had slipped the noose too far down Nathan’s body. When the barrel went out, the upper half of his torso outweighed his legs. He was whipped upside down in a twinkling and hung there ignominiously, kicking wildly ’twixt terra firma and the stars.
This in itself wouldn’t have been so distressing if he had not been suspended in a slipnoose. The more he kicked and bellowed the sharper it tightened.
“We tried to hang him!” cried the terrified little French boy.
“Tried!” wailed a wrathful mother when she beheld her offspring suspended upside down, just out of reach.
“We could get him down with a ladder, if we only had one!” volunteered the small Mayo boy who had been responsible for all this brilliant business. “Mr. Simpson’s got one, a mile down the river. I tell you what!” he suggested enthusiastically to Mrs. Forge, “you come and ask my mother if I can hitch up our horse and I’ll go after it! I could make it in less’n an hour an’ not half try!”
“And leave this boy to be squeezed to death? I never saw a Mayo around Foxboro yet that wasn’t a fool!” Mrs. Forge wrung her hands. “Oh, oh, oh! Somebody’s got to climb that tree and cut this boy down and do it quickly, or he’ll die o’ pinched vitals! Oh! oh! oh!”
“But if he’s cut down sudden, he’ll land on his head and break his neck,” groaned Mrs. Harper. “Why on earth should they hang him upside down?”
Nat’s unpremeditated inversion had complicated matters. And all this time the spy was kicking and struggling and bellowing until it was a mystery why he wasn’t heard down in the business part of the town. Moreover, the prospectswere that if he were left there much longer, any attempts to cut him down would be superfluous; he was coming down himself—in halves!
But the Providence that looks after children, drunken men and fools was proverbially kind that afternoon. It sent old Amos Winch riding past atop a load of oats. Amos took note of a kicking, shrieking boy suspended from an apple bough above a group of distraught women and children and came down through that orchard in jumps. As he ran, he unclasped a big pocketknife. Out on the limb, he wound a taut rope twice about his mighty hand. Then he hacked and cut above it. Hand over hand he hauled the little Forge boy up, caught him firmly by the collar and straightened him out.
Immediately that he was down and manifestly unhurt, Mrs. Forge walked over to a lower apple bough and pulled off a “sucker.” She stripped the switch clean of leaves and grasped her youngster firmly by the collar.
“But Ma!—I didn’t mean to do it! Please, Ma, don’t whip me. I didn’t mean to do it!”
“I suppose you got hung upside down like that accidentally.”
“We was only just playing ‘Hang the Spy’!”
“And scaring your good, dear mother in consequence so she’s nearly a nervous wreck. I’m going to see you remember never to do such a thing again.”
“Anna!” interposed my mother, “don’t be a fool!”
“You keep out of this!” snapped Mrs. Forge. “I can run my own young ones without assistance from the neighbors.”
And there, before that distressed audience, Nathan “got it good.”
I have not narrated this episode especially to excoriate Anna Forge. I mention it because—horror of horrors!—among the teams to be blocked in the road by Amos Winch’s cart was the neat piano-box buggy and mare of Caleb Gridley. The Duchess was out for a drive with the Dresden Doll.
Nathan knew that the princess of his dreams was beholdinghim “catching it.” And the welts of that switch did not manufacture half as much pain as the hurts which resulted to his dignity. For a boy has dignity. It is usually a hard, honest, legitimate dignity in sharp contrast to mere self-elation too often masquerading under that name among older people. And that boyish dignity is a heritage. In after years it is the genesis of that invaluable attribute, Self-respect.
The hanging episode was scarcely history before Nat and I got into another scrape, illustrating the brilliant Forge method of shaping childhood.
The execution of martial enemies being a bit too strenuous, the fertile little Mayo boy hit on “Slave in the Dismal Swamp.” He assured all witnesses that it was capital sport playing “Slave in the Dismal Swamp.”
In all our town, however, there was no colored boy, let alone a small colored boy, available as the slave to escape and be hunted. But that did not hamper the Mayo boy’s ingenuity.
“One of us can black himself and be the slave,” he suggested.
“What with?” I demanded. “Ma won’t let us have any matches to burn cork. Besides, we couldn’t get cork enough anyhow.”
“I know what’s good and black that we can get a lot of,” Benny Mayo promised. “You all come with me and I’ll show you.”
He led us down behind the Mayo barn. Several old carts, hayracks and farm implements were stored there.
“Now then, Nathan, you take off all your clothes and we’ll black you,” Benny directed. “This ain’t goin’ to hurt you. How can it?”
“I won’t do it unless Billy will!” Nathan objected stoutly.
I submitted.
We disrobed,au naturel. The little Mayo boy and the others set to work on us.
From the inside of the wagon hubs was scooped the blackest, deadliest grease the malignity of man has everinvented. The axles of the vehicles, especially one old dump cart, were rich with it.
Over the sunburned pelts of our little bodies the stuff was smeared in handfuls. It smelled frightfully but we remembered how it must feel to be a real slave, and stood it as stoically as possible.
From head to foot we were covered with the green-black “goo.” Our handlers took especial care to rub it well into our hair and ears. When that smearing “was called a job”, we were Africans with a vengeance. And the odor shrieked to heaven.
“But we can’t put on our clothes with this stuff all over us!” wailed Nat suddenly.
“Slaves in a dismal swamp don’t need no clothes,” the Mayo boy contended. “Start off just like you are and it’ll make it harder to hunt you.”
“But somebody might see us without any clothes and arrest us!”
“That’s why it’s goin’ to make it harder to hunt you; you’ll keep out of sight better without clothes.”
The dismal swamp was a cat-tail bog over on the Hastings farm. Thither by back lanes we were escorted, the “ferocious bloodhounds” being the Mayo boy’s sky terrier, Pink, and Nat’s shepherd dog, Ned, with the aforesaid immunity from the depredations of skunks.
Nat and I were turned loose like two justly celebrated gold-dust twins, minus all concessions to civilization. And in the next two hours we became relieved that there had been an Emancipation Proclamation.
As the afternoon waned, the mosquitoes were bad enough. But Nat’s little sister, Edith, had beheld our “making-up” from afar, and about the time we entered the Dismal Swamp, she reached our mothers and told her story. Two highly exasperated, grim-lipped women ultimately joined the “bloodhounds” and outdid them. For our mothers found us and the dogs did not.
Splashed with mud and slime on top of our coating of axle grease, scratched by brambles and bruised by limbs of dead trees which protruded from the most unexpected places, the slaves in the dismal swamp finally found a soft spot to sit down and weep with a great lamentation. We had a disturbing hunch from our experience in the bogwater that our Ethiopian camouflage was not going to be removed with any such dexterity as the Mayo boy had assured us so glibly.
The posse finally surrounded us. There was no escaping through that cordon. Our mothers’ skirts were bedraggled.
Their shoes squeegeed water at every step. But they bagged us. And the expression on their faces when they held us at arm’s length was sickening. Somehow we felt that again the Mayo boy had “spoofed” us. The Mayo boy was not among those present when we were taken into custody, by the way.
“We’re slaves in a Dismal Swamp,” explained Nathan, when his mother had firmly entwined her fingers around a slippery ear.
“Well, in mighty short order you’re going to be two sorrowful boys in a darned dismal wash-dish!” prophesied that wrathful lady. And she looked at my mother, not knowing whether to laugh or to cry.
“Anna,” gasped my horrified mother, “—suppose—suppose—it won’t wash off!”
“Then I’ll set fire to my young one and burn it off!” avowed Mrs. Forge grimly. Whereupon Nathan began caterwauling and his asseverations that he didn’t mean to do it became as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals.
Through the ups and downs of thirty years I have made many strange journeys over many rough pathways. Not one of them has equaled the awfulness of traversing those two miles of oozy bog that summer afternoon, dragged wrathfully by a grim woman whose concentration was glued on the impending ordeal of separating me from that unspeakable coating of slime and grease.
“When I catch that Mayo young one,” announced my mother, “I’ll skin him alive!”
“Amen!” affirmed Anna Forge. She gave Nathan a yank that pulled him over a boghole as though he were greased. Which he was. Greased thoroughly, adequately, irrevocably.
We got as far as the Forge homestead, and my mother decided to stop there and cleanse her offspring in company with her neighbor, rather to lighten the labor—to say nothing of the color of her boy—by sharing it.
They tried rain water and they tried soap. They tried cold water and they tried hot. None of it made any more impression than as if they’d been trying to wash a duck. They tried scraping it off with a paddle, as one scrapes butter from a slice of bread. In certain localities this last went so far as to disclose that deep down under the mass we were young humans of the Aryan persuasion. In our babyhood we might even have been pink. But at present we were anything but pink. We were a sort of blue-mauve-green.
“My God!” cried the nearly hysterical Mrs. Forge. “There’s going to be no getting this off successfully short of boiling ’em!” Thereat, the woman’s neurasthenia got the better of her and she wept.
“Anna, stop your blubbering! I’m going to try kerosene,” my mother announced. “Billy may go round the rest of his life smelling like the dirty end of a grocery store, but I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing I ‘seen my duty and I done it.’” And she whacked a little French boy for meddling with her washcloths.
The two women pooled all the kerosene they could find in the neighborhood. It wasn’t the fairly cleanly product that may be purchased in 1921. It is debatable which was rankest in taste, feeling or smell—that yellowish coal oil or the devilish massage-muck which now ran down our shivering bodies in streaks. Filling a tub with it, mother started in, determined, like Grant, to fight it out along that line if it took all summer. The prospects were that it would take all summer.
I forget in how many “waters” of oil, hot steam and soapsuds they washed us. Somewhere around thirty-seven. There is no reason to doubt the figure. So much concentrated washing had never happened to either of us before. Thank God, it has never been needed since.
Nat and I were two sick boys—physically as well as spiritually—long before those ablutions were completed. A sizable number of persons of color, sold into servitude, have undoubtedly been lost in swamps. But Nathan Forge and his biographer were the first in history who were captured, dragged out and washed in thirty-seven “waters” before being slated for additional chastisement.
Vividly I recollect little Nathan’s plaintive plea at aboutthe thirty-fifth “water”, when he gradually began to exhibit evidences of Caucasian extraction.
“Ma, are you goin’ to lick me?” he demanded, gazing timorously up into his mother’s twitching countenance. It was the fearful, pitiful interrogatory of a naked, shivering, thoroughly chastened little boy who had taken the word of a fellow man at its face value and discovered, like the psalmist of old, that all men are liars.
“I’m too done up to lick you! I’m going to let your father lick you!” his mother assured him.
“Anna Forge, are you crazy?” my mother exploded.
“No, but I’m going to see that some discretion is put in his make-up if I have to brand it in with an iron!”
“You may brand in more than discretion, Anna.”
“I’ll take my chances!”
I was sobbing—mainly for Nathan’s sake—when my mother led me home. She wrapped my red, flaccid little body in warm flannels and put me to bed. I heard no censure for my part in the day’s foolishness. Only she said wearily before she took out the light:
“Please, laddie, never play ‘Slave in the Dismal Swamp’ again. You see what mother had to do, how tired she is?”
“Yes, Ma!”
“Then always remember, when a fellow does something wrong—sooner or later—somehow or other—it’s his mother that pays the price.”
I could not see her haggard face for my tears.
She laughed,—a queer, tired, tender laugh. Then she kissed me again and was gone. My grief was mercifully merged in slumber.
It was a week before Nathan left his bed. His father threw an ax handle at me when I went around to the rear of the Forge premises to see if Nathan could come out to play.
I think Johnathan was a bit ashamed of himself and likewise afraid. He took this gentle method of suggestingthat the neighbors, particularly the neighbors’ offspring, keep out of his family affairs. Because Nathan had dropped unconscious during his subsequent chastisement and remained unconscious all night. Next day a doctor was summoned. The doctor was told that Nathan must have eaten something which had failed to agree with him.
I finally figured out, in a boyish way, what was amiss in Nathan’s relation to his parents, particularly his father.
Obedience, to Johnathan, consisted in a child instinctively knowing beforehand the thing to which the parental mind objected and avoiding consummation of that thing like a pestilence. Then, too, floggings and thrashings were uniformly good for a youngster. They gave him character and made him love and respect his dear parents when he had grown to manhood and looked back on what an exasperating little devil he had been and how much he had “tried” those who had done the most for him.