CHAPTER ITHIS FRECKLED WORLD
I straddled, precariously balanced, atop a seven-foot fence marking the northern boundary of the little Vermont school yard. As this was the opening morning for the September term, I had left home painfully dressed in the full armor of country-village scholarship. Already the puckering-string of my blouse was broken and my new dollar-and-a-quarter boots were hot upon my feet. No matter! Noisily on the philosophical old boards I whacked a barrel stave. I had aspirations toward making the lower world of pinafored humanity remark nervously of my valor and horrible propensities for breaking an arm. But I did not address that pinafored world directly. No such aplomb is possessed by a youngster of eight.
A new boy edged his way into the yard twenty minutes before the bell rang and moved along my fence. He concentrated upon tallying its knotholes. I noted that he was a stranger and immediately took his measure.
“’Lo!” I greeted him.
“’Lo, yourself!” he responded.
“What’s yer name?” I demanded, piqued.
“Name, name, Puddin’ Tame; ask me again and I’ll tell yer the same!”
“Aw, don’t get fresh!” I advised him. “I could ‘do’ you with one hand tied behind me—if I wanted.”
“My ma licks me if I fight—when I’m dressed up. If it wasn’t for that, you couldn’t.” And the new boy looked at me gladiatorially, expecting me to believe this bravado without a question.
Incipient hostilities were halted by the appearance—or condition—of the new boy’s face. Twenty-four years have passed since that morning. I have beheld many boys. Yet never since a freshly molded clay Adam was pronounced a reasonably passable job and stood against the nearest rock to dry has one human being looked into the features of another, regardless of age, and beheld such freckles.
I once knew a boy who had thirty-one thousand seven hundred and eighty-four freckles, not counting those behind his ears or a few odd thousand remaining, sprinkled across the back of his neck. The average boy manages to worry along with eighteen or twenty thousand. But the infinity of freckles upon that new boy’s face was beyond all computation. The Lord might have known the number of hairs in his head, but there He stopped. It would have been hopeless even to try to separate those freckles so to compute them, anyhow.
“Aw, you don’t need to tell me your old name,” I condescended. “You’re one o’ them Forges that’s moved up to Brown’s.”
“Howja guess?”
“I know by your freckles. I heard Lawyer Campbell call your folks ‘them freckled Forges.’ Your ma’s got ’em and so’s your pa. You’ve all got ’em—like measles ’n itch.”
Instead of growing more bellicose, the new boy became apologetic.
“Yeah, but they ain’t got so many as me—Ma and Pa ain’t. Anyhow, I can’t help it. I got a torpedoed liver.”
“You gottawhat?”
“A torpedoed liver!”
“What’s a torpedoed liver?”
He tried to explain. In the light of a maturer understanding, I assume he meant a torpid liver. But I was little wiser than he that morning, so one liver was as good as another.
“Year, but they ain’t got so many as me—Ma and Pa leaves. Ma says all us Forges has got too much iron in our blood and it makes us rust all over, outside.”
“Iron in yer blood!” I looked at the Forge boy incredulously. Was he spoofing me?
“Howja know?” I demanded. “Can yer hear it clank together?”
I had a mental suggestion of sundry billets and bars of cold steel, wagon springs, old horseshoes, machine castings circulating through the new boy’s system and wondered how he managed it.
“Naw,” he went on. “’Tain’t that kind of iron. It’s all melted or ground up to powder or sumpin’. I ain’t never heard it make no noise, anyway.”
“Maybe we ain’t got no floatin’ iron in our family,” I defended, “but my Aunt Lucy’s got sumpin’ just as good and horrible. She’s got floatin’ ribs, three of ’em. Betcha you ain’t got nobody in your old family with floatin’ ribs.”
It was now the small Forge boy’s turn to show incredulity. And momentarily I exulted.
“But ribs don’t float,” he contradicted. “They’re hitched to yer backbone and run around yer stomach like hoops. I seen a pitcher of a man with his skin off, once. If they was loose and floated, you’d be all flat and hollow and sort of pushed in across your chest.”
“Is that so?” I demanded hotly. “Maybe you know my Aunt Lucy’s shape better’n me!” This stranger asked me to believe he had iron circulating in his system and yet doubted that mere bones could follow suit.
It was true that Aunt Lucy’s irresponsible ribs had given me much perplexity as to just where they floated, or where they would go if they suddenly lost their buoyancy and sank. Still, I knew my claim had a basis in fact. I had overheard too many first-hand testimonials of her abstruse condition from the fearfully and wonderfully unjointed lady herself.
Before I could conjure up more human freaks, however, related to me by facetious Nature, with a diplomacy which has always been charming, young Nathan Forge introduced a new subject.
“We just moved to Brown’s place last month from Gilberts Mills,” he declared. “And we got five bedrooms and a vegetable cellar and cockroaches an’ everything. An’ I got a dog named Ned that don’t get sick when he catches skunks. He caught seven one autumn and brung ’em to me. But one wasn’t shook quite dead yet, and I had to stay in bed a week while they buried my clothes. Pa wanted to bury me, too, but Ma wouldn’t stand for it!”
“That’s nothin’,” I countered. “We gotta cat at ourhouse named Apron-strings ’cause she’s always behind you when you turn ’round. An’ all you gotta do to make her have kittens iswatch her! My father says, ‘Look twice at that dratted little beast and she has young all over the place’ He’s goin’ to dig a special well to drown ’em in when he gets time. He said so.”
“We got two wells over to our house already,” Nat retorted,—“one to drink from and one to fish things out of. Campbell’s pants is down the last one.”
“Campbell’s pants!”
“My father said so. Lawyer Campbell come over the day we moved in, to see about the hay. He’d bought some new pants to the Center and had ’em in a bundle. On the way home he missed ’em. When Pa heard, he says to Ma: ‘He might look down that well in the south lot! I’ve fished everything out of it but money!’ he says. ‘Bet I could find Campbell’s pants if I fished long enough.’”
Evidently the Forges occupied exceptionally interesting premises. I congratulated myself that I had been discreet about punching Nat’s jaw. I would cultivate this new boy.
Not once during all this, however, had we looked each other straight in the eye. That is another unethical thing between boys of eight. We went through gyrations with hands, legs, elastic torsos. We kicked at stones in the sand. We pried them loose and threw them. But our faces were always averted.
“Got any brothers or sisters?” I finally demanded.
“Yeah. I gotta sister.”
“Pshaw! How old?”
“Four. But she ain’t no good—only to tag ’round and squeal to Ma when I skip my chores.”
“Sure. I know. Girls always spoil everything. Ain’t it awful?”
“Awful’s no name for it,” agreed Nathan.
I learned other things of Nathan regarding his family that morning and in the day and week ensuing.
The Forges had a cow, a grievance against the selectmen, a hard time to get along and a mortgage. Nathan’s motherwas five years older than his father. The latter had once aspired to be a minister. A premature marriage, however, had sent him to the humbler calling of tapping and heeling shoes. Along with farming in a small way to help out with domestic expenses, Johnathan Forge now proposed to cobble shoes at his new residence in East Foxboro.
On his father’s side the boy’s ancestry was English,—that bigoted, Quilpish English which contends that a man’s wife and children are his personal chattels and foot-scrapers. A neurasthenic Yankee wife resented the absurdity but was too weak-charactered to do much more than scream about it. It puzzled me in those days to hear him orate to my father about “every man’s house being his castle.” I could never discern evidences of a “castle” about the flat-roofed, drab-colored, hillside home for which Johnathan had paid the Browns five hundred dollars. Nevertheless, he ran his castle as he pleased, and all the neighbors could do was shrug their individual and collective shoulders and mind their own business.
Johnathan was a short man with watery blue eyes. And his mouth never for a moment failed to register that the world “had it in” for him. His antidote for this mundane conspiracy was Religion. Religion completely strangled his sense of humor—if he ever possessed a sense of humor—and kept it strangled. As his children approached maturity, he went to and fro in the earth and moved up and down in it with a stuffed club in his clothes always loaded to the point of explosion, fearing that some one was treading on his authority. He took his religion seriously, Johnathan did, and it gave him a sickening amount of trouble.
Nathan’s mother also took life and religion seriously. There was no other way to take it, with Johnathan for a husband. As Johnathan aged, he became stout. As Anna Forge aged, she became thin. But as I first recall her in those East Foxboro days, she was a fairly well-rounded woman with terribly work-reddened hands. She too had weak eyes,—greenish, pin-pointed eyes. Her neurasthenia and hard work ultimately “wore the flesh all off her”, and soon she had contracted the nervous affliction of a twitching face. She did her work in the hardest manner possible and was always tired. She had a sallow, jaundiced complexion and it flavored her days and nights.
Nat’s little sister Edith was hardly more than a baby. Yet even at four years she had her father’s petulant mouth and her mother’s whine.
Nathan bore no resemblance to either parent. He was just a freckle-faced, snub-nosed, wonder-eyed, good-natured, little country boy. Quickly I found myself attached to him and he became my chum.
With all due respect to ninety-nine per cent. of that specific sect who are emphatically all that the Forges were not, the latter were Methodists. They were more. The village had it they were “shouting Methodists.”
I knew well enough what a regular Methodist was. My own father and mother were Methodists. But a “shoutin’ Methodist” was a novelty and a mystery. I flew wildly from the Forge shop one Saturday morning when, after watching Johnathan at work on a pair of child’s shoes for a time, I summoned the nerve to ask:
“Say, Mr. Forge, tell me sumpin’, will you? I’m a brother Methodist and all like that, you know, but not a ‘shoutin’ Methodist’, like all the village calls you, and, well, I’d like to know what a ‘shoutin’ Methodist’ is. Would you mind shoutin’ for me a coupla times so’s I can see how you do it—and why?”
Johnathan not only shouted for me but he threw something at me for good measure. I believe it was the nearest old shoe. Both of which had nothing to do with religion. I stopped running only when I had crossed the lower village. I hid the balance of that forenoon under Artemus Wright’s blacksmith shop, lamenting that probably I would never be allowed to play with my chum again.
It was in 1897 that the Forges bought the Brown place. Rumors of war filled the land. If war came, my father was going. My mother cried a lot about it.
The girlish young teacher gave Nat and me opposite aisle seats in school that autumn morning, though quickly Nathan went above me. His grandmother had taught him to read; he was already familiar with Æsop’s “Fables” and Grimm’s “Fairy Tales.”
Late that afternoon, Nat and I walked home together,—down the hill, through East Foxboro village, past the Methodist and Baptist churches, off on the Center road toward Brown’s hill. The distance was only a mile, yet it took us three hours.
Scuffing up the dust, stopping to throw stones at trees or skipping them across the surface of the Causeway—the great sheet of water reaching on both sides of the road just before we started to climb Brown’s hill—day after day during that autumn we covered that distance together.
The Causeway does not look so “great” now. Nathan and I drove over there the other day. The place was only a depressing mud flat, rank with stagnant water, grotesque stumps and tall rushes, where town loafers were trying to hook discouraged hornpout.
But to make slow progress homeward—to our “chores” perhaps, but also to fathers and mothers and faces and scenes which come now only in dreams, scaring out chipmunks, sighting an occasional sand rabbit or woodchuck, sensing the country air sensuous with ripened blackberry, goldenrod, milkweed, or the roadside pines in Hadley’s pasture—for that privilege again, dear God, Nathan and I would give of our lives many years!
For this is the first sorrow in the heart of a man, that he should have known boyhood and never been able to appreciate its heritage until the clocks of time are all run down and the chambers of his heart are peopled with ghosts!
In February of the year following, theMainewas mined in Havana harbor. I remember my father coming home through a storm of raw, wet sleet and leaving his horse unharnessed while he entered the kitchen to read the headlines of the Boston paper to my mother. In great block letters on the front page was the grim word—“WAR!”
Neighbors came in after supper. Opinion had it that fighting would follow at once. They conversed as though death were in the house. While they talked, I tried to listen. I fell asleep under the sofa, and when I awoke I was in bed with mother.
I could not understand why she hugged me to her heart so fiercely and sobbed in the winter darkness.
Spring came quickly after that. It seems only yesterday that Nat and I attended the “flag-raisings” and public gatherings down on the village Common, with the boys in blue getting ready for Chickamauga. I can hear again the martial band music; I can see the flash of the drillmaster’s sword and hear the thumps of the rifle butts in the open door of the town engine house where “Captain” Jack Halloway was drilling the Foxboro boys. I watched them with throttled heart and dry, hot throat.
My father was among them!
Never shall I forget that last breakfast at home, how smart he looked in his stiff blue uniform and how heavy his rifle felt when I tried to lift it and point it at a target. I remember too that he and mother avoided each other’s eyes during that breakfast. Mother did not go to the station. She could not trust herself. I tried to see dad as the train pulled out but the crowd engulfed me.
All my life since he has been but a picture in a plush album on the center table in mother’s parlor—an erect little man with a fierce mustache, his slouch hat with crossed-muskets showing plainly.
Nathan’s father did not go to war. He said war “stood condemned by Religion.” He quit cobbling to move down to the Center and open a store.
Micah Baker’s eldest son Sela came home on a furlough the following autumn. I remember his rumpled soldiering clothes, the rakish angle of his hat, how he stood with his back to the kitchen range, warming himself. He had been ill with fever and wore an overcoat, roughly tied at the neck with a piece of rope. My mother’s face was ashen as she waited for him to speak. As he was about to leave, he remarked quietly:
“Herb wanted I should tell you his last thoughts was of you and the boy. And ... he didn’t suffer no more’n could be expected. He said especially to tell the boy his dad’s sorry he can’t be on hand to help him as he grows to manhood.”
That summer we sold the farm, mother being unable to work it with father never coming back. We also moved down to the Center. Mother happened to get a house nearthe Forges. So Nathan and I set our little feet upon the long journey that begins in vales of opal mystery and the wondertime of early childhood, winds pathetically through twenty years of fog while growing boys are groping to find themselves and hew their niche and accomplish their task, ... knows perhaps a few golden hours of life’s philosophic, sunlit afternoon, then ends in an afterglow of still greater mystery out behind the farthest star.