CHAPTER VIMPRESSIONS
Looking back on those days in Foxboro Center now, Nathan and I think of them as Nuggets of Time from the Golden Mine of Boyhood, unalloyed. I would like to transcribe whole pages from the Memory Book, all of which has contributed to the great mass of experience influencing the most vital parts of our lives. Yet the subject matter is too trivial and the type too fine to ask a busy world to read.
There are no woods now like those Nathan and I explored in those days. There are no valleys so peaceful, no afternoons so long, no twilights so soft, no stars so high.
Thrushes and peewees sang in the leafy silences of those woodlands. Cloistered glades would be suddenly desecrated by the shrill screeches of jays. Brooks babbled unexpectedly across marshy pathways, to be forded on mossy stones. Jack-in-the-Pulpits and Lady’s Slippers grew among the smooth brown needles of hemlock-roofed hillsides. Occasionally, when lying in the forest quiet, we would hear the tread of a lone partridge on last autumn’s brittle leaves as sharp and loud as the tread of a man.
But alas and alack! Nathan’s little sister often “tagged after us,” demanding petulantly to be helped over stone walls, around bramble patches and across ditches, getting her feet wet in bogs and squealing hideously if we traveled too fast or gave the slightest indication of abandoning her to forest terrors.
There is only one thing more tragic to a small boy than having a little sister to bother him. That is having an elder sister to “boss” him.
There were rainy days, too, when we explored old attics, playing among heirlooms and relics that to-day would beworth much money. There were days when we invented weird pastimes in the fantastic nooks, crannies and haylofts of two fragrant country barns.
Sometimes in the spring, when the winter is breaking up and the soil is coming through in patches, sweet and wet, I catch a breath of fragrance from those Foxboro play-times. I smell again the clear, cool, pungent dampness of woodland ravines where we poked noisy leaves aside to find the first mayflowers. The odor of summer pastures in the sunset comes to me and the sweet scent of ripening huckleberries, briarbloom and fern. Autumn brings its scents and odors, too—crimson sumach and bursting milkweed; the acrid sweetness of loaded apple trees with windfallen fruit knobbing the ground beneath; old goldenrod; the sharp nip of frost-bitten air blowing fitfully across the hills on afternoons when the earth shivered in the nakedness of fall and the sky was a museum of cloud. Then winter came with gray days—soft-muffled, snow-heavy—moist mornings, dripping noons, melancholy twilights when even the carmine of the sinking sun was freezing cold; then the piercing stab of blue crystal nights when the stars were very high and the panes of windows in empty rooms were weirdly padded with frost.
Who can fathom the heart of a boy? I recall these items especially here, because there were times when I would find my friend indisposed to play. Often in these seasons and settings, he would stop and grow strangely silent. “It’s so pretty, Billy, it hurts,” he would tell me. “It makes me—afraid!”
One summer evening we sat on the Forge front steps under the stars. The crickets were cheeping about us. Now and then we saw ghostly petals of syringa blossoms flutter down in the shadows beneath, the world voluptuous with summer scents about us.
“I feel as if I’d like to write and tell somebody all about it, Billy,” he said to me.
“Tell ’em what?”
“How it hurts!”
“How what hurts?”
“Oh—the world—and starry nights—just livin’ in it all. It’s holy somehow—like church.”
Faint piano music floated up the valley. Somewhere belowa sweet soprano voice was singing “The Blue and the Gray.”
I choose to think of that night as the first time the poet-soul of my friend was disclosed to me. Yet I would have pooh-poohed poetry—then. It was stagy stuff to be recited hectically in school on Friday afternoons, beginning, “I am dying, Egypt, dying!” and the demise complete before a dozen lines had been rendered.
“Billy, do you s’pose all men when they was boys felt like you and me?”
“Aw, I guess so.”
“Wish I knew for sure, Billy.”
“What for?”
“I dunno. Maybe it’d make things easier to stand.”
As Nathan’s sister Edith grew older, her petulancy of mouth became more pronounced. Like most small sisters her recreational specialty was ferreting out breaches of deportment on the part of us boys and carrying dirty little tales to our parents. Johnathan and his wife indirectly encouraged this sort of thing. They thought it “cute.”
One afternoon Edith broke a barn window. She declared at once that Nathan did it. The brother’s protestations of innocence availed him nothing. He was punished on Edith’s unconfirmed say-so. Thereupon Edith discovered she held a power over Nathan. She could blackmail him into doing almost anything whim dictated by committing petty damage herself and accusing the boy as the miscreant.
This went on for the better part of the autumn. Finally Edith overdid it. One evening she accused Nathan of having let the horse out of the boxstall. She swore she saw him. She gave a convincing and vivid account as an eye-witness. Only it happened Nathan had been with his father down in the village all the afternoon, unknown to Edith.
Caught in a bald-faced lie, Edith snickered. Then she slapped her brother’s face as being somehow responsible.
Edith was not chastised for falsehood, but Nathan got his ears boxed soundly for “daring to lay a finger on his little sister” when he defended himself.
In fact, Mrs. Forge thought the escape of the horse and Edith’s discomfiture a rather good joke. If there was wrong in it, Edith would “grow out of it.” Of course! She was a girl!
That night Mrs. Forge read Nathan a homily on chivalry. There were many things boys could not do without punishment that were perfectly permissible for little girls.
Johnathan Forge “failed” at his store in the Center, as he appeared to fail at everything everywhere. He became convinced he “could do better in a larger place.” Thus came a certain day when Nathan raced up to my house bursting with excitement.
“We’re going to move to Paris! We’re going to move to Paris!” he cried. “Dad’s got a job in the newspaper office and we’re going as soon’s we can pack our things.”
Going to Paris, Vermont, at that age, was like going to Paris, France, in these later years. It was not something to be negotiated. It was something to be attained.
The day the family left town I hung about the Forge house all the forenoon, divided between doing the work of two men gratis, or getting in the way so skillfully that Johnathan Forge was moved to profanity. But the goods were loaded at last and after dinner Nat came over in his “best clothes” to bid me good-by.
We spoke as two who are going different ways into far countries. We made light of the situation and the play-times we had enjoyed together, though God knows the tears were close to our eyelids.
“I left a swell pair of baby-carriage wheels up in the wigwam in the woods. But you can have ’em for a peach of a cart,” he said generously. A pair of “swell baby-carriage wheels” was a treasure beyond price among boys in those days. Yet I was thinking with an awful heart-pinch that Nathan and I would never play in that wigwam of leaves and brush again.
“I suppose you’ll always stay here in Foxboro,” he went on, with the condescension of the city mouse for the country cousin. “But if you ever come to Paris, I’ll expect you tovisit me. I’ll probably always live in Paris. It’s a big place. There’s more advantages and op-op-opportunities.”
We spoke stiffly and indifferently as the parting grew nearer.
“Well, guess I’ll have to be going,” he said. “Good-by.”
“Good-by,” I said. “Maybe some day when we grow up we’ll meet again.”
“Yes, good-by.”
“Good-by.”
John Forge was driving his family over the road in a democrat wagon. I came to the gate to wave to them as they passed down the road and around the turn. Then the vehicle turned the corner and the road was empty.
The road? The world was empty. For the first time in my life I knew loneliness—horrible, unbearable, numbing loneliness—worse than the loss of my father!
My mother came up to put me to bed that night. She understood my tight silence. I was trying hard to keep my nerve, but the thought of coming days, weeks, months, years without Nat was dawning upon me in all its hideous emptiness.
That night I was very glad I had a mother and that she was not twitching-faced and pin-pointed of eye like Nathan’s.