CHAPTER XIIIGOD AND THINGS
A favorite retreat for most of the Paris boys in those days was the region known as “down the river.” From the Process Works dam to the mill pond at Hastings Crossing flowed a wide, smooth body of water between indolent, pastoral hills and fern-clogged, wooded shores musty with swamp bog or rotting second-growth.
Often Nathan and I borrowed Pete Collins’ old red scow, let the current carry us dreamily down-stream in the afterglow, to work our way slowly homeward under the stars. The hills, mist-haunted, were exotic in those late evening hours. Trees in the silhouetted woods rose weird against the sky. It was not difficult to imagine ourselves back in Neolithic ages,—those trees rising out of decaying fens, with outlandish shapes wallowing in the bogs along the shore.
They were pleasant, never-to-be-forgotten nights,—those trips down the river. To the dull, rhythmic knock of oars in creaky oarlocks, and the drip of warm water as we disturbed the far-flung expanse of fallen stars, we talked of many things. Our elders might have smiled if they had heard. But then, if our elders could have heard, we would never have given those long, long thoughts expression.
One sultry sunset we had gone down the river and were opposite Haskell’s clearing on our return, when Nathan, who was lying along the boat’s bottom, with arms behind his head, remarked in his slow, meditative way:
“Billy—did you ever wonder about the stars?”
“Not especially. What about the stars?” I asked.
“Did you ever imagine you were God, away above all the suns and worlds, looking down now and then at the earth? It would be an awful small place, the earth now, wouldn’t it?”
“I suppose it would,” I agreed.
The boy was silent for several minutes. Then he continued:
“If some of those stars are suns—like I read in a book a while back—and each sun has its worlds revolving about it too, the earth’s only an awful small speck in a great big space, isn’t it, Billy? It can’t be anything else!”
“Well, and what if it is?”
“If the earth’s only an awful small speck in a great big space, think how much smaller we livin’ people must show up—down here on it. I don’t mean in size, Billy, I mean importance. Well, then, if you were God, away off up in the heavens, what would one little earth like this amount to, anyhow? Still less, what would any one person or persons amount to—you and me, for instance? If you or I wanted to go to the devil, be just as bad as we pleased, do anything we wanted, what really big difference would it make? Do you know, Billy, I don’t believe God gives any single person half so much attention, or cares half so much what becomes of him, as a lot of grown folks try to make out. It’s just conceit. That’s the word, Billy; conceit! Men like my father, for instance! They get the idea that God’s a whole lot like themselves. They think he’s got the time and patience to go sneakin’ around watching for folks doing things they’ve been told not to do. But somehow, when I lie out in a boat like this and think about the stars, I sort of see things different. Myself, for instance. And the minute I go back home and listen to Pa, I get my proportion all twisted. My sins are all big and important again.”
“But the Bible says the hairs of our heads have all got numbers on ’em,” I defended. “And no one goes out and shoots an English sparrow but what God sees it when it starts kicking.”
“I don’t believe it, Billy! Because if God did know the numbers of the hairs on everybody’s heads, what good would it do Him? And what if He does know when some one shoots a few birds? What’s the use of Him losing sleep over tiny, foolish things like those when it’s lots more important to keep that frail, pretty evening star hung up there in space? Seems to me there’s too many folks want to make God a cranky old man, always finding fault with people because they don’t do things His way—or a bookkeeperlike old Joe Nevins at the knitting mills who almost wrecks the place if he finds two cents off in his balance.”
“And what kind of a person do you think God is? You believe there is a God, don’t you?”
“I like to think God would be a kind old man. His eyes would laugh when people take Him so serious, and think He’s as fussy as themselves. And He’d have long white whiskers that it’d be lots of fun to pull—so long as it didn’t hurt Him—much.”
“I’m glad you believe there is a God anyway,” I told Nathan, shocked with thelèse-majesté.
“Oh, I don’t know. I haven’t said I really do yet. Oh, Billy—we don’t know nothing about Him—not a single thing! Then why is it we keep fooling ourselves that we do? Why not be honest and say we don’t? If there is a God, don’t you suppose He’s wise enough and big enough so He knows we don’t know nothing about Him? Why is it such a sin to refuse to take everything on faith, like old Doctor Dodd is always shouting about, on Sundays? We don’t think it’s any terrible crime to ‘want to be shown’ in business or science. Why should it be in religion? If we’re honest and ready to believe the right thing when we’re shown it is the right thing, why shouldn’t that be enough?”
“You can search me!” I answered.
“Well,” continued Nathan, “I don’t know there is a God—and if there is and He’s Pa’s kind of God, I don’t want anything to do with Him. And if He isn’t Pa’s kind of God, then Pa’s all wrong about all the other things. And if Pa’s all wrong in the other things, then he doesn’t know what he’s talking about in the first place and I’m not obliged to believe him in anything. Oh, Billy, I wish I could live in a world that would just be honest! I wish I could live in a world where people were brave enough to come right out and confess they don’t know anything—about God and religion, I mean,—but were willing to be shown.”
“Don’t you believe in the church and the Cross and everything,—and Jesus Christ?”
“I don’t know what I believe,” Nat repeated angrily. “And I don’t believe any one else does, either, if they’d be honest. I’m sick of being ordered to believe things whether I do or not!”
“But if you don’t believe in the church and the Cross and everything, you’ll go to hell. The Bible says so.”
“I don’t believe there is a hell,” snapped Nathan. “Everybody tells us hell’s a place where the wicked burn forever and ever. Who’s the wickedest man in this town?”
“Why, Jake Pumpton over on the East Road, I guess. Or Mr. Gridley, he swears so much!”
“All right! Say any one of them! Now then, you know how hot the furnace fire is at the tannery in the winter? Never mind how rotten and wicked old Pumpton or Gridley are, could you shove ’em into that fire and see ’em writhe and shriek and burn?”
“No!” I protested weakly.
“Then you’re more kind and merciful than God. Yet you’re only human. According to the Bible, God’s worse than you. Because He would! Could you love anybody who’d shove a live man into the tannery furnace? No—of course you couldn’t! And if God does things like that, you couldn’t love Him and neither could I or any one, never mind how much you swore you could—or did! They’re lying when they say so! I’d hate and loathe a God like that—who’d even allow such a place. And I’m not afraid to say so, either. So I don’t believe there’s any hell because the kind of God who made that pretty evening star couldn’t roast folks alive any more than you or I.”
“Well, that takes an awful load off my mind, to know there ain’t a hell,” I declared. “Because there’s lots of things I like about Mr. Pumpton and Mr. Gridley even if they are Lost Souls.”
Suddenly Nat made a gesture of despair:
“Why? Why? Why—are we sent into this world, Billy? When we weren’t asked if we wanted to come into it in the first place, why are we scared and pounded and prohibited and lambasted, day after day and year after year, made to work, or get sick, or get well, or die—and so long as we say things with our mouths—we’ll be saved, and if we’re honest and won’t say ’em, we’ll be sent to roast in everlasting fire. Why is it, Billy? Why is it?”
I couldn’t answer. Of course I couldn’t answer. But I fancy that ghosts of the Pharaohs heard and echoed Nathan’s heart-cry from the night wind. Isaiah and Socrates and Napoleon listened and shook their heads sadly. The saintsand the prophets sighed from the far-flung shadows and the infinite hosts of the dead were in atonement with two little boys blinking at the stars from a river scow in a New England summer night.
On another night Nathan asked:
“Did you ever think about your marriage, Billy, and wonder what day it would come in the future, and where it would happen, and who the girl was to be, and just where she is and what she happens to be doing right this minute?”
“Yes,” I answered. What boy—or girl—has not?”
“A queer feeling comes over me at times, Billy. Somewhere ahead in life it seems I’m standing in a great church with faces as far as I can see. There’s millions of flowers, Billy, and soft autumn light is coming in at a window on the left. The music’s playing so it makes me want to bawl and everything’s wildly beautiful and there’s laughter and love and fragrance all around me. I can see that picture awfully plain at times, Billy. Down the long aisle from the back there’s a woman in white coming toward me—the most beautiful woman in all the world—really beautiful, Billy, not because I’m in love with her and she looks that way to me. That’s my wedding day, Billy—and it’s fine and grand. Do you ever picture yours that way?”
“Somethin’ like it,” I answered. “Only mine’s in a house at night so my w-w-wife and I can sneak off in the dark and not get our hats busted with old shoes. They threw shoes at Matty Henderson’s weddin’ and broke the windows in the hack and the horses ran away and tipped over a banana stand.”
Edith Forge was growing along with Nathan, but saucer-eyed and awkward. At school they nicknamed her “Yard-sticks” and the insinuation made her furious. Nevertheless, despite her ungainliness, she was the worst “boy-struck” girl in town.
The day that she was twelve and Johnathan came upon her giggling with an unknown boy in an empty Sunday-schoolroom, the sex prohibition went promptly into effect for Edith also. But between Nathan and his sister was this difference: a certain sense of self-discipline and proclivity toward law, order and obedience, strong in the boy, was utterly lacking in the girl. She possessed instead a “terrible temper.” She didn’t propose to forego the most interesting subject on earth, Boys, not a little bit. She “had a tantrum” and for the first and only time in her life Johnathan Forge thrashed her. Thereupon—when the neighborhood had been duly edified and quieted—Edith went promptly into illicit alliance with the brother.
“You help me to sneak out and I’ll help you!” she bargained.
In her studies, Edith had the academic mentality of a child of eight. But at thirteen she knew how to dance better than that “questionable” Miss La Mott, the village teacher. And at fourteen Edith was insisting that school would never do her any good anyhow, and she wanted to go to work “sticking eight-point” in the local newspaper office “to buy herself some rags that looked decent.”
Her mother prevailed upon her to stay in school by the compromise of filching money from the father’s trousers after he had retired. They tore holes in the man’s pockets so he would believe he lost the money. The petty loot went to purchase ribbons, waists, high-heeled shoes and two-dollar bouquets from Higgins’s greenhouse for Edith to wear to twenty-five-cent parties.
Early in the girl’s life it was expected that ultimately Edith would “marry money.” That was quite the natural and rational solution for every conjugal and domestic woe; Edith must marry money.
Not that Edith especially merited the good fortune of marrying money. Simply that if Edith were thus clever enough to land a husband of means, the girl’s family might turn parasites and dip their penurious hands into son-in-law’s golden pile.
It is always a daughter or a sister whom a family hold up when it wants funds. Never conceded, yet always recognized, when a boy of means marries a girl without means, he likewise marries her family. What are blood ties for? Why else have we daughters, being poor in purse as well as in spirit?
Of course Edith would have nothing to give such a wealthy husband but her bovine body; the mind of the girl is always a thing passed over. So Edith’s education, begun at twelve by a work-gnarled, disappointed, narrow-visioned mother, had solely to do with making her body attractive and planning what would be done with the Unknown’s cash when it was secured.
Edith “met boys” at school, she “met boys” at church; she also “met boys” on the streets. Half the parents in town at some time or other took note of those clandestine meetings and opined wrathfully, “If that Forge girl was mine, I’d lambaste her good and plenty,” well knowing they would do nothing of the sort. Because under the jurisdiction of other parents, Edith’s sex proclivities would probably have been diverted into normal, healthy channels.
Edith “never did a stroke of work at home.” It was Mrs. Forge’s contention that daughter must be “saved” from it and not get her hands all hard and red or her face lined with premature care, or she wouldn’t be attractive to Money.
So Mrs. Forge “slaved and drudged” and was always too tired at night to go anywhere or do anything but retire into the front room and rock in the dark. Edith, like the Dresden Doll, toiled not, neither did she spin. She fussed and fumed in the morning and was always late to school. She “never ate her meals” properly at noon, and after school she was either off on the edge of town, fire-playing with her latest short-trousered “catch,” or sprawled on the couch devouring Charlotte Braeme, Bertha M. Clay or Laura Jean Libby. At fourteen she knew more than most women know on their wedding night and what she didn’t know she was reasonably willing to learn.
So Edith whiled away the shining hours around the calendar and Johnathan Forge ruled over a painfully moral household.
It is notable, however, that his moral responsibility to God for Edith’s soul didn’t cause him a quarter of the fuss he made over Nathan’s.
Of etiquette in the Forge home or manners at the Forge table there were none. Etiquette was snobbish, “puttingon airs.” “Manners” were something to be displayed largely for the edification of company. The only time the Forges were scrupulously polite in the privacies of the family circle were when they were angry at each other.
Mrs. Forge railed at times about her children eating too fast or fleeing the table without folding their napkins. When they wanted a helping of food, they were supposed to say “Please” and “Thank you”, and on quitting the board to say “Excuse me.” But as the parents never observed these niceties themselves, practice by the children was rather superficial,—and Mrs. Forge’s despair.
Whatever else may be said of Johnathan, the fact remained that “he did relish his vittles.” “Good food and plenty of it” was his motto. So it became a matter for special domestic citation to “see who could eat the most”, notably at Sunday dinner, Thanksgiving or Christmas. A monstrous appetite was a sign of health and virility and a distended stomach more to be desired than gold—yea, than the gold of the caliphs. Roast beef and boiled potatoes, corned beef and cabbage, anything that afforded inward bulk, therefore, were favorite and familiar dishes on the Forge menu.
Johnathan’s favorite dinner pleasantry was wiping his mouth on the tablecloth as a coy rebuke to his wife for forgetting the napkins.
During the progress of the meal, knives, forks and spoons sprawled all over the cloth or against dishes, and the clatter of china and silver exceeded the cutlery music from twenty tables at a church supper.
The mother was ever in hot water because Edith only “nibbled at her food” and Nathan “washed his down with water.” After the meal, like a gorged python, Johnathan leaned back and picked and prodded his mouth for five or ten minutes with a huge toothpick.
In allied domestic functions the Forges followed suit. Sometimes on Saturday nights the family bathed. Sometimes it did not bathe. It all depended on whether Mrs. Forge was energetic enough to “heat the water.”
The household ran on no schedule. Nothing could be kept in its place because nothing had a place in which it could be kept. Edith particularly was the worst offender. Her bedroom resembled the pathway of a Missouri cyclonethrough a rummage sale until her mother “found time to pick up”, about once in two or three weeks.
Clothes and shoes were bought and worn until they were worn out. Then more were grudgingly bought and worn until they were worn out also. Excepting Edith’s.
Johnathan boasted—mostly to his wife and children that he and his family were solid and substantial; you always knew “just where to find him.” No stuck-up notions or fancy fairs to the Forges. People like themselves were the backbone of the nation.
Once, at Christmas, the children, imbued with the holiday spirit, wanted a tree. A tree was easily procured by Nathan and hauled home on his sled. Mrs. Forge and Edith strung popcorn and made paper chains. Johnathan, in a spirit of holiday generosity, gave his wife five dollars. The children got a dollar apiece with which to buy presents.
Mrs. Forge bought a much-needed underskirt with most of her money, knitting the children mufflers and keeping her purchases down to a few pathetic gifts in the local “five-and-ten.” She searched long for a gift for Johnathan. She finally chose a little painted picture of a scene in the Bay of Naples, Vesuvius smoking in the background. She said it was “so pretty.” The gifts made a rather thin exhibit on the tree.
Christmas morning, when the tree was denuded, Johnathan got his picture, opened it, threw back his head and roared.
Mrs. Forge had hunted a long time for Johnathan’s gift. The little picture meant a blind, vague, piteous groping after Beauty in her crushed and maltreated soul. It was “so pretty.”
But Johnathan failed utterly to grasp its erudite potentialities. He spent the greatest part of that Christmas morning making fun of the picture. He got a string and hung it around his neck, sandwich-board fashion. He said he admired his wife’s tastes in frames; he had a rubber-heel placard at his shop which would fit it exactly.
Mrs. Forge, who had parted with seventy-five cents which she might better have used for stockings, finally fled theroom in tears. During the ensuing year, the picture was facetiously referred to as “Mother’s Volcano.”
Johnathan, by the way, gave his wife a new bread board and Edith a fancy calendar.
Nathan received a small, leather-bound copy of the New Testament.
It was a red-letter Christmas!