Chapter Eighteen

A man down at Wohlgemuth’s mill was enlisting. He was a fellow with a receding chin and a reddish birthmark seared across his cheek, who had drifted in on a freight-train from Kansas City, and who claimed to have walked it overland from San Francisco.

For over a year he had been working about the neighborhood. First as herdsman at the Howey farm, for a while doing chores for Bek, and finally running a truck for Ed Wohlgemuth.

He was a gangling, big-jointed fellow, full of the lore of the open road, and with a quid as big as a nugget protruding from one cheek or the other. He had fought in the Boxer Rebellion and in the Spanish-American War, and “guerilled,” as he put it, in Mexico and done six years’ navy-service. A soldier of fortune in the literal sense of the word. Anybody’s fight was his fight.

The boys, for miles around, clustered about Pete (the only name by which he was known thereabouts) along about sunset-time, on the row of barrels that flanked the Wohlgemuth Mill. He had the knacks that delight boys. He could spit straight, and twice any competitor’s distance. He could lure a rabbit out of a hole by a jargon he knew. He could also, by another mysterious jargon, entice grasshoppers to the back of his tattooed hands and make them spit tobacco there without so much as touching them. He could tie a sailors’ knot with one hand, cause hairs from a white horse’s tail to stand straight on end at the tip of his nose, pull a cork from the inside of a narrow-necked bottle with a bit of twine, bring down one blackbird to every shot and do a snake-dance that he had learned from the Pueblos.

And now Pete, who was an Australian by birth, was about to set off for Montreal to enlist under his own flag. It was the closest that remote thing, the World War, had penetrated the uninterrupted rhythm of Whittier County.

To David, racing home that dusk, from having sat about on the row of cider-barrels with Pete and his cohorts, the fuzz of the day’s heat was a taste up against his tongue. Cattle lowed. The winding of smoke from his father’s chimney curled languidly against a torrid sky, and out of all this gentle trance, something a little terribly alien seemed suddenly to have come to life off the printed page of a history-book. War had come to life.

Pete, some one who was as casual to the countryside as—why as the very barns, the meadows, the silos, the hedges, the farmers themselves, was going to war. War had come up off the history-pages into reality.

Pete was going. The tidings made Dave’s bare feet send pebbles spinning from under them. He was panting when he reached home, from the dual consciousness of being late, which always grated against the Old Gentleman, who was more easily irascible than formerly, and with the burden of his news.

His mother and Henry were just about to draw up around the supper-table.

Supper served as near as possible to the range, even in summer, made dishing-up an easier matter for Mathilda, who no longer kept help. Trina, poor distressed creature, at the catastrophe of the family-move from the House on Sycamore Street, had been obliged to accept another position in Centralia, for the support of the two invalid old sisters she cared for.

Besides, it was cheerier in the kitchen than in the little aperture of a room off the parlor that was jammed, except for a narrow rim for slithering around with the dishes of food, with the heavy, grape-and-leaf-design, walnut dining-room set from the House on Sycamore Street.

There was no prevailing upon the Old Gentleman to let go of that ponderous “set,” even to the antique-dealers from Springfield, who came sniffing.

There was a lamp with a green-paper shade burning in the center of the kitchen table; and Henry must have been reading War and Peace, by Tolstoi, because it was hung now, to keep his page, over the lower rung of his chair, and his place was rumpled, and his unused plate pushed center toward the sugar-bowl and castor. The exuding heat of countryside, mingling with the blazing breath of the range, was like steam, and had the cling to it of a hot, wet blanket.

“Father, Pete’s going to war!”

The Old Gentleman, seated on the kitchen porch, with his shoes and socks on the floor beside him, and his hot feet dangling to the ground and soaking in the dew of the small surrounding plot of grass, screwed around a face that had been jerked from the intent observation of his dozen or so wyandottes taking roost.

“War?”

“What war?” asked Mathilda and began tilting a skillet of steaming okra-and-tomato stew into a bowl.

“Why, Mother,” said Henry gently, and rising to take the dish from her, “you know what war. We’ve discussed precious little else at this table for weeks.”

“Of course I know, Henry,” snapped Mathilda, and turned toward him with a flick of her cup-towel. “Don’t speak to me as if I were a baby!”

“I’m sorry, Mother!”

Mathilda’s memory was beginning to lapse on her, more and more. Sometimes in stretches that were impossible to ignore.[30]

In the beginning, the family met these lapses in pretty much Henry’s wise fashion, usually succeeding in jerking her back to an injured, if resentful air she always employed to cover up these hiatuses that bewildered her and made her constantly afraid of the next.

“Of course! Of course! And what’s he going to war for?”

“He’s going to fight for his country, Mother. His country is—the Brit-ish Empire. A fellow’s got to fight for his country, Mother, if his country’s gone to war.”

“Stop talking like a parrot, Davey,” said Henry with rather an unheard-of-for-him kind of brusqueness and jerked his chair closer to the table.

The Old Gentleman was pretty apt to become excited and shout at his mild-mannered son, if these supper-table controversies led to certain political topics that had particularly to do with the situation in Europe, and upon which they differed.

Conscription was one of them; and here was Dave running home with a subject perilously sure to lead up to it. Be it said for Henry that he made a gallant effort to divert it.

“While I think of it, Mother, here are those washers you’ve been asking about for your faucets. Ed Ryan, whom I defended way back in a horse-thieving case, gave me a pocketful.”

“Thank you, Henry. I can do with them nicely. Seven washers for defending a body against a horse-thievery charge. Ah me, that’s why you’ll remain a poor man all your life, son. Fine a lawyer as there is in the state, and taking washers for fee. ’Tain’t dignified, son.”

The Old Gentleman ambled in then, his attention persistently snagged by the subject Henry had tried to divert. “Who should stop talking like a parrot? It’s high time the boys of this country should begin talking like parrots, from the look of yesterday’s Enquirer. Wilson can’t any more keep this country out of wa——”

“Puppa! Now Puppa!” trebled in Mathilda, herself tired to death of these supper-table reiterations between father and son. “Taste, Puppa! Bek sent Stevey over with this okra special for your supper. Stevey’s not looking well, Puppa. Sometimes I think he must have caught some kind of a slow fever up there at Agricultural School, where he was last year for that spell.”

“And if talk don’t do the work,” bellowed the Old Gentleman in immediately argumentative key and starting to swirl the coffee in his cup with a gouging, angry spoon—“if talk don’t do the work—then I say conscription! And the man who don’t favor conscription for the salvation of his country in time of need, don’t deserve to have a country to defend. If you’ve been through what I’ve been in a country where they demand the best years of a young man’s life, war or no war, a little conscription in time of need shouldn’t be necessary, and if it is, by God, I’m for it.”

“You are talking the phraseology of militarism, Father. You’re the parrot! Go out and train cigar-Indians on such flimsy logic, but not men who think. Besides, if it is your patriotism that is so aroused, the modern doctrine of neutrality is an American idea that Washington conceived and Jefferson phrased in 1803. You can be equally American by adhering to them.”

“Doctrines of neutrality don’t change the natures of men. Men are men——”

“Except when they are hyenas.”

“Even a hyena will fight for his——”

“Only a hyena should——”

The Old Gentleman began rapping the table with his fork. “I won’t have sedition talked in my house, where I’ve got a future citizen growing up to fight for his country, right or wrong.”

“When Decatur said that, Father, he was in love with the magic of a phrase, not its meaning.”

“He was a brave man and a patriot.”

“He was both, Father. But there is a valor born of hysteria.”

“I talk facts. Not high-sounding phrases.”

“Just the reverse. You talk phrases. The phrases of the immemorial cant of warfare. Embroidered banners of phrases, made to cover up the stinking realities of greed and war.”

“Hen-ery! Use nice words.”

“I’m sorry, Mother. Please, Father, there is no use going over it all again. Whom do you think I ran into on High Street today? Remember Al Hopkins——?”

“There is this much use,” shouted the Old Gentleman, working himself more and more into the luxury of an orgy of rage, “I won’t have a—pacifist in my house! I haven’t raised two sons, and a third one growing up, to say nothing of sons-in-law and grandchildren, to have sedition in my house in my old age.”

“Puppa!”

“Let him rave, Mother. My hope for him is that he will never have anyone in his house with more seditious thoughts against country than I.”

“I don’t know about that. When a man questions another man’s right to fight for his country——”

“I question every man’s right to fight. To shed blood. To splatter out of a man’s heart, with bullets, the life that women go down into hell to bring forth.”

“Hennery!”

“And I say a country’s honor comes even before that!”

“Puppa, your biscuit is getting cold.”

“And I say no country’s honor can be raised or lowered by shooting the blood out of human hearts.”

“Such talk is traitorous. I won’t have it talked before Davey. You’re a traitor. Damnation, you’re a——”

“I won’t be talked to like this, Father.”

“Hennery! Puppa!”

“You don’t deserve the benefits of the country you live in. You don’t honor it. You don’t know what it is to come like I came, penniless, and after years of an empty belly, into the country that gave me my everything. You don’t honor the country that honored your parents and gave you a full belly. A country whose cobblestones you should kiss as I kiss them. Traitor!”

There shot along Henry’s slowly mobile face the first quick flash of heat-lightning David had ever seen cross it. Small areas around his nose turned jade-white and quivered. Sweat sprang out across the considerable bulge of his forehead. His lips moved as if trying to moisten themselves and his neck began to beat. Regarding him, Mathilda sprang from her chair. Once, in his childhood, she remembered a paroxysm like that. His sister Bek had dared him to fight a debt-of-honor over a slate-pencil, in the yard of the House on Sycamore Street, with a town-boy named Cutty Ditweiler, who had been killed a year later by the accidental side swipe of his father’s scythe.

Henry had stood by and let himself be bullied, sooner than fight. Bek, unable to endure it longer, had sprung on Cutty, raining blows, until the weaker man of the two went down before her. It was then that Henry had turned sick and run indoors to Mathilda, his face locked in the same kind of paroxysm that his mother beheld there now.

“Hen-nery!”

His whitish lips were pulled across his face like strips of adhesive tape, and Davey could not keep his fascinated eyes off them.

“We won’t go into that, Father,” said Henry and swallowed with such an effort that you could hear his throat click.

Mathilda, frantic at what she saw gathering in her husband’s face, tilted the whole of the okra-bowl, noisily scraping the last of its viscous contents to her husband’s plate.

“More okra, Father. Bek sent it over by Stevey. She raises the best I ever tasted. Stevey isn’t looking so well. Sometimes I think he must have caught a slow fever——”

“We won’t go into that, won’t we!” exploded the Old Gentleman, his face a darkening blur, through which he could not or would not see the darkening face of his son. “We won’t? We will go into that. I’m an American citizen, grateful for the benefits such a country has given me and my family, and even the bad times I am in now can’t change that. I’m an American citizen, willing to give every grandson and son I got, if, God forbid, the country gets into war. When you talk as you do in front of your brother, even if he is only a child, I say it again, you are a traitor. A traitor to your country, sir! A damn traitor!”

The Old Gentleman was launched into his rage now. He shouted. He screamed. His voice came leaping over his lips, plunging into choking incoherence.

“God strike me—down—before I should have a son—a—damned traitor!”

It was then that Henry rose to his feet. He had the look of a man whose blood might have stopped in his veins, and he walked over to his father and took him up by a loose handful of the shoulder of his coat, and, for an incredible moment, it looked as if he were going to strike him down. Only he did nothing of the sort. He just began to shake, gently at first and then a little more furiously, until the Old Gentleman was half-off his feet.

“Don’t you dare say that, Father!” To Davey, it scarcely seemed Henry’s voice. Only something thin, as if some one were clapping two tin plates. “You—with your bombast! You don’t know what love of country is. You only love your country enough to die for it, on a battlefield, the martyred death that gets monuments to it for the spilled entrails that have fertilized the earth in the name of Hate. You don’t love your country enough to crucify yourself for it in the name of Love. You hear me, I do! Yours is the easy patriotism. The patriotism of the band-wagon. The patriotism of the self-flagellation of feeding the red dramatic jaws of war with the flesh of your flesh. Of feeding your sons’ entrails to the bawdy, uncontrolled passions of men of power. Yours is the easy patriotism. The patriotism that gets its name smeared across tablets in public squares. I—oh God—what do you know about love of country?” said Henry, and suddenly, incredibly, released the bunch of his father’s coat-sleeve and went sobbing from the room.

Davey crept after, but then only after long minutes had elapsed. Minutes of a silence that was punctuated by the great, unnatural-sounding ticks of the kitchen clock, with the nosegay painted on the glass door before its pendulum.

After a while, Mathilda began to cry softly into her apron, and the Old Gentleman began to swing the low contents of his coffee-cup and drink it down in slow, untasted gulps.

When Davey crept into his brother’s room, there was the bulk of him across the red-and-white Paisley quilt of his cot, his head buried in his arms and his body as felled-looking as a tree.

“Henry,” said Davey, and touched him timidly on the arm, “you’re not a—a trait-or.”

“No,” said Henry, and jerked himself up and walked to the mirror to run a runty old hartshorn brush over his baldish spot. “I’m only a damn fool, Davey.”

“You—you’re great—Henry——”

“Yes, a great ass, Davey,” said Henry, and lifted his small brother by the armpits and set him down again and walked down into the kitchen, where his father, in a wilt, still sat in his chair beside the table, swinging the last dreary contents of his coffee-cup.

“Forgive a fool, Father,” said Henry, and walked up and held out a hand.

“Forgive an older fool,” mumbled the Old Gentleman, taking the hand without glancing up.

“Hennery,” quavered Mathilda, “will you eat your corn pudding now?”

“A big helping of it, Mother.”

The lamp burned like a round and gracious eye into the thickening gloom of the kitchen. There were a dozen and one after-dinner chores to be done, the two men and Davey scattering for them after the meal, and Mathilda lifting the dishes in clumps and carrying them to the pan of hot water on the stove.

Out in the hen-roost, where Davey scuttled to count up his wyandottes, first stars could be seen through the square little window in the roof of the chicken-house. Lovely Vega, which Davey knew by name, popped out even as he stared. Curious, that men could bicker unashamed beneath the placid enormity of stars....

There was water to be carried. On the crest at the back of the house where the pump stood, the billows of the miles of meadows, peaceful under the whitish night, ran out to horizon, the occasional farmhouses, barns, silos, and hay-ricks, looking like frail boats riding a gentle sea.

The pink patch of kitchen window, against which the hooked figure of his mother moved now and then, swam disembodied from the rest of the dark house, and might have been a window to the sky.

Across the silence, a figure, dangling a lantern, moved more deeply into the gloom. It was the Old Gentleman stalking past the barn down toward the pig-wallow.

It was deep night. Almost as if the evening were holding its breath before exuding a deep sigh of satisfaction.

Curious, that this peace had held the turmoil of men’s passions that had raged in that little room down there behind the pink patch. Passions that must even now be whirling in its timbers.

The pump squeaked as Davey leaned his lips to the spout for the first cool gush, Teddy standing by to lick the overflow with more greed than thirst.

How cool it was! It seemed to Davey he could feel it run along his throat down into a spot against his chest that hurt.

The country stretched out before him as he lifted his head and ran his tongue around his lips. Tides of country that seemed to emanate from the spot on which he stood, appearing to rise and fall, even as his own breathing, and making the flesh of earth feel almost the same flesh as the soles of his feet.

“My country,” said Davey, in the recitative voice of Friday afternoons, and standing there with his bare toes oozing into the cool, thin mud around the pump—“my country—my country, right or wrong. Mr. Hen-nery—you!—smartee—’tis anyhow!”

FOOTNOTES: