Chapter Six

It was one of those days like Christmas or Washington’s Birthday, or Father’s birthday, or Fourth of July, or April Fool. One of those particularly nice days with an underlying current of events to it.

First, Stevey was coming home from Agricultural. “For good,” Claire had said and kissed Davey square on the lips and hugged him until his cap came off. Then there was the something pending about Henry. Henry, it seemed, could have had celluloid buttons, with his picture on, that you wore on the visor of your cap. “Vote for Henry Schuyler.”

Phil was coming in on the four-twenty-eight, too, and Clara from St. Louis, but this time without Sam or the children.

But it meant meeting three trains practically at a scoop, because they all arrived within three hours. The Old Gentleman never missed being the first to welcome home a Schuyler.

Phil’s wife Rita always declared that her father-in-law’s basket phaeton, a dirty affair much maligned by the family, which you could see by craning your neck, as the Springfield train drew into Centralia, was as much a part of the landscape as the Capitol dome was to Washington.

The family was given to exchanging amused persiflage with one another, and suggesting to the Old Gentleman, from time to time, that he had better will over the phaeton to the State Museum as a relic of pre-Civil-War transportation.

The Old Gentleman lived under a barrage of winks and nods between his children. He moved calmly among them, oftentimes mimicking their very gestures with his sly old eyes.

David liked meeting trains with his father. They swooped in magnificent, whizzing reality from the world that lay flat and inanimate in words against the pages of Henry’s books. Trains dashed into Centralia depot that must have come from Gettysburg where Lincoln made the speech. And from the shores of the Delaware that Washington crossed. Why, there was a railroad called the Chesapeake and Ohio. Chesapeake! Captain Lawrence cried “Don’t give up the ship” on board the Chesapeake. There was a picture of the frigate Chesapeake, in colors, in one of Henry’s books.

Yes, it was fine meeting trains. And the depot, a rather grimy, small, red-brick affair, was filled with that intangible and tickling odor of travel. The smell of leather and coal-smoke and pot-bellied stove, red-hot. The baggage and shipping rooms, stacked with crates and bales, trunks and milk-cans and egg-cartons and plow-shares and dynamos and pumps and bicycles boarded up for travel along with shipments of Centralia’s not inconsiderable exportations of hardware from the Tools Works, were jammed with the further interest of reading labels. And addresses. Braunson Hardware Company, Terre Haute, Indiana. Mr. Silas Dikey, Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Firbers Mill, Trenton, New Jersey. United States Shipping Company, West Street, New York. It made one tingle with a sense of the outside world. Alton, Missouri. Vesey Street, New York.

Bob Fenton, the baggage-master, who had one eye and a black-cloth flap for the other, gave David gummed labels, which could be spat upon and pasted against all sorts of surfaces. Fragile. Hold. Live Stock. Eggs. Baltimore and Ohio. Farmers Shipping Union. Glass. This Side Up.

There was sure to be talk as easy as the jangle of change in a pocket, around the depot. Talk that ran like this:

“Hi, Schuyler! Got them two red heifers up at Seely’s place if you’n’ Miss Bek want to drive over tomorrow ’n’ have a look. Hi, Schuyler, who’s coming home today? Hi, trade you that youngster o’ yourn for a red calf. Hi, Schuyler, see that new breed of hogs Lederman is showing up t’fair? White belly-bands. Look good. Wal, sir, see where they’re mentioning Henry hereabouts for District Attorney. He’s got my vote.”

A vote was something you couldn’t see. People kept talking about them and offering to give them, but nothing ever seemed to change hands. A vote was something that was not something in your hand. Just the same, if Henry wanted them, he could have them. Henry, who had a head that was almost the shape of the bottom of a foot and a bald, shiny spot where hair should have been, but hair that grew down the sides of his temples into two oblongs on the sides of his cheeks, where hair should not have been, and the very nicest eyes in the world that smiled and did things that most people did with their mouths; it was highly desirable that Henry should have all the votes in the world.

Even on the way to the depot, rumbling along in the Old Gentleman’s phaeton, the way was strewn, from the sidewalk and from passing vehicles.

“Hi, Mr. Schuyler. See to it that boy of yourn runs this time. The state needs his kind. Hi. Howdy. Hi. Somebody acomin’ home, I take it?”

The Schuylers were rallying for conclave all right. It was fun rumbling up to the depot with the Old Gentleman. It was in the days before his self-importance had shrunk to a kernel. Was in the days when the dirty old phaeton was only a badge of his unassailable well-being like a rich man’s shabby hat.

Down Second Street toward the depot was the most familiar ride in the world. When Davey was five, and the Old Gentleman dozed at the reins, not infrequent with him, the small boy held them importantly. Not but what every mare that the Old Gentleman ever drove knew its somnolent, unguarded way through the streets of Centralia. Even when the automobile had practically nosed out horse traffic, the Old Gentleman’s mare and phaeton had a sort of right of way.

There was a flat building going up on Second Street. The first in town. A square, two-story, two-family affair of concrete. A “St. Louis flat.” The Old Gentleman could never pass it without clucking his disgust.

Further along, though, the street relapsed. The Blue Bird Lunch Room. The Red Trunk Dry Goods Company. Binswanger’s Hardware. Hot Lunch. The White Kitchen. Gents’ Furnishings. Buddy’s Cut-Rate Drug Store. Co-Operative Mill Supply Company.

Beulah Kohn, who wore her left leg in a brace from meningitis, leaned as usual across the picket fence of the dirt-colored frame house where Mrs. Kohn kept a rooming house for mill workers.

“Hi, Mr. Schuyler!”

“Howdy, Beulah! Come out here and shake hands.”

“Now, Mr. Schuyler! ... you’ll hurt!” But out she came limping, while the mare drew up, just as if this event did not take place every time the Old Gentleman passed Beulah Kohn’s home. The Old Gentleman reserved his trick, handshake for the very old, the very young, and the ailing.

You extended your hand. He took it gingerly by the tips of the fore and little fingers, and then, with his free hand, came down whack across the wrist of his victim, causing the bones to make a cracking sound. The Old Gentleman’s delight in this was unfailing. Sometimes children cried. Then he plied them with licorice. Beulah knew his licorice-pocket, into which she dove immediately following this habitual chastisement.

Rattly old phaeton. You could jump in and out while it was moving, which David did all the way along.

Second Avenue, as it approached the depot, was myriad with interest.

“What does ‘Katy Flier’ mean, Father?”

“Katy flies, I reckon.”

“B and O,” began Davey, bursting for no apparent reason, as another sign presented itself to his amiable gaze, into loud cacophony, and beginning to direct an imaginary orchestra from standing position in the phaeton, as he faced Jenny’s unexcited tail, “Bawleymore and O-high-O! B and O. Yip! Yip!”

The Old Gentleman never minded. Sometimes David climbed up his flank as he drove, balancing on his shoulders and shouting aloud as the little panorama of his thoughts came tumbling.

The Old Gentleman never flecked an eye, or for that matter, heeded.

The train tracks cut through Centralia like a diagonal, bisecting a rhomboid. Their grime kept the chestnut trees along Sycamore Street gray. They grazed the red flank of the Five and Ten on High Street by one foot. They skirted the edge of the Old Gentleman’s South Pasture just remotely enough to have netted him not a penny when the railroad was out franchise-buying.

It rushed into town like the proverbial lion.

It tore out of town like a howling hyena. Never was the somnolistic tendency of a community more ruthlessly split to smithereens by the bangs, the bleats, the bells, the puffings, and the backings of steam-engines, than Centralia with the railroad trains across its very face, as it were.

Siren-shrieks and plumes of smoke lay on its dead of night. Fee, fie, foe, fum, snorted and rampaged one engine after another at the red flank of the Five and Ten. Freight engines backed-and-forthed up and down the center of Maple Street, baa-ing, moo-ing, and grunting with cattle and freight cars. Fee, fie, foe, fum, I’ll blow and I’ll blow ’til I blow your house down. Where Maple Street intersected Second Street, the railway’s gates were almost always down, Buick and Ford delivery-wagons, farm-teams, buggies, roadsters and family-cars waiting, and often, to save time, backing down and making détour around the viaduct-way.

“Stop, Look and Listen” signs criss-crossed the streets of Centralia. The local Democratic and Republican factions both had a Grade Crossing Abolition plank. Nothing happened.

Centralia smelled with the railroad tracks that entered and intersected her, and erected white crosses upon the scene of every grade-crossing casualty.

Driving along Second Street, not only the Old Gentleman could detect the first remote halloo of the incoming passenger train, but up went old mare Jenny’s uncurried ears that were the shape of the perpetual corner tied into the Old Gentleman’s handkerchief, and jerk went the basket phaeton that was as full of creaks as of years.

Centralia met its incoming trains with a line of short-snouted family-sedans and open Fords; occasionally the Milliken seven-passenger Cadillac that belonged to Emma’s father-in-law, or the Howey Pierce-Arrow, mixed in. They stood in motley line-up before a row of what had once been hitching-posts.

The Old Gentleman’s phaeton and the yellow lorry from Dr. Spaeth’s Sanatorium were usually the only relics of a horse-age. They waited side by side in a little brick clearing opposite, where there were no hitching-posts, and their horses wound necks.

Jenny knew her place all right, even when the Old Gentleman dozed, edging herself and phaeton in beside the lorry, or where the lorry usually stood. When David was along, even when he was so small that a shake of Jenny’s neck jerked him forward by the reins, he drove her quite grandly into the station, clucking at a great rate.

The Old Gentleman was not dozing today as he drove in. There was a constant screwing noise he made with his tongue, spurring old Jenny to uneven lopes; and above his square, white beard that hung like a curtain, the humorous blue eyes, twenty-five years too young for their setting, kept radiating. Phil’s wife was right. He was as indubitably a part of the landscape as the rick-rack outline of the depot against the stubble of corn-fields. In his hip-high reefer, jouncing along in the old phaeton which creaked around him like a rusty ocean, he was an institution for you! He was a silhouette unto himself, in reefer, round cap bound in astrakhan, slightly mangy, in puttees, string-wound where the tapes gave out.

“Old Gentleman’s quite a character,” someone or other was forever saying.

“Hi! Howdy! Hi!” called the Old Gentleman, driving up.

“Hi! Hi! Ho! Howdy!” said the loiterers.

Almost simultaneously, Emma Milliken drove up in her father-in-law’s car, a slick, night-blue affair of shine and snout, with a nickle-plated Discobolus doing a lunge off the hood. Her mother-in-law, Annie Milliken, occupied the rear seat, a sparse, iron-gray woman, with a palsy-affliction that kept her head like a flower on a stalk in a stiff breeze. Beside her, quite a beauty after her blonde fashion, sat Claire, in a brown beaver toque and brown beaver on her broad-cloth coat. Lalite and Kenneth Chipman, children of Donald Chipman, barrister, next-door neighbors of the Milliken seniors, were tucked into the collapsible chairs for the ride down to the depot. They made a carful.

“Mother Milliken, there’s Gramp and Davey.”

Mrs. Milliken leaned her palsied head forward. “So it is. Your father hadn’t ought to come down looking like that, Emma. ’Tain’t right. I don’t see Mathilda.”

Emma wound down the glass window-pane of the car.

“Oh, dear! Your Gramp does look a sight, Claire. How could he come down to meet Phil and Stevey looking like that! Gramaw didn’t see him leave the house looking like that, I’ll wager. Fath-er!”

The Old Gentleman shambled over, Davey off to the baggage-room, and Jenny standing without so much as the reins wound around her whip stock.

“Father, come here. You do look a sight, dear.”

The Old Gentleman had never ceased to regard Emma, his sixth-born, as a feast for even his sly old parental eyes. As a child, he had carted her among the farmers and had even been known to stand her on the counter of Fred Firpo’s bar and appraise her yellow, little-girl loveliness.

“She’s a good one, boys. My little Emma she’s a beauty! I’m right? Give her a pretzel, Joe.”

Although it was Emma’s daughter Claire who was now considered the family beauty, Emma herself still possessed a certain cabbage-rose prettiness; and despite the fact that it had always been said that Emma Schuyler did not know how to wear clothes, and was a natural-born “slop,” she had realized enough to all her life affect velvet toques to match her eyes, and when she remembered even now, she used a gayly-painted rolling pin which hung in her bathroom, to ward off the pads of fragrant, cream-colored flesh that threatened her shoulders and upper arms.

“Father, Mother Milliken’s right. You are a spectacle!”

It was rather futile of her to lean out of the car, tilt back his head, and yank at his reefer-collar, particularly since little Lalite Chipman was already at his reefer-pocket.

“Licorice, Gramp!”

“Please, Father, don’t give her any. She gets her teeth all full of the horrid stuff.”

As if Emma herself, Emma’s Claire, and virtually every youngster of the last four decades in Centralia had not, at one time or another, had their milk-teeth blacked from the yield of those pockets.

“Gramp,” shouted Kenneth, who was nine and had the straight bangs of a medieval saint, “give me a pretzel.”

“Guess which pocket,” cried the old man and struck his flanks.

“Both,” shouted the boy, and made a dive.

That tickled the Old Gentleman, who dove into a third pocket for more lunch-counter loot.

“Please, Father, Mrs. Chipman won’t like it. There’s always tobacco in that pocket. You’ll make Kenneth sick. Isn’t Mother coming down to meet Phil?”

“Yes, Bek is driving her down.”

At just that moment, Bek drove around from the shipping-platform in a Ford, with a hooded front and a delivery-body, onto which was loaded a crate of Chester White hogs that she had just picked up from the freight room. Seated beside her, in a little bonnet with a jet spray and a cape with fitted shoulders, was Mathilda, her hands clasped nervously over an empty shopping-bag of shiny black oilcloth.

David leaped the running-board before she brought the car to a short stop beside the Milliken Cadillac.

“Bek, I c’n bound Ohio. Ohio is bounded on the west——”

“Davey, don’t hop a going car!”

“—by Indiana on the——”

“Look at Puppa!” cried Mathilda weakly and threw up both mittened hands in a faint gesture, “And I laid out his brown pants on the bed.”

Emma and Claire had climbed out of their car.

“It’s a shame, Mother!” cried Emma. “I declare, Father, I wouldn’t come down to meet a load of heifers looking like that. How do you think Phil will feel stepping down off the express, with you looking this way to meet him. There’s always plenty of Springfield and even Chicago business-men on that train. And Stevey coming too. I declare, Mother, I’d burn that phaeton, if I were you.”

“Puppa,” said Mathilda, a little tiredly, and a little helplessly, “I laid everything out ... your cuffs with the buttons in——”

“Poppycock!” said Rebekka. “He looks all right. Let him be.”

The Old Gentleman made one of his sly, screwing noises with his tongue and poked an elbow into his wife’s hip bone, where the cape neatly covered it.

“I’ll dress up, ’Tilda, when we have an Attorney General in the family. I’m right?”

“Does Henry know, Father,” said Rebekka, “that you sounded the ram’s-horn for conclave about his candidacy? He’ll be a mad hatter.”

“What he don’t know don’t hurt him until he sits himself down to supper,” said the Old Gentleman, and went off chuckling, with David anchored to his pocket, burrowing for a pretzel, which had looked good to him as he saw Kenneth nibble bites out of his.

“Bek,” said Emma, eyeing her sister, with a furrow between her pretty eyes, “isn’t it sudden, Stevey quitting Agricultural this way in the middle of a semester? Nothing wrong, is there? Never knew a word about it until Claire told me she’d a letter——. Nothing wrong?”

“Nothing,” said Bek, looking straight ahead over the wheel upon which her square, white hand lightly rested. “His father and I think it best to have him home this winter. That’s all. It is good practical experience for him to be around while the state dam is under construction. He’ll learn more about practical irrigation that way in a month than in a college year!”

“Funny, though, his coming so sudden,” said Emma.

It was as if the slight figure of Claire, standing beside her mother, swayed as a fir tree sways, from its toe to its tip. An almost imperceptible sway, except to Bek, to whom most tiny things were perceptible.

“It’s Junior League afternoon, Claire. Why aren’t you there?”

“Just felt like running down to the station with Mother and Grandmother Milliken to meet Uncle Phil and see the four-ten come in,” said Claire, her pretty, her appealing but faltering blue eyes meeting the absolutely horizontal ones of her aunt.

“And, of course, you wanted to come down to see Stevey too, dear,” put in her mother, who was a great putterer in the name of amicability. “You didn’t even know Uncle Phil was coming until Gramaw telephoned just before we left.”

“And Stevey too, of course,” said Claire. Her voice was as thin as a quail’s and her white young throat beat like one, as she met her aunt’s gaze.

“Of course,” repeated Bek. Her voice was so level, to Claire swaying there, like a vast and level plain.

“Bek,” said Emma, and leaned close, “Mother Milliken is so sensitive. Hadn’t you better go pass the time of day with her? She gets more and more sensitive as Father Milliken’s notes to Father fall due. Better go over....”

“Indeed, yes,” said Bek. “Come, Mother, you too. And be sure you don’t ask her about her brother in Saalsberg, Mother. Intimate as you are with Annie Milliken, you cannot seem to remember that he died last year.”

“I am glad you reminded me Bek, it does slip my mind. Saalsberg is so far,” said Mathilda, lifting her skirts neatly, as her two daughters and Claire assisted her down the step of the car. “I think I’ll take her a bit of that nice, crisp celery; it’s under the seat. I just picked it up at market.”

“Hurry, Mother,” said Bek, striding across the platform toward the Milliken car.

“Bek,” said Mathilda timidly, and put out a restraining hand upon her daughter’s stride, “I don’t want to seem unchristian, Daughter, and I wouldn’t have Emma hear, seeing how bad’s Annie’s palsy, but you and me riding up in the Ford truck, Daughter, and there sits Annie Milliken in a Cadillac, them never out of your father’s debt.”

“Sense of humor, Mother,” said Bek, hooking her Mother’s arm into hers and patting it. “The Lord gave us ribs so we could keep them tickled.”

“Yes, but not jostled, while Annie Milliken rests hers in an upholstered limousine.” Just then Davey, spying little Dora Tarkington walking primly into the depot with her hand in her father’s, made a megaphone of his: hand and shouted to her:

“Stevey’s coming home!”

“Stevey’s coming home!” Bek’s heart, all the time that Claire’s was fluttering like a bird’s, was heavy within her.

Stevey was coming home....