Chapter XIX

GOWDY ACKNOWLEDGES HIS SON

Now I leave it to the reader--if I ever have one besides my granddaughter Gertrude--whether in this case of the trouble of Rowena Fewkes and her marriage to Magnus Thorkelson, I did anything by which I ought to have forfeited the esteem of my neighbors, of the Reverend and Mrs. Thorndyke, or of Virginia Royall. I never in all my life acted in a manner which was more in accordance to the dictates of my conscience. You have seen how badly I behaved, or tended to behave in the past, and lost no friends by it. In a long life of dealing in various kinds of property, including horse-trading, very few people have ever got the best of me, and everybody knows that this is less a boast than a confession; and yet, this one good act of standing by this poor girl in her dreadful plight degraded me more in the minds of the community than all the spavins, thorough-pins, poll-evils and the like I ever concealed or glossed over. We are all schoolboys who usually suffer our whippings for things that should be overlooked; and the fact that we get off scot free when we should have our jackets tanned does not seem to make the injustice any easier to bear.

Dick McGill, the editor of the scurrilous Monterey Journal was, as usual, the chief imp of this as of any other deviltry his sensational paper could take a part in. Of course, he would be on Buck Gowdy's side; for what rights had such people as Magnus and Rowena and I?

"A wedding took place out on the wild shores of Hell Slew last week," said this paper. "It was not a case, exactly, of the funeral baked meats coldly furnishing forth the marriage supper; but the economy was quite as striking. The celebration of the arrival of the heir of the Manor (though let us hope not of the manner) was merged in the wedding festivities. We make our usual announcements: Married at the residence of J.T. Vandemark, Miss Rowena Fewkes to Mr. Magnus Thorkelson. It's a boy, standard weight. The ceremonies were presided over by Doctor Bliven, our genial disciple of Esculapias, and by Elder Thorndyke, each in his respective sphere of action. Great harmony marked the carrying out of these usually separate functions. The amalgamation of peoples goes on apace. Here we have Yankee, Scandinavian and Dutch so intertwined that it will take no common 'glance of eye, thought of man, wing of angel' to separate the sheep from the goats in the sequel. Nuff ced."

He little knew the sequel!

I did not read this paper. In fact, I did not read anything in those days; and I do not believe that Magnus and Rowena knew for some time anything more about this vile and slanderous item than I did. It was only by the way we were treated that we felt that the cold shoulder of the little world of Vandemark Township and Monterey County was turned toward us. Of course Magnus and Rowena expected this; but I was hurt more deeply by this injustice than by anything in my whole life. Grandma Thorndyke came out no more to red up my house, and exhibit her samples of prospective wives to me. The neighbors called no more. I began driving over to the new railroad to do my marketing, though it was twice as close to go to Monterey Centre. When Elder Thorndyke, largely through the contributions of Governor Wade and Buckner Gowdy, succeeded in getting his church built, I was not asked to go to the doings of laying the corner-stone or shingling the steeple. I was an outsider.

I quit trying to neighbor with the Roebucks, Smiths, and George Story, my new neighbors on the south; and took up with some French who moved in on the east, the families of Pierre Lacroix and Napoleon B. Bouchard. We called the one "Pete Lackwire" and the other "Poly Busher." They were the only French people who came into the township. They were good neighbors, and fair farmers, and their daughters made some of the best wives the sons of the rest of us got. One of my grandsons married the prettiest girl among their grandchildren--a Lacroix on one side and a Bouchard on the other.

It may well be understood that I now took no part in the township history, which gets more complex with the coming in of more settlers; but it was about this time that what is now Vandemark Township began agitating for a separate township organization. We were attached to Centre Township, in which was situated the town of Monterey Centre. This town, dominated by the County Ring, clung to all the territory it could control, so as to spend the taxes in building up the town. A great four-room schoolhouse was finished in the summer of 1860; most of it built by taxes paid by the speculators who still owned the bulk of the land.

The Vandemark Township people made a great outcry about the shape of Centre Township, and called it "The Great Crane," with our township as the neck, and a lot of other territory back of us for the body, and Monterey Centre for the head. I took no part in this agitation, for I was burning with a sense of indignation at the way people treated me; but the County Ring compromised by building us a schoolhouse on my southwest corner, now known as the Vandemark School. But I cared nothing about this. I had no children to go to school, and while I never ceased to dream of a future with Virginia as my wife, I kept saying to myself that I never should have a family. Consistency is the least of the necessaries of our visions and dreams. I never tried to see Virginia. I avoided the elder and Grandma Thorndyke. I knew that she was disgusted with me for even an innocent connection with the Thorkelson matter, and I supposed that Virginia felt the same way. So I went on trying to be as near to a hermit as I could.