IX. “WIFE, GIVE ME THE PAIN-KILLER”
“I suffered forty-seven separate chills,” said the poet. “And forty-seven separate cramps,” said I. Did we sleep? Six hours passed somehow and it seemed not so long as waiting that time for a train or for a theatre to open. Lindsay lay in a sort of hole. I lay with my head half over the abyss. I watched the stars swim out of the clouds above. I saw the blackness of the bottomless below us become grey as the clouds formed there. Lindsay cried out once: “I’m getting up to light a fire.” “Impossible!” I rejoined. “There’s no wood, and no place to light it.”
“I am afraid the clouds are below us; we may have to stay up here all day,” I whispered, an hour before dawn. But it was all the same to the poet, whose thoughts were entirely in the present.
Destiny, however, was kind to us. The clouds at last lifted and drifted, and angels at sunrise lifted white curtains and smiled at us.
A couple of old woe-begone weather-beaten tramps lifted themselves up cautiously and peeped at the wilderness. Last night’s nerve had gone. With backs bent, and sometimes on hands and knees, they picked their way gingerly down to the far snow dump beneath, to the first wind-missed bits of mountain forest, to the first tinkling stream, and to the first chalice anemones and pink paint-brush flowers. We washed and we dressed, and we slept and washed again, and put snow inside our hats—for the morning had become rapidly hot—and we descended. The streamlet foamed down its rocky bed, and we waded and jumped and clung to its sides. And other streams flowed into it and made it deeper and the current stronger, and it splashed us above the waist. We waded knee-high through pools where shadowy fishes darted, and we sat to rest on shiny rocks in the water and talked of desirable foods. We scanned the map of the Geological Survey and stared at our compasses and considered the contours of the hills, and at length were rewarded by the sight of a real human horse trail with indisputable hoof-marks upon it.
We found this in the afternoon, and for three hours followed doggedly, without meeting a soul. At last, to our great joy, we came upon a trivial enough thing, and that was a piece of candy wrapping. “Those who eat candy do not stray far from the place where candy was bought,” said I sententiously.
“Well argued, sir,” said Lindsay. “I fully agree.”
And, indeed, before sunset the happy augury was fulfilled, and we found a camp much used by Montana fishermen. Curiously enough, though all other wild things are preserved in the National Park, the fishes are allowed to be caught. In our opinion, however, after some experience, the fishes do not stand in need of protection.
At the camp we resumed acquaintance with the human race in the person of the keeper and his wife, a fire-ranger, and a hired maid called Elsie. They filled up our cans and gave us a pail of boiling water to wash our clothes, and thread for our trousers and coats, and a week’s rations to take us to “The Sun.” They were disappointed that we would not buy bacon.
“Bacon,” said the camp keeper, “is my long suit.” But Vachel vowed he had gone over to the Mosaic point of view, and didn’t care if he never tasted bacon again.
Instead, we “filled up” with corn-beef hash and took into our packs raisins and grape-nuts and butter; double quantities of bread and sugar and milk, and nine packets of comforting lozenges. And we saw by the Spokane Advertiser of some remote date that the King and Queen of England had been to Ascot races in person, and no one knew what was happening in Ireland, or whether De Valera was a Protestant or a Catholic, and the fire-ranger confessed he did not know the ins and outs of Sinn Fein. And no, there had not been a forest fire this year yet, though he evidently lived in hope.
So the poet and I fortified ourselves materially and spiritually, and set off again for the North-west. We started on our new rations and had one of the most jovial of meals in a place where evidently people had once camped before. We found the charred circles of old camp-fires in the grass.
While we were resting under the trees, and in the gleam of the firelight, Vachel told me the story of how once, in Kansas, he “ate down” his landlord. He had hired himself out with a gang of others to harvest the wheat on the land of a certain German farmer. All the week-days they “piled the golden sheaves,” and it was a red-hot July. The men ate as much as they were able, slept in barns on the hay when the day was done, slept like the dead, rose with the dawn, and certainly did bring in the wheat. For this they got two dollars fifty a day and were proud of their gains.
On Sunday, however, work was suspended, and the gang just lazed and dozed and ate. The German was a pious Catholic, and said a longish grace before and after meals. As the gang were rather sheepish regarding religion, they generally let one course pass, just to avoid the grace, and came slouching in as the meal went on. But Vachel started in with the first grace, right level with the farmer himself. Whatever he had Vachel had. He had several helpings of everything on the table, and as each of the ten harvest hands came in Vachel started afresh with him, and as he had hash he had hash. As each man thought he had done, he slunk out so as to avoid the second grace. The farmer kept piously waiting for all the men to get finished, and helping himself with them, too, just for company.
At last all seemed to have finished and gone, and the farmer was about to pronounce the final blessing when he had an afterthought and took another piece of pie. So Vachel also took another piece of pie. Then mechanically the last grace was said. “I went over to the barn and lay down and slept,” says Vachel. “By supper time I was ready for another meal, and I sat down again with the farmer before the rest of the gang had arrived and grace was said. The farmer was about to help himself when suddenly he paused, spoon in hand, and sat back in his chair, looking ill.”
Then, in a loud, stentorian voice he called to the kitchen: “Wife, give me the pain-killer.”
He had a violent fit of indigestion. Wife then brought a large bottle labelled PAIN-KILLER, an astonishing bottle, about a foot long, that looked as if it might be horse liniment, and the farmer took his dose with a large iron spoon. “A terrible stuff,” says Vachel, “a stuff that just eats the inside out of you, one part turpentine, three alcohol, and the rest iron rust. It gives you such a heat you forget about your indigestion.”
So the farmer had his pain-killer, but he did not eat any supper, and the poet and the rest of the gang as they came went gaily on and ate to the end. “I began with each man as he came in and ate him down,” says my hungry companion suggestively. “And the farmer, tasting nothing, had to wait till all were through to say the final grace. We finished at last and went all of us to the barns to sleep till Monday morning and the hour when we returned again to the golden line.”
The kiss by hopeless fancy feigned
On lips that are for others,
Does not compare with the imaginary meal
You eat when the wallet is empty.
The kiss too, when you get it,
Oft proves a disillusion;
But the first meal after an involuntary fast,
Well!
It takes a real poet to describe that!
