I hear again her breezy, cheery call to her brood as she drives up to the little church.
“Pile out.”
“Pile in,” when Sunday-school is over.
A slap of the lines, and a piece of rural America goes back to its cabin, minds sprayed with race lore. A mighty wholesome sight in a community of tools with broken handles, of harnesses toggled with hay-wire, of fortunes “busted”, of the blind, and of those who could not sleep.
There was the old retired farmer, Scotch McDugle, too, eighty years old. He would come over from next door of an evening and swap Skims stories for a cheery welcome and a listening ear. It would be midwinter. The sheet-iron stove showed red.
“Come in, Mr. McDugle,” my wife would say. “Take off your hat and mittens.”
“Oh, no, no,” he would reply, “just stepped in to say ‘howdy.’ Can’t stay a minute.”
Then McDugle would settle down for the evening close to the red-hot stove, mittens drawn tight, Scotch cap pulled close down over his ears. As he got limbered in memory, he would go through a set of queer antics with his lips and tongue—little dry, staccato sputters. He reminded me in this of a courtly neurasthene I once met who said, as he went through similar tongue motions, “I beg your pardon, but I have a hair on the tip of my tongue which I seem never able to get off.”
Farmer McDugle’s favorite theme was the making of great American men out of “hard knocks” and “a good pinch of God.” He reveled in Lincoln, whom he had known; and he never got tired of weaving the people he knew in with the race-heroes of all time.
As I think of McDugle and his ilk in these later days, I can not help suspecting that bleak little Scotland and God in the life, despite the stain of the “wee drap o’rye,” account for many of America’s man-making rural communities.