The Story of a Country Town

by E. W. Howe

Other families had their holidays, and owned guns and dogs, which they used in hunting the wild game then so abundant; but there was little of this at our house, and perhaps this was the reason why we prospered more than those around us. Usually Jo and I were given the Saturday afternoons to ourselves, when we roamed the country with some of the idle vagabonds who lived in rented houses, visiting turkey roosts a great distance in the woods, and only returning long after night-fall. I do not remember that we were ever idle in the middle of the week, unless we were sent on errands, as buying young stock at low prices of the less thrifty neighbors, or something else in which there was profit; so that we had little time to learn anything except hard work, and if we learned that well it was because we were excellently taught by a competent master. During those years work became such a habit with me that ever since it has clung to me, and perhaps, after all, it was an inheritance for which I have reason to be thankful. I remember my father’s saying scornfully to me once, as if intimating that I ought to make up by unusual industry for the years of idleness, that I was a positive burden and expense to him until I was seven years old. So it will readily be imagined that I was put to work early, and kept steadily at it.

CHAPTER III.
THE HOUSE OF ERRING.

THE friend and companion of my boyhood was Jo Erring, my mother’s only brother, who had been in the family since before I was born. He was five years my senior, and a stout and ambitious fellow I greatly admired; but as he was regularly flogged when I was, this circumstance gave rise to his first ambition to become a man and whip my father, whom he regarded with little favor.

There was a kind of tradition that when he became of age he was to have a horse and ten dollars in money, but whether this was really the price of his work I never knew. More likely he came to our house with my mother, as he was not wanted at home, and had lived there until other disposition could be made of him. He usually had a horse picked out as the one he desired, and gave it particular attention, but as each of these in turn was disposed of at convenient opportunity, he became more than ever convinced that he was related by marriage to a very unscrupulous man.

I remember him at this period as an overgrown boy always wearing cast-off clothing either too large or too small for him, and the hero and friend of every boy on Fairview prairie. Although he was the stoutest boy in the neighborhood, and we often wondered that he did not sometimes whip all the others simply because he could, he never quarrelled, but was in every dispute a mediator, announcing his decisions in a voice good-natured and hoarse; and as he was honest and just, and very stout, there were no appeals from his decisions. In our rough amusements, which were few enough, he used his strength to secure to the smaller ones their share, and gave way himself with the same readiness that he exacted from the others; therefore he was very popular among the younger portion of the population, and there was great joy at school when it was announced—which pleasure I usually had—that Jo Erring had finished his winter’s work, and was coming the next day, for all forms of oppression must cease from that date. Sometimes he came by the school on a winter evening with a rude sled, to which he had young horses attached to break them, and if the larger boys climbed on to ride home, or as far as he went, he made them all get off, and loading up with those too small to look after their own interests in the struggle, drove gaily away with me by his side.

There were few men more trusty than Jo, and he always made a round in the plough-field after my father had turned out, as if to convince him that he was mistaken in the opinion that boys were good for nothing. When there was corn to gather, he took the slowest team and the lazy hired man, and brought in more loads than my father and I, and if I found any way to aid him in this I always did it. They seemed to hate each other in secret, for the master disliked a boy who was able to equal him in anything, as if his extra years had availed him nothing; and I confess that my sympathies were always with Jo, for the grown people picked at him because of his ambition to become a man, in all other respects than age, a few years sooner than was usual. While nobody disputed that he was a capable fellow, he was always attempting something he could not carry out, and thus became a subject of ridicule in spite of his worth and ability; if he was sent to the timber for wood, he would volunteer to be back at an impossible time, and although he returned sooner than most men would have done, they laughed at him, and regarded him as a great failure.

It was said of him that he exaggerated, but I think that he was only anxious that it be known what he could do if he had an opportunity; and as every one thought less of him than he deserved, he kept on talking of himself to correct a wrong impression, and steadily made matters worse. His activity kept him down, for another thing, for thereby he raised an opposition which would not have existed had he been content to walk leisurely along in the tracks made by his elders. He accepted none of the opinions of the Fairview men, and it was said of him that he was a skeptic for no other reason than that everybody else was religious, and I am not certain but that there was some truth in this.

If the truth of a certain principle was asserted, he denied it, not by rude controversy, but by his actions; and by his ingenuity he often made a poorer one seem better, if the one proposed happened to be right, as was sometimes the case—for the Fairview people had but two ways to guess, and occasionally adopted a right method instead of a wrong one, by accident.

I believe there was nothing he could not do. He shingled hair in a superb manner for any one who applied, and charged nothing for the service. And I helped him learn the art, for he practised on me so much that I was nearly always bald. He made everything he took a fancy for, and seemed to possess himself of the contents of a book by looking through it; for though I seldom found him reading, he was about as well-informed as the books themselves. When the folks were away at camp-meeting, he added my mother’s work to his own, and got along very well with it. I never heard of anything a Fairview boy could do better than Jo Erring, and he did a great many things in which he had no competition; therefore I have often wondered that the only young man there who really amounted to anything was for some reason rather unpopular. Jo was unfortunate in the particular that he seemed to have inherited all the poorer qualities of both his father and mother instead of the good qualities of either one of them, or a commendable trait from one, and an undesirable one from the other. I have heard of men who resembled the less worthy of their parents—I believe this is the rule—but never before have I known a boy to resemble both his parents in everything they tried to hide. His tendency to exaggeration he got honestly from his mother, who was a fluent talker, but Jo was not like her in that. In this Jo was like his father, who would not say a half dozen words without becoming hopelessly entangled, and making long pauses in painful effort to extricate his meaning.

Jo was often sent to a water-mill in the woods with a grist, and while waiting for his wheat or corn to be ground, he regarded the machinery with the closest attention, and at length became impressed with the idea that after he had become a man, and whipped my father, he would like to follow milling for a business. The miller, an odd but kindly man of whom but little was known in our part of the country, admired Jo’s manly way, and made friends with him by good-naturedly answering his questions, and occasionally inviting him to his house for dinner; and Jo talked so much of his ambition and his friend, that he came to be called “The Miller,” and spent his spare time in making models, and trying them in the rivulets which ran through the fields after a rain.