Confessions of Boyhood

by John Albee

All at once, when most cast down and discouraged in my thought of the future, that blank page of the past became illuminated and full of delightful pictures and memories. I was entirely overcome by them. They all pointed back to Bellingham, which I had not thought of since leaving it. The attraction to the place became irresistible. It seemed as if there I could recover myself and begin my life over again, continuing all its joys, reuniting all its companionships. It is obvious to me now that this was an evasive yet ingenuous effort to escape from myself, an awakening that had come to me, which I knew not how to meet. I revolved several plans for getting back to my native place and becoming a farmer. None of these were practicable, and I determined to go, trusting to chance to make the way plain. But even the going had difficulties. I solved them by setting out. I crossed the bridge before I came to it, and all the way was easy. I could take no scrip for the journey, for I had none; neither two coats, for I had but one; nor yet could I take the blessing of any one, for to no one save the waitress did I entrust my intentions. I set out on foot, and once on the road, I felt as free and joyous as a bird. There were twenty-five miles to cover, and I expected to do them from sun to sun of a late April day. Sometimes I ran for a mile or two from sheer eagerness to arrive. Most of the way I sauntered along thinking of nothing, overflowing with animal spirits. Enough the freedom, the open sky, the earth, which had been lost to me for three years. It did not occur to me that I was running away, not from outward conditions, but from myself; that at last I had come to the not unusual crisis in the life of boys. However, it was a very mild form of runaway, twenty-five miles, and its objective my old home; not the lure of the sea nor the army, nor yet the adventures of the dime novel hidden in the hay mow. No, it was none of these, but strangely in contrast to them, an impulsive, passionate awakening of memory, an attempted escape from a future, which had been shown to me as in a vision, and from which I shrank in fear and despair.

At noon I was half way between Grafton and Upton and I rested on a high bank with my back against a stone wall. There I could see the church spires of Milford town, and beyond, the land fell away toward Bellingham. I ate some food that the waitress had given me for the journey, and took the road again. Soon I was in Milford. The remainder of the way was very familiar. I knew every house, rock and tree; yet everything looked smaller than I anticipated. I hurried on as I wished to arrive at Uncle Lyman's before his supper time, which I knew was invariably at five o'clock the year round. Uncle Lyman's house, to which I was going, was the house in which I was born. He had been my father's most intimate friend. The house had always been like a home to me, even after my family had one of their own. As I hurried along I saw again the house, one-storied, and the elm tree, with its branches extending over the roof, and arching the highway. I suddenly remembered the flat stone that had been set in its bole for a seat, which the tree had so overgrown that, as a child, I could sit there and be almost hidden from sight; and the brook which flowed through the fields near the house, where the grass was always a darker green along its course, even when it dried up; and the windings so many and sharp that they seemed to write letters when one looked down upon them from a little elevation. I have sat in a tree and fancied I spelled out words in the green grass.

As I came nearer the house I became more and more agitated about the welcome that awaited me. It was friendly, yet surprised, and not as warm as I had expected. Had they changed? Or was it I? Certainly I did not feel at home. This was the house most dear to me, this the settle where I had sat when my legs did not reach the floor. How familiar sounded the voices I now heard, one deep and penetrating, the other a thin falsetto; yet I did not feel the comfort I had imagined that I should. At the table were the same dishes I remembered; the taste was gone. After supper I went out and tried to sit in my old seat in the elm. It was too small for me now; alas, it seemed to disown me, to have cast me out. The barn which once looked so enormous appeared insignificant. I went to bed unreconciled and unhappy. Yet how can a healthy boy awake in the morning dejected? Night, pitying night, which knows how the evil days succeed each other, hinders their sad return and hides in her oblivious mantle their weariness, their sorrows and their disappointments. I was awake at dawn, and yesterday was forgotten. The sun shone across the tops of the forest oaks just beginning to show their red buds. There was dew on the grass and a sweet, earthy smell in the air. Robins were calling everywhere and blue birds flying low from fence to fence. The little brook was full to the brim; the lush grass laid flat along its borders. I found the places where I used to erect my miniature mill wheels, and the remains of the little dam. Here was already antiquity. I did not need Egypt or Greece. Childhood contains their whole story. The season was unusually early; the great elm was becoming misty with the ruffled edges of its unfolding leaves. The outermost sprays began to drop from increasing weight of sap and leaf bud. Catkins hung on birch and willow and alder and the ancient bed of tansy had a new growth of three inches. Down the hill toward Beaver Pond, and along the meadow clusters of ferns were leading up their brides and bridegrooms in opposite pairs with bowed heads. It was twenty days before the usual pasturing time; but Uncle Lyman was turning his cattle out for half a day to keep the grass from becoming too rank and sour. I helped him drive the cows, oxen and heifers to the pasture. How they gamboled, kicked up their heels and tossed their heads. No more bow and stanchion, no more dry hay and confinement for them. I shared in their exhilaration, having been myself a prisoner for the past six months, and as we drove them afield, could hardly keep from dancing and shouting. "There, my son," said Uncle Lyman, "let me see if you have forgotten how to put up the bars."

I lifted them into place with a will, and thought, this is the life for me. Emboldened by his question I opened my mind in a roundabout way as to helping him all summer on the farm. He saw my drift at once and told me he could not hire me, nor any other boy; he must have a man if anybody, and that I must stick to my trade.

"You can stay a few days," he continued, "and then you had better go back to it," and as if to soften his advice he added, "The first cloudy day we will try for pickerel, though it is rather too early."

This might have been discouraging and a dreadful check to my plans, but by some sudden transition wholly inexplicable, I had already half given them up. My discontent and melancholy had been exhausted in the running away; and a few hours experience of disenchantment reconciled me to my lot.

There is no human experience more acutely painful than when one awakens to the fact that he is a person, an ego, unrelated to people or things, with no real claim to assert save that of habit or associations. The sense of isolation and loneliness is at first overpowering, and vainly does he try to attach himself to former objects and environment. The awakening may come in mature years, it may come in youth; but at what time it appears, the old heavens and the old earth crumble and the soul faces its own destiny and recognizes that it must walk alone.

I was surprised to see how the face of things had altered, when, in the course of the day, I hunted up the two playmates with whom I had formerly been most intimate. I met a cold reception. We could not find our way back to the old ground, the old innocent relation. As for Launa Probana, I did not so much as inquire for her. Time and change had not yet made her distinct and dear. After this I enjoyed myself very well for a few days, excusing my prank with the notion that it was a vacation. We went fishing, but the pickerel would not come from their hiding places. In the evenings Uncle Lyman and his wife at their several sides of the fireplace, she with her knitting, and he with his pipe, and I in a corner of the settle, talked of the days when my father was alive, and of the labors they underwent to make a good farm, clearing the brush and stones and building the fences. They told me of my birth and my father's joy at having a son. Then when I inquired for Nahum, their son, whom I remembered as a young man, when I was a child, a sudden silence fell over the great kitchen. There was no reply and the mother's head drooped over her work and tears fell upon it. I wondered, but did not dare to speak, and shortly I climbed the attic stairs to my bed. The next day Uncle Lyman cautioned me not to mention Nahum again before his wife. He said he had run away, and they knew not where he was. A guilty pang struck my heart; I became conscious of what I had done, and thought perhaps at that very moment my sister might be weeping for me.

Nothing was now wanting to complete the failure of my escapade, and I was as eager to run back as I had been to run away. Memories, touched by imagination, had come to naught in contact with reality. I learned my first lesson in keeping it and ideals in their proper place. A bird in the bush is worth two in the hand! Utopia is a far country, toward which to travel is better than to arrive. It was some years before I restored the Bellingham of my imagination. If experience be nothing but suffering then I had experienced; over this transaction therefore I grant an act of oblivion.

The return to Worcester was tedious. I was in no hurry, dreading my reception; what should I say, what should I answer? I revolved many explanations, but each I could think of contained a falsehood. With all my waywardness I was never a good liar; the lie was manifest in my face and I could feel it there as something not myself. I concluded to say nothing and not attempt any apology. This proved the wiser plan. Few questions were asked; reproachful looks were to be expected. Some penalty I paid in the shop also; harder tasks were set for me and I was kept more strictly to my work. The students of Prof. Lobelia were now gone, the sessions of his medical school closing in April, and the house seemed lonesome. In the course of the summer there came into the family a young man who was preparing himself to be a missionary. For the first time I heard of Greek and Latin books. The young man was studying both; it excited my curiosity. Here were other things of which I knew nothing, and I began at this period to be oppressed continually by the more and more frequent discovery of the extent of my ignorance. Luckily I knew how to read. My rustic mentors had warned me against girls, but never of books. I found in the Professor's library a queer assortment of odds and ends of learned works. There was a shelf of theology and missionary records, doubtless collected when he was a minister; many shelves of medical books, and a small number of miscellaneous works, histories and cyclopaedias. Among these latter I chanced one day to take down Whelpley's Compend of History. All that I can remember of it now are its stories of ancient heroes, Alexander, Caesar, the greater and lesser men of Greek and Roman annals. That of Alexander made the deepest impression upon me; I know not why, perhaps his conquests, his glory, his youth. I scarcely knew before what the word hero meant. It was a mark of utter inexperience and a visionary temperament that my ambition should have been so aroused by the career of an ancient hero instead of the man who had invented a self-cocking pistol. It was to be two thousand years behind the times, in an age when half a generation is sufficient to write you down as belated and not wanted. However, it is well to have a hero in youth, an example, a spur, a Bucephalus, although one gets many a fall before he reaches the goal, and I can date my desire to know more and to achieve something from the reading of that brief compend of ancient history.