And Uncas told her, fairly and squarely. “He was a cry-baby and a big calf and I walloped him one. I wanted the hatchet and so I took it—that’s what I did. I banged him one on the nose and jerked it out of his hand.”
Mother laughed—a queer unmirthful little laugh. It was the kind of laugh that hurts. There was irony in it and that got to Uncas at once. “It doesn’t take much of a fellow to snatch a hatchet out of the hands of a cry-baby,” she said.
That was all. She kept on rubbing his hands and now it was my eyes, and not the eyes of Uncas, that could look directly into our mother’s eyes.
Perhaps it was in that moment, and not in the moment when I lay on the ground peeking through the crack into the shed, that the first dim traces of understanding of all such fellows as father and myself came to me. I looked at mother with adoration in my own eyes, and when she had taken the kerosene lamp and had gone away, and when we boys were all again curled quietly like sleeping puppies in the bed, I cried a little, as I am sure father must have cried sometimes when there was no one about. Perhaps his getting drunk, as he did on all possible occasions, was a way of crying too.
And I cried also, I suppose, because in Uncas and mother there was a kind of directness and simplicity that father and all fellows, who like myself are of the same breed with him, can never quite achieve.
NOTE II
A FAMILY of five boys and two girls—a mother who is to die, outworn and done for at thirty—
A father, whose blood and whose temperament I am to carry to the end of my days. How futile he was—in his physical life as a man in America in his time—what dreams he must have had!
There was a dream he had of something magnificent—a lone rider on a horse, dressed in shining armor and riding in a city before a vast multitude of people—the beating of drums.... “The man—he comes! Hurra!” People who live their lives by facts can never understand such a fellow. “He comes! All hail!” What has he done? Well, never mind—something grand, you may be sure of that. The dream that never can become a fact in life can become a fact in fancy. “There he goes.... ‘Teddy the magnificent’!” One both laughs and cries over the memory of him.
The showman was there, in him—it flowered within him—and it is in me too. When Carl Sandburg, the poet, long after said to me—speaking of his lecturing and reading his poetry aloud, to make a living—“I give ’em a good show,” I understood what he meant and I understood the pride in his voice when he said it. And then, later still, when I was writing my own novel, “Poor White”; and when my boyhood friend, John Emerson, gave me a job—doing publicity for movie people, in order that I might have some income to write at my leisure—and for a time I saw a good deal of that strange perverted band, I could understand them also. They were people like my own father, robbed of their inheritance. In an odd way they were my own people too.