And then the farmer who owned the fence had to be consulted and if he refused his consent the joy of the situation became intensified. We drove off up the road and turned into a wood and the farmer went back to his work of cultivating corn. We watched and waited, our boyish hearts beating madly. It was a summer day and in the small wood in which we were concealed we all sat on a fallen log in silence. Birds flew overhead and a squirrel chattered. What a delicate tinge of romance spread over our commonplace enough business!
Father was made for romance. For him there was no such thing as a fact. It had fallen out that he, never having had the glorious opportunity to fret his little hour upon a greater stage, was intent on fretting his hour as best he could in a money-saving prosperous corn-shipping, cabbage-raising Ohio village.
He magnified the danger of our situation. “He might have a shotgun,” he said, pointing to where in the distance the farmer was again at work. As we waited in the wood he sometimes told us a story of the Civil War and how he with a companion had crept for days and nights through an enemy country at the risk of their lives. “We were carrying messages,” he said, raising his eyebrows and throwing out his hands. By the gesture there was something implied. “Well, it was an affair of life or death. Why speak of the matter? My country needed me and I, and my intrepid companion, had been selected because we were the bravest men in the army,” the raised eyebrows were saying.
And so with their paint pots and brushes in their hands my two brothers presently crept out of the wood and ran crouching through cornfields and got into the dusty road. Quickly and with mad haste they dabbed the name of Alf Granger on the fence with the declaration that he baked the best bread in the State of Ohio, and when they returned to us we all got back into the spring wagon and drove back along the road past the sign. Father commanded me to stop the horse. “Look,” he said, frowning savagely at my two brothers, “your N is wrong. You are being careless again with your Bs. Good gracious, will I never teach you two how to handle a brush?”
If our family was poor, of what did our poverty consist? If our clothes were torn the torn places only let in the sun and wind. In the winter we had no overcoats, but that only meant we ran rather than loitered. Those who are to follow the arts should have a training in what is called poverty. Given a comfortable middle-class start in life, the artist is almost sure to end up by becoming a bellyacher, constantly complaining because the public does not rush forward at once to proclaim him.
The boy who has no warm overcoat throws back his head and runs through the streets, past houses where smoke goes up into a clear cold sky, across vacant lots, through fields. The sky clouds and snows come and the bare hands are cold and chapped. They are raw and red but at night, before the boy sleeps, his mother will come with melted fat and rub it over the raw places.
The warm fat is soothing. The touch of a mother’s fingers is soothing. Well, you see, with us, we were all of us—mother father and the children—in some way outlaws in our native place and that thought was soothing to a boy. It is a soothing thought in all my memories of my boyhood. Only recently one connected with my family said to me: “You must remember, now that you are an author, you have a respectable place in the world to maintain”; and for a moment my heart swelled with pride in the thought.
And then I went out of the presence of the cautious one to associate with many other respectables and into my mind flashed thoughts of the sweetness I have seen shining in the eyes of others—of waiters, horsemen, thieves, gamblers, women, driven by poverty to the outer rim of society. Where were the respectables among those who had been kindest and sweetest to me?
Whatever may be said in this matter, and I admit my feet have slipped many times toward solid respectability we of our family were not too respectable then.
For one thing father never paid his rent and so we were always living in haunted houses. Never was such a family to take the haunts out of a house. Old women riding white horses, dead men screaming, groans, cries—all were quieted when we came to live in a haunted house. And how often because of this talent—inherent in my family—we lived for months scot-free in a fairly comfortable house, while at the same time conferring a benefit on the property owner. It is a system—I recommend it to poets with large families.