What there had been of family life among us was going to pieces. It was sure that father was not one to hold it together. No one could think of him as destined to hold that or any other fort. That surely wasn’t his line.
There was a period of waiting. The older son had already found his place in life. He had already become what he was to remain to the end, an American artist, a painter. The making of little designs for the gravestones of village merchants was for him a passing phase. Perhaps it was, at that time, the only form of expression one, having a tendency toward the plastic arts, could find in our towns.
And so there was his destiny fixed—but what of us others? We did not often speak openly of the matter among ourselves, but it was obvious something had to be done and soon. In the few talks we had concerning the matter in our broken household, while the one remaining daughter (destined to die before her life could be really developed) was acting as our temporary housekeeper, father held out strongly for the learning of one of the trades. He talked of long years of apprenticeship to some craft, and it was characteristic of him that as he talked he became in fancy himself such a craftsman. One was trained slowly and surely in one’s craft. Then one became a journeyman and went on his travels, going from shop to shop, watching the master craftsmen. “It’s something at your back,” father said, “something that can be depended upon. It makes a man able to stand up as a man before his fellows.”
Did it? We boys listened and thought our own thoughts. As for father—he had picked up a smattering knowledge of several crafts; and how eloquently he, dear word fellow, could speak of them, sling the jargon of the crafts! He had at various times been a harness-maker, house-painter, sign-writer of a feeble sort, such an actor as I have described, the tooter of a cornet in the village band.
In reality he was a tale-teller, but that was no craft among us. No union had been formed among tale-tellers. The Authors’ League, the Pen Women, the Poet’s Club, etc., had not yet been formed or, if there were such organizations in existence, they at any rate did not reach down into mid-American towns. At that time even the rumors of the vast sums to be made by turning out clever plot stories for the popular magazines or the movies had not been whispered about.
Other and more significant-seeming stories were floating however. A new kind of hero, tarnished somewhat later, filled the popular eye. As we boys went about in the main street of our town, citizens, feeling a kindly interest in the motherless sons, continually stopped us. Everyone was singing a new little song:
“Get on. Make money. Get to the top. A penny saved is a penny earned. Money makes the mare go.”
“Save up your money, and save up your rocks.
And you’ll always have tobacco in the old tobacco box,”
sang Sil West, the smith, who was shoeing a horse in the alleyway back of the stores on our main street.