And now he was building a new house. “Well,” he had said to his wife; “Mary, you have been a good wife to me and I want you to have every comfort.” The house was to have a bathroom and a bathtub. It would cost money and maybe it would be all foolishness, but he wanted his wife to have it. When a man was young he didn’t mind splashing about in a washtub in a woodshed on Saturday evenings, but when he got a little older and had, now and then, a touch of rheumatism, well, he thought his wife deserved to have a bathtub in the house if she wanted it, no matter what it cost.
Father agreed with his host. (It is perhaps as well to think of him as our host and ourselves as guests since we stayed two weeks and worked but two days.) He said that he had always felt just that way himself. Women were the weaker sex and a man had to take that into consideration. “You take a woman, now, that is like a horse and I don’t like her,” said father. He spoke of mother as though she had been a weak, gentle thing, entirely dependent upon the strength in himself in getting through her life. “I married my wife up in your own state, up in Vermont,” father said, indulging in one of his characteristic quick imaginative flights.
And now that he had got a start I knew there was no telling where his flight might end and I listened for a time, and then, turning away in disgust, I began working my way downward into the hay. My mother, now dead, was something I prized. He had just said she was born in Vermont of an old decayed English gentle family. She wasn’t very strong but would have children. They were born one after the other, but, thank God! because of his own great natural strength his boys were strong.
“The one I have out here with me now was born in Kentucky,” he said. “I took my wife down there on a visit to my own father’s place and he was born during the visit. I thought his mother would die that time, but she didn’t—I saved her. Night and day I stayed in her sick room, nursing her.”
Now he had got himself launched and I knew the farmer would have no more chance to do his own bragging. Father would invent another decayed, gentle family in Kentucky to match the one he had just so lightly brought into existence in the cold barren hills of Vermont.
But I was getting deeper and deeper down into the hay now and the sounds of his voice grew faint, words could no longer be distinguished. There was only a gentle murmuring sound, far off—like a summer breeze just stirring the leaves of a forest; or, better yet, like the soft murmur of some southern sea. Already, you see, I had begun reading romances and knew, in fancy, just how the seas of the South murmured and beat upon coral islands; and then how the fearful hurricane came ramping along and swept the seas clear of ships. No one reads as a boy reads. The boy gives himself utterly to the printed page and perhaps the most blessed of all the tribe of the inkpots are those who write what we used to call “dime novels”—blessed in their audience, I mean, to be sure.
So there I was, sunk far down into a mythical Southland, my own Southland, product of my own imaginings—not father’s. One could go deep down into the hay and still breathe. All sounds became faint, even the gentle sound of the snoring of the fat boy some ten feet away. One closed the eyes and stepped off into a fragrant new world. Mother was in that new world, but not father. I had left him out in the cold.
I considered the matter of births—my own birth in particular. The idea of being born in Kentucky—the result of a union between two decaying, gentle families—did not strike my fancy, not much.
The devil! Even then I felt myself a little the product of a new age and a new land. Could I then have had all the thoughts I am now about to attribute to myself! Probably not. But these notes make no pretense of being a record of fact. That isn’t their object. They are merely notes of impressions, a record of vagrant thoughts, hopes, ideas that have floated through the mind of one present-day American. It is likely that I have not, and will not, put into them one truth, measuring by the ordinary standards of truth. It is my aim to be true to the essence of things. That’s what I’m after.
And haven’t we Americans built enough railroads and factories, haven’t we made our cities large and dirty and noisy enough, haven’t we been giving ourselves to surface facts long enough? Let us away with the fact of existence, for the moment at least. You, the reader, are to imagine yourself sitting under a tree with me on a summer afternoon; or, better yet, lying with me in the sweet-smelling hay in an Ohio barn. We shall let our fancies loose, lie to ourselves if you please. Let us not question each other too closely.