However, I again find myself plunging forward into a more advanced and sophisticated point of view than could have been held by the boy, beginning to remake his own life more to his own liking by plunging into a fanciful life. I shall be blamed. Those of my critics who declare I have no feeling for form will be filled with delight over the meandering formlessness of these notes.
It does not matter. My point is that, in the boy, as later in the man into whom the boy is to grow, there are two beings, each distinct, each having its own life and each of importance to the man himself.
The boy who lives in the world of fact is to help his father put a priming coat on a new house built by a prosperous Ohio farmer. In my day we used a dirty yellow ochre for the purpose. The color satisfied no sensual part of myself. How I hated it! It was used because it was cheap and later was to be covered up, buried away out of sight. Ugly colors, buried away out of sight, have a way of remaining always in sight in the consciousness of the painter who has spread them.
* * * * *
In the hayloft the fat boy was awake now. Darkness was coming fast and he must bestir himself, must if possible escape the wrath of his father for the day wasted in entertaining me. He crawled up out of his own hole and, reaching down, put a fat hand on my shoulder and shook me. He had a plan for his own escape which he whispered to me as my head came up into sight in the dim evening light in the loft.
He was an only son and his mother was fond of him—she would even lie for him. Now he would creep away unseen to the house and frankly tell his mother he has been fooling about with me all day long. She would scold a little but, after a time, when his father came into the house for supper and when in harsh tones he asked what the boy had been doing, the gentle little lie would come. “It won’t really be a lie,” the fat boy declared stoutly, defending the virtue of his mother. “Do you expect me to do all the housework and the churning as well?” the farm woman would ask her husband sharply. She, it seemed, was a person of understanding and did not expect a boy to do a man’s work all the time. “You’d think dad never was a kid,” he whispered to me. “He works all the time and he wants me to work all the time too. I wouldn’t never have no fun if it wasn’t for ma. Gee, I only wish I had a dad like your’n. He’s just like a kid himself, isn’t he now?”
In the gathering darkness the farm boy and I crept down a ladder to the floor of the barn and he ran away to the farmhouse, his feet making no sound in the soft mud of the farmyard. The rain persisted and the night would be cold. In another part of the barn the farmer was doing his evening chores, assisted by father—always the accommodating one—who held the lantern and ran to get ears of corn to throw into the horses’ feed-boxes. I could hear his voice, calling cheerfully. Already he knew all the farm horses by name and spoke of them familiarly. “How many ears for old Frank? Does Topsy get five ears too?”
Outside the barn, as I stood under the eaves, there was still a faint streak of light in the western sky, and the new house we were to give the priming coat, built close down to the road, could still be seen. Little strings of water fell from the roof above and made a tiny stream at my feet. The new house had two full stories and an attic. How magnificent to be a man, to be rich and to be able to build such a house! When the fat boy grew into manhood he would inherit the house and many broad acres. He also would be rich and would have a great house, with bathrooms and perhaps electric lights. The automobile had come. No doubt he would have one. How magnificent a house, a farm, an automobile—a beautiful wife to lie with him at night! I had been to Sunday school and had heard the stories of the magnificent men of old, Jacob and David and that young man Absalom, who had everything in the world to look forward to but who nevertheless did unspeakable things.
And now the voices of the men inside the barn seemed far away. The new house was in some queer way a menace to me. I wondered why. The older house, the one the young New Englander had builded when he had first come into the new land, stood far away from the road. One went, from the barns, along a path to the right. The path lay beside an apple orchard, and at the orchard’s end there was a bridge over a small stream. Then one crossed the bridge and started climbing the hill against the side of which the house had been built. It had been built of logs, very solidly, on a small terrace, and as the farmer had begun to prosper wings had been added. Back of the house stood forest trees, some the same trees that had been there when the first room of the cabin was built. The young farmer, with some of his neighbors, had felled the trees for his house on the very ground on which it now stood, and then during the long winter he had felled many other trees in the flat plain below, where his farming land was to lie, and, on a certain day, there had no doubt been a log-rolling, with other young farmers and their women coming from far and near. A whole forest of magnificent trees had been rolled into a great pile and burned—there had been feastings, tests of physical strength among the young men, a few unmarried fellows about, looking shyly at the unmarried girls, game on the table, talk in the evening of the possibilities of a war with the slaveholding farmers of the South.
All these things the older house had seen as it crouched on the side of the hill, and now it seemed to have crept away out of sight in the darkness, hidden itself among the trees still left standing on the hill; but even as I stood looking lights began to appear at its windows. The old house seemed smiling and calling to me. Now, myself and my brothers had no home—the house in which we at that time lived was not a home—for us there could be no home now that mother was not there. We but stayed temporarily in a house, with a few sticks of furniture—waiting—for what?