The last place we tried for was that much mentioned in Thirteenth Street, Thirteenth between Walnut and Chestnut, as some one of my relatives had said, but I could not find it. When we reached the immediate vicinity we found a hundred such houses—I had almost said a thousand—and it was a poor, sorrowful street, the homes of the most deficient or oppressed or defeated. I wanted to hurry on, and did so, but musingly and romantically, in passing, I picked out one which stood next to an alley—an old, small, black, faded house, and said to myself, that must be ours. But was it? Because of uncertainty my heart could not go out to it. It went out only to that other house back in the clouds of memory, where my mother and my sisters and brothers were all assembled.
And this street—yes, my heart went out to it—oh, very much. I felt as though I would be willing to trade places with and take up the burden of the least efficient and most depressed of all of those assembled here, in memory of—in memory of——
CHAPTER L
A LUSH, EGYPTIAN LAND
The next morning, after purchasing our customary picture cards, we were about to achieve an early start when I suddenly remembered that I had not tried to find the one man I really wanted to see—a man for whom my father had worked in years gone by, the son of a mill owner who after his father’s death with a brother had inherited this mill and employed my father to run it. Although he was very much younger than my father at that time, there had always been a bond of sympathy and understanding between them. But even in my father’s lifetime the woolen industry in this region had fallen on hard lines—the East and some patents on machinery held by Massachusetts manufacturers crowding these westerners to the wall—so that this boy and his brother, who had been such good friends to my father, had been compelled to abandon their woolen properties entirely and Adam Shattuck had gone into the electric lighting business, and had helped, I understand, to organize the local electric light plant here and for a while anyhow was its first vice-president and treasurer. After that I heard nothing more.
I had never seen him, but as is always the case with someone commercially connected with a family—a successful and so helpful a personality—I had heard a great deal about him. Indeed, in our worst days here, the Shattuck family had represented to me the height of all that was important and durable, and to such an extent that even now, and after all these years, I hesitated whether to inflict myself on him, even for so laudable a purpose as inquiring the exact site of the old mill or whether he recalled where my father first lived, on moving to Terre Haute from Sullivan, and which was the house where I was born. Nevertheless, I looked him up in the city directory and could find only one Adam B. Shattuck, “hay, grain, and feed, 230 South Fourth Street,” a region and a business which did not seem likely to contain so important a person. Nevertheless, because I was anxious to see the old mill which my father had managed under his ownership (I knew it stood somewhere down near the river’s edge), I ventured to go to this address, to find perchance if he could tell me where the true Adam B. Shattuck was to be found.
And on the way, because it was only a few blocks at most in any direction, I decided to look up the old St. Joseph’s Church and school which I had attended as a child, my first school, to see if possibly I could recognize anything in connection with that. A picture postcard which I had found showed a quite imposing church on the site my father had given, but no school.
Imagine my surprise on reaching it to be able to recognize in a rear building to which a new front had, in years gone by, been added, the exact small, square red brick building in which I had first been drilled in my A B C's. Owing to a high brick wall and the presence of an encroaching building it was barely visible any longer from the street, but stripped of these later accretions I could see exactly how it looked—and remember it! As I gazed, the yard, the pond, the old church, the surrounding neighborhood, all came back to me. I saw it quite clearly. As at Warsaw, Indiana, I now suffered a slight upheaval in my vitals. A kind of nostalgia set in. The very earth seemed slipping out from under my feet. I looked through the small paned windows into one of the old rooms and then, because it was exactly the same, I wanted to get away. I went round by the church side and seeing a funeral train in front walked through the door into this newer building. Before the altar rail, surrounded by tall candles, lay a coffin. And I said to myself: “Yes, it is symbolic. Death and change have taken much, so far. They will soon take all.”
Then I climbed back into the car.
It was only a few blocks to the hay, grain and feed emporium of this bogus Adam Shattuck, and when I saw it, a low, drab, one story brick building, in a very dilapidated condition, I felt more convinced than ever that this man could have nothing to do with my father’s quondam employer. I went through the dusty, hay strewn door and at a small, tall, dusty and worn clerical desk saw an old man in a threadbare grey alpaca coat, making some entries in a cheap, reddish paper backed cashbook. There was a scale behind him. The shadowy, windowless walls in the rear and to the sides were lined with bins, containing sacks of oats and bran, bales of hay and other feed. Just as I entered a boy from the vicinity followed me, pushing a small truck, and laid a yellow slip on the desk.
“He says to make it four half sacks of bran.”