“There’s another name I recognize, anyhow,” I commented to Franklin, as another sign came into view. “Some member of that family owned the clover field back of our house in my time. Good luck to him, if it’s in good condition.”
In a few minutes we were rolling up a street which would have taken us to the public square if we had followed it; instantly I was on the qui vive to see what if anything I could remember. This was a section, the north-west corner of Sullivan, which I recalled as having been a great open common in my time, filled principally with dog fennel and dandelion and thistles and containing only one house, a red one, occupied by an Irish section boss, whose wife (my mother having befriended her years before when first she and her husband came to Sullivan) had now, at the time my mother was compelled to make this return pilgrimage, befriended us by letting us stay—mother and us three youngsters—until she could find a house. It was a period of three or four days, as I recall it. The father of this family, Thomas Brogan, was a great, heavy handed, hulking, red faced Irishman who knew only work and Catholicism. On Sunday in some weird, stiff combination of Sunday clothes and squeaky shoes, he was accustomed to lead in single file procession his more or less recalcitrant family through weeds and along the broken board walks of this poorly equipped region to mass. I saw him often, even in my day. His youngest son, Harry Brogan, often played with Ed and me and once he instigated some other, older boys, to lick us—a tale too long and too sad to be told here. His second youngest son, Jim—alias Red Brogan and subsequently known to fame as “Red Oliphant,” a bank robber (finally electrocuted by the state of New York at Sing Sing for murder—he and three or four others shot a night watchman, or so the police said)—was often beaten by his father with a horsewhip because he would not work in the local coal mine or perhaps do other drudging about his home. This coal mine, by the way, had killed his elder brother Frank some three or four years before by explosion, a tragedy which you might have thought would have ended coal mining in that family. Not at all. Far from it. These beatings had continued until the boy ran away, uneducated of course, and became the character he subsequently was or was alleged to have been. I do not know. If you want to know of a fairly good boy who died a criminal in the chair owing to conditions over which he had no least control or certainly very little, this was one. If I were Red Brogan and were summoned before the eternal throne—would that there were one—I would show Him the stripes on my back and my neglected brain and ask Him why, if He were God, He had forsaken me.
I have heard my mother tell how she was present at the time this older brother’s body was brought up out of the mine (eight men were killed at the time) and how tragic seemingly was the grief of both Mr. and Mrs. Brogan. Later on, after we left Sullivan, the family became somewhat more prosperous and it is likely that the youngest son was not compelled to work as the others had.
CHAPTER LI
ANOTHER “OLD HOME”
Be that as it may, it was much of this and related matters that I was ruminating as I came through this region. But I could find no traces of what had formerly been. There was no red house anywhere—repainted probably. The coal mine, which I had remembered as being visible from this section, was not to be seen. Later I learned that it had been worked out and abandoned. The coal had all been dug out. Many new small houses in orderly, compact rows now made streets here. We had Bert follow this road a few blocks and then turn discreetly to the east until we should cross the railroad tracks, for I recalled that it was across these tracks or track facing another weed-grown square, and what was then a mildly industrious institution of the town, the hay press, that our house stood.
This square had always seemed a fascinating thing to me, for despite the fact that it was on the extreme outskirts of the town and in a district where (a little farther out) stood the village slaughterhouse, emitting uncomfortable odors when the wind was blowing right, still it was near the town’s one railroad station and switching yards—there was a turntable near the hay press—and we could see the trains go by and watch the principal industry of the place, switching, the taking on or dropping off of cars. Every morning at ten-thirty and every afternoon at two there was a freight train—the one in the morning from the south, the other in the afternoon from the north—which stopped and switched here. As an eight to ten-year-old boy how often I have sat on our porch, playing “engine” or “freight” with empty cigar boxes for cars (an extra big one for a caboose) and a spool for a smokestack, and imitated the switching and “making up” which I saw going on across the common. A delicious sense of wonder and delight always lingered in my mind in connection with Sullivan, for although we were apparently desperately poor there were compensations which the inscrutable treasure of youth trebled and quadrupled—nay multiplied an hundred and a thousand fold.
This indeed, I said to myself, as I looked at it now trying eagerly to get it all back and failing so dismally in the main, was that Egyptian land of which I have spoken. Here were those blue skies, those warm rains. Back of this house which I am now to see once more perhaps will be that perfect field of clover—only remembered in the summer state, so naturally optimistic is the human soul. In the sky will be soaring buzzards, surely. Over a field of green will stand a tall, gnarled dead tree trunk, its gauntness concealed by a cape of wild ivy. On its topmost level will sit a brown hawk or a grey headed eagle calculating on methods of capture. Across the street, up the road a little way, will be the brown home of “crazy old Bowles,” who used to come to our well for water singing and sometimes executing a weird step, or gazing vacantly and insanely at the sky. He was an ex-army man, shot in the head at Lookout Mountain and now a little daffy. He had been pensioned and was spending his declining years here. “Crazy old Bowles” was his local name.
A few steps farther out this same road, the last house but one (which was ours) would be the house of Mrs. Hudson, a lonely and somewhat demented old widow whose children had long since gone and left her to live here quite alone. We children thought her a witch. Down in a hollow, beyond our house, where lay the whitening skulls and bones of many an ox and cow, stood the tumbledown slaughterhouse, to me a fearsome place. I always imagined dead cows prowling about at night. Over the way from our house had been a great elm, in which Ed and I used to climb to swing on its branches. In its shade, in summer time, Tillie, Ed and I played house. I can hear the wind in the leaves yet. Beyond the slaughterhouse eastward was a great cornfield. In autumn, when the frost was whitening the trees, I have seen thousands of crows on their way southward resting on the rail fences which surrounded this field, and on the slaughterhouse roof and on a few lone trees here and there, holding a conference. Such a cawing and chattering!
Beyond the clover field again, in a southeasterly direction, was the fine farm of Mr. Beach, his white house, his red barn, his trees sheltering peacocks that in summer “called for rain.” In the fields all about were blackberries, raspberries, dewberries, wild plums, wild crabapple trees—a host of things which we could gather free. If either Ed or I had had the least turn of ingenuity we might have trapped or shot enough wild animals to have kept us in meat—possibly even in funds, so numerous were various forms of small game. In summer we could have picked unlimited quantities of berries and helped mother preserve them against dark days. We did—some. But in the main all we did was to fish a little—as the thought of pleasure moved us.
But oh, this pleasing realm! Once here I could not see it as it really was at the moment, nor can I now write of it intelligently or dispassionately. It is all too involved with things which have no habitat in land or sea or sky. The light of early morning, the feet of youth, dreams, dreams, dreams—— Yes, here once, I told myself now, we carried coal in winter, Ed and Al and I, but what matter? Was not youth then ours to comfort us? My father was gloomy, depressed, in no position or mood to put right his disordered affairs. But even so, oh Sullivan! Sullivan! of what wonders and dreams are not your poorest and most commonplace aspects compounded!