“Well, let’s see how it looks.”
“No.”
“Well, then, keep it, smarty! You’ll have to give it to maw, anyhow.”
I began to wonder whether “tabuckalosis” of the bones was not something developed for trade purposes or whether it was really true.
The house was in exactly the same position and physically unchanged save that in our day the paint was new and white; whereas, now, it was drab and dirty. The yard, or garden as the English would call it, had all been cut away, or nearly so, leaving only a dusty strip of faded grass to the right as one looked in. In “our” time there was a neat white picket fence and gate in front. It was gone now. Inside, once, were roses in profusion, planted by mother, and a few small fruit trees—a peach, a cherry, an apple tree. Now there were none. The fence on which I used to sit of a morning—the adored back fence—and watch the swallows skimming over the clover and the yellow humble bees among the blooms was gone also. Not a trace of all the beauty that once was mine. I stood here and thought of the smooth green grass that I had rejoiced in, the morning and evening skies, the cloud formations, the bluebird that built a nest under one corner of our roof, the swallows that built their hard bony nests in our chimneys and lost them occasionally—they and their poor naked young tumbling to ruin on our cool hearthstones. Had it been in fact or only in my own soul?
I thought of my mother walking about in the cool of the morning and the evening, rejoicing in nature. I saw her with us on the back porch or the front—Tillie, Ed, myself, and some of our elders gathered about her—listening to stories or basking in the unbelievable comfort of her presence.
Here, at dusk, I said, Ed and I used to throw cinders and small rocks at the encircling bats, hoping, as Ed used to say, to “paralyze” them. From our doorstep at night we could hear the whistle of incoming and outgoing trains and see the lighted coaches as they passed. An old grist mill a half mile “down the track,” as we always referred to the region due south, ground grain all night and we could hear the poetic rumble of the stones. Here, occasionally, my brooding father would come from Terre Haute, to sit with us and bring a little money—the money that he could spare from past accumulated debts.
My brother Rome came here once—"to get drunk and disgrace us," as my sister said. My elder sisters came, to avoid their father and have the consoling counsel and love of their mother. My brother Al came from my Uncle Martin’s fruit farm at North Manchester, if you please, to lord it over us with his rustic strength, to defeat and terrorize all our accumulated enemies (Ed and I had a genius for storing up enemies for him) and to elicit our contempt for his country bumpkin manners. And here finally when my mother was distrait as to means of weathering the persistent storm and we were actually cold and hungry, my brother Paul, now a successful minstrel man and the author of “The Paul Dresser Comic Songster” (containing all the songs sung in the show) and now traveling in this region, came to her aid and removed us all to Evansville—the spring following this worst of winters.
In addition to all this my father’s first mill was still here at that time—and even now as I later discovered—only two blocks away, behind the station—burned once but restored afterward—and also an old house which he had built and owned but had been compelled to sell. In those days these were the signs and emblems of our former greatness, which kept our drooping spirits from sinking too low and made us decide not to be put upon forever and ever by life.
As I stood looking at this I had once more that sinking sensation I experienced in Warsaw and Terre Haute. Life moves so insensibly out from under you. It slips away like a slow moving tide. You look and the box or straw that once was at your doorstep is far down stream—or rather you are the box, the straw. Your native castle is miles removed. I went in and knocked at the door while Franklin, without, sketched and photographed to suit himself. A slattern of a woman, small, young, stodgy, greasy, but not exactly unattractive, came to the door and stared at me in no particularly friendly way. Why are some animals so almost unconsciously savage?