“I beg your pardon,” I said. “I lived here once, years ago. Would you let me come in and look over the house?”
As I spoke a tall, gaunt yokel of not over twentysix ambled out from an inner room. He was an attractive specimen physically but so crude and ignorant. He looked me over superficially. I might have been a policeman or an enemy.
I repeated my question.
“Yes, I guess you kin look it over,” he said distantly. “It ain’t quite made up yet. The boarders don’t keep their rooms just as spick as might be.”
Boarders! In this unkempt house! It was a litter. The best pictures were flyspecked lithographs or chromos. The floors when they were laid with anything were covered with earthy looking rag carpets—creaky, yellow, nondescript furniture. A litter and crush of useless things—tin and glass lamps, papers, cheap pamphlets—a red tablecloth or two—and there were flies and odors and unmade beds.
I went through, looking into each room, restoring it to my mind as it had been. We had not had much—the rooms in our day were sparely and poorly furnished, tastelessly so no doubt—but there is an art in spareness and bareness and cleanliness, and still more in a pervasive personality like my mother’s. What we had, thanks to her, was clean and neat, with flowers permitted to approach as near as summer and soil and pots made possible. I realized now that it was her temperament which like a benediction or a perfume had pervaded, surrounded, suffused this whole region and this home for me. It was my mother and myself and my brothers and sisters in part whom I was remembering—not just the house and the grounds.
Aside from this house there was not much that I wanted to see—not much with which I was intimately identified. A Catholic church to which a priest came once a month and in which the Catholic school was held—an institution which, fortunately, I was not permitted to attend very long, for want of shoes to wear; the old mill which my father built and which after a fire was restored, and in the mill pond of which Ed and I were wont to fish, on occasion; the courthouse square and postoffice, in the latter of which I have often waited eagerly for the distribution of mail—not that it meant anything to me personally, but because my mother was so pathetically eager for word of some kind; the Busseron river or creek, which I knew we would see as we left town. We left this group of chattering children, one of whom, a girl, wanted to sell us the small dog in order, as she said, to buy herself a new riding whip. I could not decide whether she was indulging in a flight of fancy—so poverty stricken was her home—or whether on some farm near by was a horse she was actually permitted to ride. She was brisk and stodgy—a black eyed, garrulous little creature with a fondness for great words, but no real charm.
With one backward glance on my part we were off to the mill, which stood just as it was in my day, only instead of running full time as it did then there was an assignee’s sign on the door saying that all the stock and fixtures of the Sullivan Woolen Mills Company would be sold under the hammer at a given date to satisfy certain judgments—a proof I thought of Mr. Shattuck’s assertions. The small white Catholic Church, still at hand, was no longer a Catholic Church but a hall, the Catholics having moved to a more imposing edifice. The county courthouse was entirely new, a thing in the usual fashion and scarcely so attractive as the old. The little old postoffice in its brown shell was replaced by a brick and glass structure, owned no doubt by the government. There was a Carnegie Library of sorts—what town has been skipped? A new central public school, various new churches, Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, showing where a part of the savings of the American people are being put. We stopped for lunch and picture postcards—and found only sleepy, lackadaisical merchants and clerks, a type of indolence befitting a hot, inter-river region. For to the east of this town about twenty miles was the White river (which we crossed at Indianapolis), and to the west about ten miles the Wabash, and all between was low, alluvial soil—a wonderful region for abundant crops—a region frequently overflowed in the springtime by the down rushing floods of the north.
CHAPTER LII
HAIL, INDIANA!
Going out of Sullivan I made an observation, based on the sight of many men and women, sitting on doorsteps or by open windows or riding by in buggies or automobiles, or standing in yards or fields—that a lush, fecund land of this kind produces a lush, fecund population—and I think this was well demonstrated here. There was a certain plumpness about many people that I saw—men and women—a ruddy roundness of flesh and body, which indicated as much. I saw mothers on doorsteps or lawns with kicking, crowing children in their arms or youngsters playing about them, who illustrated the point exactly. The farmers that I saw were all robust, chunky men. The women—farm girls and town wives—had almost a Dutch stolidity. I gazed, hardly willing to believe, and yet convinced. It was the richness of this soil—black, sandy muck—of which these people partook. It made me think that governments ought to take starving populations off unfertile soils and put them on land like this.