I took one last look and went out.
Outside was the yard in which we had always played. As an eleven and twelve-year-old boy, this had seemed a dreadful place to me—one of brawls and arguments. I was not a fighter nor tough enough physically to share in the rough sports that went on here—leap frog, snap the whip, and bean bag. I did, but I was always getting the worst of it and in addition, for some unaccountable reason, I was always finding myself involved in fights. Suddenly, out of a clear sky, without my having said a word to anybody, I would be the object of some bucky little American’s or German-American’s rage or opposition—a fist would be shaken in my face. I would be told to “wait till after school.” After school a crowd would gather. I would be led, as it were, like a lamb to the slaughter. The crowd would divide into “sides.” I would be urged to take off my coat and “go for him.” But I was never much on the go. Somehow I did not know how to fight; even when at times I thought I ought to, or might win. A chance blow once won me a victory and great applause. I knocked my opponent flat—and all the fight out of him apparently—but quite by accident. I hadn’t intended to at all. At other times I received undeserved beatings, which left me wondering what I had done and why life was so fierce. It made me shy of other boys. I kept out of trouble by keeping away from them, wandering about by myself and rejoicing in the beauty of life as a whole—its splendid, spectacular reality.
Inside the Church was nothing to disturb me or cause me to alter my point of view. It was just the same. There was the Reverend Anton Dudenhausen’s confessional, front, left; and here were all the altars, statues, stations, windows, just as I had left them. I looked up at the organ loft where I had pumped air for the organ, weekdays and Sundays. It was apparently as I had left it. Kind heaven, I exclaimed to myself, standing in here, what a farce life is anyhow. Here is this same Church, from the errors and terrors of which I managed by such hard straits of thought to escape, and here is a city and a school pouring more and more victims into its jaws and maw year after year, year after year! Supposing one does escape? Think of all the others! And if this were the middle ages I would not even dare write this. They would burn me at the stake. As it is, if any attention is paid to me at all I will be denounced as a liar, a maligner, a person with a diseased brain, as one of my dear relatives (Catholic of course) condescended to remark. Yet at my elbow as I write stands the Encyclopedia Britannica and Van Ranke’s “History of The Papacy,” and a life of Torquemada, to say nothing of scores of volumes demolishing the folly of religious dogma completely—and yet—and yet—the poor victims of such unbelievable tommyrot as this would be among the first to destroy me and these things—the very first.
A little way down Vine Street from the school was the old foundry, now enlarged and doing a good business in old metal melting and recasting. We turned into Main, where it joined Vine, and there a block away was Blounts Iron Works unchanged. Thirtythree years had not made a particle of difference. The walls were as red and dusty, the noise as great. I went along the windows, looking in, and so interesting were the processes that Franklin joined me. In exactly the same positions, at the same windows, were seemingly the same men at the exact machines, heating, welding, shaping and grinding shares. It was astonishing. I felt young for the moment. At these windows, with my books under my arm, I had always lingered as long as I dared, only I recalled now that my eyes then came just above the window sills, whereas now the sills touched my middle chest. It was almost too good to be true.
And there, up Main Street, quite plainly was the railroad station we entered the night we came from Sullivan, and whence we departed two years later for Chicago and Warsaw—only it had been rebuilt. It was a newer, a grander affair—a Union Station, no less. Then we had slipped in, my mother and her helpless brood, and were met by Paul and put on a little one horse street car which had no conductor at the rear but only a small step, and in which, after depositing coins in a case where a light was, we rode a few blocks to Franklin Street. I recalled the night, the stars, the clang of summer engine bells, the city’s confusing lights. It seemed so wonderful, this city; after Sullivan, so great. It had forty or fifty thousand people then (seventyfive thousand today). On the train, as we came in, it seemed as if we were coming into fairy-land.
A BEAUTIFUL TREE ON A VILE ROAD
Warwick County, Indiana
“Mister,” I said to a passing Southern water type, a small, gypsyish, swarthy little man, “can you tell us where Franklin Street is?”
“Why, sweetheart, right they it is—right they at the conoh.”
The eyes poured forth a volume of gentle sunny humor. I smiled back. It was like being handed a bouquet of roses.