A Day with a Tramp, and Other Days

by Walter A. Wyckoff

“Yes. In that time I’ve beat my way out to Omaha and back to Lima and up and down; and one night a farmer near Tiffin, Ohio, give me a supper and let me sleep in a bed in his wagon-house, and one wet night in Chicago I had the price of a bunk in me jeans, and I says to meself, says I, ‘I’d sooner sleep dry to-night than get drunk.’”

It came then of itself, needing only an occasional prompting question, and the narrative was essentially true, I fancy; for, free from embellishment, it moved with the directness of reality.

Born in Wisconsin of parents who had emigrated from Ireland, Farrell was bred in an Illinois village, about fifty miles north of where we were walking at the time. His two sisters lived there still, he thought, but his mother had died when he was but a lad. His father was a day laborer at work in Peoria, so far as Farrell knew. He had not seen him for many years, and he kept up no contact with his people.

Much the most interesting part of the story to me was that which related to the past year. Farrell was twenty-two; he had grown up he hardly knew how, and was already a confirmed roadster, with an inordinate love for tobacco, and a well-developed taste for drink.

In the early summer he had drifted into Ottawa, the very town that we were nearing, and, being momentarily tired of the road, he sought and found a job in a tile factory. At this point his narrative grew deeply absorbing, because of the unconscious art of it in its simple adherence to life; but being unable to reproduce his words, I can only suggest their import.

It was a crisis in his history. The change began with an experience of a mechanics’ boarding-house. He was a vagabond by breeding, with no clearly defined ideas beyond food and drink, and immunity from work. He was awaking to manhood, and there began to dawn for him at the boarding-house a sense of home, and of something more in the motherly care of the housekeeper.

“Say, she was good to me,” was his own expression, “she done me proud. She used to mend me clothes, and if I got drunk, she never chewed the rag, but I see it cut her bad, and I swore off for good; and then I used to give her me wages to keep for me, and she’d allow me fifty cents a week above me board.”

The picture went on unfolding itself naturally in the portrayal of interests undreamed of beyond idleness, and enough of plug and beer. The savings grew to a little store; then there came the suggestion of a new suit of clothes, and a hat and boots, and a boiled shirt and collar, and a bright cravat. Farrell little thought of the native touch of art in his description of how, when all these were procured, he would fare forth on a Sunday morning, not merely another man, but other than anything that he had imagined. A sense of achievement came and brought a dawning feeling of obligation, and a desire to take standing with other men, and to know something and to bear a part in the work of a citizen of the town.

Some glimmer had remained to him of religious teaching before his mother died, and, in the conscious virtue of new dress, he sought out the church, and began to go regularly to mass.

I knew what was coming then; there had been an inevitableness that foretold it in the tale, and I found myself breathing more freely when he began to speak without self-consciousness of the girl.